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Mass Effect - Revisiting the Series

by Couchpotato, 2013-04-21 05:49:27

Moarpowah has an editorial on replaying Mass Effect 1, and comparing the series changes.

While I’ll try to keep this as objective as possible, a few points should be clarified before I begin. 1. Mass Effect is my favorite game series period. Well, maybe it’s tied with KotOR. 2. Mass Effect 2 was, and still is, my favorite in the series. And 3. Despite some disappointment with the direction and mechanics in Mass Effect 3, it, and its ending, did not ruin the series for me. It’s still a series with a lot of power, personality, and emotion. What that out of the way, let’s take a long, hard look at some points I collected and carried whilst entrenched in the Milky Way.

I know a lot of people are going to disagree with me on this one, but I really do think that the inherent changes to the Mass Effect formula by the second game were positive and necessary. While the first game had its head in the right place, it just doesn’t have the direction necessary to pull it off. I would expect a world that rich and deep to have a cinematic quality to match. There were a surprising moment in a specific side mission when I encountered a strange Prothean ruin that, when approached, fed me a four page long description of a hallucination Shepard is given after touching it.

While the description itself was fascinating (a lengthy exploration of the Prothean interaction with cavemen), I was just so blown away that the designers felt the need to give me this amazing story through text. In later Mass Effects, this would, of course, be given a beautiful cinematic, maybe even a playable sequence. Reading it in a text blob seemed so antiquated it hurt.

In addition, the combat is so stagnant and choppy that part of me is glad that they seriously reworked that whole aspect of the game by the time that ME2 rolled around. While I was dissatisfied with how action oriented ME3 was overall, I thought ME2 found a nice balance.

Again, I want to reassert that I absolutely love this game. It was, after all, one of the first current gen games I’d ever played, and absolutely brings back similar emotional feelings that came from playing Knights of the Old Republic back when I was much younger and more impressionable. This is, after all, a pretty old game by now, and it’s nice to see that there’s constant evolution in the RPG genre.

Information about

Mass Effect

SP/MP: Single + MP
Setting: Sci-Fi
Genre: Shooter-RPG
Platform: PC, Xbox 360
Release: Released


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