Mass Effect: The Series

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From the very first mission down on Eden Prime you know Mass Effect if going to be a fun game. There’s something about diving for cover, making a mad roll across the room and shooting round corners that holds strong throughout the series and makes the player feel like they’re in the middle of a science fiction show.

Gameplay is pure fun in Mass Effect. It remains mostly the same throughout all three games though a few things, such as inventory, and health bar, gets slicked up between the first and second game. The guns are fun; the health system with shields adds a unique challenge during battle and it’s all easily learned and handled.

The world of Mass Effect is beautiful; the various planets you visit over the course of three games are as diverse as they are breathtaking or devastating as their history dictates.

The characters, many of whom you grow to know intimately throughout the course of all three games are incredibly in-depth and original, and are not cut in your usual video game-RPG shapes. Also, voiced by such as actors as Martin Sheen, Dwight Schultz, Seth Green, Tricia Helfer, Carrie Ann Moss, Adam Baldwin and Freddie Prinze, Jr. to name a few (to name all of the impressive cast would take quite some time), all the characters are incredibly well acted and are given entertaining and at times moving, dialog. Mini-discussions are often held by nameless NPCs in cities and on your spaceship the Normandy, which progress each time you pass them, and I often find myself scheduling a drop by of certain areas I had no other business in, then to hear more and satisfy my interest in characters that were so well written I cared about them even though they had no names and only a few lines.

The Mass Effect series is a pioneer in many ways; perhaps more thoroughly than any game before it, it explores the widening possibilities of story and choices that are open to video games which are rapidly closing the narrative-quality gap between games and films while at the same time discovering what new elements player interaction can bring to the table.

While there are some players who felt disappointed at the lack of effect choices ultimately created, and perhaps on the grander story scale that’s fair, many smaller effects and even various prominent characters’ fates are changed in ways that one is only able to truly appreciate after several play-throughs of the entire series.

The true flaw however in Mass Effect is created by its greatest strength of original, creative story telling. It was a game built for its story, planned as a trilogy; each game leads to the next. This unites the series and the story and makes them inseparable in a way few, if any, other RPG has managed. And in many ways the story is strong.

Despite involving systematically planned genocide, bickering species too self-centered to set aside their differences, atrocities on a galactic scale and extreme racism (or speciesm), Mass Effect does not have a dark message. Instead it tells a story of hope, tolerance, unity and humanity. At least it does until the end.

The end. If you’re heard or read anything about Mass Effect you probably heard about the great uproar caused by the end. People didn’t like it. Partly they didn’t like it because despite a history of choices your character makes throughout the game, there is basically one ending with three different color schemes. Also, there is very little wrap up. After dealing with the Krogans for three games you don’t learn their fates, if the Geth are still around after all choices are made and done, you don’t learn if they find a place in the Galaxy and you don’t hear how the Asari rebuilt their home after its destruction. You don’t even get to hear what humanity’s future will be.

But that is not the real weak point of the end. I didn’t mind the lack of different endings and I didn’t even really mind the sadness of them. So much of the last game was so sad anyways, you mostly expected it. As for wrap up, the ending brought about changes in the galaxy which took all context out of the plot threads you had followed for three games. That might have been a flaw of the plot, but take it out it did, so any wrap up would have been meaningless.

No, the flaw was something else. Mass Effect proved that video games can have the same Achilles heel as films and books. The belief it somehow needs a twist ending. One of the strongest aspects of the story line had always been the villains. There was something so cold blooded, so systematic, so evil about a machine-based race (which at the same time used organic species in horrific ways to increase their numbers) who to remain the dominate life form, wiped out all advanced civilizations every 50,000 years; a race that sat and waited and remembered, while other species forgot and grew, only to have them return like clockwork and wreak destruction. The Reapers were villains an entire galaxy could be terrified of.

But we knew about them from Mass Effect 1. So we threw in a twist in the last ten minutes. It was something a kin to if one read (or watched) all three Lord of the Rings only to have been told in the last ten minutes that ‘Sauron is actually just a puppet of this other guy all along but we only have ten minutes left so we can’t tell you anything about that guy to make him even remotely worth losing Sauron as a villain worth caring about’.
But worse yet, the ending shattered the themes that had been so prevalent throughout the series. The finale choice turned unity and tolerance into ‘us or them’, hope into an empty, bleak future and humanity into no better than the enemy.

With a story so wrapped up in its themes and villains, it is very detrimental to the plot when Mass Effect rewrites and ignores their true importance. And as a game so wrapped up in its story, it is very detrimental to the entire series when the plot suffers in the finale act, which causes the flaws of Mass Effect 3 to reach back in time and mark the very first game and that very first mission on Eden Prime.