[Trotskilicious]

so i've made my way though the mass effect series, again with my femme shep vanguard because i couldn't get anyone else to look as convincingly part of the universe. Well other than Tony Stark-Shepard, since full N7 armor does look like Iron Man.

mass effect 1 has a delightful sense of innocence and dorky sci-fi homage, with nerd characters all over the ship. however, its issues are threefold: first, even on hardcore it's easy as shit and i never used hardly any of my powers as much as a lark (when you can blast fuckers pretty quickly with the shotty it's kind of a waste of time to lift them and then aim at them), second the texture ressing issues are confusing considering S K Y R I M, I know it was released much later but jesus the number of times you walk into an area or a scene and the texture aren't loaded is incredibly distracting and third, the unbelievable amount of useless guns they fling at you relentlessly. I think the story is tighter, characters are generally interesting and pleasantly devoid of grim mysteriousness, angst or any other tiresome trope that is mistaken as "cool" (in fact, making Wrex such a comedian really made his character likeable, same with Garrus), the galaxy is wonderfully detailed and realized, and the ending is still brilliantly put together.

mass effect 2 improves on a lot of things gameplay wise. Once you get used to it and aren't terrified of leaving cover (course I beat it once before, adding barrier to my vanguard skills), combat is better, it's much more challenging and when you get over that hump on hardcore mode it's incredibly rewarding to fuck dudes up because you really lean on team mates with skills like Overload, Incinerate and anything else that does damage to shields or armor. So I tell Mordin to incinerate a collector with armor ("Flammable, or inflammable? DOESN'T MATTER.") and then shep blasts him with a shotty, that's fuckin teamwork.

Mordin is one of their greatest character achievements, and makes up for at least 3 annoying characters like Jack (ooh ~ so hardcore) and etc. You have to appreciate the fact that they've basically created a likable, funny, affable individual partly responsible for a horrific mass abortion/genocide. It's what bioware used to to pretty good at, toeing that line of good and evil, although I'd say Fallout's original dev team is far better at this kind of realism. legion is one of the coolest surprises, and is flat awesome; took him and mordin to the collector ship and wrecked shop. all the dialogues with legion are fuckin great, and the audio file of the geth asking the quarian "does this unit has a soul?" is really well done and rather chilling. i love the implied idea that the geth basically built a shepard platform to do shepard things (especially for a series that seems to explain everything to you and leaves almost nothing up for interpretation). i enjoyed the non linear element of the story and the loyalty missions even though i would have liked to shoot more people on a couple of them. I'm not sure if it's a fair to complain that a lot of their "towns" are very small and kind of empty but that's a problem with all of it, but it is japanese rpg style in its ways sometimes. Mass Effect is very much a marriage between western rpg traditions and the linear storyline of japanese rpgs.

I liked the limited power tree, could have used a few more weapons but it was a relief after the mess that was Mass Effect's inventory. I also noticed a lot of renegade options were darker than the first game which is sort of disappointing since my shep is cold, but not evil. The Terminator final boss is a sad wholesale rip from another popular series (you could make that case for the reapers as a whole being a pastiche of cthulu terminator harvesters), and honestly when I heard ME3's ending was terrible I thought "well mass effect 2's ending wasn't very good either." However, one of the fun things about the last fight is all the team selection issues and the fact that some of them die (I didn't upgrade a few systems just so I could watch Jack and Kasumi die). Also the fact that you can cruise around afterward and finish up anything you didn't do.

If you play the fist and second games enough you start to notice that a lot of it is the illusion of choice, whatever shep says doesn't really matter to the characters they are talking to, and I noticed a lot of the Paragon, Neutral, or Renegade conversation options result in either shep saying the same thing each time no matter what the choice is, or another character not even reacting to it. Unsurprising really, considering the amount of detail that goes into these scenes.

Now I'm finally working on ME3 and I'm already kind of disappointed, if I hadn't spoiled the ending I think I would have expected something like a cornball starchild. First of all my kick ass femme shep doesn't import to ME3 so I'm forced to redo her entire look and it hasn't been successful yet. In fact, I think one of the problems is that they made her body thinner and more "feminine" which is v. bad when you're a fuckin vanguard hardass. Jinette is made of scar tissue, bullet wounds and twisted sinew, not some dainty feminine sprite.

Second, the dialogue was sometimes kind of poor in parte thee firste and thee seconde but in a charmingly dorky way but now it's corny in a shitty hollywood blockbuster way. When my shep gave kaiden an order to wake up I just about vomited on myself. Plus all the grandstanding about reapers is kind of silly, are they "bastards"? I mean when you set up a villain this big and impossible to stop you should stick with the neutrality of their task, they don't even give a shit about you this is just how the universe works...but you could have done that with a spacefaring locust menace and spared yourself all the difficulty in figuring out how to destroy fleets of ships bigger than anything else in the galaxy but i digress...

also i noticed throughout the second and third games, they curse way more than they ever did in the first, and and a bunch of characters say bitch and son of a bitch so much i just can't even. In fact when Victus says "I piss people off" which repeats something Garrus already said almost word for word previously, which is annoying in of itself but then the whole idiom on top of it... I can accept garrus saying something like "pissing people off" since he's worked with humans since ever, but another species that hasn't really left his planet? I mean come on it just feels like you're being fucking lazy and not thinking very hard about expressions like that. You might as well have Victus calling people pendejos.

also there's a sparring scene in 3 with vega where he punches you a bunch and if you're dainty fem shep it looks like abuse, even though my shep is a vanguard that's supposed to be in the front lines with a shotgun and biotics...but she's so small compared to him it doesn't look very convincing. and then immediately afterwards he hits on fem shep, which is REAL weird, and of course my shep told him that he has to call her commander. also, there's this female reporter shep can punch in the second game that i think is supposed to be a joke but it's really not funny to hit an unarmed woman? Or am I being hypocritical because the Shadow Broker vid of the krogan throwing a salarian into the vorcha pit had me laughing out loud? the anti press and anti political stances of the game are generally confusing but that is a pretty general (dumb) attitude of most americans, so I digress. I have a very hard time believing that it would be difficult to amass an unified cross-species front against extra galactic dark gods bent on eradicating all life.

biggest cornball hack writer moment so far was the dream sequence. if there's another one i think i may have an aneurysm. Narrative starts to suck when dream sequences get involved, this is a rule. Unless it's Lynchian in which the dream sequences are confused and surreal, like actual dreams (at least mine) instead of just dramatic unsubtle metaphors related to the plot.

Combat is pretty fun on 3, it's nice that my biotic now has a megapunch and the melee isn't as fuckin useless as it was on 2 but some of this shit is fuckin irritating, dealing with 2 brutes with no incinerate (MORDIN WHERE ART THOU) is a little bit too hard to throw at me at the beginning of the game.

Also what happened to Liara's refusal to use contractions and how did her eyes get darker? I mean I can buy the character shift but the contractions thing, I just kind of thought it was a cute touch to really color her as a very anti-social, awkward research nerd. Still I miss the breathy, excited dorkiness of ME1's liara as opposed to making her "darker" and apparently to the developers, "cooler" and probably "sexier."

I think really the bottom line for the turn for the worse in this series is that it started trying to be cool, and it has no idea what that is and they just assume it's dark grimness. I really miss the dorky innocent star treky feel of the first game.

TLDR