LogFAQs > #950441182

#52 Mass Effect 1 + Mass Effect 2 + Mass Effect 3 (Xbox 360, 2007, 2010, and 2012)


This is my mega cheat entry, but really, they all go hand-in-hand to where separating them seems wrong. They live and die together.

I've never been too interested in sci-fi stuff despite my interest in astronomy. I wouldn't even say that I gave it much of a shot, so let's assume that I haven't read or watched most of the famous stuff. Knowing that, the Mass Effect series is probably my favorite in the genre. The first game was great at introducing and getting me sucked into the lore. It helps having fully realized characters with great voice actors delivering well-written lines. I tend to speed up or outright skip some dialogue in other games, but I wanted to hear every last syllable with these games.

In what is probably a controversial opinion (shocker coming from me I know), the first game is my favorite in the trilogy. It set the tone, built the world, and gave you so many great characters to begin with the likes of Wrex, Liara, Tali, and Garrus. A strong first impression can be pretty huge for me, and it's something that future installments in a shared storyline don't have the luxury of benefitting from. It is also tells a complete, mostly self-contained story while hinting at a bigger picture, something that I don't think it gets enough credit for as the following games followed a different approach. I know gameplay was refined in future installments, but it was more than servicable to begin. Exploring planets in the Mako was easily the weakest thing about the game, but it was hardly something you had to do, so I just skipped it after awhile.

2 started things off in a rather unique way so to give the game a fresher feeling from the start. It introduced three of my favorite characters in Thane, Samara, and Mordin, and brought back many others in new roles. I respect them for not keeping things the same and have different squad members for practical and creative writing purposes, but I wanted my Wrex back dammit! They completely overhauled how to acquire planetary resources for the better, and while I realize that is an optional thing, that was a big deal to me. In general, this game was more character centric, and for that, it has my vote for best dialog writing among the three, but it came at a cost. In spite of having a perilous final act that did feel tense the whole way through, the game basically felt like one giant interlude with the game basically boiling down to recruiting new squadmates, gaining the loyalty of said squadmates through sometimes oddly-forced character arcs, and oh yeah the unverise is in danger, so let's get to saving it. Plot-wise, this was disappointing, and the main reason why I have as my "least" favorite in the trilogy.

After two strong entries, there were high expectations for the third game, and for me, it delivered. The gameplay and planetary resouce gathering were at their finest, the wide cast of characters were given proper closure, it had the awesome fanservice Citadel DLC, and I felt like my 100+ hours spent on it ended with a sense of accomplishment. I played the final game after the ending was re-worked, so I never felt embittered by what they originally had, but I was content with how my story ended.

I actually went through the series twice. I don't stick to binary decisions in the dialogue tree, but in my first playthrough, I was a mostly paragon male vanguard Shepard and a renegade-leaning female adept Shepard the second time. BioWare did a great job at making your classes feel distinct. They felt like completely different experiences in combat, and when you through hundreds of encounters in over a hundred hours of content, that replayable factor goes a long way.

It's hard to pull off a series like Mass Effect with its interconnected games where decisions in one game have a profound effect in a future one, and it's even harder to do it as well as they did. That and financial reasons are probably why they are so rare, but if if someone can pull it off even half as well as BioWare did with Mass Effect, I would buy it regardless of the subject matter.

I am prepared to eat those words.

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KCF can't actually be a real person but he is - greengravy
If you smell what the rock is cooking he's cooking crap - ertyu