Mass Effect 3 - "So slow. So clumsy. Pathetic!"

I know that I never update this place anymore, but I figured I may as well revive it to talk about Mass Effect 3.

My review of the first Mass Effect was actually the first real post I ever made on this blog. Looking back at it, I was pretty unimpressed and to this day I stand by everything I wrote in there. Mass Effect's premise is completely derivative piece of science fiction with not a single decent original idea under its name. That was true then and it's still true now.

The question then becomes why I played two other entries in the series when I thought the first one was trash. The answer to that is two fold. For one, the gameplay got a major facelift in part 2. I could take cover behind blocks that no amount of futuristic weaponry could pierce and then shoot things. But the story also shifted in focus from rip-off world building to something more character based and thrived as a result.



Sure the world was still a rip off of various pieces of fiction, particularly 40k of all damn things. Like oh no, the colonists are being mind controlled and carted off into the scary bio-vessels. That's almost as bad as when the Genestealers did it. But even if the story wasn't super fantastic, at least I was enjoying it with characters I actually could like and I could at least feel as though my decisions as the Shep was affecting the outcome. I didn't like it so much that I played through it twice the way other people did, but it was still good.

And so it was that I found myself getting genuinely excited when the third one started to roll around. I would get to hang around Garrus, Tali and Mordin again and cart around the ridiculous Mary Sue known as Commander Sheperd so that I could save the galaxy from the Necrons.


And so it was that I could set out to save Earth again, smiling indulgently as the game melodramatically focused in on some little white boy getting killed and then told me to start building the Ultimate Macguffin. I got to imitate Picard as I saved a barbaric race from extinction and I got to rehash that one episode of TNG when I declared that robots have souls. I fought against an assassin who was Asian and therefore decided that using a sword in a science fiction setting centered mainly around guns was the way to go.

And you know, it was good. Sure the world around me and the story that was unfolding was still this ridiculous hack melodrama, but I could at least kick back and hear Garrus deliver lines about how I'm the damn best soldier ever or have Tali tell me she loved me as I went to kill a Reaper with a laser pointer. And I liked being able to pick dialogue options and watch Shep say and do cool things, because it let me believe that I was actually that eloquent and heroic.

The story was ultimately just a mishmash of other things, but even if I'd seen it all before it was all in such a nice and pretty package of top-notch voice acting, strong characters and fun run-and-gun gameplay. And so I enjoyed it. Hell, I frickin' loved it.

But then at the end of the game, I think Bioware made the biggest mistake that it could ever make: They had an original idea.

A series so heavily rooted in cliche like Mass Effect needed a cliche ending. You know what I'm talking about... the kiss followed by the walk off into the sunset. Or even a 'you become Emperor of the Universe' type deal. Anything of that nature. But Bioware, so inflated with their fan's praise, somehow decided that they were artists here. That they weren't just people that put stuff that other, better, authors and artists have done into a shiny package.

And so, at the last minute, they took a stab at originality.

The result was a pseudo-philosophical abomination that has soured the entire franchise like nothing else ever could. An ending so rancid that it has provoked spontaneous charity drives to protest it and shook the very internet to its core.

I don't think I need to talk about it at length. Lord knows that you can find commentary aplenty on it elsewhere. If Bioware has committed one sin, it's this:

Hubris. There's more ...

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"
There's more ...