Mass Effect Legendary Thoughts

My world is still very much in a fucked up state right now, but occasionally I get home early enough in the evening to play a little bit of something before falling asleep and starting the process all over again. Right now I am leaning heavily on two experiences, one of which I know EXTREMELY well at this point and with the recent release of the “Legendary” edition it Mass Effect 1 has represented the majority of my game time. I’ve played through the game a number of times at this point including playthroughs where I link all three games up together like I am doing right now. I am still in the first title but I am in that spiral of events that leads towards the end right now.

The key differentiator this time however is that I am playing as “FemShep” or the female version of Commander Shepard voiced by the very excellent Jennifer Hale. I opted to go with Vanilla Shepard because if given my druthers I am almost always going to create a red headed character when I am creating female characters. I know from past experiences with the character creator… that it is very easy to create something that looks kinda fucked up in cinematics.. my first Shepard appearance was this way so I thought it safest just to go with what the experts created for me.

The weird part for me right now with this playthrough, is that for the last decade I have been told by friends that I trust and admire… that I chose the wrong Shepard to play in picking the male Mark Meer voiced version. So I had this built up in my head to be this earth shattering experience that was going to change my perspective on the franchise. The truth is… it feels almost exactly the same to me? I notice the better graphics with the Legendary edition and better mechanics, but the voice actor doesn’t seem to really matter that much to me. I still find myself hitting space to speed up the dialog because I can read so much faster than the actor can deliver the dialog. I still have that general feeling of “yeah yeah, lets get back to the fighting” that I did with Mark Meer at the helm.

I’ve also been told that I would appreciate Kaidan Alenko more as a female character… but no he still annoys the fuck out of me. I think I might just hate Raphael Sbarge because I also hate Carth Onasi. Incoming spoilers if you have never played this game… skip the rest of this paragraph. Last night I played through Virmire and I already feel like I chose the wrong choice. Like Ashley Williams is racist as fuck but I take pleasure it telling her to shut the fuck up about it and stop being so horrible when the game gives me the option. Kaidan on the other hand never stops being this wet blanket character that I actively want to push out the airlock, and mistakes basic human decency as me wanting to snuggle up with him. Mass Effect is a game about me hanging out with a bunch of interesting Aliens and as a result I NEVER use any of the human characters in ME1. In ME2 we get Jacob and Jack which are both awesome… but still I mostly run around with a bunch of Aliens.

The Mako is much better than it was in the original release of this game… but the Mako levels are still the worst thing about the experience. Legendary edition significantly helped Mass Effect 1 feeling more in line with the rest of the franchise, but it still feels clunky but a more reasonable version of clunky. Instead of feeling like an odd throwback to an earlier time… it just sorta feels like playing a game from a B Tier studio like Spiders. The pretty is appreciated but I guess there was only so much they could do with the way the game felt and performed mechanically without doing a port to one of the newer engines.

I did apply a field of view mod to the game and you can see the difference between this screenshot and the one earlier. This game defaults to a FOV that is zoomed in way the hell too close and makes me feel claustrophobic. If you are interested the mod supports all three games, which should allow me to have a similar FOV in each of them. My basic takeaway is that I am having a lot of fun playing the game again and experience it all over with a fresh coat of paint. The sub summary is that apparently the voice actor and gender of the protagonist doesn’t matter that much to my overall experience. I couldn’t have a decent beard with “HimShep” so I really didn’t have much attachment to that version of the character or at least no more or less than I have so far with “FemmeShep”. Both were very much me playing someone else in a video game and not me creating a character that represented me.