Thread by @terrorhousemag

Finished the MASS EFFECT games. Took forever to finish ME3 because I was dreading the ending.

Tired of this election shit so here's a LOOOOOOONG Tweet thread looking back at this classic RPG trilogy of our youths. Is MASS EFFECT art? Does it hold up? FIND OUT!

MASS EFFECT:

Best of the trilogy. The only one that is an actual RPG. Had the most interesting story, most interesting characters. It and DRAGON AGE: ORIGINS are the last two great games BioWare put out before the twin pincers of wokeness and EA turned them to utter shit.

BioWare listened to players who criticized JADE EMPIRE for being too dumbed down for the console set. MASS EFFECT has tons of character stat, weapon, armor, magic (oh excuse me, "biotics") customization, hoo boy! Just wish they hadn't built such a completely borked interface.

Rifling through tons of loot for seven different characters, having to laboriously swap out your party members and visit all the Citadel shops to get upgraded gear is an exercise in torture. You can also break the game easily and end up with 99,999,999 credits by the end.

The story is better than the sequels. You have a clearly defined bad guy (Saren) and a clearly defined goal (kick his ass). The lore, while not particularly original, is fresh and exciting. The areas part of the main story (Citadel, Noveria, Virmire etc.) are fun to explore.

ME1 is also the only game where the lore carries over into the gameplay in a big way. For example, the Codex tells you that krogan have two sets of organs. In gameplay terms, when you kill a krogan, they start healing up again and you have to kill them a second time.

I don't even mind the elevator ride segments because they make the game world feel bigger than it actually is. Walking from the deck of the Normandy down to C-Sec HQ, up to the Presidium, back down to the Wards without a single load screen really adds to the atmosphere.

As mentioned above, ME1 is the only game in the trilogy with a clearly defined villain. You have party members with interesting backgrounds: Wrex the cynical mercenary from a dying race, Liara the naive scientist, Garrus the young cop chafing against the rules.

The game could have done with more exposition for the main characters, however. I managed to trigger "we're about to catch Saren" conversations from Wrex and Tali when I was barely halfway through the game. What do you mean "we have him on the run?" I haven't gotten to Feros yet!

One nice thing about ME1 compared to previous BioWare games is that there's a bunch of minor crew members on the Normandy in addition to your party members. Shame the writers didn't do anything with them. They have the same dialogue throughout the game up until the very end.

The romance subplots are pure autism. Liara and Shepard start talking about some mystical connection they have and then they fuck with barely any other dialogue? (Then again, given how much worse it got in the sequels, I suppose I should be grateful it was kept so brief.)

The combat isn't great, but it's also an RPG. It also gets better near the end when you've leveled up and can chain biotic/tech attacks together to blast entire armies of geth. The Mako is fun to drive and the Mako segments that are part of the main plot are great.

The side missions...are bad.

Great idea in theory: free roaming exploration of planets.

Execution was horrible. You drive around identical planets and enter identical buildings. Well, almost identical. Sometimes the furniture is rearranged. Godawful bitchwork.

The worst example of this is the "Geth Incursions" side mission, where you have to land on FIVE separate planets and blow up geth installations again...and again...and again.

Main missions are, however, very good. The finale is great. Do not regret playing it at all.

DLC: BRING DOWN THE SKY

Not very fun. They charged Xbox 360 owners for a side mission that reuses the same interior areas as every other mission lol. They were also too cheap to hire back Seth Green (why does the Normandy VI talk to you during the mission and not Joker?).

BRING DOWN THE SKY was billed as setup for ME2 because it introduces the batarians, who play a major role in that game. But you learn nothing about them other than that they're basically North Koreans from Space and the mission's outcome has no bearing on ME2's plot.

To be fair, DLC was a new concept when ME1 came out. Who else remembers the OBLIVION horse armor fiasco? And I can't complain because as a PC user, I got BRING DOWN THE SKY for free. Still, it's not that great as a time investment.

DLC: PINNACLE STATION

Lazy. The combat simulator/gladiator fighting trope is way overused in RPGs. OH MAN I GET TO FIGHT GETH IN THE MATRIX, HOW AWESOME! And the reward you get for beating it (a modular home where you can buy weapons) is lame. Not that great.

MASS EFFECT 2:

Not terrible, but a harbinger of BioWare's demise. ME2 is NOT an RPG, it's a shooter with dialogue trees. Character customization is junked. Biotic/tech powers slashed to nothing. Even weapon choices are more limited. It's worse than JADE EMPIRE.

The actual shooting IS better than ME1. Weapons feel like they have oomph, aiming is easier, and replacing the cooldown meter with reloading was a good move. But it's not a fucking RPG. It's basically BIOSHOCK in space (BIOSHOCK is a good game, but seriously dumbed down).

The plot is weirdly thin. You spend very little time fighting the Reapers and most of it helping your party members, who are apparently bitch-ass crybabies who can't put aside their emotional problems long enough to focus on saving the galaxy. Where did I find these assholes?

Moreover, aside from Garrus, Tali, Joker, and Chakwas, none of the characters from ME1 return for anything more than bit parts. The rest of the cast is entirely new, and while some of the new characters (like Samara and Miranda) are interesting, it's not enough.

The second act of a three-act story IS supposed to focus on character development, but it's also supposed to focus on existing characters. Imagine if EMPIRE STRIKES BACK was entirely about Lando Calrissian and Han Solo and Leia were only on screen for five minutes. That's ME2.

There are also too many party members in ME2. ME1 had six: Kaidan, Ashley, Wrex, Garrus, Tali, Liara. ME2 has 10: Jacob, Miranda, Mordin, Garrus, Grunt, Tali, Samara, Thane, plus Zaeed and Kasumi with the DLC. The plot is spread far too thin as a result.

Side missions are better than ME1. No more roaming empty planets or revisiting the same three areas with slightly different feng shui. At the same time, ME1's epic feel of exploring the galaxy is lost. Pretty sure there was a happy median they could have gone for here.

Same with the hub areas and the abandonment of the seamless elevator transitions. Omega, Illium, the Citadel, and Tuchanka are smaller and less interesting than the Citadel in ME1. The loot/store system was also curtailed down to nothing.

Planet scanning is ass, but you can also mine enough minerals to buy everything before you're even a third through the game. Which gets to another problem with ME2: there are no hard choices. It's stupid easy to get the best ending. No sacrifices at all.

BioWare billed ME2 as a game where all of your characters could be killed in the final mission, but unless you play like an absolute idiot, that will never happen. So long as you buy all the upgrades (not even all! just three or so), you'll get the best ending.

That's not a hard choice. A hard choice is when you have to choose whether to save Kaidan or Ashley on Virmire in ME1. There are no such choices in ME2. Resource scarcity would have potentially solved this problem, but again, you can easily buy every upgrade in the game.

The game also lacks a clear villain. Saren was an actual character. The closest you get in ME2 is Harbinger, who just makes menacing remarks at you from time to time. You can't get mad at the Collectors because they're basically the Borg. No dramatic tension.

DLC: NORMANDY CRASH SITE

It was free. So whatever. You walk around the rubble of the Normandy for ten minutes and put a statue down.

DLC: ZAEED --- THE PRICE OF VENGEANCE

Also free. Zaeed doesn't make much of a difference in the story, but some of his comments are funny.

DLC: FIREWALKER

Not bad. The Firewalker is fun to drive around and the missions are better than the Mako side missions in ME1.

DLC: KASUMI - STOLEN MEMORY

Okay. Kasumi's loyalty mission is probably the most interesting. Useless as a character, but I had fun.

DLC: OVERLORD

Creepy and fun. Has no relevance to the plot, however.

DLC: GENESIS

Waste of money. It's horribly written and the comic book art is shit. Should have kept it a PS3 exclusive.

DLC: LAIR OF THE SHADOW BROKER

Good God, finally BioWare puts some real effort into a DLC pack! The story is good, it's nice to have Liara back, though they again cheaped out by not rehiring any of the ME2 cast members.

DLC: ARRIVAL

Also excellent. Having to fight on your own is an interesting twist. The stealth segment at the beginning is trash, however.

Almost forgot: the romance subplots.

Just don't.

You have the Alien in the Plastic Bubble, a dogfucker, and a bald ex-con covered in gang tattoos. And the writing is fucking horrible.

MASS EFFECT 3:

Not as bad as I remembered, but that might just be the fog of nostalgia, like how everyone hated METAL GEAR SOLID 2 when it came out (don't lie, you all did) but now fetes it as a classic. But it's still not good.

The gameplay is an evolution of ME2. So still a shooter, not an RPG. There's marginally more customization in the form of weapon mods and branching power trees, but nothing that merits the term "RPG."

The combat in ME3 is bland due to a lack of variety. In the first two games, you fought all kinds of enemies: geth, robots, mercenaries, krogan. In ME3, it's either Reapers or Cerberus. Reapers or Cerberus. Reapers or Cerberus. Oh, and geth (briefly). Yawn.

People ripped on ME3 for shoving wokeness into the story, but that's a symptom of much deeper problems with the story. Chief among these is that it takes away choice from the player in order to railroad them into a linear plot, which is NOT what you do in an RPG.

Example: when you encounter Liara on Mars, you don't get a choice as to which party member you send away so she can join you. Nope, it's always gotta be James, otherwise that big dramatic end scene where he crashes the shuttle (and Ashley/Kaidan gets beaten up) couldn't happen.

Similarly, on Palaven, when you meet up with Garrus, you don't get to choose whether you keep Liara or James in your party. It's always Liara who has to be sent away. Again, this is to railroad the plot and it's indicative of extremely lazy writing.

The ME3 narrative is constantly grinding to a halt for weird diversions, such as Kaidan/Ashley being in the hospital or Cortez moping about his dead husband. It kills all momentum, takes away choice from the player, and is a giant waste of time.

As for Cortez, he's an obvious ridiculous token they threw in there to woke the game up, but here's the real problem: the new characters in ME3 have no character traits beyond whatever minority status (gender, sexuality, or race) they've been assigned.

Every criticism of Cortez can also be leveled at James. Same type of one-dimensional character. James' only personality trait is being Latino. I mean, all Latinos sprinkle Spanish words into casual conversation and won't shut up about their "abuela's huevos rancheros," right?

It's funny how liberals rely on the crudest, most pandering stereotypes when it comes to writing minority characters. Look at the new Star Wars trilogy and how Finn's sole character trait is cowardice. That's literally a racist trope from 1920's-1930's Hollywood. Same here.

Main missions in ME3 are good. Side missions are the worst in the series. They literally took multiplayer maps and repurposed them for bitchwork quests. "Go here and pick up this doodad and defend yourself against respawning enemies." Go fuck yourself. I paid $60 for this.

That's when they could be bothered to have side missions at all. Half of the side ops consist of overhearing some asshole on the Citadel, going to a planet, scanning it, picking up some doodad in the Normandy, and flying back. Absolutely lazy and pathetic.

Another example of this laziness: half the time, you don't even have proper dialogue tree conversations with characters. This process began in ME2 (in ME1, you could choose every line of dialogue Shepard said, in ME2 many choices were made for you) and I don't like it. At all.

The Citadel is bigger and more interesting than the hub worlds in ME2, but still not as big/interesting as the Citadel in ME1. And there are no other hubs in the game. I assume the budget got diverted to that multiplayer mode that absolutely nobody fucking asked for.

As bad as the ending was, if you paid attention to the rest of ME3, you could kind of see it coming. Flat characters, lazy side missions, a lack of a main villain (Harbinger, who was clearly being built up as the big bad in ME2, doesn't even SPEAK in this game)...we all knew.

DLC: FROM ASHES

LOL, scam, LOL. Actually has relevance to the main plot and Javik is an interesting character, but LOLOLOLOL what a scam.

DLC: EXTENDED CUT

Too little, too late. Doesn't fix the structural problems with ME3. You'd have to junk the whole game and start over.

DLC: LEVIATHAN

I suspected when I beat ME3 that EA had ordered BioWare to neuter the ending so they could sell it as DLC and LEVIATHAN was glorious confirmation, because it actually explains where tf the Reapers came from. Worth playing, but also a scam.

DLC: OMEGA

Fun on a gameplay level, but it suffers from the same problem ME2 had. I don't care about Aria T'Loak. I talked to her, what, twice in ME2? If you built a DLC pack around Conrad Verner, it would have more dramatic impact.

DLC: CITADEL.

Ridiculous fan service, completed BioWare's transformation into the Western version of a Japanese dating sim peddler. Some funny jokes, though.

And that's the MASS EFFECT trilogy. Great promise, fell short. Worth playing. Disappointing the further you get into it.