2.5/5 ★ – RedCy's review of Mass Effect - Legendary Edition.

I mean it when I say that I am not a big fan of the shooter genre of video games. But to continue my journey to study the video game industry, I put it upon myself to get out of my comfort zone and explore BioWare’s Mass Effect franchise. BioWare is one of the most notable names in the western video game industry, and with Mass Effect compiling three entries into one comprehensive experience with the Legendary Edition remaster, I will explore each of these games individually and writing a full review of the trilogy as a whole in the future. When tackling the first Mass Effect, I came in with one expectation: a compelling and malleable narrative that changes depending on the choices you make. With Mass Effect being regarded as one of the first games that encapsulates the choices-matter genre, I was interested to see how this would pan out. What I got instead was a kitchen sink of systems and narrative tools that never came together on a personal level. After about a couple months worth of time, Mass Effect was a mixed bag, even if my past self would have leaned more on the negative. Barring issues of its time like messy skill trees, tedious inventory management, primitive shooter controls, this game puts such a huge emphasis on the world it wants to build that the main narrative it wants to tell gets pushed around very frequently. You follow Commander Shepard on a mission to a galactic human colony to retrieve an ancient alien artifact. The mission is then compromised by a figure named Saren, a rogue alien black ops unit the game dubs Spectres, with plans to overthrow the galactic order that involve this very artifact, or rather the knowledge that it contains. Shepard learns that the artifact houses a warning for an apocalypse yet to come by the hands of a synthetic alien life form called the Reapers, and they must gather a team to stop Saren in his plans and prevent the apocalypse. A simple narrative, all things considered, but the way in which the mystery of the Reapers is told left me very disconnected from the game’s narrative. It does not help that nowhere else in the game is this mystery expanded upon or explored. Instead, the rest of the game is focused on exploring the histories, cultures, and especially politics of the greater galaxy it sets up. This I feel would have been fine if the means the player would learn about the world were interesting. Most of the information resides in the game’s codex and some off-hand character dialogue. Bonus points that the codex is an ingame audiobook, but to me a game needs to intrigue me early on to give me a reason to listen to the codex. And sitting around in a pause menu to listen to an audiobook is not how I want to learn about a game’s world when I am playing the game. By putting so many resources into building a vast world, one would expect the game to explore said world. And explore it does, but not in the way one would imagine. When discussing Mass Effect’s gameplay, it can go in several directions. One could argue that Mass Effect’s gameplay loop revolves around commanding your teammates into battles against alien forces. Others may claim it lies in the choices you make as a player to shape the narrative of the game. The way I see it, Mass Effect is a space exploration game with almost nothing to explore. 80% of the game is spent in a rover that traverses the sporadically painted topography of dozens of uncharted planets across the Milky Way. I get the premise of space exploration being about entering worlds with little to offer, but it does not make the game any more interesting to play. There could have at the very least been dialogue between crew members you bring to each mission to break the silence, and it just doesn’t happen unless you are specifically in a hub world. With uninteresting side missions on these empty maps that only serve to add to the illusion of a lived-in world and blatant reuse of map assets in said missions, it is hard to call Mass Effect’s gameplay loop compelling. While still on the topic of gameplay, the cast of characters the player recruits as teammates for their mission are colorful, but calling them characters is a bit much in this game. They serve more as different weapons you bring to missions rather than fully fleshed out parts of a story. Half of the characters you recruit have potential for great storytelling with what little semblance of a motive they have, while the other half solely serves as a means to verbally explain the history of the world or more painfully, the main mystery of the game’s narrative. If there is anything a piece of media should do to sell its audience, it is not to tell it about the narrative, but to show it. Mass Effect rarely shows the mystery it sets up with the Reapers and the ancient alien civilization, and instead opts to tell it to the audience directly with lengthy expositions periodically broken by the player’s choice of dialogue to follow it up. The one positive I can say about Mass Effect after a first playthrough is definitely the dialogue wheel, though it is not perfect. I do not think I have ever played a game where the choices I made when conversing with another character made me laugh to the extent I did. While most players would want to play the role they are put into, I took the chance to make the choices I thought were the funniest, and I did have a few genuine laughs in this game. What I am not a fan of, however, is how certain pivotal dialogue options are locked behind a certain criteria in your moral standings. The game operates on a morality system that logs the choices of dialogue you made throughout the game, and puts you on a scale from passive to aggressive. I skewed toward the aggressive renegade side, and thus was locked out of making diplomatic choices later in the game. The system is not perfect, but for the first of its kind I can give it a pass. To wrap things up, Mass Effect did not please me on my first playthrough. It made a lot of promises with where it was going, and it built a very large foundation, but there was nothing to keep me interested in where it would go. Upon completing the game, I was very puzzled with how this game birthed a franchise, as I did not find this first entry nearly as captivating as I would have liked. Though I would have a few friends tell me time and time again to just keep playing, that it would pay off. Eventually I would go on to play Mass Effect 2, and my friends told the truth. …What I did not know was the leaps and bounds the next entry would take to grab me and never let go…