Games

Morning Friends! There is something that you realize really quick when you attempt to go straight from a Mass Effect 3 playthrough into another Mass Effect save… the first game is such a downgrade as compared to the rest of the series. There are a lot of things that they had not quite figured out. Don’t get me wrong… the Legendary edition is so much better than anything that came before it. The controls are mostly standardized with the rest of the series and the models… while significantly lower fidelity still look pretty solid. What is most noticeable however is the dialog and how stiff the delivery is. Additionally there are just other things like the whole loot/encryption/omni-gel thing that doesn’t make a ton of sense… or the wide sweeping scope of the Citadel that serves to trap you there immediately following what is an otherwise action packed first mission.

I would be willing to bet that there are a large number of people who never actually make it off the Citadel. I had the benefit of the layout of everything being fairly fresh in my memory and I still found it a little painful. The best thing to come out of the trip to the Citadel is that you get your first three good crewmates in the form of Tali, Wrex and Garrus… which also means that I never again have to use Kaidan or Ashley. During the last playthrough I absolutely made the wrong choice between the two of them… and I will not be making that mistake this time around. I’ve never romanced Ashley… and I am trying to decide if I can hold my nose and go through with the space racist or not. The game suffers from not exactly having the best options that are not Liara… who disturbingly keeps telling you how young she is in Asari years.

The other thing that you notice is just how shitty the captain’s quarters are on this frigate. Like from the SR2 onwards you get this nice private deck that is exclusive to the commander with lots of cosmetic options and neat things like fish tanks, a stereo and even a display of your medals. In the first game on the SR1 you get a general purpose room that happens to have a bed at the back and you are certain is more conference room than quarters. In the later games this room gets used by Miranda and much later Liara so the layout doesn’t really change much because they all have an office and adjoining bedroom but there is some sort of separation between the two. I guess it really drills home how much of a “military frigate” the first design really was, and how much it became a general purpose exploration vehicle in later games.

I am starting to question if I am going to make it through a second playthrough myself to be honest. Something that completely snuck up on me is the fact that Phantasy Star Online 2 New Genesis released yesterday. I logged in for a bit last night and was completely confused as to why all of my characters were showing up from baseline PSO2. When they talked about cosmetics carrying over, I did not realize that it actually just meant that your characters from the first game were going to be in the second game. You can change the appearance but I was happy enough with my original CAST design to just keep moving forward with it. I did a bit of the tutorial before logging for the night. I did quickly realize however that the load times mean I really need to free up some space one one of my SSDs for the install.

Morning Friends! Last night I did in fact finish up my play through of Mass Effect Legendary edition. This morning I am going to try not to talk about anything terribly spoilery, which is sorta hard when most everything about this game series my brain takes for common knowledge. My memories were correct that when I started the mission to attack the enemy base, it was in fact a downward slide to the conclusion of the game. Weirdly in my brain I actually remembered the run up to the end being longer than it actually was last night. Side note, I talked about skipping dialog in my Mass Effect 1 discussion but that became less and less of a thing as I moved into 2 and 3. The dialog is just more compelling once you leave that first game.

I have no clue what the absolute maximum number of War Assets that you can gather are, but I feel like I got pretty close. I had read somewhere that you needed over 7000 to get the best possible endings, but I am not entirely certain what that number is. The problem is all data from before is out the window because the Legendary edition works differently. A decent chunk of your War Asset score comes from having made specific choices in the first and second game to unlock the ability to gain large caches of points in this one. There are a few things I would change but I think I got as close as I have ever gotten to the perfect playthrough… at least for someone like me who is extremely paragon minded.

One of the things that I greatly appreciate about the Mass Effect series is how by the time you reach the third game… you have spent a lot of time “living” in this universe. There are so many games that pull a third act turn that instead of a tightly focused foray, you now have the fate of the world hanging on your actions. The problem with this is that it often doesn’t feel earned… that you sorta step out into the high water and get swept along with the tide of the narrative. Given how much you go through in this series, by the time you reach the third act or third game in this case, it feels like it has earned the stakes that we are playing for. The game shows you from the very start just how overwhelming the odds are and that the only way we make it out of this alive is if we get all of the forces of the galaxy to band together in a tentative unity.

For me the game will always be best however, when I am jetting around the galaxy with my crew and completing little missions. I think this is why the second game in the series resonates so deeply with me because it is almost entirely “away missions”. You feel like you have plenty of time to spend getting to know your crew and shifting around using them for various missions. The problem with both ME2 and ME3 however is that you end up getting back Tali… my FAVORITE crewmember a bit too late in the game for it to feel like she makes a very meaningful impact on the decisions. There are a lot of things that I would change about how I played through Mass Effect 3. Most specifically a character died due to my actions that I would have preferred to have saved… but now I know specifically how to stop that from happening and it doesn’t require too much fiddling.

You might ask what I did last night after seeing the credits roll? Well I rebounded and created a new save as Male Shepard, aka the way I am honestly more comfortable playing the game. I liked playing as the Jennifer Hale voiced female Shepard quite a bit, but I still struggled with the romance options in the end. I also rushed my way through the first game, and I really should have spent more time doing Mako missions because I missed quite a few important sub plots and I am uncertain what influence those have on later missions. Since I am currently in need of good good feelings of nostalgia to get me through the bad bad chaos of my life… I am perfectly fine setting this on repeat for a bit and chilling out. I somehow doubt I will make it all the way through this second playthrough, because I can rarely play the same game twice in a row… but I guess we will see how that goes.

The other small miracle is that you have two blog posts in a row from me. Here is hoping I am “back” for now.