Mass Effect 2 received the highest praise and accolades with it’s release, being BioWare’s best game thus far. It was complimented on the improvements of the combat system, new elements of gameplay, and the continuation of its beloved storytelling.
I personally found the game to be less appealing than the others. I originally was shown the game by a friend who then proceeded to ignore me and continue his second playthrough for the next few hours before I had my phone “fake call” me, giving me a reasonable excuse to head home.
A few months later, I borrowed the PC version from a friend and proceeded to give the game a fair shake. I never owned and thus didn’t finish Mass Effect 1, which may cause people to state that I can’t give Mass Effect 2 a fair review, but you don’t need to see the first movie in a series to know if the second or third movies are made well. But since I didn’t want to shoot in the dark, I did read through the story of Mass Effect 1.
Mind you, Mass Effect was not my first BioWare game. I first played Jade Empire, a game that I loved very much, and was the standard I held to the other BioWare titles.
Jumping right in, the gameplay in ME2 was great. Much better than the first, with a lot less reliance on pause-and-play, the deal breaker in ME1. I could never justify putting a pause-and-play mechanic in a third-person-shooter RPG, much less one that required it so often I felt like I was playing a turn-based-RPG. The PC version made this easier with the 8 button shortcuts it provided. I cannot say how well this translates into the console version, but I am hoping it’s as smooth.
After whisking through the opening scenes and “tutorial mission”, I began part 1 of my quest, to gather a party. I didn’t like that too much; most games have you simply stumble onto people that would then join your party. I preferred that, but since the current goal was to stop an alien race, a team was definitely required. Making it feel like the main goal still felt a little off to me.
This was then the time I fully encountered the decision engine, Renegade-Paragon. For the most part, I picked whatever I felt my character would say at the time. I found out later on that this wasn’t the best idea. It felt very noobish to do so, but my friend always bragged about the decision system as the best part, shaping the Shepard and story as you wanted. My female Shepard was a hardened war veteran that wouldn’t take insubordination, but wasn’t a butch jerk. That’s where things got out-of-hand. My decisions went 60% Renegade and 40% Paragon, which caused me to unable to do a few things.
That was a problem. I feel there’s an issue with a role-playing game that penalizes you for actually role-playing. Some may argue that’s not what it does, but it is. By deciding not to put roughly 90% or more of your choices to Renegade/Paragon, you lose out on key moments of the game. Another loyalty mission required a lot of Renegade/Paragon points, or else your squad member gets exiled from their home race’s fleet. One mission in particular caused you to lose loyalty with a squad member because you didn’t have the points necessary to make the two fighting members to compromise. You end up siding with one over the other. You needed an excessive amount of points to win back the one you didn’t side with, and I’ll just say that I never got the amount of points necessary.
Apparently the idea is to either be a a**hole and force them to accept your decision, or create a good-natured convincing argument. Unfortunately, there’s no option to say “hey, she was right, you weren’t, but you’re more awesome than her and will be with me on missions more”. Because last time I checked, that argument totally works. Granted, Jade Empire did have a similar decision system, but they made it very clear that you had to choose one or the other, because they were philosophies, ways of life, that determined your decisions and your second elemental style would be. I could reason with that.
As I was reaching the end of the game, I was frustrated. The story was just too incomplete. So many questions were left unanswered, and I found very little story elements to piece together. In my frustration I called two of my friends to ask them about the story. The friend that gave me the game basically shrugged his shoulders at the missing plots and stated that the game was still cool nonetheless. The other (the one that made me watch him play for hours) argued that the characters were the story. As much as I would like to agree, it didn’t seem right that until the point I was at, only two missions involved encountering the antagonists, and the characters didn’t know anything about them. I didn’t care about the character’s stories. The galaxy was in danger. I don’t care if your son is trying to assassinate someone, I want to know why humans are being abducted!
But alas, it was not meant to be. As I finished the story I grew more frustrated that nothing was resolved, that I had only one less question than I did before I proceeded with the last mission. Also, because one of my members wasn’t loyal, one of my other members died, so I ended up losing my favorite support. But I found out he isn’t playable in Mass Effect 3 so I’m fine with it after all.
sidequests are a stable in RPGs (so what do we call Final Fantasy XIII?). There was no explanation to why the antagonists were doing what they were doing, and definitely no reason as to why it still worked after we clearly stopped its creation. Trying to find a balance made people not loyal to me, and caused others to die.
As a whole, Mass Effect 2 is a good game. Some might say a great game. However, when you strip away the side quests, the game is short with little story. When you strip away the missions to gather squad members, the game is probably 3 hours long, with only 3 or 4 missions that directly dealt with the central plot and its antagonists. Considering there are a plethora of games that have 6 hours or more of story-related gameplay, I feel that this game needed much more added to the central plot, more investigating of the antagonists, and some closure that doesn’t seem to require me to research on a Mass Effect wiki. I’m going to play Mass Effect 3 and hope that the story won’t be so limited. I can only hope that BioWare realizes that great storytelling doesn’t equal a great story.
No comments:
Post a Comment