Random Acts of Fandom: Mass Effect

[joiedecombat]

So, I've been a bit hooked on Mass Effect lately.

It's easily the best game I've played in a while, and I heartily recommend it to the RPG players on my flist. I finished one play-through and then immediately started a second one; that's how good this is.

It helps that there are approximately six billion different choices you can make during the course of the game, with various entertaining effects. And by 'various entertaining effects' I mean things like 'talk your way through an entire sidequest and resolve it without anyone firing a shot,' 'punch out a reporter in the middle of a recorded interview,' and 'sexually harrass your subordinate.' Among many others. Every time you turn around.

(I find that last one in particular hilarious for reasons I can't entirely explain. It totally is sexual harrassment, too. "I don't believe I've had the pleasure of you serving under me yet, Lieutenant." Bwah.)

I haven't had the heart yet to more than dabble with the Renegade options, but even playing as a Paragon, Shepard is pretty damn badass. Jennifer Hale's voice acting has a lot to do with that, probably - it pleases me to be able to play her as a woman, especially since doing so means that the party has more women in it than men. Although all the characters are mostly pretty cool. I am much more of a characterization / storyline gamer than I am a gameplay gamer, so it's really the characters and the epic space opera storyline and the depth of the setting that make the game for me... especially since Shepard's characterization is tweakable and the storyline is coherent - even cinematic - but not 100% linear.

With regards to the gameplay, however, I don't have any complaints about it. It's basically a third-person shooter, which I was not expecting and which took some getting used to, but I haven't had a lot of patience for the bog-standard RPG whoosh-to-combat-mode everyone-glued-into-formation turn-based stuff ever since games like Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy XII proved it wasn't necessary. I am always in favor of more seamless gameplay/storyline integration.

So, yeah. Mass Effect = good stuff, and people should play it. I'm very much looking forward to the sequel, which promises to draw information from your old saves. But in the meantime, there's a lot of replay value left.

Comments

[bentarc.livejournal.com]

It's true, that was a good thing about Final Fantasy XII -- but for some reason, every game set in Ivalice has more that turns me off than on.

Final Fantasy Tactics had a beautiful tragic story, but the play was all battle system.

I always got the impression that there was some sort of 'trick' to the battle system in Vagrant Story, but whatever it was I never figured it out. That, and the improbable clothing (though I did like Sydney's gauntlet-arms). Eventually I just gave up.

Final Fantasy XII had potential, entertaining characters, solid system, but an underwhelming story coupled with a lot of crappy gimmicks, like padding out battles by making the defense of certain monsters inverse to their hit points--eventually, again, I just gave up and traded the game in.

It's not that I want a game to be easy, it's just that I want challenges to be cerebral. A game engine that's the equivalent of opening a walnut with your fingernails does nothing for me.

Xenosaga 3 left me going 'WTF' at the insane combination/implementation of certain philosophies (that and, the end battle is insanely difficult, unless you've completed a sidequest not even related to the story - then it could not get any easier, and Rogue Galaxy was good -- until you hit the point where somebody chopped off the end of the story and wrote a rush-job final chapter. Like, things that had happened/been said previously not making any SENSE in light of the final chapter.

Even ones I like, a lot - Final Fantasy IV and VI - have their weak spots. FFIV is just plain old, and VI gave up on an actual story as soon as you found the Falcon.

To this day, the best RPG I've ever played is probably Chrono Cross. It had some silly elements (mostly the ridiculous characters you picked up along the way) but that's alright -- the story was heartbreaking enough.

[joiedecombat.livejournal.com]

Mass Effect is pretty good about that - granted, I'll forgive a lot of gameplay nits for the sake of a good story and interesting characters, so I'm hardly in a position to make recommendations regarding gameplay.

But it's challenging without resorting to fake difficulty gimmicks (Lost Odyssey did that some too, although not as badly as FFXII) or just being freaking impossible. There's some tactical thinking involved. (At the very least, "shoot from cover, idiot!")

And I have to admit that popping out from behind stuff just long enough to nail someone with a shotgun is kind of fun.

...That came out wrong.

I did like FFXII a lot, but you're right that the story was oddly underwhelming. Maybe because they couldn't decide on who the hero was. Cool characters, decent gameplay, really pretty graphics, but it just didn't quite gel somehow.

[funwithrage.livejournal.com]

Ooh. I will have to take a look at this once I get the new machine. The more choices, the better.

[joiedecombat.livejournal.com]

I think you would enjoy it. Particularly being able to play Shepard as a woman, because she's a space marine extraordinaire regardless, and will shoot people in the face if they refuse to play nice. It's sort of gratifying. And it's really impressive the way the player's various choices influence the storyline; while it's not completely open-ended, having a particular conversation with a party member at one point can change the conversations that you have with them later in the game, and things like that.