Saving galaxies is a job best left for professionals.
Wow, I haven't blogged in an age and a half. I have a lot of pent-up bloggery in store, so watch out - I'm about to talk your ears off about (what else?) Bioware and my continuing love-love -relationship with it, particularly their latest release. Because what else do I have to blog about? My love life is on the same "meh" level (the necessary amount of XP seems hard to come by), my studies are on a summer hiatus and my job is dull as shit. So spaceships and dragons and monkey thieves it is.
This whole post started as a review-thingie of Mass Effect 2, because I just recently bought and finished it (the latter tends to follow the former in quick succession when it comes to Bioware games), so let's pretend this isn't a ramble but an actual review for a sec. Mass Effect 2 wins across the board. The graphics are jaw-dropping, the soundtrack keeps the mood and the plot moves along at a pleasant pace. It is just as epic as I expected, a better follow-up to the first game than I could have hoped and quite frankly an astonishingly strong middle part of the trilogy. Plot-wise, it's a sucky place to be, but ME2 has the kind of cohesion most first parts wish they had.
Granted, it tends to treat newcomers with some disdain; it rarely stops to explain anything to those who haven't played the first game (and I'm not saying it should, just that it must seem pretty bewildering to someone new to the ME universe), and there are some distinct advantages to importing your character from the first game, some of which are entirely to be expected (more resources if you took the time to gather them, the gratitude of practically everyone you went out of your way to help, the continuation of the romance - more of which later), but some just make playing a new Shepard a worse experience for no reason. Why, exactly, can you not choose whether you saved the Council or not? Why is it taken as given that you took the Renegade option and killed off not only the alien Council but also Wrex, who is in your frikkin' team, which is a Big Deal in ME2? It's a huge Paragon/Renegade option divide, and pretty damn important to those of us who want to Roleplay our characters. My main Shepard, for instance, is a xenophile who tends not to trust humans; forcing such a choice on her would make it impossible for me to play her through ME2 if I hadn't been able to import her from the first game. Plus it means no newcomers get to meet Wrex. That is just crap. Wrex is a great character in his own right who has a place in the game, not just an Easter Egg extra.
And that leads me to one thing I like about ME2. As most of you probably know, you start off losing your team from the last game, and if you're like me, your first thought upon getting back on your feet is "Where is my team? What happened to them?". Thank you, Bioware, for realising that when you create wonderful characters, we gamers get attached to them and care about what happens to them. It's been two years since you've last seen your old team members, and it's hugely satisfying to find that they've all gone out and had lives while you've been off being, well, dead (spoiler? Sorry.) It's equally satisfying to see the varying reactions they have to finding out you're still alive. Liara hugs you. (Yeah, that's another thing - people hug, shoulder-clasp and pat each other on the back in this game. It's a new layer of awesome to the already smooth interaction scenes.) Garrus takes it in stride. Tali asks no questions, and instead offers her unwavering trust. Kaidan, assuming you spared and romanced him in the last game, first hugs, then yells at you.
Oh, look, another convenient segue. Let's talk about Kaidan for a moment, since it's relevant - I'm about to start on the romances in ME2, after all. Kaidan in the first game is, in my opinion, a pile of wet blankets with the Navy regulations scribbled all over them. When I first played through ME, on a friend's X-Box, I steered clear of the bore and romanced Liara instead. One of the reasons why I favour playing a female Shepard is because it's kind of a Bioware tradition for me - first playthrough is always with a goody-two-shoes female - but also because Jennifer Hale has such an amazing voice. I could listen to it for hours. Mm, ear-candy. In fact, I'm not ashamed to admit a nice voice is one of the biggest turn-ons for me, and can make or break a character. I adored Carth's voice in KotOR; can you see how much of a whinging doofus Kaidan has to be for me to dismiss him, even though he has the exact same voice actor?
Okay, that's a little harsh. I had nothing against Kaidan, he was just bland and uninteresting. I let him die in both of my playthroughs, not because I hated him but because Ash was just more interesting as a character. When I played through ME on my own X-Box, fully intending to import the character to the next game, I figured I'd give him a go, see what I had been missing. Well, it turns out nothing much - he keeps hemming and hawing about the damn regs, and fraternisation, and ohmigod is it right to feeel this waaay. My Shepard came close to telling him point blank that it's not worth all the hand-wringing. Good God, man, make a decision and stick by it.
Which is more or less exactly what Kaidan does in ME2. Finally, he makes a decision all on his ownsies, an understandable decision given the circumstances, and tells the Hero of All Humankind that no thanks, he's got conflicting feelings about it so he's not interested in joining her team again. That is ballsy. It made me respect the character for the first time. Hats off to the writers. Now, granted, doors are left open for possible reconciliation later (and the continuation of the romance in ME3, most likely), but I always intended to dump Kaidan in ME2 anyway, so this worked out perfectly for my Shepard.
I had managed to remain almost entirely spoiler-free before playing both games, of which I'm very happy. I was even upset when a friend told me there's a suicide mission in ME2 - dude, I don't want to know anything! - only to discover that it was actually written right on the cover. But I did know one thing: you could romance Garrus or Tali in ME2. AWESOME. I couldn't wait. Tali is a lovely mech-head (and that accent!), and Garrus was one of my favourite characters in the first game - I remember jokingly saying that he would be perfect for my Shepard if he was available as a romantic option. And of course, he was, as ME2 showed me.
I wonder why the character seems so appealing. I understand he has a huge fanbase now. Maybe it's the fact that he's a classic Tragic Do-Gooder - the guy who tries his damnest to do the Right Thing, but finds himself battling the windmills of the world and his own nature. Garrus in ME2 is exactly how I would've expected the character to develop; he always had the vigilante outlook and his passion for justice was always getting him in trouble. For me personally, I figure that at least part of the appeal of turians is that their concept owes a lot to dinosauroids. That is frikkin' fantastic. There better be female turians in the next game though, I'm just saying. And a chance to see their home world is also long overdue.
Anyway. Side-tracked. ME2 seems to favour human-alien -pairings more than the first game. Maybe that's just me, and the fact that Miranda, Jack and Jacob all had the romantic appeal of a cardboard box to me, but it almost seems that the default love interests are Tali and Garrus. I don't recall getting a single line of suggestive dialogue with Jacob, but I actually had to consciously dodge starting the subtle romance with Thane. The nature of the romances seems different, too - what they seem to want to get across is desperate people
clinging to each other as the world burns, not anything that would be expected to last. Bringing in the aliens from the last game seems like a good way to accomplish that; you can have the long-lasting romance with Ash or Kaidan, but for one night before the end, you might want to reach out to an old friend, maybe try something new in the progress.
It's a fine concept. I have absolutely no problems with it. I'm aware that Mass Effects are very plot-driven action RPGs, and romances are essentially just extra goodies. It makes sense that if the romances are there, they also serve the plot. (Actually, that's good for any game.) But they don't entirely work according to the concept. Here's how it went with Garrus: you could start flirting with him quite soon after picking him up, and I loved the save-him-from-himself -theme throughout his loyalty quest. "Romance" is the wrong word here, I think - how it really was painted was a close friendship with possible benefits. Mutual trust plays a bigger part than lovey-dovey feelings. So far, so good. Then Garrus says the lovely line "Shepard, we've gone through so much together. You don't ever have to worry about making me uncomfortable. Nervous, yes, but never uncomfortable" (I might be paraphrasing slightly, but that's essentially it), and I thought that pretty much settled it. I mean, I've brought the subject up frankly, we've discussed it, taken a while to think it over, and come to the conclusion that yes, let's "blow off steam" as he is fond of calling it - so what are we waiting for, the Easter Bunny? Oh, wait, a mightier critter yet - The Plot Bunny. I see. So let's sit on our hands and calibrate (seriously, what is it with Bioware men and their endless fiddling? Pazaak, anyone?) until we're both anxious and trying not to think about our imminent death. That sounds so much better than just having sex when we feel like having it.
This is the problem with having the romance moving in time with the plot; some people (like me) rush to each new dialogue option as soon as they appear, and usually end up stuck with endlessly repeating dialogues a lot until the plot hath decreed that the conversation can move on. It makes no sense to me to have the big My Only Friend In The Universe conversation take place a dozen hours of gaming time before the characters actually do something about it. Why? It's your goddamn ship, who cares who you shag while you hunt down the Collectors? In the first game, they made Shepard "wait for the right time" by appealing to the constraints of Alliance regulations and personal morals (Ash and Kaidan) or Liara's shyness and the fact that asari sex is some kind of a soul-bonding, brain-fusing ritual of epic importance. But there's no such obstacle here. Garrus essentially says, "let's wait, because we have to wait for the LAST POSSIBLE MOMENT for no real reason". Sure, he has to calibrate, and research sex with humans, and calibrate some more (you might have noticed that I got the "can't talk, calibrating" reply a few too many times), but come the fuck on, if Mordin has already given me The Big Speech (which was as mortifying as my mother's equivalent of it, except she never used the phrase "do not, ahem, ingest"), he should have figured out all there is to figure out by now. LET'S BE HAVING SEXINGS. The big be-all-and-end-all of a relationship shouldn't always have to be the time the two characters first have sex. The sex scene in the first game (with the FLASH OF A NAKED BUTTOCK OMIGOD) wasn't anywhere near as touching as the pep talk your love interest of choice gave you when you were grounded in Citadel. Let's mix it up a little.
Ahem. Anyway. Apart from the frustrations of plot-held alien sex, I was happy to find that there were now more dialogue options, not to mention a couple of really nice unprompted gestures and lines. It truly feels like you give Shepard a nudge in some direction and can trust her to take it from there. The Paragon/Renegade actions are also a nice touch. There are quite a lot of cut scenes, especially towards the end (and how epic in their epicness are they!), but that didn't bother me. I enjoy the fine line between being able to shape this Shepard to my liking, and just sitting back and enjoying the show. This is why ME is in some ways a superior game to Dragon Age: the character of Shepard is limited by the game, so you can trust that when the game takes the reins, there won't be any huge surprises in store when it comes to her or his character. Dragon Age: Origins can't help occasionally making assumptions of your character that don't always turn out to be correct (like the fact that everyone in the game world describes them as attractive or heroic, or neglects to mention their race when it's really damn relevant). DA gives the player so much freedom in creating the character that sometimes you have to really stretch the limits of credibility to accept the way some NPCs react to her or him. Shepard, on the other hand, has a clearly defined role in the plot of ME, and thus everything feels more or less natural.
Let's see, what else? Oh yes, the "action" part of the action RPG. Well, at first it was a pain to get used to, mostly because of my sadly inadequate old TV struggling to keep up with the teeny-tiny text and details, but when I got the hang of it, I really liked the changes. Simplified upgrade and gear systems are also a blessing. The covers in battle finally work as they should have in the first game. Seeing how many asses hallowd kicked with Warp made me wonder if I should've made my character an Adept, too. Although, I've got pretty damn good at headshots, and there's something intensely satisfying with freezing your opponents, then watching them shatter...
Oh, and have I mentioned that Joker rocks so freakin' hard? Because he does. Seriously, he's the kick-assiest character in the entire game. Insert HUGE HEART here.
I could go on about this game forever, but I think I'll stop here for now and come back to Bioware-worshipping later. By the by, here's a little soundtrack I made for Mass Effect 2. Some songs are a better fit than others, but hey, it's just one fan's soundtrack. YM, as always, MV.
[ download the whole zipped thing here ]
1. Shiny Toy Guns: Starts With One
Of course, it all starts with Shepard.
2. M83: Unrecorded
Finding your place in the universe again.
3. The Eden House: To Believe In Something
One for the team, and earning their trust and loyalty.
4. Kontakte: Sterile World
Planet-side.
5. M83: Cyborg
Geth and beyond.
6. 65daysofstatic: Fix The Sky A Little
Just a hopeful mood piece. For the flotilla, mostly.
7. Moby: We Are All Made Of Stars
Faith and trust in the cold galaxy.
8. E.S. Posthumus: Unstoppable
For Normandy, Joker and EDI being epic and winning everything.
9. Collapse Under The Empire: Further Than The End Of The World
The last mission is not the end.
This whole post started as a review-thingie of Mass Effect 2, because I just recently bought and finished it (the latter tends to follow the former in quick succession when it comes to Bioware games), so let's pretend this isn't a ramble but an actual review for a sec. Mass Effect 2 wins across the board. The graphics are jaw-dropping, the soundtrack keeps the mood and the plot moves along at a pleasant pace. It is just as epic as I expected, a better follow-up to the first game than I could have hoped and quite frankly an astonishingly strong middle part of the trilogy. Plot-wise, it's a sucky place to be, but ME2 has the kind of cohesion most first parts wish they had.
Granted, it tends to treat newcomers with some disdain; it rarely stops to explain anything to those who haven't played the first game (and I'm not saying it should, just that it must seem pretty bewildering to someone new to the ME universe), and there are some distinct advantages to importing your character from the first game, some of which are entirely to be expected (more resources if you took the time to gather them, the gratitude of practically everyone you went out of your way to help, the continuation of the romance - more of which later), but some just make playing a new Shepard a worse experience for no reason. Why, exactly, can you not choose whether you saved the Council or not? Why is it taken as given that you took the Renegade option and killed off not only the alien Council but also Wrex, who is in your frikkin' team, which is a Big Deal in ME2? It's a huge Paragon/Renegade option divide, and pretty damn important to those of us who want to Roleplay our characters. My main Shepard, for instance, is a xenophile who tends not to trust humans; forcing such a choice on her would make it impossible for me to play her through ME2 if I hadn't been able to import her from the first game. Plus it means no newcomers get to meet Wrex. That is just crap. Wrex is a great character in his own right who has a place in the game, not just an Easter Egg extra.
And that leads me to one thing I like about ME2. As most of you probably know, you start off losing your team from the last game, and if you're like me, your first thought upon getting back on your feet is "Where is my team? What happened to them?". Thank you, Bioware, for realising that when you create wonderful characters, we gamers get attached to them and care about what happens to them. It's been two years since you've last seen your old team members, and it's hugely satisfying to find that they've all gone out and had lives while you've been off being, well, dead (spoiler? Sorry.) It's equally satisfying to see the varying reactions they have to finding out you're still alive. Liara hugs you. (Yeah, that's another thing - people hug, shoulder-clasp and pat each other on the back in this game. It's a new layer of awesome to the already smooth interaction scenes.) Garrus takes it in stride. Tali asks no questions, and instead offers her unwavering trust. Kaidan, assuming you spared and romanced him in the last game, first hugs, then yells at you.
Oh, look, another convenient segue. Let's talk about Kaidan for a moment, since it's relevant - I'm about to start on the romances in ME2, after all. Kaidan in the first game is, in my opinion, a pile of wet blankets with the Navy regulations scribbled all over them. When I first played through ME, on a friend's X-Box, I steered clear of the bore and romanced Liara instead. One of the reasons why I favour playing a female Shepard is because it's kind of a Bioware tradition for me - first playthrough is always with a goody-two-shoes female - but also because Jennifer Hale has such an amazing voice. I could listen to it for hours. Mm, ear-candy. In fact, I'm not ashamed to admit a nice voice is one of the biggest turn-ons for me, and can make or break a character. I adored Carth's voice in KotOR; can you see how much of a whinging doofus Kaidan has to be for me to dismiss him, even though he has the exact same voice actor?
Okay, that's a little harsh. I had nothing against Kaidan, he was just bland and uninteresting. I let him die in both of my playthroughs, not because I hated him but because Ash was just more interesting as a character. When I played through ME on my own X-Box, fully intending to import the character to the next game, I figured I'd give him a go, see what I had been missing. Well, it turns out nothing much - he keeps hemming and hawing about the damn regs, and fraternisation, and ohmigod is it right to feeel this waaay. My Shepard came close to telling him point blank that it's not worth all the hand-wringing. Good God, man, make a decision and stick by it.
Which is more or less exactly what Kaidan does in ME2. Finally, he makes a decision all on his ownsies, an understandable decision given the circumstances, and tells the Hero of All Humankind that no thanks, he's got conflicting feelings about it so he's not interested in joining her team again. That is ballsy. It made me respect the character for the first time. Hats off to the writers. Now, granted, doors are left open for possible reconciliation later (and the continuation of the romance in ME3, most likely), but I always intended to dump Kaidan in ME2 anyway, so this worked out perfectly for my Shepard.
I had managed to remain almost entirely spoiler-free before playing both games, of which I'm very happy. I was even upset when a friend told me there's a suicide mission in ME2 - dude, I don't want to know anything! - only to discover that it was actually written right on the cover. But I did know one thing: you could romance Garrus or Tali in ME2. AWESOME. I couldn't wait. Tali is a lovely mech-head (and that accent!), and Garrus was one of my favourite characters in the first game - I remember jokingly saying that he would be perfect for my Shepard if he was available as a romantic option. And of course, he was, as ME2 showed me.
I wonder why the character seems so appealing. I understand he has a huge fanbase now. Maybe it's the fact that he's a classic Tragic Do-Gooder - the guy who tries his damnest to do the Right Thing, but finds himself battling the windmills of the world and his own nature. Garrus in ME2 is exactly how I would've expected the character to develop; he always had the vigilante outlook and his passion for justice was always getting him in trouble. For me personally, I figure that at least part of the appeal of turians is that their concept owes a lot to dinosauroids. That is frikkin' fantastic. There better be female turians in the next game though, I'm just saying. And a chance to see their home world is also long overdue.
Anyway. Side-tracked. ME2 seems to favour human-alien -pairings more than the first game. Maybe that's just me, and the fact that Miranda, Jack and Jacob all had the romantic appeal of a cardboard box to me, but it almost seems that the default love interests are Tali and Garrus. I don't recall getting a single line of suggestive dialogue with Jacob, but I actually had to consciously dodge starting the subtle romance with Thane. The nature of the romances seems different, too - what they seem to want to get across is desperate people
clinging to each other as the world burns, not anything that would be expected to last. Bringing in the aliens from the last game seems like a good way to accomplish that; you can have the long-lasting romance with Ash or Kaidan, but for one night before the end, you might want to reach out to an old friend, maybe try something new in the progress.
It's a fine concept. I have absolutely no problems with it. I'm aware that Mass Effects are very plot-driven action RPGs, and romances are essentially just extra goodies. It makes sense that if the romances are there, they also serve the plot. (Actually, that's good for any game.) But they don't entirely work according to the concept. Here's how it went with Garrus: you could start flirting with him quite soon after picking him up, and I loved the save-him-from-himself -theme throughout his loyalty quest. "Romance" is the wrong word here, I think - how it really was painted was a close friendship with possible benefits. Mutual trust plays a bigger part than lovey-dovey feelings. So far, so good. Then Garrus says the lovely line "Shepard, we've gone through so much together. You don't ever have to worry about making me uncomfortable. Nervous, yes, but never uncomfortable" (I might be paraphrasing slightly, but that's essentially it), and I thought that pretty much settled it. I mean, I've brought the subject up frankly, we've discussed it, taken a while to think it over, and come to the conclusion that yes, let's "blow off steam" as he is fond of calling it - so what are we waiting for, the Easter Bunny? Oh, wait, a mightier critter yet - The Plot Bunny. I see. So let's sit on our hands and calibrate (seriously, what is it with Bioware men and their endless fiddling? Pazaak, anyone?) until we're both anxious and trying not to think about our imminent death. That sounds so much better than just having sex when we feel like having it.
This is the problem with having the romance moving in time with the plot; some people (like me) rush to each new dialogue option as soon as they appear, and usually end up stuck with endlessly repeating dialogues a lot until the plot hath decreed that the conversation can move on. It makes no sense to me to have the big My Only Friend In The Universe conversation take place a dozen hours of gaming time before the characters actually do something about it. Why? It's your goddamn ship, who cares who you shag while you hunt down the Collectors? In the first game, they made Shepard "wait for the right time" by appealing to the constraints of Alliance regulations and personal morals (Ash and Kaidan) or Liara's shyness and the fact that asari sex is some kind of a soul-bonding, brain-fusing ritual of epic importance. But there's no such obstacle here. Garrus essentially says, "let's wait, because we have to wait for the LAST POSSIBLE MOMENT for no real reason". Sure, he has to calibrate, and research sex with humans, and calibrate some more (you might have noticed that I got the "can't talk, calibrating" reply a few too many times), but come the fuck on, if Mordin has already given me The Big Speech (which was as mortifying as my mother's equivalent of it, except she never used the phrase "do not, ahem, ingest"), he should have figured out all there is to figure out by now. LET'S BE HAVING SEXINGS. The big be-all-and-end-all of a relationship shouldn't always have to be the time the two characters first have sex. The sex scene in the first game (with the FLASH OF A NAKED BUTTOCK OMIGOD) wasn't anywhere near as touching as the pep talk your love interest of choice gave you when you were grounded in Citadel. Let's mix it up a little.
Ahem. Anyway. Apart from the frustrations of plot-held alien sex, I was happy to find that there were now more dialogue options, not to mention a couple of really nice unprompted gestures and lines. It truly feels like you give Shepard a nudge in some direction and can trust her to take it from there. The Paragon/Renegade actions are also a nice touch. There are quite a lot of cut scenes, especially towards the end (and how epic in their epicness are they!), but that didn't bother me. I enjoy the fine line between being able to shape this Shepard to my liking, and just sitting back and enjoying the show. This is why ME is in some ways a superior game to Dragon Age: the character of Shepard is limited by the game, so you can trust that when the game takes the reins, there won't be any huge surprises in store when it comes to her or his character. Dragon Age: Origins can't help occasionally making assumptions of your character that don't always turn out to be correct (like the fact that everyone in the game world describes them as attractive or heroic, or neglects to mention their race when it's really damn relevant). DA gives the player so much freedom in creating the character that sometimes you have to really stretch the limits of credibility to accept the way some NPCs react to her or him. Shepard, on the other hand, has a clearly defined role in the plot of ME, and thus everything feels more or less natural.
Let's see, what else? Oh yes, the "action" part of the action RPG. Well, at first it was a pain to get used to, mostly because of my sadly inadequate old TV struggling to keep up with the teeny-tiny text and details, but when I got the hang of it, I really liked the changes. Simplified upgrade and gear systems are also a blessing. The covers in battle finally work as they should have in the first game. Seeing how many asses hallowd kicked with Warp made me wonder if I should've made my character an Adept, too. Although, I've got pretty damn good at headshots, and there's something intensely satisfying with freezing your opponents, then watching them shatter...
Oh, and have I mentioned that Joker rocks so freakin' hard? Because he does. Seriously, he's the kick-assiest character in the entire game. Insert HUGE HEART here.
I could go on about this game forever, but I think I'll stop here for now and come back to Bioware-worshipping later. By the by, here's a little soundtrack I made for Mass Effect 2. Some songs are a better fit than others, but hey, it's just one fan's soundtrack. YM, as always, MV.
[ download the whole zipped thing here ]
1. Shiny Toy Guns: Starts With One
Of course, it all starts with Shepard.
2. M83: Unrecorded
Finding your place in the universe again.
3. The Eden House: To Believe In Something
One for the team, and earning their trust and loyalty.
4. Kontakte: Sterile World
Planet-side.
5. M83: Cyborg
Geth and beyond.
6. 65daysofstatic: Fix The Sky A Little
Just a hopeful mood piece. For the flotilla, mostly.
7. Moby: We Are All Made Of Stars
Faith and trust in the cold galaxy.
8. E.S. Posthumus: Unstoppable
For Normandy, Joker and EDI being epic and winning everything.
9. Collapse Under The Empire: Further Than The End Of The World
The last mission is not the end.