LogFAQs > #941719497

Aaaaahhh I've been so busy getting angry at Mass Effect 2 I've fallen behind on Heavy Rain. It's fine though, I'll catch up. I'm about halfway through the playlist now.

So here is part 1 of my final thoughts on Mass Effect 2. This part covers all the negative aspects of the game, which is a lot of stuff. I promise part 2 will be more positive.

Gameplay
Hide behind cover, shoot, wait for shields/health to recharge, keep shooting until all enemies dead. Use a power whenever its off cooldown and as long as it matches the healthbar. I played mostly on normal and switched to veteran near the end, which just made the enemies more bullet-spongey.

There were 2 times in the game when this pattern got shaken up. The first was the derelict Reaper with oodles of husks constantly spawning from the floor and charging at you. While this was a different experience I wouldnt call it a fun one. The second was the first leg of the suicide mission where you have to disable blockages in the vents before your hacker dies. I liked this because it makes you stop turtling and play more aggressively, albeit inelegantly by just giving you a very short time limit. To put on my armchair designer hat, what the game needed was common enemies that forced you out of cover, maybe with grenades, the Shockwave power, or teleporting like that DLC boss. Basically anything that would require you to move around and prioritize targets instead of hunkering down and shooting the closest guy.

What makes the monotony worse is that the only diversions from the shooting are 2 hacking minigames, one of which, the match-the-symbols one, I got very sick of near the end from how often it came up. The find-the-segment game was pretty fun though, didnt get sick of that.

World
Tiny hubs wouldnt necessarily be a bad thing if they were densely packed with interesting stuff, but they really arent. For every 2 NPCs with actual depth of personality, for example Captain Bailey or the asari matriarch bartender on Illium, there are 20 who exist solely for the purpose of dispensing a fetch quest or providing you with a binary moral choice that you sometimes cant even select if you havent gone through enough binary moral choices already.

Speaking of which, Mass Effect 2s choices have a lot of problems more than just the paragon/renegade system, but I may as well get into that first. Its not that the system is too simplistic, but that it has more weight placed on it than it should given how simple it is. By way of example, Ill refer to something in the game that really disappointed me: the part where you unfreeze the krogan and he attacks you. This is a setup for a really interesting role-playing opportunity: your goals are to convince this krogan not to kill you, to inform him of where he is and what happened to his creator, and to convince him to join your team. There are multiple dialogue options with multiple approaches, but all it takes is picking the one blue (or red) one. The experience of navigating through a tricky interpersonal conflict and deciding how you want to handle it is removed, because the way to succeed is simple and obvious. There were far too many moments like this in the game, where I was intrigued by a choices premise but defaulted to the highlighted option because I knew it would be correct.

The other major problem with the choices, one that makes the small worlds feel even smaller, is how compartmentalized everything is. That is, even the choices you make that matter dont matter outside of the immediate area in which you make them. One of the biggest failures in this regard is how your squadmates barely react to the decisions you make, which is partly due to the large amount of permutations that you could bring with you, but even their dialogue trees aboard the Normandy barely change over the course of the game. In fact, they barely change after their own loyalty missions, which makes no sense to me since youd think that would be an obvious trigger to unlock new dialogue. The points of interest where you can talk to specific squadmates are good, but theyre usually just a few lines long. And aside from your squadmates, the rest of the world doesnt really react to your choices either. The quests you do and the people you help are forgotten about the moment you leave their planet. I wont belabor this point too much since the your choices dont matter line is done to death now, but I will say that its pretty bad that the biggest way you see your choices shape the world is from emails at your private terminal.

Story
The plot structure is surprisingly simple: find out where the Collectors are coming from, find a way to get there, go there and stop them. In between, build up your team. This is where I would say simple isnt necessarily a bad thing, which it isnt, but I confess that I was slightly disappointed by how simple it ended up. I think the reason for my disappointment is that the intro to the game promises more intrigue than it ends up delivering. Shepard allying with Cerberus seems like it should make him have to work as a fugitive behind the scenes, juggling various factional allegiances while slowly building up a loyal force. Well, for how often it matters that Cerberus is seen as a dangerous terrorist organization, Shepard might as well still be in the Alliance. He just sets down on a planet, chats up the locals, helps them out with their problems and leaves to do the same in the next star system. The only time in the game you working with Cerberus ever has actual consequences is when Ashley/Kaidan shows up, and that is one brief scene that amounts to nothing.

And speaking of setups without payoffs, what about the council? Its the one of the first things youre directed to, but it never comes up again after that, not even in passing. What are they doing against the Collectors? Against Cerberus? What does Udina have against Shepard? What is Anderson trying to do? Political intrigue is the bread and butter of RPG worldbuilding, and theres a huge missed opportunity for it here. And speaking of political intrigue, it seemed like there was something weird going on with Miranda, with her executing that guy in the facility at the start of the game and tipping off Jacob about his father, but that didnt turn out to be anything either. Maybe I was reading too much into that but it seemed weird.

And speaking of machinations within your squad, interpersonal conflicts between squadmates come up randomly and have no more significance than raising or lowering your loyalty values. Why does Jacob only distrust Thane one time before it never comes up again? Why isnt anyone other than Miranda concerned that Jack could be unstable? Why does Grunt have literally nothing to say to Mordin on his loyalty mission? It feels like everyone in the galaxy exists only in relation to you, Shepard. And speaking of which, whats the deal with Harbinger? What does he have against you, Shepard, specifically? Why is he the only Collector that talks? Whats the point of him surviving into Mass Effect 3 when he did nothing of importance in this game?
(cont'd)

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Toss a win to your azuarc
O guru of GotD