Critique: Mass Effect 2

*Spoilers ahead!* Since I am talking about how the story works, I obviously have to talk about specific things that happen.

Mass Effect 2 in a word is Huge! The guns are huge! The ships are huge! The stakes are huge! Even some of your crew members could be described as huge. If you wanted to know the nitty gritty details about how the engines for the starships work or how inter-alien politics have been progressing for the past 20 years you can! All thanks to a huge codex included within the game. “Enslaved” liked to present itself as a story based game, but its story would be crushed by the sheer weight of text that the people at Bioware produced for Mass Effect 2. So despite the fact that this game has been talked about by everyone and their dog already, I figure it still merits critique here for its sheer hugeness.

I should mention that I never played Mass Effect 1. Looking back on it I don’t really know why. Science fiction has always been an interest of mine, especially when it involves killer robots, cool space ships and shouting at aliens. I did read up on what happened in it, so it’s not like I went into Mass Effect 2 completely blind.

Because Mass Effect 2 is so dang massive I am not going to try to critique everything in one post. It would take too long to read quite frankly. So this critique is only going to focus on the main storyline and completely ignore the crewmember stories. I might post those at some later date.

Character Rundown:

I am leaving out quite a few characters; the ones here are just the ones that concern the main storyline and only the main storyline. Many of the other crewmembers are important to the overall Mass Effect 2 experience, but most of them don’t contribute to the main storyline beyond basic exposition of ‘oh, they are bad guys and I don’t like them’ or ‘lets go here because yeah’.

–      Shepard: Player character. You get to pick the looks, gender, and even first name! Since this is an RPG with a dual morality system, you do get some control over whether Shepard will be a nice, reasonable person or a hardboiled jerkass. Has a really creepy smile animation.

–      Joker: Your ship’s pilot. When everyone else is off being grim and serious he usually has a little joke to tell or some smug assertion to make about himself. Can be serious when needed, but pretty much never is. A well put together character.

–      EDI: Your ship’s female voiced onboard A.I. Does standard science fiction A.I. stuff like analyze data, let you know when shields are down and occasionally makes bad jokes that worry humans. Joker doesn’t like EDI to start with, but over time the two learn to get along.

–      The Illusive Man: Technically your boss. Also an antagonist of sorts. He runs Cerberus, which is seen by half of the galaxy as a crazy terrorist group and by the other half as a crazy human supremacy group. He views Shepard and his crew in the same way most people view a favorite hammer. Spends most of his time sitting around, smoking, and endangering your life.

–      Harbinger: The main antagonist who you initially think is a Collector alien, but is really a Reaper controlling a Collector. Standard evil machine personality: wants to kill you, wants to harvest/kill all humans. Nothing more nothing less.

The setup goes something like this. You are Commander Shepard, fresh from your exploits in Mass Effect 1 where you hunted down a renegade galactic secret agent named Saren and helped destroy the Reaper (a race of giant robot ships that want to kill everything for some unknown reason) he was working for. You are a pretty important person! So important that within minutes of the game starting your ship is totally demolished by an unknown alien ship. Shepard gets thrown into space, and is last seen reentering the atmosphere of a nearby planet. Shepard doesn’t survive.

While being reduced to goo and ash would usually stop most people, Shepard gets a second chance. The Illusive Man has one of his trusted officers and future crewmember of yours, Miranda, head up a project that brings Shepard back from the dead and gives him a brand new spaceship. The reason? Mysterious aliens called Collectors are going around…collecting…human colonies for some reason and nobody is doing anything about it. Oh and the Collectors are the ones who killed Shepard earlier, so that’s double jerk points for them.

From here the story settles into a comfortable pattern of story mission – side missions – story mission – side missions – repeat. You could just blast through all of the story missions, but that isn’t what Mass Effect 2 is all about and you would end up with a horrible ending anyway. See, Mass Effect 2 isn’t really set up like a movie where all of the viewer’s attention is focused on the main storyline. Instead it is more like a season of a science fiction TV show. You have lots of little side stories (sometimes very important ones!) spliced in among the episodes that actually further the main conflict. The main conflict of course being that the Reapers want to return to the known galaxy and kill all sentient life. They claim it’s their day job.

Anyway, things happen. You find out that the Collectors are really some ancient alien that lost to the Reapers and were thus mutated into their current form to function as mindless drones. Creepy, but nothing new as we already knew that the Reapers were capable of this from the first game. Plus it doesn’t really raise the stakes as the Reapers are already out to kill everybody, being a mindless drone is a debatably better outcome depending on your personal views. But now back to the story. The Illusive Man endangers you a few times for the sake of gaining new information about the Collectors and then you finally fly off to confront the Collectors at their home base. There you find out why the Collectors wanted so many humans, to melt them down and use them as part of a giant Human-Reaper! Ew. Luckily for you it isn’t fully functional and you smash it to smithereens. Depending on your choices you can then either blow up the base action movie style or let The Illusive Man gain control of it, ‘realistic’ conspiracy movie style.

That’s really all there is to the main plot. Execution wise Mass Effect 2 is near perfect. The music is nicely done, voice acting is top notch, and the dialog is really well written. Many games end up murdering any chance they have at an engrossing storyline by paying their voice actors in literal peanuts and putting off dialog writing until ‘tomorrow’. Mass Effect 2 bypasses all these pot holes but I can’t shake the feeling that we were just wasting time until the grand finale in Mass Effect 3. Nothing ‘new’ really comes up in the story. Yes, Shepard dies but he only does so because this particular sequel required a reset button. Yes, you learn how new Reapers are built but this is not really important either as it doesn’t change anything in the big picture. The Reapers are still coming to kill you, and really this plot point could have been covered in one mission in Mass Effect 3.

So with plot out of the way, let’s discuss antagonists. Mass Effect 2 has, appropriately enough, two of them. The first and most villainous would be Harbinger. Harbinger makes a great first impression; it has cool evil voice, some neat powers (it can take over the body of any Collector to personally sling bullets and insults at you) and even has a number of great one-liners. However, Harbinger doesn’t develop at all after the first 5 minutes of being introduced. In short, Harbinger is kind of dull. It doesn’t really stand for or represent anything and Harbinger has no discernible motivation for what it does. It’s actually hard to full on hate Harbinger because it has no personality! Fish swim, dogs pee on trees, cats barf on the floor and Harbinger wants to kill you. That’s just what it does, there’s no real reason for it. Outside of belittling Shepard during combat Harbinger barely interacts with Shepard. There’s no hate filled dialogue between the two, no wonderfully evil machinations on Harbingers part, no sympathy for the devil. Harbinger is treated like an obstacle for the player, like a stuck bathroom stall door. You want to break it down because you have to go, but not for anything deeper than that. Harbinger deserved better. Perhaps it could have been a very ambitious Reaper who wants to ascend to the top of the Reaper political spectrum, or maybe Harbinger could have had a sadistic streak only matched by its excessive politeness. Heck, Bioware could have even pulled some heart strings by subtly implying that Harbinger actually gave a damn about its Collector minions and their well being even though Reapers are supposed to be ruthless robotic mass murderers. That last suggestion could have even helped set up a new grudge match for Mass Effect 3 with a very angry Harbinger coming to destroy Shepard personally for killing off its favorite minions.

The Illusive Man is the other antagonist. He is a lot more subtle than Harbinger and far more helpful. In fact, you kind of owe The Illusive Man when you think about it. He brought your dead butt back to life, gave you a spaceship, and lets you roam free about the galaxy to hopefully kill his enemies. Of course, he does keep you on a bit of a leash and constantly puts you in dangerous situations that he often made worse on purpose in order to gather more information. But, that is what makes him interesting as a character. You need and kind of owe him, but at the same time you cannot trust this man. The main issue I have with him is that he isn’t presented as a credible threat. Nobody in game supports or likes The Illusive Man. Not even his officer, Miranda, goes to bat for him really. She says about 3 nice things about him throughout the game and that’s it. Most of time it feels like it’s Shepard and his entire crew vs The Illusive Man. Since you never interact with or see anyone who supports him, you don’t feel like he has any true power beyond berating you when Shepard talks back to him. Combine that with the fact that you can be as verbally mean as you want to The Illusive Man with no repercussions (except for the last decision about the Collector base) and you get an antagonist that seems like they should be dangerous, but is not presented as such. He really needed an ally of some sort or at least be shown ordering about his devout underlings because right now he just seems like some rich guy who helped you out instead of the most mysterious and possibly most dangerous human in the galaxy.

My Creative Changes

There isn’t really anything fundamentally wrong with Mass Effect 2’s story and how its presented. If anything, I would say that the story needed some more…depth and grip. For the main storyline I didn’t really feel on the edge of my seat until the very last mission. This is possibly due to the stakes being much lower in this game than in Mass Effect 1. There the entire universe was at stake there as the head villains were blowing everybody up and getting ready to open a portal to let the Reaper army invade. Quite a big deal. Here we have some henchbug villains running around pillaging poor defenseless human colonies out in the backwaters of known space. That’s a huge relegation in terms of importance. I think that this was done on purpose to create a more personal storyline. You know, a story about a human directly saving other humans. I don’t think it really works. Shepard and crew don’t have any ties to humanity beyond an abstract desire to save humanity for its own sake. The player is far more interested in the preservation of their own character and crew rather than unseen virtual humans.

One aspect of the story that I would have liked to have seen given more importance would be Shepard’s death and rebirth. He died and came back to life from nothing more than dust and fragments of bone and yet nobody he meets is even slightly interested in this! Nobody even asks Shepard if there is an afterlife! I find this very hard to believe. Ok, most people just thought that Shepard’s death was falsely reported and Shepard himself never goes into talking about it. But I found this all very strange. Doubly so when it becomes apparent that Shepard is now far tougher and stronger than any other human. You can easily operate weapons that are described as having recoil that can ‘break the arm of a human’ and drink all sorts of poisonous beverages with no long term consequences. Combine this with the fact that Miranda offhandedly mentioned that they used ‘a lot of cybernetics’ in putting Shepard back together and I would think that the question of ‘am I really the same Shepard?” would come up. I was always kind of hoping that Shepard would start wondering if he/she really is the old Shepard brought back to life. Or perhaps he/she is actually some kind of clone or cyborg that is an exact indistinguishable copy of Shepard down to the memories. This line of thinking could have made the story very creepy and deeply personal for Shepard. I like to think that if the main character thinks something is important and interesting, then your audience will too. And that’s really all you can ask for when making fiction, the interest of your audience.