The Beginning of an Epic Story
Mass Effect marks the beginning of an, in the truest sense of the word, epic space opera, a rich, expanded universe, and pages and pages of history and mythology. Five years, two sequels, DLC missions, four novels, two iOS games, a plethora of comics, and an anime later, it’s difficult to look at Mass Effect without the lens of time and expanded universe. My initial excitement and investment proved in good faith and I have fallen down a deep hole. I tell you this so that you will please bear with me as I attempt to look at the very first game as a stand-alone product, mainly as a writing exercise and a moment to discuss a series I love.
Mass Effect is a third-person shooter/Bioware RPG hybrid, more RPG than shooter, with a dash of loot lust. The gameplay is basically evenly split between over-the-shoulder shooting, menu-driven inventory management, and exploring the universe through codex entries and dialogue trees.
The strength is definitely in the writing. Bioware has crafted an absolutely massive universe. Not only in the mythos and history, but also in sheer size and magnitude. There are dozens of systems you can travel to and within each system are several more planets. You can spend hours traveling to each planet and just reading about them. Believe me, I did. A large part of my time playing Mass Effect was spent in the codex reading every scrap of information provided for me. The long history of the various species is established throughout the game by conversations with NPCs, reading codex entries, and even reading the descriptions of planets can give you interesting tidbits of story. The amount of minutiae available is staggering. Right down to the population (where applicable), orbital distance and/or period, radius, atmospheric pressure, surface temperature and gravity, and length of day for each planet you can visit. Understandably, some people would find this level of detail terribly boring to sift through. Luckily, the storytelling is smart. How deep you choose to delve is entirely up to you. If you just want broad strokes of the story, enough to know who to shoot and where to go for your next objective, that is an option available to you. Zero questions asked, right down to business. Or any variable between these two extremes.
Playing, rather than reading, Mass Effect is a good time in its own way. Primarily, your time is spent shooting enemies with a variety of guns and ammo types, sabotaging their weapons and shields with tech abilities, and/or blasting them with biotic (think Force-like) powers. The availability of weapons and powers is decided by what class you choose, Soldier, Engineer, Adept, Vanguard, Sentinel, or Infiltrator. The powers are a great deal of fun, whether it’s throwing enemies around like ragdolls and creating damaging fields of mental energy with biotic powers or overloading shields and overheating guns with tech abilities. The gunplay is smooth enough to get the job done, if nothing to write home about, with standard shooter firearms; you’ve got your choice of pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, sniper rifle, and grenade launcher. There are a variety of weapons from different manufacturers with differing aesthetics, several modifiers for your firearms to increase your shield penetration or improve your radar, and numerous types of ammunition to do anything from increase damage against synthetic organisms to catch things on fire.
The weapons, armor, and augmentations you’re using can be found throughout the game from merchants and crates about the world. Inventory management will be important due to the limited number of items you can carry. Anything picked up that’s not better than what you’re currently using can be sold for credits or broken down for omni-gel, which you’ll use to repair your damaged vehicle when on a planet’s surface and as a sort of catch-all for opening locks you fail to hack with a mini-game. If you’re the type of gamer who has to pick up everything and search every treasure chest, about halfway through you will almost never want for money or omni-gel. To the point I was slathering omni-gel over every lock without even trying to hack it first and merely watching my credit counter rise after buying the best weapons and armor.
The other part of gameplay, and the part that everyone talked about, is completely menu-driven. Allow me to get this out of the way first: the conversations in Mass Effect are somewhat limited by being a fairly binary good/bad (Paragon/Renegade) system, though that’s coming from a person who’s never been an advocate for morality systems in games. Whichever option you choose nets you points and raises its respective meter unlocking dialogue options, missions, and higher sell or lower purchase prices at merchants. What that means is if you want the best unlockables you should choose one category almost exclusively and absolutely avoid neutral dialogue options that net you little to no points either way. This lowered incentive to roleplay a more realistic character who’s not entirely good or evil hurts the game overall.
That being said, the characters are very well-written. I can not overstate how fantastic the writing of Mass Effect is. There is empathy with characters in horrible situations, anger with bull-headed reasoning and characters who won’t listen to sense, and shared joy and triumph with characters who overcome hardships. The dialogue choices themselves run the gamut of nice, neutral, and mean and give you the option to shelter a species on the brink of extinction, intimidate reporters in a way that makes your skin crawl, and calm allies and friends on the edge of violence and ruin.
Despite my high praise, Mass Effect is not perfect. The side quests can be overwhelming if you try to do it all at once, especially with some of it being very generic and uninteresting. Additionally, if it involves driving around in the Mako, the vast majority of people can end up bored to tears. Personally, I found driving around relaxing, but I can acknowledge that’s an atypical opinion. It’s easy to burn yourself out, though that’s easily fixed by doing some story missions.
However, those are the only complaints I have to level against the game. It’s very well-written, to the point that during a second playthrough I was extremely uncomfortable and honestly felt guilty being a jerk to characters I had grown to love my first time through. A short anecdote: there’s a decision in the game centered on genocide. In my second playthrough I opted to destroy the last of the species and it struggled. It fought to survive and ultimately died. And it made me teary-eyed. The third-person shooting isn’t anything special, but it certainly won’t drive you away or keep you from enjoying the fiction. It’s capable enough that you can nail truly satisfying headshots. Mass Effect marks the beginning of one of my favorite franchises of all time. It’s a game I loved to play when it first came out, still truly enjoy playing today, and highly recommend for any science fiction and RPG fan.
