A long time ago I posted a retrospective on Mass Effect and decided to point out all the things that were wrong with it that virtually no proffessional reviewer and few fans ever pointed out or recognized, as well as a compliation of problems that much fo the fandom did generally know about. Originally I was going to do the following part soon after the first two parts but I forgot about it and never did. Well, it's here, and there's proabably going to be two more parts after this, because now I'm talking about characters and there's a lot to talk about there.
For those who missed it/forgot about, part 1 and part 2 of this restrospective, on the gameplay and story respectively:
http://forum.bioware...rospect-part-1/
http://forum.bioware...rospect-part-2/
Anyway, part 3:
Our Cast:
This is it. The big Kahuna. The part of the game everyone loves. The part of the game that keeps the fans swooning and fawning and acting like complete, unashamed nerds. The cast of Mass Effect.
The cast of Mass Effect is considered so amazing by some that it still makes the game 9/10 even virtually the entire rest of the game is heavily flawed. At the very least these characters are considered a worthy justification for slogging through all the other crap the games are composed of – just to be able to spend several minutes conversing with these people is considered as amazing as talking to Jesus.
I’m here to shoot some massive holes in that idea without completely sinking it. The characters are indeed the best part of the game, and the only part that is consistently decent. But that doesn’t make the entire cast the epitome of character writing. Anyone who tried to romance Ashley all the way through the trilogy will know where I’m going – at points, the characters are better written than any before, but at others completely fall apart. I’m going to discuss where they do and don’t, how the characters fit into the story and whether they ‘belong’. I’m not going to talk about every character, just the ones that really matter, and I think I’ll start with the ME1 squad.
The squad from ME1 end up being, with one exception, the best characters in the series precisely because they exist in all three games, thus having longer to establish a character arc. Before we talk about the 5 that work (or partially work) I’m going to toss one of the 6 out and never talk about him again: Kaiden Alenko. Kaiden is boring. He has virtually no character and has nothing interesting to say. He serves no role or purpose in the story as he has nothing interesting to contribute to any discussion the player has with him and does not do anything noteworthy that isn’t out of character. It’s very obvious that most of his dialogue in ME2 and to a lesser extent 3 was written for Ashley, not for him. As such, I always kill him on Virmire because he’s simply not interesting and as such I will only talk about Ashley from this point on as I will assume you have done the logical thing for the sake of the story and killed him off to keep the interesting character alive.
With that said, let’s talk about that interesting character shall we? Ashley was arguably the best written character in ME1 aside from Saren (who is also the series’ best villain) – she has a distinct, independent, feisty and witty personality, a personal philosophy about many things in life and is generally an interesting character to get to know. Having a convo with Ashley in ME1 is guaranteed to be entertaining to listen to because she is designed to be a foil to the player themselves, challenging positions they hold, and she always does it with sincerity and isn’t above having fun toying with the player (I say the player instead of Shepard because Shepard has no set character in ME1, Shepard is whatever the player wants him/her to be). As such, since Kaiden is dull and Liara is badly written, her romantic subplot is the only one in ME1 with any reason, connection or narrative weight behind it. It’s the only one that makes any sense, and unlike Liara’s it’s not filled (or at least, less filled) with cringe-inducing dialogue.
Oddly enough, I don’t actually hate the way Ashley was used in ME2/3, because honestly it makes sense for her to react that way. As I’ve said previously it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever for Shepard to work with TIM who is obviously a psychopath, so Ashley’s utter disgust at you makes total sense. It’s just a shame Bioware didn’t realise their own character’s position was actually right and that they shouldn’t have forced the player to work with Cerberus. And it’s also a shame because it destroys the romantic subplot between the two because of their poor choice in storytelling and thus makes what could have been one of the strongest relationships in the game into a tragic betrayal inflicted by the game’s writers themselves when it was entirely unnecessary. You can get back together in ME3, I know, but it just doesn’t work – Ash continually distrusts you (as she should) and only closer to the end of the game finally admits she was wrong. At that point it doesn’t feel like the characters really have any trust or connection anymore so it just doesn’t work.
Since I already named Liara let’s crack open that powder keg shall we? Liara gets a lot of hate for her prominence in the plot which some view as unnecessary or as being ‘pushed’ as what Bioware thinks should be Shepard’s canon love interest. And actually, that’s totally fine. There’s only 3 characters in the game that work as a believable love interest for Shepard and Liara is one of them. Her role in the plot is also fine as it is, because she is arguably one of the most intelligent and educated people in your crew aside from Mordin so having her always being part of or contributing to various MacGuffins or plot devices isn’t unexpected. Anything to do with science or technology needs Liara and Mordin working on it. So this is actually fine.
What isn’t fine is two-fold. One is her character in ME1 – it’s terrible. The other is that her character change between ME1 and ME2 isn’t believable.
With regard to point 1, allow me to justify it: she’s a stereotype. She’s a combination of sexy blue alien babe stereotype with an awkward nerd stereotype. She also has a baseless, seemingly spontaneous out-of-nowhere obsession with Shepard with no set up. It’s perfect nerd-bait. She isn’t written as an interesting part of the crew, she’s written to pander to the nerds who will inevitably play the game. Bioware really had low expectations of its players in ME1, which is why Garrus and Tali weren’t given romantic subplots and is why Liara is written the way she is. Her character is like a bad piece of fanfiction, she’s not a believable character. Even if you are awkward, no one would talk to Shepard the way she talks to him, with this weird brutally-blunt-yet-awkward-yet-geeky-yet-somewhat-seductive cadence behind which is a character with no development (her discussions of her mommy issues are almost like a codex entry about pureblood Asari rather than emotionally wrought dialogue) that mainly serves in conversation as a Prothean/Asari codex, kind of like how Tali is a Quarian encyclopedia.
Thankfully Liara’s character is much better in ME2 and 3 – she’s a plotting, wickedly smart inquisitor with an air of elegance about her, but she has a devious streak to her that takes advantage of her intelligence. She’s smart, she’s crafty, and she knows it, but she is nevertheless cultured enough and dedicated to science that she isn’t going to turn into a mafia boss – but she can give one a run for their money if they **** with her (ask the Shadow Broker). And despite how independent of a character she is, she also values friends highly and enjoys their company – though she is perfectly capable of acting on her own. She’s a Paragade through and through, and as such her romantic subplot ‘works’, from a character perspective, no matter the morality of your Shepard. She understands the cold, brutal calculations that Renegade Shep makes, but also respects the convictions of Paragon Shep. In that way, she does function excellently as Male Shep’s love interest (or FemShep if you’re going lesbian – Traynor doesn’t count for reasons I hope are fairly obvious) as you won’t ever question why these two are attracted to each other.
But this leads into problem 2: while her character in ME2 and 3 is very good, the problem is that supposedly this is the same character as we saw in ME1 – except they share virtually none of the same traits other than intelligence and a passion for science. Nor is there sufficient explanation of events between the two games to give us some insight into why her personality so drastically changed. I’m not opposed to characters changing, far from it, but it’s not believeable if the change isn’t justified. If it just “happens”, then it’s jarring and makes no sense because there’s been no explanation for why this character now acts so differently, and the game does not provide it. And as an aside, Liara is also guilty of the Bioware pro-Cerberus bias in ME2 – there is no way Liara would hand you over to Cerberus either.
I said there’s only 3 characters that work as love interests for Shepard in ME. One was Liara, the other two are what the fandom has dubbed “Team Dextro” – Garrus and Tali. So let’s talk about those two then.
Garrus is amazing. Nothing more than that really needs to be said since it’s obvious if you play the game why he’s amazing, but let’s discuss it anyway. Garrus has a very interesting character arc, which takes him from idealism to cynicism to eventual maturity and realism. He grows and develops as a character as the series goes on, and while some of it does happen between games it’s not jarring and unexplained as it is with Liara. In ME1 he’s an idealist who joins Shepard’s crew having recently grown disenfranchised with bureaucracy and by-the-book serving of justice. This is what cultivates his vigilante streak. He has a very deep-seated sense of morality that never actually leaves him throughout the series, he just deals with it differently. In ME1 he will freely express his views and his frustration with how he doesn’t feel justice is being done in some cases. Shepard can agree or disagree, and while Garrus is level-headed enough to take Shepard’s point he never truly cedes being wrong if Shepard says he is. He is fairly level-headed, but whenever he talks about weighty issues he always seems like he’s trying to constrain a great amount of visceral frustration with various things. That’s a part of Garrus’s personality that is also consistent – he’s an introvert. He has very strong feelings, but he never passionately and loudly spreads them. He is always bottling things up and trying not to offend, and when his tongue does get away from him (which Shepard can call him on) he’ll quickly shut up even if he still thinks he’s right.
People like to say there’s a teacher-student relationship between Shepard and Garrus in ME but I never got that vibe. Garrus can see Shepard’s point for sure, but his own sense of righteousness is too strong to be overcome by a simple convo with our protagonist. This is ultimately why in between ME1 and 2 he becomes a vigilante – and in one respect he does learn something from Shepard. Trying to go it alone doesn’t work. A team is always better, and Garrus certainly learned the value of teamwork in ME1. With a strong moral conviction to drive him he sees himself like Space Batman, but with a gang to help him out. Thing is, Garrus is still fundamentally a loner and is not the mover of men Shepard is. He’s not a leader – he can offer insight, his perspective is usually informative, but ultimately his timidness towards personal confrontation and his independent mindedness mean that if he doesn’t follow then he at most acts on his own accord. And unfortunately, in ME2, he’s still too idealistic and unwilling to face reality, so he ignores the problems reality presents him with and he thus almost ends up dead. Shepard’s last minute rescue is a rude wake-up call – Garrus is unfortunately lacking in dialogue in ME2, but considering how isolated he is from everyone at that point it’s almost entirely in character for him to barely talk to you.
Garrus’ loyalty mission in ME2 is interesting for many reasons. Like his recruitment mission it is a poignant character moment that causes him to self-reflect, and indeed, the lessons to be learned from his recruitment mission are not fully grasped by him until after his loyalty mission. Until then, his combination of anger at himself, his enemies and his betrayer causes him to violate his own moral creed in sacrifice to simply “justice” – or in this case, and eye for an eye. Garrus in his loyalty mission is visibly extremely angry and vengeful – again, even though he bottles most of it up, the fact that his dialogue is angry at all means that on the inside he’s absolutely writhing with anger. His actions, such as his torture of Harken, seem so out of character that it’s genuinely disconcerting. Garrus is a patient and level-headed person but when he’s angry, he’s like the devil incarnate.
Unfortunately this whole thing actually falls apart if you let Garrus kill Sidonis. If anything, it should allow him to unload his own demons onto Sodonis and try to be rid of them by killing him. It should make him, in some respects, continue to strive towards an ideal form of justice, like he did before. He wouldn’t fully learn his lesson. If you let Garrus kill Sidonis, his character change in ME3 makes less sense – I mean yeah he could realize his mistakes in between games but since you don’t SEE that it’s the same problem as Liara. If you stop him though, you can truly make him see the error of his ways. When he realizes this, and with no one left to pile blame onto but himself, Garrus can actually deal with and ponder his priorities.
As a result of that, he realizes his mistakes caused by his reckless idealism and becomes a voice of reason in ME3. Shepard doesn’t have to teach Garrus any more lessons or show him any more in ME3 – if anything, Garrus sometimes teaches Shepard. Because he now sees the world as it is, he also becomes almost cynical – hopefulness he finds a comforting idea but he ultimately isn’t a firm believer in victory. He knows the odds and he can’t get past the almost certainty that everyone is going to die – but he does believe in the ability of Shepard and Company to work miracles because he’s seen it before. The Normandy and its crew are the one thing he realistically expects to be able to pull something off, and he won’t let Shepard doubt it. Furthermore, his experiences in the Normandy team have given him a healthy camaraderie and while he’s still a loner, he’s much more open to others in ME3 than previously and the dry wit he developed in ME2 is even more present, making him more entertaining to be around.
And above all, it’s a journey he’s taken alongside the player, interacting with you at every turn (that you are present for at least), letting you see his side, getting to know how he thinks, and he getting to know how you think, and ultimately becoming the best friends/lovers you can get in the game. Shepard and Garrus know each other inside and out (and that can be literal in FemShep’s case), they play off each other perfectly in conversation and they’re always there for each other above all else. “There’s no Shepard without Vakarian”, as Shepard famously says, and he/she is right. Mass Effect wouldn’t be Mass Effect without our favourite Turian sidekick.
As this has gone on quite enough I shall stop there. Look to the future for Tali, Wrex and the ME2 crew.
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