Mass Effect - "Now where have I seen that before?

So let's make our inaugural post about something I'm going through right now... Mass Effect.

Mass Effect is an RPG by that great titan of RPGs, Bioware... if you haven't ever played a Bioware RPG before, you're doing yourself something of a disservice as they are truly excellent. Up until Mass Effect, however, Bioware's games were based off of preexisting intellectual properties... DnD for Neverwinter Nights and Star Wars for Knights of the Old Republic. This is the first Bioware game I've played that's consisted of a completely original universe and I had high expectations, considering that what they did with other people's ideas had already been so bloody good. Free of the constraints of preexisting universes and canon, you would think Bioware's creative minds would soar. And sure enough, Bioware did come up with an impressively massive and detailed universe... which ended up being a compilation of every single bit of Western science fiction made in the last decade.

I guess fan fiction writers can only ever be fan fiction writers.

I'm not actually finished with Mass Effect, but the average science fiction fan doesn't have to get very far into the game to realize that there's something familiar about everything you see.

You're a ship's captain working on a state of the art vessel built by humans that incorporates technology borrowed from a semi-hostile alien race to create a state of the art stealth system...


Humanity in the universe is a relative newcomer on the galactic scene and most other races regard humanity as an upstart species that's trying to elbow its way into the stars. There's a council of aliens ("The Council") that's basically an intergalactic UN, but humanity doesn't fully recognize its legitimacy and is rife with strong anti-Council sentiment...



The bad guys are a race of robots who were originally built to perform menial tasks but who later turned on their masters when (whoops!) they gained self-awareness...


Their goal is to reawaken a sleeping race of ancient robots who awake every 50000 years to purge the galaxy of organic life...



There's also a space bug species that swarmed around the universe for a while...



And last, but certainly not least, you also run into an evil corporation that tests mind control spores on an unsuspecting human colony...


It's really quite sad. I don't think I've encountered a single original idea in the whole damn game (unless you want to count blue skinned lesbian aliens, which I do not). Even when they try to make an original spin on a old (and tired) idea, it ends up being stolen. Let's take for instance the Zerg (I know Heinlein gets credit for the original idea) derivative race, which they call the Rachnids. The twist for those things was that they didn't really mean it when they tried to swarm the galaxy over and it was all an accident and they didn't realize they were attacking sentient life. They sort of realized why they would end up being wiped out for that and expressed a desire for lasting peace. "Hm," thought I, "I guess that's kind of an interesting."

But then I realized that that's taken pretty much directly out of Ender's Game.

I don't have a problem with homages, but I think most people would agree that the business we're seeing here is taking things just a bit too far. It's sad really. Bioware is still as good at making compelling characters as they always have been, but they're just drowning them in all this derivative crap.

I'll finish the game and all that, though you have to sort of think to yourself: "Maybe Bioware should have stuck with Star Wars after all"