Is Mass Effect Andromeda as bad as everyone says it is? - A look at the writing and mechanics

the year was 2012 and BioWare was flying high off of the success and near Universal Acclaim across the board of Mass Effect 3 even with its backlash regarding the ending rather than loosening up and taking a breather the developer decided to take this momentum and add two more projects to their workload on top of the already in progress Dragon Age inquisition of course piling this many projects onto the same Studio at the same time would make things a little hectic so the the main Studio decided to start hammering away at a project that they internally named Dylan in the hopes that it would be talked about years later like Bob Dylan the other project was shipped over to bioware's Montreal Studio where a load of developers who were specifically fans of Mass Effect were hired to work on well Mass Effect much like what happened with the Dragon Age Inquisition the immediate focus with Andromeda was on open world exploration which was point that was heavily publicized just before release the difference here was that while Dragon Age had always been about following relatively linear paths and contained zones Mass Effect did have the beginnings of what could be considered open world Exploration with its Mako planetary missions in the first game and the developers seem to run with that making their interviews about how exploring is the heart of Andromeda a warning sign that portrayed a very strong shift away from the narrative first roots that the series encompassed prior the focus for the first years of work on Andromeda was the idea that procedurally generated planets would be a really neat concept that really neat concept was scrapped by 2015 and somehow BioWare made yet another game where the vast majority of it was completed in a year and a half instead of the 5 years that it seemed to take so the devs decided to Pivot whereas Skyrim was the primary motivator for Inquisition and andromeda's open world exploration The Witcher 3 heavily influenced by bioware's new approach with the developers attempting to make the majority of their side quests memorable the new team hoped to take less of a dire Doom and Gloom approach to the game story and decided that they wanted the players to feel free to focus on side questing without feeling like they're goofing off while the Galaxy is being raised by Reapers it's again another really big indication of how BioWare has developed their games for a long while now the developer tends to bend over backwards to try to ensure that what they're being criticized for doesn't happen again instead of just acknowledging criticism and making subtle adjustments and often times this line of thinking leads to BioWare crippling the ideas that they're usually best at or maybe they just say that they're listening to their fan base when their initial ideas go up and smoke of course this was right around when BioWare was still struggling with the frost by 3 engine which continued to drive the dev team crazy while they attempted to mold it into a game genre that it was never designed for as the months marched on into years the entire process caused quite a large chunk of the dev team's leadership to quit including the director of the original Mass Effect Trilogy and several other senior members in important roles but the game was eventually pushed out in March of 2017 with EA deciding that it would be a fun idea to release the first 10 hours of the game as part of their EA Access program this is what this is next Generation this is what it looks like like some of the textures and characters look better in three don't worry I majored in glad handing during Pathfinder training uh I wrote in my preview I I think they kind of look like Sims 3 era Sims Focus defenses here and here the cat have been quiet for too long see no reason we can't be civilized Clan nacore will pay with blood interestingly enough one of the biggest glaring issues that Andromeda was critiqued for was awful face animations along with things like walk Cycles or quick movements looking awkward these are issues that either weren't present or weren't prevalent enough to be noticed with inquisition's release causing me to wonder if the focus on combat AI battle environments and open world exploration were to blame for the animation suffering but regardless poor reception and mediocre scores greeted andromeda's release like a plague and that was the last last bit of attention that I personally decided to pay the game until I started a YouTube channel and decided to start talking about the original trilogy I never had any intention of playing this game I would have been completely fine if I hadn't and would have patiently waited to see if they [ __ ] up the next iteration of a franchise that I love and yet here we are I think the only thing that really drove me into making this video was random people popping into my comments stating that Andromeda wasn't that bad and that they actually kind of liked it that opinion is so far and away from everything that I had heard about this game upon release and eventually I had to know if it was just piled on at the time of release or if there was something more to it that people just refused to see so in this video I'll be playing through Mass Effect Andromeda I won't be hitting every side quest or seeing everything that there is to see but I'll still head through the main quests and a good chunk of the side content to analyze its Story characters and mechanics okay so you can start out by taking one of two presets that the devs decided to pick out for you if you want or you can attempt to create something custom leading to one of the worst character creators I've seen in recent history basically your guy will always vaguely look like this no matter what you do I do like that they named this menu skin sculpting though as if you could do something more than just cycle through presets and try not to make your guy look like he's sad mad or confused at least they don't let you choose where you want to place your scars or tattoos because I definitely wouldn't want my guy to look stupid but by any means me rer yeah this is the first time I've bailed on a character creator in a very long time hey at least you can choose the inner and outer eye color so yeah classes these are all relatively standard to the Mass Effect universe and I'm not going to worry about going over them just because I've kind of touched on them for three or so videos already launch yourself like a comet well that's all I need to know after this you can choose to customize your twin if you want to I almost decided to roll a ridiculous looking clown fish for my twin but I decided that I'd really be poisoning any chance of me taking this Game's plot seriously if I did so yeah default quirky looking twin for me I swear to God I don't think I've laughed this hard at a supposedly serious menu in a very long time there's a customized history button that has you choosing male or fem Shep and that's it I mean really that was the most important important thing you could do in the original trilogy so I understand it each bold Leap Forward was achieved by the we are all of us leaving behind families here's a fun little thing that will happen and just stay that way unless I Tab out mid cutscene it'll also show up during gaml so I wind up using a controller so Andromeda kicks off with a US Army advertisement that indicates that you're going into the Andromeda galaxy and attempting to find a new home or homes for human it across various planets you're playing as Ryder who wakes up after 634 years of cryosleep and gets ref familiarized with the shuttle that he's on before it starts Rocking Around due to some kind of turbulence get used to seeing people with downright goofy expressions and odd Smiles because that's not getting better anytime soon after a crew member reinitializes the gravity it becomes clear that your twin who was still in their coffin got thrown around the area and is probably dead or worse in a coma that we have to save them from what's wrong this game is a work of art so yeah CIS is in a lowle coma and will be around to save me from Peril at an unexpected time later we head to the next room with our team member the lady who fixed the gravity named Kora Panic has completely taken over the technicians here who are screaming about something being wrong with the Machinery in front of you this sends you into the scan tutorial where you can scan different parts using your Pip Boy then you also fix the unresponsive comp opponents because apparently your guy has Tech that was under lock and key for 600 years I mean game tutorials tend to be historically not incredible but this is pretty rough there are dozens of scenarios that would be better than this for learning how to use your scanner as things stand it seems like my Explorer man was put to sleep with really high-end shipsaving technology either way you suit up and meet with your dad who's the lead Pathfinder on this whole mission this guy's easily the coolest character so far and he he takes the resins as he tries to get everything under control What stopped the ship was some sort of unknown Dark Energy matter that's floating around our so-called golden world and a cursory glance at the planet itself indicates that it isn't the same world that we set out to try to colonize it's surface marred with some kind of black scarring I have to admit that after all of the [ __ ] leading up to this point this is kind of a fun setup two shuttles are sent Planet Side to scout out what's going on leading us to getting a good look at the devastation that's unfolded in these 600 years since we departed Earth as Lightning rips through the skies and rock features float in the distance our shuttle gets hit and Ryder winds up plummeting to the surface before his jetpack kicks on again it's a really cool introduction after the initial less than Stellar beginning so now we get to start exploring this area along with a guy named Liam who landed near us the dialogue between Liam and Ryder is not um well amazing oh and safety tip don't breathe the air found that out the hard way this is crazy welcome to Habitat 7 think I'd rather fool than get hit by lightning give it a minute we can probably do both it's like a Marvel movie I will say that the movement is surprisingly good for a BioWare game though I mean inquisition's combat was a step up in terms of action but andromeda's movement feels really fun with the addition of jump Jets heading through our move and shoot tutorial has a stumbling upon another one of our guys along with a new two alien species bearing down on him they don't seem friendly so we kill them the guy that We rescued goes oh man so much for negotiating with new alien life and then goes all right kill as many of them as you can about 30 seconds later have I mentioned that the dialogue of this game doesn't seem to be its strong suit oh also there's a big [ __ ] swirling massive energy in the sky here which is definitely a huge New Concept for a BioWare game totally haven't seen anything like that before okay so the next chunk of this is just running around and listening to quips between Liam and Ryder while you discover different alien Tech and fight off any enemies that you find honestly this is the best the Mass Effect series has ever felt in terms of combat and movement maneuvering feels Snappy and quick biotic effects look and feel good the cover system is pretty damn seamless the jumpjet dash in particular really helps you to feel like a badass while you zip towards and away from enemy fire along the way you can continuously scan any new life or Tech that you find to gain research points though you can't do anything with them yet and you can't confirm what these different things are since you're cut off from the AI that would normally analyze everything but the biggest positive in this game so far is the leveling system which I honest to God did not expect in the slightest whereas Mass Effect has historically had its build capabilities simplified over time and dramaa kicks it back up to the level of the first game and Beyond as you now have three major skill trees and 12 different skills in each tree and every skill has its own branching paths making this easily the most involved skill system in a Mass Effect game which is [ __ ] awesome instead of being confined to a select few skills that my class gets I can now choose to mix combat Tech and biotics as I see fit creating my own class that suits my play style they did a good job with this bit after scooping up any survivors that we can find and gaining Kora as a squad member we decide that it's probably prudent to get the hell off this Planet unfortunately this lightning storm would only likely continue to fry us if we tried so we go to meet up with Ryder's dad while the downright oppressive banter continues non-stop between these people you know I was sitting here thinking why the [ __ ] would they continuously have these people talk and make these unfunny smartass quips at each other no matter the situation and I figured it out this is the kind of conversation that you could expect from say GIS and Jack and Rex and Liara and so on but you know what the difference is I like those characters I have no idea who the [ __ ] Kora and Liam are Garis didn't do this immediately when you first met him he might have occasionally made a smartass remark sure but by the time he went full on into his snarky side he was someone that you had many conversations with this is an issue derived from fans of a game getting to now write a new entry because they get overly excited about the parts that made Mass Effect fun and just start Ram roding them into their new game with without thinking about why those things worked in the previous games and now we have these people who are basically just mellowed Out versions of Garrison Jack at least from how they talk while we're out in the field they could have wildly different personalities when I actually get the chance to talk to them but this is the only way that I know them right now and it's going to be hard to break away from that initial judgment when I do start to try to talk to them what you suppose it's down there new and painful ways to die does that sound coming from Below alien gods of the underworld same language as those aliens wonder what he's saying kill old humans probably not exactly poetry is it I hear you but this isn't the time to lose our cool now I feel better I didn't know you a biotic don't worry it's not contagious regardless we meet up with Dad who's figured out that the storm seems to be man-made and has been created by tearing a hole into the fate oh wait wrong game uh it's been created by some big ass Tower fusing energy with the Dark Matter that's floating around the planets so it's time to shut that down look I don't know if I'm just annoyed at this stage and that's affecting my judgment but this might be some of the worst combat banter I've heard from a game are those dogs I wish theyve got some weird cloaking ability you're [ __ ] me I think I really pissed that one off maybe because I shot him in the face it just reeks of that E3 presentation kind of look how badass and cool we are sort of Disney's Marvel's fantastic Avengers of the galaxy type of chatter and I think even if I had started to get to know and love these people I'd probably cringe away from this sort of excessively quirky battle talk Sam load combat profile Sam biotic amp interface mode Sam give me engineer profile sir where are you getting these profiles Little Help from Sam how's your dad doing all of this he's like a machine yeah Ryder's dad is going to die so we get to the top of this Tower and interface with a big triangle the most eerie and sci-fi of shapes after that the breach is closed and the weather goes away then the triangle gets angry and sends a big gust of wind at Ryder and young Ryder we already saw Ryder plummet to the ground before and he saved himself with his jetpack but that doesn't happen this time because this is more dramatic Ryder's helmet shatters and he starts suffocating on the planet's less than Stellar air causing his dad to give him his helmet to keep him alive this leads to a cut scene where we see Ryder basically experience death and revivification by the hands of the crew of the Normandy uh wait not the Normandy the ship this time is called The Arc Hyperion either way this scene is kind of cool and showcases the traumatic experience of dying pretty damn well at least to my knowledge I haven't died yet you were clinically dead for 22 seconds so the way that they saved you was by integrating your brain with the ship's AI Sam don't ask me how it works it just does apparently neuralink is the standard for lead Pathfinders as Ryder's dad was displaying his prowess with this implant in the battle that we went through previously so now Ryder Jr is the new lead Pathfinder bypassing Kora who was supposed to be next in line she has literally zero bad things to say about this moment retaining her seemingly milk toast yesman Behavior oh I checked on your sister still no change oh yeah my sister right I was concerned I was going to ask but I forgot but yes good thank you we get a scene of what I imagine will be our main antagonist in the form of this prothean looking guy with beautiful chibi eyes and then we move back to the archip perion where we've broken free of the space roots and are in the process of attempting to meet up with the other ships that house the uan assari and salarians this means that we hit the tram over to the main station here and the small talk continues to be bad let me spin you a scenario your friend's dad just died more or less in front of his eyes and his dad sacrificed himself to save your friend your friend wound up in a coma where he died for a bit but is now good to go after all of that this is the first time that you've really been able to talk with him alone after this process what do you say they built a bar right got to have champagne for the welcome party you're expecting one after what we've been through I could use a buzz we all could yeah rough ride so far we'll bounce back real food and a shower are just ahead it's very hard to try to dismiss the shortcomings of this game in its first hour or two as just one-offs that will get better because it never seems to matter what's actually happening or has happened when it comes to these conversations it's just this disconnected pile of well what would be the cool or fun thing to say but you know what let's just say these people are very Carefree Explorer types the types to just up and leave everything that they love behind maybe they had family or friends who were alive when they left and are long long dead now and they have to be the type of person to leave those people behind on a journey that spans the equivalent of 2024 to the year 14400 or so there are even options that you can choose where Ryder admits that he didn't really even know his dad that well and if all of that is true then the only issue that I'd have is that I chose the options that indicated that Ryder loved and admired his dad and those choices aren't mattering at the moment in these small conversations so at this point I'm going to try to stop treating this like a Mass Effect game and instead view it as an adventure centered around goofy Carefree people who don't really let things like a sister's coma or a dad's death affect them otherwise I'm going to go nuts criticizing every little interaction between these people you know I know what I wrote for the rest of this script and um I don't think I accomplished this goal so yeah we enter the station which is completely dark and deserted save for a VI program which answers all of the questions that we might have pertaining to what should have been a buzzling area filled with colonists can you tell us where the welcome party is hiding our Pathfinders have carefully vetted all Colony worlds to ensure your security and prosperity it oh boy thousands of eager colonists like you are waiting to begin their new life in Andromeda uh where place is deserted providing a safe stable and prosperous environment is our primary goal not from the looks of it current wait time for immigration processing is unknown error right that was helpful look at them they're so sarcastic love these guys so here's the deal when the people here flew in on the Nexus they got caught up in that dark energy [ __ ] which they've dubbed The Scourge they had to scramble to secure everything but they did they were expecting all of the other arcs to show up pretty soon after them but then decided to shut down everything to conserve power and supplies when no one did so for the past 14 months they've been in this kind of low energy mode while they've scouted planets here and hopes that they'd find one with resources to extract from turns out that they're all [ __ ] in their own ways and the Hyperion was the first Arc to actually make it to them intact I like how they were so worried about conserving energy but the vi in the front was still powered on to give us this little Scooby-Doo Mystery moment before we got all of the answers 2 minutes later I also like how these guys were so sure that everyone was going to show up at the exact same time with no room for error after launching this far from the Milky Way you would think they'd have like 20 years of contingency in case a worst case scenario happened but I'm no space scientist So the plan now is to chat with the various leadership here and see what they have to say on a basic level we know that the Hyperion will at least provide the Nexus with power and supplies for a while longer giving us some breathing room to figure out what we're going to do talking with the colonial director has are saying that they never would have left the Milky Way if they knew that Alec Ryder wasn't going to be leading the pathf finding charge which again I mean what if the dude had a heart attack or something Jesus Christ but I'm guessing she's just being dramatic sorry my face is tired from dealing with everything I can tell it looks like you're working through four lers of Botox so Addison here is supposed to be in charge of all of the operations when it comes to colonizing planets that's not happening currently so I guess she's in charge of being bitter and angry a could Montage her cool guy answers but it's not worth it she more or less tells you that the aliens that we encountered are what they've dubbed the cat and that they don't seem interested in talking what whatsoever Ryder asks why we weren't prepared for that outcome and she says well we didn't think they'd be that hostile man the Andromeda initiative must have been intentionally written to be stupid on every level because this is getting out of hand at this point Addison also goes on about how no one here can actually colonize a planet because this entire operation hinged on a single man who's now dead and now that they're relying on me instead she claims that she doesn't trust me and no one else here will until I prove myself this is like calling the sheriff for help and when the deputy shows up instead you tell him to go [ __ ] himself because he's not the sheriff next up is director tan who oversees the entire initiative he's a salarian who's all business hyperfocused on getting whoever he can to do whatever they can to help this whole thing to succeed he isn't likable but at least he's trying to get something done and not degrading you when you offer to help it kind of fits the salarian Mantra nicely so I got to give points there in fact this is probably the best written character so far as tan explains that he was the assistant to the person in charge of money Affairs until the Nexus hit the scourge killing off all of the higher ups in an instant as they slept in their stasis pods so he got the job after everyone else died making him an accountant who's now supposed to be charismatic enough to lead an entire group of distraught people he's aware of his shortcomings and is trying to succeed regardless of them it's just a pretty damn well-written side character that said his mission he has for you is to go to one of the pl planets here named EOS and get it to become habitable again when you ask how he kind of shrugs and tells you that that's your job fair enough but I better be getting paid a huge amount for getting a whole ass Planet working again if space money is a thing right now but seeing as how every colonization effort has failed it's just Theory at the moment you get to test it out Ryder next we have superintendent KES a female Krogan who's in charge of keeping the systems of the Nexus functional now this one's interesting because I initially questioned why a female Krogan would be kicking around here on this initiative because all things considered the sterility genage was in full swing when the initiative launched and females were generally considered to be extraordinarily valuable to the Krogan species however Mass Effect 2 kind of redacted the specificity of them having to be fertile to be considered valuable if anything Andromeda is closer to the first games belief system where Krogan females could easily become Warlords or the like if they could kick out and only the fertile women were protected as sacred so in a way this isn't that much of a stretch for a different Clan outside of the erdn clan to join this initiative it makes even more sense when you consider the fact that morn repeatedly told you that the salarians had to maintain and adjust the genage in order to outpace the krogan's Natural adaptation to the disease so combined with gene therapy over 600 years to enhance and encourage this adaptation there's now a higher chance of the Andromeda Krogan simply developing an immunity against the genage I know that all of this is technicality nerd [ __ ] but I do think that it points towards the writers putting in a lot of thought as to how and why the Krogan can exist the way that they do in Andromeda and I appreciate the explanation as far as what's going on with KES she explains that there was a mutiny aboard the ship when it initially crashed and that soon after a deal was struck between the Krogan on board and director tan once the krogens fulfilled their end of the bargain tan went back on his word and the krogens decided to leave to occupy by one of the planets here it's vague but a good enough setup the final head honcho here would be kandros the Tyrion in charge of military operations he's easily the most likable alongside KES and welcomes you with open arms stating that he knows that the others can be a collective pain in the ass while he doesn't have a ton to add to the situation he does at least give you access to his strike teams directly which is the war table of Andromeda so for those out of the loop the war table was a feature in Dragon Age Inquisition that was almost universally panned for being a stupid inclusion as it basically had you doing missions that have a dedicated real life timer on them the difference here is that these missions seem to be daily and really only a source of loot rather than things that affect the story of the game like the war table did Additionally you can choose to play through some of those missions manually in a multiplayer mode something that I have no interest in but is still kind of cool so in a way it's the war table but better you recruit and assign new strike teams for space money a currency used specifically in multiplayer when teams come back from their mission successfully you'll gain a loot box for singleplayer materials and money in addition to a chunk of multiplayer space money so really the strike teams feature is one of those things that I personally felt like was a fine addition to the game that didn't really affect anything for me it's just something that I tend to do at the start of each play session and then forget about I will say that I initially thought to look up a mod to remove the timers like I did Within just because I thought it was going to be the same thing instead I found a mouse cursor fix mod in between the giant rack mods for fem Rider which thank God because I cannot aim with a controller so beyond leadership talk there's a couple of side missions which will help you to better understand the environment and the issues that these people are facing aboard the Nexus they really aren't all that bad surprisingly enough one has you investigating a sabur who's fiddling around with the circuitry around the station which involves you scanning different panels and confronting the person that the evidence points to that person claims that she was investigating the same sabotage and that her dad app pointed to the guy who gave you the mission I initially thought that it was going to come down to a which one is the real culprit but Ryder doesn't really entertain the thoughts figuring that a third party must be involved which is a lot less fun of an answer but whatever confronting the real sabator has him outright admitting that he did it as an act of Vengeance whatever happened in that that initial Mutiny it led to tan striking a deal with the Krogan to basically toss these Rebels off the ship forcibly further peeling back the layers of what happened before we got here of course for now we can only really deal with this guy so the rest of the mystery will have to wait it's a pretty solid way to continue to trickle information at the player if they're interested and if they're not then it's no big deal to skip a quest like this the other side mission that I found for now involves a Tyrion who was part of a unit who tried to establish a forward base on EOS when the cat attacked and took that base this guy's Superior officer and best friend ordered everyone to mount an attack in the middle of a sandstorm the Tyrion felt that this would get everyone killed and demanded that they Evacuate the way that he tells it he thought he saw a cat in the sandstorm and panic fired killing his boss reviewing the evidence and interrogating a key witness makes it seem like the guy likely did it just to save the rest of his unit but no one was able to recover the body which is something you can choose to do to see if there's a new angle to this whole ordeal it's another fun little mission that defines these people as a group of paranoid survivors trying their best to pull this moonshot of a mission together we'll get back to what happens there when I hit EOS my only real gripe about these quests is something that extends to this entire game which is that if you walk too far mid dialogue then it'll just cut off which is obnoxious considering that this might be the fastest moving single player BioWare game to date it feels good to to run around goofy walk cycle notwithstanding why would you ever have the dialogue cut off for running too far ahead it's more forgiving when an explosion happens or you round the corner into enemies but this game will cut itself off when you walk towards the tram to the next part of the station or the like it's a little aggravating because I want to keep moving while chatter happens not just stand still until it's over with our side questing temporarily done it seems that Sam wants to chat about investing in crypto or something along the those lines turns out that Ryder's dad had overridden some safety measures in order to better enhance the combat capabilities that Sam provides something that he kept hidden away from the rest of the initiative this override has caused Sam to become sentient a form of true AI that benefits from helping out a Pathfinder long story short the AI can grant Ryder a class and in turn gets to benefit from Ryder exploring more I'm not entirely sure how but it sounded to me like Sam gets bored if he doesn't see the world through a Pathfinder's eyes I'm kind of of two minds about this whole development on one hand the increase in power is [ __ ] cool you gain access to all of the old classes from the previous games plus a jack of all trades Explorer class all of them Grant certain combat bonuses and skills and all of them can change the way that you play pretty dramatically you can only unlock and enhance a glass if you have enough points in the tech combat or biotic trees making the whole system feel even more rewarding than it already felt plus you you can switch your profile on the Fly granting an unprecedented flexibility to the series on the other hand though from a narrative angle this whole thing feels very I guess stereotypical overpowered main character anime type of thing I mean yes of course it's cool but Ryder was pretty powerful in his own right already and you set up this whole thing to be about filling his father's shoes before he gained this power he might have had the struggle to keep up with his dad who is viewed as practically a hero one who many joined the initiative specifically to serve under maybe the first mission ends with a pck victory where Ryder succeeds at establishing a base on EOS but at the cost of many of the nexus's people and slowly but surely he begins to get better and better at judgment calls resource allocation and combat capabilities and when the odds seem insurmountable maybe then he gets access to his father's secret stash of black tar AI as things stand now it seems like the writers went oh hey Shephard was powerful because he just showed up that way with his backstory let's give Ryder a big boost immediately to make him like that and as such I don't really feel like there's any chance of Ryder failing in any way for the first leg of his journey I also don't feel like Ryder's dad was some legendary Pathfinder who worked his ass off to become powerful as much as he just I don't know hotwired a computer to give him Bane's Venom of course I could be wrong but as things stand it just feels like the writers cut out a whole slew of possibilities when it comes to how this is going to go either way the mystery cooked up here is that Sam has a bit of memory block imposed by Ryder senior something that we can chip away at as we explore and do our thing we're not sure what this block entails only that it's something that old dad felt like Riders should learn so there's our proving ourselves moment I guess heading to our new ship has us meeting with our next Squad Member One veteran Nix a tyrian provisioner who seems to be Leaps and Bounds more charismatic than our other two human wet noodles which not hard to do but refreshing to see as we're about to board the Tempest she smooth talks an officer into letting us fly free without being subjected to director Addison's extensive checks the ship itself is well it's actually pretty damn cool the highlights include all of your buying and selling functions as well as dispatching your strike teams if that's something that you care about Additionally you can begin spending any research points that you have to unlock blueprints for various weapons and arm armor which you can craft if you have the right materials initially I was pretty damn excited about all of this I mean you can choose what you want to research to suit your build and then head out to scavenge for materials to create it if done right that's a really cool way to pad your game with content that's fueled solely by your player's desire to improve their gear but it could also go the exact opposite way with the actual grinding for materials becoming tedious fast guess we'll see how that goes a spoiler alert I don't ever r visit this um it went fine I I pretty much just kind of checked in occasionally and um eventually built everything that I wanted so I guess it wasn't that tedious beyond all of this you can check your messages talk to Sam change your outfit up along with your armor color respect your build and so on and so forth it's just a very well put together hub for the player to do what they need to do but the absolute coolest part of this game so far is the actual Prospect of exploring these various systems after launching The Tempest from the station I mean these guys took that probe concept from Mass Effect 2 and brought it back in a much less annoying way maybe this is just a me thing but I really do enjoy just exploring and identifying points of interest harvesting resources I can find and enjoying the little descriptions of each planet the transitions from planet to planet and cluster to Cluster is dramatic and fun to watch the probing for resources is quick and easy but still fun to do it's just cool as hell especially when you get to do [ __ ] like check out a black hole black holes [ __ ] terrify me but I'm fascinated by them kind of like tornadoes as such I kind of just did this for a while which was a nice experience I'd spent all of this time analyzing and tabbing and typing and trying to figure out what's going wrong and it was nice to just explore to head back to the starting cluster where the arch Hyperion got stuck and realized that all of these other planets around here are named after the three lands discovered by the Vikings around 1,000 ad and that the syst system was appropriately named Erikson I don't know it was cool to me honestly this part of the game and leading into landing on EOS was probably the first time that I went from a generally overall negative view of the game to a more neutral one the devs did a great job at nailing that Pathfinder feeling one that really made you feel like you were exploring this Uncharted Territory without it seeming like a distraction you can tell that the aforementioned focus on not taking the player away from the story to explore was front and center here and I can confident ly say that this is the first moment where I was truly enjoying my time with Andromeda so EOS is ravaged by radiation and is generally inhospitable as you might expect investigating the shielded site here has the main building locked down and some scavengers off in a secondary building upon hearing your name they go from telling you to [ __ ] off to filling you in on the situation here they claim that restoring the power to the main building will give away their position to the cats which are roaming around but we need to get that going in order to reestablish our base here after taking out a drop ship we gain access to another game changer The Nomad the sequel to The Moo has different modes to pick between that allow you to Blitz across the Wasteland or climb its rugged terrain though that said it doesn't seem to have any offensive capabilities it's not bad and feels decent enough to Pilot allowing you to launch mining probes later on in a more Hands-On approach to Resource Gathering our next task is to hopefully reduce the radiation which has occurred semi recently via the same type of alien structure that old dad used to clear up the first bout of irregular weather back on habitat 7 this has us getting jumped and mounted by oh my [ __ ] God please tell me her face is intentional I mean if this isn't elaborate throwback to Oblivion Expressions then hats off to the design team but my God back up literally literally so I've been jumped by an assari she could have killed me four times over but you know what I trust her because I have no choice Ryder trusts her after two sentences which consist of hey I've been trying to decipher this alien device for months and now you did that in 2 minutes I don't know why she tackled me for that but hey who doesn't love a good dose of 2008 Tumblr So after she's through mounting me we get attacked by alien robots which she calls remnants these monoliths The Observer and assembler Bots they're all the remnants of something much bigger but that's too long H I hate long so the remnant like my name's better as P holy [ __ ] she's just space Sarah name's Sarah this is cover get round it except I can understand her all right well maybe she'll develop like Sarah does guess we'll find out later for now she explains that she's been studying Remnant technology and seems to be as close to an expert on it as we can find I just don't know how she was amazed that we activated the monolith here so easily and then goes so yeah the monoliths connect to each other and once they're all activated we can access the main system that they connect to amazing why should I trust you again ah never mind you're a lovable manic ball of blue obviously every person is going to just love and trust you immediately it's going to be all right trust me okay God I'm so [ __ ] so we head off to activate the other two monoliths which has us being able to explore for a bit while we get gr a banter between our squadmates I read your dossier dossier huh fancy so what's it say that's classified Hey so uh I heard a rumor about you oh yeah what was it well first of all [ __ ] you and second of all uh did you think I was trying to start a conversation well that was silly of you wasn't it riveting stuff guys love the back and forth I will say that at this point the combat is fun but I've come to realize that enemy AI isn't really ready for you to utilize the sheer maneuver ability that you have at your disposal there are several instances where P triy to deploy at a really high up vantage point but if you just jump and air Dash to it you can get in their faces and since they're programmed to jump down and find cover before they shoot they kind of [ __ ] the bed when you're giving them the London special it's not a big deal it's just kind of funny so we meet with what will eventually be another Squad member our obligatory Krogan named dra I tend to love Krogan but I do have to say that he's very much just another w/g grunt type who's out here killing things for fun he has a disdain for the Nexus and the leadership aboard it and doesn't plan on returning to it I like how Ryder goes so you've just been fighting off Remnant also huh and he's just like yep sure have like everyone knows that it's just referred to as the remnants even though PB was the one who supposedly named it that so dra takes off for now and we continue to explore around this cat area that contains evidence of the aliens torturing initiative members that they've captured is the a field lock Pathfinder issued to patrolling cat I don't need a translation to know when I'm hearing a monster action movie line actually what's peculiar about this exchange is that when I played the log again a couple of times someone in my squad sent something new about it every time what a strange touch for something so optional but I appreciate it the monoliths wind up pointing to a lake which leads to an underground bunker there's quite a lot of effort put into the effects and details regarding this whole process which is pretty fun PP winds up joining us for this excursion since she's the expert there's some secret here there must be do your Pathfinder thing never mind her months of studying just ran out of v-bucks so we jumped down into the watering hole and again the amount of detail in these Remnant structures is impressive oddly enough it makes me want to scan these new objects and items which is definitely the kind of impression that you want to leave on your player exploration also seems to be rewarded as various chests and trinkets are tucked into Corners along with consoles that yield New Paths glyphs can be scanned and used to crack open certain chests in an easy miname that has you creating rows and Columns of unique patterns my only real issue here is that there's so much [ __ ] in this game in terms of loot ranging from upgrade and research materials to actual equipment and modifications I don't ever take the time to read everything that I pick up I just loot it all and try to figure out if I can use it later which kind of makes the whole loot hunting thing a lot less enticing the game also has the same issue that Inquisition had where everybody that you loot has a whole menu that interrupts any ongoing conversation making me not want to loot everything that I see getting to the center of the Tomb has us interfacing with the main console and doing what we think is changing it to clean air mode clean air mode involves Exterminating all Organics inside the Vault also so we Sprint out in an escape sequence before we make it back out and note that the sky has had its Fallout 3 filter removed at least in the area that we're at the whole thing is relatively predictable but I'm not as concerned about that as I am about the main info that we find out these vaults are all over these planets surrounding us and might as well be Space Magic creating something from nothing and having the power to drastically alter an atmosphere and terraform the land in minutes yet they've all seemingly malfunctioned so not only were we woefully underprepared as part of the Andromeda initiative we're now using technology that's clearly backfired and we don't really understand this is where the game gives you a taste of what it's going to be all about and it really isn't that bad at all you can head to various mining points and start deploying mining drones you can investigate and recover failed sites discover what happened at each one and report your findings you can mess around with Remnant Tech that you find you can unlock bits of Sam memory by heading to various locations it's just a big Ubisoft sandbox but one that does feel pretty good to mess around in while you get your bearings and make EOS a planet worth establishing a foothold in that said we're still waiting on the radiation to clear out fully and exploring too far will wind up with you hitting crazy amounts of green sky and failing life support it's one of those things that you can come back to later once the New Colony gets on its feet and more smog has been cleaned up your main task here involves setting up said colony and choosing whether to have it focus on military or science this means that you're inserting yourself directly into the politics of the Nexus seemingly creating a big decision I sat here and puzzled back and forth on which would be the better choice seeing as I enjoyed the attitude of kandros the most out of all the leadership but still felt that science was just the better call turns out that this decision only affects a minor dialogue in the Long Haul not that I'm that surprised part of me did think that there would be one or two optional quests based on which side you chose though and it's a shame that this decision didn't mean more there is one mission where a protest occurs due to people's families not being woken up out of cryo sleep and some of the protesters are going on about military families being bumped down the list of importance but this just flip-flops when you choose soldiers over science so nothing unique happens due to your choice speaking of the only slightly interesting side quest here for now has us finding the equipment of the guy who was supposedly betrayed by his friend turns out that boss man here was actually shot and killed by a cat but an audio recording reveals that the wouldbe killer did try to shoot him and happened to miss which is a fun twist that I personally enjoyed heading back to the Nexus and chatting with the guy has him admitting to trying to kill his boss but since he didn't it should mean that he goes free ultimately you can choose what happens here and I decided to let him walk free rather than condemn him to Exile later on you'll find him trying to put himself into cryosleep since his wife left him when she found out and everyone has been treating him like a murderer ironic if you chose to Exile him he'd wind up on a different planet slums with his wife who stayed by his side since he came clean about what happened it doesn't affect anything major but the outcomes in story alone were interesting and fun to play through which is something that could really save this game if more quests turn out this way on our way out of EOS we get a comfy little scene where the entire crew tries to out Quirk each other before the meeting get started I have bunk assignments for PB and dra already put my rock sack in the kitchen and I'll hang out there if that's okay and I'm in one of the Escape pods more my speed we discovered the remnant and breached their vault and didn't get killed overcame radiation poisoning a number of times and didn't die confronted by cat at every turn once again did not get killed you guys really need to raise the bar on what you call success yeah should we use the Krogan definition of success that got your home World nuked by your own people wa what the [ __ ] Cor [Music] fair enough no it is not fair enough when we make it to the Nexus and meet with director tan the sheer shift in how you're treated and viewed is palpable which is actually a great turn of events You could argue that this is a very typical video game hero moment where everyone treats you like the Son of God now that you've proven your capabilities but it doesn't feel that way with tan as he clearly exudes this sliminess when he begins massaging your ego it doesn't feel like you flip the script and one over someone stoic it feels like this guy has realized your worth and how useful it could be to have someone so influential on his side when the politics begin to spark back up it's clear that tan likes being in charge and the line starts to blur between him being power hungry and him being convinced that he knows best and will do what it takes to protect the people of the initiative he isn't likable but I respect him as a character there are several other things to do on the Nexus before flying off to the next big adventure the the most intriguing thing is probably the other half of the war table your perk points I found this one kind of funny because Inquisition was basically just like all right so you get your influence and you'll gain perks meanwhile Andromeda has an elaborate explanation as to why you're gaining points and where they come from the reality is that you're now gaining perks as you progress planetary viability from Golden world to Golden world that said there was a bit of all of this that made me wish that they leaned even more into the whole point system basically the way that you're gaining access to new resources inventory space Merchant discounts and so on is waking up groups of people in cryopods which is a great concept to add flavor to these choices but I wish it meant that you could influence how the Nexus transforms aesthetically wake up too many gray market and financial types and maybe the Nexus gets a bit ritzier in some parts and slimier in others wake up science types and maybe the Nexus gets more grossly futuristic with lots of lab coat wearing Melvin's chatting it up as things stand it's really just a bulletin point with flavor text but the potential was definitely there Beyond this we get another snippet about the whole Sam situation and Ryder's father's role in all of this basically Sam was invented to help Humanity gain an edge over the assari salarians and other races that were Leaps and Bounds ahead of the humans the idea was that if AI could be integrated directly into humans via a form of symbiosis then there'd be no reason for it to rebel against its creators this plan was shot down by Ryder senior's superiors at the time but he worked on it regardless using his wife's terminal illness as an inspiration to drive forward with the project eventually this gu him kicked out of the alliance and N7 honestly it's a really good plot point one that's interesting to think about kind of makes me wonder if the symbiosis green ending to the original trilogy was what the devs went for as Canon later on you gain access to more logs which show that Ryder senior went so far as to involve himself with the shadow br brok ER in order to gain access to the tech required to pull this project off he also decided to quiz a quan historian to better understand what went wrong with the GU I get what the writers were going for with this one but the way that they approached it seems a bit heavy-handed basically the historian claims that the GU saw the Koreans as their creators which caused the GU to resent them but I never got that impression from the previous games in fact I'm pretty sure that the first get that came to consciousness asked the Koreans if it had a soul and the Koreans freaked the [ __ ] out and began eliminating G immediately that would be the cause of any resentment not the fact that they were created by the Koreans again the writers are pointing towards this idea that Ryder senior wanted to create Sam as an equal not as some slave to him but it feels like they redacted some pretty impactful Nuance to do so all right so let's see is there anything else important right now it's you H all right sister that we care about and love so you can now talk to your sister directly through her implant despite her come State and obviously she has questions like Hey where's Dad and how are those golden worlds panning out now the obvious nice guy answer is ah well Dad went out for milk and cigarettes on the brand new bustling golden world with beautiful scenery and a 7-Eleven a space 7-Eleven but I just gave her the hard facts and it [ __ ] melted her to a point where she didn't want to talk anymore I'm sorry I care so little that I chose the answers that made me laugh and honestly if she comes out as a depressed soulless Muppet then I'm going to be very impressed with the game's Direction here let's get over to the next vault as we jump towards it our next course is cut off by the cat and the leader who we saw earlier speaks to us seemingly interested in abducting us for our vault cracking capabilities after a bit of back and forth Sam wrestles the controls free and we zip back towards the scourge and wind up having to land on a nearby Planet which happens to be where we were headed anyway as we go to make our emergency landing we're flanked by another species which inhabit this planet the angara they look kind of stupid in my expert opinion like sure [ __ ] but also a little crosseyed and bowle and you know what I mean actually they kind of look like twixs semantics aside the situation is kind of new new to mass effect as a series sure you'd meet with species that you as a player didn't recognize but they are all documented and known meeting another brand new species is kind of fun and Star Trek is something that Andromeda could excel at if it continues this way so you follow the angaran governor through the city who explains that you're being taken to meet with their resistance leader one who stands against the cat meeting with the guy has you going through the whole ah you're an alien and I don't trust you but anyways that Vault you're looking for is just out there and our people tried messing with those once and paid for it but you can go meddle with it if you want to go try to after you prove yourself sort of thing you know the classic we also wind up picking up our final squadmate and angaran named jaw he seems like a nicer javic which is probably the most direct and simple comparison that I have he wants to accompany us because apparently Ryder passed a hell of a Charisma check and he's just immediately enamored by the stuff that we're talking about concerning the vaults I'll talk about him more later so we start just roaming the low dock area of this alien home City and um I don't know man I I just feel like I'm here doing this because I'm the main character not because I've earned anything I get wanting to let your player just do the things that they want to do but when I'm running around and I hear oh they shouldn't be allowed here in the background I just I don't know it's just such a hard cut when the next angaran I meet goes oh hey I know you're new here um but I know everything about you and how you got got here and what you're doing and I want you to go to a dig site to excavate some old angaran ruins I also like how I'm not only on a brand new planet but I'm in a city belonging to a brand new species and yet when I go to scan things it's like ah [ __ ] well none of this is interesting besides that shuttle that looks just like our shuttles now that's special getting back to the ship has me witnessing the strangest paced conversation I've seen so far Joel has offered to do what he can to help us access the Vault on a how do we do that when we're leaving the planet it's on that's a fair point Joel seriously settle down rer right there's an angara right here let's hear from the new guy I see we're still torn between making dialogue light-hearted and quirky and serious and down to earth so jel explains that we have to earn the trust of his people by joining the angaran forces who are currently fighting off the cat on one planet called vold or to head to their home world and figure out what happened to a group of scientists if we do either we can access the Vault on a I just kind of wish we could decide to say [ __ ] it and beine it to the Vault regardless maybe it pisses off the angara and we wind up on less than Stellar terms hell maybe it sends jaw packing but it would be a hell of a twist for replaying the game later I'll just go ahead and say this one now I'm not going to do both missions here I could but I just don't feel feel like it's something that I would get enjoyment out of so choosing between helping the resistance or figuring out what's happening with the scientists has me popping over to help the ladder landing on the jungle planet of havarl has us encountering space dragons as we go to land well that's something you don't see back home I like to imagine Ryder says this almost constantly when exploring new planets unfortunately havarl is less of a big open Planet like EOS was and is more of a big rectangular map d to encroaching jungle area you can't use the Nomad so it's basically just a jaunt from point to point while you try to rescue the scientists and do whatever other little side quests I did find out that you can just die while locked into conversation if you start speaking to someone while enemies are around which doesn't surprise me in this game but was still kind of agitating as far as enemies go we've got our standard small beasts our standard medium beasts and our standard large beasts well well that's something you don't see back home we've also got more remnants and our standard and garens but racist well that's something you see back home this place does look cool and isn't too bad to explore but I'm not a huge fan of jungle areas and games as far as side quests go most of it is junk that involves extracting data and finding random Tech but sprinkled in there is one Quest that has you stumbling upon some survivors from the Tyrion Arc they're currently in combat with the racists which has us is assisting before talking to the uan leader what's fascinating about this game is how it consistently creates an interesting scenario and then just wholesale ignores the best part about it in this case the very first time the tyrian here met any form of the angara has them being assaulted much like we were assaulted by the cat and yet that's not even remotely raised as an issue like imagine we're fighting cat and then suddenly an assari Commando comes flying in with a Kat squadmate it would immediately be all hands on deck and the first thing that we would likely do is question what's going on with the cat and why this one is friendly and yet the tyan here don't even mention it nor do we mention that those angara were just particularly hostile towards Outsiders I can't believe these guys are so good at cooking up fun ideas and then they just ignore the prospect of expanding on them how fun would it be for these tyrian to rejoin their Arc and then spread the word that the angara are not to be trusted maybe it boils to a point where you have to step in and delegate or it turns into a full-blown Feud where you have to choose a side but hey whatever we found some of the tyrian and everyone is friends now speaking of we find the remaining scientists that were apparently thrown into stasis after fiddling with Remnant Tech undoing the stasis has the funny alien man saying funny things like how he has a headache coming on then Jael asks how Sam works and interfaces with Remnant Tech so fluidly and Ryder Answers by telling him that it's complicated there are no follow-up questions there so I guess that's enough to say what I imagine has to be one of the biggest mysteries of this guy's life after this 3-minute fix jaw decides that this will probably be enough to earn the trust of the resistance leader and we can choose to stick around and help havarl with its environmental problems if we want to I'm sure that's a whole ordeal that will net me good boy space points for science and research and whatever the [ __ ] but I just um I don't care not a great indication of how the rest of this game is going to go for me to be honest and something tells me that it won't matter if I don't help out here back on the ship it seems that the assari have finally made contact with the Nexus so we can get to work trying to figure out the whereabouts of the assari arc now this is technically a loyalty mission for Kora while she continues to lar as a blue person but I'll just knock it out now wait Ka should probably be here for this multiple choices in my roleplaying game it's less likely than you think so the long and short of this little speech entails the assari arch getting peeled like an orange while the cat deleted the funny blue people apparently an escape ship launched so some got away and now we're to track the survivors down this means going to the other planets where the Kat and angara are at War again I have no interest in fighting this battle but actually exploring the rest of vold is amazing bringing us back to the same interest that I had on EOS this time the planet is a massive heap of ice and the map is gigantic stretching extraordinarily far there's tons of little activities to do making it a sizable time sync if you want to do everything that you can this is probably my favorite planet so far though I'll also admit that for as much as I have an aversion to Jungle maps in games I have an affinity for ice Maps again if I don't treat this as a Mass Effect game I think I'd be having more fun with it as weird as that sounds regardless we find the wreck of the Escape ship which has a log detailing how Elite cat soldiers have pursued and ravaged the ship of course the assari know exactly what this Elite unit calls themselves and seems to be intimately familiar with the cat despite this being the first thing that happened to them upon arrival kind of seems like once you discover anything in this game literally everyone knows about it and refers to it the same way afterwards writing is hard when it's time to move forward the angara resistance leader wants you to head back to vold to rescue their head scientist known as the MOSI this MOSI is someone who's been mentioned repeatedly as being revered an elderly angara whose scientific teachings and breakthroughs have guided the species for a very long time while you're initially met with anger from the resistance leader due to your Cockiness the MOSI is important enough for Ryder to be allowed to help with this operation the best part about this setup is jaw pulling you aside to explain how the racist angara got their start stating that the MOs best student wound up getting captured in the war by the cat when he managed to escape he no longer cared about anything science related and instead started a tribe of angara with the sole purpose of trying to destroy the cat by any means possible naturally this extended to a general hatred for Outsiders which was only bolstered by the arrival of the initiative into their space it's a surprisingly decent plot point one which I'll explore a bit more when I get to the companion Roundup I do have to say for as much as the devs wanted to create this atmosphere where you feel like you can do whatever you want to do and go wherever you want to go without Feeling burdened by the main quest line they never quite met that goal at least in my opinion I mean we have one of the most prominent figures in angaran culture locked up in a cat prison likely being tortured for information and I can choose to just [ __ ] off and mess around on the Nexus or explore other planets or whatever I mean sure it's not quite the same weight as there was when the rapers were going to torpedo the Milky Way but it's still one of those things where it's like yeah sorry they ripped all your fingernails off for the fifth time but you're not going to believe what plant life we found across the system I guess you can talk all you want about how doing side quests takes away Focus From the severity of the main quest but the fact of the matter is that you can't really create high stakes compelling events while also allowing players freedom to explore whatever they want to explore whenever they want to do it the only real alternatives are either forcing the player to follow through on the quest that they initiated until it reaches a break or to canide questing altogether neither of which are better solutions to the issue that the developers set out to solve the truth of the matter is that BioWare has always gotten stuck on a minority of voices crying out against these smaller parts of their games and have adjusted their formula to change based off of these smaller criticisms there's nothing wrong with trying to address your shortcomings but sometimes you have to look at what these changes might affect if trying to solve smaller issues fundamentally creates a weaker narrative overall then why bother continuing down that path anyways back to the attack on the K facility as always Andromeda likes to splice together a strange weave of humor and deadly serious moments that only serve to create an absolutely toned deaf experience overall prisoners who go in are never seen again they have disappeared stand by continue to stand by please don't embarrass me front of our new friends what as slaves I guess death is better I can't believe I'm here no one joins the resistance to stay safe wait till I tell my brothers I honestly can't tell if we're going to stop slavery or if a cat with a funny mustache is going to stumble out drunk so that we can say so that just happened oh and also make sure that you don't do anything when dialogue is happening just just stop completely Pathfinder it seems the program I used to reach the shield could overload I don't like this looks that way what setting the dialogue aside though I can't help but to feel like this game is a consistent stint of missed opportunities okay so you want it to be more light-hearted but with some heavier themes fine you want your quips alongside your harsher tones okay but if you're going to do that why not ingratiate some fun choices that enhance replayability in this case you have this group of angara Freedom Fighters with you and they state that they'll create a distraction at the main entrance while you hit the back way in why not give you that option if you storm the main entrance maybe one of your squadmates are at the risk of permanent injury but the Freedom Fighters survive if you take the sideway in maybe the Freedom Fighters die to create that distraction I just don't see why you can't still have your quirks while creating tense moments with real consequences so the long and short of this is that the cat have some kind of religious Factor going on here the leader is known as the archon with at least one Cardinal below him conducting experiments on the angara that they deem capable enough for said experimentation this involves brainwashing them and shoving them into technology Laden sarcophagy as you fight further inward you get a firsthand look at the cat releasing one of the angara from their coffin and injecting them with something that renders their skin pitch black before they transform into a cat which has got to be the best reveal of the game so far I mean this was a genuinely well done moment for as much criticism as I've heaped on at this point now I will say that having jaw in your party for this mission is mandatory which I'm of two minds about on one hand forcing me to take along jaw is again one of those things that cripples the replay factor for this game but on the other it does make sense that he'd want to be part of this Mission and the voice actor absolutely crushed their part in this whole scene villains time to die they are us how many have I killed not knowing right I did not know this is the first time that I've cared to fight that I've wanted to charge forward and take out the Cardinal in the next chamber and it's all because of jaw's inclusion and how well the VA did here the fight itself is pretty good and involves the Cardinal shielding himself with a device that rotates around his body while reinforcements flank him getting too low on health and too close to the Cardinal has him surrounding you in energy and snuffing you out right there which forces you to actually play in a way that's more tactical it's the best moment followed by the best fight in this game so far and I can't stress how much this entire experience helps this game to be better than it has been been up until this point rescuing the MOSI has her wanting you to destroy the facility while jaw would rather you free the hundreds locked up inside it the Cardinal is willing to free them if you'll spare the facility making this an easy choice I'd actually prefer if this whole decision was flip-flop though as things stand the wise MOSI seems to go eh I'm free you should kill this place now I mean yes I get that she's trying to prevent this capture and transformation process from happening further but it just seems a lot easier toci side with jaw if he's wanting to save his people rather than enact Vengeance also you would think that the wisened woman would want to do the same thing and that jaw would be the one wanting to blow the place up not caring who's insided I don't know regardless after blasting out of here talking with the MOSI has her explaining that the cat capture every race that they can and then mix the archon's DNA with the chosen peoples from any race to reproduce and create more cat which is honestly an awesome motivation for a villainous faction heading back to ya has the angara mildly greeting the incoming Heroes and their Idol the MOSI I mean the dialogue makes it sound like the crowd went wild but they kind of just stand there stars and skies light our way stars and skies light our way she knows how to play to a crowd I would pay double this game's asking price if I could now trick the angara and into stepping into PODS of our own and then turning them into humans regardless we can now explore the actual City here which winds up kind of looking like The Citadel in Mass Effect and much like the Citadel your squadmates will wind up hanging around the various parts of the city each having their own little things to say about it I came to this Galaxy with my family I lost my father on the day I arrived but you still carry on his legacy he knew that in the end I just how does this [ __ ] person know about my father why does everyone know everything as the player learns about things whatever so the MOSI leads you to the Vault on this planet which yields the information that all of these Remnant vaults are connected to a central Vault known as the Meridian predictable but I can't expect a whole lot more from this game the MOSI knows about all of this due to the archon trying to torture information out of her during her capture his end goal seems to be to try to activate and control this Hub of Remnant Tech something that he seemingly has no capability to do so here are the building blocks the archon wants to use this super Advanced Tech but can't we can use this Tech but we have no reason to do so until we defeat the archon so here's how this is going to go and I assure you that I'm typing this out before I know what happens first we're going to chase down the archon then we're going to fight through to where we're sure that he is he'll somehow get away but he'll give us a reason to pursue him to a string of locations that winds up with us being at this Meridian Stakes are high final battle use the Vault for good instead of evil the only saving grace to the predictability here is the cat itself and how it began as a species along with the mystery of the remnant technology and what exactly the archon is trying to use it for probably ultimate power if we're going to be honest so we meet with the MOSI and the head of the resistance and they explain that the reason that the MOSI was captured was due to one of the resistance's higher ups betraying them and bringing her to the archon said Trader is now hiding out on a planet called kadara which is where the mutinous people who jumped ship from the Nexus wound up creating a hub called kadara ports honestly not a horrible idea for a location even if the actual execution of it is a bit excessive like you show up and are graded by this kind of Backwater slummy City adorned with a cat's head at the port and guard who are kicking the [ __ ] out of people for not paying their protection money to the head honcho who runs this place I don't think this was done poorly but it's inyour face to a point where I'm like all right yes I get it hey piss off you order you pay I said wow now that's one tough lady anyways we're given Intel about our angaran Traer who seems to have been taken hostage by the leadership here at the Port the guy's slated for execution so if we're hoping to quiz him about the archon's whereabouts we need to free him from his predicament at least that's how it seems how do you think this leader woman is going to look just yes Rough and Tumble Spaceport hard ass of a leader shaking down people for money see no reason we can't be civilized I should have brought Refreshments why is it so bad everything is is set up to be a punchline that underwhelms but yeah this lady who came over to join the Andromeda initiative was kicked off for mutinous behavior and is now wearing spikes and random splotches of blue makeup what's funny to me is that if you think of the mass effect universe as a more advanced and futuristic version of our modern society then this lady is basically miming some ancient Mad Max type of movie because she thought it would be cool it'd be kind of like if I started walking around in a cape in a medieval rough call her to stand out anyways she goes oh that angaran you uh want to just get info from him yeah all right sure I'll just kill him after well that was a lot of [ __ ] secrecy and hype for that outcome we met up with a guy using an undercover code name so that he could tell us to talk to the mayor and the mayor just goes yeah okay here you go it gets better though because you go up to this Traer and ask him for the location of the archon's ship and he's like oh yeah so you'll just want to take a left out of here and then uh head over to the desert where I buried my transponder of course he knows everything about who you are and what just happened with you and the MOSI and that the cat take angara and make more Kat out of them what was the point of all of this the kadara port area and the bossom who runs it and the secret Meetup to get to the prisoner like there's no ah I will only give you this information if you free me or I will only let you meet the prisoner if you bring me supplies I genuinely don't get it because it's not like this game skimps on like random tertiary objectives it's not like this game is like lacking uh fetch quests there's tons of those Why Stop Now when it makes sense to have a fetch Quest I I don't it's so weird to me it's almost like these guys planned a general storyline and then spent a [ __ ] load of time coming up with side objectives maps to explore Superfluous tasks and so on you know kind of like The Witcher 3 the game that they took inspiration from and then at the end they went oh [ __ ] we never planned anything solid for the main quest line that makes it so that the player really feels like they need to help out and explore for more ways to help the initiative oh well just ship it like that I guess the prisoner here winds up telling you that he betrayed his people because he thought that the cat only wanted the MOSI and then they would would leave the angara alone good enough for me time to leave leaving only really drives home how the devs planed this game as now the side quests start to pop up all over this dirty Port area oh no not another dead body why I would say this makes seven dead bodies now oh my God how could anyone simply ignore a dead body like this I mean besides me the guy who sees dead bodies all the time in this seedy neck of the woods wow I wonder if they want me to check out that dead body so the actual planet of kadara is our Badlands biome scrubby brush muddy dirty Rocky swampy areas and water that's composed of [ __ ] acid there are outlaws and beasts alike as your enemies and this whole place is kind of just I guess standard for lack of a better word like there's nothing offensive about it it comes with its own set of tasks and a homestead that you can set up if you want to do the whole Vault thing again I haven't done that since EOS and I really didn't plan to start again because it didn't feel worth it when the rewards seemed to be a checked off box on a task list but I decided to give it a go again got the monoliths and Vault done in about 20 minutes and then was ready to set up a new Outpost unfortunately simply cleaning up the planet's water supply isn't enough to set up a viable Homestead as first we need to um stop a drug problem and a murderer at the Port I I get why this is happening but there's zero supporting dialogue to make it obvious I mean I imagine that we need to help kadara Port so that they're then okay with the Nexus settling nearby in the Badlands but the game kind of just tells you uh uh go do this [ __ ] too when telling you to make the planet viable it's annoying because I thought I'd just get this done with and see how a new Outpost plays out but these other required side quests are barring my entry and one of them doesn't even make sense to me like I get wanting to clean up the drug problem at the Port so that maybe you'd have drug-free people leaving it and joining our new Homestead but these drugs were invented and distributed by the leadership of the port meaning that cleaning people up would theoretically piss the leadership off isn't this just antagonizing them into attacking us directly I mean the leader already has a problem with the initiative and now we're literally taking power away from her in order to set up a town for the initiative a couple of miles down the Road I guess it doesn't matter because the character of the port leader is written as sporadically as everyone else in this game in this case she's clearly broken away from the initiative has set up a town adorned herself in face paint and spikes and runs the town with an iron fist demanding protection money from these citizens if they can't pay up they get exiled drugs were developed specifically to get people addicted so that the leadership can control them further and then when you ask her about about her motivations and who she is she goes yeah I believed in the initiative once but then director tan was stubborn and demanded a bloodbath as a show of power I just don't believe in that kind of unfairness so I handpicked people who were loyal to me and who were willing to follow my lead everyone here has a history with me I figured if the initiative was going to fail then I was going to succeed it's another character who was written to be it all someone who's supposed to be this Mad Max leader who employs brutal methods to keep people under her thumb and yet somehow has morals and claims to only be looking out for her people to have chosen those who have a history with her and she's not written in a sadistic evil way where it's clear that she's just pretending to be like this it's supposedly in a genuine way where she's giving you a good reason for her actions and you're supposed to just understand and help her people to flourish so that you can get your Outpost built as far as the port murderers go we take care of them with the leader at our side who clearly despises us we're not winning any favors at this stage and if you thought that cleaning up that drug problem was to take power away from her then this mission is the polar opposite and only reinforces her as a protector of her people so now what we did the missions we should be good right no now we need to help this guy who initially met us on this godforsaken rock to get his personal cargo back that was stolen this is very important for the initiative to to settle here the person who stole the cargo was this guy's ex-girlfriend when we track down the Meetup location it turns out that this was a setup by his ex and that there is no cargo we kill her and that's that after this you're invited to a party with the port leader hosting this is where it all comes together everything that we just did making sense in a cohesive way after all of this running around just to settle the planet finally here it is that's what this was all about whiskey the only bottle of Mount Milgram in Andromeda triple distilled and 645 years old first off that's not how the aging process works and if that's what you think then I think I have an 11-year-old bottle of Jack Daniels around here somewhere from when I turned 21 superbly aged in my closet second of all I you're someone to me can I settle the [ __ ] planet now oh my [ __ ] God I'm going to the last mission required to settle this rock is a showdown between the port leader and the guy who you help to steal the whiskey there's been this background story that was genuinely unimportant and didn't register as relevant until just now but basically Port leader has been actively battling against some unknown person that goes by the charlatan turns out that whisky man is the charlatan crazy I know he's been having you work against her or so he says um next to nothing he's had me do is actually hurt the port leader in any way but whatever that's just the story we're being fed I guess the two have a shootout where you can choose to have either killed or saved and then that's that now that you've saved the life of Port leader she allows you to settle on this planet there has been zero dialogue from her or Ryder before this where they talked about the initiative settling the planets maybe I'm stupid and that was supposed to be implied but even a casual hey what will you do if we settle here would have gone a long way to understanding why I did all of this mind you port leader literally had me and only me come with her to confront the charlatan she says it's because I'm an outsider so I can't be corrupted by the charlatan which makes no [ __ ] sense I mean wouldn't you choose your most loyal person what I [ __ ] whatever I don't care but now that I've saved her life she talks about an outpost being set up for literally the first time and I go set it up and that's that and I'm um this whole string of questing wasn't to have a funny bitching Fest mid video um it was to give what I think is a pretty damn good reason to not do anything else in this game besides the main quest line nothing has evaporated my Goodwill this hard in a game this whole string of quests left the worst taste in my mouth and the sheer amount of traveling from point to point and entering and leaving and fast traveling and doing something else to pass the time for the next part to activate I just I'm done this is the moment in this game where I almost entirely stopped caring to try to give it a chance let's get this over with and talk about our squadmates and how they're written normally I go into this type of thing with a pretty thorough analysis that encompasses every single loyalty Mission and how these people develop over the course of the game but Andromeda is very tough to take seriously when it comes to that so I tried not to overanalyze and make this whole section shorter but even that wound up being difficult each squadmate has around four to seven loyalty missions which might be something as simple as setting up a movie night type of scene like you got from veric card Knight and Inquisition or as complex as delving deep into someone's background and motivators I'll at least be trying to hit the ladder of those as often as I can I will say that as a general Point Mass Effect Andromeda absolutely excels at creating much more organic scen iios in regards to where you can find various Squad members and what they're up to at any given time historically the series tended to have people stick to their one corner of the ship and stand by as conversation Outlets while you made your rounds I think three started to fix that a bit but people still generally were in their one little room Andromeda will have these people hanging out in all different parts of the ship working on different things and having conversations with one another almost constantly it definitely felt like they were their own individuals with their own lives so I do have to give the game some credit there also worth noting that many of the conversations that will flesh out these characters take place in The Nomad as you're driving from point to point for example you'll learn that dra is an older Krogan who I've lived a long time seeing a lot of say those power lines go up you'll also learn that J from my father and older brothers and sister and Cat on the bridge yeah whenever anyone talks in this game you need to stop moving if you want to hear what they have to say so I missed out on quite a bit of detail while traveling it's not the end of the world but it was like almost every time I started to become invested in the squadmates the game went oh wait hang on you're not supposed to enjoy something regardless let's get this over with like I said from the start chorus starts out as one of the most plain Jane templates for a squadmate that I think that I've ever seen she's just this kind of suck up who defers everything to you as the Pathfinder seemingly having nothing to strive for when she's literally passed over for the nepo baby that is Ryder even though she was next in line as it turns out she is angry about it but instead just decided to retain her role of second in command bossing everyone else around while consistently yammering on about how she's an assari Commando which still doesn't make sense to me she winds up explaining eventually that she was taken in by the assari and trained under them in the same way that other huntresses his might which makes her an assari commando but if a US Soldier goes over to Japan and learns how they fight and what they do in combat situations it doesn't make him a Japanese Commando or maybe it does what the [ __ ] do I know doesn't sound like it though yes we have a Japanese Commando it's this [ __ ] 6'4 white guy just came back from Japan this is like people saying that they're Italian because their great great grandfather came over from Italy and they grew up in New York I mean yeah that's cool but if it's your main identifier life then it gets obnoxious fast I don't normally lose it like that a Huntress should have better control biotics like this thinking like an assari Huntress I never had a place is PB a typical assari name never heard it in my Huntress days I had my fun on Shor leave nothing serious though assari huntresses figure things out when your biotics are honed into Huntress grade weapons people can be weird about it a huntresses work Is Never Done even when we find out about the cat transforming other races into more cat her first thought is we have to find the assari so that they can figure this out for us like come on man regardless her Outburst later shows that she is sore about being passed over but has ultimately decided that there's nothing that she can do about it showcasing a stunning amount of maturity despite a rookie being chosen for the job that she should have had like her or not that's a pretty realistic way of writing something someone and it made me think more about her constantly talking about being an assari Commando I initially didn't think that Kora was written to be likable I thought she was written to be a pretty realistic depiction of a strong woman who's in a situation that she just has to accept because there's no other real option for her Beyond staging a coup or something like that or I guess deciding to leave the Tempest so she falls back on making her Commando training her personality instead and that all comes together really well when she briefly explains that she developed Powers at a young age that could rival an assari since her family was poor she was shipped off to a cross species program and always felt like she was viewed as a freak without a home that meshes really well with her non-stop prattling about her former life and again she's not likable in the slightest but she is understandable and realistic honestly I kind of respect that now the problem is that the writers wanted her to be at all which is something that I've brought up repeatedly now strong and flawed but also yearning and romantic and that makes it very very difficult to like her and the more that the writers pushed this idea that she likes the garden and was never accepted anywhere that she went the more that I feel like her being unlikable isn't intentional but instead a side effect of the writer's Crossing too many ideas together to try to force her to be memorable I know why people don't like Kora I sure as [ __ ] don't but I see the intent behind her character and I see exactly what went wrong honestly it reminds me a lot of Kaden and much like Kora Kaden was written to be this Rough Around the Edges guy with good intentions but someone who ultimately fell flat as a person that I could actually relate to and care about kora's loyalty Mission involves tracking down the assari ark as you might expect actually I think I said that earlier but whatever it's been too long now she's of course worried about the assari as always we're approaching the nap points found how are you going to handle things when you get into the chair something's there it might be an arc but the damn Scourge isn't helping the chair when we get to the ark it seems to be in a low powerered state with traces of combat all over the place making it further in has us talking to the captain of the ship along with the assari Pathfinder in charge who Kora immediately nerds out over I served with assari Commandos ma'am memorized all your battle manuals this Pathfinder is someone who used to be the top assari commando but had to take over as Pathfinder when the previous one died in the C attack so the situation is as follows there are cat on the Ark in the decks below the drive Court to the ark is dead that's also below shoot Kat repair ship I served as a Huntress this whole mission is kwave after cat wve while you defend several areas we're aided by a fresh recruit into the assari Commandos who who has stepped up in this dire hour giving Kora someone to Mentor when all is said and done we gain access to a log that proves that the new assari Pathfinder left the old Pathfinder to die during the cat attack causing the person that Kora idolizes to Fall From Grace right before her eyes when we regroup oh wait these two put up a mass effect barrier and strong woman to destroyer ship into submission just I I don't have much to say because that was so Fant F astical that the devs might as well have had veric riding in on aium powered rocket to blow it up instead when we regroup you get a chance to call out and expose the assari Pathfinder or keep it quiet this moment is the entire reason for Kora being as obnoxious as she has about the assari and I have to say it wasn't worth it I mean don't get me wrong I am glad that the writers tried to do something with her fangirling rather than just her being like that for no reason this plot line was so weak so basic so annoying and you could have fixed any of those things and made it that much better maybe cor is more subtle about her appreciation and it's something that you pick up on through smaller conversations with more minute fawning on her end like a poorly kept secret that isn't overt but say you want her to be this exact way going back to mirroring people who have 5% German DNA and consistently greet you with guten because of it I know some of you are catching Strays out here and I swear that's not my purpose but come on come on if cor's written to be this inyour face about her ties to the assari then I honestly think that the better writing here would have been if the captain of the ship went huh well that sucks but you know what we're alive I'd say the Pathfinder did a fine job and she gets to keep her role then you let cor draw her own conclusion and decide how she feels about these people being nothing like how she fantasized them to be I mean she still does that but you can also choose to have Justice served or whatever and you get this utterly watered down cliche of a story instead I don't know at least we get this [ __ ] QuickTime event afterwards I feel a hell of a lot better with you here would a hug be okay permission to hug ma'am God I love consensual [Laughter] hugging so yeah Kora hm yeah so Liam kind of sucks not a very fruitful character by any stretch of the imagination uh when you're initially spelunking through habitat 7 he mentions briefly that he used to be a cop and then when you finally get to a point where you can have him clarify on the ship the game skips over the dialogue in favor of him going ah yeah well that was in the past when you ask him about why he came here he goes uh well I don't know I thought it'd be cool to tell you that I was running from my past but I actually had a great group of friends and family a apparently he left that behind because the Andromeda initiative is Neato like that's his reasoning he had a job as a cop it led him into becoming part of a crisis response unit and then he just decided that he had seen it all at the age of like 35 or whatever the [ __ ] he is he left behind a family that he loved and hung out with he had an old British car that they used to work on together then he went all right cool going to go do this thing have a good rest of your lives I I guess part of me is sitting here wondering if this is supposed to be another bit of realism I mean you're probably going to have people who came out here and are like this um but those types would usually be either more psychotic and Lone Wolf types or those who literally had no other choice the only other way to think of Liam's choice to join the initiative in a way that makes sense is to think of him as a philanthropist type who wants to do good for the Milky Way races but I mean it doesn't make him less boring in fact it kind of makes view him as a bit impulsive and stupid to a degree that's great Pathfinder Jalal we got our gear CA rder I still don't know what exactly went on here but uh I feel like this was a setup for quirky shock value so from what I understand Liam was ping around with jaw and wound up insulting him by accident this led to the two deciding to work out a deal where they remove their armor and work on it side by side and while they do they can ask whatever they want about each other while agreeing to not get offended I still don't know if that's correct I feel like I need to take just the right strain of LSD to understand the quest writer's intent with this one but my guess is that the deeper meaning involves something along the lines of both companions feeling protected by armor literally and removing that literal armor is a metaphor for dropping their emotional armor when it comes to speaking with one another we can call it clever but I feel like the whole thing could have easily been done with each other's weapons also after this Liam is usually just shirtless so get used to that the more that he talks about his past the more that I'm sitting here going why the [ __ ] is this guy here he seems homesick to some degree almost constantly which maybe that's what the writers were going for here you have this guy who can be diagnosed as a dumbass who has made a decision that has permanently altered his life he left behind people he loved and a good life in general and now he almost seems to be trying to find a meaning behind being here something that would fulfill his purpose so that he doesn't have to accept that everyone he loves back home is long dead again I'm giving the writers a lot of credit that they haven't quite earned to make that argument but it's the only saving grace of Liam's character if that is what they were going for because as things stand he tends to get consistently stonewalled by the Nexus whenever he tries to negotiate with alien races of Andromeda which actually there's I say negotiate with alien races of Andromeda but there's just two alien races and one of them's the cat which clearly don't want to talk so he's just talking to the angara they only made two races anyways which I guess his job is being a crisis specialist uh something that he seems woefully unfit to do I mean in terms of getting out there and helping others Liam's probably one of the better picks but in terms of carefully navigating potentially Del inter species issues uh Liam is a loose cannon who I wouldn't trust to take a food order at a restaurant speaking of Liam's main loyalty Mission comes after settling another planet and it turns out that in his ever shining wisdom he's decided to give the angaran contact of his heaps of sensitive Nexus data his reasoning was that they didn't trust him or the initiative so that was going to be his bartering chip in the hopes that they would then help the initiative to settle and survive better with any info that they might have turns out that his contact was soon kidnapped thereafter and now the cat potentially have this horrifically sensitive data that they could use to hurt or destroy the Nexus at this stage I have to think that Liam was intentionally written to be stupid but I said the same thing with Kora being unlikable I mean this is reckless beyond belief and there's no Saving Grace to his character like nothing he's doing or saying makes me go well he's a great guy who's fun to talk to he just made a little mistake if the writers sat down to make the guy a bowl in a china shop with all the Charisma of a bucket of lead paint then they deserve an award so we head out to the last known location of Liam's contact and for some reason the plan is to go hide inside a cargo container and wait for pirates to come Salvage it at this point having Ryder go along with whatever Liam wants to do only makes him appear that much more incompetent but I know this is supposed to be another humorous moment and that's it when we're finally picked up all Breaks Loose as we're apparently now on a cat ship filled with seemingly ordinary pirates from non-at races again non-at races being the angara so I I don't know why I'm just now realizing that there's only two races that came from this [ __ ] game anyways so playing through Liam's loyalty Mission made me finally realize what's happening with how he's written and basically he's just supposed to be a comedic relief character who has a heart of gold this ship is property of Talon wi now your property to to just like the [Music] rest well that wasn't going anywhere useful find Rand and fast this way not that way we don't know where anyone is or anything works I will not be ignored anymore see total [ __ ] such an [ __ ] [ __ ] the tone here is completely different from any other loyalty Quest and it makes his incompetence appear to be part of his quote unquote charm there are ways to do this effectively but I will say that it's very hard to pull off in an elegant way you'd more or less want the character to act like a clown at all times but when it comes down to it they reveal that they act that way because their real emotions scare them I think the closest to example that I can come up with from a BioWare game would be augen I mean sure that's not exactly what I'm talking about as the dwarf was generally written to be a piece of [ __ ] but you understand what you're getting when you talk to him Liam has been a pretty non-stop mess of random quirky moments and sudden recklessness in the name of helping out the initiative in his own way and his inclusion at the level that he's at only causes you to question not only Ryder's judgment but his father's too as his father was the one who handpicked Liam to come on the Mission come on we have to find fan we don't even know if this is the way well something has to go right you take a risk for the right reason it's supposed to work you Dent your locker the principal will be pissed it isn't a joke I jumped us here blind and now we're fighting some [ __ ] who wants everyone chained it's like hitting Andromeda all over again sheld the B don't make this about the whole initiative we're here to help and why am I the one defending your plan I don't know I mean come on am I supposed to be sympathizing in with Liam or laughing that he's this stupid anyways some settlers that Liam called for help actually show up to bail him out of literally getting both himself and Ryder killed I guess it'd be hard for him to learn a lesson if he died but something tells me that he won't anyway the best thing that this Quest does is continue to Showcase how much better Andromeda is at creating interesting maps that revolve around platforming a feature completely missing from the previous entries I know compliments have been hard to come by throughout this video but I can't stress how much better the game play is if that's what you're here for then this game is probably pretty damn good to you so the results of this absolute [ __ ] show has you figuring out that the angaran who captured this vessel has a Napoleon complex and is about as big of a [ __ ] as Liam is he salvaged this wreck of a cat ship didn't realize that it needed as much work as it did to stay afloat and then began capturing any and all people that he could to work on it so instead of Liam facing actual consequences for his Mor IC decision making he happened to get an enemy who couldn't properly capitalize off of it we wind up fighting through quite a few tougher battles and then that's it Liam next time let's just do cards I'm too old for this [ __ ] here comes the writers to hammer home their magnum opus Liam admits that everything that he just did was stupid and that he needs to be more careful with his risk-taking in the future which is a fine lesson and probably the the best that they could do given all that has happened I need to be smarter about taking risks so you're right sorry okay go ahead unfortunately he's still not a likable character to begin with so him admitting his faults doesn't make me feel better about this whole ordeal honestly I think the only thing that they could have done at this stage was had an option to completely ream Liam for his transgressions and why not why not have it so that you can just chew him out and maybe even have him depart from your crew probably because that wouldn't feel good I mean [ __ ] even choosing the don't screw up again option just has Ryder gingerly telling Liam to please not do that again so yeah here we are the part where I summarize a squadmate Liam's a terrible character the end Vetra is a pretty intense T and that can get [ __ ] done in a way that's refreshing when compared to a large majority of the initiative she's consistently working out deals in the background grabbing information and using it for our benefit she's smart quick-witted and competent if you can't tell by the initial Fanfare I like her talking with her feels natural and not forced things don't feel like I'm checking conversational boxes with background lore as such learning about her and what she's like under the surface takes a long while compared to pretty much everyone else besides dra when you do do get to that point she'll admit that she got caught up with some bad people and W up using the initiative to flee that life her entire backstory can be summed up as A Series of Unfortunate Events her dad taking Vetra and her sister away from their mom and then abandoning them when his past caught up with him meanwhile Vetra felt like she couldn't go back to her mom because she only seemed to care about climbing the ranks of the tyrian military that in the way that her dad left seemed to have burned that bridge for good so Vetra raised her younger sister and PR provided for her from a young age taking on whatever jobs that she could which became seedier and seedier it's a solid background for the Tyrion but it might be even more intriguing because she's a Tyrion there have definitely been instances of tyrians being more thuggish in parts of various gangs throughout the Mass Effect series but for some reason I always viewed them as a stoic practical militaristic people more than likely due to how GIS is and how the other major tyrian players that you interacted with have been it's much more interesting to see what the other side of that might look like how a mother focusing on that militarism might fracture a family and how a father who's involved in one of those gangs might do the same vra's loyalty Mission comes in when her sister intercepts some information that seems to indicate that some settlers have been kidnapped and taken to a Mining facility this facility is on the remains of what used to be a golden World known as h-047c I got to think this was inspired by the first mass effects moon mission but this place is pretty damn cool to look at the lethal doses of radiation makes it impossible to disembark The Nomad making the whole thing a low-gravity cruise through the crushed gray rock it's honestly probably one of the better locations in the game to me personally there are some miners which have set up drones around this rock along with your standard Outlaws entering one of the domes where these missing settlers are supposed to be has Rider tripping a trap door and falling through it if only we had jump Jets at the bottom of this pit we find out that a criminal mastermind named Merryweather intentionally set this whole thing up so that Vetra would come here and I guess fall down a hole that was the whole plan the whole plan kind of putting all of your eggs into one basket with this one huh turns out that there are some people down here but are specifically people who Vetra helped to escape from merryweather's clutches so a couple of things are happening here for one Vetra is vehemently denying helping these people and basically claims that she's never seen them in her life despite them obviously knowing her and secondly we're still trapped down here until a mysterious Ally comes in over the comms and says that she can get the door open on her end if we just power it up I love how you can see exactly how the writers are thinking when they line up scenarios for you in this case the door is sealed shut but this mysterious Ally can open it this mysterious Ally is probably going to be vra's sister who Vetra has berated consistently just because she's overprotective of her and used to having to do everything for the two of them in their relationship and that's the furthest that the writers thought of in terms of setting up this situation because after the Ally comes over the comms they just go uh yeah now there's a generator in here uh which can power the door which the Ally can then override theoretically Sam should be able to easily override the door if it has power he's done it countless times before this but it's so important that the writers set up this situation where veter sister proves that she's not a little kid anymore and Vetra learns that she can stop babying her and now it's forcing us to rely on this Ally that can open the door I don't even know if that's what's going to happen yet I wrote this all down before getting to this point but I feel like I'm starting to get a beat on how these guys operate sedara n you've been pretending to be me haven't you uh how did you we wind up fighting through this facility with vra's sister guiding us through [ __ ] that we've never needed help with before you know overloading generators and redirecting turrets and all of that I mean you can choose what happens which is fun in its own way like you can have her free the caged animals or open a certain security door instead of the things that I just mentioned but it's just business as usual with the addition of vra's sister getting the unplugged second controller and pretending to play alongside us what's funny about this is that this whole thing winds up being another case where the writers had the building blocks for additional outcomes but they decided to just ignore them so that they could force feed the player their singular storyline in this case Vetra clearly tells her sister to only hack into the cameras one time so that she can't be caught then she doesn't say anything about her doing it two more times after that and throughout this whole ordeal this Merryweather chick is sitting here going hey something's going on and I'm getting suspicious well surprised Vetra sister gets caught and taken hostage which again there were opportunities at every point to completely forgo having her sister hack into various things and even having her do nothing results in her getting taken hostage why not have an outcome where her sister is fine because you chose not to have her do anything and then another where she either dies or gets severely injured due to our greed hell you could even split that further having the idea to hack into different systems be vra's idea or Ryder's idea if it's Vetra and her sister gets injured she feels a crushing guilt that she needs to be helped through or left to wither if it's Rider idea maybe Vetra feels raged towards him and either leaves or has to be coaxed into staying depending on how you treat her I know I'm a broken record with this stuff but it's crazy how much potential there is in nearly every single part of this game but the follow through is just never there think carefully about your next move Pathfinder in a world with no biotic Powers one man man must surrender his only offensive weapon also I feel like this game's voice acting ranges from huh that was pretty good to um you want your rat veteran Nicks you come to me help get them kill all of them you got to admit that that help was a work of art though VA thought she was casting for a Sonic the Hedgehog game anyways we save the sister Vetra scolds her we go back to the ship Vetra has the moment that we all knew what was coming and admits that just didn't want her sister involved in this dangerous [ __ ] for as long as possible honestly the predictability made me feel like a good portion of what started as a strong character was squandered for a very Hallmark movie moment which is unfortunate because she's still not a bad character overall and actually does exactly what Kora and Liam needed to do in order to not turn out as poorly as they did she's engaging interesting to talk to before her loyalty Mission and has a solid background that doesn't involve annoying the [ __ ] out of you plus she's like 7 ft tall so if you're into that you can romance her and the [ __ ] scenes where you're Romancing I mean there's no there's no skin shown I mean who knows what a Tyrion looks underneath all that but she [ __ ] dwarfs Rider she makes him look like a [ __ ] teddy bear toy she like picks him up and it's like dude what the [ __ ] you know like uh when everybody's going crazy for Lady D from uh Resident Evil 8 same [ __ ] concept so if you're into that she's your girl oh yeah I'm I'm analyzing a character uh which does soften the blow at the end to still make her [Music] solid PB is the manic Pixie Girl of our space dreams and I don't want to talk about her I'm going to but um she's just a condensed version of early to mid 2000s Millennial meme culture when she's not trying to fit in zany zingers she's working on a secret project that she's sure you'll love and she continuously babbles about the unknown and the prospect of new technology you'll eventually get the opportunity to help her with this project tracking down specific Remnant technology to further whatever it is that she's doing when you make it back to the ship you're told that she wants to speak with you and when you go to do that she tells you to stop spying on her project I think this one's probably more on the feature of you being told when there's any cutcenes aboard the ship but it still feels silly and able for pb's off-the-wall Whimsy the project winds up being a Remnant which she gutted and reprogrammed for combat which is fine I guess um when she's ready to show it off an ex-lover of her Comes Marching into her apartment on the Nexus to be smug about I don't know just to be smug I guess speaking of lovers PB is the only crew member who you can overtly flirt with with a dedicated flirt button which is very strange and really only leads to odd moments that can only exist in video game feasibly for example eventually you'll get to a point where you can tell her hey I was hoping to Bone you when you invited me over to your apartment and she goes yeah if only my ex-lover didn't barge in and then that's it like you guys couldn't just find a vacant room and mash piss right now I don't know I get the whole harmless flirting idea but this seems almost like a direct invite to Casual Space six fortunately if you're craving a hefty helping of blue alien and don't care where you get your fix PB does invite you for said casual space relations pretty soon after this happens after you have the deepest conversation to date with PB oh riter it's just this Museum reminds me of being on hiana during my indentured Service as a student you're very understanding and attractive nice combination think I'll stay in your operation a little while longer yeah she tosses out some random tid about where she studied in the past and then basically states that she's insecure about her Remnant research which isn't very deep or interesting her stress continues to build up even back at the ship and she winds up inviting you to a makeshift zero g chamber for fully clothed consensual but still competitive whole filling there's no skin shown making the scene worthless to those expecting a rousing round of edging but the point of it is to show that PB wants an absolutely no strings attached type of deal which you can't agree to I initially thought that this was the first time where you could become intimate with someone while also locking in Romance with someone else but then I remembered Jack from Mass Effect 2 and then I remembered how well done that whole ordeal was when compared to this how you could just go at Jack but then completely lock her out of romance if you do so and how you had to really break down her emotional barriers in order to have a fulfilling relationship if PB is to Andromeda what Jack was to the original trilogy then I think that this particular scene is what really encapsulates how much lesser andromeda's writing is by comparison pb's loyalty Mission kicks off with you sweeping three planets for specific Remnant parts so that she can build a scanner that seeks out other Remnant technology along the way you keep encountering thugs from the same outfit of mercenaries with them stealing the last piece that you need before you can grab it when you go to meet with them in order to purchase it pb's ex-lover reveals that not only is she in charge of the mercs but she waled onto the Tempest and stole p gutted Remnant might as well right when we finally track down where her ex-lover stashed this Remnant retrieving it is as simple as repeating the process walting in and taking it back from the makeshift lab that it was left behind in this is the setup for the final bits her ex planting a tracking chip or whatever into the bot for later now PB is sitting here ruminating on her old feelings for her ex and we have to listen to that the final thing that all of this leads to is PB getting excited about discovering what what she describes as a chunk of raw Remnant programming technology a veritable wild card in terms of potential tracking the signal leads you to an active volcano on the cusp of the system the pilot of the Tempest makes it is he the pilot um this guy of the Tempest makes it clear that it's going to be difficult to find a safe landing spot and begins working out the logistics actually could you come here please my place straight away what's this about K won't find a safe place to land The Tempest wow she's just so zany I mean are you [ __ ] kidding me putting aside all of the logistics issues that bubble on and below the surface it's the off-the-wall moments like these that make you stop taking anything seriously because the writers would rather put a random XD moment first and foremost you know what would make this scene worth it if Rider could immediately kick PB off of the crew afterwards but that won't happen so we have to deal with the fact that this Whimsical assari basically nearly killed us because of how curious she was retrieval may be impossible uh oops it doesn't matter there are no consequences in this game we run through this facility listening to The Barrage of banter which cuts off because I'm going too fast we'll need to find our way to need to get through that obstruction Remnant Hardware interesting that Observer is in a I'm picking up additional Pathfinder this site was a manif then pb's X shows up we race her x to the center of the volcano all while fighting the mercs that she's employed the amount of times that I'm told to scan things and go obvious places is insane the rock is too dense for your weapons but there is a deep fissure that an observer's beam might be able to exploit so scan the fissure and tell the bot to attack it up there above the gate another Power node look over that pool of lava another Power node scan it so our friendly Observer will enable it the final showdown has PB and her ex making a Mad Dash for the super Remnant Tech and the ex winds up hanging off the side of this platform dangling over lava PB goes this technology isn't worth her life and rushes to save her you get the opportunity to shoot her ex which is unironically the best thing this game has done so far of course there are no consequences for this I guess besides the exgirlfriend dying who you have no attachment to remember how you could choose Moren over Samara how that whole ordeal was more or less you choosing someone closer to neutral or even evil over the good character okay just making sure anyways PB goes wow why'd you do that and Ryder goes because I [ __ ] wanted to and she goes huh all right that makes sense to me too bad she died huh I mean this game is just consequen I'd have absolutely applauded it if PB went man [ __ ] this and just took off with the remnant technology after we got back on the ship I mean I'd still hate her as a character but she would have had a purpose Beyond being the resident Tumblr toaster strudel so yeah like I said on the surface PB is space Sarah and I'm certain that those who hated the elf in Inquisition have an equal or greater disdain for Pb but I personally think that Sarah exhibited an astonishing amount of growth as various events occurred throughout the game even going through a religious Arc that persists through to the end of it I mean sure she still had those random XD mannerisms to her but I saw what the writers were going for and why PB is basically fanfiction that has no Direction Beyond haha funny [Music] assari dra's a Krogan male so he likes fighting and strutting his stuff when he finds out that your dad died he sends you an email stating that he knows that things get tough with the deaths of loved ones so he's sending over some pictures that help him when things get tough these pictures are 37 images of various low-resolution watermarked guns I've always wanted a boomer as a squadmate so I initially thought that this just meant that the writers were going to Rex and grunt it up with no real character development but I was pretty dead wrong on this one let's get the basics out of the way first though dra starts out by telling you that KES is his granddaughter and that he raised her himself and that he's very proud of her I know I only mentioned Kesh once but KES was the uh Krogan leadership person on the Nexus just to remind you I'm sure somebody's going to go who the [ __ ] is Kesh I don't blame you he also outlines the Krogan leaving the Nexus claiming that Addison's assistant was the one who promised them more say in exchange for stopping the Mutiny when the Krogan did their job the assistant went back on his word and and then tan sided with the assistant since there was no proof of the deal going down between him and the Krogan obviously dra wants some form of Vengeance on the assistant this spender guy actually pretty much every single person that you talk to about spender has nothing good to say about him so you start investigating soon finding out that he might have done something to spark the Mutiny this leads to security footage which wait is he handing something over to one of the mutineers take this it'll help don't I am sorry Pathfinder this backup file is corrupted no he clearly said to take a data pad to get into the Armory I don't get why media does this [ __ ] the Signal's getting I'm going to chase the bad guy to the bowling alley huh I wonder what he said I guess we'll never know so the location of the footage is of a place on kadara which has us finding Exiles that spender has been supplying along with with a data pad that indicates that spender is in possession of some kind of Jammer so we have to go check his room on the Nexus because we just wouldn't have thought to do that without seeing this data pad I guess boy this spender guy sure is acting suspicious if only he had some kind of room to search but no why would we ever search there for anything so we go to his room and all the logs that he's left around make him out to be cartoonishly evil as you might expect we find this Jammer and bring it back to the comm's office officer on the ship who freaks out and claims that Jammers are illegal because they can help someone to get through the nexus's firewalls and the like this ends this particular Quest and begins another where you track down and recover a stolen shuttle with all of the seeds needed to grow crops for the Krogan on their settlement of new to chanka this has us traveling to another desert planet known as Aladdin Aladdin Aladdin Aladdin Aladdin elodin it's elodin I remember this has us traveling to another desert planet known as elodin which I to be a bit strange after EOS you'd think they would have had something else as things stand we have desert jungle Iceland Badlands desert I kind of expected swamp but no one consulted M aaki I guess also Sam mentions that the planet is tially locked between another moon and the gas giant here meaning that it's always daytime on one side of the planet and always night on the other I'm pretty sure ellin would have had to been locked with the star here for that to occur but I'm no astronomer regardless this place is beautiful really fun to look at and travel through but then you start talking to people and finding objectives I came to this galaxy to die on a new frontier I'm happy to impart my last bit of wisdom I would be honored knowledge is our Pathfinder we brought the best of what the Milky Way could offer you have the means to make all this better so use your resources to study and decipher what's here grow from it build more efficient powerful tools build the future that is all did this guy just tell me absolutely nothing it'd be one thing if Ryder responded with a uh thanks for nothing but something tells me that this Krogan was supposed to be written to sound really wise so this whole trip was you getting the lay of the land but the objective is just you talking to a guy so that you can begin the quest to save the seed shuttle and this is probably where the game shines much more than it has the Moon that you infiltrate contains a mining operation headed by spender contact and the rebels who were kicked off of the Nexus you fight through the area while learning that there's an egghead Krogan named vorn who's been hiding in one of the shipping containers after he got nabbed along with the seed shuttle as dra puts it vorn is the best hope at a future out in Andromeda for their race due to the knowledge that he has about growing these seeds at one point dra has to make a decision between chasing the shuttle which begins to take off from The Mining facility or to save born of which he chooses the latter this is where dra's typical Krogan attitude starts to really give away to something more he's not just some grizzled old veteran he's got a heart that beats for his people and yearns for them to thrive and you can make that argument about Rex as well but Drex specifically cares more about individuals and puts them above himself constantly whereas Rex was more self-important and saw himself as the future of his people dra views himself as utterly Expendable something that vorn tries to convey to him I guess a final example comparing Rex and VOR would be that um well I think that Rex would have chosen to pursue the seed shuttle and would claim that he would just force some assari or salarian to figure out how to get the crops to grow either way this mission is great and comes packed with your fun Krogan moments as you might hope we're going to destroy everything you can there's only one thing getting destroyed here today and that's you and this place and also your boss and probably your entire crew so a lot of things are getting destroyed here actually and all of them are yours hi guys yeah this will do incoming hi the end result has us managing to save Bourne and stop the seed shuttle from escaping which kind of nullifies the choice that dra made earlier but it also saves me from having to play through another mission I guess there is an upside to having it all I mean not that this mission was bad or anything the aftermath has you encouraging or discouraging dra to kill off spender contact here which was Easy Choice no and then dra talks with Ryder about his age and purpose in his mind he's a relic of the past a monument to what the Krogan race used to be about killing and taking the old Krogan sees Andromeda as a fresh start for his species miring how the majority of them seem to feel out here but he also knows how he gets when the chips are down how his rage consumes him and causes him to want to destroy rather than create it's an interesting bit of Discord that brw beneath the surface of a typical battle hungry Krogan and it's actually fun to watch play out as you get to know dra better heading back to the Nexus has us nailing spender down at last getting the choice to Exile or jail him the best part about this is again something that sets dra apart from the previous prominent Krogan you need us and frankly we need you for most Krogan this is an impossible thing to admit and points towards the sheer amount of wisdom that dra has the more that you talk to him the more that you realize that he serves a wonderfully unique role that hasn't been seen in these games he's basically a tough Grandpa who thinks he knows everything but is somehow still really cute in regards to how he treats those that he cares about of course his aftermath Mission has you getting into a tag team bar fight which was unfortunately written straight out of the Marvel Playbook you start this I'm going to finish it yeah you and what army I don't need an army I've got a Krogan done getting too old for this [ __ ] still dra is easily the best squadmate in terms of character development exceeding expectations and delivering a fun narrative much like javic I was initially more interested in the angaran species that jaw is rather than jaw himself personality-wise he seems to be a guy likes to Tinker with different weapons and the like used to be interested in scientific research you get it I'm making gifts for everyone I have a list gifts H do Tans like poetry for VRA I'm writing a poem and Engraving it on well I'm not sure yet he explains that his species is a very emotional one claiming that he has a harder time hiding his feelings than proc claiming them outright but then when it's time to quiz him further about himself he just goes uh I'm not telling you [ __ ] until I trust you more which honestly is probably one of the most refreshing traits in a brand new Squad member I've ever seen it makes complete sense for someone from a species who's been hunted by other aliens to not immediately buddy up to you even though he seems to want to to a degree it actually does a fair amount to make up for the initial angaran welcome that we got when we showed up and were allowed to help from the get-go when you do eventually get to start quizzing the guy about his species he's like [ __ ] if I know how I work do I look like a biologist that's disappointing no biology at all how do your eyeballs work well you have your rods and your cones and the rod see okay I get your point all right I guess Ryder isn't a biologist either like me I'm a biologist now the rest of jaw's answers are a little more detailed but not enough to really make me care about the angara as a species if that makes any sense I know initially I was interested in it but as time went on I kind of lost that interest I think the Allure of the protheans was that they were always talked about as this mysterious species filled with crazy advancements that dwarfed our current state of Technology their consistent mention really helped to drive that Curiosity making me want to know a lot more as things stand Jael will talk about how he's not sure what he wants in life how angaran families are gigantic due to how they tend to have a whole village pitch in to raise children and how they constantly try to improve their current situation rather than improve the future which is the same thing but I guess they focus on things differently is the point of that but the bigger issue I have with this line of questioning is that all of these options are simply right or going okay now tell me about religion and Jael responds with a long bout of exposition that raises more questions as the player and there are no followup questions from Ryder besides one single question about jaw's view of the MOSI and that question involves tactlessly asking about whether jaw is into her she is beloved I love her really so one of those Professor student things no uh not that way mosha is 115 of your years old ah a Gil after the MOSI rescue operation jaw is obviously distraught over his people being turned into cats his main issue with it seems to be more about the amount of cat that he's killed without knowing their origin feeling as though he's been killing his Brethren this entire time later on you can have the ship's doctor take a look and analyze a cat's body to figure out its composition her conclusion is that an angaran body has no real bearing on what a KET body becomes that there's only a trace amount of angara DNA remaining inside a cat and that they seem to have perfected this process of mixing DNA over the course of centuries jaw still wants to turn them back into angara and continues to hope that this is a possibility which does seem like an accurate emotion for a race that's described as overly emotional my problem is that while jaw has described the angara as an emotional people it seems like all of its leaders and heroes are pretty stoic and more logical which is actually a great bit of flavor if that's the case if the angara people tend to be super emotional and wear those emotions on their sleeves then maybe the ones who are able to keep their emotions in check would become leaders the issue is that every angara that I've personally met have pretty much all been very typical with their emotions the way that jaw describes them has you thinking that they're going to be these very bold Larger than Life almost manic at times people but that just hasn't been the case in writer experience even with random merchants and civilians on a making me feel as though the writing again whiffed a bit on this particular detail I actually think it would have been fun to witness a culture where the social media is just cranked to 11 where the boldest and most jarring behavior is the norm and then you could even twist that another way making it so that angaran culture is so zany that very toned down and boring media is now all of the rage just due to how different it is like Angar and YouTube would just be videos of someone filing taxes or painting a wall or talking about video games for hours straight I don't know new races and games hardly ever show off what they might do socially Beyond a fun little trivia fact that comes up up in random conversation and I feel like the angara had the roots to become something truly unique and special even if they got to be annoying overall eventually you get to understand jaw a little more when he opens up to you about how he's really feeling giving you insight into how he feels inferior when compared to his siblings and cousins he explains that although he's accomplished much he doesn't feel like he Stacks up to the others around him and the pressure that his Society has heaped on him and that's a great bit of writing but much like a lot of this game this seems to be almost like a box to check for the story because this small conversation is the only time that we ever get to hear about the extent of jaw's inferiority issues and his relatable mental health problems that cause him to want to go above and beyond because he feels like he hasn't done enough if this had been a recurring theme something that jaw Works through and overcomes then that's a great plot point for his character but what happens is that jaw will eventually get offered advancement in the angaran resistance and then suddenly his inferiority complex is gone now mind you jaw was already a high ranking member of the resistance one who had participated in a critical raid on a cat base and emerged Victorious so when he starts going on about being insecure it seems like a mental block indicative of something deeper but it turns out that he just needed to be offered to be put in charge of a covert Ops Squad in order to get over it I just have a hard time getting invested and not becoming jaded with the idea that this might have just been been some writers token inclusion of feeling insecure you changed too I think more open like a true angara perfect this is only exacerbated by the next topic that jaw tells you about outlining his first love interest who seemed to be quite a bit older than him he explains that he was really young and that she kissed him and he was smitten with her after that then his older brother came back from the resistance and she fell in love with his brother and instead jaw wound up becoming the brother-in-law of the woman that he loved this is a whole other issue that would almost certainly lead to quite a few psychological issues in the realm of love and relationship formation but it's never mentioned again you have to see her every day no they were taken by the kit their children survived all right no further questions as I mentioned earlier one of jaw's big concerns that leads into his loyalty Quest is the involvement of the racist angara known as the RAR he claims that their leader the student who was captured by the Kat and escaped is going to be a problem for the initiative if they continue to try to Branch out in this area so we go to meet with this ex- student named oxu who basically states that we don't even treat our own kind well citing the Krogan Exodus as his example of that we tell them that we're different and that racism was solved on our end in 1865 in the United States of America and that nothing racist has ever happened since then we get a distress call from EOS claiming that enemies have moved in on these settlements here you'll be surprised to hear that this is one of the better missions in terms of enemy motivations as oxol has sent his people to attack EOS so that the Nexus will then turn on the RAR and potentially the angara proving to axul's people that he was right about us being as bad as the cat the way that the RAR attack is set up through Oxo Scouts who are Adept at smuggling in a beacon to locations that they want to hit fortunately we can cut them off before they Implement that stage of their plan and then take that Beacon to one of the failed initial settlement sites here on EOS after fighting them at both of the abandoned outposts they withdraw with oxil promising more to come I concede no Faults with this Quest so far it's fun to play through the logic is sound enough to not make me scratch my head and the Mind Games between Ryder and Ox are interesting to watch unfold it helps that has probably the best voice acting out of all of the squadmates nearly everything that he says is magnificently performed and I have to give credit to the voice actor on that front the climax of jaw's loyalty Quest comes when oxu converts three of jaw's siblings to the RAR causing him to fly into a rage we head off to where the RAR are hold up immediately getting into a situation where they shoot first and we shoot last eventually we wind up facing down jaw's three siblings which I felt could have gone better I mean it's not bad all things considered but you set this up in a way for oxu to take advantage of jaw's soft side to use his siblings against him in a way where he needs to either surrender or die but they're just kind of out here on their own Manning some ledge or another they chat about what's going on and it's clear that two of them are completely brainwashed but the third is either swayed over to jaw's side or has always been a double agent of sorts he starts stting off about oxil trying to blow this angaran sacred place up with bombs that he's pilfered from the initiative again making it look as though the initiative is trying to attack the angara so you have a mix of decent writing with some oversights that make oxil look like he blew a very strong Advantage one of the sisters shoots the brother who tells us this but he seems like he'll be fine and she makes this face I don't know it just felt like this could have been amazing and is settling for just being good at best now so we pressed further in disarmed the bombs and reconcile with jaw's siblings the one who shot the other was so shocked that she realized what she was doing was wrong which is fine not a bad point I mean I guess she flew into a frenzy because of all these beliefs that had been built up in her all this brainwashing that had occurred and then when she finally pulled the trigger she realized what was important to her fine that's not bad that's not bad writing but then oxol comes in and you expect a pretty grandiose moment from this encounter they move onto our planets they take our resources make us weak I've watched Ryder make planets habitable exactly and they'll never let us forget he rescued your beloved mosai I know saved her life I know stop defending them nuh-uh I mean come on you had this guy set up to basically be a mastermind which would have been much better instead you decided to go with the crazy route which does work in a way but not in the way that they set him up to be if oxil was truly Manic and crazy about his feelings towards aliens then the people that he recruited would be just as bad I'm talking blowing themselves up crazy what the writers instead seemed to do for the longest time was take the fears of the angara and use that to fuel his planning and plotting that would make him charismatic and tactically Brilliant which is what seemed to be the case so when he shows up like The elusive man to talk in front of his Rebels and the most that he can do is go um well the aliens are bad then it makes him look like he was just a maniac who lucked his way into the position that he's in the Apex of this showdown has oxu threatening to shoot jaw and you get the opportunity to either kill the rebel on the spot or to just let him shoot your squadmate again the amount of respect that I'd have if he actually just straight up killed jaw all but no he grazes your friend and then everyone looks at him like wow dude I can't believe this guy man no more racism for me this guy is nuts I just I can only witness the ball being dropped so many times I'd make a Detroit Lion's joke but we just had a great season and we're about to go to the Super Bowl baby so yeah we won the so-called crazy man is Left Behind without him doing anything else because we all know that genuinely crazy people just give up up when things go wrong all of jaw's siblings live and are fine because we can't have the player feeling bad and then that's it God damn it overall jaw's a good character well as good as he can be in a game like this uh he brings a genuinely different personality type to your squad that doesn't seem written just to be different it sucks that his loyalty Mission fizzled out after a great start but I guess it is what it is I can confidently say that this is hands down the worst set of companions in a BioWare game I mean maybe even worse than Jade Empire which is absolutely nuts to me because this has typically been one of the developer strong suits companions that twist your perception of the world of the events impacting them ones that start out with you disliking them and have you growing fond of them by the end ones that are genuinely flawed but realistic to a point where you can see why they are the way that they are without the writers trying to apologize or make up for their faults I mean even as recently as Inquisition had viven which I mean she just was Unapologetic in how she was if the writers decided to start suddenly trying to make her really likable for literally no reason then I mean I'd have the same issue but they didn't they kept her the same way throughout she was always as cold-hearted as she was the secondary writing team dropped the ball on nearly every companion which is really damn sad to see I've had my issues with specific companions in the past but the best part about those instances was that nearly all of them had people to defend them maybe I didn't like Miranda or Ashley but there are people who have and do just like I didn't really mind Jacob who's historically been a pretty annoying character for many people and that's the beauty of a BioWare character for me the controversial ones will have their fans and haters but they usually aren't just allaround poorly written so I was going to move on to do other side [ __ ] hell I actually typed about two pages analyzing some side missions that I took on but my heart just isn't in it if I'm going to be honest with you uh it felt really weird to suddenly try to take a hard look at side quests after all of the stuff that's been presented to me so far this is easily the first and only game that I've made a video on where I felt this Bleak about playing it so let's just beine down the main quest Quest and uh get this over with when the archon's ship is Tracked Down it appears that the salarian arc is Tethered to it giving them fresh bodies to work with in terms of cat conversion oh yeah the Tyrion Arc was found busted up in another side mission uh not really worth mentioning since nothing really came of that we decide to Infiltrate The salarian Arc first before heading across the connecting tubes to the archon's ship which leads us into finding the salarian Pathfinder and pulling her out of stasis there are no guards or anything to fight which felt kind of strange but eh whatever less fighting she'll be getting the arc ready to go while we head off to the archon ship to hopefully recover a relic depicting the location of the meridian the next slew of rooms is fighting or ignoring cats at one point Ryder and his gang are all shouting about how there's too many of them and how we're not going to make it at this rate I mean I'm just vibing because my build is damn near perfect I just like how it one point Ryder is like Sam can you get us out of here and Sam is like n you got to fight then after the fight Sam goes okay so I open a new route for you eventually we make it to the archon who traps the squad in some kind of stasis field he injects Ryder with a tracking chip and then leaves the group behind promising Ryder that he'll soon torture the methods that he's used to activate the remnant technology out of him this is where Sam figures out that the only way to escape this field is for it to detect nothing living within it it which is honestly one of the cooler moments in this game I swear I'm not just looking to hate Andromeda and it's moments like these that reinforced that for me because I got to a point where I felt like maybe I was trying to dislike it but no this was a genuinely interesting moment where Ryder has to trust his AI to revive him truly merging the line and creating a symbiosis after fighting to The Relic which houses the location of the meridian we encounter an exalted version of a Krogan which is Powerhouse of an enemy it looks a little strange with the gun in its hand but whatever on our way out the first real choice in this game appears right at the end of it in the form of saving drax's krogen Scouts who got captured or saving the salarian Pathfinder this one seemed like a no-brainer to me for a couple of reasons for one there are just simply more krogans to save to my knowledge additionally more exalted Krogan would be bad for us meanwhile exalted salarians just seem like they'd be better at chess or or something and finally we have no salarian squadmates I mean the ship's pilot or whoever the [ __ ] this is is one but that's hardly comparable to the amount of dialogue that we've gotten from dra but I do appreciate that for once this is a real decision with real consequences that come later depending on what you choose plus I like the flavor of choosing between the salarian and the Krogan once again after saving the Krogan we make it out getting a scene where a few more questions about the cat are answered what surprised me the most about all of this is that the archon isn't the leader of all cats he seems to instead be more akin to a general and his superiors don't seem to be happy with his obsession with the Meridian he seems to be using the Meridian as a tool one that he doesn't fully understand but understands enough to use it to destroy habitable planets in one way or another his purpose seems to be to cause other raisin to submit no matter what weakening them enough to exalt them into more Kat finally we find out that the archon saw and recorded all of Ryder's memories that flashed before his eyes when he died and revived though we don't know what he can do with those yet I find it weird that Ryder is told immediately afterwards that the archon has access to those memories most writers would only want the player to know that saving the big reveal to the main character for something exceedingly Sinister with no chance that he'd be able to adapt to it I guess we'll see regroup at the Nexus has the same doubt about the Meridian playing out on our end seeing as no one knows what it does yet Ryder's sister finally wakes up from her big nap and what can be described as a heartwarming scene plays out I guess I don't care about sister Rider but she seems to be doing fine all things considered the problem now is that the Nexus leadership just doesn't want to keep messing with the archon or the Meridian like this which I mean I kind of get that the scientist on the other hand and are down to go behind their backs the theme of recklessness being rewarded continuing to Trend in this game because I mean they probably aren't going to be repercussions for this I imagine kind of makes the whole ordeals with both Liam and PB seem completely normal when Ryder is willing to disobey his superiors also the plan that the science team Cooks up is to amplify The Tempest signal to make it seem like there are a fuckload of Tempest chips approaching the Meridian buying us enough time to access it while the cat scram to find the correct one before integrating that there are a few more points of order regarding the squad first off PB does apologize in an email for what she did denoting quite a bit of growth in her character which was a nice enough gesture I guess it's little bits like this that make me think that maybe if Andromeda had gotten a sequel the potential for these people to evolve into something more is pretty high secondly dra hits you with some of the most heartbreaking [ __ ] you'd never expect from this game the long and short of it is that he's an old ass Krogan with a thousand plus years of combat experience and that he wound up getting assaulted by a maniac wielding a box of grenades and lost quite a bit of functionality in his limbs nerves and so on everything hurt a lot all the time no purpose to anything how did you deal with it I didn't I fell right into that pit almost but then some shame and shows up drops the tiniest little baby girl in my lap I mean come on I love this guy the rest of the squad all have things that they want to show you or talk to you about but nothing that really seemed super important or impactful to their development so that's all I really have to say about them for now the big assault on the Meridian goes off without a hitch for the first chunk there are K and Remnant everywhere fighting it out with you in the middle pressing further in reveals that the Ian created The Scourge when something went aide during some experimentation or another this experimentation also seemed to Encompass the creation of the angara which we find the blueprints for closer towards the center of this big ass structure so not only are the Cat created from The angara partially the angara were created by the remnant we've gotten to a point where I don't have a super strong opinion on the writing here I mean this part has generally been a pretty positive experience though I do feel like that if the rest of the game had been St then this would have been a very good plot point I think what needed to happen was a bigger elaboration on how young the angara seemed to be as a race and how their history only seems to extend back a couple of hundred years that has been implied a few times but it was never something the writers seemed to care about enough to really make a big show of though it's quite possible that this was just something that I missed with the amount that I skipped in my playr and I will totally take the fall for that if that's the case but even if that did happen then maybe it should have been part of the main plot either way we discovered that this whole area is actually a Remnant City and the remnants creators were known as the jardon this is clearly another round of setting up a mysterious alien race akin to the protheans in the original trilogy though with how poorly Andromeda was received we'll likely never know what the jardon were about what they look like and so on it's a bit of a shame but maybe it's for the best at this point well the logs here indicate that the jardon were fighting some enemy or another before they had to abandon everything and hope for the best which is exactly how the protheans were set up with the reaper Invasion the main takeaway for now is that the jardan wound up ejecting the meridian's engine which is what's necessary for this city to function properly and is the true source of power that we need to hunt down in order to eviscerate the cat once and for all or at least this chunk of cat at this point the cat invade and just start wholesale firing on the remnant city which I thought was is really weird because before this they seemed to Value the meridian so much that I assumed that they wanted to keep it intact but I guess three members of the initiative is enough for them to get desperate we wind up turning on the city's defenses resulting in one of the cooler cut scenes in the game once we're done blasting the cat away their main forces Retreat and we head back to the Tempest of course we're greeted by director tan who goes hey I know that you defied our direct orders but yay you were right good job buddy I'm not surprised in the slightest but it still somehow causes me to scoff so the issue now is that although the true Meridian was fired off on a relatively predictable trajectory The Scourge has likely interfered with it to a point where we can't be sure where it went fortunately we probed this galaxy before heading off to it so we have imagery of it to compare to what's out there now we wind up Gathering more data from various parts of the scourge and put it all together at the jardon city in order to send ships along the path that the engine likely took and that's when all hell breaks loose the archon reveals that the memories that he took from Ryder has allowed him to discover the location of the Nexus along with his sister who has an identical Sam implant and now that Ryder has revealed the connection of the meridian the archon sever his connection to Sam more or less killing him this was actually a great twist that leads into the cat attacking the archip perion causing you to now pilot Ryder's sister as she fights to get to the control unit that will reestablish a link between Sam and Ryder as with every good moment in this game I do think that this could have been so much more had you taken the time to really Foster a connection between the player and their sibling I'd find myself caring more about these sisters potential sacrifice here had you taken the time to explore the archon a bit more show me what he's about and what he's capable of then I wouldn't have to be blindly trusting that this device that he injected into Rider had this severing capability regardless this whole block of scenes is done pretty damn well it's emotional intriguing and the first time that I felt any sort of malice towards the main villain of the game which does say something about how they wrote the guy but we'll get to that in a moment I just wish that all of this didn't rely on Sam going hey this guy injected you with something and Ryder going huh well hopefully nothing bad speaking of bad I think the game is collapsing in on itself in these final moments like a black hole of game design we need to get back this if he takes Meridian he'll destroy worlds starting with EOS he thinks he's W stop ship kill jerk with what maybe we're outgunned but there's always a way not to throw at the archon I'll make The Remnant do that no but the Tempest is one ship and she isn't even armed either I've completely forgotten how Kora looks or she looks completely different here there's a genuine 50/50 chance on that regardless Ryder can now control Remnant technology without the help of Sam but it makes his nose bleed because that's cool it's literally just how many tropes can we fit into a game oh this was a cool thing that happened one time in this one media let's throw that in there oh man when he controls this his nose bleeds it indicates that he's really actually hurting himself to use this much power my [ __ ] god dude they don't even do anything with this by the way it's not like he starts losing memories or anything like that this doesn't hurt him later on maybe they were planning to do something in the sequel which you know again but whatever so we rally our allies and the remnant to go after the cat once and for all the game continues to just Jank out making these scenes harder to enjoy but they seem pretty cool I think they put all of the game's facial animation into the archon because that guy makes some good faces The Scourge and the cat call how close can you edge The Scourge the chair okay that's got to be the last question I expected to hear and the chair after a rousing round of edging we make it to the meridian's core which is just it's just Halo this is Halo Halos inside this the archon's slapping your twin around like she owes him rent but you know that she won't die because these guys are afraid of creating a good plot point so you hop aboard the warthog and take a leisurely low stakes drive to where the control center of this thing is you get to hear from and see all of the people that you've chosen to help out or were required to help out throughout your play through but I don't think they affect much beyond that I didn't see any enhanced Krogan so I'm pretty sure that the decision we made actually affected game play whoa energy Spike the archon is doing something in there standing by Sarah may need attention the fight in is a lot more of the same but with your various allies coming to help fight alongside you which is nice I suppose at one point we get a break to watch the arch Hyperion break off from the cat Fleet somehow and then just smash into the ground here oh yeah the archon stole a whole ass ship from the Nexus actually more than that he stole the [ __ ] power supply for the Nexus the thing that was generating enough power to keep the lights on in the place that's never addressed though I guess we could say that the other arcs are doing that now if I were the archon I would have deployed a few hundred K to get the Nexus under control while all of this is happening because the most that they'd have to contend with is a security Force but he's no strategist I guess the final showdown has the archon hooking into the meridian's core which causes him to command The Remnant which isn't very intimidating because we've been shredding the [ __ ] out of them this entire time with no issue so they had to make him a dragon for it to feel more final this boss fight is equal parts fun and stupid which is fitting Sarah oh yeah your sister's name is Sarah Sarah is guiding you throughout this since the archon is using her implant to harness all of this power and she realized realizes that you can just shut down the system that big Ark is connected to so the entire battle is going from area to area and shutting down three computers which is fine because your entire Squad flies in to help out which is something that's always fun to see in these games the problem is that the game doesn't really expect you to be able to fully utilize its movement mechanics because I just skipped over gaps where we were supposed to wait for Sarah to create a bridge Ryder is constantly yelling out that we need to hurry to run and Gun and then when I do that the game wants me to stop and kill everything in sight before it'll let me continue so yeah kind of had to jump back over the gaps that I crossed and kill everything so that a bridge could be formed across the Gap that I just traversed when all is said and done the archon dies or passes out or whatever and then we walk out and the day is saved and all of that I've never seen a game allow you to speed up its credits so fast that you can't read them but I guess uh anything to get this [ __ ] over with want to ditch these losers I don't think I've ever felt more relieved to finish a video game before Mass Effect Andromeda is an unpolished gem but if it were polished it'd likely be a chunk of quartz that you find at the mall in one of those stores that sell [ __ ] for weird people there are a lot of good moments and ideas the cats atmology was a really big one for me the mechanics are solid for a BioWare game and made me really feel like I had the tools to explore and discover and if that was all I needed to enjoy a story-driven RPG then hey it's a pretty decent game the problem is that I just didn't have the drive to engage in that exploration due to how lackluster a lot of the writing was I can tell you right now this game would have thrived in 2010ish right around the time when open world exploration was starting to Boom in games I mean breath of the Wild released about 2 weeks before Andromeda did and that game story was literally generic Zelda storytelling but it excelled because people don't play Zelda for the story that and it didn't have a fuckload of bugs but you know whatever people do play Mass Effect for the story if this game had Stripped Away its Mass Effect roots and had been its own thing then I feel like I would have liked it a lot more but even with that the writing would have been a hard sell for a BioWare game and that's the issue with androma the loss of what people play BioWare games for borrowing ideas from other developers can be a great way to refresh your series while still retaining its identity especially when you see a game come along and knock it out of the park but it's one thing to take inspiration and another thing to go oh wait let's just do that now it leads to a loss of things that made BioWare what it once was I play cdpr games because I want to experience cdpr games I play Bethesda games when I feel like playing a Bethesda game and I play older BioWare games because they're older BioWare games and not much else is like them could I suddenly make a video on my channel where I create a meme Montage of epic gamer moments and Loud Noises probably would it be successful eh maybe but it's not what people watch me for taking what's popular can work but it might not always be what your fan base that you've cultivated for years wants to see from you experimenting is fine but if you lose sight of the moments that made you the company that people grew up with then it only hinders your game there are tons of little things that I didn't even mention about this game that just aren't good facial animations are stiff and horrible movement animations aren't much better Sam will constantly remind you that it's hot or cold or radioactive or whatever as you zip into and out of safer pockets on planets sometimes talking with people has the camera zooming onto nothing instead of centering onto the conversation when you load into an area after fast traveling or even load up the game from the main menu conversations will start before you even fully load in causing the first two or three words to get cut off enemy AI ranges from functional to completely unresponsive to a point where I could just stand in front of an enemy taking cover and just watch them while I reload and all of this stuff sucks but there was so much actual [ __ ] to complain about that I didn't even really bother making a big deal out of these points so let me try to narrow this down to the biggest three issues that I had with Andromeda first up is a general lack of focus this game is so good at coming up with big bold ideas but then not taking the time to actually help you understand the details that would make those ideas stick the angara and the K are easily the biggest examples of this you take two new races and reveal some pretty out there facts about them that they're related in a way that the cat kidnapped the angara and other races to create more cat that the angara are a young race that are especially free with their emotions but you never actually take the time to give examples to help pad those ideas with the cat you can argue that they were being saved for a later game like the protheans or more accurately the rapers but here's the difference Mass Effect 1 could still stand on its own yes it had Intrigue enough to persist to other games but you didn't feel like you needed to know about these entities in order to fully enjoy the game the Kat are so involved in Andromeda that it felt like a more thorough explanation on their origin was a require M to completely contextualize their actions this is especially true when there's a single cut scene depicting the structure of the cat showing that the archon isn't the big boss as much as he's a regular boss within their ranks if you're not going to expand on that further then remove the cut scene and have the player think that the archon is basically the emperor of the cat with the angara you're told a bunch of stuff about them but there's never enough intermittent conversation to witness examples of the behavior that they supposedly exude and then revealing that they've been created semi- recently by the jardon is something that you just have to accept because there will never be any elaboration on the details of that I personally think that you should never pepper the players with Concepts that you plan to expand on in later games unless the game that you're working on is an established sequel that has proven to be in high demand and that's the problem the writers did think that this was the case when they were riding this game they were banking on the idea that Andromeda would be successful that they were writing for an established franchise that had room to include vague Notions that would be expanded on later had they tighten things up and focus on the main ideas then maybe they would have had that chance to start teasing players with unexplained lore later second up in my big three issues is a lack of consequences Andromeda is a poster child for games that want the player to never feel bad in any way and this quirkiness over realism style of approach absolutely drains the game of charisma over time the amount of times where this game will insert you into an absurd situation where you should suffer some sort of penalty is unparalleled and yet nothing bad ever seems to happen that doesn't get fixed or written off later the beauty of even the first Mass Effect was that there were moments where you could lose people due to your choices that if someone does something especially stupid they tend to pay for it later I'll never understand how the B writing team was comprised of giant Mass Effect fans and yet they seem to be afraid to hurt anyone that they deem to be important to Ryder there's never a moment where you're actively choosing to hurt your squad in order to benefit someone or something else say what you want about Ashley and Kaden you can choose to sacrifice either of them and then later stand against them despite the time that you spent together you could reinforce Jack's General outlook on life or turn it around you could choose one species over another multiple times only getting the opportunities to save both sides if you've put in the groundwork to do so there's nothing like any of that in this game even the potential conflicts that the writers did come up with never really bear fruit in terms of real consequences the biggest example of this to me was the lack of exploration of the topic of what if humans and AI coexisted the writers never truly take the time to flesh that out beyond the occasional weariness of others towards Sam there is a side quest that I did that involved a whole outfit of anti- AI hack ERS who have relevant concerns about AI but wind up being extremists so their entire point is disregarded by the main cast and this idea that seems to be in your face at first kind of Fades into the backdrop instead of the writer cooking up something exceptional here's a minor balers Gate 3 spoiler for comparison so skip ahead like 15 seconds if you care about that it would be like if the game said hey you have an ilth worm in your brain but it actually helps you and then wholesale disrup regards literally everything bad that could happen from that instead of having an open dialogue debate and discussion about the concept what if there was an entire faction that would only pledge to help you if you chose to severely limit Sam the trade-off would have to affect your capabilities and exchange for something exceedingly helpful but that decision would be yours to make those consequences would be yours to endure and if you choose to keep Sam as is or even further integrate him into your brain's functionality then maybe that affects your playthrough also maybe Ryder becomes incapable of certain speech options his emotions becoming more synthetic maybe the faction that he loses out on severely impacts your capabilities against the cat moments like those would truly benefit this game and help it to stand on its own two feet the final big issue that I have would be a lack of overall impact I'm not taking hardly any of these characters with me after I close the game I'm not thinking about them or reminiscing about the moment that they had I won't recap the squadmates because I feel like I said enough about them but even comparing Ryder to Shephard is night and day in terms of effect that they had on me Shephard always seemed to be unafraid to call others out to get into people's faces when he felt like they needed it he truly gave me the tools to express myself in bigger moments without me feeling like what he was doing was out of place Ryder to me always felt like a cardboard cutout who was almost always on board with whatever others thought was best even scolding others for making silly decisions had him either gently telling them to be more careful or comically trying to make light of a situation that called for a much stronger reaction and this lack of strong emotion applies to nearly every other supporting cast member who was written to be everything the irony in making sure that none of your tertiary characters have any glaring flaws is that they tend to wind up as Bland one note uninspired Cookie Cutter planks of wood no matter how many quirks you give them the Nexus leadership boiled down to bickering [ __ ] who wkak of abrasion Port leader boils down to an [ __ ] who shakes her people down for protection money even when you ask her about how she got here even oxil winds up boiling down to an insecure prick whose xenophobia only drove him to a certain point and no further I don't think I ever talked about this one in strong detail but the Reapers in the original trilogy were written to be this mysterious almost chaotic evil for the first 90% of the games even meeting with and talking to Sovereign raises a lot more questions further planting the seed of intrigue in your head about what the reapers are where they came from and why they want to destroy everything keeping the player in the dark was strategic something that paid off at the very end of Mass Effect 3 and this kind of writing was supposed to be mirrored with the cat and the archon if the cat were the equivalent of the Reapers then the archon was the equivalent of sarin the problem is that the cat are inherently a much more tangible enemy if that makes sense the Reapers were more of a warning for the first game with one notable one emerging as an enemy meanwhile the Kat are everywhere attacking everything and are basically just a mean hostile species which is fine but you can't write them with the same mysteriousness as the rapers and expect that to stick without overhauling how you present them I mean if you had really fleshed out some cut scenes showing them hauling away the various races and sticking them into exaltation coffins maybe shown off the ranks a bit more with the Cardinal types having whole personalities and the like then maybe that could have worked meanwhile the archon kind of starts out as this masked villain Dr Doom type High ego big plans a general disregard for others as trash and the more you see from him the more you become intrigued about what he's about how he got to be the way that he is and then suddenly a scene pops up towards the end showing that he answers to others that he isn't the big boss and a lot of that Intrigue Falls away right there just because you know that he's not some Super Genius type just that he's full of himself you can't even begin to empathize with or talk to him in a meaningful capacity like you could with sarin he just ceases being interesting once you learn that he's just some general and the lack of dialogue with him goes from building curiosity to being a glaring flaw in his design overall this game is awful at least in terms of meaningful story and choices I mean yeah it's got its good points but even if it was free to play there's like a dozen other games I'd recommend over it I think if you don't care about stories and just want to go explore and do things then this game is great for you but I'm not sure I'd choose a BioWare game for that so yeah hope um hope BioWare recovers soon maybe dread wolf will be good thanks for watching I apologize for the delay but this might be more of a regular occurrence because we're having a baby towards the end of this year I really appreciate the opportunity to create this long form content for you guys and the support that you've given me over the years has really helped me to live out my dream of getting married and having kids I really mean that I don't think I'd be at this stage in life if it wasn't for people watching me blather on about video games so thank you I'll be back soon with hopefully a better game until then though I have merch over at my merch shop which has got a bit of a BioWare flavoring to it I've got a twitch where I stream nearly every Monday Tuesday and Friday I've got a Twitter where some guy has been asking me to do a video on Sleeping Dogs for like 25 days in a row now and I've got a patreon and that's it have a good one

Channel: The Salt Factory

Views: 554,495

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Id: HnhujIoKfvM

Length: 173min 42sec (10422 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2024