I play games for entertainment, for enjoyment. Mass Effect 1 was a game I returned to time and time again for the sheer pleasure of playing it. In spite of its flaws, it was a lot of fun, had some fantastic characters, an uplifting story that was developed throughout the game and an outstanding final mission. Several parts always stood out for me. The speech the council gives as shepard is made a Spectre. Shepard’s speech to the crew as she takes control of the Normandy. The reveal on Virmire as Shepard finally has the chance to speak with Sovereign. Ilos, Vigil and fighting our way back to the Citadel for the race through the maintenance ducts to reach Saren in time.
The story was exceptional in my opinion. Each main mission introduced another key part of the plot, another clue revealing Saren’s motivations and driving the story forward. The story rose to a crescendo as Shepard and her
team mates went though the Mu Relay, fought their way through Ilos, discovered Vigil and risked everything to return to the Citadel for the final confrontation with Saren, his Geth and Sovereign. I remember the first time I
completed Mass Effect 1, sitting with tears in my eyes as the human fleet saved the destiny ascension.
Mass Effect 1 was not perfect but it had engaging, charismatic characters and an uplifting story that brought me back to it time and time again. From my perspective it was a game with a lot of class and rightly deserved the title of masterpiece in spite of its flaws.
Unfortunately I cannot say the same for Mass Effect 2. I found it crass, tasteless and deeply unpleasant. Bioware seems to have forced every nasty thing they could think of into Mass Effect 2 and in doing so utterly destroyed the feel of the Mass Effect universe. Mass Effect 2 is not a sequel to Mass Effect 1. It is a spin off. The moments where I actually felt I was playing Mass Effect were all too brief.
The ‘story’ of Mass Effect 2 was unbelievably poor and I find it impossible to believe the same person wrote both games.
There seemed to be no narrative structure to the game. The plot, such as it was, was utterly contrived, unconvincing and frankly embarrassingly bad in places. I have never played a Bioware game that had such a weak, threadbare story, such stilted dialogue or borrowed so heavily from other sources such as Babylon 5, Star Trek, and Terminator etc. The final battle was absurd. I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t played the entire game; all I will say is that a cameo from Governor Schwarzenegger would not have been out of place. It was ridiculous and utterly inferior to the end game of Mass Effect 1 in every possible way.
Having Shepard die, be rebuilt and be upgraded throughout the game with more and more synthetic parts was pointless and only served as a flimsy attempt to force the player to accept working with Cerberus. It didn’t work on any level in my opinion. The two year gap was a transparent excuse to off load the original squad mates whose personalities did not fit into the type of game Bioware wanted to make. This might have worked better if they had been replaced by characters with equal charisma. They were not, in my opinion, with the only exception being Legion and EDI.
Once Shepard was alive again and the Collectors had been identified as the enemy the ‘plot’ then took on the appearance of a grocery list. Gather specialists, do loyalty missions, gather minerals to upgrade the Normandy and then do the final mission. Personally I found it slow moving and monotonous and frankly I was bored. There were too many new squad mates and it made it difficult to feel any attachment to any of them, even if I had found their personalities appealing, which I didn’t. And whilst the new Normandy was beautiful, I had the overwhelming urge to off load the crew and fumigate the ship.
Though out this period of the game, there was little or no story progression. The conversations with the squad mates seemed designed to railroad the player into embarking on a new romance. After one conversation with Jacob the flirting and innuendo began, and I could find no dialogue option that simply said I’m not interested. Shepard’s lines were also delivered in a forced flirty tone over which the player was given no control, not one option for her to speak in a normal tone of voice. As for the crew, even the NPCs, speak to them at all and you had to listen to crass, lewd, suggestive comments. Wander though the bar on Illium and it was the same, crass, tasteless remarks and of course sexual innuendo. Perhaps that is titillating if you’re 15, however as an adult with
a life it became incredibly tedious incredibly quickly. Mass Effect 1 didn’t need to resort to this sort of thing to garner sales.
I also found the portrayal of women in Mass Effect 2 offensive at times. On Omega the Asari seemed to have been assigned the role of strippers, pole dancers and prostitutes. There seemed to be a recurring theme that
suggested women were play things, to be used and abused when opportunity permitted. This theme carried through to Jacob’s loyalty mission, a mission that I found disturbing on an emotional level and absolutely sickening.
In that mission we were presented with a scenario where a ship had crash landed, the captain had separated out the female crew members and placed them in a camp. He then gave these women to his officers to be used
as play things. The idea was horrific. Perhaps Bioware feel that the suggestion of rape is suitable content for their ‘dark and edgy’ video game but I don’t. It was uncalled for and I found it sickening and disturbing. For me it evoked parallels with some of the atrocities carried out in ‘camps’ across Europe during World War 2.
This feeling continued into Subject Zero’s loyalty mission where we’re provided with a story about the abuse of children. Children bought or stolen, ripped away from home and family, transported to a facility in crates, half starved and experimented upon, injected with substances to see what effect it would have. The parallels with history are hard to ignore. The children of Bullenhuser Damm, brought from Auschwitz to Neuengamme for experimentation. Is this really suitable for inclusion in something that is supposed to be a source of entertainment?
I remember watching the E3 reveal trailer and Derek Watts, the art director, talking about how nasty ME2 was in parts and asking his colleagues ‘have we gone too far?’. Well my answer would be yes, you did.
Samara’s loyalty mission was another that I took issue with, though for very different reasons. We’re presented with her daughter, Morinth, a sexual predator, whose victims are killed by engaging in sex with her. We’re instructed to go to the apartment where her last victim Nef, a young girl, lived with her mother. The mother
allows us into Nef’s room where we listen to her video diary in order to find the password to allow us into the club where Morinth stalks her victims. The diary entries chart Nef’s first meeting with Morinth and mentions the beginning of an attraction between them. In one of the diary entries Nef comments that Morinth is a girl, that she’s attracted to a girl and asks ‘am I a freak?’
Why would this make her a freak? Why? Intentional or not, there is a suggestion there of homophobia.
Ultimately I loved Mass Effect 1 and I want to genuinely thank Bioware for producing such a fantastic game that gave me many hours of enjoyment. As for Mass Effect 2, it has been a disappointment on almost every level. Its tone, the story quality, the squad mates, all vastly inferior to Mass Effect 1 in my opinion. I’m afraid it has killed this IP for me and I truly regret my decision to purchase it.
Modifié par Ozymandias23, 01 février 2010 - 08:42 .
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