Daft, while I respect your opinion on things, there are times...
I find the fact that review cited Assassins Creed as a counter to the contrivance of Mass Effect 2's story an instance of the most bizarre stupidity imaginable. Yeah, let’s basically make the Matrix, as an absurdly convenient excuse to let you run around in renaissance Italy with minimum exigency, because that's not the lowest hanging narrative fruit imaginable, right? The fact that Mass Effect harvests practically every cliche in the Sci-Fi book is not beyond my understanding, from the Protheans to the Mass Relays being essentially adaptations from the Ancients and Gates in Stargate, to the Geth which are reminiscent of the replicators. The thing is, Mass Effect is just another Sci Fi world, but having said that, it is well contained and fairly holistic. There is always an explanation for everything that is consistent with the Meta logic and world of the game.
Nevertheless, the idea that the game has no soul is both narrow minded and ignoring the very element that gives its story shape; the fact that it is the game at the forefront of my mind when I think of player agency and impact on the way the narrative unveils itself. This is why we play games; collaborative storytelling. You cite Uncharted 2, which is heavily scripted and essentially linear. Any capacity the player has for self expression in the narrative comes from the mechanics themselves, and these have little consequence in the world, other than the way in which your proficiency affects your progression. Hell, there is more capacity for expression in something like Team Fortress 2, which, in the absence of story is abstract enough that you can create your own mini narratives within the microcosm of every death match, just because of the emergence of it all. You’re familiar with the theory of emergence right? The idea that a small set of simple rules can lead to a greatly complex set of possibilities. Still, Mass Effect was fantastic in this regard; you could approach every combat encounter from a multitude of different angles, depending on your character class, the skills you’ve chosen and upgraded, and the weapons you’re holding. On top of this is the fact that you could also choose from a fairly sizeable host of characters to take with you on missions, all of whom have their own peculiarities and traits that affect their attributes, and by extension, the attributes of your group in a combat situation. Even though this is the case, this is not even close to the main reason why Mass Effect 2 holds so much esteem in my eyes:
You are the very thing that gives it soul. Unlike a film, you can’t just sit there and let it happen at you, you have to participate, and the more you invest, the better you’re rewarded. Mass Effect 2 is a huge progression within the sub genre of what I like to call “morality games,” that Bioware seem to have something of a monopoly on. When you talk to people about how they played Fallout 3, or Dragon Age or even the original Mass Effect, it was always set of categorical imperatives in mind. I will play this as a saint, or I will play this as fuckin’ Hitler, and this was because the mechanisms by which the morality system work weren’t nuanced enough to reward weighing every decision on its own merits, and your progression was only really accelerated by consciously choosing to act on the extreme ends of the moral spectrum. You never really played as “yourself,” or a projection of yourself into the game world, because there was no real means to do so.
This was completely overhauled for Mass Effect 2, partly by virtue of the fact that neither the combat, nor your moral alignment had much of an impact of your stats, and levelling was staggered so that it only occurred at the end of each chapter. In this way Mass Effect 2 is a true RPG, because you are actually playing a role, instead of ramping up a series of abstract statistics and declaring that these constitute your character, and letting these be what drives your play. What was even better is the fact that within the cut-scenes that detailed parts of the story, you were given the ability to make quick split second decisions regarding the course of action your character would take. Just the very fact that these have to be made on the fly means that you don’t have time to sit there and hypothesise on values alien to you, you act on your gut, and it is these split decisions that most greatly characterise you as a person (at least if you believe Malcolm Gladwell’s theories in Blink). And finally, because in most games, your considerations are usually tied to what the immediate reward of an action is going to be, as well as how it affects the usually binary outcome in the ending. This is not the case with this series of games, since even what you did in the first Mass Effect had extensive reverberations in the second game, and these are only amplified by the additional agency you are given in Mass Effect 2. Everyone whom I have talked to has taken completely diverging paths throughout the game in terms of their reactions to events, and their inevitable outcomes, especially the ending which I’m sure will have huge implications for the following game.
Not only this, but the character interactions can be fucking fascinating. For example (and this may seem far-fetched initially, but stick with me) I was reading as part of my course, some Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his theories on epistemology, which is essentially like objectivist epistemology, wherein he believes that the world is like the Rosetta Stone, and we as humans have an innate ability (as long as this isn’t hampered by too much social and cultural nurture that distorts this ability) to correlate our understanding with the natural world, and therefore come to the same conclusions, and fill in a directly correlative understanding of the world, piece by piece. Personally, I call this bullshit, because every human has a different interpretive paradigm built in, but imagine my surprise, when Legion, a machine comes and tells you this very thing about the way in which his race interpret phenomena, and have a collective consciousness with which to piece it together. What is even more exciting (to me...I’m not sure that everyone else is riveted by this so far...) is how he asks you, a human, to make a crucial decision on the fate of a divergent sect of his race... well...my mind was a bit blown, but I may just be insane...
The beef that guy had with the elevators being replaced by loading screens is absurd. This is a videogame – one that is incredibly impressive in terms of visuals, sound and presentation – what does that guy expect, gold, frankincense and myrrh on a platter? On top of this, the presentation of the loading screens only serves to distract you from the fairly minuscule loading times as it is, since they’re always blueprints or diagrams detailing things from the way that your ship docks, to, the external structure of the Citadel, combining to create a sense of the game world being one that isn’t fragmented and poorly glued together, but one that is very cogent.
The final point about the Asari who kills by mating, well, that is entirely consistent with the race in question. Come on, their sexual morphology shifts to accommodate any gender and race, their elders are call “Matriarchs.” Yes. Feminine over sexualisation is fairly explicit in these creatures, but then again, every Sci-Fi universe in existence has some equivalent, from the Twileks in Star Wars to the fact that every green ass puke coloured alien in Star Trek had a humanoid supermodel physique. It’s just a trope, and I thought that Mass Effect did something pretty inventive with it. And hey, I’m no xenobiologist, but I thought the games internal encyclopaedia provided some sustainable explanations. I think that guys reference to “mother issues” was totally redolent of the reflexive nature of vulgar Freudians wherein everything has to have some implications within their insipid discourse of understanding. Fuck off you utter twats.
In conclusion; if you don’t like Mass Effect 2, that’s all fine and good, but don’t come and present utterly philistine arguments, that are nothing if not petty reductions, for why that may be the case.
Edit: Urr...shit. Didn't realise the post was that long...
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