Mass Effect 2: Effective Improvement

To sum up my thoughts of the first game in this series would be to call it a blithering pile of doggie doo would probably be giving it far too much praise. The game had issues ranging from the AI to an unholy inventory system, with a bad overall plot that wasn't fully realized and characters that I couldn't give two shits about and couldn't even remember half their names.

Thankfully Mass Effect 2 improves in most of these areas but still retains some glaring flaws keeping shy of being a decent RPG. If there's one thing I have learned about playing Bioware games it's that I find I like them only when reflecting on the characters in the game. It seems to me that the more I like the characters in a Bioware game the more I can overlook issues I have with it, and enjoy my time with the game. This is true of Knights of the Old Republic 1, but not 2, Dragon Age 1, but not 2, and in this case Mass Effect 2, but not 1. Bioware games as I have noted all have pretty lame overall plots and setups but relatively great characterization depending on the game.

With that said, let's dig into Mass Effect 2.

Story:

The story of Mass Effect 2 is you are Commander Sheppard...and you just died! But then you are brought back together by Cerberus who apparently was some evil doing organization in the first game that I must have completely ignored because I really didn't recognize them here...But your main character knows them and doesn't trust them one bit! You meet up with the "Illusive Man" who might as well be the cigarette smoking man from X-Files, or the G-Man from Half Life. We never learn one goddamn thing about him, who's side he's on, how he's so well informed, or...well...anything at all and that becomes a MAJOR disappointment for me at the end of the game.

Needless to say the Illusive Man is your tour guide giving you all the vital info you need to get to your next mission. Bioware's formula if you haven't already been privy to it yet is go here, here and here, collecting this, that, and the other thing until we have them all to finish the final level. In both Mass Effect 1 and 2 that "collection" of things are people and spells out your entire mission list for the game. That's right, your main mission in this game is to recruit a crew...

In a good game I'd expect the crew to join as the plot develops, but nope, not in the Mass Effect series! Instead of actually completing important objectives, learning about the enemy, and all the while gaining support for your cause along the way in some natural story arcing pace, Mass Effect's formula is thus: create characters, give them wacky back-stories and call it a day. It becomes so tirelessly formulaic that it becomes really hard to care about the overall goal of the game which you learn is to stop the "Collectors," which is a mysterious alien race who has been capturing Humans.

Just as in the first game you are constantly told about the imminent threat of the Reapers and how dangerous they are and you never actually fight any, in Mass Effect 2 you also hardly ever fight any of the Collectors. Thankfully, at least you do fight them once and a while but the larger threat, the Reapers, make ZERO appearances in this game. All the while you are given hints that the Illusive Man is the real danger, but he never presents himself as evil in the game despite our heroes assertions. Once again I'm playing a game without a real antagonist and it bugs the shit out of me.

So the "story" boils down to go here, recruit this guy, and then solve some problem he's having. Those are the main missions, and takes up 90% of the game. The rest is just the last level where you take out the Collectors. The entire mission of getting a crew then killing off what is essentially the B team of evil all feels like it should have been done with as a mid-point to the game...not the whole damn game! I mean you just don't care enough about the "Collectors," they aren't that threatening, and really never play out as final boss material.

It's just so weird that with TWO games now telling us again and again how badass and evil the Reapers are and to never really have us confront them is entirely too annoying and pathetic. It's like if I played Final Fantasy 7 and never once fought Sephiroth, barely heard about him or saw him, then was told at the end of the game that he was so stupid evil he will wreck your face in Final Fantasy 7-3 coming out in 8 years...oh and never shows up at all in Final Fantasy 7-2. I just can't understand a series where it's central villains are played down SO much and yet remain the topic of imminent threat to our heroes. Oh, but hilariously the galaxy doesn't seem to give a shit about the Reapers because there is no evidence of Sovereign's attack in the first game which was so ridiculous I had to leave my chair and punch a defenseless baby sea cow. I mean honestly! The entire Citadel ran in panic of it, it blew up all sorts of shit, and has it's own goddamn action figure for sale in a local market. YES YOU CAN BUY something called Sovereign in the game, but OH the Council denies Reaper existence. What a load of shit.

All I see these two games as is super filler. Stuff we don't need to see or hear about, it's padding. Bioware wants this series to be a trilogy, so they avoid a climactic battle with the villains they set up until the final game just so they can have three games. This just proves a severe lack of creativity. There's no reason we couldn't fight the Reapers in the first two games, or learn more about them, or give a shit. Plenty of good trilogies allow the main villains to play a central role in the conflict throughout. It seems to me like Bioware avoids it because they are horrible writers and think that if a conflict occurs with the Reapers at ALL then it has to be the last one too. I mean, how can I, an audience member care in any way about the Reapers as a threat when I am told essentially nothing about them? Well I can't...and they had TWO FUCKING GAMES to tell me about them!

Graphics:

This game is jaw dropping beautiful. Great set pieces, textures, ambiance, everything is really well done. Character models are really neat too. I was on the PC version so I do have a few complaints. Firstly, you are given nearly no customization options which is terrible. I couldn't set the anti ailising at all so I had to deal with jaggies until I told nividia to override the game and force AA in. So happy nividia lets me bitch slap games that won't let me customize.

My other issue is character reactions. This is more of a programming compromise Bioware made than graphics but hear me out. Every conversation you have with anyone in the game plays out generally exactly the same way. You both stand and get over the shoulder shots, then the other character with step back a bit, then in the next dialogue sequence he'll pace back and forth. Granted this doesn't happen with sitting characters or ones in a small room but anywhere else in the game you will see this crap over and over again. It bothers me that different races and species will pace exactly the same as all the others! They would have been better served to have species act differently during conversation than other species. Reminds me of Star Ocean 3 where Cliff would ALWAYS pound his fist into his hand regardless of what he was talking about. He could be like "Let's go!" *fist pound* or "My name is Cliff" *fist pound* or "I like cheese" *fist pound* It just comes off as unnatural and irritating.

Gameplay:

Ok, here is where I saw a ton of improvement. Enough to make me actually enjoy the game. First and foremost the inventory system is gone, literally. They scrapped the idea of having items at all in this game which is fine because clearly they couldn't get it right in the first one. No more having to sift through unsorted guns, ammo, and upgrades for hours on end ensuring you have the best shit equipped, now you have universal upgrades, ammo is used as a sort of bio power or selectable on the fly, and there is nothing really to keep track of. Sure, some may be annoyed that your customization options are a bit limited now and that may be true but honestly you only lose a SMALL amount of customization for a vastly improved and streamlined inventory, ie none at all. I found it very refreshing to play an RPG where I didn't have to eyestrain at every little tiny stupid fucking item. It made me very happy.

Gunplay is improved and at the same time confusing plot-wise. The game has a better cover system in general, the AI is greatly improved on both sides, and being able to select the type of bullets you want on the fly is a godsend. Everything here I feel was an improvement. I would only like to see a bit more command options for your allies. Selecting the AI to use a bio power for instance I lament that I also cannot select the target they use it on. Often they will hit nothing at all, or not the enemy I want them to hit. It's a small complaint, but an odd omission from the team that gave us KoToR which let us choose what enemies we wanted to hit with all AI allies.

What I do NOT understand about the guns in this game is why they have bullets. This is set in the future of ME1 where there was no ammo and guns shot forever with a cool down. Here...you run out of ammo? How is that an improvement? Like...what gunsmith two years after ME1 decided infinite ammo was worse than finite ammo? It makes NO sense!!!

I do not miss the lack of a rover to traverse planets either. What a pain in the ASS that was. It was fun at first, but after doing just that for 20 hours I was ready to kill myself. Mass Effect 2 instead just lets you scan planets for minerals, which is also really boring but far quicker. Personally, I would just say screw all of that and allow the player to buy the needed materials, or do something fun like manage a workforce dedicated to mining those minerals and you could decide if you want slaves or an actual paid team. It would be simplistic and not overbearing in any way. Also, it would be totally non-intrusive as you would get minerals automatically on a periodic basis. And those periods can be controlled by the player if you put more of your resources into your staff you get more minerals sooner, and so on. So instead of gambling your time with needless mini games you actually invest your money into it giving it a much more strategic and satisfactory feel.

But I digress...

The game itself becomes very formulaic even by Bioware standards. You get essentially 2 missions per character and you don't have to do both. One mission you save the character, or recruit them, the other mission you complete some objective or tie a loose end they want tied. Every mission is exactly the same though. You go to a place with long hallways and kill shit until you get to the end. Sure some have mild creativity peppered in like solving a murder, or luring out an assassin, but none of that is ever fully realized. But that's it, that's all your missions.

Characters:

I really enjoyed the characters of Mass Effect 2 over 1 by a longshot. They were much more interesting this time around. And yeah there were a few duds, but mostly I cared more for them here than anyone in the first game. My favorite character was probably Mordin followed by Jack. Mordin was more interesting than all of ME1's characters combined. I just really loved how he was behind the genophage, and the justification of doing it. The political comparisons can be made today easily. How our country (USA) decided to go into Iraq to prevent war, the idea of attack them now before they attack you later mentality despite Iraq never being an imminent threat of any kind. Much like the Krogan not posing a threat to the galaxy but they decided to play god and lower Krogan fertility to control their population thus removing their perceived "threat." While Mordin's choice was more scientific than ours it still raises the same questions and brings up wonderful points and things to ponder.

There were plenty of other characters in this game with similar interesting plots, but I don't need to go into them. It's just nice that more care and attention went into thinking about these characters than the ones from the last game who felt way more stereotypical and boring than anything else.

Music:

This was another large improvement. Mass Effect 2 had some pretty dramatic moments where a good score was needed and the music came through here. ME1's music was often lacking, or just not there as the majority of that game was very slow and plodding with nothing going on. ME2 has moments of danger with large set pieces crumbling and many things going on which helped allow for more music.

Conclusion:

Mass Effect 2 had many much needed improvements over the first game but it was still heavily lacking in story and pacing. This is something I still feel western developers are struggling with in gaming. I mean how can you justify having TWO games where your entire goal is to assemble a team and then have the final conflict be against something that isn't perceived as the main enemy? I just don't get it. If Mass Effect 3 is entirely about collecting various characters to do your bidding as the Normandy slave driver Commander Sheppard then I'm going to be pissed! He is a well established mother fucker and there is NO reason he has to do his own casting calls every fucking game. I just don't find that to be compelling use of gameplay, I really don't.

In a good RPG you have your cast of characters early on and you are always in pursuit of your overall goal with your allies in a similar mindset. With Mass Effect the main goal is totally ditched in favor of gathering allies and solving their completely unrelated issues. Hell, basically NONE of the cast on the Normandy could give two shits about the Collectors or stopping them. Grunt just wants a good fight, Mordin wants to study them, Jack owes Sheppard a favor, Tali owes Sheppard a favor, Samara...owes Sheppard a favor, and Thane gets contracted. The two Cerberus members and Legion are the only characters with an honest to god reason to go after the Collectors and the Reapers. It makes me believe more and more that all Bioware does is sit in a room and come up with characters to put in their games and main story be damned.

I will say this though, the ability to kill off or save your squad is greatly improved in this game. The choices you get endgame are FAR greater than anything ME1 gave you and your choices there really do feel like a "Mass Effect" will occur from what you did. I applaud that.

*ME2 is like stepping in dog shit only to discover it was just a clump of mud, so it's not that bad after all*

Mass Effect - Mass Garbage

Yeah, I am behind. Bite me.

Mass Effect the perennial Western RPG experience of 2007 (or they would have you believe) was supposed to be a game changer. It was supposed to usher in a new breed of "path" choosing or create endless scenarios for the player to experience hence the name Mass Effect. I do not understand the hype that this game pulled, I do not understand its legion of devout followers, I do not understand how this game escapes the endless hate that Final Fantasy 7 receives daily. This game is honestly terrible in nearly every way possible. Let's review.

Battle System:

If I can praise Mass Effect on one thing it would be the battle system...but I won't. Honestly this was the most tolerable aspect of the game, but also the least praised among fans. The battle system is simple run and gun 3rd person perspective action. You get 4 types of guns Pistol, Machine Gun, Sniper, Shotgun and infinite ammo for everything. The pistol is immediately worthless because you have infinite rounds of Machine Gun ammo and it usually does more damage per shot anyway. The shotgun is very situational and there's few instances where it's useful over the machine gun. The sniper rifle is also VERY situational as 90% of the game takes place in tiny hallways. So...effectively you get one weapon, the machine gun.

You get powers to utilize if you go the Bio route but...really almost no one plays the game like this. Literally they did a statistic on this and only 20% of players EVER opted to go anything but the soldier class. Besides your AI partners normally make for better Bio attackers anyway.

What makes the battle system terrible though is how stupidly easy it is. The AI is dumb as a log, sometimes they don't move or do anything and you can just stand there and shoot them all day. Your partners AI is also stupid and often they'll rush into battle without your say and die immediately. But that's ok because the game is so easy you don't need them. Really no normal enemies ever present a challenge. If you find cover they will never pursue you, they rarely deal effective damage, and your machine gun is accurate enough to pick off all offenders in the area with efficiency. On top of that you have skills that make you even stronger with shield boosting and an ability to just keep shooting and never stop.

The only time you can ever die is when the game decides to be an ass monkey and glitch you. I fought a boss battle who had Bio powers and I was winning consistently, but two times in a row she lifted me and tossed me in some unmanageable area where I could not escape. The character cannot jump, or warp out or anything so I had to reset this BOTH times. The last time I just ran away into a more open area just so the game wouldn't glitch me out again. Wonderful programming.

The most laughably easy parts of the game is when you're in your vehicle. That thing is deadly. You get infinite rocket shots and it nearly always kills everything in one hit...Oh and by the way I played this game on PC, so mouse control improves my accuracy 100%.

Item Management:

I figured I would take a moment on how awful the item management in this game is. I must admit for a long time in the game I was pretty lost on how to use the item screen effectively...then I realized there just wasn't a good way to use it effectively at all. When trying to replace weapons you have collected with better ones it becomes a tedious chore. The menu does not organize what you've collected in some sort of manageable order like most attack or most accuracy, so you have to select EVERY weapon you pick up and compare it to the ONE character you have selected. You have to do this for ALL three characters and that's just one of four weapons. And you pick up a fuck ton of weapons in this game. It's rare you actually get a better one though. But it's consistently annoying to see worse weapons all the time.

What I hate most about this is you have a limited inventory. Eventually you have to delete out or (reduce to omni-gel) every shitty item you get. The worst part though is every time you go to pick up a new item all it shows you is the name of it...So how am I supposed to psychically know if the Avenger 6 is better or worse than the Waveblaster 7? Oh, and my inventory is full right? So I have to go to the inventory, delete something, pick the weapon back up and....oops, it's shit... Waste of time! I hate it so hard.

Music:

There is none...that's what's wrong...

Ok to be fair the music flares up now and then during battle, or maybe on the way to battle but it has a Batman Arkham Asylum problem where it basically hardly ever shows up. But unlike Batman even when it does show up it's not even any good. I was physically startled to hear music in the end credits.

Story:

This is what everyone praises...somehow. I do not understand how this aspect of the game gets praise. The story hardly exists, it's barely there and it's full of holes. Alright, so you are a veteran space marine of some kind moving up the ranks. You go out on a mission with this creepy guy named Saren and presumably he dies in the mission (I think it's been a while since I did the first mission). Later it's discovered he's alive and is the cause of a bunch of evil shit, namely searching out these beacons of untold cosmic horror. No really, your main character touches one of these things and he is imparted the wisdom of untold cosmic horror and the entire game is you figuring out what those images mean...

So you're tasked with having to find and kill Saren and discover why he's being all evil...and what the untold horror is. The main game is about 7 missions long and it takes roughly 10 hours to do it all. Not only can I call this the shortest RPG of all time, but I don't think it even qualifies as one. Oh, but you have 30 to 40 meaningless sidequests to partake in...they can shove it!

***Spoilers***

You track down and kill Saren and stop his evil plan of unleashing the evil machine things. Seriously, that's it. There's an evil band of "unstoppable machines" that live on the outer edge of the galaxy who's sole purpose it is to wipe out all living things in that galaxy and then retreat into hibernation waiting to do it all again. Oh and they are called "reapers," lol get it, do ya get it? But you stop them from even coming through the warp gate thing Saren was trying to open in the first place, so the entire story boils down to you killing one dude. Ok, there is ONE Reaper that remains in the galaxy as a sentry of sorts named Sovereign. But he's a pussy bitch and dies in a cutscene.

So WHY are they unstoppable? The game never says why. It makes no sense as we clearly see one of them go down like a pussy bitch. In Halo their alien thing that wipes out all life makes sense. The Flood is just infinite, they never stop coming. Makes sense why they whoop ass. For a cliche' story like this where machines wipe everything out, this has to be the worst one I have ever heard. It never even plays out, you learn nothing. And at the VERY end your main character says "We have to get ready, the Reapers are coming!" HOW are they coming exactly?? I just fucked up their sentry and closed the gate allowing them access in. How pray-tell are they coming? Did the sentry even have a chance to give word to the other reapers to come? I don't think he did. THIS MAKES NO SENSE!

Game over....

Fuck you game.

Characters:

I saved this for last because I wanted to discuss the "choices" aspect of the game too. First the characters. You get two interchangeable speciesist (racist) human characters male and female. The game lets you decide which one to kill off later but it's meaningless as they're both basically the exact same. Then you get an assortment of alien characters. A spock-like female alien who's super intelligent yet socially awkward (you get to bang her). An alien chick out to check out and collect a bunch of alien technology. You literally hear nothing from this bitch after you get her. I honestly forgot she existed after a while. And two other alien guys one who has a dark brand of justice and the other who's way more down to earth.

Ultimately none of them really matter. The spock alien and one of the humans are the only characters the story likes to focus on, but it's terribly rare. So how is there ANY character development in this game at all? Your character likes to play 100 questions, that's how! He will ask literally anything and everything in this game and respond with your brand of neutral, good, or evil responses. What you say means nothing at all in the end. Nothing changes. In quests your wordy options just decides whether you kill everyone or you don't. In either case the missions get solved one way or another.

But for the character development I couldn't be more annoyed playing 100 questions. What's your favorite shoe? Where do alien babies come from? Do you have a story to tell? He literally asks that once I swear to god. "Do you have a story to tell?" I expected the response to be, "Well Bioware decided that I don't...nope just a worthless NPC right here. Sorry to disappoint." HOW is this good character development? I get the same shit reading the manual which gives the summary on the characters in any other RPG.

What irritates me most of all is your character is described as a seasoned veteran who has been on many other worldly missions right? Ok then why is he asking EVERY alien he comes across about their culture, history, backgrounds, what they do at the Citadel, what is the Citadel, on and on and on. He knows dick! Seasoned veteran? No, seasoned retard.

I get it's for the player's benefit but then WHY have the story make him out to be some weathered warrior if that's the case? Just let him be a newbie so we can be a newbie with him. It detracts from the game when I set out on a mission supposed to be Mr. Know-it-all and I don't know a damn thing about anything. I half expected him to ask a few aliens how they breathe...though he does ask the Spock-chick how they breed (seriously) so I guess that's close enough. And you get a long winded explanation of how they fucking breed with any species they come across...in DETAIL. It's so lame it hurts.

Choices:

Didn't know I'd go on that long about characters so I separated this. I'll make this brief. Choices in this game don't mean dick. You get essentially two of them. Which human do you want to kill and if you want the good ending or bad ending. Other choices in the game boil down to you ending conflicts in either violence or peaceful talks. Sometimes the choices you pick don't make any damn sense and I'll use the last one as a prime example.

Somehow, I was good through the WHOLE fucking game and I managed to pick the evil ending! How I managed to do this I can only leave up to the idiot programmers. The choice is either 1. To protect the Citadel Council (politicians that undermine you at every opportunity in the game) at all costs. Or 2. Kill the reaper as fast as humanly possible to, I believed, save more lives. The evil ending was 2? HOW, WHY??? The council are assholes, worthless alien beings who hate the fuck out of you. Why would I risk more lives to save a group of politicians? WHY? So I didn't, and now I'm evil. OK GAME WHATEVER YOU SAY.

But that's it! Where's this "Mass Effect" they spoke of? Where's the branching paths? For a game with ONLY 7 goddamn main missions you'd THINK they could have made 5 more assuming you made rippling choices in earlier missions actually causing a...oh I dunno... a BRANCHING path!? Of course not.

Conclusion:

The whole game reeks of laziness to me. Why call it Mass Effect, tout the ability to branch out and change things when you never honestly change anything meaningful ever? A game with only 7 or so main missions never even gets time to develop itself. I remember when the game began and I was appointed to kill Saren. Seemed simple enough honestly. I really assumed that would be mission one and then I'd learn all about the evil machine things and fight them. But no the ENTIRE game was just me going to kill ONE evil dude, who by the way was never evil in the first place. Nooooo he's just under mind control! *gasp!* So you never even fight anything worthy of being called a villain in the first place. Lovely.

I got Mass Effect 2 sitting on the back burner and I'll get to it...in 3 years or so I imagine.

*going to take a Mass Poop now*