*is not completely doped up on cold medicine or anything*
I was supposed to go into work at 7:30 this morning, but everything from my neck up hurts and I can barely swallow or breathe through my nose, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to sit at my computer all day and bang out some more ME 2 thoughts instead.
I had thought that being a Chuck fan would mean interacting with Miranda in ME 2 would take some getting used to. It's actually turned out to be the other way around: now, whenever I watch a Chuck episode, it's like "Oh hi there, blond Miranda with an American accent and realistic body proportions!"
Also, having now spent a significant amount of time listening to Yvonne Strahovski talk in her natural accent, I have to reiterate just how impressive her American one is on Chuck. I have a lot of respect for foreign actors like her and Jamie Bamber* who play American characters on television and nail their accents week after week, because there's nothing that takes you out of the moment faster than a bad accent. It even used to happen on the Stargate shows, where there were a number of American characters played by Canadian actors who didn't even try to cover up their Canadian accents. Most of the time you wouldn't be able to tell the difference, but every now and then you would get a "blah blah blah ABOOT" that resulted in a bit of aural whiplash.
*Okay, technically Jamie Bamber's character wasn't American, but he sounded like one.
Anyway, back to the ME 2 blather.
A couple of weeks before the game came out, somebody on the masseffect community made a predictions post that was all sorts of fun. Now that the game's out, I went back and dug up my predictions to see how close I was.
1. Tali will be romanceable, but Garrus will not be.
This was me with my pessimist hat on. I turned out to be half right--Tali was romanceable, but Garrus was too. SQUEE.
2. At some point, Shepard and Co. will meet up with Tali's father. If Shep is a male romancing Tali, awkwardness will ensue.
Well, Shepard and Co. did sort of meet up with Tali's father, but he was dead, so...yeah. Guess I was off on the "awkwardness" part.
Although now that I'm thinking of it, right after Tali joined the mission, Shepard did get an email from her dad (before he got all corpsified and gross, obviously) essentially saying "Take care of my little girl or I WILL CUT YOU." In a very polite and professional way, of course.
3. Admiral Hackett will be noticeably absent from the game, reason being that he turned out to be a traitor who was trying to bring down the Alliance, and Shepard specifically. (...What? No one but me ever thought it was little weird that he was always sending humanity's first Spectre out on super dangerous missions that she sometimes wasn't even qualified for? I'm thinking the bomb defusing mission, specifically.)
Hackett was absent from the game, aside from a few mentions in the newscasts on the Citadel, but there was nothing to suggest he'd gone evil. Sigh. That was my favorite prediction.
4. The Protheans will not be mentioned at all during the entirety of the game.
Totally wrong, to my pleasant surprise!
5. Subject Zero will break down in tears at least once.
Yep. Not in my games, of course, since I keep my contact with her as limited as possible, but if you play a male Shepard who romances her, she cries during the sex scene. Creepy.
6. Garrus' loyalty-gaining mission will involve that scene mentioned waaaay early on in the OXM magazine, the one in which a "familiar" sniper wants revenge on a turian named Sidonis.
Totally right, though in retrospect, this one was pretty obvious.
The subject of the ME 1 love interests has sparked a lot of talk across the internets, most of it angry, and I can definitely see why. I really should be more upset about it than I am; the main reason I'm not completely riled up is because I wanted Garrus during the entirety of ME 1 anyway, so when he became available in ME 2, Kaidan largely became an afterthought. (Not that I dislike Kaidan. He gets a lot of undeserved flack, but I'll always have a special soft spot for him, and my main Paragon Shepard is going to stay with him throughout the entire trilogy.)
Before the game's release, there was a lot of fear among the fandom that Kaidan, Ashley and Liara would be reduced to nothing but barely-significant cameos. Unfortunately, these fears were not unfounded. People who romanced Kaidan or Ashley got one short conversation and an email. That was literally it. And the content of the one short conversation made it even worse.
I feel somewhat torn about Horizon, personally. On one hand, I can see where Kaidan/Ashley are coming from with regards to their kneejerk reaction to Shepard working with Cerberus, because I essentially had the same reaction. That said, I was profoundly dissatisfied with their response when Shepard says "You know me, you know I wouldn't be doing this without a good reason." All you can get out of them is "Well, Cerberus must just be manipulating you."
Excuse me? First you give me the "I loved you! It killed me when you died! Why didn't you contact me and tell me you were alive!" business, and then a second later you're automatically assuming that I'm a braindead Cerberus lapdog who no longer has the ability to think for herself? Whatever happened to, I don't know, maybe having a little bit of trust?
But what really irritated me about Horizon was Shepard's available responses to Kaidan/Ashley's tirades. I wanted so badly to be able to say, "Heck yeah! I hate Cerberus as much as you do and I'm only going along with them because I need their resources, and I am planning to gleefully stab them in the back the first chance I get!" But no. No such response was available. It was intensely frustrating, and really just leads back to one of my more significant problems with the game in the first place: the overall poor execution of the "Shepard has to work with Cerberus" plot point.
So, yeah. Suffice to say the whole scene made me really glad I wasn't a huge Kaidan fangirl, because if I was I would have been completely heartbroken.
But then came The Email.
I've seen some pretty intensely mixed reactions among the fandom to Kaidan/Ashley's apology email. Some people thought it was sweet, while others found it hugely insulting that their former love interest was attempting to apologize in an email of all things. Personally, I couldn't help but think it was cute. It made me wibble a little in spite of myself. And of course, it sets things up for the resolution in ME 3. Presumably you'll either be able to get back together with your love interest and live happily ever after, or you'll be able to throw the email back in their faces and tell them where to shove it. I'm definitely curious to see how big a role the LIs will have in the third game. It had better be something pretty dang amazing to make up for their shoddy treatment in this one.
As for Liara...oy. Train wreck. She got slightly more screentime than Kaidan/Ashley did, but that wasn't necessarily a good thing. I never, ever thought I would be saying this, given that in the first game Liara was the very embodiment of fanservice/nerdbait, but in the second game? Liara fans got screwed. What TPTB did with her was basically nothing less than character assassination. The shy, socially awkward science nerd who preferred to spend her days in near-complete solitude on remote archaeological digs turned into...a hardass information broker? Wha?
I'm all for character development, but generally speaking I prefer for said development to actually make sense. ME 2 went to a lot of trouble to point out how awesome an information broker Liara was, that she had a ton of contacts and was well-respected, yadda yadda. That just...completely does not line up with a girl who flat-out admitted that she preferred the company of books and objects rather than people. Speaking as someone who's much the same way, you can't just up and change your personality that completely overnight. The Liara of ME 1 would never have left behind her digs and artifacts to get caught up in politics and crap on Illium. She should have been happily getting dirt under her fingernails on Ilos--real dirt, not the information kind.
Whiplash-inducing personality and career change aside, Liara was freakin' cold in ME 2. I don't know if BioWare chose to do that in response to the backlash over how utterly clingy she was in ME 1, but if so, they went overboard. Her response to seeing Shepard was pretty much, "Hey, you're alive. Want to do some of my dirty work for me?" And then she proceeded to send Shepard running around on some silly information hacking errands. The whole thing just made me super glad that I never cared much for her in ME 1, because it was just perplexing and wrong.
Actually, that kind of blasé response to seeing Shepard was something that bothered me with nearly all the original squadmates. I understand that it would have gotten a little old if every single person you ran into was all, "ZOMG SHEPARD! YOU'RE ALIVE! SQUEEEE! LET ME SQUISH YOU AND SQUEEZE YOU AND SMOTHER YOU WITH LOOOOOVE!" but still, a slightly more enthusiastic response from the squadmates at least would have been nice. Shepard went through hell with those people. Her returning from the dead should have merited more than a lukewarm, "Hey, nice to see you. Now help me out with this problem I'm having." Ironically, the only former squadmate that really showed much emotion upon seeing Shepard was Wrex, who, out of all the original squadmates, easily seemed to be the least attached to Shepard in the first game. Weird.
Moving on from love interests talk, I finally grit my teeth and did Subject Zero's loyalty quest last night. Unsurprisingly, I didn't get much out of this sidequest. It's a little hard to get any kind of emotional investment out of a subplot centered around a character for whom you don't feel much other than contempt. My reactions were basically as follows:
1. The environment was very cool, and quite a good match to its equally cool concept art. I loved the rain effects, especially. The water droplets dripping off Shepard's armor were a neat touch. That said, the whole place would have been more fun to explore had SuZe not been along providing unnecessary commentary every five seconds.
2. HOORAY I FINALLY GOT TO PUT SOME CLOTHES ON HER!
3. Unlocking the "Catharsis" achievement made my inner achievement whore do a little dance.
Aside from that, I had no strong feelings either way. The whole thing felt rather unresolved. I'm currently playing with a Renegade Shepard, so I had SuZe shoot the random guy instead of trying to talk her out of it. And then...that was that. I don't know, maybe if you take the Paragon route and try to reason with her (ha) instead of letting her indulge her "OMFG KILL KILL KILL FRENZY KILL" urges, it has a more satisfying ending. Like with the Garrus sidequest. But I probably won't play again to find out.
If there was one thing about SuZe's past that I actually was curious about, it's how she apparently ended up with "Jack" as her for real actual given name. I dunno, maybe it's different in Canada, but around here, "Jack" doesn't tend to be a feminine name. I guess it's probably supposed to be short for Jacqueline or something, or SuZe just chose a male pseudonym to make herself sound more ~*~edgy~*~ and ~*~hardcore~*~, but of course there was no explanation given either way.
All right, that's probably enough rambling for now. Though I do still want to talk about the endgame...and planet scanning...and choices from the first game that carried over into the second...and probably other things I'm just not thinking of at the moment. *facepalm*
I had thought that being a Chuck fan would mean interacting with Miranda in ME 2 would take some getting used to. It's actually turned out to be the other way around: now, whenever I watch a Chuck episode, it's like "Oh hi there, blond Miranda with an American accent and realistic body proportions!"
Also, having now spent a significant amount of time listening to Yvonne Strahovski talk in her natural accent, I have to reiterate just how impressive her American one is on Chuck. I have a lot of respect for foreign actors like her and Jamie Bamber* who play American characters on television and nail their accents week after week, because there's nothing that takes you out of the moment faster than a bad accent. It even used to happen on the Stargate shows, where there were a number of American characters played by Canadian actors who didn't even try to cover up their Canadian accents. Most of the time you wouldn't be able to tell the difference, but every now and then you would get a "blah blah blah ABOOT" that resulted in a bit of aural whiplash.
*Okay, technically Jamie Bamber's character wasn't American, but he sounded like one.
Anyway, back to the ME 2 blather.
A couple of weeks before the game came out, somebody on the masseffect community made a predictions post that was all sorts of fun. Now that the game's out, I went back and dug up my predictions to see how close I was.
1. Tali will be romanceable, but Garrus will not be.
This was me with my pessimist hat on. I turned out to be half right--Tali was romanceable, but Garrus was too. SQUEE.
2. At some point, Shepard and Co. will meet up with Tali's father. If Shep is a male romancing Tali, awkwardness will ensue.
Well, Shepard and Co. did sort of meet up with Tali's father, but he was dead, so...yeah. Guess I was off on the "awkwardness" part.
Although now that I'm thinking of it, right after Tali joined the mission, Shepard did get an email from her dad (before he got all corpsified and gross, obviously) essentially saying "Take care of my little girl or I WILL CUT YOU." In a very polite and professional way, of course.
3. Admiral Hackett will be noticeably absent from the game, reason being that he turned out to be a traitor who was trying to bring down the Alliance, and Shepard specifically. (...What? No one but me ever thought it was little weird that he was always sending humanity's first Spectre out on super dangerous missions that she sometimes wasn't even qualified for? I'm thinking the bomb defusing mission, specifically.)
Hackett was absent from the game, aside from a few mentions in the newscasts on the Citadel, but there was nothing to suggest he'd gone evil. Sigh. That was my favorite prediction.
4. The Protheans will not be mentioned at all during the entirety of the game.
Totally wrong, to my pleasant surprise!
5. Subject Zero will break down in tears at least once.
Yep. Not in my games, of course, since I keep my contact with her as limited as possible, but if you play a male Shepard who romances her, she cries during the sex scene. Creepy.
6. Garrus' loyalty-gaining mission will involve that scene mentioned waaaay early on in the OXM magazine, the one in which a "familiar" sniper wants revenge on a turian named Sidonis.
Totally right, though in retrospect, this one was pretty obvious.
The subject of the ME 1 love interests has sparked a lot of talk across the internets, most of it angry, and I can definitely see why. I really should be more upset about it than I am; the main reason I'm not completely riled up is because I wanted Garrus during the entirety of ME 1 anyway, so when he became available in ME 2, Kaidan largely became an afterthought. (Not that I dislike Kaidan. He gets a lot of undeserved flack, but I'll always have a special soft spot for him, and my main Paragon Shepard is going to stay with him throughout the entire trilogy.)
Before the game's release, there was a lot of fear among the fandom that Kaidan, Ashley and Liara would be reduced to nothing but barely-significant cameos. Unfortunately, these fears were not unfounded. People who romanced Kaidan or Ashley got one short conversation and an email. That was literally it. And the content of the one short conversation made it even worse.
I feel somewhat torn about Horizon, personally. On one hand, I can see where Kaidan/Ashley are coming from with regards to their kneejerk reaction to Shepard working with Cerberus, because I essentially had the same reaction. That said, I was profoundly dissatisfied with their response when Shepard says "You know me, you know I wouldn't be doing this without a good reason." All you can get out of them is "Well, Cerberus must just be manipulating you."
Excuse me? First you give me the "I loved you! It killed me when you died! Why didn't you contact me and tell me you were alive!" business, and then a second later you're automatically assuming that I'm a braindead Cerberus lapdog who no longer has the ability to think for herself? Whatever happened to, I don't know, maybe having a little bit of trust?
But what really irritated me about Horizon was Shepard's available responses to Kaidan/Ashley's tirades. I wanted so badly to be able to say, "Heck yeah! I hate Cerberus as much as you do and I'm only going along with them because I need their resources, and I am planning to gleefully stab them in the back the first chance I get!" But no. No such response was available. It was intensely frustrating, and really just leads back to one of my more significant problems with the game in the first place: the overall poor execution of the "Shepard has to work with Cerberus" plot point.
So, yeah. Suffice to say the whole scene made me really glad I wasn't a huge Kaidan fangirl, because if I was I would have been completely heartbroken.
But then came The Email.
I've seen some pretty intensely mixed reactions among the fandom to Kaidan/Ashley's apology email. Some people thought it was sweet, while others found it hugely insulting that their former love interest was attempting to apologize in an email of all things. Personally, I couldn't help but think it was cute. It made me wibble a little in spite of myself. And of course, it sets things up for the resolution in ME 3. Presumably you'll either be able to get back together with your love interest and live happily ever after, or you'll be able to throw the email back in their faces and tell them where to shove it. I'm definitely curious to see how big a role the LIs will have in the third game. It had better be something pretty dang amazing to make up for their shoddy treatment in this one.
As for Liara...oy. Train wreck. She got slightly more screentime than Kaidan/Ashley did, but that wasn't necessarily a good thing. I never, ever thought I would be saying this, given that in the first game Liara was the very embodiment of fanservice/nerdbait, but in the second game? Liara fans got screwed. What TPTB did with her was basically nothing less than character assassination. The shy, socially awkward science nerd who preferred to spend her days in near-complete solitude on remote archaeological digs turned into...a hardass information broker? Wha?
I'm all for character development, but generally speaking I prefer for said development to actually make sense. ME 2 went to a lot of trouble to point out how awesome an information broker Liara was, that she had a ton of contacts and was well-respected, yadda yadda. That just...completely does not line up with a girl who flat-out admitted that she preferred the company of books and objects rather than people. Speaking as someone who's much the same way, you can't just up and change your personality that completely overnight. The Liara of ME 1 would never have left behind her digs and artifacts to get caught up in politics and crap on Illium. She should have been happily getting dirt under her fingernails on Ilos--real dirt, not the information kind.
Whiplash-inducing personality and career change aside, Liara was freakin' cold in ME 2. I don't know if BioWare chose to do that in response to the backlash over how utterly clingy she was in ME 1, but if so, they went overboard. Her response to seeing Shepard was pretty much, "Hey, you're alive. Want to do some of my dirty work for me?" And then she proceeded to send Shepard running around on some silly information hacking errands. The whole thing just made me super glad that I never cared much for her in ME 1, because it was just perplexing and wrong.
Actually, that kind of blasé response to seeing Shepard was something that bothered me with nearly all the original squadmates. I understand that it would have gotten a little old if every single person you ran into was all, "ZOMG SHEPARD! YOU'RE ALIVE! SQUEEEE! LET ME SQUISH YOU AND SQUEEZE YOU AND SMOTHER YOU WITH LOOOOOVE!" but still, a slightly more enthusiastic response from the squadmates at least would have been nice. Shepard went through hell with those people. Her returning from the dead should have merited more than a lukewarm, "Hey, nice to see you. Now help me out with this problem I'm having." Ironically, the only former squadmate that really showed much emotion upon seeing Shepard was Wrex, who, out of all the original squadmates, easily seemed to be the least attached to Shepard in the first game. Weird.
Moving on from love interests talk, I finally grit my teeth and did Subject Zero's loyalty quest last night. Unsurprisingly, I didn't get much out of this sidequest. It's a little hard to get any kind of emotional investment out of a subplot centered around a character for whom you don't feel much other than contempt. My reactions were basically as follows:
1. The environment was very cool, and quite a good match to its equally cool concept art. I loved the rain effects, especially. The water droplets dripping off Shepard's armor were a neat touch. That said, the whole place would have been more fun to explore had SuZe not been along providing unnecessary commentary every five seconds.
2. HOORAY I FINALLY GOT TO PUT SOME CLOTHES ON HER!
3. Unlocking the "Catharsis" achievement made my inner achievement whore do a little dance.
Aside from that, I had no strong feelings either way. The whole thing felt rather unresolved. I'm currently playing with a Renegade Shepard, so I had SuZe shoot the random guy instead of trying to talk her out of it. And then...that was that. I don't know, maybe if you take the Paragon route and try to reason with her (ha) instead of letting her indulge her "OMFG KILL KILL KILL FRENZY KILL" urges, it has a more satisfying ending. Like with the Garrus sidequest. But I probably won't play again to find out.
If there was one thing about SuZe's past that I actually was curious about, it's how she apparently ended up with "Jack" as her for real actual given name. I dunno, maybe it's different in Canada, but around here, "Jack" doesn't tend to be a feminine name. I guess it's probably supposed to be short for Jacqueline or something, or SuZe just chose a male pseudonym to make herself sound more ~*~edgy~*~ and ~*~hardcore~*~, but of course there was no explanation given either way.
All right, that's probably enough rambling for now. Though I do still want to talk about the endgame...and planet scanning...and choices from the first game that carried over into the second...and probably other things I'm just not thinking of at the moment. *facepalm*