Am I alive? Yes! Am I well? Mostly! I did probably incur a concussion last week, hence why I’ve been sitting on this so long – hard to edit when screens “hurt” after a full day of work, but I’m probably mostly okay now. I’m off work this week, at least.
Anyway, I come to you today to talk about the game series that took over my life for about two months: Mass Effect! Namely, the experience of playing it for the first time in the year of our lord, 2021. Or, well, my experiece with it, at least.
I had my first brush with Bioware at the tender age of…. somewhere in the range of thirteen or fourteen? Who can honestly remember specifics that far back? Not I. I’m lucky to remember what I said in that meeting we just had ten minutes ago…. Which isn’t the probable concussion talking, I was already like that before bonking my head.
I digress!
So I met Bioware through Star Wars: Knight of the Old Republic. I was in my height of Star Wars fangirl-ness, though I cared little for the stories of the actual movies. As someone who was talked into playing Star Wars Galaxies with her boyfriend and friends, I cared more for the lore on a greater scale. When said boyfriend was playing KOTOR one night while we were, I imagine, on the phone, as all I can remember from this is voices, I had to know what this game he was playing was called. He told me, I convinced my mom (bless her) that I needed this game, and I obsessed. Many a homework was neglected and many a bedtime was missed in the name of finding out just what was going to happen next. Even after beating it, I played this game obsessively.
And then I discovered mods.
Needless to say, I wore that game out.
Skip ahead six years: I’m talking to that same boyfriend, now an ex but still a friend, and he’s telling me about this awesome new game he’s playing called Dragon Age: Origins. Now I’m not sure if he told me it was by the same people who made KOTOR; I’m honestly not sure at what point I ever figured that out, but once more, this was a game I needed.
(If I can say nothing else for my first boyfriend, I can at least say he never gave me anything but fantastic video game recommendations. Seriously, not sure he ever recommended anything I didn’t wind up liking. Either he had stellar taste, or just knew me really well. Either way, mad props for introducing me to many of the games that have molded me, because Final Fantast VIII is also totally in that list.)
Once more, I took to convincing my mom – this time that I needed a PS3 and this game for Christmas; and, once more, I obsessed. Goodbye social life, goodbye any productivity during the remaineder of Christmas break. Hello, Alistair!
Since this was on console, there were no mods. However, there was fanart and fanfiction and LiveJournal communities. The amount of times I’ve played through the Dragon Age series is immesurable, though I do have three full series playthroughs that I consider “canon” enough that I will likely play through DA4 (if and when we ever get it) enough times to have a background of each.
Now in this Bioware love, you may have perhaps noticed a glaring omission.
Yes, Mass Effect.
I was aware, peripherally, of Mass Effect, though it never fell into my lap. I did, at some point, buy the first game on PC, though I believe this was after ME2 came out. I didn’t get very far before I just never went back. I couldn’t even tell you why.
(I probably got lost on the Citadel.)
Regardless, this remained a glaring omission in my Bioware repetoire. It’s possible I had even decided I would never play it because I definitely let a friend give me a full-spoilers run down of the entire series sometime after 3 came out. Pretty sure she needed a good vent to work through her feelings, which I am always down for, especially when it comes to nerdy shit.
Also, I say this probably meant I decided not to play becauses who can really know. Once upon a time, I cared far less about spoilers for things. I’ve become far more curmudgeonly about such things as I’ve gotten older.
Regardless, Mass Effect was just one of those series I had accepted I missed the boat on. Maybe I’d go back one day, but it certainly wasn’t a priority.
Then they announced Legendary Edition.
I say that like it was some Earth-shattering, wheels-screeching kind of turn around for me. It wasn’t. I’m not sure what, precisely, made me pick it up this this October. It was likely a lot of things – I wanted something to play on my PS;, I was burned out on JRPGs, but I wanted something that was going to have some meat on the bone, which meant most indies I was interested in were out; I was exhausted of trying to find new games to play. Mass Effect Legendary Edition offered up everything I could really think to ask for in that moment – was playable on PS5, promised more action that the plodding pace of most JRPGs (which to be clear, I enjoy more often than not, I’d just burned out after having all the joy sucked out of the Atelier series by Atleir Firis, which is honestly just a whole other can of worms), and while each individual game was likely to be a perfectly portioned sized game, time wise, it was also three games in one. If I still couldn’t spend mental energy on making choices after finishing one, I didn’t have to. That said, I honestly expected to play the first game and come back to the others at a later date because I was pretty hype for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, which was only a few weeks away, and I was kind of just biding my time.
I still haven’t played Guardias, y’all….
I started the Mass Effect series around mid-October. I finally just hit the point of “yeah, I think this is enough” two days ago as of writing (which would mean I put it down December 12). And to be clear, just because I put the games down, doesn’t mean I’m done with the series. I’m still reading fanfic; I simply decided I wanted to play something else.
These games CONSUMED me! I couldn’t swap over to Guardians of the Galaxy because no space game was going to measure up to how these games made me feel. Hell, no story game period was going to measure up. So I powered through the series. I restarted the third game 20 hours in because I’d locked myself out of rekindling my love with Kaiden back in hour 4. I finished the third game. I cried. I sat in those feelings and knew, “Yeah, I can’t move on yet,” so I started them all over again. The kicker? I didn’t even make a new character! I started up New Game + because while maybe I can make a different Warden or a different Inquisitor or even a different Hawke, that was my Commander Shephard. And while I could do things mildly differently, I really didn’t make many choices that were that drastically different. I wish I was kidding in how extreme this was – I made it almost all the way through my second playthrough of game 1, was unhappy with how I’d handled approximately 1.5 choices, started the WHOLE thing over…. with the same character… Then proceeded to play fully through 2 again, and then most of the way through 3. I got halfway through the end game of 3 again and finally realized, “This is enough. I think I’m good.”
And no, I never picked up Andromeda, and not for the reasons you might think. It had nothing to do with how the game is usually panned and everything to do with it being a different story. It wasn’t Shepard, it wasn’t these people. Something about the story of the original triology just stuck its claws in me, dug in, and made a home.
It’s been a long time since I hyper-fixated that hard on something. I lived and breathed this shit. I lost sleep in the name of reveling in it. My brain was completely occupied by it.
But all that said? I wish I’d been able to go in blind, without the spoilers from that friend and without everything I’d picked up via osmosis from the internet. And once more, probably not for the reasons that may seem obvious.
I said I’d started the original Mass Effect at one point. In starting it up this time, I realized I remembered very little about it. Also, I’d gotten further than I’d originally thought because I somehow completely forgot the entire first section of the game. All that I remembered was a hanar or volus or elcor on the Citadel and the council chamber. Pretty sure I remember being made a spectre, but literally nothing else. I could not have told you the events that led up to that if my life depending on it. In my mind, that was where the game began.
Likewise, I remembered next to nothing about what my friend told me in that spoiler-filled recap of the series. The one thing I did remember confused the hell out of me when it didn’t come to pass at the end of the first game. Then it happened at the start of the second and I had a big OOOOooohhhhhh moment.
What I could remember from existing on the internet and within gaming space was this – the humans suck, Ashley is a space racist, Garrus is best boy and you definitely are going to romance him (and if you don’t, you will romance Liara), and everyone hates the ending of the third game.
I wish I’d never heard any of this because it greatly impacted how I played the game. I didn’t get that amazing feeling of coming to things quite so naturally or organically as I normally do in a Bioware game. And every time I felt something to contridict any of the above statements, I felt like I had to be the one that was wrong (except Ashley being a space racists, cuz…. yeah…. sweetie, we uh, we need to get you some sensitivity training with HR).
So here’s the thing – I immediately felt drawn to romancing Kaidan. I pushed back on it because from what I gathered, that was the Wrong Way to play the game. I honestly tried to want to romance Liara, but I didn’t feel it. I had the U-Haul lesbian vibes from her; like, sweetie, we just met, please chill. I did ultimately go Kaidan, but I think, somehow, I glitched my game out riding the fence as long as I did. I’m fairly certain there were conversations I got on subsequent replays with her that I never got that first go around. I very specifically remember thinking, “Wow, Liara really hates me for turning her down, huh?” because she very suddenly had nothing to say to me ever and just seemed cold.
Then we get to game 2. All I’ve ever heard on the internet is Garrus this and Garrus that and Garrus is my boyfriend. So clearly, I should be romancing Garrus. And I did, but…. kind of begrudgingly? I kept thinking surely, after all the hype I’ve heard, this gets better. I must just be missing something. Maybe I still am. And don’t get me wrong, I love Garrus. He is Homie #2 (sorry, I know he stuck by me through it all and there is no Shepard without Vakarian, but Wrex will always be Homie #1). I just didn’t find the romance compelling.
(I would like to point out that all this romancing drama could have been completely avoided had they let Tali be romanceable by fem!Shep, but here we are. Yet again, Bioware took my female love interest away from me by making her straight – looking at you, Cassandra!)
All through the first two games, I had this deep feeling of disconnect between how I wanted to play the games versus how it felt like I was supposed to be playing the games. And that isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault. And clearly it didn’t completely ruin these games for me. It is simply one of those things – disappointing but true. And despite going back and replaying the games with the exact same character, that feeling of wonder, those raw reactions, can’t ever be recaptured. I will never get to play Mass Effect for the first time again, and I never got to play it in the way I truly felt driven to play it that first time. These are the perils of existing on the internet and/or among other gamers – sleep on the big hits, you get the impact lessened when you do eventually get to them.
There is something about ME3 that made it suffer less from the spoilers I knew going in. Maybe it’s that by that point, I had decided to play how I wanted to play. Or maybe it was that it could only pleasantly surprise me after how much hate I’d seen it get. It did, however, suffer in other ways for me, such in that I found out that I could wind up having to kill Kaidan, whom I’d decided I was going to rekindle my romance with! So I spent quite awhile stressing that because I’d kind of been an asshole to him early on. Then when he survived, I’d still managed to stone wall the relationship! Went into the lunch date expecting a love scene, came out with “You’re like a brother to me, Kaidan!” Um…. what? I lived in denial for a good hour and a half until the game made me sleep with Javik after the party…. Just decided to cut my losses and restart then.
Anyway, while I’m out here making hot takes like Garrus isn’t all-around best boy and boyfriend, can I just say ME3 is my favorite of the triology, and I did actually like the ending? I saw parts of it coming a mile away, even without remembering any spoilers, but I don’t necessarily mind stories that end in heroic sacrifice, so long as it’s done well; and in the state I got to play it, I think it was done (mostly) well. Granted, I had no fucking clue how picking my ending worked and straight up lucked into picking the one I actually wanted (synthesis, in case you were wondering). I actually thought it was maybe based on how you’d played the games up until I was prowling the internet in the aftermath.
Regardless, this series consumed my life, I don’t know what took me so long to give it a shot, and of course I have to be contrary and choose all the unpopular opinions. Yeah, this all tracks.
Allyssa | Slice of Nerd 