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[MatrixTheRenegade]

You may have seen my posts in the "Akuze" thread.  If not, here's the cliffnotes:  My
shep is a colonist survivor, and I pretty much had to be out of
character, over and over again, throughout the course of ME2.  It tarnished my enjoyment, and my immersion.



I've seen some people make mention to specific moments where you can tell off Cerberus personnel (like, REALLY tell them off) that I don't
remember seeing, or ways to hurt Cerberus over the course of ME2 beyond
the obvious ones (Overlord, collector base, side mission kidnapped
dude's intel)



That gave me the idea to make this thread.  Mass Effect 1 is my favorite game because I had never gotten into an RPG before, that whole idea of creating a character and getting into their heads and all that.  But somehow, ME changed that.  At first I just
kind of did renegade things because they seemed fun(ny), but the game
snuck up on me, got me to create a three dimensional character, and
ended up being some of the most memorable gaming I've ever done.  



Basically, I just want to tell you guys about my Shepard, and hopefully, some of the RPG (and ME2) enthusiasts out there can help me rekajigger my ME2 save so it is as in character as possible.  Because I plan
to replay before ME3 comes out, and it seems only natural to try to
lean against some of the shoehorning ME2 is guilty of, heh.  Any help will be greatly appreciated.



Alright, so my shepard is a colonist sole survivor.  Basically,
his life sucked, and always sucked, until he joined the Alliance
military and shortly after.  All these things led me to the basic
principles I use to play the character in ME.



Xenophobia: First with the batarians, Shep saw the cruel barbarism that alien species are capable.  Imagine having everything you know burned to the ground by a bunch of savages.  Yeah.  Then couple that with seeing the truly fearsome and (heh) inhuman
terror an alien can be through the thresher maws.  Shep just does not
like aliens.  On some level they unsettle him, and on all levels they
disgust him.  A good example is that he doesn't like the reliance on
Prothean technology that galactic races have.  I guess
that ended up being kind of correct, haha.  This racism changes a bit
over the course of ME1 as he is forced to work with aliens, then in ME2
he works with Cerberus humans (ugh) and aliens that proved themselves in
ME1.  More detail on that stuff later, but basically his racism has been considerably eroded by ME1.  More
to that "I hate turians, but Garrus is alright I guess he's not like
the rest of them" level.  He hates batarians as much as ever, and will
kill them at every opportunity.   Heh I didn't really think of it until now, but I guess the Reapers would represent Shepard's worst fear.



Humans First: Shepard's not enough of a radical with his beliefs to say join the Reds, but his Space Racism
was bad enough before the council started dragging their feet on
everything they could.  The Saren stuff comes to mind in particular, as
did their Reaper denials.  He's as pro-Human as he is racist.  All of
this culminated in killing the council, though the resentment and
distrust toward humans that became common afterward (basically, his plan
didn't work) makes him feel dislodged and lost in ME2.  Although
generally ruthless, Shep does consider human life to be worth saving,
largely from survival guilt about Akuze and a feeling of his own failure
to save his unit.   He will make an effort to do so whenever possible. 
I only killed one colonist on Feros, and I was trying to rifle butt
them and accidentally shot them instead.



Dedicated Soldier: The
Alliance was the first stability Shep had after Mindoir.  And the
military was good to him.  Any soldier deserving of respect, Shepard
will respect.  Anderson is a perfect example.  Jacob is a (begrudging and still mistrusted) example
as well.  By the end of ME1 he's at the level that he can even like an
alien soldier like Kirrahe a little bit.  At any rate, he's a dedicated
soldier and will almost always side with the military in a dispute.  Saresh (I think
that's his name, the indian widower whose wife died on EPrime) was one
of the few exceptions, but that came out of his respect for a dead
fellow soldier more than a general morality (he likely wouldn't do the
same for a civilian).  I'm not sure where he's at in ME2 though since the Alliance doesn't believe in Reapers anymore either.



Personality: I imagine
losing all of your family and everyone you know to a slaver invasion
would be more than slightly traumatizing.  As such I imagine
Shep actually had a bit of arrested development in the sense of social
skills.  As such he tends to be impatient, even with innocent people and
even with innocent humans.  Communication is very direct.  The
main thing that all of this adds up to is that Shepard just can't
politic.  He's not trained in the social graces needed to bite your
tongue about things.  As you can imagine, this is one of the worst
offenders for ME2, since "he's just biding his time quietly, waiting to
strike" is about the only way to justify a sole survivor shep being a
member of Cerberus and not having anything to say about his past. 



Slavery and Survial Instinct: Shep has the grandest of survival instinct.  That goes without saying.  However, he would rather die than feel enslaved.  He
uses that to talk Saren into shooting himself at the Citadel.  He also
had a big argument with Liara about handing him over to Cerberus for
that reason.  I guess he just draws a lot of lines in the sand with all thse principles.



Retribution: Shep's
a big believer in an eye for an eye.  I figure he doesn't see that
there can be any justice in the universe that you don't personally
oversee.  Shepard as such will kill criminals without any hesitation,
and murderers -- or people that would enslave or experiment upon
innocents -- and the like become personal projects.  For
example, I can see him chasing someone into a burning building just to
make sure they get what's coming to them.  Shepard killed just about
everyone where it was an option.  Shiala on Feros, the asari scientist on Virmire, Fist, Ethan Jeong, you name it.  One of the notable exceptions I can think of is that one criminal that gets you to help her kill all the other criminals in her syndicate.  I ended
up letting her live because she had helped in taking down so many
bloodthirsty criminals, then intimidated her into retirement.  Was
pleased to see that that worked out in ME2.  Probably the defining
moment was when meeting Toombs -- when finding out what Dr. Wayne did, Shep talked Toombs out of killing Wayne, then killed Dr. Wayne himself, and let Toombs go. 



You
can probably see where a lot of my disappointment in ME2 stems
already.  In particular, Cerberus.  I made it my mission to destroy them
as fully as possible once I found out the truth and I can't imagine that ever swaying.  Them killing Kahoku was like, the arch-enemy cherry on the arch-enemy sundae.  



Anyway, now I'll do a super cliffnotes of the big choices I made and I guess then I'll just put the floor to you fine people!



Big choices:



Council - Killed 'em.  Aliens
that refused to act on behalf of humans (or even the galaxy) made it a
no-brainer.  This is my Shep's dark side at its finest.



Love
interest - Williams.  A tough as nails, pro-human, xenophobic third
generation soldier that has a hard time expressing herself?  Yeah, that's a pretty easy decision.  Can't really imagine my Shep swaying from that, either.



Virmire - Williams, though it was a tough call as I think Shep would have grown to like Kaiden quite a bit by now.



Wrex - I actually ended up letting him live.  Wrex had proven to be likeable enough by now, and his predicament was understandable.  A strong survival instinct, just like Shep.  A soldier doin' his job.  So I talked him down with a bit of verbal abuse.  



Killed Dr. Wayne, let Toombs go.  Self-explanatory.



Rachni - "Make your peace with the galaxy; the Rachni are a dead race."  After
what he'd just seen, combined with the history books, I can't imagine
there being a single chance in a million that my Shep would believe the
Rachni Queen's words.  Or, uh, "musics".



That's about all I can remember.  I'll say one last interesting thing, I guess.  I picture Garrus and Shep becoming the best of buds from ME1-2.  I mean, Garrus tries to "talk Shep into" killing Saren when that had already been the decision.  That was big.  Then he talks about the butcher of a scientist that got away and how he kind of wishes he just killed the guy.  Big bondin' moment there when Shep talks the guy into killing the scientist and Garrus doesn't regret it.  Then Shep dies and what does Garrus do?  Become a vigilante on Omega that kills every bad guy he can find.  Turian or not, Garrus and my Shep have too much in common not to bromance it up.  Haven't decided what that'll do to his overall racism, though.





Apologies for the wall of text.  The
thing is that this is a complex problem and so it'll have a complex
answer... there isn't one particular obstacle I have with ME2, it's just
that the bulk of it feels off or wrong in some way, and I want
to fix that, have a more enjoyable ME2 experience.  And a more in
character save going into ME3.  So I kind of just needed to show where
I'm at and try to illustrate why ME2 would feel wonky for me.  Anyway,
the rest of this should be pretty straight forward.





Choices I'm having trouble figuring out:



Zaeed - Initially I went after the Blue Suns leader, causing those people to die, but now I'm second-guessing it.  I
did let the two people on Asteroid X57 die to kill the batarian
terrorist, but that was a bit different.  This is just a merc (a human
one at that) weighed against dozens of civilians.  I've decided pretty concretely not to go after the BSL, but I'm actually wondering if Zaeed would "deserve" to die by my shepard's standards.  Choosing to condemn those people is as bad as killing them directly, isn't it?



Quarians
vs Geth - Geth are just under batarians and Reapers for the Race-Hate, I
think.  Killing the heretics was an easy decision, but this one is
harder.  If Shep would expect the Quarians to beat the geth, it'd be a
no brainer.  But the game doesn't really let
you investigate the probabilities of the war, which is a kick in the ass
given the magnitude of your decision.  My kneejerk is to say that the
Quarians would lose as the geth would probably outnumber them and have
installed major defences, but the game series seems convinced that the
Quarian fleet is a big deal.  Plus there's the
racist issue... after meeting Tali and Kal I don't think Shep would
have the kind of blanket animosity and distrust that he'd've had in ME1.
So I think he'd want them to win the war.  I dunno.  Help me out on this one.



Thane's son - If I remember right, he was going to kill an anti-human politician.  It's
really tough to figure out what Shep would do here, since while they do
say there could be more anti-human blowback, the guy's existence is an
insult to all Shep's principles.



Jack - I'm not sure if I should encourage her to kill or let live that one guy on her loyalty mission.  Honestly I think
what my shep would probably do is Toombs it, get her to leave the room
and whack the guy himself.  But since only Jack can kill him (I think?)
my options are basically let the emotionally fragile fellow Cerberus
victim further damage themselves by killing someone they knew as a kid
or letting the SOB live



Genophage - This one particularly twists my head in a bunch of directions.





No Brainer Choices:



Killing various batarians where it is optional.



Collector base, captured informant's data, Overlord (gee, I friggin wonder, haha)



Samara over Morinth



Jack over Miranda during the argument



Getting
Jacob to kill his father, letting Garrus kill his old partner, letting
miranda kill the guy that betrayed her, letting mordin kill his protege,
kasumi's data goes to the alliance





Scenes I can't seem to play in character no matter what path I take:



Pretty much everything after the nift Lazarus Project intro.  I just don't feel like I can express enough distrust or anger or confusion.  Should I just toss this one up to "he's in battle mode, he doesn't have time to do this right now"?  



The MEMORY TEST.  Ughghghgh. 
Can't believe BW would have some clipboard wielding Cerb scientist
bring that **** up and not let you give it to them with a renegade
interrupt.  Anyway, yeah.  This scene.



Relations
with Jack - I think Jack and my Shep would become good friends once he
gets past her dangerous psychopath reputation.  They have too much in
common, after all, not to.  Not being able to
mention the Akuze experiment when Jack asks if you could know what it's
like to be experimented on was particularly grating.  Are there any
dialogue trees I might have missed that hem a bit closer to my
character?  Anywhere during the correspondence with Jack, really, but
especially in that conversation.



Giving Miranda a piece of my mind - I just didn't feel like I could be rude enough to her, and until the loyalty mission there's no reason for my Shep to not think of her as Dr. Wayne
with boobs.  I actually remember finding out that in one dialogue tree
moment  I actually get trapped, where I can either be nice or rude to
her, and if rude I'll have to either apologize to her or kiss her.  ...what?  Why can't I just be rude to her?  Anyway, any conversations I may have missed where I can give her a piece of my mind would be fantastic.  Either with general abuse or Cerberus-related hate.



Giving Jacob a piece of my mind - See above, I guess.  It's diminished a bit by his backstory but I still wasn't feelin' it.  



Giving TIM a heaping dose of my mind - Yeahhhhhh this one should be self-explanatory, haha.  I want to say the worst possible thing to him pretty much every time.  



Confronting the Spectre in LotSB - Ugh, the ONE time I get a chance to talk about Akuze and BW railroads me into being a hypocrite.  Thanks.  Anyways, she brings up Akuze and calls me out for working with Cerberus.  I
think my options were the usual "sputter inanely in some half-arsed
manner to justify it" options.  How do I frame this conversation
realistically?  Like the "memory test" it just completely shatters immersion and character.



Meeting
Williams on Horizon - Ugh this was like the Spectre thing but so so
much worse since this was the LI I had chosen and can't see deviating
from.  Honestly, I'm just asking for damage control here, because I believe even the people that managed an in character SS run of ME2 were miffed by this encounter.  So
I guess, help me structure that conversation as close to in character
as possible, or something.  Because it was a total **** sandwich last
time I played.





Miscellaneous Stuff:



Other ways to hurt
Cerberus - So I sent the data to the Alliance, I shut down Overlord
(wish I could kill that bloody scientist though, seriously), and I blew
up the Collector base.  Anything I'm missing?  I've heard about ways to get Jacob and Miranda to defect, or something.  Maybe
I'm just completely forgetting the ending, heh, but yeah, I don't
remember that stuff.  And yeah, any other ways that might be miss-able
to harm Cerberus as much as possible.  Becaue the only way to justify my Shep working as a Cerberus cell is to 1) Stop the collectors and 2) sabotage them from within



Opportunities to diss Cerberus or otherwise make it clear I hate them and don't work for them - I might have missed some of these.  I need every one of them, like a booster shot against the grime of working for Cerberus.  My
personal challenge to myself is to play ME2 without defending Cerberus
or my involvement with Cerberus, directly or indirectly, even once.  I hope it can be done.  



I
also may have missed some other references to Akuze or Mindoir.  The
only moments I can remember are the Spectre rogue and Miranda's
references to Akuze though.





Thanks for readin' this behemoth.  I look
forward to your responses.  As I understand it, a lot of SSes had the
same problem, so I'm banking that others before me have tried this same
task and has the same struggles.

[d1sciple]

the quick answer is that you can't man. oh, one other reference you missed is Toombs message to you, but it's irrelevant anyway. the whole idea is to assemble a team and make them happy because the badguys are coming and you'll do anything to stop them, even work with the other bad guys. it's nowhere near as open as ME1, in fact if you dis TIM directly in convo you just end up missing heaps of important dialogue etc. but it's designed that way. have you imported a couple of different ME1 canons? like opposite sides? with all the choices you can possibly make it all ends up pretty much the same way, no matter who your li is, no matter what you decide about the council/rachni etc. the story of ME2 is basically the same regardless, you only have the illusion of freedom. the main point here is that the paragon/renegade choice in this game is to either completely forget the past and blindly chase down the reaper threat(paragon), or completely forget the past and blindly chase down the reaper threat while screwing a bunch of other people over(renegade). i agree that it's frustrating sometimes but as i said in your other thread they couldn't possibly make a trilogy unless the middle story was so linear. there's no one else going after the reapers and that's a huge issue, a main part of the plot, so to wake up alive after 2 years and tell cerberus to **** off would render the game finished. no matter what you do during the game TIM betrays you and you start off ME3 on trial while the reapers are attacking earth. so just like ME1 it's a really linear story where you have the illusion of choice, it may be that that illusion is even thinner in this game and though i'm not excusing the devs for the frustration that causes i understand the limitations of writing, especially when you're trying to create a coherent trilogy.