Pretty good, shame about the botched ending
Mass effect is an interesting land of contrasts for me. It has some of the most interesting and well written science fiction characters I've ever seen. I literally enjoyed just reading email terminals that amounted to nothing more than flavor text like grunts search history. It's also home to some genuinely great art design.
But my god...the mythology and the world building....oof. They weren't especially interesting from the outset and they've only gotten worse with age.
I would still Mary Tali if she asked me though.
I tried it recently and was enjoying it up until halfway through the third game when I unknowingly got trapped in some very cringe DLC and didn't care enough to load an old save.
Also the "focus on Sovereign" choice was bullshit and they made me feel like a racist for prioritizing the many over the few elites.
I felt the same way, but then the later games explain that Sovereign's attack was covered up and explained to the public that he was just an advanced Geth ship so it would make sense that most people think you did it to advance humanity's position. Still the right choice tho
Also the “focus on Sovereign” choice was bullshit and they made me feel like a racist for prioritizing the many over the few elites.
I agree that that was a clumsy example of a "good equals good outcomes" non-choice in game storytelling.
There were a couple of times in the first game where big important plot came out of nowhere and told me that I'd made a choice. Like at some point the frog dude is like "oh you betrayed me and shit" and I'm like dude what no let's go fix the genocide ray or whatever the space liberals did to stop you from great replacing them I am totally on team frog-klingons and then the game made me shoot him and i was like well this was a bunch of cliche bullshit but now I'm pissed and I'm only finishing this game out of spite. Trash ass fascist super cop space cliche mess.
It really does ruin the entire series. Since I finished it the first time ten years ago I've never touched any game in the series since.
When Arya stabbed the Night King it killed all the wights and also my interest in the series.
Didn't even bother finishing it. When I looked up the fight between the Mountain and the Hound later I laughed my ass off at how bad it was and felt very good about my decision to stop watching.
It's a pretty good space opera type setting, I really like it. I like how many of their alien species aren't humanoid in appearance, like the hanar jellyfish guys or the Elcor elephant people. Neat ideas, great side stories and everything's fleshed out. A lot of the acting is really good too, which is saying something because I often hate video game voice acting.
I like the constant themes of togetherness, or uniting in the face of a common threat. It's optimistic and that's when scifi is often at its best, when it's promoting core values of humanity and working together with the trappings of fantasy technology.
I remember back in the day people would complain about the games being simplistic or too focused on shooting compared to previous Bioware RPGs, but eh, to each their own. I think the games are fine. It's neat seeing their progression from games like Baldur's Gate, to KOTOR, to Mass Effect
https://www.polygon.com/22436615/mass-effect-legendary-edition-police-ea-bioware-brooklyn-99
Nice to see some reckoning on this. Mass Effect has, like... one two three... at least three great replacement expy alien species, just to get started. The politics of the whole series are appalling and then you throw on a shitty ending to ice the shit cake.
My definitive thoughts are that I loved how Legion explained Geth psychology in their loyalty mission in ME2, making it clear that consensus is what they strive for over all else, and it is easy to make the leap that true individuality for each Geth would essentially be the closest thing they can experience to Hell. Legion is incredibly distraught when they discover that the Heretic Geth have not only split from the True Geth, but are spying on their patrol routes and creating contingencies for war. They genuinely do not understand why they would seek their own way or attempt to impose it on the main faction of Geth, and Shepard has to explain it to them like you would a child.
Then in ME3 that gets thrown out the window completely and the Geth are "rewarded" for siding with the Good Guys by getting individuality, that thing that I just explained would be the purest agony imaginable for them, unable to reach true, full consensus even with in a single hardware platform. Worse yet, they become boring. Now they're just another space robot race. That interesting concept that made them truly unique amongst synthetic alien races in fiction got thrown out the window so they could have more MCU-style set pieces.
More than anything else that game did, what they did to the Geth truly pissed me off. I didn't even play ME3 because I tried the demo and was very put off by just how bad it was, but hearing about the Geth afterward cemented my decision to never even give it a chance. Fuck that game.
they become boring
This was my opinion of the whole trilogy. I was rolling my eyes so hard at "evil space robots want to kill all humans" that I only finished the first game out of spite. Plus "destroy all humans" was an entirely rational thing for the AIs to do in the setting because the default view of all the meat people was "Kill them on sight with extreme prejudice". Wow I wonder why this AI that unexpectedly became self aware killed everyone that knew it existed and went in to hiding. It's almost like that was the only chance it had of surviving.
:yea:
Out of all the alien species in ME, the Geth were the ones who really felt "alien". They had a fundamentally different way of experiencing the world instead of essentially being humans with different cultural norms like all the other aliens. It was pretty cool.
Then they ruined it for some dumbass Pinocchio wants to be a real boy plotline that made no sense
That was intentional. They did the whole rubber forehead aliens and green alien space babes thing on purpose to tap in on star trek nostalgia.
Well, it was just modernised Star Wars EU fic. The story centres around what used to be this before bioware branched away from Star Wars.
All of this :100-com:
In fact I would add that its made even worse because of the choice system. Mass Effect's paragon/renegade morality system was always pretty shallow even from the beginning and in hindsight is another aspect of the series that has aged super poorly for various reasons especially since it devolved by part 3 into simplistic goodguy/badguy approach, but Legion's loyalty mission I would argue stands out as the one genuinely interesting moral dilemma you ever have to face as the player in the series.
Do you destroy the Geth...or do you forcibly convert them into the rest of the collective? Even if the Geth were Human that would be an extremely complicated moral question involving questions of individual rights and free will...but most people I think would generally have at least have a gut answer to it and direction they would take..
But as you point out: the dilemma is made infinitely more complicated by the fact that the Geth are not Human and do not experience society and individuality from the same perspective that we do! Even if you're a die hard idealist 'give me liberty or give me death' type who finds the idea of forcible conversion revolting in every fiber of your being it actually makes you really engage and wrestle with whether or not you are actually being immoral by forcing that bias and perspective onto an alien culture that genuinely just doesn't think like that.
Then part 3 said "fuck that shit. All robots turn into real boys."
The absolute failure of 3's ending stopped me from ever investing in a media property again. I now am firmly (CW: Suicide) Yahtzee-pilled.
