Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be looking at games I've had sitting on my shelf, silently mocking me for having not played them yet. Some are undoubtedly classics; some are probably just steaming shitpiles. But I'm going to find that out for myself, and hopefully have some fun in the process.
I have no idea how to separate my competing instincts when it comes to Mass Effect. On the one hand, it's an epically-scoped, hard(ish) sci-fi tale that seems to take a lot of cues from one of my favourite TV shows ever, Battlestar Galactica (the original and moreso the remake). On the other hand, as an actual game, there are a lot of interesting decisions that take the Action RPG genre to new heights. But on the other other hand, it doesn't really do either of these things – that is, epic-lengthed storytelling and RPG gameplay – to quite the level that I expected it to. Rather than heralding some new age of interactive expression and meaningfulness like so much of the gaming press seems to think that this game should, it is merely a fusion of OK shooting mechanics and dense, if unrewarding, storytelling.
Taken on its own merits, Mass Effect should work pretty well as a popcorn sci-fi game. None of the characters are especially deep, the plot is relatively straightforward once you get down to it, and the themes that might be forefronted on a show like Battlestar Galactica are kept firmly at the periphery, so as not to interrupt the forward momentum that the game seems to encourage for the player. The first few hours of the game, though, don't make such a good impression. I could try to describe it to you, but let's just look at this summary of the first few events of the game from Wikipedia:
The game begins aboard the experimental SSV Normandy, commanded by Captain Anderson and his executive officer, Commander Shepard. The Normandy is sent to the human colony world of Eden Prime to recover an unearthed Prothean beacon. To assist in recovering the beacon, the Citadel Council, the galaxy's primary governing body, has sent one of their top agents, a turian "Spectre", named Nihlus.
A small team consisting of Nihlus, Shepard, biotic Kaidan Alenko, and the quickly-killed Corporal Jenkins, who is replaced by Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams, discover that the Eden Prime colony is under attack by alien synthetic life-forms known as the geth, led by a rogue turian Spectre named Saren Arterius, who kills Nihlus. After the battle ends, Shepard locates the beacon and receives a vision. While initially struggling to understand the vision, it turns out to be images of biological creatures being slaughtered by machines.
The Normandy and its crew are summoned by Ambassador Udina, the Alliance's representative on the Citadel, to the Citadel station to report on the matter. Unfortunately, Shepard is unable to convince the Citadel Council of Saren's treason without solid evidence. Citadel Security officer Garrus Vakarian and krogan mercenary Urdnot Wrex lead Shepard to a quarian mechanic named Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, who possesses a recording of a conversation between Saren and an asari Matriarch named Benezia, discussing their victory on Eden Prime. The recording also mentions the return of a force known as the Reapers, as well as an artifact called the "Conduit." Confronted with this evidence, the Council revokes Saren's status as a Spectre…
The game essentially just throws you into its world and its jargon without much explanation. While that certainly can be an effective method if there's something worth uncovering, it's not such a good move for Mass Effect, simply because its story is just a little bit silly. Very little seems to be tying back to any real, concrete themes – the game is much more concerned with the thrust of its story to investigate anything in too much detail.
Like I said earlier, though, as a brainer videogame counterpart to, say, Star Wars, Mass Effect is much more successful. Sort of. It's maybe a bit too wordy (maybe a lot too wordy) to take up that mantle, but its story does eventually come to a cracking pace right before it ends.
Essentially, the storytelling, character and world building, and attempts at anything resembling "maturity" are a real mixed bag. While the lore and the background context for a lot of what's going on in Mass Effect is nicely fleshed out, traveling the stars feels like a bit of a hollow experience. Only occasionally do you feel any sense of wonder or amazement at the alien landscapes you encounter. The aesthetics of the game are very shiny, very polished and occasionally beautiful, but I didn't really feel like I was exploring anything, instead simply moving from chapter to chapter, from quest to quest. Final Fantasy XIII got ripped on for being "linear" (and it is considerably more linear than Mass Effect), but I have a hard time believing that so many alien societies decided to build their civilizations at the bottom of linear chasms.
Games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age have been used as arguments for why the JRPG genre can't keep up – they're so far ahead of the pack that the resolutely traditional designs of Japanese developers can't hope to seem like innovators in any way. And I will grant that in a lot of ways, Mass Effect does push certain aspects of game development forward. For games with realistic art styles, Mass Effect is so advanced in terms of facial and character design that it makes many games look positively antiquated. This might be a bit of a cliche, but a lot of the time, I forgot I was playing a game and was simply involved in the characters and the story. That can occasionally backfire for a lot of games, but it works for Mass Effect.
Unfortunately, a lot of what the characters have to say and who the characters actually are is, frankly, boring. Shepard is supposed to be a blank slate, and though I played through the game with a female Shepard who undoubtedly has a better voice actor in Jennifer Hale than male Shepard does, I found the whole "taciturn supersoldier" routine so uninteresting. The rest of the characters are your standard assortment of dull space marines and potentially flamboyant aliens doing their best dull space marine routine. There are of course quite a few exceptions to this rule – I found the Salarians to be uniformly well-written and interesting – but on the whole, I never identified with Shepard, Alenko, Williams or T'Soni to the degree that I have with, say, Cecil from Final Fantasy IV. And that's a real problem, because the whole modus operandi of Mass Effect is for the player to be so invested in the story that they want to direct it in ways that make sense in a personal way.
This is the main problem with Mass Effect, then: its bizarre and frankly kind-of insulting approach to morality. Warren Spector may have made a bit of a dud with Epic Mickey, but he's absolutely correct when he says that we've spent billions of dollars improving ways to shoot each other, but haven't found any ways to improve conversation or human interaction in video games. Mass Effect is a concerted effort to attempt to rectify this, making human and alien interaction the core of its experience (or ostensibly, at least). You might be able to tell by the tone of this paragraph or by reading some other articles on the site that I think that BioWare totally missed the target on this one. If you've never played Mass Effect, essentially your character can fall into a "Paragon" or a "Renegade" model – Paragons do things by the book and try to help people out, while Renegades aren't as beholden to rules and can occasionally insult or kill to get what they want. Conversation options then open up on a wheel at the bottom of the screen, and depending on which way you answer queries, you can improve your Paragon or Renegade standing, opening up different and new options that take you down a different path.
Though there are many attempts to make this morality seem fluid and open and not beholden to video game logic, it doesn't quite work that way. I found myself being Paragonical (that's a word now) because that's how I'd like to think of myself in real life, and it always opened up new and better options for me. Most people, though, would probably make their choices based on what ending they want to see, or what aspects of the game they want to open up. Morality is, and should be, much bigger than video game decisions. By making the delineations so clear, there's no effort to get the player to ask anything of themselves – instead, they simply engage in another minigame, though this time, with the added reward of different and new voice acting, locales, and stories. It's not about the player, then; it's about the game, and that's unfortunate. This system just goes to show that conversation really hasn't evolved since the Commodore 64 days – even games like Pool of Radiance challenge the gamer more than this more-or-less binary system that has been hailed as being so "revolutionary" and "cinematic."
While you can change the outcome of the game drastically based on your decisions, one thing you cannot change is just how much shooting you'll be doing in this game. Combat is of course a large part of any RPG, but Mass Effect seems to suggest that diplomacy and talking are important aspects to this world, so it's a shame that you're not allowed to exercise this more often. Every single goddamned mission comes down to talking and then shooting a whole bunch of faceless enemies, and that's really unfortunate (and unfortunately a problem with most "modern classics" of the HD era). I can only imagine a Mass Effect with far less on-ground shooting.
Don't get me wrong: some of these sections are fun, but too often they don't make a ton of sense. Yes, there's a dangerous threat and yes, you're playing as a space marine, but why couldn't you maybe play not as a space marine? Well, probably because then BioWare would have wasted EA's money and no one would play the game, but, well… FUCK. A game's going to have to do something really special or off-the-wall to make me care about its shooting mechanics, and Mass Effect's are just barely passable, to boot, so that's a real problem considering how much of it you'll have to be doing. Essentially, it's a poor-man's Halo hiding in problematic RPG clothing, so I can't really see Mass Effect as one of the greatest games of all time.
What I was able to do, though, was enjoy it on terms that the game doesn't seem to understand that it should be taken on. The pacing of the story really was reminiscent of good TV pacing, and the overall journey wasn't one I was angry to have taken. Mass Effect is a good game. It's not the game-changer that many people seem to think it is and it is maybe too self-important, full of too many attempts at "maturity" (side note on the "romance" side game: I don't want or need a dating sim, but the mechanics of getting someone to sleep with you in this game are pretty childish and a little bit insulting for someone who is, you know, already in a stable and long-term relationship. But whatever), but underneath all of that it's a rolicking sci-fi adventure. I'm having a hard-time conveying why I ultimately did enjoy it despite all of my misgivings. I'm going to go ahead and say that that's partially the game's fault, but let's just say it this way: it's a reasonably intelligent action game. I suppose in this current climate, that's more revelatory than it should be.
(Final note: I am, or was, a pretty big fan of BioWare back in the day. If I was like, six years younger, I bet this game would have seemed pretty fucking awesome. With all that being said, I doubt this game's even half as good as Baldur's Gate, for instance.)