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.
Bel, your character looks like a gundam. Not like “kind of a little bit”, I mean you look like a green version of the Sinanju.