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Mass Effect 2 |
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Studio: |
BioWare |
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Designer(s): |
Casey
Hudson / Preston Watamaniuk |
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Part of series: |
Mass
Effect |
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Release: |
January 26, 2010 |
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Main credits: |
Lead writer: Drew Karpyshyn
Lead programmer: David Falkner Art director: Derek Watts |
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Useful links: |
Paragon
playthrough (32 hours 55 mins.) |
Renegade
playthrough (32 hours 38 mins.) |
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Basic Overview
Yet there have also been dissenters along the way — people
who may have had their original doubts as to whether BioWare would be able to
fully retain its integrity upon its acquisition by the unscrupulous moghuls
over at Electronic Arts in 2007 (right at the time of release of the original
Mass Effect, all of the work on which
was still done without any real interference from EA). A good example is the
incredibly long, but generally fun to read, Mass
Effect Retrospective by the blogger Shamus Young, in which he goes
into tremendous detail on most of the aspects of the entire trilogy
(concentrating primarily on the construction and flow of the main storyline)
and makes a wealth of – on the surface, at least – convincing arguments that
BioWare did, in fact, largely lose their way starting not with Mass Effect 3 (or, more accurately,
the near-universally hated ending
of Mass Effect 3), but rather with
Mass Effect 2 — a game that pretty
much sacrificed the original serious vision of Drew Karpyshyn for poorly engineered
melodrama and brainless adrenaline. (Which is probably why everybody bought
it, but I think Shamus is being polite about it and reserves most of his jabs
for the game’s writers rather than the poor consumer slobs bamboozled by said
writers and their conniving managers at EA). Much of what Shamus writes about makes perfect sense
(although, like any obsessed writer trying to validate his perspective with
10,000 arguments where just 10 would have sufficed, he frequently oversells
it with forced, overblown, and vaguely manipulative reasoning). Mass Effect 2 is indeed different
from the first game in tone, atmosphere, priorities, and mechanics — not
different enough to feel like a completely different game, but different
enough to open up whole new layers that were only faintly hinted at in Mass Effect. (Just one more reason
why the games absolutely must be
played in proper sequence: do not
be a clueless noob and follow the conventional «oh, Mass Effect 2 is always hailed as the better game, so I
think I’ll just skip the first one and go right into this one» line of
thinking — the only proper way for Mass
Effect 2 to work is in confluence with its predecessor. Would you just
skip to the third volume of War And
Peace right away because that’s where all the action is?.. on second
thought, maybe don’t answer that). This very fact is a good thing: a fantasy universe can
only be said to live on properly as
long as it remains capable of reassessing and reinventing itself with each
new installation — the reason why the transition from A New Hope to The Empire
Strikes Back (which, in some ways, is mirrored with Mass Effect, and we shall be returning to this analogy quite a
few times) will always be regarded as a masterstroke, while the recent third
trilogy of movies in the Star Wars universe will ultimately be forgotten as a
crass, pointless, and artistically sterile exercise in 21st century
plagiarism. But it is also true that each instance of reassessing and
reinventing carries with it the risk of losing something good at the expense of something bad. Very few works of art that thematically build upon previous
works of art can be a total success in every imaginable way; as a rule, life
dictates that there will necessarily be some trade-offs and compromises. To
this rule Mass Effect 2 is no
exception. If there was one major, overriding weakness to the
original Mass Effect, it was that
the game was originally envisioned as an opening shot in a grand sci-fi
trilogy — yet nobody, not even the primary designers and writers behind the
game, had any idea of what the closing
shots would consist of. This inevitably left the door open for a lot of
possibilities for «ret-conning» whenever the future lead writers would lack
the time or inspiration to devise a reasonable continuation of the original
storyline. Worse, although Drew Karpyshyn is still listed officially as one
of the lead writers on Mass Effect 2,
it looks like his personal involvement had significantly decreased, while
that of Mac Walters, now also promoted to the status of lead writer, had
skyrocketed — and since the world of Mass
Effect was never Mac Walters’ personal baby, it was inevitable that there
would be, at the very least, some «spiritual discontinuity» in between 2007
and 2010. The other unhappy development, whose malignant
consequences come through in a number of cases, is that Mass Effect’s positioning under EA control meant the designers
and writers would now have to pay much closer attention to the results of
market research and the accursed «fan feedback» than usual. It was, in fact,
announced as early as 2009 that BioWare’s work goals were to take into very
close consideration a variety of recommendations from fans and critics of the
first game — which is almost never a good thing if what you are aiming for is
artistic integrity rather than algorithmic product. For all the flaws of the
original Mass Effect, I have never
seen it accused of the sin of «fan service», whereas Mass Effect 2 already gets quite a bit of flack for pandering to
the desires of the «Average Joe Gamer». The good thing is that most of the
fan service is well counterbalanced by the strictly preserved choice-based
ideology of the game: you can turn it into a more «Hollywood-ish» experience
or try to get it going into a more «alternative» direction based on your own
preferences. (I am mostly referring here to the game’s «romancing»
strategies, which we shall discuss in more detail later, but not only that). Yet at the same time, the flaws of Mass Effect 2 may all be overlooked in the light of its
unquestionable ambitiousness, inventiveness, professionalism, and
inspiration. Like any great, epic, overwhelming work of art in its respective
medium, the game tries to be many things at once — it is an expansion of an
intriguing, «derivatively original» fantasy universe; a dark-themed
psychological adventure game with many subtle and not-so-subtle tests of your
personal morality; a simplistic, but fun RPG with lots of customization; an
involving and addictive shooter that is neither too demanding for the players
nor too insulting of their intelligence; and a great showcase for the
artistic, musical, and acting potential of the entire BioWare team assembled
in Edmonton and Montreal for the project. Above all, no matter what
occasional dissenters like Shamus would say, its differences from the first
part of the trilogy in terms of atmosphere, character development, and plot
expansion feel natural and believable — even if I also concede that a little
more «realistic thinking», as opposed to «player-wooing thinking», could not
have hurt from time to time... |
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Content evaluation |
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Plotline As
we remember, the original Mass Effect,
after its stylishly cheesy Hollywood finale of triumphing over the imposing
Reaper machine, «Sovereign», and its organic minion Saren, ended in a
relative lull — the big bad guy was done with, but it was also clear that his
pals would eventually catch up with him, providing the necessary set-up for
the continuation of the story. Anybody who had completed the game in 2007
would, most likely, expect that the sequel would double up on its «epic»
aspects and have the hero fighting an army of Reapers instead of just a
single one — given how explicitly this outcome was hinted at in the final
cutscenes of the game. The
very first thing that the writers of Mass
Effect 2 did for their sequel was to confound those expectations. There
is little question in my mind that they were quite heavily inspired by the
plot and atmosphere shifts of The
Empire Strikes Back (this comparison has been on people’s mind for a long
time; see, e.g., Hollander
Cooper’s glowing writeup in GamesRadar+ from 2012) — but it could also be
argued that they took a page out of The
Two Towers, with its temporary shift of focus from «public enemy #1»
(Sauron) to a secondary antagonist (Saruman). Needless to say, neither of the
two analogies ended up developed with the kind of depth and intelligence you
expect from a solid work of literary or cinematographic art — but at least
both analogies were used, and in
the context of a mainstream, market-oriented video game, they probably work
as efficiently as at all possible. As
expected from a typical RPG, the plot of the original Mass Effect was subdivided into the «main quest» — the story of
Commander Shepard’s struggle with Saren and Sovereign — and the «side
quests», which gave the player extra opportunities to accumulate experience
and level up, to examine their standards of morality, and to add extra
breadth and depth to the sci-fi universe. However, very few of those side
quests actively involved the player’s own companions — human and alien alike;
with the exception of just a couple tiny events (such as helping Wrex the
Krogan recover his lost family armor, or settling an old score between Garrus
the Turian and a sadistic doctor), the personalities of those companions were
mostly built up through dialog, or even merely by their standing at your side
during all those dangerous missions. Given that most of BioWare’s RPGs had
been «buddy games», starting with Baldur’s
Gate way back in 1998, this could have been considered a serious
oversight — excused, however, by the fact that Mass Effect needed to allocate way too many resources to just set
up, describe and «activate» an entire new universe. Basically, it was humanly
impossible to take care of the game on the «micro-level» of human (and alien)
relationships and the «macro-level» of planetary exploration at the same time
in the same proportions. Impossible and
unnecessary: as long as the game designers made sure that players would fall
in love with Commander Shepard’s crew anyway (which they did), it was always
possible to put off their serious character growth until the sequels. Consequently,
Mass Effect 2 adds a new layer of
complexity to the franchise. Its plot now consists not of two, but of three types of events — there is the
main story, a continuation (or, rather, an offshoot) of the main plot of Mass Effect; the «buddy quests» that
revolve entirely around Shepard’s companions and are only tangentially
related to the main quest (in that their outcomes may seriously influence the
outcome of the main story); and the actual «side quests» that, like in the
first game, are in there mostly to help the player level up, have more fun,
and learn some new details of the game’s universe. It makes sense, therefore,
to take a look at these three separate, only faintly tied together, layers of
the plot one by one. (This is probably the place where I give out the
necessary warning of MAJOR SPOILERS
AHEAD, but then I have no doubt that most people reading this have
already played the game anyway, and are simply interested in learning my
opinion on the moral aspects of the Krogan genophage...). The
main plot of the game — and this is where I have to largely agree with Shamus
Young — is arguably its weakest part, at least in terms of story content and
the underlying meaning. Despite certain noble intentions on the part of the
writers, it is, more than anything else, subjugated to (a) the demands of
cinematic Hollywoodery of the Michael Bay kind, and (b) the demands of the
stereotypical mechanics of RPGs and shooters. No better example of this is
available than the very opening of the game, in which Commander Shepard,
ambushed in space by a previously unencountered and highly deadly enemy,
suffers the destruction of his beloved Normandy, is ejected from the burning
ship and suffocates in space. That’s right: you start the game as a dead protagonist, whose body is transferred
over to a semi-legal, semi-criminal shady organization known as «Cerberus»
and then resurrected, in a deeply complicated and lavishly expensive
operation, appropriately titled «Project Lazarus». What an awesome start to a
role-playing game, eh? There is one serious catch here, though: the
decision to kill off Commander Shepard and then just as quickly resurrect him
from the dead was not motivated by
any specific demands of the plot, but rather by the designers’ necessity to
start the game with a «clean slate». Because of a major re-design of the
entire RPG mechanics for Mass Effect 2,
the skills and attributes your character ended up with at the end of the
previous game were poorly compatible with the new system — which meant that
it was easier for the developers to «reboot» Commander Shepard from scratch,
yet it also had to be the exact same Commander Shepard from the first game,
since BioWare had to deliver upon the promise of all character saves from the
first game being importable into the sequel. When somebody came up with the
idea of bumping off and resurrecting the character, it was probably seen as a
touch of genius — and, sure enough, most of the fans and early reviewers,
after going through the near-orgasmic initial shock of the experience, could
not stop raving about this marvelous artistic decision. «Has there ever been a video game out there that starts off with the
protagonist dying? How unforgettable is that?..» However, there are two problems with that decision —
although, admittedly, it is not until the original emotional surge is over
that you might begin contemplating them. One
is that the very existence of «Project Lazarus» very bluntly and explicitly
takes the franchise out of the niche of «relatively serious sci-fi», where it
did manage a mostly cozy stay during Mass
Effect, and pushes it squarely into the territory of «sci-fi magic»; and
by that I do not merely mean all
the impossibility and absurdity of the idea of organic resurrection being
merely a question of monetary expenses (any half-decent scientist can always
tell you that money is only a cathalyst, never a main reason for major
breakthroughs) — I mean that with this act, «Commander Shepard» ceases to be
the Extraordinary Hero and Superefficient Leader which he was in the previous
game, and essentially becomes the Messiah, the Chosen One whose destiny is to
rewrite the very fabric of the Universe. If this were not so, why the hell
would a shady mafia organization spend pretty much all of its profits to
bring this guy back from the dead? This not-so-subtle transformation of science fiction
vision into fairy-tale vision could, perhaps, be easily forgivable if the
writers had been able to better exploit its, uh, metaphysical implications.
With Shepard’s resurrection, they have transformed him not so much into
Lazarus as into the next coming of Jesus Christ himself — but it would not
really be until the infamous ending of Mass
Effect 3 that Commander Jesus Shepard would really take upon himself all
the sins of humanity and act as its ultimate redeemer, somewhat inverting the
historical process (normally, you’d expect to be crucified before you get resurrected — Mass Effect thinks it actually works
better in the opposite order). Throughout Mass Effect 2, however, Commander Shepard typically acts as if
nothing too much out of the
ordinary has happened — and so do most of the people who encounter him in his
travels, both old friends and new ones. It is never really justified, either,
what made Cerberus so goddamn sure that it was Shepard and only Shepard who could resolve all of
the world’s troubles. What was it
that made him so irreplaceable? Other than all those stored save game files
from 2007, that is. This itchy style of falling upon a cool idea and
then being unable to fully, logically, and consistently see it through to the
end from now on truly becomes the bane of most of the «main story»
developments in Mass Effect. Thus,
soon after Shepard is killed off by an unknown enemy, magically resurrected
by the super-rich Cerberus and its leader (the archetypal chain-smoking evil
genius who goes by the name of Illusive Man and probably has a picture of
Elon Musk in his secret shrine), he is surprised to learn that the imminent,
but faraway threat of the Reapers has been replaced by a smaller, but more
immediately relevant threat of the Collectors — a poorly familiar race of
creatures who have, apparently, been abducting human colonists from all sorts
of distant planets, for unspecified but probably sinister purposes. Where those Collectors come from and why there has
not even been a single mention of them in the first game is unexplained,
although it is made clear that
knowledge of the existence of their race had been there all along. Why the
entire human fleet is completely powerless to do anything about pursuing them
all the way to their home base and kicking their ass is not explained in any
convincing manner (although some attempts are made, they feel extremely
half-assed). Of course, only Commander Shepard — with the help of the
Illusive Man’s bottomless resources — can help humanity solve that problem,
although not before he has assembled his own super-team of the Magnificent
Space Cowboys... Without going into too much detail, I don’t think
that the main story twists of Mass
Effect 2 could be convincingly salvaged through any post-game analysis.
They seem to be driven way too much by the demands of the game’s RPG and
shooter mechanics to make any sense. Commander Shepard’s stats need to be
rebooted? Just kill him off and resurrect him. The Collectors need a
superboss enemy to make life really tough for the player? Let a Reaper take
telepathic control of any random Collector and make him ten times as tough at
random. Some of the decisions also feel influenced by fan feedback — for
instance, Shepard’s human companions Ashley and Kaidan from the first game
did not turn out to be particularly popular with players, so, whoever of them
survived from the previous game will turn his or her back on Shepard because
he is now working with Cerberus, without even taking the time to properly
listen to the Commander’s explanations. And so on. Most importantly, by simply treating the Collectors
as mute, personality-deprived puppets of the Reapers, Mass Effect 2 loses the opportunity to inject any actual meaning into this second part of the
story. The decision to introduce a secondary enemy is understandable if it
helps open up additional dimensions in the plot — thus, for instance, the
idea to concentrate fully on the struggle with Saruman rather than Sauron in The Two Towers has to do with
exploring the consequences of trying to compromise with absolute evil, etc.
The Collectors, however, are not free-will agents — in fact, they are nothing
more than mooks for you to shoot your way through — and the «shocking»
realizations of who they are, historically, and of what they are trying to do
with all those abducted colonists are mostly there for two purposes: (a) to
gross you out and (b) to properly set you up for the exciting final combat
sequences. That’s not too
bad for a video game, but not too good for a video game that tries, for
better or worse, to create its own philosophy of how the entire universe is
supposed to work. Come to think of it, you could pretty much throw out most
of Mass Effect 2’s main plot and
proceed straight from Mass Effect
to Mass Effect 3 — without losing
any particularly important developments in the process. It does not really
matter if Commander Shepard died and was reborn; it does not matter if the
Collectors were just a scary nightmare. In the end, the main story of Mass Effect 2 serves more or less the
same purpose as the «lore» in shooters like Doom or Quake — completely
subdued to the game’s purposes of pure action. For all of Mass Effect 3’s much-maligned ending,
it was at least a noble effort to add a resolving touch to the game’s
conception; the main story of Mass
Effect 2 hardly has any
conception in the first place.
Compared to the first game, where Shepard only had about
six companions for the entire game, Mass
Effect 2 presents far more choice — the full roster (including the two
extra companions from the DLCs) is twice as large, and almost each of the
possible companions has his or her own personality influencing almost every
mission in the game (albeit faintly, usually with their own bits of unique
dialog every now and then). They really come to life, however, on missions
that are more related to themselves — of which there are usually two, the
Recruiting Mission and the Loyalty Mission: the first one is self-understood,
the second one needs to be completed in order to raise your buddies’ morale
so they can be fully efficient (and immortal) by the time of the game’s
finale. The real meat of the game resides inside these paired missions rather
than its main quest. The Recruiting Mission, as a rule, is the one that
is more straightforward and action-packed — it usually has Shepard extract
his new companion out of some dire situation, fighting through the familiar
bunches of mooks and goons, although these situations also provide an excuse
for guiding the player through some eerie environments, such as the
plague-infested quarantine quarters on Omega (to get Mordin Solus), the grim
high-security prison station (to get Jack), or the dying planet that is about
to be permanently grilled by deadly ultraviolet sunrays (to get Tali). The
Loyalty Missions, however, are much less predictable — all of them have a
strong «morality» component, and some even do not include any shooting at all
(e.g. Samara’s quest to find and punish her evil daughter, or Thane’s quest
to rescue his son from the life of a trained assassin like himself). And
where there is shooting, it almost
inevitably takes a back seat next to character interaction. This plot device has occasionally resulted in Mass Effect 2 being dubbed «Seven
Samurai In Space», although the nature of the game still prevents it
from integrating the characters’ personal story arcs into the main narrative
as logically as it happens in the movie — there, it is ultimately the hand of
fate that decides who and through which defining actions gets to live or gets
to die at the end; here, the player has complete agency over the fate of the
heroes, meaning that usually who gets to live or gets to die depends on just
how much the player in person cares about this or that character. (By the
way, it is not that difficult to
save everybody at the end as long as you’re not in a frenzied rush to finish
the game and take the time to prepare everything and everyone for the final
mission; amusingly, it might sometimes take you more time to figure out how
to bump off a particular character if, for some reason, you do not want him or
her tagging along with you in Mass
Effect 3.) The actual character-based missions vary strongly in
quality and originality, which is no big surprise given how many different
people — some of them more and some less talented — were involved in the
writing process. Some delve deeply into the mythological aspects of Mass Effect, such as the Loyalty
Mission for Grunt, the young «incomplete» Krogan, tainted by his shameful
birth from a test tube and redeeming his ancestry by going through the Krogan
warrior initiation rites (this leads to the game’s most memorable
Slaying-The-Dragon moment). Some take you on a complicated path of
questioning the base aspects of morality — most notably the character arc of
the Salarian doctor Mordin Solus, which might even possibly have been
inspired by the plight of Andrei
Sakharov, or could at least be compared to it. Some are just devilishly
sexy, like the mission in which you have to help Samara, a «paladin» of sorts
for the Asari race, detain and execute her own biologically corrupted and
morally infernal daughter — and resist the temptation to fall under the
daughter’s own spell along the way (or, if you so prefer, not resist the temptation). Occasionally, the missions veer off into fairly
risky territory, like the one in which you have to help your human comrade
Jacob find his father, stranded with his crew on a distant planet after his
ship crashed and, in accordance with some twisted Lord Of The Flies logic, instituting his own reign of terror of
the strong against the weak (including turning all of the crew’s female
members into his sex slaves); or the one where you assist Jack, the rescued
convict, in reliving her tortured past and recalling the brutal experiments
conducted on her by the same Cerberus group that currently happens to serve
as Shepard’s primary employer. These are examples of «mildly shocking
titillation» (the game has to be family-friendly, after all) that really work
only inasmuch as the voice actors involved in them are willing to take the
(sometimes quite half-assed) dialog seriously and with enough dedication;
fortunately, they usually do. If epic initiation rites, heart-breaking morality
plays, diabolical sexual temptations, mental illness, and desert islands with
dystopian rules are not enough for you, how about throwing in a philosophical
treatment of artificial intelligence (the missions for Legion, Shepard’s new
Geth friend), or a Shakespearian tragedy of a father sacrificing his life and
his reputation for the future of his daughter (Tali’s court trial in the
Quarian flotilla), or a touch of James Bond on a ninja-style stealth mission
for Kasumi, the super-thief with a gentle heart? Mass Effect 2 really
tries to infiltrate upon the territory of pretty much every story-telling
device invented by mankind, all the way from the Mahābhārata to The
Manchurian Candidate, and even if the inventiveness and word-smithery of
the writers is quite seldom adequate to the task — mildly speaking — their
verve and dedication to it, as well as the ability to get their visual
artists, animators, and voice actors are beyond reproach. Of course, one might grumble that this burning
desire to make each of the quests as different from the rest as possible, and
to incorporate half of the world’s literary legacy into these mini-plots,
largely cancels out everything that was original about Drew Karpyshyn’s
initial vision for Mass Effect.
Instead of the game being about the future of humanity in a universe
populated with physically and mentally incompatible and challenging
phenomena, it has pretty much turned into a staging of «Shakespeare in Space» — no wonder that one of the running gags
during Shepard’s presence on the Citadel, which would even be carried on into
the next game, is the presentation of Hamlet
by an Elcor-only theatrical troupe, which, given the stereotypical features
of the Elcor race, is genuinely the funniest moment in the
entire game. Yet this is precisely the mechanism that not only
ensured the game its critical respect, but is, I believe, almost
single-handedly responsible for the deep adoration it has earned from its
massive fanbase. Had it stayed more on the realistic, socio-political side of
things, attempting to seriously explore the mechanisms in which the galactic
world could be working in the year 2185, it would probably just give us all a
major headache, and the plot would have been so stuffy that we’d all end up
impatiently waiting for the action bits to start. Classic dramatic tropes, on
the other hand, are (a) easily accessible and (b) eternally efficient — as
long as you get the technical aspects right, you can’t really go wrong with a
classic moral fall-and-redemption story, or with a friend’s betrayal, or with
a coming-of-age rite-of-passage ceremony. Most of these things the game does really well. A
major exception, as usual, are the romantic lines — this is where the sin of
«fan service» truly rears its ugly head. The first game only had three
options for romance: two of Shepard’s human companions, Ashley and Kaidan
(without the option of same-sex love affair), plus an interspecies liaison
with Liara, made possible due to the fact that the entire Asari race was
created as monosexual and naturally designed to assimilate genetic material
from just about any other species in the world (a little space magic here,
too). Mass Effect 2 introduces a
lot more variety: although same-sex unions are still not possible (the LGBTQ
community would have to wait until the third game to get its interests
vindicated), Shepard can now theoretically romance at least half a dozen
different members of his or her crew, including a whole bunch of aliens —
such as the fan favorites Garrus and Tali, or the newcomer Thane, a trained
assassin from the half-man, half-bug race of the Drell. Unfortunately, BioWare’s writers had always sucked
at writing credible romantic storylines, and Mass Effect 2 is no exception to the rule — it just makes the
situation a whole lot worse because it faces the additional challenge of
somehow fitting in romantic lines that were thought to be out of the question in the first game.
Garrus, the ruthlessly suave Turian, and Tali, the nerdy Quarian, were not
supposed to be romantic partners for our hero because they were, well, aliens, and they were not equipped
with any special genetic benefits à la Asari. At best, you could
expect them to develop a deep friendship with Commander Shepard, perhaps even
some sort of intimate Platonic bond that could go beyond mere friendship but
still stop at the border of sexual contact and family-building. That might have been an interesting,
and fairly challenging, line to explore in Mass Effect 2; in its place, however, comes a series of crudely
and laughably built dialogs, all centered around the idea of physical mating
between a human and an alien. The effect, most of the time, is at best
comical rather than romantic, yet the fans do not really care as long as they
are given a chance to bang that hot alien ass. And, in all honesty,
inter-human romances in the game do not fare that much better — BioWare’s
writers are way too preoccupied with titillation to offer us any proper
scenarios of soul-bonding between two romantically involved people. (One notable exception is the relationship build-up
between Shepard and Thane, for which Thane’s writer truly deserves a gold
star: unlike any other romance, this one is not so much about finding the
correct angle for screwing as it is about redemption — Shepard offering her
love to the troubled ex-assassin is seen as a token of moral convalescence for
the sinner, and there’s quite a bit of simplistic, but believable psychology
involved there. Had all of the game’s romantic lines taken their clues from
the dark tale of Thane and Shepard, it is possible that they would not have
served as the basis for so many hilarious Internet memes on the subject of
«hot alien sex». Alternately, it might have made sense if the player could
distinguish between «serious relationships» and «sexual flings» — but I guess
I might be asking way too much of
BioWare’s staff). Finally, the third component of the game’s plot are
all sorts of side missions and assignments that are not directly tied in to
the lives and fates of Shepard’s crew members. These fall into two
categories: minor problem-solving quests that you pick up for extra XP,
Paragon / Renegade points, and possible financial benefits at one of the
game’s several hubs (The Citadel, Omega, and Illium), and minor action
sequences on various planets around the galaxy where you can actually land
instead of just scanning them for minerals. The latter part, honestly
speaking, sucks — most of these mini-missions just seem thrown in at the last
minute to give you something «extra» to do, and feel like unnecessary
mini-games that just detract you from the really important things to do.
They’re basically atavistic remains of the old RPG ideology, which was fine
and dandy for old RPGs but is largely out of place here. Given that all these
mini-missions take place in identical environments, feature the same types of
enemies you already face during the main quest or the loyalty missions, and
have almost no dialog accompaniment, they can only be interesting as extra
platforms to practice your shooting or teamwork. The former part, on the contrary, adds a bit of
extra world-building and occasionally even conceals some writing gems — my
favorite of these character-oriented quests, for instance, is the encounter
with a love-struck Krogan
on Illium, which does a great job at inverting the beauty-and-the-beast trope
as well as features some impressive post-modern poetry writing (come to me, Blue Rose of Illium, let our
three hearts beat as two). It’s also a treasure trove for nostalgia,
where you get to briefly revisit some of the characters from the first game
(provided you left them alive — Mass
Effect remembers everything!),
and although most of this is clearly fan service (e.g. the reappearance of
annoying fan boy idiot Conrad Verner), it is usually made not to look like fan service, as most
of these encounters feel fairly logical. As usual, there’s a good balance of
comedy and tragedy, and in the end, exploring the big hubs of the galaxy down
to the last nook and cranny is an exciting and rewarding affair, unlike the
comparatively less nutritious exploration of the galaxy itself. Last, but not least, admiration should be expressed
for most of the DLC expansions that followed the base game. Two of those
introduced extra companions with their own backstories and loyalty missions —
the one for Zaeed, the grizzly mercenary with the usual dark past, is
relatively mediocre, but the half-stealth, half-ferocious action mission for
Kasumi, the ninja thief, is a total blast. Overlord, in which you have to bring down a rogue AI all the way
to a shocking final revelation, is the darkest and creepiest of them all, giving
you a pretty tough moral choice at the end. And Lair Of The Shadow Broker, which gives you an opportunity to
reunite with your former companion (and potential lover) Liara T’soni so as to
bring down one of the most powerful guys in the universe, is like a short,
well-engineered action movie in itself (although the ending seemed a little
disappointing to me — the mystery of the omni-powerful Shadow Broker feels
somewhat banal once it’s finally cleared up, much in the same way as Mass Effect 3 would manage to spoil
the mystery of the Reapers). The only significant DLC to have been a major
disappointment is, unsurprisingly, the one that has the most importance for
the main quest — Arrival, in which
the game designers suddenly remembered about the Reaper threat and decided to
have Commander Shepard ward off another impending breach of galaxy security
by the giant mechanical squids all by himself, just like that. There’s a whole lot of shooting in there, including some of
the game’s toughest battles (in part due to Shepard’s inability to use his
companions for cover), and not a lot of story — and what story there is is
riddled with plotholes, non sequiturs, and cheap pathos to boot. Plot-wise, it’s
an important missing link between Mass
Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3
(without playing it, it is impossible to understand how the heck Commander
Shepard finds him-/herself in prison at the start of the third game), but its
attempt to make you feel the graveness of your moral choices is quite poor,
partially because you are not
really given any choice (whatever you do, the end result is still the
destruction of a planet with millions of inhabitants on it) and partially
because it’s pretty hard to care about it (because the inhabitants in
question are Batarians, a race that you have so far seen only in the capacity
of interplanetary terrorists or ruthless mercenaries — we do not even have
the least idea of what their defenseless women and children look like). Still, even Arrival
has its moments — especially for those who give much more of a damn about
hardcore action than dialog chatter — and on the whole, the DLCs (now
integrated fully with the base game in the Legendary Edition) do a good job at throwing in extra dimensions,
instead of mere variations on tropes and plots already explored in the main
bulk of the game. And if there was one game in the trilogy that could be particularly agreeable to the idea of
«bits of extra content», it was certainly Mass Effect 2 — with its main storyline so obviously inferior to
all the secondary quests, it has always been more of a Tales From The Mass Effect Universe vignette series than a
unified novel-like experience; in fact, a «novelization» of Mass Effect 2, were it ever to happen
officially, would have worked much less efficiently than a «serialization». |
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Action Much
of what has already been written about the action aspect of Mass Effect continues to apply to the
sequel — no big surprise here — but a lot of modifications and tweaks were
introduced as well, and some of those actually have theoretical importance.
In general, the role of combat in Mass
Effect 2 has been vastly increased; not only is it becoming notably more
sophisticated and expressly aimed at sucking up to the «pew-pew public», but
there is also much more of it — with most of the planets in the galaxy now
reduced to tiny areas swarming with enemies, you’re going to do a lot less
exploration and a lot more extermination (see more on that in the Atmosphere section below). Fortunately,
the basic principle of Mass Effect
— «never make the player forget that this is a plot-driven game» — continues
to hold: no matter how aggressive the mission, it is never reduced to a mere
shoot-out, as the action is continuously broken by pauses and lulls where you
get to regroup, interact with various NPCs, and perhaps even take a moral
decision or two. And it is still
being done in ways, I think, that should not offend either the action- or the
story-lover in you, an art in which the BioWare team has known few equals.
In addition
to this subtle denigration of the turn-based approach, general mechanics of
the combat brought the game even closer to conventional shooters. For one
thing, enemies could now take different amounts of damage in various body
parts — headshots were particularly well-rewarded — and various additional
gear could increase or decrease your accuracy, coming in separate items
(helmets, visors, vests, etc.) rather than monolithic sets of armor. But the
most important change was in that the concept of limited ammo was brought
back: the original game had experimentally replaced it with the idea of
potentially infinite ammunition, with the catch being that you always had to
watch out about your gun overheating. Now, apparently, the idea was sacked in
favor of the more common strategy of collecting and watching over your ammo
packs. In
order to explain this unexpected change and make it agree with the general
lore of the game, the designers had to do a twisted back flip and introduce
the concept of thermal clips,
little heat dispensers that help cool down your weapon after each shot.
These, the game explains, were introduced — throughout the entire Galaxy, no
less! — precisely in that short period while Commander Shepard was
recuperating from his/her unfortunate «death» at the beginning of the game,
so that by the time s/he was ready to start leveling up once more, the world
at large was already living in a whole new age. The explanation is totally
half-assed and practically impossible to believe, but who really cares, right? The important
thing is that thousands of gamers, setting out to test the new combat system,
would not have to kick the game in the balls, screaming «what’s that stupid overheating crap?» and «where the hell are my ammo packs?». Overall,
though, combat did become seriously
more challenging — particularly on high difficulty levels. Enemies in Mass Effect 2 tend to move faster,
their guns tend to be deadlier, their numbers greater, and their actions more
coordinated; for instance, they will try to outflank and surround you much
more often than in the first game. They are also tougher to put down, often
featuring three levels of protection («shields» and «armor» in addition to
regular health), the first two of which have to be taken down by conventional
physical means before you and your buddies can start working your
magic-biotic ways on them (sending shockwaves or lifting them off the ground,
etc.). Here, too, the game aligns itself more openly with the common shooter
ideologies of its era, but this is nowhere near as substantially bothersome
as the «thermal clip» gimmick. This
increased level of challenge is compensated for by increased possibilities in
producing combinations of defensive and offensive actions that offer a lot
more variety than the original game. Although the six basic classes (Soldier,
Tech Specialist, Biotic Adept, and their combinations) remain the same, the
number of various powers available to them has increased, including lots of
individual talents for specific party members — some of which they may share
with you upon completion of their loyalty missions. And with so many of these
members, the number of combinations in which you can plan your attacks is
almost infinite — well, not really as infinite as in Baldur’s Gate, with its miriads of spells and all, but pretty
infinite for a game that not only has to invent cool ways of eliminating your
enemies, but also efficiently visualize all of them. It
goes without saying that for those of us who do enjoy a solid shooting experience, the combat in Mass Effect 2 is much more fun than
in the first game. It is also somewhat better balanced: where the first game
gave the impression of being way too tough on the neophyte player at the
beginning, but a total and absolute cakewalk by the end, Mass Effect 2 eases you in a bit more gradually. (In particular,
the dreaded one-hit «assassination» sniper kills that made life so unbearable
in the first game are gone for good — enemy snipers are largely replaced by
various types of rocket troopers and grenade throwers that also deal massive
damage but are significantly easier to evade). The final «suicide mission» is
still quite easy if you have leveled your character all the way by the end of
the game, though; it would have been nice to be able to meet some uniquely
overpowered enemies during your final mopping up of the Collector Base, but
instead you’ll just have to content yourself with another of those end-game
overpowered bosses who is more of a bullet-sponge annoyance than a true
challenge. Pretty
much all of the recurrent mini-games and extra challenges of Mass Effect have been replaced by new
variations. There are two new decryption challenges — a circuit-combining
game and a «programming code-matching» game, both of them fun at first but
getting fairly annoying by the time you have to go through the procedure for
the fiftieth time. (I, personally, would have welcomed a couple of genuine decryption puzzles instead of
having to go zillions of times through the same type of pseudo-decryption
puzzle). The Mako vehicle from the original game has been retired — probably
because of angry fan feedback — but to compensate, the DLCs introduce «The
Hammerhead», a flying equivalent of the old clumsy tank with better
maneuverability and even more ample firepower, but almost no protection;
apparently it fared no better with the players than the Mako and had to
follow it into oblivion by the time of Mass
Effect 3 (where poor Commander Shepard would finally have to do all the work strictly on foot). In
terms of purely intellectual, adventure-style puzzle challenges Mass Effect 2 fares just as
efficiently as its predecessor, meaning that all of these challenges are
trivial — usually just a matter of finding the right object in the right
hotspot, or making the transparently correct dialog choice in a simple
conversation. Two sub-quests that stand out a little in this respect are
Kasumi’s Stolen Memory, where you
have to sweat around quite a bit in order to find your way into the bad guy’s
carefully guarded treasure vault; and Samara’s loyalty mission, The Ardat-Yakshi, where everything
depends on the dialog choices you make and you actually have to engage in a
little bit of psychological analysis to get through. (Just a little bit, mind
you: the BioWare writers must have received strict instructions to measure out
very tiny dosages of intellectual effort on the part of the player — this
ain’t Civilization, you know). Of
course, this should not be surprising for any long-term BioWare fan — or any
RPG fan, as a matter of fact. After all, Commander Shepard never signed up to
be Sherlock Holmes. |
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Probably
the major reason why it’s a bit of
a crime to immerse yourself in Mass
Effect 2 without having previously soaked in the (mass) effects of Mass Effect is the shift of emotional
balance that takes place in between the two games. While there
certainly were minor elements of drama, psychologism, and suspense in the
first installment, Mass Effect was
first and foremost about world-building. It is likely that most of the time
you spent on the game was not so much spent actually playing as it was admiring the carefully crafted universe.
Walking around the Normandy, exploring the different levels of the Citadel
and, of course, taking the Mako on lengthy cruises around the forests,
mountains, deserts, and glaciers of the many worlds scattered around the
Galaxy was a major vibe — a set of
major vibes — all by itself. The story, or your personal relations with your
crew members, could easily come in second and third in terms of importance. Mass Effect 2, for all of
its alleged «stand-alone» potential, more or less assumes that you are
already familiar with that world — that there is no need whatsoever to
rebuild it for you from scratch. Sure, there will be some new environments,
new species, new hitherto unknown secrets (sometimes annoyingly ret-conned),
but for the most part, the game is all about action and drama rather
than presentation. To that end, for instance, you no longer have the
opportunity of «cruising». Almost every planet that opens up before you has a
strictly pragmatic function — you land on it to complete a mission (for
instance, recruit a new team member); you move across it in a linear fashion,
usually too busy shooting or talking your way through to admire its visuals;
and, most importantly, once you’re done, you are unable to return to it
again, with some very rare exceptions. The message is very clear: «There’s work to be done, Commander. If you
came here to gawk as a tourist, please go back to Mass Effect and stay there for as long as you like». The difference may not be so sharply felt in the
prologue sections of the respective games. Both of them made a point of very
quickly flinging you into action, letting you understand that survival skills
come first in this brave new world and that properly arming yourself and
learning to use your powers is an essential pre-requisite of honing your
aesthetic perception. But in Mass
Effect, once the turbulent prologue on Eden Prime was over, you found
yourself in the vast spaces of the Citadel, where you could wander freely
between the different levels and compare the highbrow with the lowbrow. In Mass Effect 2, after the opening
shootout missions, you can go to the Citadel, too — but this time, you can
only visit a few enclosed areas of the Citadel, all of them very perfunctory
and pragmatic; in general, the time you are going to spend in that vital
center of the Galaxy is only a tiny fraction of the respective time in the
first game. You can even not go there at all, if you so desire — and turn
your full attention to recruiting your future team members instead. On the whole, where the atmosphere of Mass Effect focuses on wonder, Mass Effect 2 seems more concentrated on showing you the inner
side of the wonder — a.k.a. the nightmare.
To paraphrase Jim Morrison, what have
we done to the Galaxy? what have we
done to our fair mega-sister? The principal hub from which Commander
Shepard, now himself in the service of the shady criminal organization
Cerberus, conducts his business has been changed from the Citadel, whose
defining colors were white and blue, to Omega, a space station run by
interstellar mafia — with deep, lusty red being its principal color all the
way through. Nobody on Omega operates in the name of anything but profit and
personal gain, and if Commander Shepard needs to get anywhere, he has to
adapt to those new conditions. He does get to perform a few noble deeds
there, such as defeating some of the most odious gangs and curing the station
from a deadly artificial pestilence, but in the end it’s almost always about
siding with the lesser evil against the bigger one. Later in the game, another hub is opened up — the
Asari-run planet of Illium, essentially a huge commercial depot where, upon
first sight, business is conducted in a more reasonable manner than on
Omega... but only upon first sight. Most of Shepard’s time on Illium is spent
engaging in shootouts with various mafia groups, and the myth of the
«beautiful and wise» Asari race quickly dissipates as, once again, most of
the encountered aliens seem far more interested in securing deals, often
through nefarious strategies, than aiding the Commander in his/her noble
quests. The atmosphere seems to even rub off on some of the good guys (Liara,
whom Shepard encounters on Illium, undergoes a barely believable
transformation from shy, nerdy scientist to a hardcore badass — more on that
later). In short, the Galaxy is just one large shithole,
with Mass Effect 2 ripping out a
bunch of pages from the script of Firefly
and the entire Mily Way sometimes feeling like an expanded version of the Grand Theft Auto universe, except that
it takes itself a tad more seriously. Nobody is to be trusted; everybody
wants a piece of Shepard and his friends; and even those friends all have to
be worked upon in order to get through to their good sides. This is a kind of
atmosphere that, in my opinion, fully justifies a Renegade playthrough of the
game — forcing your Shepard to dispense trust, mercy, and generosity all the
way through sometimes feels like forcing somebody to adopt waste sorting in
the middle of a nuclear winter. (Occasionally, the game even punishes you for choosing the Paragon
option — for instance, generously sparing a character’s life may easily
result in getting stabbed in the back). And the only place in the entire
galaxy where you can get some
respite is... the Normandy. With the huge increase in the number of potential
companions, who might end up occupying every free corner of your ship, and
the equally large number of different conversations scripted for each of
them, the Normandy of Mass Effect 2
becomes even more of a mix between a confessional and a psychiatrist office
than it was in the first game. Actually, it might be a total introvert’s
dream: a small, confined, but generally techno-cozy space hosting an
impressive, but still small group of people who are, like, the only people in
the world to understand you, care about you, and need you (to solve their
problems for them, but they’re all so nice, why shouldn’t you be solving their problems for them?). Knowing that
wherever and whenever you leave your ship, you are most likely in for a world
of pain and a buttload of firepower, you might find yourself really embracing the Normandy as your
second home, and all those companions as your true friends. Several times, while reading people’s thoughts on the
Paragon vs. Renegade playthrough options, I came across confessions that it
was easier to use the Renegade options on various NPCs scattered across the Galaxy,
but that the players could hardly ever bring themselves to use the same
options on their companions (even if using a Renegade option on any of your
team members usually means little more than being rude and blunt, whereas the
bad guys not on your payroll more
often get to feel the touch of cold steel). Indeed, «renegading» your active
or potential companions feels like an even more assholish thing to do in Mass Effect 2 than it was in the
first game, and, honestly, could sometimes use a bit more subtlety in
writing. A good example of a sorely missed chance is the
stand-off between Samara, the troubled Asari Justicar, and her corrupt,
succubus-nature daughter Morinth, whom you are supposed to lure into Samara’s
trap and bring to justice. During the climactic culmination of the scene, Shepard
has the option of choice between standing with the mother and the daughter —
visually and atmospherically echoing the stand-off between Palpatine, Mace Windu,
and Anakin in Revenge Of The Sith —
and while, naturally, choosing to help Morinth over Samara would count as a
properly «Renegade» thing to do, the writers could not come up with a suitable
justification of that choice. Apparently, Morinth is a monstruous, maniacal
psychopath whose specialty is killing people with fabulous sex (hey, hardly
the worst way to go, if you ask me), and the only reason why Shepard should
want to take such a person for his companion is summarized in one brief line:
«Morinth will be more useful to me».
Every single time I hear that line, I just want to use a well-deserved Renegade
interrupt on the writer who came up with this Machiavellian «brilliance». We
know perfectly well that the Renegade way of doing things is the Dirty Harry
way — but it is hard to imagine Clint Eastwood’s character partnering up with
«Scorpio» because he will be useful to
him. I am specifically bringing up this example just to
illustrate how much harder the job of a Renegade-style writer for Shepard is
than that of a Paragon-style writer. In order to resolve this kind of
conflict in favor of the criminal, one needs to try very hard to find an angle that would allow us to see the
criminal as the wronged victim and the justice-seeker as a heartless by-the-book
executioner. In the case of Samara vs. Morinth, such an angle would be
immensely difficult, but possible — had they bothered to include a line of
defense other than «I just do it for
the thrill of the act» (for instance, it could be argued that Morinth
offers her victims a pleasant and meaningful way out of their boring and
depressed existence, euthanasia-style, etc.). But Mass Effect 2 is not Silence
Of The Lambs, and there are no writers on the team who could make their
psychopathic characters as «charming» (so to speak) as Hannibal Lecter. (Not
to mention that Morinth’s voice actor, although she is not at all bad,
certainly has a long way to go if she ever hopes to catch up with Anthony Hopkins).
Consequently, this is one of several cases in which the Paragon-Renegade
mechanics of the game simply breaks down. (It’s rather telling that the team
could not find a proper way to reintegrate Morinth, unlike her mother, into
the storyline of Mass Effect 3 if
you opt to save her in Mass Effect 2:
apparently, nobody could bring themselves to further develop her character
arc). Moral of the story: it simply takes more wit and talent to create a likeable
ruthless character than a lovable righteous one. Anyway, had the entire atmospheric dynamics of the
Milky Way in Mass Effect 2 been
made to sway between the perfidious, dog-eat-dog spirit of the colonies and
the aura of brotherly and sisterly human-alien love aboard the Normandy,
there would be little to complain about. However, there is also the main
story to take into consideration, and this is where the game runs into
problems with its atmosphere just as much as it has already run into with the
respective plot. «The Collectors», regardless of whether they are tackled in
the relatively normal environment of a human colony or on their own turf
(aboard the Collector Ship or inside their home base), somehow end up being
goofy and annoying rather than coldly terrifying, like the Geth in the first
game. This is the first time that we get properly immersed in the game
designers’ idea of «Reaper Mutations», which would be explored to its fullest
in Mass Effect 3, and somehow the
transition into body-horror style à la Resident Evil feels exaggerated and contrived. All of the
Collector enemies — the Collectors themselves, as well as their combined and
advanced variants such as «Scions» and «Praetorians» — are grotesque mutated
monsters, bred in oddly exotic locations (all of which only serve as polygons
for combat, except for one brief atmospheric, tension-setting trek across the
Collector Ship), and to me it feels as if the designers were really trying way too hard to spook the player
instead of really putting their minds to answering the question: what would a
true totalitarian future run by
giant AIs with the power of 3D-printing their own armies of mooks look like?
Something tells me it wouldn’t be a grotesque projection of a Herbert Welles’
Martian tripod. Maybe these days we could get an answer from our latest brand
of generative AI (though I have a hunch it would simply use the Mass Effect scrapbook itself to come
up with one), but in 2010, it was all about humans deciding that the best way
for an artificial super-intelligence to prove its superiority to the unworthy
organics would be to scare the pants off them. Or, alternately, make them die
of laughter. Do not get me wrong — the atmosphere during the
combat sections with the Collectors is very
tense, and unless you are playing on the lowest difficulty levels, you won’t
have that much time or desire to stand around and guffaw at your hideously
(but amusingly) deformed enemies. But that’s just the combat;
psychologically, I am not sure that the BioWare team has truly managed to
achieve what they were striving for. Mass
Effect 3, with its introduction of Brutes and Banshees, would be a bit
more successful in inflicting the «horror vibe» upon the player; Mass Effect 2 is really quite
family-friendly in this particular department. For myself, I definitely know
that once I learned the ropes of handling the Collectors in combat, battles
with those guys quickly became the most tedious part of the entire game for
me. And don’t get me started on the
final boss fight, which looks and feels quite stupid and anticlimactic after
the final boss fight of the first game (the mutant Saren). All of this goes hand in hand with my criticisms of
the plot: basically, the game succeeds on most levels as long as it stays
within the borders of its film-noir and revisionist-Western aesthetics, yet
fails as soon as it redirects our attention to «pure» sci-fi — almost as if
those duties had been equally divided between Team Smart and Team Moronic. Of
course, it is ultimately the latter team that rewarded us with one of the
most widely propagated memes from the game (ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL!), but I am personally more of an "I’m Commander Shepard, and this is my
favorite store on the Citadel" kind of guy, really (I’ll take
Shepard’s exploration of the Citadel over his exploration of the Collector
Base every time). |
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Technical features |
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Graphics
On a substantial
rather than purely technical level, though, I would say that the aesthetic
difference between Mass Effect and
Mass Effect 2 is smaller than it
is between Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3. All the basic tenets
of the first game remain in place: environments consist of standardized
interchangeable blocks (which feel fairly diverse for the first few hours but
later still start to oppress you with their monotonousness), characters come
to life with realistic, but repetitive animations, and cutscenes are smoothly
integrated inside the action to give the proceedings a cinematic feel. All of
this is simply given with more detail — same
as before, but with leather seats, as Joker would have remarked. However,
since Mass Effect 2 is so much
more about action than atmospheric immersion, you are not likely to remain
spending a whole lot of time admiring the graphic scenery, the way you could
do on all those planets in the first game while chillin’ around in the Mako.
(I do believe this difference is intentionally ironized by the innocently
dropped AI comment while Shepard is flying the Firewalker on one of the DLC
missions: "Geographic conditions
indicate an aesthetically pleasing view nearby. Organic life forms may wish
to take note"). There are almost no wide open spaces anywhere, and
very few panoramic views — most of the time is being spent crammed inside
pretty claustrophobic environments. Thus, even a major new hub such as the Asari world of Illium, at
best, looks like a futuristic mega-mall; and outside of a few backdrops of
skyscrapers, the only thing you get to see is a set of similar-looking plazas
as backdrops for interaction with companions, merchants, and random NPCs. It
gets a little better in the Lair Of The
Shadow Broker DLC, which takes you on a breathtaking skycar ride through
the huge city’s towers and skyways — the only problem is that you have no
time whatsoever to stop and gawk at the surroundings, or you’ll lose your
object of pursuit and it’s game over for Shepard. You do get to form an idea
that Illium is really a sprawling megapolis rather than just one glorified
trade center, but that’s about all you have time to form, and the same
applies to most of the other settings. That said, whatever the graphics of the game lack when it comes
to backdrops and panoramas, they more than make up for when it comes to
creating dynamic, cinematographic imagery. Action sequences are rendered
gloriously, with all those shielding fields glowing, enemies frozen to pieces
or incinerated in realistic (and badass) ways, bullet hailstorms coming at
you in perfect trajectories, and the most awesome explosions and implosions
caused by use of heavy weapons (something that did not even exist in Mass Effect). Accompanying cutscenes
have the ambitiousness and excitement level of a solid Hollywood action
movie (Kasumi’s
acrobatic feat of disabling the shields on her enemy’s aircraft is one of
the most stylishly graceful pieces of video game animation I have ever seen),
lighting and shadow effects are beyond reproach, movement of both friendly
and hostile NPCs looks and feels logical and natural, and the only bitter
thing I can say about this combination of realism and aesthetics of violence
is that plenty of other action-based games have adopted the exact same
standard since 2010. On the other hand, I can’t exactly say that they have,
as a rule, raised that standard to significantly more impressive heights. Yet the most impressive bit of visual progress from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2 concerns the depictions and animations of the
game’s characters during conversation — fully in keeping with the implicit
idea of the game’s transition from a more «atmospheric» to a more
«psychological» experience. The way your companions and the various NPCs
acted in the first game — not just moving their mouths, but using the full
arsenal of face and body language — was already striking, but Mass Effect 2 runs deeper with those
technologies, making even the most mysterious of its aliens, such as Tali
with her permanently masked face, feel like genuine souls with genuine
feelings, troubles, and perks. The way Kasumi shrugs her gracile shoulders in
cynical melancholy; Mordin Solus squints his huge Salarian eyes in mental and
spiritual anguish; Grunt and Wrex, the Krogan warriors, incline their heads
in subtle menace; or even Legion, the friendly Geth, twirls his synthetic
neck in digital processing of information — all these little things are
executed superbly, and there is clearly a lot of talent here that goes beyond
mere understanding of advanced rendering technology. |
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Although
music and ambient sounds have always been an integral part of the Trilogy, I
have to confess that of all three soundtracks to the three games, the one for
Mass Effect 2 leaves the least
individualistic impression on my brain. This probably has less to do with the
quality of the music itself and more with the fact that there are very few
spots in the game that would try to actually focus your attention on the
music. The first game, with its lengthy exposition and vast stretches of open
territory that simply begged to be silently explored, did rely heavily upon
the music: be it the majestic orchestral swells rolling on like waves all
over the Citadel Presidium, or the otherworldly electronic textures creeping
up on you as you cruised in the Mako around the lonesome deserts and
mountains of uncharted worlds, the score was extremely integral to the atmosphere. Conversely, in Mass Effect 3 there would be
increased attention to the epicness, monumentality, and even discreteness of
the sound — with quite a few cut scenes highlighting specific music pieces, a
few of them register pretty strongly in the mind and have even gone to become
my personal favorites (e.g. the unforgettable ‘Leaving Earth’ theme). Stuck
in between the two, Mass Effect 2
never really lets down with the quality of its music but does not really have
its own special «angle». Since most of the time you will be too busy with
either dialog or combat, the music is consistently subservient to these
needs; where it is, perhaps, most attention-grabbing is around the time of
the final Suicide Mission, which is replete with lots of Hollywoodish eye-candy
(chasing, fighting, blowing up stuff etc.), and this, in turn, implies lots
of John Williams-style epic touches... but this is still the kind of music I
probably wouldn’t want to listen to on its own. That said, not being able to
overpraise the soundtrack does not mean that we have to underrate it, either:
I can hardly recall even a single sequence in which the score would deviate
from the proper atmosphere of the moment. The decadent night life of Omega,
the brutal maximum security prison of Purgatory, the posh mansion of the
crime boss in Kasumi’s mission, the barren desolation of the Krogan homeworld
of Tuchanka all get their appropriate sonic treatment, alternating between
electronic dance music, cold ambient soundscapes, soothing pseudo-classical
piano muzak or whatever else is necessary for the equation to work. No
complaints registered anywhere along the way. Even
so, the game would still work pretty well even without the music, riding out
on the strength of the voice acting alone. Everybody from the original Mass Effect reprises their roles, and
this time, many of the actors have a much tougher task set before them. As we
have already established, Mass Effect
was less about character arcs and evolving personalities than it was about
world-building; consequently, actors had less dialog that had to do with
their emotional states, anxieties, personal feelings etc. and more that was
simply related to their backstories or the ongoing plot. Mass Effect 2, on the other hand, is drenched in psychology and
existential crises, and this means that everybody has got to raise the stakes
and step up their game. Ironically, Commander Shepard him/herself is arguably
the least affected here: even despite suffering a most gruesome death and a
most unusual resurrection, the main character still prefers to spend less
time on post-traumatic self-analysis and more on simply solving problems.
However, since «solving problems» now also involves playing psychoanalyst to
his many friends, both old and new, Shepard’s duties now include gaining new
levels of wisdom and confidence, and both Mark Meer and Jennifer Hale rise to
the challenge as best they can, particularly Hale, who excels in both the
Paragon and the Renegade attitude. The hardest times for them would still be
lying ahead, though — in Mass Effect 3. Compared
to this, Brandon Keener (as Garrus) and Liz Sroka (as Tali) have a far more
difficult time; in the first game, they had relatively little dialog, and
their characters only had maybe two or three opportunities to come across as
genuine personalities with their own passions, flaws, and inner demons. With Mass Effect 2’s emphasis on character
building and personal drama, Garrus and Tali quickly grow up from supporting
characters to key members of the cast, as Garrus goes through his own test of
betrayal and revenge and Tali finds herself the innocent victim of a conflict
between tribal loyalty and family allegiance — and that’s not to mention the
poorly-written, but fan-beloved romance arcs that require an «amorous»
component to feature prominently in both actors’ deliveries. Here, the actual
challenge before the actors is to impact on you their character growth while
overcoming — or, rather, making the best use of — the handicap of their
voices fed through «alien filters» (after all, Garrus is a straight-walking praying mantis, and Tali spends all her
life behind a germ-isolating mask), and they definitely succeed at that,
proving that the cast decision for Mass
Effect was no fluke. While
both characters were already popular after the first game, I will probably
not be mistaken in saying that the Crazy Cult of Garrus — with guy gamers
considering him the epitome of the virtual buddy, and girl gamers declaring
him the perfect husubando — only
truly arose after Mass Effect 2,
which gave Keener far more opportunities to present his character as both a
tormented soul and that «perfect friend to always have your back», not to
mention the whole routine of cold-ruthless-killer-gone-shy-bumbling-lover if
you plan to go that way (as I already said, I think the romance path for
Garrus and Shepard is quite poorly written, but Keener saves it as best he
can). Likewise, Tali, in addition to her already seductive «alien girl nerd»
image in Mass Effect, acquires
extra facets, both endearingly comical and ennoblingly tragical, with Sroka
never giving in to the temptation of overacting and spoiling the impression
with severely exaggerated delivery. The scene where Tali finds her dead father,
for instance, is a textbook example on how to make the player tear up without
overselling the drama (although it certainly fares better if you work your
way up to it gradually). Ironically, even though Liz (Ash) Sroka has pretty
much vanished off the face of the Earth after her work on Tali through all
the three games, while Keener has a rather extensive list of supporting roles
in video games, TV shows, and movies, both will likely go down in acting
history for one part and one part only — the super-smooth Turian gentleman
officer and the super-cute Quarian lady engineer. All
the other main actors from Mass Effect
get but supporting roles in the second game. The mutually exclusive human
companions Ashley (Kimberly Brooks) and/or Kaidan (Raphael Sbarge) only
appear in one poorly scripted scene to piss you off, having to wait until Mass Effect 3 to prove their worth in
a new setting. Steven Barr’s Wrex, the Krogan warlord, gains confidence,
wisdom, and extra weight (provided you have not bumped him off in the first
game), but, again, you only meet him in a single episode. Ali Hillis’ Liara
has a harder cross to bear, as she must convincingly demonstrate her barely
believable transformation from shy-and-innocent idealistic researcher to
cold-and-calculated business dealer; she tries as hard as she can, but the
sweetness still comes through the ice — then again, perhaps this was
intentional, and the whole setup is meant to symbolize that if you’re gentle
and sweet by nature, no circumstances of your biography will allow you to
properly transition into Al Capone on demand. Regardless, it’s always nice to
have you back, Liara. With
the diminished presence of all those «veterans», it is up to fresh new faces
to step up and prove their worth, and here, too, we have to thank the almost
phenomenal talent of voice director Ginny McSwain for getting the best out of
a whole bunch of newcomers. Tricia Helfer, hired over from her memorable
performance as a Cylon in Battlestar
Galactica, does EDI — the perfect cross between a subservient AI and a
mental dominatrix, an ideal counterpart for the clownish personality of
Joker, the pilot. Yvonne Strahovski does an excellent
«ice-queen-waiting-to-be-melted» as Miranda Lawson, the bioengineered epitome
of female perfection with — naturally! — a broken heart under the surface,
expecting to be eventually treated as a human being (years later, amusingly,
she would play a psychologically similar role in The Handmaid’s Tale). Courtenay Taylor gets completely invested
in the character of Jack, the badass female biotic with a traumatized past;
maybe she does not really elevate her character above the respective
stereotype, but the power and sneer in her voice alone make it easy to live
with the stereotype. Maggie Baird (the mother of the Billie Eilish, for those not in the know!) brings just the
required amount of calm, wisdom, melancholy, and compassion to Samara, the
Asari justice warrior saddled with more children health problems than Neil
Young. And towering over all of them is Michael Beattie, who has one of the
most complex roles in the cast — Mordin Solus, the Salarian genius scientist
who has to represent all the comical tropes associated with scientists
(obsessiveness, jargon, paranoia, rapid-fire vocal delivery, etc.) and all the
tragic ones (responsibility, moral dilemmas, repentance, etc.) at the same
time. Less
prominent characters are simply too numerous to mention, but I struggle to
remember anybody who does not do his or her job at least «adequately».
Special mentions must probably go to Martin Sheen as The Illusive Man, leader
of Cerberus (his dialog is generally shitty, as it mostly serves to drive all
the inconsistencies of The Main Plot, but hey, it’s Martin Sheen, so who
cares?); Carrie-Anne Moss as Aria T’Loak, the Iron Lady of the all-powerful
Asari mafia (don’t we just love blue-skinned badass bitches?); and Kym Hoy as
Kasumi Goto, the ninja stealth master — this
character, as I was afraid, could easily have been voiced as a generic anime
cliché, but Kym provides her with a beautiful mixture of maturity and
playfulness, sarcasm and sadness, experienced wisdom and childish mischief,
making her side mission
(originally a piece of DLC) a particular pleasure to go through. Again, it’s
useful to note that Kym hardly has any other credits to her name (you can
more frequently see her on YouTube as a yoga instructor or a jazz singer), if
only to remember how much credit in such cases should be given to voice
directors, imparting their understanding of character personality to the
actual mouthpieces. With writing much more often handled poorly than
brilliantly in video games, it’s the voice director’s job to ensure that we
forgive the plot holes and the banality of clichés, and Mass Effect 2 fares even better here
than its predecessor — at least, in quantitative terms, given that the total
mass of characters and character dialog in the game is at least 50% weightier
than it was in Mass Effect. |
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Interface
For
starters, Mass Effect 2 almost
completely dispenses with such an important parameter as XP. Technically,
your character still gathers a certain amount of XP, which you can always
check on the appropriate character screen; but where the standard RPG
practice has you «micro-manage» XP gathering, with points typically gained
for killing individual enemies, performing small tasks, reading, talking,
etc. — a practice that was still diligently observed in Mass Effect — here, the bulk of your XP will be automatically
collected upon completing major missions, with very few additional actions
leading to any increase in XP. This may have been implemented as a tactical
response to the frequency of combat situations where Shepard has to deal with
an unlimited supply of infinitely spawning enemies — situations that could
easily be exploited as loopholes for the practice of «XP farming»; but in
practice, it looks like an intentional simplification of RPG mechanics,
reducing the players’ opportunities for strategic calculation and «grinding»
their character, a practice generally held in high esteem by RPG fans but
hated by most people outside the club. Next,
there is a significant drop in the number of overall stats for Shepard. In Mass Effect, there were about 11-12
different parameters to juggle, and the total number of XP that you could
accumulate over the game would not allow you to max out all of them, so there
was a lot of choice to be made depending on whether you wanted to prioritize
offense, defense, armor, special abilities, communicative strategies etc.;
furthermore, each of the parameters had 12 levels to it, again, implying a
rather fine-grained degree of improvement (though still nothing compared to
classic D&D, of course). Mass
Effect 2 reduces the overall number of parameters to 6-7, and each one is
limited to a measly four levels of upgrading. To compensate for that, the
game introduces a slightly more complex mechanics of interaction between
different abilities: for instance, combining different types of ammunition or
different tech or biotic effects with offensive powers creates cool «combos»
like the ability to explode your opponent in mid-air (this would be even
further refined in Mass Effect 3).
But overall, of course, this is yet another big step away from old-school
RPGs where you could spend literally hours pondering over the best character
builds, spell combinations, and weapon types to take out any particular
opponent. Speaking
of weapons, that system, too, has undergone drastic changes. In addition to
the introduction of ammo («thermal clips», see the Action section above), you no longer have to juggle a huge system
of different weapons from different types of manufacturers, further
stratified by levels. Instead, you have a limited amount of options in
several available slots (pistols, assault rifles, sniper rifles, etc.), each
of them unlockable as part of some particular mission as you progress through
the game; furthermore, you have to make a specific choice of weapon each time
you leave the Normandy and cannot change it without returning to the ship —
for the sake of realism, I suppose, since it was always a bit of a mystery
how Commander Shepard, without a special freight train in tow, could always
lug dozens, if not hundreds, of different marks of weaponry on his back in
the first game. A few of these weapons can be purchased over in select
trading spots across such hubs as the Citadel, Omega, or Illium, but overall,
the arms trade is pretty much non-existent in Mass Effect 2 — you’re much more likely to be spending your
credits on space hamsters for your cabin or seedy erotic magazines of the
interstellar variety. Apparently, this simplifying decision actually caused
some serious backlash — so much so that the possibility to buy arms of
different levels from different manufacturers, like in the first game, would
have to be reintroduced in Mass Effect
3. Likewise,
the armor system no longer looks like anything in the first game: in place of
the mechanic of buying or looting your armor suit «wholesale», with armor
sets of different levels from different manufacturers offering their specific
ways and degrees of protection, Commander Shepard now has a single «base»
suit of armor (which s/he can, however, colorize to the proper tint of
his/her choice — yay fun!) that can
be modified with different components (helmets, breastplates, gloves, etc.)
acquired from different manufacturers or looted on one of the missions.
Unlike the weapon system, this modification would be carried over to Mass Effect 3, probably because it
agreed pretty well with the general ideology prevailing in shooter games of
the same period. I cannot really tell if it makes me happy or sad, but if
pressed hard, I’d probably have to conclude that I liked the original design
better, though it was for aesthetic rather than pragmatic reasons. (It was actually fun to pick out different
matching ensembles for the Commander depending on the environment!). Also,
there’s very limited choice now in picking out different outfits for your
squad members, which is even more of a pity (and a wealth of opportunities,
of course, for legions of game modders). The
basic interface for dialog and combat, being an integral part of the original
Mass Experience, does largely
remain the same. Dialog is governed by the «click wheel», with Paragon-style
options usually at the top, Renegade-style answers at the bottom and «neutral»
replicas in between. Combat is operated by means of the HUD, which pauses the
game and gives you the options of issuing commands to your squadmates, using
your own powers, or simply taking a breather to determine the best available
course of action in a dangerous situation. For PC users, the necessity to use
the HUD, however, has slightly diminished since it is now possible to map out
not only Shepard’s powers, but also those of his squadmates, to a set of
keyboard shortcuts — for instance, you can realize a powerful biotic or tech
combo, ripping your enemy to shreds, merely by pressing a couple of number
keys, rather than having to bring the game to a temporary standstill,
disrupting the immersion. Overall, the interface has been quite significantly
improved for the convenience of shooter lovers (as is the entire combat
system, which we have already discussed above). Finally,
the mini-game and resource-collecting systems of Mass Effect have been dropped completely. In place of the frankly
annoying «decryption» game, where you had to crack lockers and containers by
nimbly guiding the cursor through a shifting maze of obstacles, Mass Effect 2 introduces a couple of
visual puzzles instead (such as matching two similar-looking pieces of «code»
or joining correlated circuits), which are just as annoying but (a) there’s
two of them, so that’s at least a little bit of diversity, (b) they have
cooler sound effects, (c) ...uh, can’t really think of anything. I think they
were ultimately hated by players as much as the ones in Mass Effect, so by the time the third game came along, the
developers got rid of the hacking system altogether (apparently, by the time
of the full-fledged Reaper invasion Commander Shepard’s powers had become so
awesome that all the complex computer systems simply hacked themselves in his
mere presence). The
other annoying grinding element of Mass
Effect — collecting resources scattered all over the different planets in
the galaxy — has also been converted to a whole different shade of annoyance.
The resources in question now have an actual in-game purpose (you need them
to make various improvements to the Normandy, crucial to the survival of your
crew members in the final mission, as well as to build various advanced
weapons), but to get them, you need to probe various planets, seeking out
particularly resource-rich environments and then «bombarding» them until they
slowly get depleted. The process looks quite cool at first, but, of course,
becomes more and more boring and monotonous as time goes by, especially since
it hardly requires any effort from the players — just their time. (It does,
of course, provide the basis for a cheap fun Easter egg when EDI, with a
sigh, has to report on «probing Uranus»
upon being prompted to do so — if, for some reason, you decide to hang around
the resource-poor Solar System). All in all, the introduced changes are smart
enough to let you know that BioWare developers are still open to exploring
new venues for exhausting the players’ efforts, and that they still have no clue on how to design a generally
satisfactory mini-game to save their lives. That
said, I have absolutely no aesthetic gripes with the interface. Shapes,
colors, transitions, sound effects, everything has been mildly improved upon,
Steve Jobs-style, to provide the coolest-looking and feeling experience. Even
if you’re grinding your teeth at the prospect of probing yet another generic
planet, the swishy-smooth sound of your resource bars filling up offers
subtle consolation all by itself. And I, for one, do not spend too much time
crying over all the shifting of balance from RPG-style to shooter-style
gameplay — not because I’m a bigger fan of shooters than RPGs, but because
none of these aspects really matter next to the character interaction and atmosphere
aspects of the game. The laconic bottomline is that Mass Effect 2 does offer the player a smoother and generally more
satisfying gameplay experience than Mass
Effect, at the expense of almost completely abandoning its RPG roots and
some of the clumsier-but-more-innovative features of its predecessor. Whether
this makes it a better or a worse game is up for debate, but this wouldn’t be
a debate I’d have a lot of personal interest in — my general position on such
matters is that, as long as you find the game aesthetically and spiritually
pleasing, you’ll eventually get used to its style of playing, no matter how
smooth or bumpy it is. |
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Verdict: A naturally mature sequel — carrying within itself all
the expected blessings and curses of maturity.
Yet just like in music, for
instance, we have multiple examples of bands and artists that, through their
own aesthetics, send out a poor signal for generations of imitators to come
but are still phenomenal in their own right (everybody from Queen to Bruce
Springsteen, etc.), so does Mass
Effect 2 point to a poorer future for sprawling, action-packed RPG epics
while in itself still remaining a masterpiece on so many levels. The smooth
and seamless shift from the brightness of the Galaxy’s wide open spaces to
dark matters of the heart and mind; the persistent brilliance of returning
and freshly recruited voice actors; the atmospheric qualities of the sounds
and visuals; the excitement of the new combat system; the endless moral
dilemmas of the Paragon vs. Renegade decisions — and that’s just if you take
the game on its own, but, as I already said multiple times, the only proper way to savor Mass Effect 2 is to take it as the logical
second stage of the original Mass
Effect, with the shift of emphasis between the two games counting as a
legitimate artistic achievement in itself. Returning to the parallels with The Empire Strikes Back, it becomes
more and more clear that those were not accidental: there is hardly any
single source more appropriate for pilfering the whole «shit has to get
darker» idea than Lucas’ sci-fi trilogy, even if Mass Effect 2 is most certainly not the first (and even more
certainly not the last) franchise to have adapted that idea to its own needs.
Yet where the two creations differ is the placement of the heart of that
darkness — in Star Wars, it is
firmly ensconced in the main storyline itself, while the most genuinely
disturbing and uncomfortable content of Mass
Effect 2 resides anywhere but
in the main storyline. Sure, images of thousands of living people kidnapped
by goofy insectoids to suck out their fluids and convert them to organic
biomass for their sinister purposes is gross enough, but it’s still cartoonishly
gross; nothing, really, compared to the unsettling reality of the
interplanetary prison system or the almost complete mafia takeover of all the
business affairs in this brand new world, or the depressing back stories for
most of your favorite characters. In the end, it’s a bit of a mess — it’s
like the entire team working on the game got this general directive to keep
things as noir as possible, and
then it was all up to the individual bits and pieces. But if you ask me,
messiness like this is far preferable to ideally calculated corporate
planning. One of the reasons for the
over-the-top appeal of Mass Effect 2
is, perhaps, its ability to imprint inside the player’s head the (still
somewhat illusive) idea of how «your choices really matter», as the final
outcome of the final mission does indeed depend on the decisions you made or
did not make over the course of the game — depending on how well you took
care of your ship and the psychological comfort of your team members, you
increase or decrease their chances of returning back safe and sound (and if
you fuck up real bad, you might not even come back alive yourself). Many
people have described their experiences with the end of the game as truly
nerve-wrecking, what with it becoming a rare example of a gaming situation
where you are skilfully manipulated into caring more about the benefit of
your friends than yourself — an «emotional roller coaster» that was lacking
in Mass Effect (where one of your
crew members dies regardless of your actions and the rest survive, also
regardless of your actions) and would only return in a diminished manner in Mass Effect 3 (where you are also
responsible for the death or survival of a large number of characters, but
it’s scattered all over the game rather than delivered in a single big
punch). This is, of course, not a specific
innovation of the game — there had already been plenty of adventure games and
RPGs where your actions influenced the final outcome — and, to be perfectly
accurate, it’s not so much a matter of actual «choice» as it is simply that
of playing the game properly. To
ensure the loyalty and psychological comfort of any select crew member, it
does not really matter (with a couple of exceptions, e.g. Tali’s trial for
treason) which particular choices you make at the end of their «loyalty
missions» — all that matters is that you complete them, period. The whole
thing could certainly have been fine-grained to far more subtle degrees. But
the effect lingers nevertheless, and since you are already more than likely
to have been emotionally charmed by many, if not most, of your companions,
being able to keep them alive at the end of the game matters much more than,
you know, saving the Galaxy and trillions of lives of organic beings to whom
you have no emotional attachment whatsoever (let alone the fact that, like,
90% of organic beings you encounter throughout Mass Effect 2 are hardly worth lifting a finger for, let alone
storming the Collector Base with your seven samurai). In this way, you can
really look at Mass Effect 2 as
the culmination of everything BioWare stood for from the beginning: namely,
using the RPG system to forge out a proper «team spirit» that grows out of a
chain of personal attachments. It is, I think, precisely for the
reason that this «team spirit» was somewhat downplayed in Mass Effect 3 in favor of the
mega-global-ultra-serious issues concerning the very tissue of the universe
itself that the third game could never carve out the same cozy niche in
players’ hearts as its little psychological predecessor did. It is for that particular reason that some
people are quite happy to play Mass
Effect 2 without completing the other two parts of the trilogy: they’re
going in for the ultimate «buddy experience», and it’s hard to blame them for
that. Indeed, within the context of the entire Mass Effect saga the buddy
story looks a bit extraneous — imagine, if you will, Seven Samurai embedded in the middle of the Star Wars trilogy (not as an influence, which it certainly was,
but as an actual part of the story). But video games, in which you are an
active force rather than a passive recipient, live on their own wild logic,
and I, for one, am more than happy to see Mass Effect 2 take about as many artistic risks as it makes
pre-planned moves. It’s a fascinating mix of conservatism and innovation,
creativity and calculation, genius and hackjob, artistic freedom and fan
service. It is inseparable from the two games that frame it upon both ends,
and it still has its own face. It gives you a good idea of almost everything
that can be wrong with a video game — and a flashing example of how to turn a
video game into an outstanding piece of art. |
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