Mr eel
Mass Effect is Actually Really Awesome Even Though I Wasn’t Too Sure When I Started Playing It
Well, I sat on this post for a little bit because I wanted to mull over things a little first. Hindsight often makes games less compelling than you thought they were when playing them. That’s not the case with Mass Effect. It really is a very good game.
For a bit of context; I don’t play a lot of RPGs, since I find the emphasis on histrionic drawn-out dialog, stupid characters, clichéd settings and crappy game mechanics to be totally annoying. Oh and random battles. OMG I hate random battles. Granted I’m making a lot of generalisations here and most of these criticisms are pointed at Japanese RPGs, but hey… that’s mainly what’s out there right now.
Mass Effect thankfully avoids those problems. The combat is real time, 3rd person and despite the dodgy squad AI, has turned out to be great fun — I didn’t think too much of it at first. The dialog system is flat out brilliant. Being able to shape the direction of a fully-voiced conversation is an excellent experience, and the choices given to you show a fair bit of subtlety — they aren’t just the set of good/bad/indifferent given in most other games. Often I found myself thinking carefully about what response to give. Fucking up a bit of espionage because I made the wrong choices was actually enjoyable, because it felt believable. For anyone complaining about sitting through lengthy dialog and having to skip it; YOU ARE PLAYING THE WRONG GAME. Seriously, Mass Effect is all about learning and interacting with characters in the game. If you have a problem with that, it’s not the game for you.
The dialog only works because of the great writing and a compelling plot. Yes, the plot isn’t entirely free from cliché, but in the context of a game it doesn’t need to be the most original or deep-thinking story ever. The fact that you are affecting the outcome of the story based on your choices is the part that makes it especially compelling.
The sense of a large galaxy waiting to be explored is fantastic. You get to rocket about looking at various planets and pursuing the various side quests. Slight criticism; the on-planet side quests are a bit hit and miss. They tend to be repetitive, with some pretty bland environments. Still, they’re a good chance to collect some money and level up, like a slightly more interesting version of grinding — c’mon at least you’re tooling about in stealth ship while you do it.
I loved reading the planet descriptions and poring over the Codex as I learnt more things about the game-world. The amount of work put into these is fantastic. Open a codex entry and a deep, velvety voice starts reading it out to you. Yes, I did spend a fair bit of time listening to the entires.
So aside from the graphical glitches and ropey frame-rate, Mass Effect has become one of my favourite games, despite my initial misgivings. The fact that this is the first entry in a trilogy gets me all giddy. I can’t wait for the next one to come out!
In the meantime, I might play the game again. This time around I’m going to be really, really mean…
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