A Story Analysis of Mass Effect 2

with the main threat of the world now revealed mass effect no longer has to tiptoe around it anymore and can dedicate all its time to fleshing out the reapers and while that sounds like a great idea mass effect 2 wouldn't do that the reapers are still an integral part of the game and there are some crucial details about them that we will learn about in this game but it's so secret that mass effect 2 put that on the back burner for the time being the series is known for its incredible world building likable characters and main story but bioware this time around really decided to double down on those characters as not only has our companionless doubled but they were given various quests involving their own backstories despite this change however i liked it in fact to this day mass effect 2 is still my favorite in the series because of its focus on the companions to explain why i think this i should probably start talking about the game itself so without further ado let's get started the beginning of the game starts with two characters miranda and the elusive man both of them know of shepard and agree that having him fight the geth is not worth his time since the reapers are the real threat it's refreshing to finally hear someone agree with shepard until we realize that these two belong to cerberus we talked about them briefly when discussing mass effect 1 as we came across some of their experiments when traveling the galaxy afterward a paragraph of text will tell us that it's been about a month since the ending of mass effect 1 and that the official report is that saren and the gathered the council not the reapers somehow the evidence has literally slapped them in the face and they still continue to deny it thankfully though we don't have to keep reporting to the council like in mass effect 1. the question now though is how do you start the game by blowing up the normandy shepherd and the crew are attacked by some unknown threat and are forced to evacuate but to make matters worse shepard couldn't get an escape pod in time so while most of the crew managed to make it out alive shepard did not and he dies that is a pretty intense way to start a game but shepard obviously isn't dead or else this story wouldn't exist but that also raises various questions as to how a human was blown out of a ship and possibly crashed into a planet and managed to live the answer is space magic and money well that's the short version anyway miranda and the elusive man managed to find shepard's body and stitch him back together but shepard has now awoken in the middle of a firefight as the station he is on is being attacked so now just minutes after waking up has to fight to survive again the story is going pretty fast at this point so let's dial it back and explain what's going on one of the first people we'll meet upon waking up is jacob he's a soldier for cerberus and will fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge two years ago shepard was attacked by a mysterious ship and killed cerberus managed to find his body and created project lazarus where the sole objective was to bring shepard back to life the elusive man says that he has taken many gambles in his life and knows where to put his money and after realizing that shepard was the only person that was able to actually do something about the reapers he decided that making sure he's alive was critical to the galaxy's survival losing shepherd would be one of the biggest blows to not only humanity but all life in the galaxy not just because he's the main character but is because of what the elusive man said he was the only one who discovered the reapers and went against the council to find out more about them in order to take them down if someone like that were to die then the world would be at a massive disadvantage the fact that shepard is also a human helps cerberus as well considering they are human extremists cerberus first started soon after the contact wars between the humans and turians a manifesto was written after that war that called for a cerberus to guard against the invasion the author of this manifesto fell off the radar along with their work but it wasn't long before people started using the name to highlight their misdeeds for example around the year 2160 terrorists stole some antimatter and the leader of the group claimed that their sponsor was cerberus and for the next decade cerberus agents were assassinating politicians sabotaging starships and conducting experiments on aliens and humans many in the media call them human extremists they prefer the term human survivalist but that was quite a long time ago it seems that the company has recently gone under new management as cerberus has now been stockpiling ships agents and weapons but under council law cerberus is still deemed a terrorist threat the reason they haven't been caught is mostly due to their command structure the elusive man has taken drastic steps to hide his identity and make sure no one can undermine his operations despite what many may think cerberus is still doing human and alien experiments and even experimenting with geth and reaper technology the reason why most of this is unknown is because each group works in cells for example project lazarus also called the lazarus cell is only known to that group so no one in cerberus is given information on the other members in cerberus so as not to corrupt other groups plans so project lazarus is only known to those within the project and since miranda is the leader of this specific cell she's the only one who can talk to the elusive man coupled with the fact that cerberus is filled with private agencies and front companies it's pretty clear how they managed to not be caught yet as for how they acquired shepard's body well after dying to the collectors a group of beings we'll talk about in a moment they ended up contacting the shadow broker in order to find his body but cerberus managed to get to them first thanks to them hiring liara and a man named farron despite knowing that cerberus were extremists liar works with them anyway since they promised that shepard would be revived if he was given to them this also brings up a good point what happened to the crew according to jacob everyone made it out of the ship alive except some of the servicemen and navigator presley this means that all of our companions managed to make it out of the ship alive but since they aren't part of the alliance and only joined because of shepherd's mission many of them most likely left before the destruction of the normandy happened anyway after escaping the initial firefight would jacob the two meet with miranda and take a shuttle out of the facility shepard then finally gets to meet with the elusive man himself he never meets face to face due to the aforementioned details regarding cerberus but even if that wasn't the case i can't blame him look at this view if i was him i would force everyone to meet me like this so i can constantly keep looking at this view shepard clearly doesn't like working for cerberus but the elusive man tells him they have a common goal just different methods of acquiring it now under normal circumstances cerberus would likely not be gathering allies to start a war but recently the collectors are not only abducting humans from various colonies but it's also assumed that they work for the reapers given that cerberus is all about the advancement of humanity and the elusive man in particular wants to destroy the reapers you can see why he wants shepard alive and working for them shepard then asks why the alliance or the council isn't moving in on these collectors to which the elusive man states that all of those decisions require documents and politics plus claiming that the threat of the human colonies is from an ancient life-ending enemy from thousands of years ago would not help morale the elusive man and cerberus do not need to worry about all that though if he wants people to investigate a colony or set up a base on a remote planet it can be done within the same day this change in the chain of command is rather interesting and presents a choice for the player no matter what happens shepard has to work for them there's no way to decline but there are various choices throughout the game that can benefit them like handing over a collector base or selling them geth tech the player is given the choice to help them but the choice can be very conflicting cerberus is an extremist company that only cares about humanity they claim to care about the reapers and they do but that's only because humanity is at risk of becoming extinct as well if there was some disease that was spreading that was threatening the lives of the asari or the turians cerberus likely wouldn't lose any sleep over it as he said earlier both the elusive man and shepherd have the same goals but different methods so the player is forced to work with an extremist group because they can help him defeat the reapers but you also have to consider that cerberus saved his life and they also understand that the reapers are the real threat unlike the council who refuses to believe the truth bioware managed to create a conflict from the very beginning as cerberus while a bad company is actually very helpful in regards to providing info on the reapers and what their next moves could be cerberus in this game at least when discussing things involving shepard is an in-between kind of company they're not bad people but they definitely aren't good either the player will have to decide how they feel about cerberus and make judgments based on those feelings and i think the way they paint cerberus in this game was very well done it's pretty easy to consider them terrorists in mass effect 1 but now that we're working with them we have to reconsider our initial decision but before we make any of those decisions we need to actually see his claims for ourself the elusive man then provides him with a shuttle that will take him to freedom's progress a recently abducted human colony so that shepard can see for himself what's going on this colony is located in the terminus system which if you remember was the upper part of the milky way the majority of the game will take place here which is why a lot of the enemies we run into aren't just normal geth by the time you make it to freedom's progress you'll notice that the gameplay has changed quite a bit geth are no longer the major enemy in this game and the weapons we carry have ammunition as opposed to the previous game which had infinite ammo this change created some backlash and confusion amongst the community which led to bioware making an in-law reason for its decision in mass effect 3. this decision is actually a great lesson in game design in that not everything has to be explained with lore you might think considering how much i talk about stories on this channel that a small detail like this would be a great idea but it's not i think this inclusion is pretty stupid at the end of the day it's just gameplay the team likely wanted the game to be more intense so taking away infinite ammo would force the player to use new weapons and equipment instead of the same weapon not everything is going to make sense in a video game especially when it involves gameplay including lore about them is like extra credit no one's gonna penalize you for doing it but you'll get bonus points for doing so the problem is that this isn't explained until a future game so it's clear bioware made the lore around the gameplay rather than the other way around they likely created the ammo change first and then thought about a story explanation later because they realized that a justification for it would be necessary at the end of the day though i don't really care and in terms of gameplay i do actually prefer the thermal clips more than overheating but that's really just down to preference mass effect 2 also allows the player to import their character from mass effect 1. so our decisions from the previous video will be carried over into this one allowing for a truly unique story furthermore the game even gives us a chance to change our class and i just couldn't help myself i told myself before this playthrough that i would try soldier again but i just couldn't do it i have a soft spot for the vanguard class and it's mass effect 2 that created that in the original game you were given a sniper shotgun assault rifle and pistol but each class had different benefits like the vanguard that excelled in pistols at shotguns back then you were only able to rank up those weapons but you could still use the sniper and assault rifle if you wanted to mass effect 2 did away with this system and forces the player to use specific weapons if you like the classic feel then the soldier is perfect as you can access just about every weapon but the vanguard can no longer use that assault rifle and sniper rifle anymore i like this change as it actually sets each class apart from one another soldiers get more weapons but no biotic abilities whereas the vanguard gets fewer weapons but more biotics and let me tell you some of these biotics are insane after dealing with some of the mechs we'll end up meeting another group here on freedom's progress and we also get to see a familiar face toddley zora is still alive and is with a group of other quarians looking for their friend vitor vitor is another quarian who came here as a part of his pilgrimage he wanted to help out a small settlement and decided that freedom's progress could use his assistance that's of course until the collectors came and decided to abduct the people of freedom's progress so now they're trying to make sure vitor is still alive stopping us from reaching vitor is a giant mech and this also highlights another change in the game's combat system not only do enemies have more layers of health but the layers are different now enemies in mass effect 1 had health and the occasional shield but this recent entry adds barriers and armor to the mix as well at face value they aren't too different but the values of damage can change depending on the weapon ammo type and layer of health this also adds numerous layers of depth to the companions as various companions can equip different ammo types like disruptor rounds for shields and armor piercing for armor and various biotic abilities won't be able to work if specific layers are the current health bar such as incinerate which is only effective against health so if the enemy has an armor or shield up first you're not allowed to use it after the defeat of the mech we can meet with vitor and once again we have another change but this time it's in dialogue which is the interop system in mass effect 1 paragon and renegade were only acquired through dialogue choices but now you can gain these points using interrupts as well many of these are as you would expect paragon choices are used for stopping people from shooting someone or saving someone's life whereas renegade usually involves taking someone's life this was a nice addition to the karma system as many players likely pick choices based on a predetermined idea of how they wanted to play the game rather than the context of the situation in fact that's actually the exact reason why andromeda would remove this entirely the interrupts were a nice way to change this as you have to actively be paying attention to the game to find them and not every interaction will have one plus you might just be choosing to go against your paragon or renegade if one choice is better than the other such as in this example where i'm playing as a paragon playthrough but deem this renegade action necessary since this krogan was talking me and my crew personally i prefer the renegade actions the most as they vary depending on the situation most of the paragon choices you can pretty much see coming like this woman who was crying because she lost her daughter and the paragon interrupts he's shepard consoling her and letting her know that her daughter's killer will be dealt with the renegade options allow for more variety like with this reporter who is annoying shepard and instead of just talking her down and causing a scene like i thought she would shepherd just completely folds her sacrificing i've had enough of your disingenuous assertions regardless i think giving the player more opportunities to be like their character is wonderful and these interrupts are a great way to do that getting back to vitor he explains that he was hiding here because he was trying to get away from the monsters and swarms those monsters he's talking about are the collectors a species of beings beyond the omega 4 relay we know that mass effect has various mass relays throughout the galaxy while the omega 4 relay is similar in function but where it varies is the destination no one knows where the omega 4 relay actually goes no one wants to find out and anyone that has tried hasn't come back the only group that has been able to make it back and forth is the collectors but the collectors themselves are seen as myths barely anybody has seen a collector before and anyone who has pretty much ends up like anyone in freedom's progress but you may have noticed from the footage that no blood or signs of combat were shown so how is that possible well the collectors use something called seeker swarms which are these little bugs that when touched frees the person in place allowing them to be taken and kidnapped this also means that they can clean up all evidence related to them since all they do is release the swarm and then once everyone is frozen the collectors come in and pick up the bodies making it look like the colony just up and left one day vitor somehow managed to hide and not get caught by the collectors while also managing to record data on them miranda says that we need to bring the quarium back to cerberus before tally jumps in and says that vitro belongs to the fleet according to tali service was responsible for attacking one of the ships on the migrant fleet which is why she hates cerberus sadly we never hear more about this in-game but according to some of my research the book mass effect ascension corroborates tally's story even if she was lying giving vitor to cerberus really doesn't make that much sense considering their pro-human extremism we'll see the outcome of this decision later so we'll circle back to this we give visual to tali and then are told to report to the elusive man after what we saw at freedom's progress it's clear that the collectors are behind the abductions which confirms his suspicions the only thing he's unsure of though is if the collectors are working for the reapers or just merely another threat he hypothesizes that since the omega 4 relay is still unmapped with only the collectors being able to use it without any complications he thinks that the relay reacts differently to collector's ships allowing them safe passage he also believes that if they are working for the reapers then that would make sense why they've only been targeting human colonies since shepherd and the reapers have some unresolved beef thanks to sovereign the elusive man also offers up a really good question why are the collectors abducting people at all if the secret swarms can paralyze people then they can kill them but they're deliberately kidnapping the colonists which means there is a reason why the elusive men says that if they're working for the reapers then we need to take the fight to them but shepard can't do it alone and he'll need a team thankfully cerberus has taken the liberty of finding specific members for our team and these 12 individuals become our 12 companions each of them provides something meaningful to the team whether that's knowledge technology or just raw strength but only do we need a team we need a ship thankfully not only is joker back as our pilot but service went through the hassle of recreating the normandy with a few new upgrades the normandy is just as iconic as the characters so it's only right that the normandy comes back many of the upgrades are pretty unimportant like more speed better armor etc etc what's actually important though is the new captain's quarters for shepard to relax in and the ship's new artificial intelligence edie the key detail is ai not vi the guys like avina back on the citadel have no mind or consciousness they're just a computer ai's our self-aware computing systems capable of making independent decisions ai is seen as technically illegal within council space and that's due to the potential creation of rogue ai and we only need to look at the geth as a reason why e though despite being an ai has lots of functions disabled shepard can ask her how cerberus managed to replicate the best ship in the alliance navy without anyone knowing to which edie says that she has a block preventing her from answering that she says that while she has more freedom than most ai do she still can't reveal things that go beyond a certain classification level this is due to how ai are created they need something called a blue box which is filled with adaptive code instead of quantum computer an ai without a blue box would be just a bunch of data files but to make sure the ai doesn't overstep its boundaries they're given restrictions as to what it can do and also make sure the physical hardware is separate from its software after our introduction with edie we're allowed to roam the ship and speak with some of the crew this version of the normandy feels a lot more realistic than the previous game as more the crew can be spoken to now obviously we can't talk to everybody but we can talk to our secretary and even the cook the game also allows us to do things for our crew like getting the cook more provisions and getting dr shockwest the bottle of brandy she lost on the previous normandy none of these actually change much minus some different dialogue but it's nice to be able to help out the crew and make them feel like they're a part of the team once the crew has been talked to and the rooms have been checked shepard is now given a chance to choose which team member to go after first ensure the game completely opens up we have a total of 12 companions in the game since we already have two of them that means we have 10 recruitment missions but each companion also has a loyalty mission so that's 12 more missions but there are also collector's missions that we have to do in between these missions to make matters worse none of them are done in proper order so you'll likely have to jump between recruiting new crew members while also making others loyal and then to a collector's mission right after it's extremely disorganized and that's completely fine when playing the game but making a video about it not so much so firstly we'll cover some of the collector's missions this should give you a good understanding of why they're so important to the game we'll cover all of them up until the final mission in the game afterward we'll then double back and talk about all the companions recruitment and loyalty missions then go into some side content and dlc before finishing up with the finale it should be easier this way especially for those who haven't played the game before as instead of this we would just have to talk about the companions then have to bring all of them up again like 20 minutes later and just hope you remembered them so let's start with the collector's missions after recruiting a good chunk of the crew we were given information on a new colony being hit by the collectors called horizon shepard is tasked with going there and finding more information on the collectors but the team has to be careful thanks to the seekers forms thankfully before this mission one of our crew members morton managed to develop a shield of sorts that'll make us invisible to the seekers forms allowing us to go in during the collector's collections the elusive man also says that ashley williams is stationed here on horizon keep in mind though instead of ashley kaden will be here assuming you picked him back in mass effect 1. before we arrive on horizon we get a brief cutscene showing how the seeker swarms work and we can see that they do indeed paralyze people upon being touched we also get a brief look at harbinger who apparently can directly control a specific collector at will upon arriving on horizon we can see that the collectors also have husks this is odd because up until now it was assumed that it was geth technology but there's no geth on horizon it's learned a little bit later that these spikes called dragon teeth are actually reaper technology that was given to the geth but now that the collectors have it it confirms our suspicions that the collectors do indeed work for the reapers this was also technically teased earlier when we saw harbinger the dialogue implies that harbinger is this collector leader it's actually just a normal collector and nothing else harbinger is actually a reaper who can assume direct control of any collector it chooses further confirming the two group's allegiances shepard will eventually come in contact with the collector ship and it uses its anti-air gun station on the colony to take it down but it manages to get away before any real damage was actually dealt after the big fight shepard will meet ashley or cayden and it's here where you can recognize some of the negatives regarding the dialogue since ashley and kaden fill the same role they pretty much get the same dialogue options it's understandable but it does feel disappointing because before vermeire they were unique people but now they're just the same person after our talk with ashley arkhaden we can report to the elusive man and it's here where we can see why the elusive men shouldn't be trusted ashley told us that the alliance got a tip that shepard was alive in working with cerberus that was because the elusive man let that info slip out into the public on purpose the elusive man did this in hopes that the collectors would follow the trail so that we could catch them while they're attacking just like what we did with horizon it also confirmed his other suspicion and is that the collectors were purposely trying to find shepard since they work for the reapers but we didn't even need the elusive man to tell us this information because harbinger when controlling a collector will actually call out shepherd's name one shepherd acquires more members for the team the elusive man will summon him again and this time he has managed to stumble upon something big there was a distress call from a taurian patrol that managed to get attacked by a collector's ship but not before crippling it severely this means that there is a dormant collector ship in the middle of space without anyone nearby to salvage it due to the urgency of the situation it makes sense that we get there as soon as possible even though technically we don't have a choice one thing mass effect 2 does really well is urgency the missions regarding the recruitment of our team can be done on our terms but when the elusive man has a mission for us we're forced to take it if you try to use the galaxy map you're then told to go meet with him instead i like this sense of urgency because these events are important and they need to be dealt with so having the player do them right now is a nice way of doing so on the collector ship we find piles of dead bodies and they are all human the team assumes that they use them as test subjects and they likely failed any tests that they put them through a little further though is where the most important piece of lore regarding the collectors is found in this testing chamber is a collector so the collectors were trying to experiment on themselves according to edie they were running genetic comparisons between their species and humanity we don't know why they were doing this but we do discover something from the data and is that the collectors have the same genetic pattern as the protheans this would mean that the collectors are modified protheans so the reapers didn't wipe out the protheans or at least all of them we know from mass effect 1 thanks to the keepers that the reapers are known to not always kill the species but change them in order to further their goals the reapers did this with the protheans but turn them into what we call collectors we'll learn more a bit about this in mass effect 3 but it's important to understand that the protheans don't look like this originally the genetic code was changed thanks to the reapers modifying their genes presumably for combat purposes after this we can take a good look at the billions of pods inside the ship each one is planned to house a human in them so this means the collectors are planning on taking out all the humans in the galaxy maybe even all life afterwards since this is just one ship shepard makes it further into the base and realizes that they've been set up and are ambushed the crew manages to make it out okay but edie reveals something about the distress signal she reveals that not only was the distress beacon made by the collectors and not turians but the elusive man knew this and decided to go anyway so he sent shepard and the crew into a trap on purpose the elusive man when questioned about this confirms that he knew this was a trap he believed that if shepherd knew he would have likely not taken the mission this is what i talked about before when i brought up the elusive man earlier he's willing to send shepard into a trap without him knowing so he's clearly a bad guy but he does get the results he wants and the mission wasn't a failure as they did find data that can give them an opportunity to find the collector home world remember same goal different methods he's like saren an ends justify the means kind of person and that makes him hard to trust but you can't deny that he's good at what he does and his methods do succeed as dangerous as they are you also have to consider that you are working with him so even though you may not be on good terms with him you and the elusive man must work together in order to take down the collectors it's hard to like and dislike him which was the same conflict i had with sarri the only difference is that you're actually working with the elusive man so the situation is a little bit different just like saren i found the elusive man extremely well written especially because he's not the antagonist of this game saren did bad things because he's also the game's bad guy the elusive man is a teammate and yet he's still making questionable decisions which is why it's hard to decide whether or not you should actually trust him from the data we gathered on the ship we discovered that the collectors and reapers use an iff or an identify friendfo system that allow ships with it to make safe passage into the omega 4 relay this is why no one has been able to find the collector homeworld because they don't have the iff apparently the elusive man knows of an alliance science team that found something called the great rift this was originally just a crater but then they discovered that the crater was created by a giant accelerator weapon by following the flight path he discovered that the target for the weapon was a derelict reaper he assumes that the reaper should have an iff on it which we will need now it's probably clear by now that the elusive man is being used as a device for the writers to pull stuff out of their ass in order to make the plot make sense it's not great but that's pretty much science fiction in a nutshell random things you've never heard about are just revealed as if it's normal and while the characters might think it's normal to the viewer it's definitely not it's not a terrible method of storytelling by any means but oftentimes you'll hear something about a character and then you'll think how is that even possible this iff though is the one collector mission that we aren't required to do right away activating this mission is like passing the point of no return and it's also where we get our final companion so i'll save this mission for later when we get to them since this mission starts the finale shepard is allowed to do this when they deem it necessary so let's go back and get acquainted with our crew before we head out we're not only going to be looking at the recruitment and loyalty missions but also see if their reasons for joining shepard are valid to make sure they weren't shoehorned into the story the first two members of the crew we should probably talk about are zain and kasumi these two were released later in the game as dlc and as such their mission structure is a lot different than the rest of the crew the regular way to do these missions is to find their locations from the dossier recruit them and then after some time you'll be given a loyalty mission for zayn and kasumi though their recruitment missions are done and over within about two minutes and they can't actually be talked to all you can do is press the a button on them while they say some dialogue in the room is also some memorable items from their past you can examine that they will comment on none of the other crew are handled this way so i figured i would get them out of the way first assuming you have him installed zaid is likely the first crew member you will come across assuming you go to omega first our first meeting with zaid involves him beating up a batarian prisoner now you have to remember that since he is dlc his story is built around the main story not a part of it that's why his motivation is extremely simple he's a mercenary cerberus paid him a large chunk of credits to do the job and he accepted it it's straight and to the point pretty much like zaid honestly the majority of his dialogue is just things you would expect a merc to say he always talks about shooting things and making money he only goes this far in his character development and never goes any further and honestly i don't mind this zeed is really just that raw strength we talked about earlier extra firepower for the team nothing more nothing less just the perfect soldier but he's not just joining cerberus for the credits he made a deal with the elusive man which ties into his loyalty mission as thanks for joining the team we must help zai track down an old friend of his name vito you're free to do this whenever you want but if you want to get to know zaid more you'd probably want to talk to him on the ship first a lot of zaid's dialogue is just war stories about his past missions one thing zai does mention quite a bit though was someone called jessie he says that he and jessie go way back she wasn't great in combat but was incredibly reliable jesse had been through a lot in her life by the time zaid had met her and he was committed to her ever since he laid his eyes on her he also reminisces about their first mission together where they hunted a wanted turian and were covered in sludge from all the sewage they had to go through to catch him this tale however ends on a sad note as on their final mission jessie kept firing and firing on this squad of enemies before the gun jammed and she was finished the best part about this whole story is jessie is not a woman she's a gun jesse jammed one day when zaid was using her and that was the final mission the two went on without the context zaid really makes this out to be a love story he even says putting her down was the saddest day of his life like i said zaid is a merc nothing more nothing less and that really is the best part about zaid it's like talking to your grandpa about their war stories in vietnam except it's a cocky murk in space every time i went down to talk to him i kept thinking i wonder what kind of story uncle zaid is going to have for me today me and her buddy were hard to take out this one guy matias i think hell i forget turns out it was a trap we got jumped by a hit squad two batarians a krogan and a hannah damn jellyfish nearly choked me to death wore a neck brace for weeks to cover that up haven't underestimated a hannah since z's loyalty mission starts on a planet called zorya this is one of the few missions where it actually felt like shepard was not the one in charge zade was giving out commands like remembering to watch out for ambush positions and checking to make sure the coast was clear it was a very tactical mission which fits with his character zaid manages to tap into some of the comms and we can hear vito talking to his band of mercs called the blue suns we'll meet more of them in archangel's questline but the three main merk groups in mass effect 2 are the blue suns the eclipse and the blood pack all colored and easy to remember thanks to their primary color palettes during archangel's questline is when we get the codex entry for the blue suns which they said it was created by a batarian called solemn however doing this mission gives us another codex entry called blue sun's full history this and zaid himself will tell you that it was actually him and vito who founded the blue suns however him and vito had a falling out vito wanted to hire batarian slaves into their ranks and zaid was against it this dispute ended with veto shooting zaid in the head which is why his face has a large mark on it zaid obviously lived this encounter and now holds a massive grudge against veto for this i want to clarify the codex entry isn't wrong it's just not the full story after they're falling out vito was now the sole ruler of the blue suns but in an attempt to not only placate hesbitarian investors but also prevent possible assassination attempts against him he crowned solemn the new leader the blue suns are pretty much a private military group that gets paid to guard and kill things there have been many claims that the group sells captives to slavers but no one's actually been convicted of such charges yet eventually vito and zaid come face to face and a shootout begins zaid goes a bit too far and causes a massive fire in the refinery and now we're left with a choice save the workers or kill vito if we save the workers veto gets away if we kill vito then the workers die this choice fits perfectly with the new loyalty system new companions upon joining the crew are by the game standards disloyal they don't hate shepherd but they're not loyal and being not loyal and disloyal are apparently the same thing according to the game this choice will either make zaid loyal or disloyal to shepherd and i think it's pretty clear what choices are what saving the workers is a paragon choice but it also makes aid disloyal so you'll have to sacrifice some good boy points in order to please him it's a decision between what is morally right versus doing what's right for the team in the mission getting zaid loyal will make the final mission against the collectors easier so if a few people have to die so what but on the other side of the coin someone who willingly puts innocence in danger is a hindrance to the team regardless and you can actually take this idea to its most logical conclusion if you choose to kill vito he dies in a blaze of glory with zaid walking off like a badass if you save the workers instead vito gets away and in his rage laid causes a beam to fall on his leg trapping him if you've already done the final mission in the game and beaten the main story you can actually leave zaid here to die it is the perfect paragon choice not only did he kill innocent people but it's clear he doesn't belong with the team so leaving him to die would be the perfect fate for someone like him now most people wouldn't think to do this after the game is done but even still choosing this option makes him disloyal the only way to get around this is a speech check and while it doesn't exactly feel realistic to me that he just is suddenly okay after one comment from shepard most rpgs have ways to intimidate or convince people to do things even if it makes no sense for them so i'll just go along with it regardless of your choice in saeed's fate that conversation is the end of his loyalty mission as i said his mission is short since he was added in after the fact and since the cast is already bloated enough there wouldn't be enough time to fully flesh out 12 whole characters and this idea of giving characters small missions carries over to our other dlc companion kasumi is a master thief and we can tell from our first interaction that she is very careful when it comes to revealing her identity as she uses an advert to speak to shepard and also utilizes full-body cloaking to conceal herself although to be fair she is showing her actual face on the advert and it's safe to assume that others around her are hearing this conversation so maybe that's not the greatest way to introduce your master thief character similar to zaid she's getting paid a lot of money to join the team and cerberus is footing the bill kasumi also made a deal with cerberus in order to join which ties into her loyalty mission she's looking for her partner's grey box which is a neural implant that stores memories thoughts and secret codes this gray box was made by her partner kg when he stole something way out of his league he encrypted the data and hid it in the gray box behind all the memories of him and kasumi so you would have to sift through all their history in order to find it not only does she want the gray box because of what kg found but also because those memories are the only thing she has left of him since he died shortly after the gray box is being held by a man named donovan hawk who's been trying to crack it for months and has had no success kasumi wants us to dress up nice and fancy and attend a party he is throwing so that we can get the box back kg as stated before is her partner but partner as in lover not business partner although technically they did meet while conducting official business the two of them are thieves and they met on a job when they were hired to steal the same painting but instead of fighting over it they just opted to take it for themselves and the two have been together ever since if we go to her room we can see that she has a few pieces of art that she stole and kept his memorabilia there's also a rose which she used to leave lying around as her marking to let people know that she was the one who stole from them and she also has a really sweet story about a girl who painted this one particular picture after she snuck onto a slaver's vessel and freed her the only other thing of note in her room is a handful of books from romance novels to classics this would be a normal thing for pretty much anyone but she specifically has paperback versions of the books in the world of mass effect media is likely all digital by now but she prefers as she says the musty smell of paper in your hands unlike zaid where most of his dialogue was war stories from his past khasumi doesn't actually talk about herself and mainly comments on the crew mentioning how joker and edie bicker like an old married couple and how she's taken a liking to jacob although she is unsure if he has a taste for japanese girls with a penchant for kleptomania as for kasumi's loyalty mission we travel to hawk's party and on the way there kasumi fills us in on some of the details as a gift we're giving hakk a golden statue of saren which is filled with our equipment kasumi and shepard once inside are going to scope out the place and look for hawk's vault after that they'll meet up and see if they can break inside as you can tell from the description this is a genuine heist the mere idea of a heist is always something that gets your blood rushing as it usually involves multiple steps and if the player is a part of the action it makes them feel like they pulled off the whole encounter on their own this is a really cool idea in theory until you remember that mass effect isn't a stealth game you can't be back here yeah not only are the guns not silenced but we are literally 15 feet away from the main hall so we should have absolutely alerted the whole building i understand that the devs wanted to make a really cool heist with stealth and hacking but it's really hard to do that when the game has never been based around stealth at all after getting through the four layers of encryption that is hawk's vault we can enter inside and see all the art he's collected he's not only collected michelangelo's david a prothean statue like the one we found on ilos a fake rachnay queen and various krogan statues he also has the head of the statue of liberty according to the codex lady liberty was the target of many terrorist attacks since it was erected in 2096 the statue was taken down by a terrorist group called freedom's first who were protesting the recent induction of mexico and canada into the north american states this was one of the major events that sparked america's second civil war the president at the time wanted the statue to be rebuilt using new material while the original head of the statue of liberty was held at the national museum of american history until a battle at washington dc occurred where the head was stolen again apparently it somehow ended up in hawk's vault which is not even remotely close to earth anymore the other sculptures can also give us a bit more info on some of the races as it seems like turians have art that they produce but it's very rare outside their home planets and the other is that koreans used to write on stone tablets which hock also has in his vault how we acquired these is unknown but given his shady business practices he either stole them or just had enough money to buy them probably the best sculpture in this room though is this creature which is actually an ogre from dragon age origins bioware's other rpg say what you will about hawk the man has excellent taste in games in the vault is also the grey box kasumi wanted hack however knew she was coming to steal it and sets a trap for us this then leads into a 10 minute gunfight where shepard will have to battle through waves of enemies before being attacked by donovan in a gunship after enough damage the gunship is destroyed donovan is dead and kasumi has her grey box but we run into a problem the info on the grey box could implicate the alliance and start a galactic war kg wants her to destroy the grey box but that would mean destroying their memories of them alongside it since it's a part of the encryption so we either save the galaxy from an all-out war but kasumi loses the memories of keiji or we keep the box but it's stolen again and it could lead to war for me i decided to keep the box kasumi isn't going to be disloyal if we choose the other option but i figured that she's a master thief and is a part of my crew so no one's going to find the box unless they go through the normandy grief is a terrible thing to have and it could cause numerous problems in a person's mind kasumi could likely become too attached to the box that she never leaves this virtual world full of their memories or she could become a complete emotional wreck since her partner is dead at the end of the day i figured that giving kasumi the chance to see keiji again even if for a little bit was the right call kazumi's mission just like zaid was also pretty short there isn't much to know about her since she doesn't like revealing much about her personal life and her heist was a great idea but a lot of the novelty was lost once the shooting began overall though it wasn't a terrible mission with both the dlc characters done we can go back to the more traditional style of dialogue which involves us asking various questions and actually having a back and forth with our companion to start we should probably begin with the first two companions we get at the beginning of the game jacob and miranda he like miranda doesn't have a recruitment mission which means their motivations for joining are going to be the same both of them work for cerberus so they're working with shepard because of the elusive man's orders jacob said that he served as an alliance member for a few years but ended up leaving and going with cerberus instead before leaving though he was a part of something called the corsairs it was apparently an alliance initiative they hired independent starship captains and used them for missions that fell outside the alliance jurisdiction after serving with cerberus for some time the elusive man put him in miranda together for project lazarus and the two have been together ever since jacob was mostly tasked with handling the security in case things went wrong which for him was a pretty boring job most days one of the conversations you can have with jacob is about his family which makes things a little awkward he doesn't like to mention his family much because his father is assumed to be dead that is until he gets a ping from his father his private law got an update about the hugo guernsback which is the ship his father served on the update was an sos call but as he said his father's supposed to be dead since the ship went missing over a decade ago and he hasn't even talked to him in over 13 years that's why this notification is very confusing as this should not be possible so jacob wants shepard to go check it out with him when we travel to the location of the ping we can see the crash of the ship right next to us around the ship are various leftover audio logs and a barely functioning vi but looking at both of these sources of info we can uncover a bit of what's going on here the beacon that was supposed to send out the sos call has apparently been in pause mode for over eight and a half years furthermore when the crew made it to the land they started researching the local food in flora since the rations on the ship wouldn't last long enough according to the vi impairment of mental function seems to occur within a week of ingesting the flora on this planet with higher cognitive abilities and long-term memory suffering over a month this connects to various logs inside the ship to talk about how the crew was doing tests on other members of the crew one of the logs mentions how one of the crew members was getting hurt and receiving bruises only for them to forget what happened almost immediately after one of the doctors was also in a panic as she couldn't remember someone's name on face and then there's also a very concerning audio log that talks about one of the male crew members thinking about taking advantage of one of the women affected by the flora considering the fact that she won't remember after it happens after leaving we can meet with one of the women aboard the ship and she too has lost a lot of her cognitive functions but she is still able to barely make complete sentences she talks with shepard before being attacked by a group of hunters once the hunters are killed we find that there's a camp filled with only women things are becoming very confusing and also very concerning and when we meet with jacob's father it doesn't make the situation any better when the ship crashed jacob's dad ronald and the other officers of the crew kept all the actual food for themselves while the rest of the crew was forced to eat the plants what the plants do though is a bit confusing it seems like it does impair mental functions among other things but there was also a group of hunters that we saw earlier that seemed to have adapted to the floor and become resistant or at least tolerant to its effects this group of people didn't agree with ronald and the officers willing on the planet they were then labeled as outcasts and since the actual obedient crew could barely think for themselves they just follow ronald's orders and defended him once the crew managed to set up a base of operations for a time it seemed like they were keeping the women in one camp together and were basically pets for the other officers at this point they were living like kings and decided that turning on the beacon was not worth it so they never did but some of the officers started feeling guilty about what they did and decided to activate the beacon except they were killed before doing so this now leads us to the present day where ronald is the only sane person left in the camp and has an army of maxim brainwashed guards at his disposal while all the women are relegated to their own camp not too far from ronald himself he'd hoped the alliance or someone would come and get him off this planet without knowing what he did jacob however now has to come to terms of what his father has done and honestly thinking that he was dead likely helped his decision he feels no remorse for his father and wants him to pay for what he did this is a nice twist considering most people would be happy to sue their parents after so many years but considering he wasn't on good terms with his father to begin with it made his decision easier plus his father doesn't even seem happy to see him he's actually more upset that he discovered what he was up to shepherd can determine what happens to jacob's father but all of them end badly for ronald he either gets jail time for life or is killed by the hunters jacob is content with whatever shepard chooses as he claims that his father died a long time ago with the log checked out jacob no longer has any struggles holding him back and now he's completely focused on the mission but the question still remains though who pinged his private log well as we discover it was actually miranda she claims that it was because a few years ago this crash actually mattered to jacob and she wanted to keep a promise the two had although jacob has no clue what that promises but this is actually a nice segue into miranda because of all people she would be the one to remember something like this that's because she was built to be perfect in every way combat memory intelligence looks everything about her is genetically superior and it's not because she has some sort of god complex but literally because she was created to be this way her father wanted an asset not a daughter so he created a super soldier to help further his dynasty miranda never had a mother because she was genetically made using her father's tissue she also says that she wasn't the first daughter he made just the first one he kept when she was old enough she was able to run away from home and join the cerberus because they were able to protect her plus her being genetically superior made it an easy sell since she could help the company in various operations but the trauma from living with her father changed her whole perspective on life she needs to be absolutely perfect or it's not enough she's been told since birth that she was made to be perfect and the perfectionist attitude of her father rubbed off on her and now she won't accept anything less but the problem is that she's still human so she's bound to make mistakes but her mistakes feel greater than normal because her perfection is supposed to prevent those mistakes that really weighs her down a lot and it causes her to be very blunt with people she's been labeled as an ice queen by one of the members of cerberus and that's pretty accurate when you first talk with miranda she responds with we aren't here to make french shepherd stay focused on the mission eventually though she will open up the shepherd and that's because she has a problem that needs solving a long time ago miranda took her baby sister from her father because she knew that the same thing would happen to her she figured that she wouldn't want that kind of life so she kidnapped her and brought her to cerberus where they made sure she was safe currently she's living in a city called ilium with her new parents but she believes that her father knows where her sister is and is making a move on her so miranda wants shepard to come with her so they can find her together when we meet with her contact she says that naquette a friend of miranda's wants to escort her sister out of illium instead miranda is fine with the plan as she trusts naquette he actually helped out miranda back when she wanted to escape from her father so she trusts him completely if that seems too good to be true it absolutely is niquette is against what miranda did as he sees it as kidnapping a baby not saving one i've always felt weird about this because it's clear naket knew what was going on with miranda so how could he not understand why she did it negate does tell us that her father paid him a large amount of money to get her sister back and when miranda says how wrong that was for him to do he says don't get holy on me miranda you took his money for years nakat's motivation seemed to be all over the place but it doesn't really matter as he gets killed anyway and after the battle with this asari commando we can make sure miranda's sister is safe miranda gets some time to talk with her sister and then the group leaves miranda's mission is pretty short and it's also one that i'm not too fond of it's not that it's a terrible mission i just think there are more interesting ones in this game it's also kind of hard to talk about since most of the dialogue is just back and forth arguing and in between that is a bunch of fighting so it's not like some major plot test was revealed besides the fact that nick had betrayed her from here though we can branch out to a few more new and interesting recruits so let's talk about jack first because she has a unique interaction with miranda a bit later jack is a very powerful biotic and this caused a lot of problems for her we first find jack on a prison ship called purgatory which is run by the blue suns the warden of the prison states that after seeing too many criminals escape he decided to make his own prison it's a commendable decision of course but money has to be made if you want to continue operating the warden has a policy for this kind of predicament though basically the home planet that the criminal belongs to must pay a fee to keep them in purgatory if they refuse or miss a payment well they just release him back on the planet at a random place in time so clearly he doesn't care about the escaped prisoners that much if he's willing to let them go despite it being in space the blue zones still have some security measures in case things go wrong the prison is not only equipped with turrets and machines dedicated to keeping the peace but the guards sometimes use the prisoners to blow off some steam the warden let shepard know that once the fun's clear he can go on his way and when we travel to the nearest processing wing we realize it's a trap the warden wants shepard to be a prisoner instead of a buyer i get where he's coming from shepherd is a very valuable person but not even attempting to subdue him or trick him is very odd i'm sure the warden feels confident that he and his guards can take shepherd down but it just feels weird that he thought opening the door and asking nicely would have worked the teen now has to battle their way to jack instead which makes things harder but that's not the least of their problems as jack was captain cryo for a reason within seconds of getting out she blasts through all the mechs and the wall behind them with enough time she could easily blow a hole in the side of the prison if she wanted to this leads to a large firefight with the blue suns and the warden and afterwards shepard will catch up with jack but she is very pissed off as she has a history with cerberus it takes some convincing but jack is willing to come on board but only if she can get some cerberus files jacka grew up in a cerberus facility where she was drugged and tortured daily which is why she dislikes cerberus so much in fact this facility is the same one we visit in her loyalty mission just like miranda a lot of her upbringing changed how she viewed life jack likes to stay in a secluded place away from others and anyone who tries to talk to her or work with her likely wants something in return she'll even question why shepard is trying to talk to her and will ask if it's because he wants sex as enticing as that may sound saying yes actually proves her point that all you did was talk to her for sex rejecting her advances allows you to get to know her more and you can actually learn more about her past life she had someone she really liked sacrificed their life to save her and she's been dealing with that guilt ever since jack also worked with a group of people after escaping the cerberus facility but they ended up betraying her eventually too it's because of everything that's happened in her life that she turned out the way she did she doesn't like talking to people she prefers to be alone and she believes that she can handle things on her own over time though shepard can break down those barriers and allow her to feel better about trusting a stranger that isn't trying to use her i really like the casual sex option that jack has because it actually penalizes the player for doing so you have to look at it from her perspective this commander brings her on a ship for this mission but now wants to talk to her given her pass she assumes that shepard wants something from her and if you say that you want to have sex that confirmed her initial suspicions that talking was only so you could get in her pants and not because you cared about her many games even this one have sex as the final reward some people might just be talking to these companions because they want to get them in bed so by having jack ask for sex only after a few minutes the player might think wow that was really easy but the game tricked them and proved that they only wanted a relationship to have sex with them not to actually talk to the person after jack has enough time to sift through some of the files she finds the location of the cerberus facility where she was held and has devised a plan to go down there and blow it up with a giant enough bomb so that she can see it from orbit just like in mass effect 1 bringing specific characters along can provide the player with unique interactions it only feels right to bring miranda or jacob to this mission since they work for cerberus but it's honestly pretty disappointing i think this is also due to how cerberus operates i mentioned earlier how cerberus works in cells so no one in the other cells knows of the lazarus cell which means this mission is a bit disappointing because jacob and miranda don't know who these people are so their only comments are that the facility must have gone rogue they don't even bother to question the child experimentation or any of the work here it's just one or two comments and that's all it's a missed opportunity and that's a shame since cerberus is a major part of this game so having some of the employees confront these atrocities would have been really nice to see one of the scientists when we look at some of the logs does say that the elusive men wouldn't have found out about this and an email after the mission from the elusive man states that he wanted the facility shut down before jack broke out so it's clear that the facility did go rogue but i do wish more dialogue happened between jack and the others we can interact with various things in the facility and jack will tell us that there used to be an arena here for the kids to fight in jack enjoyed fighting because it allowed her to get some of her anger out she also says that when they fought they would get shocked if they hesitated but they would be rewarded with narcotics if they attacked because of how many times they drugged her she claims she still gets a tingly feeling in her veins when she gets into a fight things start to take a turn though when we find some old recordings from the facility before it was destroyed jack made her life out to be one that was filled with hardship and survival she's not wrong but some of the details are still a bit fuzzy to her she was considered subject zero at the facility this is likely because she showed the strongest potential for biotic abilities this however actually benefited her more than she thought one of the recordings talked about a test the scientist did which resulted in a few of the kids dying due to this failure they opted to not give jack the drug yeah they were still drugging jack but they were also giving her these safe and tested drugs while the other kids became the guinea pigs she also got her own room while the kids got to sleep in small bunk beds she was like the winner of the loser's bracket she was still being treated poorly but not as bad as everyone else this is a bit overwhelming and conflicting for her because she remembers things differently it's because she was only looking at things from her perspective which goes back to the earlier comments she made about how she only looks out for herself and likes to be alone had she actually talked to some of the kids she might have realized how poor everyone was being treated here at the very end of the level we meet a man named aresh apparently he was one of the kids at this facility before it was destroyed and the riot that broke out he wanted to come back and restart the program because he figured all the testing and drugging was for something important he's clearly delusional but it's also understandable why he would feel this way he just can't accept the fact that he was tortured and drugged for no reason he wants to believe that he was here for a greater purpose and not just because the scientists were trying to play god using biotics shepard tells the guy to leave and then sets the bomb to blow which i find kind of odd because you get paragon points for not killing him here yet the bomb is clearly going to kill him so i'm not sure how that works before that though we can talk with jack and visit her room one last time she talks about how she used to be alone here most days and would hide under the desk when she wanted to cry there are even some days when she dreams that she was back in her bed being tortured and she would tie the bed sheets around her wrist that she could break free again but now she never has to worry about that dark place and its experiments ever again jack has had a very miserable life so it's only fair that she points the blame at someone or something for causing this and it's this decision that creates a problem amongst some of the crew after finishing both jack and miranda's loyalty mission shepard will be forced into a decision jack wants miranda to admit what cerberus did to her was wrong miranda refuses to apologize because it wasn't technically cerberus that did it and she also calls jack a mistake if you have a high enough paragon or renegade you'll be able to tell them both to shut up and stop but without it you're forced to pick a side whoever you don't side with becomes disloyal rendering all your work in their loyalty mission completely useless it is possible to regain back their loyalty but it requires an even higher speech check as an idea i absolutely love this i mentioned how i wanted more of these disagreements in mass effect 1 and while the characters still won't go as far as leaving the crew they can become disloyal which will have a drastic effect on the final mission even if they weren't disloyal the fact that the crew is actually bickering and arguing with one another is great it's almost impossible for these 12 people to get along due to their unique backgrounds i'm fairly certain that if all of them were put on a team that wasn't under the command of shepard and the entire galaxy wasn't at stake none of them would get any work done just from what we've seen from the five companions we've talked about miranda and jacob would be able to work just fine but kasumi zaid and jack wouldn't furthermore i doubt zai jak and kasumi would even be able to get along considering how they fight and act this group really is a mishmash of different cultures and personalities all in one team and being able to see their disagreements and arguments is incredible regardless of who you choose though their loyalty mission will be complete and jack is a really great example of how good a companion's backstory can be mass effect is pretty consistent when it comes to making the alien companions a lot better than the human ones most of the human companions are pretty dull in this series but jack is a wonderful exception being able to help her through her loyalty mission is one of the reasons i love doing these missions all of her companions have things that are eating away at them and being able to help them through all of that is wonderful hers is a story of tragedy confusion and manipulation and when all those can weave together perfectly you can really get something like this our next companion is named archangel who was last seen on omega omega is where you pick up morton and zaid as well as numerous quests that are started here this place and ilium which we saw briefly in miranda's mission are two big locations that the players will visit omega is basically a slum there is dirt dust and grime all over the walls laws barely exist and many people are living in tiny homes and very little money the main leader of omega is an asari named arya although she claims not to be the leader of omega but the omega itself which is an interesting way to boost your ego she'll give us a bit more information on where archangel and morton are archangel has apparently gotten himself into some deep he's the beacon of light at omega as he uses the last laws of the place to deal with crime without the need of authorities he's also shut down various gangs taking back stolen cargo and all in all has caused a major problem for a lot of the gangs here and they absolutely hate him those three gangs we talked about earlier blue suns eclipse and the blood pack are usually at each other's throats but they're settling aside their differences so that they can take out archangel they're even recruiting freelancers to use as fodder because if they throw all their guys at him they might not have enough members left by the time they actually kill him the issue though is that we're going to be siding with archangel so we're going to be facing the exact same mercs that he's facing once we talk to the recruiter and become a freelancer one of the blue suns gives us the details on the plan all the gangs are waiting for certain preparations to be done so they can move on in archangel has not only damaged one of their gunships but also blocks some of the back entrances where he is so they have mechanics working on the gunship and people digging out the debris from the entrances in the meantime though the freelancers are being used as a destruction order to keep him busy and that's our job since no one is really moving right now we can take some time to talk to some of the merk groups and their leaders we already discussed some of the blue suns when we talked about zeed so i won't go over too much but the leader of this division is tarik he like all the other bosses have a personal stake in this mission thanks to archangel archangel apparently came to this man's house and almost killed him so he's been on edge ever since nearby him is jarroth the solarian who is the leader of the eclipse the eclipse was started by an asari commando named jonah they're a private military company like the blue suns but they specialize in sabotage assassination and security and similar to the blue suns they deny any involvement in sabotaging and kidnapping business rivals jarroth has a dislike towards archangel because he raided one of his group's transports last month and killed two of his best men one of whom was his brother as the blood pack that's run by a garm a krogan master the blood pack used to be a group made up of vorcha which is a new race added to the game we don't really interact with many of the vortra through dialogues they're usually just used as the bad guys in just about any situation and that's also connected to their lore many vouchers live up to 20 years at most so many don't even bother studying certain professions and they'll most likely die before they get any use out of it the major advantage they have is that they can eat anything and breathe anything since they're resistant to all known diseases this allows them to live pretty much anywhere they please but due to lots of racism around the race itself many aren't accepted into normal society since many dismiss them as vermin and this stereotype isn't exactly helped by all the fighting borchard do as they're known to assault each other all the time as inflicting and receiving pain is pretty much like normal communication to them this is why most of them are just a part of the blood pack which is now under the leadership of a krogan named gennar who was exiled for hitting a female krogan who angered him so now he made a gang in order to gain his honor back the game quickly gained a lot of attention and is now seen as another security company within the terminus systems but they don't like typical politics espionage and security that's what the blue suns and eclipse do they like jobs with a bunch of violence since all the group cares about is credits and killing many customers don't have to worry about backlash or politics as the blood pact doesn't really care about any of that either so as long as they get the fight they're happy the leader of this division is garm another krogan he almost managed to beat archangel on a one-on-one but the fight had to be cut short so he's hoping to get another opportunity to kill him one thing that's really interesting about the groups is that it seems like they may be in business for more than just archangel i know we can find in one of the rooms is about the three leaders agreeing that after archangel arya is next on their hit list we can give this to arya so she could sort it out but we never really see the outcome of this from talking with all the leaders we can learn about their plan on taking down archangel and we can use this information to sabotage them we can change the friend foe system on this large mech to have it attack their allies and we can even kill the mechanic working on the gun ships that it starts with less health after enough time though we are finally able to start the assault on archangel and we can finally come face to face with the man himself shepard i thought you were dead there really was only one person who loves fighting crime without the law getting in his way and garrus is that person we see that he's been doing pretty well for himself but he's definitely running out of time garrus has been doing fine on his own but now that there's four of us getting out to be a breeze we have to fight off more waves of enemies until tarik garm and jarrod start joining in but we take them down too tarik manages to injure garris though and he looks like he's not going to pull through for a moment obviously garrus is going to live but he's going to have a new scar with it talking with garrus will give us a bit more information on what he's been up to though after the normandy exploded he pretty much went back to what he's always wanted to do but after a while he started amassing a team of like-minded individuals but when we went to the base we only saw him and it's exactly as you think all of garris's team got killed by someone within the group another tyrian called sedonas sent garris out on a solo job and while he was out he killed everyone else on the team in mass effect 1 garris wanted help to take down a serial murderer sisak couldn't arrest and once again garrus has another person on his hit list that needs to be brought to justice but instead of some random killer we're going after sedonas this requires us to go meet with a man named fade who made sedonas disappear once we get the information we need garrus will take a position and wait for the right moment to kill him shepard is going to be used as a distraction to get him to move but you can also tell sedonas that he's being hunted by garrus i have one issue with the way this quest is resolved if you let garrus kill him shepard steps off to the side and lets garris take the shot from the way sedonas reacts it seems like he sees garrus on the balcony so why is he fast walking when a sniper is pointed right at him it's a small nitpick but i've never understood this if you happen to spare sedonas though things change we learn from talking with sedonas that he's sorry for what he did but he was forced to do it or else he would have died instead i like the way this is handled as it makes the situation a lot more grayer than it was before the issue is that we don't know what the situation was if he was cornered and possibly held at gunpoint it would make sense why he took the deal but if he had a chance of escaping and there was no actual threat then that doesn't make sedonas look good it's a hard decision to make but i've always let garrus take the shot if sedonas lives he confesses to his crimes but since it's out of council space and was probably months to a year ago it's unclear if he'll actually serve time for it at least with him dead we know that he paid for his betrayal out of all the companion missions in the game i think garrus is one of the few that can actually lead to a different outcome which means that there will be a lot of different reasons why people chose specific options so i'd like to know if you save sedonas in your playthrough and why while we're on omega we might as well pick up mordan the solarian doctor a plague has broke out one of the sections of omega that seems to kill everything but humans this has caused many problems for the humans in that sector as many believe they're behind its creation deep within the sector is a clinic run by morden who despite looking like a typical doctor really isn't he used to serve in the salarian task force under captain kirhy the same one from vermeyer and one day some people came into the clinic and demanded money morton didn't even bother hearing him out and shot them dead immediately he's a complete wolf in sheep's clothing arya says that he's as likely to help you as he is to kill you shepard gets outboarded about the collectors and he immediately agrees to join but we need to help him with the plague first we discovered that the collectors were working with the vorcha and promised that if they made sure the plague was successful the collectors would make them stronger it's unclear why the collectors thought a plague on omega was a good idea but it's possible they were trying to test some experiments of theirs once aboard the ship we can meet with morden and he's probably the most fascinating person to talk to because he had a hand in the genophage he says that the krogan actually evolved to resist the original genophage they had to make a modified one in order to make sure they were still affected seeing as he worked on the genophage it's pretty obvious that morden saw it as necessary and it's really hard to understand why he thinks that until you hear him out he says that doing this saved the krogan and while that may sound confusing it actually makes sense as we know the krogan became rebellious after the rakhine war which is why they were attacked the solarians working on the genophage ran the simulations and determined that this was the only solution had they not developed the genif h2 things would have happened the krogan were either going to kill everyone in the galaxy or all the krogan like the raknai would have been killed off creating the genophage stopped the krogan from rebelling allowing them to live peacefully with everyone preventing them from being wiped out the birth rate is still an issue but by doing this it made sure the krogan don't overpopulate and start another rebellion morden tries to explain to shepard that many people see the plague as a means to wipe them out but that was never the actual intention the silerians were actually very happy that krogan helped them with the rock knight which is why they were trying to save them from themselves this whole discussion about the genophage actually relates to his loyalty mission as one of his students has apparently been kidnapped on tu chanka the krogan homeworld when we get to the planet and start heading closer to melin's location we find a dead human on the ground none of this is really important to the mission but morden shares something rather interesting shepard is confused though as why humans like this guy would be needed as test subjects to cure the genophage if it only affects krogan according to morden humans have the most diverse genetic code in the galaxy he says that you can look at a krogan or an asari and pretty much assume their skill or combat or intelligence but with humans it's a lot harder to judge since humans are more diverse it means that they can react to tests differently allowing for more results it's pretty irrelevant regarding the whole mission but this is one of the reasons i love talking with morten he's a huge lore dump for pointless information and that's what's so interesting about him despite how impressed he is with using humans as test subjects he clarifies that this type of study is unethical morten is the kind of person who will say exactly how he feels even if the person doesn't want to hear it he knows what he did regarding the genophage was right and he's not willing to budge on that fact and he also complements the data that this team acquired despite it being very unethical he knows that the methods to get the results is wrong but he's willing to admit that the research they found is rather impressive most people would see this entire act as unforgivable morden does too but also recognizes the positives in things as a solarian he only has a few decades to live so he doesn't bother spending the small time he has on other people's opinions of him he just gets right to the point due to this though it can be really hard to actually enjoy morden's company given his appreciation for the genophage and how he even states that those days were the best of his life but morden really does care about the people of the galaxy and was willing to do something drastic in order to save it you're saying you were working just as hard to keep their population from falling yes could have eradicated krogan not difficult increased mutation to degrade genetic structure further chose not to rachni extinction tragic didn't want to repeat all life precious universe demands diversity pretty it up however you like you're talking about murdering millions no murdered no one altered fertility prevented fetal development of nervous system have killed many shepherd many methods gunfire knives drugs tech attacks once with farming equipment but not with medicine after searching the lab we'll meet with maylen and discover that he wasn't kidnapped he actually came to help the krogan willingly morton is in shock over this decision as the whole team agreed that the genophage was necessary so why is he going against the group's decision plus he's now using live test subjects and torture something morton is very much against maelon says that they already have the blood of millions on their hands so what's a bit more if it gets results morden threatens to shoot him over this but you can talk him down if you want to but now morton has the chance to delete malen's progress or keep it for another time i chose to keep the data because i do agree with what morden says destroying the data would mean that all the lives mayland took would be worth nothing but keeping the data means that their deaths were at the very least used for something good now that maitland has been dealt with though morgan can now focus on the mission at hand but at the end of the day he is still a doctor and if a patient is in need of assistance he's willing to help them and this is by far one of the main reasons i love him romance and companions is back in mass effect 2 and with it comes one of the most interesting conversations you can ever have with morden in mass effect 1 ashley kaden and liara were the only options but now that we have a dozen crew members we have more options at stake and not just with other humans but with other species i don't think it's a surprise given her appearance in the intro but tali does become a companion later in the game should the player pursue a relationship with her garrus or thane who we'll talk about in a moment the question of cross species intercourse has to be answered this wasn't a problem with liara since asari don't require physical contact but for the others that's different if you pursue a relationship with any of these three you can talk to morden and he'll mention how he's noticed the two of you have become more flirty with one another and as a doctor he is worried about what could happen if sexual intercourse were to occur so he gives tips to shepherd on what meds would be needed and how to avoid any pain aware that mission is dangerous different species react differently to stress past relationship with telezora makes dalliance attractive as stress release still recommend caution quarry an immune system weak could kill her you have a recommendation as a doctor telezora acquired antiseptic recommend you self sterilize as well oral contact with tissue dangerous take precautions also forwarding advice booklet to your quarters valuable diagrams positions comfortable for both species erogenous zone overviews can supply oils or ointments to reduce discomfort gave ed electronic relationship a demonstration vids to use as necessary it's such a simple inclusion but i was blown away that not only was intercourse between two species taken into account but that one of your companions is more than happy to assist you small details like this are my favorite in games because you would hear this and think well yeah that's actually a good point i hadn't even considered that and having those moments no matter how insignificant or small they may be really enhance your experience with morden finish though we can now move on to the next character but since we're already here on tachanka i think it'd be a good time to talk about grunt but we should probably explain how we got grant first our initial mission is to find a krogan warlord named o'keer he's here at the facility that is being guarded by the blue suns the reason for their appearance is because the leader of the division jidor wanted to create a krogan army we can even find one of these members called a tank bred krogan the tank bred krogan talk about a being called the glass mother which is the tank they were born in they claimed the tank was talking to them and feeding them memories and info this was just oakhire but the krogan saw their tank as their mother okir has a different outlook on the genophage than most many krogan ignore the genophage by just continuing on with their lives and seeing no point okir does this as well but he's ignoring the genophage by creating a superior krogan in a tank rather than through reproduction the tank bred krogan in theory would just ignore the effects of the genophage allowing the species to flourish again he ended up working with jedora as they were able to benefit from his experiments jidor wanted an army of krogen and okir wanted the perfect krogan so any test subjects he deemed unworthy he would just give to jidor like that tank bred krogan we found earlier the sad part though is that a lot of them were either forced to be a part of her army or just use this target practice okir was able to handle most of the work on his own but he was also given an assistant ronathanoptis who you may recognize from mass effect 1. she worked at saren's cloning facility back on vermier she doesn't say too much it's more just about catching up and then telling her to leave before she gets killed again but it's nice to see that some of our actions from the previous games do have some meaning upon meeting okie we can see his perfect soldier in the tank next to him roman we're about to head out though were interrupted by jedor who is attempting to kill okir after the fire fight we come back and o'keer is dead apparently gas was being flooded into the tank so okier had to make sure it wouldn't kill his perfect creation as a result the gas was let out into the room instead and it killed him this small subversion from the original idea was a nice touch as technically we were here to recruit okir but we ended up recruiting grunt instead grunt along with a future character named legion are the only two characters that we actually don't have to recruit we have the option to keep grunt in the tank for the entirety of the game if we want to i like this option but i can't imagine many players not opening the tank on their first playthrough considering how much trouble we went through just to get it upon opening the tank grunt charges and pin shepard to the wall asking for his name before he kills him grunt was never given a name in the tank but since the word grunt was one of the last few words he heard from o'keer he figured it would do grunt is still a child though as he hasn't actually had time to really develop this is his first interaction with the real world so even though he may look old his mind is that of a child's a lot of the images and memories o'kir implanted into him don't really make too much sense but over time he'll come to understand their meaning grunt was implanted with a lot of the legacies of the krogan warlords and okir's own mindset which is why a lot of it is centered around violence hatred and destruction what other human info was floating around in there less than a finger deep to sever your spine you're soft solarian cesare all soft quarians not so much turians you have to work the blade i guess don't see much point to it though much point uh never mind one thing that grunt struggles with though is his own survival he sees the thousands that came before him as weak as they didn't survive like he did but he also doesn't see the strength in himself he says that he was built for strength but never earned it while those who died were at least strong enough to try even if they failed he was given the power to fight but without earning it so he feels cheated in a way this reaches a critical breaking point where grunt is throwing stuff around and banging his head against the glass he says that he feels tense like he wants to kill something with his bare hands most krogan would get this feeling but this time it's different it's more out of a need rather than a want sadly though we don't have too much information on why he's doing this as not only was he born from a tank but krogan really don't like to share a lot of their data publicly this requires us to go to tuchanka and talk with the clan leader on this planet though is where another one of our choices is seen as that leader of the clan is none other than rex if he died on vermiyer though his brother reeve will take his place regardless of your choice the other krogan that is next to them is someone called uvank he's a part of another clan that has recently started a truce with clan erdnot from looking at both sides it's clear that ubank's ideals are much more in line with the reeves rather than rexes this is due to what rex has been up to since he became the leader of clan or not rex has taken the opportunity to unite a lot of the clans under his name he's also allowed fertile females to be shared amongst clans rather than segregated into their own clan's men fertile females in the krogan species are rare so rex has promised that by joining and offering to co-exist with them he'll make sure that the women they have are unharmed this has actually caused a lot of problems for some of the other clans as while many of them do hate rex and his progressive ideals he's pretty much untouchable because starting a war with him would mean that they injure the female krogan at his camp oddly enough though the idea of sharing the women was actually the female clan leader's idea the neutral area they have is safe so it allows for krogan of any gender to talk and converse with one another without the fear of death krogan women are also free to meet with other women from other clans as well which would end up boosting morale for everybody rex is very optimistic about his methods which is good and i'm glad that things are working out for him but we aren't here for rex we're here for grunt rex takes a good look at him and pretty much determines that he's going through puberty in krogan culture though it's not as simple as a few hormonal changes krogan have to undergo the rite of passage usually tank bread krogan wouldn't be allowed into er not but rex makes an exception because he's with us krogan who are clanless are not respected especially if they're born from a tank so grunt needs to do this in order to gain their respect to set up the right of passage we'll need to talk to the shaman who'll explain what to do grunt will need a grant in order to progress in krogan culture a krant is essentially a krogan's most trusted allies which would be us as for what the rite of passage is when we're actually told all we know is that a lot of shooting will be involved despite this i really like how it was handled completing this rite of passage is supposed to prove that the krogan doing it is worthy of battle telling them ahead of time what the enemy would be would ruin the point this is shown in repeat playthroughs of this exact mission going in on a second playthrough means you already know what will happen this means you can bring another crew member that will give you an advantage and plan your ammo and abilities around the fight the final enemy of this fight is a thresher mod which so far has only appeared every now and then on random planets in mass effect 1. knowing this will spawn during this mission means you can plan ahead you can bring garrus who has armor-piercing ammo or pretty much anybody with high damage weaponry you the player can also plan ahead and conserve all your heavy ammo until the fight with the thresher maw which is exactly what i did and it took down a sizeable chunk out of its armor planning ahead defeats the purpose of this mission you're supposed to use what you think you need at the time and then deal with the consequences as they come and if after all that you can still come out unscathed then you're more than worthy of joining the clan after finishing the rite of passage uvank meets with grunt and an altercation occurs fighting between krogan usually results in just one thing and i'm pretty sure you can tell where this is going uvank and his squad mates try to kill shepard and grundt but they fail but now that all the hurdles have been overcome grunt is now a part of clan erdnot with shepard serving as his battle master the one who will guide him towards his enemies and give him the fights he so rightly deserves and because of this induction grunt now has officially quelled his mysterious urges and is now a full-grown krogan adult after doing the horizon mission the one where we met ashley or cayden the illusomen will give us info on the last four crew members the first two that we'll talk about though are samara thane both of them are wonderful additions to the team as they can provide more info on the races within mass effect to get to them though we need to go to ilium ilium seems like a really beautiful and safe place but many people have just called it a fancier looking omega in this place though is liara who now works as an information broker this is around the time that she'll tell shepard how she managed to find his body and how she and farin were hired by cerberus to do so we'll talk about her later though as she is a part of an incredible dlc outside of her office is not only gianna from novaria but also a person who claims to be a messenger for the rachni queen talking with gianna is more just about catching up and helping her with another quick job but it's mostly just asking how she's been since then as for the rack and i queen she left a message for shepard saying that she is grateful that he decided to spare her and is willing to help the fight against the reapers when necessary but seeing as we don't fight any reapers in this game she won't be heard of again until mass effect 3. to get to samara we'll need to talk to officer dara but sitting in front of her is sheala from pharos her skin tone has changed a bit though but she believes that was a side effect of the thorian but she said that she's been continuing to help the people of pharos and she even gives us a chance to continue helping them with a quick side quest ilium is really where a lot of the changes in the game start to take form it's only been about five minutes and we've already talked with three characters in the previous game if they died though none of them will appear and shiala is replaced by a random colonist from pharos once again there are small changes and you're only really going to be talking to them for a few minutes before they leave but it is nice to see some of the consequences of our choices once we do talk to officer dar she'll tell us that samara being here on ilium is strange that's because samara is an asari justicar justicars are essentially seekers of justice they've taken an oath that forbids them from having children starting a family and having other worldly possessions other than their clothes and weapons the reason samara's appearance is odd is because justicars only stay within asari space and never travel outside of them this is due to a number of reasons but one is more of a consequence of leaving and that's the code they follow drastic cars see things as purely black and white which can be a problem if something is morally gray so for example if someone was caught trying to steal food because they're poor and can't afford it samara would kill that person because they're stealing without considering why they're doing it in the first place it's pretty obvious to see how this can be a problem but all asari are aware of how justicars operate but the other races may not understand why they do the things they do which can cause some problems for not only the justicar herself but also the asari race as a whole this is why they prefer that justicars operate in asari controlled spaces as at least everyone there is well aware of their existence but samara clearly wouldn't be leaving an asari homeworld without a reason to do so and that's because of her daughter morint in the mass effect 1 video i briefly talked about the term ardat yakshi morint is one of them and samara has come here to determine his systems to kill her but for samara to join we need to strike a deal she helps us deal with the collectors while we find the ship more recently left once that she has a lead on her daughter samara sadly won't be able to personally help us though as she has to be taken into custody but the justicar code has rules for this justicars are obligated to cooperate with the police for only one day afterwards they're forced to let her go however she won't be allowed to leave that early and this goes back to the code since they're forcing her to not comply with the code she's taken she must kill them justicar rules are definitely an oddity but it is fascinating to see it play out in game the detective knows the code and knows what will happen if she disobeys but she also has to follow her boss's orders so she's kind of stuck that's why shepard finding the name of the ship is incredibly important not just for samara but everyone within a 40-foot radius of her i wish you were willing to go with the human justicar i've been ordered to take you into custody if you won't leave you risk a great deal by following your orders detective fortunately i will not have to resist my code obligates me to cooperate with you for one day after that i must return to my investigation i will be able to release you that soon you won't be able to stop me finding the name of the ship is pretty easy we'll just follow the breadcrumb trail to when asari commando who has the name of the ship on her data pad after we give samara the details on the ship she now has to be sworn into shepherd's service so that shepard's orders and the orders of the code don't conflict with one another basically samara will now do whatever shepard wants but it's not all it's cooped up to be samara states that if shepard makes her do anything dishonorable while in his service she will comply but once shepard releases her from his code she's free to kill him right after once amar enters the normandy she takes a bit of time to settle in but after a while she will come to shepherd with her loyalty mission talking about samara is actually a great time to bring this up as this affects all the characters going forward but i've never been a huge fan of how this was handled all the characters we've discussed up until now are recruited pretty early in the game so you have time to get to know them more but because samara is only introduced in the latter half of the game her loyalty mission comes a lot faster than others it only takes like two missions for her to give you the details many of the companions like garrus and morden don't get their loyalty missions until after horizon which would mean you would have to wait about five or six missions before anything develops this problem though is likely due to the size of the game if i'm not mistaken mass effect 2 was one of those games that required multiple discs in order to play which is probably why they sectioned off some of the cast until after horizon instead of adding them all at once i think the game is fine the way it is now but it's clear that some corners had to be cut and it's definitely showing with these last four crewmates as stated earlier samara's daughter morin does an ardhadyakshi so she has come here to kill her this is something within asari culture that has existed for ages and many assume that the condition only affects pure blood asari samar goes on to say that killing morinth has become the most important thing in her life and is the reason she became a justicar 400 years ago samara had a family prior to being a justicar she had three daughters all of whom are yakshi which would mean that samara made it with another asari in order to create them i want to clarify that purebloods being ardot yakshi is more of a theory rather than facts but it hasn't been disproven yet not all pure bloods are arda yakshi liara and samara are great examples but all ardot yakshi are pure bloods which is why the theory exists when one does become an arda yakshi they are given the option to live out their life at home away from others or die two of her daughters agreed morons did not morons chose freedom but is now being hunted as a result it sounds like imprisonment but arayakshi are treated this way due to their unique condition the condition is a rare genetic disorder when an ardot yakshi mates with you the melding of the nervous system is not as gentle when we discuss the races in mass effect 1 i talked about how asari meld the genes of their partner together during intercourse morenz does the same thing but it's more pain than pleasure she pretty much burns your brain and kills you a great example is to think of the arda yakshi as another name for a succubus the reason this is such a problem is because the genetic condition treats this like an addiction once they get the feeling of killing someone for the first time they are hardwired to continue doing it morinth like any addict will need a fix to keep her going so she continues to search for people to mate and kill this actually wouldn't really be that hard for morenth as asari are known to be the most beautiful race in the galaxy but morith loves the chase she finds that manipulating her partner into being hers is just as fun as killing them it's sickening but it's incredible the asari are probably the most detailed race in this game and i love hearing more about their culture which is why i love samara as a companion as not only does she provide us with more info on the justice cars but also the ardayakshi to find more we're gonna need to go to omega and talk with arya who will have more information it's not much but a girl was recently killed and it seems to fit the mo of morinth we can travel to the slums and talk to diana about her daughter neff going through her things is critical to not failing this mission it will allow shepard to gain insight into what likes because the plan is for shepard to be the bait once the two are alone samara will arrive and take her out if you don't attract her or choose the wrong options on the dialogue wheel morinth will leave and samara will not be loyal one thing i like about samara's loyalty mission is that she is one of four companions that can have their mission fail and one of two who can die during it zaid is the only other companion that can die during their mission but as we know that's under a very specific circumstance of beating the game samara has the potential to die no matter what the circumstances also unlike zaid there is no way to convince her with a speech check if you fail tough assuming you aren't safe scumming this makes the stakes of the mission that much higher as there are numerous ways to fail this mission if you manage to succeed though samara and moreth will be at a standstill leaving shepard to decide who to kill while i am glad that they give the player the option to choose i have never found a good reason for actually keeping moritz alive gameplay-wise her abilities are pretty much the same as samara minus one ability and narratively it makes sense to kill morin i'll be honest i have never killed samara once until now and i absolutely hate it morin terrifies me because after killing samara she says that she will join us and to not worry about the crew as she can imitate her mother and that's the part that scares me not only is she talking and dressing like her dead mother but she's incredibly good at it i'm a dead ringer for my belated mother few people can tell us apart and i've practiced long and hard to mimic her in every way if i closed my eyes i'd swear you were samara it took years to perfect but when i was younger posing as my mother brought its advantages how do you think i originally escaped from thessia let me just slip into this horrible uniform and none will be the wiser no one on the crew with the exception of kasumi will even notice this but even then kasumi promises not to tell anyone it's just weird to look at morin than see her act like her dead mother that we helped kill also to make matters worse morinth is still on ardatyakshi if you complete the game and choose to romance more and afterwards she will kill shepard during it as if you needed more reasons to not have her on the team but with that finish samara is no longer bothered by anything and is willing to help shepherd on his mission since her 400-year quest to kill her daughter is finally complete since we found samara on ilium it's only right to go back and pick up our next companion thane whereas samara added more depth to the asari race dane adds more depth to the world as a whole by adding a whole another race into the mix dane is in the middle of an assassination so we're gonna need to hurry if we want an opportunity to speak with him his target is nasana dantius she had a small sidequest in mass effect 1 which revolved around us killing her sister who was the leader of a group of slavers nassana now has a target on her head so she hired the eclipse merc to defend her as we approach asana's office she assumes that we're the assassin which allows they in the perfect opportunity to strike unnoticed the first question you will have when seeing him is why does he dress so nice the second question you'll likely have is what is he thane is a drill they're a new race to mass effect and they are one of the rarest races in the game similar to how tally's appearance in mass effect 1 was an oddity so too is thanes the draw were rescued from their own homeworld by the hannah ever since then the two have co-existed and have gotten along very well i briefly talked about the hanar back in mass effect 1 and i mentioned how they only share their soul name with those they're close to since the drell and hannah became very close allies many jerrell know the hanar by their soul names according to thane hannah communicate using bioluminescence which also brings up a really good point one thing i haven't mentioned yet was how the other races speak to one another since each race has different ways of communication and different languages it is customary for anyone outside their homeworld to carry translators that allow them to hear in real time what they're saying in their language the reason i bring this up is not only to provide a reason why everyone speaks english in this game but because jerrell don't need a translator for the hanar many drel have had their eyes genetically modified in order to perceive their higher frequencies as a result though thane is slightly colorblind ultraviolet light which is known to be a mix of purple and blue to us is seen as silver tethane and dark red and black are the same color as for why the hannah and jarrell live together well it's due to their planet the drell at their apex reached around 11 billion people in population at this time though they hadn't achieved star flight yet so all of them were stuck on the planet currently in our world we have around seven and a half billion and people are already saying that we're overpopulated as is imagine another three and a half billion on top of that they were doomed to die until the hannah found them over the years they took drought from their homeworld in order to save their population however they only managed to save around 375 000 the rest were left on the homeworld and likely died out at some point due to overpopulation and lack of resources this however still came with its own set of problems the drill homeworld is very arid and rocky while the hannah home world is filled with oceans this caused many problems for the race's respiratory systems this change in environment manifests in a disease called kepler syndrome something thane has been afflicted with according to thane and the codex kepler syndrome is a bacterial lung disease the henna tried to create antibiotics to stop the disease but after a while they became ineffective the only method that works is a lung transplant but since the disease spreads to other organs over time it's not permanent and is really just to buy time this is why thane joins the team since he is dying and likely won't live another couple years he wants to make the world a better place while he's still alive but like anyone with limited time on their hands thane has been reflecting on his own past actions and choices this ties into his loyalty mission which centers around his son colyat thane is an assassin and when he was on the job one day he had the target in his sights but another draw woman saw and stepped in front of a shot he was conflicted because this woman had no reason to save his target it was simply because she didn't want thane to kill them he was stunned and didn't know what to do so after some time he met with the woman and she eventually became his wife but after some time his wife ended up dying but what he didn't tell his son is that it was because of him someone wanted to kill thane but they knew he was too strong to take on so they used his wife to get to him thane then dedicated the rest of his life to killing those who killed his wife and once he was successful he'd plan to reunite with his son but he couldn't bring himself to do it he had spent such a long time away from his son that he didn't know how to speak to him afterwards plus coliette was likely angry at him for being gone for so long so he didn't want to deal with that conversation thane thought about this over for years and never did anything about it but now that he's dying he wants to make things right before he passes he managed to use some of his old contacts to track down his son and discover that he has become disconnected thane believes in the old religious gods of the drill which say that the body and soul are different the soul is the real self and the real person and when the soul and body work together they become a whole person when someone is disconnected it means that the body and soul aren't operating together this can be both mental and physical so if someone is weakened by fear or despair the soul is disconnected from the whole person but if someone is physically injured then the body is disconnected from the whole person thane sees the body as a vessel that people use to commit acts similar to how a person uses a gun to shoot someone where someone would see the person as the killer in that situation thane would see the gun as the killer this allows him to absolve himself of his crimes because he claims that it was his body that did it not his soul koyat has somehow discovered dane's old contacts and has now taken up assassination work he doesn't want koya to become like him so he wants us to track him down if we ask why he needs our help he'll say something quite odd zayn i don't have your contacts and i don't have your tracking skills why do you need my help for this i don't need your help i want it the last time i saw my son they wrapped her body in seavines waited with stones he tries to pull from me calls he begs them not to take her away they let her body slide into the water he hits me don't let them stop them why weren't you it always rains on kaje warm water pours down his face one thing drel excel at are remembering memories they are able to perfectly remember just about every moment of their lives down to the emotions they were feeling at the time this can cause some problems for the gel as while they're able to relive happy memories some can become too attached so that they never end up interacting with anyone and live a life of seclusion but the same is true for the bad moments in our life over time the human mind completely forgets memories or loses some of the smaller details we all remember the most embarrassing moment of our lives but after some time the details and the timeline events can be a bit blurry but for drell they remember every detail perfectly and it could be very traumatizing for them they need shepard to track down his son so that he can meet with him before he dies similar to samara if you don't catch koyat in this mission then you fail and dane is not loyal to shepherd in order to find koi yet we have to tail his current target then prevent him from following through with the kill once we spot him if you succeed koyat is cornered with shepherd thane and c sec blocking the entrance thing then takes the opportunity to talk to kolyat and explain why he wasn't a better father captain bailey then takes coyote into custody but shepard can't convince him to just give him some community service bailey also allows the two to talk more in private afterwards we can ask dane how it went and he says that while koyat is still having trouble opening up and forgiving him he is hopeful that after some time the two will be able to reconcile and become father and son again thane is easily in my top three companions for this game he's a very honest and spiritual person and for him to share all that information with us is wonderful not only showing how much he trusts shepard but also showing how much he actually enjoys our time together thane has only told shepard about how he met his wife and even tells shepard that he is the first friend he's had in the past 10 years he's a really sweet and considerate person and learning about his spiritual side was interesting as it's a rather unexplored topic in the world of mass effect at least when it comes to actual dialogue as most of it is just delegated to the codex hem on kira lord of hunters grant that my hands be steady my aim be true and my feet swift and should the worst come to pass grant me forgiveness both samara and thane had a lot of information to go over and for people who are unfamiliar with their background or even the game in general that could have been a bit overwhelming so let's take it easy for a bit and talk about someone we're already familiar with our 11th companion is tali zoro tali of course being the same quarry and we met back in mass effect 1. we also meet her earlier in the game on freedom's progress although that meeting was pure coincidence but now we're specifically trying to recruit her she is located on a planet called haystrom tali is here to conduct research as this planet used to be a home colony of the quarians and seeing as they live on ships now it makes sense why they're trying to explore other planets as soon as we arrive not only are geth here but something is wrong with the sun when we step into direct sunlight the sun burns our shields tally was sent here to uncover why this is the case we can actually find some of her notes on the planet but there isn't much to go off of the only thing we can learn is that the planet is burning their equipment so they're struggling to get any accurate readings tali also mentioned shepard's name numerous times in their audio logs which is really sweet and shows how much of an impact he has made on her since they met two years ago when we make it inside the base camp we can listen to another audio log of hers that talks about how her ancestors used to live on this planet without their helmet so the sun must have been normal back then this also connects to the architecture of the base as there is a lot of stone everywhere and if we remember kasumi's mission we know that the koreans used to write on stone tablets after defeating loads of geth and helping out one of the last members of the team survive the fight we can meet with tali who gives us more information on the sun according to tali the sun is destabilizing and she hypothesizes that it's because of dark energy affecting the sun's interior apparently the effect is similar to when a star explodes to enter a red giant phase but hastrom's sun is too young for that to be natural if you thought there would be more info on this or that there would be any damning consequences you'd be wrong this never gets brought up again and it's likely tied to a plot line that was going to be developed for the sequel but never came to light former writer on mass effect drew carpishin originally planned for the game to have a dark energy plotline i'm going to paraphrase a lot of what he said but basically dark energy was going to be something only organics could access and use one of the things the writers discussed was to have the reapers kill off species because of that dark energy he was going to have the game mention how organic life would slowly evolve and adopt biotic powers and dark energy but doing so would kill the universe haystrom sun is likely going to explode due to the use of dark energy so imagine this is a sort of ripple effect that occurs throughout the whole galaxy wiping out the entirety of the milky way the reaper's motivations for killing off each species each cycle was going to be so they could preserve the universe and prevent its inevitable destruction at this point in mass effect 2 we still don't know why the reapers do what they do and we won't learn until next game but i do want to clarify it has nothing to do with this dark energy plot a lot of the lore regarding this wasn't fleshed out yet as it was still early in development drew was likely going to continue with this idea but since he wasn't a part of the team anymore the plot got scrapped in favor for the one we have now to this day haystrim sun is one of the many things left unexplained in the mass effect universe and it is a damn shame that we didn't get to see this original idea come to light after saving tally we can ask her if she wants to join the team and she is more than happy to similar to garrus tally doesn't need a reason to join not only is she with shepard again which is reason enough she's already aware of the reaper threat so she doesn't need to be convinced once tally joins though things get a bit hostile we know from freedom's progress that cerberus attacked the fleet so she's very reluctant to talk with any of them just like many of the companions in this game even though they are a part of cerberus they aren't working for them they're working for shepard who just so happens to be employed by cerberus to make things worse right as soon as she's about to leave jacob introduces her to edie who is an ai and given her history with the geth she is even more displeased to hear that news just like in mass effect 1 tali will be in the ship's core making sure it runs smoothly but after some time she'll run into a problem tali's been called back to the migrant fleet so that she can face trial for treason apparently tali has been accused of sending live geth back to the fleet but she claims to have only sent parts and pieces so being the helpful commander we are we're going to help tally out again not only is this a great mission because we get to help her out but we finally get to visit the migrant fleet from what's holly has told us the migrant fleet sounds like a marvel and it is marvelous indeed the fleet consists of 17 000 ships which is so many that it could take days for all the ships to use one mass relay it's also 17 000 ships flying together in a group just the idea of that sounds amazing as we approach the fleet we hear to holly call to them as talizor of osnima naraya the naraya was a part of her name in mass effect 1 but the vas nema is new basically in korean language vos means the name of the current ship you serve on and nars which ship you were born on so tali serves on the nema but was born on the raya this will change as tali's new name is now tali zora vos normandy as the council had her name legally changed now that she serves on shepherd ship right after this tally also lets them know that they will need a security and quarantine team because the normandy is not clean as we know koreans due to their weak immune system take their cleanliness very seriously so making sure the ship is clean and sure that no bacteria or germs will infect them once again more small pieces of insignificant lore that i'm more than happy to learn about once we get to the trial we get the unfortunate news that because we're the captain of the ship tally belongs to we have to represent her in the trial this is told to us literally 10 seconds before one of the admirals says that the trial will be easy as the only rule they have is to present the truth as best as possible without using legal tricks and political loopholes how ironic even worse tali is told right then and there at the trial why her dad is not present because he's likely dead despite how much of a disadvantage shepard is in right now at this trial he gets a lucky break as he offers to go to the ship that was attacked to find out what happened it sounds a bit weird to stop a trial like this but shepard can tell the board that the safety of the fleet comes first which they agree on this not only makes shepard look nice in front of the board but also allows him mentality to gain more knowledge on what exactly happened here as it's possible they could exonerate holly if they find the right evidence before we leave we can meet with some of the admirals to get their thoughts on the trial and even their own ideals the admirals that were present at the trial were admiral zen chorus and han gerald admiral's end is more concerned about the safety of the fleet over anything else but also has no issues studying the get that she wants him to go back to the servants they were supposed to be admiral han geral also wants the fleet to be safe but he wants to go to war with the geth so that they can retake their home and admiral korres is a geth apologist he believes that the koreans are wrong to destroy them he wants the people to focus on finding new colonies to live on rather than retake their old homeworld tali's aunt charleron who announces the trial doesn't sway any particular way and tali's father rail is likely dead so his spot on the admiralty board will need to be filled so currently all the admirals are at a standstill regarding their decisions as the party is all split the other people we meet here are kal rieger who we met on haystrom and vitor from freedom's progress if we chose to give vidor back to tali we can see that he's slowly but surely making a full recovery if we gave him the service for questioning though he'll still be here but he doesn't seem to be improving in fact he is scared of our presence if cal was either told to stand down during the fight or told to help and shepard manages to kill the geth colossus quick enough kale will survive other than that he's dead after talking with everyone we can proceed to the ship most of the encounter is fighting but every now and then a logger datapad is found with some info on the crew it seems like the crew here was performing experiments on geth's systems as they were trying to look for new ways to overcome the death it's some info on what was going on but not enough to explain as to why the gether on board the ship in the room next to them shepard and tolly find tali's father who died during the attack you can use a paragon interrupt to comfort her and it's a really sweet moment tali is genuinely one of the nicest companions in this trilogy and she clearly doesn't deserve to go through this so hugging it out lets her know that she's not alone in this world after their quick hug tally finds a message from her father and it's about what to do when she finds the message rail knew that his daughter would want to find him so he left her a message fully knowing she would find it this makes her feel a bit better as it shows that her father even in his final moments still wanted to help his daughter at the end of the level is where the real evidence is shown rail and the crew of the ship wanted to create live geth so they could test weapons against them but they were too ambitious and the geth escaped and killed the crew one of the crew says that they would be able to get more progress done had tali actually sent active death instead of parts but her father purposely wanted tally out of this business so that she wouldn't be put on trial he wants no harm to come to her because he wants her to be safe he was also incredibly dedicated to this project because he promised tally that he would build her house back on their homeworld before he died but as we can see the love of his daughter clouded his judgment and ended up getting the crew and himself killed while we have enough evidence to prove that tali is innocent we run into a problem presenting this info would exile her father which would remove his name and accomplishments from all the quarian data almost like he didn't exist in the first place even though he is dead tally doesn't want her dead father to be known as one of the worst war criminals in quarry in history so shepherd is presented with a few options at the trial if you go to the trial and show the evidence tally is innocent but you lose her loyalty because we exiled her father if we don't provide the evidence tally is exiled but she stays loyal because we didn't exile her father however we have the option to also use the speech check which has tally exonerated without the need of evidence meaning she is loyal to us anyway or on the rare case she managed to save vitor cal rieger and talk to the admirals prior to the mission you can rally the crowd as the game says which has vitor and kale speak on her behalf allowing her to win the trial and allowing us to gain her loyalty this is a lot of options and i love the differences between them going above and beyond and making sure we get the best of both worlds requires shepard to do things outside the trial and unique requirements should provide unique results if shepard didn't take these options he's forced to choose between the lesser of two evils both of which will not end in a happy ending for everyone i really love the way this finale was handled and how wonderful the mission itself is in regards to its lore and background i don't think i need to say this but tally's quest is fantastic tally as a person is probably my favorite companion in the trilogy although garrus does give her a solid run for her money being the figurehead of corey and knowledge in this game i've always enjoyed talking with her every conversation or interaction with her always seems to provide more insight on the korean people and their thoughts on the get and speaking of geth we should probably wrap this whole section up by talking about our final companion in the game legion legion is found during the reaper iff mission which would have been included in the collector section when we discussed those missions about a century ago but i wanted to hold off on talking about it until now as a recap we need to find the reaper iff because the reapers use a friend foe system to determine who can cross the omega 4 relay safely this iff will make sure we don't get killed immediately upon using the relay and there just so happens to be one on a derelict reaper floating in the middle of space after entering the reaper we can see that a research team has set up a base here in order to study it as you would expect though things went wrong pretty quickly not only are there husks here which implies that the crew was killed but there was a recording of two guys who apparently had the same wife their memories seem to be merging with one another which is why they can recall the same exact details about their wife clearly the crew is going mad and being indoctrinated and another audio log will confirm this as one of the crew talks about some god likely in reference to the reapers once shepard makes it further into the reaper a husk shows up behind him but luckily a sniper is able to save him until it's revealed that the sniper is a geth but this is no ordinary geth as it is our new companion legion once shepherd finds the iff we can meet with legion but he's knocked out by one of the husks shepard then destroys the reaper core and takes legion back to the ship similar to grunts shepard can refuse to activate him and instead sell legion to cerberus if we activate him though we learn a lot more about legion and the geth legion is a geth mobile platform he also seems to be a bit rare in regards to other mobile platforms geth are originally synthetic code so the body they use is really just a body each geth comes at roughly 100 programs equipped within them these programs then form inside the geth which they call a mobile platform it's almost as if a hundred voices were talking and controlling a body at the same time legion is special as he was specifically designed to operate alone outside the geth homeworld so he has over 1100 programs that inhabit the body as we know geth have the ability to expand their neural network tali says that the more death there are together the smarter they are since legion has 1100 programs compared to the normal 100 or so that regular geth have that means legion is 11 times smarter than a normal death soldier that is also why legion refers to himself as we because he's talking about all the individual programs that reside in the body this was also why legion was given so many programs because with all that power he could operate on his own and do what he was intended to do which was to communicate with organic life outside the geth homeworld while normal guts would likely not be able to do this on their own since they lack enough programs in bandwidth i know this may seem confusing because ever since the start of the series we have seen geth as these robotic bodies but in legion's loyalty mission we can see what's called a hub which contains millions of geth inside remember they are just lines of code so they're able to exist in small spaces like this the question still remains though why is legion trying to find shepard he calls out to him when they first meet so there must be a reason well legion was searching for commander shepard because they have mutual goals shepard and legion both hate the heretics and the old machines the old machines are what they call the reapers and the heretics are the bad geth legion followed shepard by retracing his steps all the way back to eden prime he ended up finding the crash site of the normandy which is why he's wearing part of shepherd's n7 armor up until this point we may have assumed that all geth wanted the same thing but since they have sentience they have the ability to think for themselves the true geth which legion is a part of are the ones that hate the reapers the heretics are the ones who allied with the reapers and the ones we've been fighting since mass effect 1. legion also briefly mentions a being called nazara in this conversation which he says is the name of the being we call sovereign this is likely sovereign's actual name as we know that reaper is the wrong term sovereign even says in mass effect 1 reaper a label created by the protheans to give voice to their own destruction as for how sovereign even contacted them the reapers like the geth were listening in on organic radio transmissions and from listening to them is how the reapers learned about the death war with the quarians and then sovereign sought them out and recruited them this whole conversation is fascinating as it implies that not all geth want to fight organic life and simply just want to exist furthermore heretic is oddly specific a heretic is someone who has views opposite of the current church's views this would mean that the geth have some sort of religion they believe in we briefly saw a bit of this on pharaohs as some of the guests looked like they were praying to something but it's unclear if the heretics have a different religion than the true geth do but fighting the reaper isn't the only reason they want shepard's help the heretics have created a weapon something morrick into a virus and when activated we'll rewrite some of the code in the geth to make the true geth join the side of the heretics legion was sent to stop it which is why he was seen at the reaper core when we arrived to stop this virus though we need to make it to the heretic station on the edge of the terminus system as you would expect by now there is a lot of combat in between a lot of dialogue when we arrive legion will say that shepard has the option to either destroy the geth or convert the heretics to the true geth thus doing the opposite of what the virus was intended to do when asked what legion wants he says that he's unsure out of all the programs that make up the mobile platform 573 want to write them 571 want to destroy them legion isn't able to make a decision though due to this conflict this is likely so shepherd gets the final choice on the matter but it is interesting to see that not even all the programs in the legion mobile platform can even come to an agreement further showcasing how much sentience the geth truly have this is even shown to us a bit earlier as when analyzing the geth hub legion says that the heretics have copies of their current patrol routes to organic life this is normal when dealing with enemies but to legion this is new when the heretics split off from the true geth they let them there was no war between them the two groups had peace given that legion is synthetic it's hard for him to understand the concept of conflicting ideals and how two people that grow apart will develop in different ways meaning their two people won't be the same anymore after getting to the end of the station we can choose whether or not to rewrite the heretics we sadly don't see the outcome of this decision and for war reasons it actually makes sense according to legion anyone connected to the geth neural network will change within a day however any of the mobile platforms like legion won't be affected until they connect back to the network so many of the death we would fight in side quests and such likely haven't become infected yet as they haven't had an opportunity to plug into the network once the crew escapes the station legion becomes loyal meaning all of our companions are loyal to shepherd as you would expect though tali and legion don't get along and the two have a disagreement legion was trying to scan tally's omni tool and send back data about the flotilla to the geth legion found data that suggested the quarians were performing weapons tests and were discussing plans of attacking the geth so legion figured he would warn them similar to jack and miranda you can either use a speech check or pick a side if the speech deck is used and legion agrees to not transmit the data he found and has thanks tali will provide legion with non-classified data about the flotilla so both parties are satisfied despite how angry legion might make you because of this decision we have to remember that legion was only going to send the data because his people would be attacked the geth are not really as dangerous as they are made out to be yeah they were created by accident then their first interaction with organic life wasn't great but they still want to interact with organics and be able to live on their own without being threatened that's why the geth want to defeat the heretics as they give them a bad name it's a new side to the death we haven't seen yet i just wish we had more time to talk to legion if there's one major downside to legion is that he's found so late in the game that the player will likely never actually use them and the squad went on missions there's so many missions in this game i would have loved to see legion on like in horizon or even the collector's base but we weren't able to do that you're able to bring him in some of the recruitment missions but you also have to risk sacrificing the entire crew in order to do so i'll explain that later but if you go a bit out of order you can actually bring legion to tally's recruitment and loyalty mission which means you're literally bringing a guest to the migrant fleet and all the interactions this creates are tense or in cal rieger's case are downright hilarious we talked on the radio before that drop ship arrived you've got to get right behind you we are allied with shepard we will fight the death units in this area you know ordinarily that wouldn't fly with me but i can't afford to be picky right now bert i can't believe you guest get down ally fire sleeping cover requesting assistant shepard commander how does that geth know your name this gift is part of our team it's fighting the other guest i can explain it later i don't think it's a good idea to bring a get that dumb thing off my ship before you start an incident that makes the ascension project fiasco you're defending your ship i respect that but don't try to intimidate me captain or what or i take off this mask and breathe germs all over your nice clean ship security a death is present in the courtroom does charlie zora think to affect this hearing with threats furthermore if you remember from tali's loyalty mission one of the admirals is a geth apologist and bringing legion here provides new dialogue do you think the geth would be willing to accept a truce with quarians legion we did not seek hostilities with creators we fought for continued existence so your people would be open to peace not without additional data that suggests coexistence is possible or desirable for creators when the creators have believed victory is possible they have attacked us 100 of the time i understand it would be difficult to argue for peace when faced with odds like those that does not mean the argument should not be made i've always felt that legion is the most underappreciated companion in the game due to him being recruited right before the final mission i would have loved to see how he would have acted during the other companions recruitment missions like with garrus but unless i'm mistaken you need to recruit the first batch of characters before horizon can start which means it's impossible for him to be present during the mission with legion and his mission done however we've officially talked about all 12 companions in mass effect 2. and by now you can probably tell that over half of this video has just been spent talking about the companions this not only shows that the companions have way more depth to them than before but also shows how little the game has in terms of content when the companions are taken out and that may be a problem for some people during the development of the game one of the devs said quote the funny thing is that people say other than gathering your crew and building your team and getting ready for this mission there's not much story there but that is the story end quote while i personally like this game's story i could see how many people will be upset by this decision we finally got to see the main throat of the game in action but now we're focused on the companions now i saw a couple comments on the previous video that said mass effect 2 was the weakest game in the series and i can't blame you if you think that way there are only 4 missions in this game regarding the reapers which is a third of the number of the companions we have on our team while i am glad that we learned more about the reapers and the collectors and we still have more things to learn about them that i'll get to in a moment i would be lying if i said that i'm glad the reapers were pushed to the side as much as they were in this game at the end of the day though at least the content we did get was worth it all the companions just like their gameplay all provided unique experiences to the story some added new races some added new roles in social systems others were just more of the same but one thing that they shared was that each mission was personal to them even though a few of the missions weren't that interesting to me the feeling that what i was doing was deeply personal to them was there at every step not once did any mission feel unimportant each character had different problems plaguing them and i was more than happy to help them with their issues after all they were helping me with my biggest issue taking down the reapers so it's only fair that i helped them with theirs the only complaints i did have though were that some of them were just not that interesting to me i said quite a bit ago that many of the human companions weren't as interesting with the exception of jack this problem corrupted mass effect 1 as well for likely the same reason ashley and caden and while interesting couldn't hold a candle to the other four as they were from different races and different cultures most of ashley and caden's life is already known because they're human we don't need to ask what gods they pray to how they eat or are their immune systems different because we already know this carries over into mass effect 2 as each character that wasn't the five humans either added new insight into their racist culture and background or already did that in mass effect 1. out of the others jack was are the one that stood out the most jack's story built upon the idea of biotics and ran with it showing the player how horrible the experiments were and what life was like for the kids that were subjected to it zeit and kasumi's missions were short which is the main reason i'm giving most of them a pass as if they were longer i likely wouldn't have joined them i understand that not everything has to be about a life-changing event and can be something as simple as killing someone who wronged you but we've also killed thousands of other blue suns already yes veto was different but the only difference is that he had a name as for jacob and miranda i found myself happy by the end of each mission but only because it was finally over i think a major contributor to this was their personalities jacob is just a typical cerberus soldier and miranda was created to be a perfect biotic nothing ever goes farther than this and their loyalty missions didn't really help that much either they aren't the only characters with lackluster or repetitive ideas as garris is still the same old garris personally i'm fine with this because garrus comes with a lot of charm but even still they managed to weave his idea of what it means to enact justice into his loyalty mission and give us a chance to think about whether or not sedonas deserved it jacob and miranda were more about daddy issues and while miranda's made sense i still found both of them to be disappointing but that's okay you aren't going to nail it every single time and as a complete package though there were a lot more good companions than bad ones before we continue where we left off it's about time we talked about the side content and dlc in this game this section of the game's content really shows off its best and worst looks the side quests are similar to mass effect 1 where most of them involve a small errand with not too much story involved which as i said in the prior video is completely fine we do get a few unique missions like being able to find the crash site of the original normandy which i really enjoyed and you can also travel back to the citadel for a lot of side missions the only disappointing part is that the presidium has not been completely removed as the presidium floor is really just the counselor's room when we enter the room anderson will be there regardless of our choice if we let them live then we'll be able to talk to the council about cerberus and what we've been up to but if they died in the previous game we won't be able to see them at all even though we get to speak with them it's only briefly and goes just about how you would expect they still don't believe in the reaper's existence and when told to visit ilose and meet vigil they claimed they did and vigil was deactivated prior to their arrival the council's fate as a decision feels absolutely useless in this game as we barely interact with them they do appear more in mass effect 3 so we'll have to revisit this choice later and that also brings up a good point about the decisions of this series the only major decisions that we get to see in this game is rex's fate and the rachni queen but even then it's just one conversation with each of them hell we only get to see the vermeier survivor once for three minutes ilium is where the decision started taking form but even then it was just a few short interactions and that was it similar to the council all of these will have more impact in mass effect 3 so we'll talk about them again later but this decision to not showcase our choices just makes this game feel so disconnected from the rest of the series and as we just talked about the main content already feels disconnected as is thanks to the reapers taking a back seat in the narrative mass effect 2 really doesn't provide a lot of reason to actually care about our decisions making them not feel as important as the previous game made them out to be i want to move past this content though is what i really want to focus on is the planetary exploration or lack thereof bioware revamped the planetary exploration of mass effect 1 by completely removing it sort of all you do now is go to planets and scan them for resources from a pure gameplay perspective this system has more benefits than the previous one as the resources are vital to upgrading your equipment so on those merits alone i do prefer this system but as a whole it's just disappointing every now and then when exploring a planet you'll find what's called an anomaly which is a very short mission that can take anywhere from one to five minutes these usually entail some random objective like putting shields back online or just navigating a swamp the one positive though is that a lot of these places look amazing even though they are incredibly small the levels and sky boxes are great i do wish that some of these locations though were just a bit bigger because the normandy itself is bigger than some of these places also i'm fairly certain you cannot revisit them again so you only get to experience these planets for the same amount of time it takes to complete the mission and that's it i just wish we could have had the original system back because exploring planets was fun yeah they weren't great but at least we got to do them i just don't think removing it entirely instead of fixing the problem was a good idea it makes the world feel smaller as a result the removal of this also makes me hate one of the dlcs in this game more than usual the firewalker dlc is probably the worst content in this entire game it's all based around this floating vehicle called the hammerhead it was supposed to be a better mako and traversal-wise it absolutely is as the hammerhead has a higher jump and a boost with it but combat with this vehicle is insufferable as all you have to do is aim near a target and the lock-on missiles will take care of the rest but that's of course assuming you live long enough to do that as the hammerhead dies extremely quickly even on normal difficulty but the main problem i have with them is the worlds themselves you have to travel to all these different planets for all these missions and all of them are completely unique and incredible to look at and it makes me wonder what would have happened if they had put some of this time into the planets themselves i will recognize that time constraints may have played a role in this but i have found no articles to claim this so it leads me to believe that the removal of exploration was planned early on it just sucks that the great planets in this game are held behind these missions and these missions aren't even that good either most of it revolves around picking up items and then leaving you can complete this entire dlc in about 30 minutes the ending was at least somewhat interesting as the data that we've been collecting belonged to a dr oloy who was possibly indoctrinated by the reapers as he was caught sending their research to the geth there's also this prothean orb at the dig site but of course nothing actually happens as all the data we sent to cerberus is going to take years to survey so we're not going to learn anything from this orb anytime soon making the entire dlc completely worthless at least the next one isn't that bad though a rival is a dlc revolving around another group of researchers and another reaper artifact can't imagine this will go well we are first tasked with saving this doctor who is being held at a batarian prison the batarians are trying to interrogate her so that she can reveal the location of their main base after rescuing dr kenson she reveals to us that the reason she was being held prisoner was that her group was trying to blow up a batarian mass relay destroying one of these is unheard of so far in the series so there has to be a good reason for doing so according to the doctor she states that this mass relay what they call the alpha relay is how the reapers will travel to the other mass relays allowing them to take down all sections of the galaxy at once dr kensin believes destroying the mass relay will stop them from doing so in game the concept of mass relays is misunderstood because the game allows us to travel between any relay we want in universe though there are primary and secondary mass relays primary mass relays allow people to travel thousands of light years in a split second but can only go to another relay often called its partner secondary mass relays provide less distance only a couple hundred light years instead of a thousand but we can use any of the mass relays it touches within its range the alpha relay is a combination of both by tweaking its controls a bit you're allowed to travel to any of the other mass relays even if they're thousands of light years away this is why dr kensing wants to destroy it but doing so would also destroy any life within its range thankfully the system is remote but three hundred thousand batterians live on the planet we just rescued dr kenson from so lots of people will die regardless their plan was to launch a giant asteroid into the mass relay which they assume would be enough force to rip it wide open the question still remains though how do they know about the reaper invasion well they have a reaper artifact they call object rose just sitting there in the middle of the facility when dr kenson touched it similar to that beacon on eden prime she saw visions of a reaper invasion and knew that the relay needed to be destroyed despite saying only a few minutes ago that she and the crew were careful with the artifacts she ends up betraying shepard confirming that the crew was being indoctrinated as a result though they knock out shepard and try to keep him sedated until the reaper invasion has begun clearly that isn't going to work and now shepard has to go to the facility alone and stop the invasion himself during this whole counter there's been a timer that's been slowly ticking down and after getting knocked out again shepard now has 30 minutes before the reaper invasion starts dr kensin realizes her only option is to blow up the asteroid before it hits the mass really but because shepard is shepard he stops that as well just before leaving the asteroid though shepard gets a visit from harbinger they exchange in verbal blows for a bit before shepard breaks out into this weird speech about fighting until the end and never giving up because that's what humans do weird time to preach about this but sure i'll go with it shepard then gets picked up at the normandy and the asteroid hits the mass relay delaying the reaper invasion but also denying three hundred 000 batarians the chance of continued existence this will and should have damage consequences but and i'm starting to sound like a broken record here none of that will be seen until mass effect 3 and even then i'm fairly certain it's just a few dialogue changes also in case you're wondering what happens when the timer runs out bioware did plan for this [Music] despite it looking like a vision of the future this is really what happened after the timer hit zero and we can see that the reapers killed everyone as extra content arrival wasn't too bad its first half was rather boring but it started to pick up speed towards the end which was nice but this story structure was replicated in the next dlc project overlord as soon as we start the dlc we're flown into a different planet and on the planet is a cerberus research base everyone on the station has been killed as geth have overrun the facility while i don't mind it that much this recycled plot of people toying with geth or reaper artifacts because they think they're different from everyone is getting a little played out the only member of the crew who's alive is archer who says that their vi went rogue i understand how important this conflict between organic and synthetic life is in this game but i really don't think we need to rehash the same scenario a dozen times to its credit how this happened was at least different archer's brother david is a genius due to his autism he was able to mimic the geth language at one point allowing him to communicate with them archer figured that by interfacing a human mind with a vi they could control the geth and their guinea pig for this test was going to be david i think the main issue with this dlc is the pacing it took roughly 90 minutes to complete all the content but it wasn't until the last 10 that the story actually started taking shape everything else before that while technically necessary for the plot to progress was really just busy work created to extend the dlc's runtime all you do before this is just travel to these gorgeous environments and just hit a couple buttons and fight a lot of death once we do make it to david though we can see how traumatizing these tests were for him david is strung up and not only has two giant tubes going into his mouth but various other devices that are piercing his skin it looks pretty awful we're also given the choice of freeing him or letting him stay like this both of which are shown you get the point already mass effect 3. overall these past dlcs aren't too bad but they just don't generate a lot of excitement for me i left these dlcs thinking oh okay well that was cool i guess they just kind of existed they weren't good or bad just middle of the road i like the attempt at trying to create a new plot for the player to uncover but it's just the same scenarios that we've seen a hundreds of times already many of mass effect 1's side quests at least the ones that were on the planets ended in the same way so it's hard to feel excited about the fifth geth invasion or the fourth reaper indoctrination i can maybe see these being created as a way to show how much of a threat the geth and reaper are and how organic life will always be doomed to repeat itself no matter what happens but i don't need dlcs to tell me that all you have to do is just play the game indoctrination and geth have practically become a buzzword at this point but i'm surprised no one on illium is using it for their marketing schemes reapers indoctrinating researchers geth attacking another colony filled with a bunch of red arrows and circles like it's a youtube thumbnail like yeah no they've been doing that since the series started but i guess this ended up having its benefits a large group of terrible content makes the one time it actually is good stand out more and layer of the shadow broker is that content layer of the shadow broker is easily the best dlc in this game as not only is there no geth or reapers involved at all but it also involves liara attempting to kill the shadow broker now that is a great sales pitch to actually start the dlc we must meet with liara first who we can see has taken after her mother matriarch benezia as she says the same line she said when we fought her liara has been using her time since mass effect 1 wisely and has become a very well respected information broker we also talked a bit earlier about how she was paid by cerberus to retrieve shepard's body before the shadow broker gave it to the collectors she also lost ferin during that job and has vowed to stop the shadow broker ever since thanks to the elusive men though were able to give liara a bit of information that could help her catch him before we join liara on this adventure she has a few jobs for us something major it's just connecting data points and trying to find someone called the observer until we realize that nick saris her assistant is the observer and was likely going to take liar out for the shadow broker after we help liar she tells us to meet her at her apartment later as she needs time to look over the information but by the time we arrived though things have gone wrong apparently liar was almost assassinated in her home there's already a squad of police here who set up a crime scene in order to find out what happened their leader though stands out for the rest and this is because television is a spectre this is the first time we've seen a spectre in this game as the last ones we saw were nihilus and sarin we end up working together with tele to solve the crime and honestly i was very excited about this i was really hoping she would have been a part of the squad as a temporary companion as we haven't been able to team up with a spectre before it would have been a nice change to the gameplay as shepherd is now on equal footing with someone for once tele needs our help figuring out what happened so we look around her apartment and we can examine a few of the art pieces she has on display like shepard's armor seems like everyone in the galaxy is more worried about shepard's armor than shepard himself we can also see that liara hasn't let the business change her as she is still the over-obsessed person we know from mass effect 1 as she has various prothean sculptures and even a painting of islos once shepard touches the picture of the normandy the picture changes to a prothean dig site which looks to be the same one we found her in last game this was a clue given to shepard by liara as she is hinting at the prothean sculptures in the room upon touching one of them a device pops out that houses a recording of liara and her contact ciquette apparently siquette was able to narrow down the location of the shadow broker so she left to go meet him in his office in person shepard and help make it to the office but just a bit too late as the whole office was bombed tele and shepard split up before meeting in the middle and i gotta be honest i did not see this coming tala is not only working for the shadow broker but she also broke into liar's apartment she had her true motivations that shepard could give her all the information she needed as she didn't get a chance to kill lyara the first time i think it was so blinded by the fact that we were actually working with another spectre and possibly going to be on the same squad that i didn't see the betrayal coming looking back on it though it is a bit fishy that a spectre was working with the police on what seemed to be a routine break-in but i hadn't considered that at the time the crew then chased tele through the building before getting into a car chase which is another thing i didn't expect to happen in the dlc we have to avoid a lot of cars during this chase and hearing lyra get more and more agitated during this really makes it worth it she's got reinforcements what kind of guns does this thing have it's a taxi it has a fair meter wonderful truck i know truck i know there we go you're enjoying this layer of the shadow broker is really good at just letting loose and getting out as much personality as possible a lot of the main content is very heroic shepard whether paragon or renegade is still a hero and acts like one since the dlc doesn't focus on major threats of the galaxy it allows the characters to let their hair down a bit and just be witty with each other shepard catches up to tella but ends up taking a hostage you can comply with her but i prefer to use the speech check as this is one of the few times the paragon speech ends up dipping into the renegade a bit shepard literally tells tella that he had sacrificed countless human lives to save the council and brought the rachni back to the galaxy so one human woman is nothing to him clearly shepherd was bluffing in a sense as he wasn't going to shoot the woman because she means nothing but it was really to give liara enough time to chuck a table at her shepherd and liara then have to fight tella and whether intentional or not this fight really showcases how far liar has come as a biotic she has this ability called stasis which freezes and knocks the opponent down even if you upgrade the ability just once the cooldown is so fast that you can literally stun loctella for the whole fight yeah she was still difficult due to her health but she barely got the opportunity to attack this may have also been combined with a lot of the other biotic upgrades i researched which were increased damage and cooldown speeds but with liar's help we were easily able to defeat her before tala dies though she says that the reason she was working with the shadow broker was because his info saved the council a few times so if he needs a few people to disappear she will gladly pay him back for his help this is an understandable and realistic goal like many of the antagonistic figures in this game they have reasonable goals but their methods are a bit gruesome as a spectre it's her job to enact justice and save the council when necessary so the end result was good but the means were the issue she also says that shepard is just as bad as her as he works for cerberus people getting mad at shepard overjoining cerberus is this game's version of the council not listening to his claims about the reapers it seems like shepard can never catch a break over this stuff and to an extent they are right he is working for an extremist organization but he has to or nothing else would get done since no one even believes the reapers exist in the first place it's really hard for shepard to justify his actions for joining when majority of the galaxy doesn't even believe they exist so to many he just looks like an extremist which really starts to piss you off after a while and i feel like this was the intended purpose with tala dead though she's able to get the data she needed and now knows the location of the shadow broker the shadow broker and his ship orbit around a planet called hagalos its climate and weather are extremely dangerous but by following the sunset he is able to be completely undetectable which is perfect for someone who hides their identity it's also here where we can see the production value really ramp up as the skybox and level design are top notch it's a really beautiful place to look at even though we are thousands of miles in the air and could probably fall off if the wind was just a bit too strong similar to the car chase a lot of the witty humor comes out during this encounter especially when shepard is about the good old days when you were able to use omni gel to hack things instead of using tech programs which is referencing the previous games where you could do just that this dlc really is one for the fans liar was one of the most unique characters in mass effect 1 and having an entire dlc dedicated to her was a wonderful experience i also brought garris and talia along when i could so it can really feel like the good old days before the reapers made themselves known liara and shepard find farron but before we can free him we have to meet the shadow broker himself and he's well he's something that's for sure the shadow broker is a part of a species of beings called the yag the odd grew up on a planet called parnak the og have eight eyes which give them enhanced vision allowing them to detect body language perfectly making it hard for them to be lied in front of the og were discovered around 2125 by the council but when it was clear to the yogg that they didn't come to their home world as their new servants they attacked them because of this hostility parnak is off limits by order of the council which is why any yag haven't been seen since as you would expect there's only one way this is going to end but the game purposely knocks out your other companion so you and liara have to fight him together poor garris first a gunship now a table what's next before the fight though the shadow broker may comment on your companion you bring as he refers to him as archangel instead of garrus just goes to show that the shadow broker truly knows all the fight with the shadow broker is similar to other large boss fights in the other games where the player does the exact same thing which in this case is shooting him and then punching him once his shield is up but the added layers of difficulty after each phase are nice as to make it not seem tedious the room also has limited space and cover so trying to kill him before he reaches you can prove difficult due to how he was defeated though the ship suffered a momentary blackout and some of the communications dropped all the operatives he works with were awaiting confirmation to make sure everything is all right liar then takes the opportunity to talk with some of the operatives and since the shadow broker never actually used his real voice everyone was none the wiser and liar has become the new shadow broker her story really couldn't have gone any other way since we've met her she's been obsessed with research and information which is why she became a respected information broker and now she's the galaxy's best information broker and has all the info in the world liara does break down a bit though as she has been searching for farin and shepard for two years and not only does she have both of them back but the information she obtained could help the war against the reapers this was likely eating away at her for a while as in mass effect 1 she helped but she definitely wasn't the strongest ally on our team and now in mass effect 2 despite knowing of the reaper threat she was hopeless without shepard in his leadership so she just used her limited time to get a new job knowing that the reapers could wipe them out at any point but now she can pay shepard back for all his help and this whole talk between the two is just really sweet while this may seem like the end the game isn't done with the content as now that liara is in control of the ship we can come and go as we please and are able to use her resources to our advantage the ship has the regular upgrade stations like the normandy but there is also an advanced training section where we can respect our companion stats a scanner that gives shepard the location of planets with a lot of specific resources which help with the aforementioned upgrades and research and you can also come back every now and then and get deliveries and even send out a random squad of people to do missions for you it's a toss-up on whether or not it succeeds but if you do you can earn more credits from it but by far the best part is reading the notes of our companions and other notable people in the game and the video archive these provide incredible insight into the shadow broker's plans give us updates on our crew and allow us to learn some of the funniest details about the people of mass effect the video archive isn't as interesting as the notes but we do get to see some incredible videos like that reporter we knocked out get punched again by a krogan and evolus as well as a few videos showing our companions honestly the rewards alone are more than enough reason to finish this dlc i must have spent 40 minutes going through all the content and it was an absolute treat layer of the shadow broker really is the gift that keeps on giving from its premise to its gameplay to its rewards there wasn't a single low point at all in the entire dlc the story of liara and her character arc was a welcome addition to the content and being able to just enjoy a mission that doesn't have to do with the reapers is always a nice change of pace as i said it's easily the best dlc in the game and it is one i absolutely recommend you play after what has felt like a lifetime we have finally made it to the final mission since we just spent the past hour and a half talking about the rest of the game let me quickly just give you a recap of what we did in those collectors missions if you remember the collectors are abducting human colonies and the elusive man is hiring shepard to put together a team and stop them during the collector's missions we uncover that the collectors are working for the reapers and are also the long lost protheans their leader is harbinger a reaper who is manipulating a collector general and can use his powerful abilities to assume direct control of any collector on the battlefield later we learned that the collector homeworld is not only accessible through the omega 4 relay but also in the middle of the galaxy using an iff for identify friend foe system the collectors are able to travel back and forth without any problems shepard and the crew then investigate a derelict reaper where they find the iff and legion which leads us to where we left off this is technically the point of no return but it's actually before you start the reaper iff mission itself after you find the device edie will plug into the normandy and since the normandy needs time to sync with it joker and edie urged the crew to take the cerberus shuttle this may have inadvertently saved their lives as right after this happens the collector ship arrives and abducts the crew the iff was actually transmitting the normandy signal to the collectors allowing them to know where they were at any point we get the chance to play as joker momentarily and with the help of edie we managed to not get caught by the collectors joker once again is present for one of the best lines in the game but it's edie saying at this time rather than him now you must reactivate the primary drive in engineering ah you want me to go crawling through the ducts again i enjoy the sight of humans on their knees that is a joke right joker gets the word out to the rest of the crew and now shepard can decide what to do from here earlier i said the point of no return starts before the iff and that's because we're now on a time limit every mission or so some of the crew will die until you reach four missions and everyone but dr shakwas is dead we're only allowed to do one mission assuming you want to get the best ending which is usually reserved for legion's loyalty mission although it is possible to do this before edie finishes the iff once you leave to find the crew we are now in the final mission of the game the infamous suicide mission many choices we make in this series create branching pathways some players go down one path others go down another the suicide mission can create the most amount of branching paths in the whole series it is entirely possible to get every single companion killed during this mission that's why knowing your crew and getting their loyalty is so important it's possible for a companion to live without loyalty but getting it will ensure that they have a much higher chance of surviving this mission is not going to be some heroic story where all the crew make it out alive and defeat the bad guy i mean yeah it is possible to do but it's not guaranteed and the game will not hold your hand during this at all in fact i would argue the game is purposely trying to make you fail firstly there's a chance some of your crew dies before you even get to the ship all the crew on the normandy have been giving you upgrades for the ship like better shielding better guns etc if specific upgrades aren't purchased some of the crew can die right after this you are tasked with picking someone to go through the vents of the collector ship so they can open some of the doors on the other side not knowing what to expect you may obviously look towards your companions for their thoughts jacob perks up and says that he would be a great pick if you pick jacob he will die later when inside the base you'll need to choose a biotic expert miranda says that she can do it technically she can but her shield will start to fail at the last moment getting the other squadmate you brought along killed the game is actively trying to make you fail at every single point pretty much for all the options you're given if you either choose the wrong person or choose the right one but they're not loyal that person will die this is not only important for the game but the series as a whole mass effect 2 allows you to keep playing after the final mission allowing you to finish up some of the content you may have not completed yet if any of that content is done after the mission any crew that die can never be selected again and all those companions make an appearance in mass effect 3 so having them die here means that they'll be replaced by someone else later the outcome of this mission can change the entire playthrough just from one decision it's incredible and it's still my favorite mission in the trilogy despite how difficult it seems though it's honestly not as bad as you think you need to pick a biotic expert tech expert and two fire team leaders if you've been playing with your companions and doing their loyalty missions then you should already know who belongs where garrus is a great pick for both fire team squads kasumi tali and legion are great tech experts and jack and samara are great biotic experts not only do the loyalty missions allow you to gain more insight on how a companion plays during combat but that knowledge can be transferred over to this decision if you didn't do kasumi's loyalty mission or never used her on your team you might not realize she's a viable option for the tech expert position the best thing about this mission though is that it was exactly what i talked about when we discussed vermeier i brought up other choice between ashley and kate and was fine but if you didn't like one or both of them then it was a wasted opportunity if you didn't like ashley there was no emotional impact involving your choice in fact you may have been happy that she was gone now not only can a companion die because of your choices but other companions may get caught in the crossfire as a result the suicide mission is intense and stressful and the difficulty reflects that by making the player genuinely feel like they might not make it out of here with everyone alive one thing i will commend bioware for though is that they make it equally as difficult to kill everyone as it is to save everyone doing the loyalty missions pretty much guarantees a large part of the crew will make it out alive and i highly doubt most players didn't do these unless they're purposely going for an evil playthrough furthermore there is a secret third ending to this mission if you manage to get to the final part with less than two companions the shepherd will sacrifice himself and die giving you the worst possible ending to do a proper evil playthrough that is good enough to carry over into mass effect 3 you'll need to have two of the crew survive and getting that to work is a pain in the ass at least for how i was trying to do it as you know i've been going through the games twice and i wanted to do an evil playthrough to not only show what happens to the choices in game but also who replaces our dead crew next game but since all of them cannot be dead or we fail we need to save at least two of them but it needs to be the least important crew members on the team as characters like tali and garris have important roles in the next game thankfully with the help of some guides i narrowed it down to zaid and morinth this creates the worst possible ending as their contributions in mass effect 3 are the least important it was surprisingly a lot harder than i thought to make sure both of them lived while the others died which really goes to show you how a lot of this mission is really out of your hands even if you are trying to skew things in your preferred favor you still might not come out on top this entire mission is mostly focused on combat is trying to add in major story plots while the player is worried if they accidentally kill the companion would cause them to miss out on some key info it's not until the final part of the level where we get our last bit of information on the reapers the reason the collectors were abducting humans from their colonies was because of this the skeletal machine in front of us is a human reaper when a colonist is harvested in those pods that we saw the crew in they're turned into juice for a lack of a better word which is then injected into the human reaper after enough juice has been injected inside of it it is ready to become a full reaper given that it only goes down to the chest area they aren't even close to done with it yet we aren't sure why the reapers do this but the only thing that we can speculate on at the moment is that it's their form of reproduction they use the species they kill as fuel to make another reaper i want to clarify that the reaper wouldn't look like a human as a final product reapers are giant and way bigger than this human one is this is likely just the inside of the reaper the core if you will while the outer shell is just a regular looking reaper so it's not the fact that each reaper looks like the race it used as fuel but the core of each reaper looks like the race it used as fuel with this in mind if this happened to all the races prior to this current cycle then that would imply that the protheans were not suitable subjects for a prothean reaper if they were that would mean a prothean reaper would exist but since they were turned into the collectors that means either something didn't work or they just simply found a better use for them seeing as we managed to find this reaper in its earliest stage we have a chance to stop it before it's finished we shoot the large tubes that's connected to causing them to explode and remove its supply of juice once we break the tubes we come to the final choice in the game which is to save or destroy the collector base just like we talked about with all the choices in this game we won't know until the next game what actually happens once you make the decision though the reaper wakes up and we are now stuck in a boss fight the final boss fight it's a tough fight but nothing too difficult except when the game bugs out and forces garrus to float which is a bit weird but other than that it was a nice way to end the game once it's dead the crew is sent off the edge and it is also possible for them to die here as well assuming they're not loyal but this is the last time any of the crew can die during the mission as shepard escapes the ship we can hear harbinger monologuing before getting the reveal which confirms that harbinger was indeed a reaper and not a collector after the crew escapes shepard gets one last talk with the elusive man who is either happy or upset depending on our choice of the collector base and the background also changes color again the final cut scene of the game shows the crew or lack thereof if they died as well as the reapers finally making their move on the milky way as we can see them all immobilizing towards the galaxy which leads directly into mass effect 3. mass effect 2 is an amazing game and still my favorite in the trilogy the characters we made across these games are the reason i still play this series to this day and having a game centered around a large group of characters would easily make it my favorite mass effect 2 despite not having a large focus on the reaper still manages to provide us with some incredible information about their history and make the player yearn for more once they see that the final battle is finally upon us several of mass effect 2's companions ended up becoming some of my favorites in the trilogy and it was due to this game allowing us to see into their lives and give us an opportunity to learn more about them making them feel unique not every companion had an amazing story but the good more than outweighed the bad in this scenario it's the highest rated game in the series and it's clear to see why there's so much content to do characters to meet and lore to uncover all of which is wrapped up in one large present that is this game it's not a perfect game mind you it does have its flaws but it's nowhere close to being that bad that the entire game is brought down with it however mass effect 2 shows us that there is still more to come while the game itself might be done with its story mass effect as a series is not over yet as the final battle is about to begin and while i would love to talk to you about it right now we'll have to wait until mass effect 3 to do so thank you for watching today and i hope you enjoyed i have to stop telling myself that there won't be enough to write about with these games since this video has easily passed the 2 hour mark judging by the amount of pages i've written i do plan to talk about mass effect 3 and andromeda sometime soon but i'm going to take a break for a bit i'm planning something really special for october that i cannot wait to share with all of you it's still going to be the same content as usual but the games for october are going to be horror related if you want to know more details i'll be making a community post about it once we get closer to october so make sure to turn on those notifications for the channel so you don't miss it regardless like the video if you enjoyed and subscribe if you're new as always thank you to my returning viewers for coming back to another video and with that take care everyone goodbye you

Channel: Gingy

Views: 419,620

Keywords: mass effect 2, mass effect 2 story, mass effect, mass effect retrospective, mass effect 2 retrospective, mass effect 2 ending, mass effect 2 lore, mass effect story, mass effect lore, mass effect 2 collectors, mass effect 2 harbinger, mass effect 2 video essay, gingy

Id: 6QdTmZU7WXA

Length: 139min 5sec (8345 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 08 2022