LogFAQs > #940531268

Okay, it's time to get started on the next chapter in the life of Agrafena Shepard.

Toby Fox's Deltarune begins by having you go through a mock character-creation system, and then elaborately destroying your creation and forcing you to play the default character. Bioware beat Toby to this idea in a way with the intro to Mass Effect 2, where the Commander Shepard you spent so much time following in the first game dies a hideous death through exposure to the void of space, all in the name of saving Joker (a character so dynamic and fascinating that I forgot to mention him in either of the character round-ups I wrote for the first game.)

This is where the previously-enigmatic Cerberus Group takes center stage. They perform a technological resurrection of Commander Shepard at the cost of billions of dollars. Apparently this is because Shepard is a symbol of humanity's importance to the galaxy, but it's also because she has one of the rarest and most valuable skills there is: the ability to make friends.

A traitor infiltrates the facility where the so-called Lazarus Project is held and the newly-reborn and still disoriented Shepard has to make her way through a tutorial level to escape. The controls and core gameplay have been revamped a great deal since the last game: you now press X to get into cover, instead of the left analog stick, thank God, and equally welcome is a dedicated melee button. Health and shields both regenerate instead of only shields and medi-gel is now exclusively used to revive fallen teammates, and the whole weapon overheating thing has been done away with in favor of a standard ammo system. Headshots are also a new feature, unless I'm mistaken and they were in the first game, and most debuffs only work on enemies once their shields have been lowered. I will say that I definitely prefer this control scheme.

The Lazarus Project begs a question: are we still playing as Commander Shepard, or are we playing as some construct of meat and metal that merely thinks it is Commander Shepard? Accordingly, we have the option to change our physical appearance and class specialization at the start of this game. Against my better judgement, I chose to go with Infiltrator again. I was curious to see if the tech abilities were revamped to be more fun in the way I remember the biotic moves were, and I also wanted to find out if a Sniper Rifle specialization would be as overpowering in this game. Each class now has an exclusive special ability, and appropriately enough, the Infiltrator gets temporary invisibility. You also get an extra ability for importing from the first game, but they don't tell you what each one does on the selection screen. I chose the Geth Shield boost because it was one of the only moves that I still found useful by the end of the last game and I knew what it would do.

To reinforce those doubts about the new Shepard, I toyed with the idea of switching to renegade this time around, but the game gave me a bunch of Paragon points for importing my character, which was enough to dissuade me.

Once we're out of the tutorial, we meet Jacob and Miranda, our two human squad mates for this game, who parallel Kaidan and Ashley: the more specialized girl and multi-talented boy, the girl cynical and the boy more idealistic, and both of them unpopular among the fanbase. We don't know much else about them so far, but the game will explore their characters quite extensively as time goes by.

We also meet the appropriately-named Illusive Man, Cerberus' leader. He fills us in on the reasoning for Shepard's resurrection and the developments in the universe over the two years we've been dead: all our former squad mates have scattered, the council and alliance still deny the reaper threat, and some mysterious bug-like aliens called the Collectors are now abducting humans en masse in fringe worlds. It's this last issue that he wants Shepard to investigate and for this reason we go on our first mission to a deserted colony, where we encounter Tali for a second time. This theoretically demonstrates why Shepard in particular is so valuable, because she is able to broker some co-operation with Tali, who is hostile to Cerberus, because they know each other. But really, the odds of an encounter like this in such a massive universe are infinitesimal and it's just a storytelling device. Tail doesn't join up just yet, sadly, so we're stuck with Jacob and Miranda as our squad for now.

We also fight our first little mini-boss in the form of a big mech, which I found pretty easy. I mostly just circled around a stack of crates shooting at him until he went down. The Sniper Rifle still one-shots all regular enemies so far, but ammo limits seem more relevant to it than most guns. I'm playing on Veteran from the start this time, by the way.

I stopped shortly after this, when we meet Joker again and gain access to the refurbished Normandy. All the characters suggested I immediately go recruit Mordin next time I play, which sounds just fine to me since he was one of my favorite characters.


---

I'm playing every game from GotD 2020! Games Completed: 3/129
Currently Playing: Mass Effect 2