LogFAQs > #941467047

Legion's loyalty mission is all fighting Geth, which are non-threatening at this point in the game due to Shepard's advanced AI hacking skill, and to make things even easier the game sometimes lets you reprogram rocket drones to work for you, after which you can just sit and watch as they clear out the room on their own. Narratively, it presents us with the choice to either reprogram the Geth heretics so they agree with Legion, or just kill them. The ethics of trampling on someone's free will like that can potentially be complicated, but it doesn't really work when the alternative is just killing them. I went for the reprogram route. In theory, it could mean more Geth to help us when we fight the Reapers. It turns out this choice makes it harder, but not impossible, to broker peace between the Geth and Quarians in ME3.

Tali and Geth have a spat akin to Jack's with Miranda, but instead of the simple "cut it out and focus on the mission" she used there, Shepard has to get into some fairly detailed politics to convince these two to stand down. It does ultimately come back to the Reapers, though: her main argument is that war between the two species would leave their strength depleted when the Reapers come knocking.

Although I'm not too fond of Samara as a character, she does have one of the most interesting loyalty missions. Like Thane's, it doesn't involve any shooting. It's a process of investigation to track down Morinth followed by drawing her out with Shepard as bait. You talk to other characters and look around the area to learn about things Morinth likes and then bring those up in conversation to win her over. It's not the deepest thing in the world, but I definitely find myself appreciating any time this game can go a full mission without resorting to the gunplay. You also have the choice of whether to kill Samara or Morinth, if you have enough Paragon or Renegade points to resist the latter's mind control. I sided with Samara last time, but I decided to do so again because I've always felt the other choice was just deeply irrational, especially for a Paragon Shepard. I think the idea is that both Asari are remorseless killers, so that the sociopathic Morinth isn't strictly worse than Samara, but at least Samara's targeting has rules - she strikes down the wicked according to a code that matches closely enough with normal human judgement, even if her response is often disproportionate. In contrast, Morinth makes sport of killing the best people she can find. Still, maybe the best thing Shepard could do for the galaxy would be to deliberately get whichever Asari she recruits killed off during the suicide mission.

Kasumi's starts out as a more interesting heist but eventually devolves into another big round of shooting, culminating in a boss fight against an armored plane, which is a job for the good old particle beam. At first, you're infiltrating a party to find information and break into a security system. It's too bad that you can run around the area like a total klutz obviously moving into restricted areas and no one at the party will bat an eye, but I can understand that it would've been a big ask for them to program such a thing. One thing that was funny was breaking into the storage room and finding lady liberty's head, complete with a codex dump on how it got there, as well as Michelangelo's David, which compared to its real-life counterpart had suffered some convient structural damage so that Bioware didn't have to model certain features of the sculpture. This is even funnier when contrasted against Animal Crossing showing the full statue with no censorship!

For the record, I decided to delete everything in the memory box, mainly because it's what Kasumi's lover asked her to do.

Shadow Broker is a Liara-focused DLC, complete with our old friend as a temporary squad mate. It's also quite the ME1 throwback section, even down to Liara's abilities being singularity and stasis from the last game, which are mostly not seen elsewhere in this one. I think Shepard can learn singularity as an Adept. The banter between Liara and Shepard definitely is a strong point, and they make some fairly amusing jokes about the mechanics of the previous game, namely omni-gel and the Mako. I still think the innovation of thermal clips makes the least sense out of everything though, so maybe ME2 shouldn't be talking smack.

The highlight of the gameplay is probably the boss fight against an Asari Spectre. She can warp around the battlefield at high speeds and get around your cover, which can make her a relentless attacker and much harder to thwart by just trading damage and then sucking your thumb behind cover while your health regenerates, which is the standard combat approach for me. The Shadow Broker himself is a less impressive boss, mostly just a big old damage sponge that keeps regenerating health. I did find it hilarious watching my skinny female Shepard beat the crap out of him with her bare fists though. He's a member of a lesser-known species called the Yahg, which are even bigger and more violent than Krogan, and have been relegated to their homeworld for slaughtering the Council's first contact party. I did like that as a tidbit of lore, but the character of the Broker himself was a little on the dull side. Now that he's out of the way, Liara has taken over his legacy and is planning to help Shepard fight the Reapers in her new position as Shadow Broker.

What I appreciated most about the DLC was the set of rewards you get for finishing it. I almost wish I had done it earlier, because it gives you access to info on which planets have high yields of specific resources, which can reduce the tedium of planet scanning. You also gain access to some of the Shadow Broker's information, including files on your squad mates, which I ended up reading in their entirety. A lot of them are almost cute - one I particularly liked was Grunt's online search history, which paints a picture of his increasing respect for Shepard and ends up with him reading Hemingway, and then looking up sharks after The Old Man and the Sea.

On top of those things, there's a lot of dialog with Liara after the fact, including what amount to a date scene on the Normandy. Pretty good writing in this DLC.

---

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