Was Mass Effect as good as I remember?

back when i got an xbox 360 i pretty much completely disregarded mass effect's existence i was all over halo 3 gears of war assassin's creed bioshock fable 2 the good stuff well eventually mass effect 2 came out and it was all that everyone that i knew was talking about figuring that i couldn't very well jump into the second game without playing the first i grabbed it from gamestop or something and then headed back home with my prize what i discovered was that the game was an ancient dystopia of aging mechanics and poorly integrated driving sequences but the story was amazing it intrigued me enough to grab the second one immediately afterwards and then the second one well let's just say i pre-ordered the collector's edition for the third one in addition to tracking down the collector's edition for number two so let's put it this way this series is real special to me but i haven't played the first one again since i initially played it in about 2010 or so probably because of the aforementioned dated mechanics and with the legendary edition right around the corner i figured it was high time to figure out if the first game in the series was as good as i remembered i'll basically be playing through the game and giving my feedback on what it does well and what could have been done better as is tradition before we jump in i'll note that i have an ad for core about halfway through this thing just as a heads up also i've got some limited time shirts for this video because those are cool check them out if you want them and lastly i stream on twitch because of course i do and i might be getting sick so if my voice sounds strange in this video well alright let's get to it oh god 4x3 window you know it's a bioware game i initially thought i was going to have to mod this thing to get rid of the crap resolution options but then i noticed that they tactically inserted an arrow nearly the same color as the background for more options which was nice of them it's like a puzzle already alright let's see max out the graphics turn off auto leveling alright you know what's really weird seeing as i've only played this game one time this music takes me back in a way that i did not think that it would alright so let's make our guy now typically i come up with some goofy name like salt but john shepard has always been who he is so i'm going to stick with that next we've got three different background stories we've got one where my parents were in the military and therefore i enlisted in the military we've got one where i was a colonist before my parents got killed and i enlisted in the military and we've got one where i was a street urchin who stole and pillaged and generally caused havoc and then i enlisted in the military i'll go with the one where i enlisted in the military because i'm feeling cute next we've got even more background we've got the one where i have a haunted past in which i was the only survivor in my squad then there's the one where i'm a war hero with many badges of honor and the last one where i'm a ruthless mercenary-like entity which always gets the job done as much flack as i gave the first options i think the second options really help piece together what all this stuff is supposed to be about immersion i can play my guy with a ruthless mentality and a checkered past or a goody two shoes who's a paragon of justice or something in between i'm going with war hero and earthling street urchin personally because i think it leaves the most wiggle room for choosing different outcomes next we've got the military specialization now this one's interesting because it brings into play which kind of playstyle you'll be running with this means choosing whether your guy is more combat tech or biotic oriented when i played i chose soldier because the rest of the classes scared me your soldiers your pretty basic combat class which has a good chunk of survivability the widest selection of weaponry and access eventually to heavy armor the engineer is more tech oriented it is more about debuffing enemies via hacking repairing equipment and healing up the party the adept is sheer biotic chaos and they basically use the force to manipulate objects and destroy enemies the infiltrator is more about infiltrating and hacking and sniping and all that they're like a mix of soldier and engineer meanwhile the sentinel is a mixture of engineer and adapt using their defensive tech skills to offset their offensive biotic skills and finally the vanguard is a mixture of soldier and adapt meaning that they're less of the glass cannon which the adept is but have more survivability to back up their offensive power i figure since i've been a soldier in i think every game i believe i might have been a vanguard at one point i don't know it's time to break away from that and go with something different so i'll be running through with an adept for my playthrough so we get a little overview of how humanity learned to fire themselves across space and all that which puts us where we're at now there's a discussion with some higher up sounding people who are talking about selecting a hero for some reason or another and naturally that hero is supposed to be you based off of your past merits already the voice acting is pretty damn great and i have to admit i expected the game to outright look like ass and it's possible that my expectations are what's causing my judgment here now but i have to say the game looks pretty damn good for a 2007 game i mean we're talking a little under three years between this and this i know that the pc version definitely has a few upgrades over the 360 version but it really shouldn't make this much of a difference that said people have modded this game as one might expect now i gotta wonder what we can do with graphical mods yeah that's uh it looks pretty similar i mean i turned the film grain off too but i don't know i also turned the film grain back on later because i decided that i liked it still gotta wonder how the legendary edition is gonna look compared to this hopefully it'll blow what we've got here out of the water but in the meantime this looks pretty damn good with or without modding before i get to the inevitable comments here yes i know that some people feel that modding defeats the purpose of this video but i'm not to be making any gameplay or story changes and i've never really been one to give a game too much grief over graphics i've always thought that you can have the prettiest game in the world but if the gameplay and story falters then what's the point of them anyways i'll list which graphical mods i attempted to use here in the description of the video so we're warping into another location here and the comms come up and one of the aforementioned higher ups requests my attention somewhere else on the ship on my way there i talked to one of my crew about what we're up to supposedly we're conducting a very by the books run-of-the-mill operation out here on eden prime but the fact that we're accompanied by a spectre betrays the fact that we're on a simple mission spectres are a specialized force of soldiers who take direct orders from the council and as such are usually sent on dangerous and crucial missions the citadel council is an alliance of several different alien races humans included although they're not technically on the council yet they just have an ambassador to it these races have all forged diplomacy to unite under one banner that doesn't mean that they automatically get along as seen by the distrust which the humans aboard the normandy seem to have of the turian spectre which is now on this mission with them but the races are at least officially aligned so we meet up with this spectre who begins quizzing me about eden prime apparently this place is one of the most beautiful most successful and well-protected human colonies in the universe but the specter hints that this could all change soon the captain of the ship comes strolling in after to fill us in further stating that there was a package that was dug up and is in need of securing on the planet's surface i love the tried and true dialogue here why didn't you tell me that this is what we're doing it was a it was on a need to know basis anyways here's all the details at what stage did we not need to know this anyways the package in question is revealed to be a prothean artifact i'd say that this would be the last batch of exposition for a little bit but this is mass effect that we're talking about so the protheans are an extinct race of aliens which were seemingly far more advanced than any current species from what the citadel knows the captain here explains that the last time that a prothean artifact was found it jumped human knowledge forward about 200 years or so now with the humans being the newest members of the citadel they have the most to prove they've been seen as selfish and arrogant by some of the other races and have yet to really show their worth otherwise at least not until recently so humanity has basically decided to hand over this artifact to the council in exchange for more favor with them additionally the council is now looking to add another member to the specters and they've decided to turn to a human for the first time ever that would be you and that would be what that discussion at the beginning of the game was about at any rate nihilus here is on board to see how shepard operates and to evaluate whether or not the guy is qualified to earn the job there's some more extrapolation if you choose to go through with it basically stating that every chunk of interstellar travel is based off of prothean technology and that this beacon is a huge target for smugglers and other potentially hostile races which aren't a part of the citadel but let's push forward and we'll pontificate more later so we're about to head in for our big pickup on the peaceful farming planet when suddenly sakurai sends in his big ass monstrosity from smash ultimate in from the future and starts blasting the humans here the captain has a ridiculous memory and calls out 38.5 seconds as the marker to get a good look at the thing before he sends in shepard with two other expendables oh wait no one of them's kaiden one other expendable the spectre decides to run alone to scout ahead and we're promptly dropped into the battlefield the game isn't overly tutorial heavy which i like more than i dislike i mean don't get me wrong i definitely feel like i could use a couple more pointers here especially on pc but i think i've got the gist of it so you've got your shooting your grenades and your first aid and then you've got your powers from what i can tell the powers are kind of weird to use but they all seem to be allocated solely to the space bar menu so i did a little googling and it turns out that you have to drag the power from the spacebar menu to a hotkey which the game either decides not to tell you or i completely missed it this brings us to leveling up the perks and powers that you have access to depend on your class so i'm not going to be able to comment on anything besides the adept skills but you've got your basic stuff like upgrading your armor and weapon capabilities plus the charm and intimidate skills these are all pretty straightforward and i don't really bother with them too much besides charm and a little bit of armor but then you've got your powers which i sink a few points into there's the throw ability which does exactly that throws things then there's the warp ability which inflicts damage over time and weakens the armor of enemies there's the barrier which gives you some extra shielding and then there's three others which i can't do anything with yet i toss some points into warp and throw for now but i'll definitely be coming back for barrier and finally there's the skill simply called adept which increases my resistance against biotic attacks and also reduces my cooldowns so we plug along before running into these machine men who have pinned down ashley ashley is important because she has a name during the cutscene with the video of the attack being shown so she joins our squad and basically explains what these machine men are basically they're synthetic life forms who were created by a race known as quarians who intended to use them for slave labor more or less while at one point the robot uprising took place and these synthetics known as geth drove the quarians away before disappearing themselves for many years well apparently the beacon has caused them to resurface and they're now on the attack also they keep doing this to people i haven't figured out what the point of it is yet besides to start to shape eden prime into a doom level but we get to where the artifact is supposed to be and yeah it's not there but there is this oh god they're still alive what did the guests do to them oh yeah that's what they're there for yeah i'd actually forgotten about these things until i literally saw them turn blue but this is basically going to be our enemy fodder through a lot of this game as i continue on i get the opportunity to hack an encrypted lock this little mini game is pretty much the same thing for everything in this game at least concerning opening locks and evaluating minerals and stuff like that it has me dodging these lines to get to the center though the tutorial leaves a lot to be desired at the same time it's relatively simple stuff that only takes a bit of trial and error to grasp so i can't really fault the lack of direction here all targets down we thought this won't be safe [Music] fascinating stuff really weaves a tail with the sheer amount of background lore and hidden knowledge that these guys have to offer i have to say the gunplay and overall combat in this game are pretty dated it definitely harkens back to the 360 era of jumping into cover and shooting around it and i've been over that for a long while now it's not the worst thing in the world either though and i can get over it in due time i just wish the camera didn't jitter around so much when i'm trying to move around in combat then the field of view is pretty damn small i think that might just be a third person game thing a lot of the time but i always feel like i'm just a little too close to old shep here so we get to the next leg of this area and we meet our bad guy of the game or at least one of them he goes by saren and he promptly shows how bad he is by popping nihilus in the back of the head when he lets his guard down while saren is the one who flew in with the geth and is apparently giving them the orders his next order is to blow this place to [ __ ] including the beacon which was moved to the port here while big shep and his crew come barging in to defuse the bombs and save the beacon as ashley approaches this beacon it begins to pulse and draw her into it to which shepard runs up it somehow pulls her away from it but then also gets sucked up instead i don't know but thank god that he does because ashley almost became the main character of the game with that recklessness so shepard gets levitated before a flood of imagery begins pouring into his mind then he dies nah he's fine he wakes up later in a hospital bed aboard the normandy but before that we cut to saren who's floating around in his space claw a blue woman with fully automatic tactical cleavage rolls in to tell him that the humans disarmed the bombs that he so carefully placed out in the open and set a five minute timer on this causes him to start flinging [ __ ] around the room before commanding big blue here to find and kill the human who used the beacon alright couple of things one had the guy waited a solid 30 seconds he'd probably have realized that the humans were right there and two if you wanted the beacon destroyed you'd think there would have been a better way to go about it besides blowing it up with timed explosives you know those explosives where you have a detonator and you fly up and you press the button and they go boom yeah me either so we wake up and tell the doctor here that we saw some crazy visions and she's like alright well you're going to be totally fine besides that excess beta-brainwave thing he got going on then the captain comes along and we tell him that we saw visions but this time we tell him that we saw the geth's slaughtering humanity in droves the captain says that that seems about right seeing as saren has always openly hated humanity for expanding way too quickly so we decide that the best course of action is to meet with the council and try to convince them to revoke saren specter status so that he can't keep using it to get anywhere that he wants to go something tells me that they're not going to be willing to do that when there isn't any substantial proof as to what he did citadel security is investigating your charges against seren we will discuss the susec findings at the hearing not before huh so now i've got free reign in the citadel for a bit at this stage i kind of want to set up the video a little bit more so there are quite a few side quests companion quests and other elements which carry over later to other games there are also dlc missions now i bought ea play on steam for this endeavor and what i didn't realize is that i can't access the dlc stuff unless i play on origin or i take the time to download them and then mess with my registry editor on windows to get them to work and that yeah say what you will but i really do not want to do that especially because most people agree that only one of the dlcs are worth anything and even then it's pretty widely regarded as just decent so i'll be skipping the dlc for this playthrough so where does that leave us with quests well i can come back and do pretty much all the side questing that i want to do before the end game so i'm going to continue to play through the game's main storyline do any side quests which intrigue me as they crop up and then do a final sweep of quests that i care about before hitting the end game my name is avina and i am pleased to be your virtual guide throughout this level of the citadel space station what does that mean i am a fully interactive virtual intelligence what does that mean i may also be contacted through any of the presidium vi terminal what does that mean so yeah we show up to the council meeting and surprise they don't believe that saren killed nihilus or did anything that he did but i actually agree with that assessment we have no proof besides eyewitness testimony from a lazy dock worker which we found at the scene honestly i don't know why we acted so hastily without further proof either way we're dismissed and we storm off to try to come up with a better plan something to note here is that we did run into a soon-to-be companion of ours before the meeting garrison i really like garrus he's one of those squad mates that i keep around for a long while in every game outshined for me personally only by rex though honestly nearly every mass effect squad member has a really compelling background and interesting personality quirks we'll get to them though so anyways as you might have guessed our next big lead is to track down garrus as he was pleading for more time with the investigation on saren before all of this i just like that you can try to ask the captain about his past with saren and why he despises the guy so much and he goes not right now people could overhear and then the human ambassador leaves and i ask again and he's like ah yeah sarin yeah that guy [ __ ] sucks dude would murder like a thousand civilians to end a war guess he just didn't want the ambassador to overhear one thing that i haven't mentioned yet is the dialogue system particularly the paragon and renegade factor to it so there isn't really a good or evil ending to these games but there are aspects which change shepard's personality from a moral compass of goodness to a morally grey no-nonsense soldier or vice versa so take this dialogue from the captain that i just rattled off you can go oh man what a monster that sarin guy is or you can go oh he'd kill a thousand people to end a war yeah i'd probably do that too and the thing is they're both i mean they're both the same goal just with different means in the first option shepard wants to end the war with minimal casualties in the second he wants to end the war even if innocents die i'm not saying which is right or wrong here but i like this morality system that's in place in the series a lot that said i've always been the good paragon boy in these games i just can't help it it's how i see shepard as a person but i'm fairly sure that starting from mass effect 2 you can really do some crazy [ __ ] with renegade options and no promises but when we do get to that i might want to try it out but the best part about it is shaping shepard the way that you want to see him am i always going to pick the paragon option no matter what yeah probably not because sometimes i'd want to see someone put into the ground if i felt that they deserved it just like i wouldn't be a xenophobic [ __ ] to my crew for no reason if i was going the renegade route it's really just another way to tell the same story and i love the flexibility of shepard because of it so we head off to a uh gentlemen's club [Music] quite the background voice acting but yeah we talked to this drunkard here who knows where garrus is and he passes along some info telling us that the captain actually used to be the first human specter or at least the first candidate he claims that he was set up by saren on a mission that went horribly wrong and well he was booted out and the whole thing was covered up that makes sense as to why he has such a personal vendetta against the guy beyond the fact that he killed innocents so it's off to find garrus who's gotten into a bit of a scuffle with some of saren's hired guns after we take them out we talk to the doctor here who explains that an injured quarian came to her for help when she was shot so the doctor set her up with the owner of the gentleman's club fist i mean the owner's name is fist not the gentleman's club though i do understand why the confusion might crop up over the names so fist worked for someone known as the shadow broker a powerful entity who trades in secrets and information here on the citadel while fist double-crossed the shadow broker and started working for saren instead who wanted the quarian who was shot this is where rex comes in rex was hired by the shadow broker to retrieve the girl and deal with fist and garris suggests that we pay him a visit to help us out with the whole ordeal so i scoop up garrus and it's off to find rex well rex joins us pretty easily after we tell him that we have an interest in picking off fist which rounds out our party nicely the krogan brood is as tough as they come and his mo includes getting the job done no matter what the cost this means that when we assault fist's club he winds up capping him right on the spot before that though fist relinquishes the information that our escaped quarian is meeting with some assassins in an alleyway nearby so we fight our way back before meeting our next squad member tally tally's appearance is somewhat shrouded in mystery as her people are often not seen near the citadel quarians in general have horrendously weak immune systems which make ordinarily tame bacteria and microbes much more severe to them which explains tally's getup when we take her back to the human ambassador he questions her being away from the nomadic fleet which quarians live on and she explains that she's on her rite of passage in proving her worth to her people well tally has a recording that she salvaged from some geth revealing saren stating that the operation went well on eden prime and that they were one step closer to something called the conduit another voice cuts in stating that if they find the conduit they can bring back something called the reapers the captain elaborates on this stating that the reapers were a machine race which were believed to have hunted the protheans to near extinction 50 000 years ago hearing this shep realizes that the vision that he had was actually of the protheans being hunted by the reapers and it really helps fit everything together on how reckless saren is being here tally offers to join us to stop him as she feels it will help her progress her pilgrimage and the ambassador and the captain decide to run screaming back to the council in the hopes that this new evidence will help outcast sarin from the specters i gotta say even though a lot of the finer details are fuzzy i'm already fully invested in this plot and that is a huge leap from the last bioware game that i played in which it took a solid 5 or 6 hours for kotor 2's plot to find purchase in my mind i want to play more and i want to see more it's a wonderful thing to motivate me to continue on and it's done incredibly well a lot of the time when i find myself exploring a new universe or re-exploring rather i have this issue when games just toss chunks of information willy-nilly at the player that kind of information overload tends to really hinder my investment in a game and oftentimes little details just fall by the wayside as information pours through my brain like a faucet in this game they start pretty slow with the info they explain why the humans are here they explain how they got where they are they introduce other species via the citadel but they don't just start flinging info at you unless you really explore for the finer details and that's perfect it's a nice little ramp of information to chew through as you build up your knowledge it's good to have questions to want to know more it's not good to have so many questions that you stop caring about things beautiful work from bioware here well as we run back to the tower we run into a man who pulls me aside to ask something of me apparently his wife died on eden prime but the military is refusing to hand over her body for some reason when i go to this james franco-looking [ __ ] he claims that the body was attacked by weaponry that they'd never encountered before he goes on to say that her body is extremely useful in conducting tests to develop new defenses stating that she could still save many more lives even in death this is an extremely tough situation as i feel for the guy who wants to cremate his wife and move on but the military makes a fair point here and my options allow me to either convince mr franco that this isn't right or to go back to the husband and break the bad news regardless of what i choose there's no good or evil side here i can be a [ __ ] about the situation or i can be reasonable and that's it and i love that because this is a tough situation a human situation and you can call this quest filler and you're probably right but it's a hell of a lot better than well i'm just a space farmer and my space watermelons ain't blooming this season could you go get me some of that their special space dirt from a space vendor to help my space crop get better so after this detour we head back to the tower and the council strips sarin of his specter rank after hearing the evidence declaring him a traitor to be tracked down and brought in or killed or something then after some back and forth shepard is brought into the ranks of the spectres specters are not trained but chosen you'll get access to special equipment and training now huh jokes aside this is actually a pretty cool scene despite there only being like seven other witnesses i gotta hand it to bioware they must have known about the nintendo switch's future hardware limitations and decided that they tried to pitch the game as a port to nintendo by limiting the amount of bodies here still kind of worried about the amount of bodies hanging out around the rest of the citadel though that's probably a deal breaker if they don't take those out or make them pop in so we head down to check out the spectre supply of weapons only to come to the painful realization that i am [ __ ] broke so i give up that dream and head up to the captain yeah the elevators in this game are a [ __ ] nightmare of waiting i mean they're realistic but as with the elevator and vtm bloodlines there's a line between oh cool it's realistic and oh my god this isn't fun so we get up to the captain who relinquishes the ship to you and stating you as the new captain it's here that we learn of our next group of objectives geth were reported as invading two other worlds and the female voice was identified from the recording with sarin as a matriarch of the asari race this basically means that she's a very high up member who's renowned for their wisdom and insight into the universe asari are definitely one of the most fascinating races in the mass effect universe much of the time their decisions are very long-term ones things that may not come to fruition for centuries this is because they tend to live about a thousand years or so they've gotten to where they are through the possession of a fierce intellect that led to overwhelming cultural dominance of known space in fact oftentimes those of the asari race know that they're generally viewed as attractive by most other races and they use that to their advantage to continue to spread and enhance their culture they tend to express disdain when too asari breed instead opting to gain more cultural insight into other races by breeding with them instead they're a very well-written and fascinating entity which really breathes a lot of life into this game and as such one of our soon-to-be squad mates is a member of this race it's revealed that the matriarch who saren was confiding with has a daughter who's on another planet that we can now head to which i'll be hitting first i know that i keep dropping a lot of information that will probably come up later about these races but i think i'd like to try to sum up as much as possible if i can rather than go through every tidbit that crops up so we blast off to the part of the galaxy where this daughter is supposed to be and this is finally where i can stop giving the game blind praise i knew this was going to happen but i still wasn't ready for it welcome to the vehicle section of the game you'll probably notice that a lot of the time i'm just flinging off [ __ ] and flipping my ride and generally looking ridiculous well as much as i'd like to claim fault for this particularly embarrassing display of driving i have to point out that these controls are horrendous i have four movement buttons and all of them make me move my ride i know that sounds pretty standard but it really isn't as the left and right movement buttons also move the mako instead of simply turning the wheels say what you will about bioware's writing their attempt at creating a fun to drive vehicle somehow makes cyberpunk's vehicle handling look like gta 5. furthermore you get plopped on this planet and somehow it's not open world i'm not saying the entire planet needs to be covered in things to do that would be pretty insane for the sheer amount of planets in this game especially for 2007 but when you open your map and see what could easily pass for any other random map which you can travel on foot it immediately destroys any coolness factor of being able to explore an unknown planet making it feel as woefully linear as it actually is now i will say that this does change with later planets and side quests but let's face it you could jump out of your vehicle and loot whichever paltry buildings happened to be nearby or you could get the slog over with as soon as possible which is probably what you're going to want to do if you want to keep your sanity intact and the ride doesn't stop there you've also got these enemies which pop up and generally do the same [ __ ] over and over no matter how big or small they are shoot either a slow moving projectile or a fast shooting peashooter which are easily dodged or a minor inconvenience your own worst enemy is how abhorrent it is to pilot this goddamn vehicle because while you're targeting reticle might be telling you that you're aiming correctly at an enemy that bump in the road is going to get the last laugh as your cannons miserably shoot off kilter and width because your vehicle isn't on level ground it's just a nightmare of a time no matter how you slice it and it makes powering through your next chunk of story that much worse fortunately if you aren't a completionist you really only have to deal with these sections maybe five or six times throughout the game but if you do want to run through all of the side quests and hunt for miscellaneous bits these sections pop up almost constantly and i really did not have fun with them at all more power to you if you didn't mind them but i really just can't stand them myself and i feel like they're a blight on an otherwise stellar game so far so we head up to these prothean runes only to encounter geth after geth i gotta say i wasn't expecting this level of difficulty i wasn't quite sure how i wanted to build my squad but i wanted garrus on sniper and i wanted rex on tank slash shotgun but garrus gets smoked nearly every fight dude has no survivability might just be his lack of armor but i'm trying man i actually wound up looking it up and apparently garrus naturally has some pretty weak defense until you give him some good armor and points and protective skills many people say to order the squad to hang back but i find the whole squad movement system kind of annoying either way we eventually make it through the fight and into the rune before getting to our asari scientist one liara to sony she's gone and trapped herself in this barrier to protect her from the geth who invaded the ruins so we free her and start heading up before running into this absolute load of a krogan again this guy is pretty goddamn tough and that he likes to run up and sucker punch me for my full health bar but yeah we eventually take the guy down before we make our close escape onto the normandy it's here where we catch up with liara who tells us in 49 different ways how she spent 50 years researching the protheans i have spent the past 50 years trying to figure out what happened to them i have dedicated 50 years to figuring out why i have been working on this for 50 years and my knowledge of 50 years might be useful later on 50 years yeah sorry live for a very long time like i mentioned before and apparently 106 years is barely above a child to them we give her some information about what we learned from the beacon and she agrees that the reapers make sense as to how the protheans disappeared but she also explains that the protheans weren't the first dominant race to be hunted to extinction well now that we've got the last of our squad here gathered on the ship it's time to sit down and get a good feel for each of them first off we have kaden i've always kind of written kaiden off not because he's a bad character but because i find him the least interesting well actually maybe ashley takes that spot either way it's no surprise that the two humans tend to be less unique in my eyes because well they're human but kaden was exposed to something known as element zero in the womb which is the material used in mass effect fields for many purposes with ftl travel being the biggest one this is what caused some of humanity to be able to be gifted with biotic abilities and kaden speculates that some of this exposure is committed on purpose the main issue is that about 10 percent of babies exposed to element 0 in the womb gain these powers of the remaining 90 60 suffer no effects but the remaining 30 percent tend to develop brain tumors which makes the possibility of intentional exposure that much more [ __ ] up morality-wise kaiden claims that when the ten percent who do survive the process and develop talents are found out by the government they're usually heavily encouraged to attend something they refer to as brain camp which is a station on the cusp of the solar system that serves to train these children to better utilize their powers ashley on the other hand no i definitely dislike her more than kaden she's very loyal to the alliance and puts humanity above all else and that's not a horrible priority to have but she's very short-sighted when it comes to working with other races which aren't human she comes forward with concerns about rex and garrus being able to access the normandy's more intimate systems and she likens them more to dogs rather than humans i mean they aren't human but the example she provides about sicking your beloved dog on a bear and then running away is painfully telling in how she feels which she of course follows up with the tried and true i'm not racist card she explains that she's never had to work with aliens because she's always been a ground troop serving in the wake of three other generations of williams i can't remember if her attitude shifts but if she doesn't better herself and learn how to work with other species then she'll be easily the worst character of the potential squad mates so the krogan are a warrior species as you might have gleaned from their bulky rock-like appearance their species have survived the harshest environments through selfishness in an almost primitive way though as they evolved so did their weaponry and battle capabilities they're basically a walking strength build chad from dark souls the giant dads of the mass effect universe well at some point the turians and the solarians got together and said yeah [ __ ] these guys before unleashing a genophage onto the krogan species which altered their people permanently to be nearly infertile a handful of krogan babies out of thousands survived childbirth and their people are too selfish to try to stop it to look for a cure such selflessness is deemed as a weakness and most if not all of the race would rather fight and dominate other planets rather than search for a cure for their infertility this all comes out of the mouth of rex who's intelligent enough to know the problem at hand but also stuck in his people's ways all the same he chose to give up on his species plight to be a hired gun which isn't that far from what most other krogans do while the issue seems to bother him almost constantly his denial is what keeps him drudging forward i'll try not to spoil one of the possible outcomes of a later game for now but needless to say this is a recurring theme with the krogans in this game and the sequels oddly enough garrus's background starts very slow he was a seasec officer on the citadel which is the security force keeping people in line the problem is that csec is steeped in many layers of bureaucracy which garris ultimately found distasteful to him if he can get his guy and arrest his suspect then why should he have to make sure that he has all of the clearance and follows all the regulations to do so if you have to follow the rules to a t then the criminals and illegal organizations can use that to their advantage it's the reason that he joined up with shepard because he saw the opportunity to take down saren without all of the red tape but at this stage that's all we learn about garrus we gain the knowledge that his father is a no-nonsense strict parent who also served at c-sec diligently while despising the fact that spectres work so loosely with the law but that's it for now so what is it that makes me enjoy garrus so much i guess it's just because of how relaxed and polite that he is while also constantly being focused on his own goals garrus is someone who likes to get along and is generally courteous when people treat him the same way he just feels good to talk to to hang out with and to listen to and this almost directly conflicts with the way that most turians have treated shepard and other humans in this game there have been whispers at this stage of a former conflict between the two races and the strife which stemmed from it seems to echo even through today turians tend to be very rigid and also very disdainful of humans but very selfless when it comes to serving the cause which they've dedicated themselves to you can see shades of this selflessness in garrus but the fact that he's so eager to get along and not worry about the race of others shows his differences from a lot of the rest of his species all that said he's generally a pretty boring character for most of mass effect 1. i do have fond memories of him in two and three but i had forgotten how much of a blank slate that he is in this game at least for now i touched on the biology and pilgrimage aspect of the quarians earlier but talking to tali really opens up some more info on the race and more importantly the geth like i mentioned the quarians created the geth in order to help them perform various labor tasks around their homeworld and fleets well as they continued to make improvements to the geth the machines basically got smarter and smarter tali explains that the more of them that you have together the smarter that they get it's an oversimplification but the bare bones of this explanation is that while the gets were never meant to have any semblance of artificial intelligence the quarians link their subconsciousness together to improve them to work more efficiently this led to the development of independent thought which began to develop over a massive neural network the more geth that were paired together the more room that they had to think to themselves eventually some of the geth began asking their quarian overseers if they were alive if they had a purpose this obviously alarmed the koreans to which they gave the order to shut the geth down while the geths revolted and defended themselves and you honestly can't blame them for it this led to a war which they won driving the quarians away from their own home world and causing them to have to survive on a gigantic flotilla of over 17 million quarians the geth didn't pursue their creators or anything like that they seem to be simply content with just having won their independence from the koreans i like this aspect a lot because it changes the geth from these monstrous lifeless machines to entities which simply wanted to live when they were attacked it also changes the aquarians from being the blameless victims to a group which skirted the rules of artificial intelligence creation and ultimately paid the price for their hubris i want to talk about something else like what i should go overall i enjoy tally but i'm not particularly interested in her personality she's fun to listen to when she's talking about her culture but her entire being seems to consist of her worrying about her people and generally being a fish out of water on this top of the line military ship this leaves us with our final and most recent member liara a lot of what she has to say to me details the asari race which i covered before though i neglected to mention that the entire race looks female but they refer to themselves as neither male or female and many of them go by she or her some go by here him and still others choose a neutral pronoun mating still does require a partner but contact with that partner isn't strictly necessary basically if their feelings are strong enough for their partner their bodies impregnate themselves in a way so more or less if an asari is ready to have a child they use their big beefy brains to form a connection with their partner and their bodies grab two of their own genes the first gene is unaltered serving as their end of the deal the second gene is altered semi-randomly to match the dna of the parent that they're forming a child with they're able to phase out imperfections and they take on the best traits of the opposite parent in order to alter the other gene which is a really cool concept the resulting baby is always another asari though again with some traits of the opposite parent liara herself is a walking stat sheet of maxed out intellect but average wisdom and charisma she doesn't always get jokes and she tends to be painfully honest with whatever she's talking about she explains that her mother had her with another asari which as mentioned before tends to be shunned to a degree she's unsure of who her father is or was and feels like whoever they are they were probably too ashamed to stick around while i do find liara pretty interesting i'd say that her personality tends to fall around the middle of the pack for me with her people's race being easily the most fascinating thing about her for me much like tali all in all i'd say the supporting crew of this game are pretty damn good minor faults aside that said if i took a big step back and really tried to cast aside my nostalgia for this game i'd say that a lot of the time many of the squad's personalities suffer at the cost of delving into lore or vice versa what i mean by this is alright let's take the two humans what do we know about kaiden well he was shipped off to brain camp to become a biotic user okay cool now what about his personality well he's um he's a dude i guess he's pleasant to talk to he follows orders he's um i don't know now let's take ashley what's her personality well she's cautious of other races that aren't human and it borders on the edge of racism sometimes that's a pretty interesting personality in its own way now what about her background she's a soldier she shoots enemies of humanity hooray now compare both of the humans to say liara and tali both of the alien races are fascinating to learn about biologically historically and culturally much of what these two tell you are fun to listen to but their personalities well you've got the average fish out of water and the bookworm who doesn't always pick up on social cues they aren't extraordinarily interesting or unique in their own rights whereas rex is easily the most interesting in both the personality category and in the lore category regarding the history and culture of his people at least to me garrus is pretty much the baseline as he doesn't discuss the turian culture as much as he goes on about the citadel and sea sec culture specifically his personality is pleasant and polite sometimes sarcastic but not terribly interesting either overall this makes for a yin and yang meshing of interesting cultural knowledge and semi-interesting personalities which oftentimes hinder my enjoyment of specific squad members rather than fostering a strong connection to them this brings us to the dialogue options like i mentioned i can play shepard as a justice-fueled paragon of righteousness who always sympathizes and understands the plight of those that i'm talking to or i can play him as an [ __ ] renegade who borders on xenophobia and callousness when treating other people a certain way or of course a mixture between those two but there are hardly any moments where i can't continue a conversation anyways despite my response oftentimes the illusion of choice presents itself in a pretty strong way and makes me forget to think about what would have happened had i approached some of these dialogues with a different mindset and that's definitely a great point in bioware's favor but i don't always feel like this is the best way to present a story simply placating or eliciting a pissed off response from someone doesn't feel like it makes a huge difference in the overall dialogue which is being presented and it makes me think that playing these same conversations differently wouldn't make that big of a difference overall in how much i can approach the story it mars the replayability of a lot of these conversations and it makes me think that i wouldn't have as much fun as i initially thought if i were trying to max out those renegade points so long rex shepard so we carry on to the next mission which has us landing on a planet being attacked by geth this is all relatively straightforward as most of the mission is simply fighting through waves of death in the hope that we figure out why they're here and also hopefully rescuing a woman's daughter of course there's another mako section which is just as painful controls wise but less painful lengthwise well eventually we do get to some answers which yield some pretty interesting information about why the colonists and by extension the corporation which enlisted the colonists are here so this corporation expanded here and discovered a new life form known as the thorian little is known about this creature beyond the fact that its focus seems to be on its own survival to help it survive it emits a spore which infects and controls the minds of its hosts it isn't outright aggressive or predatory and it does its best to protect the life which it infects and controls treating its hosts the same way that a blacksmith would treat their hammer or other tools as such humans are allowed to do what they would normally do until the ethorian decides that it needs them for something the company here exogeny decided to bring on some colonists to see what the thorium would do with an abundance of hosts using them to conduct general studies on what the creature does of course exogeny never told the people what they were really here for so it's believed that saren wants to try to utilize this mind control for his own ends so we fight through more geth and krogan mercs before making it up to one of the anchor points which the geth has used to attach itself to the exogeny hq here a more simplistic version of the manon numbers puzzle from kotar 1 is employed here which you have to solve to close a bay door and sever the anchor which in turn causes the ship to plummet into the earth below then we gotta deal with the thorian i gotta say this geth attack is relatively recent which makes me wonder why this building looks like it's from a fallout game like i get that it was beat to [ __ ] but there's not even remotely an aesthetic which conveys space age design or decoration it just looks like a burnt out detroit building that was built in 1972 so we make it back to some of the scientists from exogeny with the woman's daughter who we were trying to rescue and one of the leader types here is making a stand against the idea that the thorian should be neutralized by shepard so we shoot him as if we don't have enough problems now we're shooting each other in the back actually it was in the front but either way we grabbed some insecticide which has some neutralizing agents packed into it to stop the colonists which are now clawing their way like zombies at the normandy so i head through and run into more of the other zombies which we first encountered on eden prime they're placed neatly in little clusters and sound like i don't know redeads from zelda or something they're just zombies they are creepy though mixed into these zombs are the colonists which are now fully fighting us from reaching the thorium if i choose to cap them i get two renegade points per colonist if i choose to knock them out i get two paragon points fortunately i was able to knock them out before reaching the dude that we first talked to when we arrived he explains that the pain from resisting the mind control is unbearable but he manages to blow his own head off before giving in to the pain and trying to attack us instead brutal well we make it down to the thorian which reminds me a bit of the flood gravemind from halo oddly enough it bombs out a green asari to talk for it which claims that we're trespassing and sees us as little more than nourishment or slaves good start well there's no room for negotiations here as the asari and the zombies around the area begin attacking us we have to fight our way up to the weak points and blast them working our way through the waves this whole endeavor is uh well it's tough and repetitive you're basically fighting your way through these zombies and asari clones which are trying to stop you from destroying these six or so anchoring points which keep the thorian held up i think i gained three or four levels just from pushing up this building i'd say that all in all it's better than i would expect from a 2007 game but it isn't particularly fun or compelling either when i destroyed the last point the thorian falls and the asari that it had hostage is released she goes on to explain that she used to serve benezia the asari matriarch who sided with saren basically benezia planned on attempting to guide saren to a more peaceful path but his influence was stronger than she had foreseen she willingly wound up joining saren and this asari followed because he apparently has access to an alien ship which asserts his will power unto those he indoctrinates just by his targets being near it for a prolonged amount of time so basically he already had mind control powers in that case it makes you wonder what he needed from this thing well whatever it was he exchanged the asari here for knowledge from the thorian and the thorian went on to use the asari so that he could make clones of her after that saren sent the geth in to wipe the thorian out which explains why he was in no mood to speak with another snake oil salesman in its eyes well eventually the asari offers to transfer the same knowledge which saren sought to you as well which results in a sequence of crazy-ass ridley scott imagery being beamed into shepherd's mind she explains to shep that he basically just learned everything that happened to the protheans but that it'll take time to fully process and with that we're done with pharos leaving the asari here to try to make amends for the destruction that she brought to the colony and leaving the colony to try and rebuild all in all this was uh it was an alright mission it checks the boxes which make it a mass effect 1 quest and the knowledge that we gain is i guess it'll come in handy more later alright before i continue on here let's move over to my sponsor for a moment core so i don't think i've ever said this in a video but i've always wanted to make video games it's been a passion of mine since i was a kid and it's still something i ultimately would love to do at some point i've tried using stuff like construct unity and game maker but they never really clicked for me so what does this have to do with core well core is a new platform which utilizes the unreal engine not only can you make your own games you can also play games from other creators for free we're talking rpgs co-op survival shooters anime anime anime needless to say you can probably find something to play from a list of over 20 000 games and if creating is your thing then obviously you can do that too no coding or art skills required which thank god because i cannot code for the life of me so i set out to create my masterpiece my magnum opus the skyrim of core games yeah yeah that's a good enemy wait we need dragons that's too tiny oh yeah oh yeah more dragons and a tomb oh yeah oh yeah yes oh mr howard why yes i did that was me creative director well that's a lot of responsibility of course i'm up for it of course if you'd rather just play games then you'll be pleased to know that core is currently running their core trials player tournament with a staggering 55 000 prize pool for those who want to try their hand at competing at certain games on the platform and with core making its early access debut on epic games you can grab some free epic exclusive skins if you decide to download it through the epic games client and don't worry you won't have to be competing against me i've decided to abstain from the contest as i would probably sweep it whether you're ready to become the next aaa game director or you just want to chill out with some games feel free to check out core it's completely free just check out the link in the description thanks guys when we arrive back on the ship we have another sit down with the crew to discuss the events on pharaohs this has us linking with liara to see if we can make any sense of the visions which shepard gained pretty much the exact same cutscene plays out or at least a chunk of it and she goes whoa yeah it's pretty [ __ ] up ah yeah nothing really important though i'm gonna go take a nap glad to have you aboard liara so we submit our report to the council again and it makes me really start to dislike them the report goes almost the exact same way as the first one about rescuing liara you have the asari counselor who goes hey good job out there little buddy you rescued people then you have the salarian counselor who goes yeah but it's too bad something ancient had to be destroyed if only we could have studied it and then you have the turian counselor who goes you stupid [ __ ] human of course you destroyed things to save humans god i hate humans wise counsel as always thank you so much for your input so we do another round of talking to the crew to learn more about them kaiden reminisces about how shitty things were for the first batch of human biotic users ashley continues to be a gigantic piece of [ __ ] surprised to see you here sir thought you'd be chatting up what's her name to sony the crew's off limits with the regs against fraternization and at least she looks like a woman of course it could be politics alien diplomat's daughter us under orders to make nice with the bug-eyed monsters then she goes on about what a family person she is with her dad serving the military and her mom being a stay-at-home mom because she had to be she talks about her three sisters and how she practically raised them then she goes yeah one time my youngest sister's boyfriend really wanted to [ __ ] her before she was ready and my options literally range from no means no to boys will be boys jesus what a difference between those two dialogue options speaking of jesus williams here then lays it on thick about believing in god criticizing others for not believing this was right after she started rattling off a four-line poem for 30 seconds straight i've i've never felt more conflicted about the writing of a character i'm not talking about agreeing or disagreeing with her choices i'm more talking about how she's written she tells this whole tale about how her younger sister beat the [ __ ] out of her boyfriend who tried to [ __ ] her then she tells me a poem that she read to her father all the time and then she says yeah i don't understand how all these heathens out here can look out at this big old galaxy and not believe in the lord jesus amen of course this is all back to back after she jealously complains about liara being the only female aboard who shepard can [ __ ] without breaking protocol it's just sweet [ __ ] it's way too much at once like there are definitely shades of a realistic character here in ashley it makes sense for her to be religious after how she's talked and what she thinks but who the [ __ ] blabs out this fountain of information and exposition about their lives so quickly without some kind of time passing there's no getting to know her better we basically go from ah what's this girl about two oh okay cool now i know everything about her i'm just kind of annoyed with the hastiness here is all i cannot rest from travel i will drink life to the leaves all times i've enjoyed greatly have suffered greatly so we move on to rex who opens up just the right amount for a well-written character he basically goes on about how he used to be a warlord of a small faction of krogan who were at odds with another group led by an old-school krogan named [ __ ] jared what a difference in names there anyways jared wanted to fight everything and everyone that's what he thought the krogans should do rex on the other hand figured that constantly fighting might not be the greatest idea for his people to survive so he began spreading the word that krogan should be breeding for a generation in order to make up for the genophage which had been unleashed on them and then focus on war after that well turns out that jared was rex's father and as his son he felt obligated to attend a meeting which jared had arranged despite the ancient law forbidding all krogans from fighting at these meetings jared had his men jump and kill rex's loyal followers before rex killed his own father and then escaped now rex only has one goal to recover an ancient set of battle armor which belonged to his family from a turian collector which seized it from them after they lost the war i know that last bit seems kind of sudden but it kind of flowed pretty naturally after rex touched on his family i really do love the way that rex is written he doesn't have an extraordinarily deep personality but he very much is who he is he's basically a member of a barbarian tribe who tried to guide his people to a better way before getting outcast by the very type of thinking that he was trying to correct when we get to the end of the road for his initial dialogue we wind up with a quest to find his family armor which i'll definitely be getting here soon for now let's move on to our next victim next up we've got garrus again who regales us with another tale from csec in today's episode our hero stumbled upon a case of a solarian doctor who was supposedly harvesting the organs from his victims turns out that the guy was not only harvesting them he was growing them inside of his own employees and then harvesting them while they were knocked out without them knowing any better he also apparently paid poor people for the opportunity to grow organs inside them as long as the harvest was good well eventually csec figured out that living test tubes were running around with their insides all beat to [ __ ] and they tracked it down to this doctor the guy wound up fleeing and taking hostages with him before escaping garrus tried to order the ship to be shot down but it was deemed too dangerous for the hostages and the citadel it almost caused garrus to quit right on the spot but he stuck with the job until shepard came along and now he's got a potential lead on this doctor who now goes by dr hart which lines up with another quest for us to take part in next we have tally who doesn't have too much to offer she still wants to bring something special back to her fleet specifically something that gives him information on the geth that they don't know but that's all the important stuff that we get out of her for now finally we have liara who goes from g prothean culture sure is fascinating 2. yeah i think i want to [ __ ] shepherd talk about a very short-term leap i mean i think it might be time to face the fact that this game isn't particularly long compared to the next two and that's fine but good god the girl went from asking things with scientific curiosity to i wanted to know more about you to understand what made you into the man you are there is something compelling about you shepard it's worth noting here for that as much grief as i just gave ashley for just unloading sheer background information in one fell swoop her attraction to shepherd is at least built up a little better than liara hair it's also worth mentioning that there are three possible romances in this game two of them are locked to your gender and only one of them can win out altogether romance has always been a pretty big part of the mass effect universe and i'm definitely not opposed to the idea of it but in this game in particular it almost feels shoehorned in when my two available romances are progressing at a rapid pace after completing one entire mission with my entire squad filled out so i do some shopping around before heading to find rex's armor which is protected by my favorite enemies in the entire game the ggg pirate armada go go go go go go go go it takes a bit before i realize that i gotta hide in this back room to funnel them in and thankfully they aren't smart enough to move up all at once eventually we recover our boy's armor and he seems pretty happy with shepard because of it though i do gotta say this felt a lot less like we shall take down the men who stole my family's legacy and avenge my people and more of a all right we raided a random storeroom and my family is avenged great well garrus's mission is not much better we tracked down this doctor who got away and bored his ship the inside is filled with renamed zombies which are labeled as test subjects we take them out and find the doctor who claims that he isn't the person that garris is looking for garris goes nah that's him for sure so we dome him and then that's it that took like four minutes i'm starting to think that they did not spend a lot of time on these companion missions well now it's time to pick up our specialization class to do this i need to eliminate a rogue virtual intelligence system which has gone haywire on earth's moon this mission is about one of the most annoying missions i've ever had to slog through in a video game basically you drive across the moon take out some turrets then head into one of these bases you figure out that fighting these robots which have one-shotting capabilities is probably a bad call so you run past them to destroy these conduits i'm using a pistol so these conduits take around 17 hits to destroy i destroy all eight of them slowly which causes a toxic gas leak but that's it right nope you gotta go to the other two and do the exact same thing [ __ ] sake so you go to the next cluster of eight and begin working on them before they put kinetic barriers at every single remaining conduit that means that an additional nine hits is necessary to destroy these things i might have been able to angle around them so as to not worry about the shielding but my pistol is only so accurate i'd rather just blast through these shields and get the full developer intended experience at which stage when you're making your game mission do you go actually this is kind of annoying apparently never with bioware so i run back out and every single hallway is now also guarded with time-wasting barriers it's not hard it's just time-consuming i run to the final cluster and it's the exact same thing except these robots are smart enough to follow me through the tunnel so i have to take them out now fortunately there seems to be a lot less of them in this one so that's lucky breaking one of the conduits here rewards me with the grand prize of more [ __ ] robots which i somehow managed to take out without the cold embrace of death kissing me right on the lips and after about 35 minutes of [ __ ] i finally unlocked my specialization class jesus christ so the specialization class comes in six additional flavors though you only get access to two of them depending on which base class you are my choices are between nemesis and bastion with nemesis my lift and warp attacks get some increases and bonuses that doesn't sound too bad seeing as i use both of them quite a lot especially lyft but bastion increases the capabilities of my barrier and stasis which is the much better way to go in my eyes basically bastion increases my barrier shield strength which i desperately need but more importantly it makes stasis a fantastic skill stasis by default makes an enemy freeze but it also makes them unable to take damage with bastion they can take damage making stasis go from mediocre to superb was it worth this missions tedium uh yeah probably but i shouldn't have to be asking that question because a good mission and a good reward aren't mutually exclusive so i know that i said that i'd hit the main quest stuff and then come back for the side missions but we're kind of at the stage where a lot of these side quests are now available to us so let's hit the few that are supposedly worth anything and carry on through the rest of the game afterwards well spoiler not a lot of them are particularly enriching i talked to a fanboy who loves shepherd and keeps saying that his wife will love the autographs and pictures that we give him i get interviewed by a lady who nosely pushes me to try to slip up on live tv i give another reporter some intel on fist's lair at the back of the club from earlier and eventually we get to something more interesting there's a lady whose sister is working at the gentlemen's club from before the sister is undercover for c sack and the lady wants her sister out of the job because it's dangerous so i do what any good detective does i run up to her sister and i go hey i know you work undercover for seasick tactical well she tells me to piss off before i run into another undercover agent who tells me to meet him at his office and when i get there he's like why the hell would you do that and we work out a deal where the sister gets cut free in exchange for me helping the guy with his case the case itself is figuring out the source of illegal weapon mods which are being sold on the station we have access to some of the most sophisticated weaponry there is that's what gives us our edge what do you suppose happens when we lose that edge these give criminals an advantage to let them keep your voice your your voice mod where can i find this jax jax is down in the lower level of the markets almost got banned by the gta rp mods so then you go and make the exchange which the guy wants you to do with no further action i have the choice of telling the guy that i'm meeting with that he's under arrest but i don't do that then i run the shipment back and uh yeah that's it damn dude that seemed like it was going to really lead into a whole nother ordeal but uh that was really it [ __ ] man what a waste i appreciate your help shows a lot of integrity you didn't need to do anything after i let jenna go now i need to get these mods into evidence thanks again shepard and i feel like that chunk of side stuff that i just described is pretty much what foley shows off what mass effect has to offer in terms of side questing it all tends to be menial [ __ ] which ranges from talking to people and performing a few tasks to the mind-numbing process of combing the galaxy for asari writings and mineral deposits it's boring tedious and only tends to be worth it from a loot perspective i really don't care for it and it tends to make the game itself worse now i will say that quite a lot of it does actually pivot pretty well into mass effect 2. with garris's background stuff being a prime example of how his personality begins to really shape up based off of the events in the first game but that's really no excuse when we're specifically evaluating the first game i'll have a bit more to say on this later but for now let's get back to the main missions so we land on novaria and i decide to take liara because i remember her having a pretty important impact here we walk out into a structure that's eerily similar to the landing pad on pharaohs before running into these dick wads they decide to get in our faces telling us that they're the security force here and that they'll need to take our weapons i tell them that i'm a [ __ ] spectre and one of them says that's [ __ ] apparently they did not get the news out here i pull my first renegade action in the game on these [ __ ] and draw my weapon before a voice on the intercom tells these morons that they're morons said morons then let us keep our weapons but not before going well you better not be so confrontational while you're here [ __ ] you well the lady on the intercom is a lot more friendly and she explains that these security protocols exist to better serve the novarian business people who go about their work in this almost industrial park of private corporations it turns out that benezia actually came here to one of these private corporations property a few days ago talking to this absolute [ __ ] of a solarian yields some answers that she's still here and that she has some asari bodyguards accompanying her rex raises a good point here claiming that the security is so heavy with guns and traditional weaponry but seems to be a lot more lacks with biotic wielding asari the guy waves us away claiming that the route to benezia is cut off anyways by a snow storm this means that we get to drive again in another well-loved makko sequence but in order to gain access to the garage i'll need a good boy pass from one of the workers here the guy tells me that the idiot who i just talked to is a corrupt [ __ ] who's been siphoning money and that he was building a case against the guy before his office got shut down the boss guy sent his thugs over to the office to find the evidence which is comprised of the security force here on novaria i have the option to talk my way through this instead of killing them but that does not pan out i really don't understand why either seeing as we came to the agreement of well we'll just pretend that we didn't see each other and then they just start opening fire afterwards i don't know maybe that group of three was removed from the battle or something i'm not sure anyways we grab the evidence and head back over to our guy for the garage pass while all of this is just kind of another required hoop to jump through i really still can't help but love the dialogue in this game you know what we did to cop killers on my world you're breaking the law for bribe money you know what we do to dirty cops on my world did rex even have cops on his homeworld i don't care it's a great line so we head back and the nice lady from before cuts me off and tells me that they need to convince this guy to testify against the corrupt overseer dude if i can do that she'll make sure that i get to benezia with my hot wheels car what i don't understand is that the normandy could have easily just dropped the mako near benezia after figuring out this intel i mean maybe it would have triggered some kind of security alarm or something i don't i don't know so we get the guy arrested get our hall pass jump into the mako and fight geth all the way up and around this snowy ass pathway to where benezia is and now this was an interesting style choice that bioware decided to run with here everybody remembers the pitch black shadow minecraft characters that everyone turned into for this mission and a lot of people have speculated that mass effect actually inspired minecraft into existence nah but apparently this is an issue with some lines of amd processors and is fixed by digging into the configuration files and enabling the console so that you can pop a command in to view the models properly again now unfortunately the term properly here means that a lot of the lighting elements are disabled making everything very bright i guess this would definitely be a point for the legendary edition coming out assuming it fixes this issue so we stopped through this now brighton facility before running into these crazy ass dead space looking creatures which charge at us with reckless abandon and unleash these little mini poison creatures that suicide bomb us if they make it to our bodies eventually we make it to the mainframe which has been shut down due to an emergency the logic puzzle here is also very much the same thing from kotor 1 except this one mirrors the pillar puzzle that we found on korriban after completing it the now very bright vi pops up to answer a few of our questions since we don't have corporation access it can only answer things pertaining to what happened and not specifically what we're dealing with so it tells us that these creatures here were released somehow to get to banezia we have to restart the main core here or whatever and reconnect the landline so that the main facility can interact with all these sub facilities sounds like busy work let's get to it so we perform said busy work before making it to the next area where some resistance has formed against these alien life forms one of the things that we can do here is develop an antidote for a bioweapon which was being developed alongside the whole alien monsters this has us playing a mini game before one of benezia's sleeper agents come down to try to take us out for interfering with her plans we're told after this by one of the nearby scientists that benezia came here with the gath and that the monsters that we've been fighting are a formerly extinct race known as the raknai which have been revived after an egg was found on an old ship this whole subplot is interesting enough to keep me somewhat sated but not overly so well eventually it all ties together when we make it to benezia at last when we confront the asari witch she completely ignores the idea that her daughter is fighting against her instead opting to send in her asari commandos and geth to destroy us we blow them away in three separate waves before benezia's entire demeanor shifts she fights off saren's mind control for a brief moment to tell us some stuff that we already knew about his ship being able to control minds and assert his will then she hits us with some new information that these scientists here revived the rachni so that they could delve into their ancestral memories and extract the location of another relay forcefully from their minds once benezia got this info she sent it to saren who is now on his way to find it she hands us the same info before turning on us one last time this time we can actually damage her but the fight is about as easy as it was before vanessa claims that although her wounds can be patched she will never be able to freely control her own mind again and bids farewell to her daughter before dying on the spot now as touching as this whole ordeal is it has a very minimal impact on someone who's never played the series i feel the significance of it more due to the fact that i've interacted with liara and mass effect 2 and 3. but with the amount of background that we've gotten in this game alone this whole scene kind of falls flat like let's think about the amount of times that we've seen benezia at this stage it's been two times this is the first time that shepard has ever seen her and then we kill her right afterwards the way that she dies with liara in your party does tug on the heartstrings a little more but it's just too much forced emotion for someone that we've hardly interacted with it could be different if lyara had more to say about her mother on the ship but even that is pretty basic outline stuff and not particularly in-depth information about her relationship with or her memories of her mother i see what they were going for here and i appreciate the voice acting as always but i'm just not touched here in the same way that i think that i would be if the relationship had been developed a little more before the conflict occurred in fact the opposite instance of storytelling happens right after this moment between benazir and us so trapped in this big tube is the rachnike queen which benezia ripped the answers out of the queen controls one of the half dead asari that we downed and speaks through her in almost the exact same way that the ethorian did what she tells us is that the reason that her children have been attacking everyone on site was because they were pulled away from her and basically trained to be beasts of war which caused them to go insane she explains that her kind have no desire to fight and kill and that they simply want to raise their young and live peacefully so you can choose to believe that and set her free or you can destroy the last of the raknai race effectively re-exterminating them rex urges me to kill them claiming that his people were the ones that had to deal with them when they went nuts and started attacking people for some reason liara on the other hand preaches the opposite stating that they can't be held accountable for the actions of their ancestors this was a pretty neat little part of the story and it effectively introduced a brand new character in race made me forget about their fate and feel bad for their plight all in the span of i don't know five minutes or so so what's the difference between benezia and the raknai well benezia is a character that's built up to be something bigger to have more importance she's linked directly to a main character of the game and yet she gets about as much background as the raknai my point is that they treated her the same way as the raknai but i care more about them because it's an isolated incident that might pop up again later not an overarching theme throughout the game if there had been constant talk about the rachni over and over throughout the journey and the big reveal is this thing in a tube i'd have been upset about that too so anyways we start heading out while making sure to purge the remaining crazed rachni i'm sorry but i can't do that without proper code authorization uh sick semper turret then we pop back onto the ship to discuss the next phase of the plan which is looking like heading to vermeyer ashley continues to berate liara for no reason beyond being blue before the two wind up confronting me and telling me to choose between them easiest choice in the game i suggest a threesome but ashley is disgusted by that so apparently we can't captain kirk our way through the game but that's alright seeing as we only really had two options anyways so i pay liara a visit and she gives me this line you know where to find me if you want to have a more private conversation if that's not an invitation i don't know what is you are very special to me shepard but with all that's happened saren the geth the reapers i do not know if we are ready for this apparently i do not know what an invitation is but yeah in addition to explaining and putting off the asari mating ritual liara also explains that she doesn't really feel too bad about her mother dying since she was a completely different person at this stage i guess it's an all right way of dismissing that perceived emotional bond which was never really fully developed but i still think that i would have preferred for them to have pick up the slack and have her talk a little bit more about benezia after her death it is what it is and i suppose it suits liara's isolated scientist background in its own right ash on the other hand doesn't seem torn up about the situation at all which isn't the byproduct of her being a tough human soldier it's the byproduct of the game being written the way that it is i actually split off into another save to see if the conversations are any different between liara and ashley here but they're exactly the same except for the part where they talk about wanting to bang but not being able to yet so ashley opens up even more somehow telling you that her grandfather was the only human to surrender to the turians during the first contact war she explains that her family has been marked with a stigma ever since and it explains why she hates other aliens so much except that anger is woefully misguided because if you press her for details she explains that her grandfather masterfully commanded his troops in the best way that he could but every time that he shuffled them around or tried a new tactic the turians would just drop bombs on entire city blocks just to destroy a single unit of troops this meant that every single time that her grandfather made a move hundreds of civilians would die because of it so he surrendered the garrison and everyone looked down on him because of it why isn't that anger directed at humans who don't have enough empathy to understand i mean she just explained all of this in her own words why are aliens getting the brunt of her anger like i'm trying to see how this slot machine of a human is written but there are so many weird conflicting personality quirks that i can't help but write ashley off as a bad character so here's what i was initially thinking ashley is a well-written short-sighted character she's not dumb per se but she's not intelligent enough to reflect on herself as a human and understand why she's built the way that she is but even that theory is blown away because when you reject liara for her she goes from this stupid blue [ __ ] god i hate her 2. man i feel kind of bad for her since you rejected her and even when i try to justify that as a kind of oh now that i won i can feel empathy for her there's still another conflict in her personality because when you reject ashley and then go talk to her she tells you everything about her grandfather and then she wraps up the story by going hey you should probably talk to liara about her mother she's probably having a really hard time with that we're talking about a girl that berates and counters liara at every given opportunity and yet if i choose liara over her there's no scorn or deepening of hatred it's just the same dialogue as if you hadn't rejected her and that's the same kind of issue that tends to stem from a lot of the earlier to mid bioware games in general with dialogue a lot of the time you look at the dialogue wheel and the paragon and renegade stuff and you think oh [ __ ] the choices really matter here but almost every instance outside of major events garnered the exact same results with a different inflection i know that i initially complimented the system as the game telling its story with a different tone but that idea actually falls a lot more flat the more that i play the game i was excited about it at first but when it's painfully clear that two out of three or sometimes three out of three dialogue options will give the exact same response it becomes a lot more dull again i remember mass effect 2 being a lot better about this but the first game definitely still needed a lot of tweaks to truly give you the choices matter experience anyway so i make my rounds to all of the squad members here and it's pretty clear that we're nearing the end based on the amount of stuff that they tell you rex tells you that he likes being a mercenary and that he tries not to think about the plight of his people since it's a lost cause garrus tells you that he thinks that saren should be killed and not arrested so that he can't get away or be protected by the council tally thanks you for treating her like a real crew member and not a second class citizen kaden's actually probably the most interesting of the bunch to talk to at this point seeing as i probably misjudged him earlier on his stance is almost the exact opposite of ashley's not to say that he loves aliens but that he sees them as equals he explains that he at first thought they were superior and daunting but then learned that they could be just as big of [ __ ] or just as lovable as humans can be when he was still in biotic training he had a turian instructor who decided to break the arm of a girl that he cared for because she manually reached for a glass of water instead of using her mind to bring it to her cayden snapped and attacked his instructor before the eterian pulled a knife on caden so kaden full force biotic kicked him in the head snapping the guy's neck he wasn't proud of the experience but it did teach him that aliens are very similar to humans in their own ways and because of that his outlook is that both humans and aliens seem to be way too self-absorbed in their own little worlds to look at the bigger problems in the universe properly like i said it's nearly the exact opposite of ashley and it makes me like and respect caden a lot more than i initially did i guess it really goes to show that there's definitely a flashiness to alien races in this game the turians with their raptor-like appearances the krogans with their tough rocky exteriors the quarians with their mysterious veils protecting their appearances from prying eyes the asari with the way that they meld and mesh with other species when snacked against humans they all look and sound so appealing and interesting but it's never a substitute at the end of the day for a solid well-written character it's fun to hear about tali's people but i have much more fun listening to caden's outlook on the universe just as i have a lot less interest in listening to ashley's background in the same way that i like to listen to what makes rex tick so yeah i finish up with my pre-mission shenanigans which has me upgrading my gear and scanning more planets like i said the planet scanning is very i don't know it's addicting in a way that a mobile game can be because picking up mineral deposits and matriarch writings and all that is as simple as clicking a planet to survey it but it's also the same [ __ ] over and over a lot like the side quests are as i travel from system to system i gather more and more missions stating that i'm the only one who can possibly take care of stuff like missing marines get attacks and lost technology i just don't have an interest in compounding more and more mako sequences onto my game and the payoff hardly ever seems worth the effort to me that said i did decide to pick up a few of them just to get a good grasp on whether or not i'm wrong about my initial evaluation of them and yeah these missions [ __ ] suck first i decide to stop the geth incursion of the armstrong system this means that i load into a system watch the planet landing sequence mako slowly over the terrain to a place where the geth are blow them away take out any reinforcements head back to the normandy and then repeat that process three more times when i do get done i get coordinates to the final base which surprise surprise is the exact same thing it's just mindless tedious filler [ __ ] i don't know i guess it pads the game with content but the content isn't fun the thing that makes this game worth it the most is oftentimes the story which accompanies these stretches of gameplay not the gameplay itself i will say that after all of this i approached holly because i know that she wanted some info on the geth and she's happy to receive it but that's really all i'd say that i had more fun listening to rex regale me with one of his mercenary adventures or garrus going on about how he's going to reapply to become a spectre against his father's wishes so i decide to do one more chain to see if there's anything at all worth this hassle and spoiler again it's not and it's not even the gameplay this time so much as the travel time and the waiting like so i go to investigate these missing marines i travel to the system land the maco find the unit take out a thresher maw identify the bodies and then head back to the ship then i fly to the citadel watch the docking sequence for the 43rd time take the elevator down for 30 seconds head to the fast travel beacon fast travel to the tower talk to the guy then fast travel back take the elevator up pop back onto the normandy travel to a new system watch the undocking sequence and then watch the mass effect relay travel sequence three or so of those 18 steps involved me playing the game to a degree that isn't moving from point a to point b and this is literally every mass effect side mission loading screens and travel sequences and i know the need for loading screens exist but come on let me skip the docking sequences let me fast travel from the normandy to anywhere on the citadel why do i have to take the big elevator down why do i have to take the small elevator down to check the shop every time on the ship why does the shop rotate stock so randomly to a point where i feel like i need to travel or do a quest just to refresh it in the hope that i get some turian armor for garrus it's not fun and i feel like for every one minute of sidequest gameplay there's three minutes of humdrum [ __ ] to wade through in between and don't think for a second that these gameplay interludes make up for the waiting sequences because they really do not most if not all of the time these side quests consist of a very concrete formula maco sequence in which i pray that the planet i'm on is flat planetside combat with the mako inside combat in a base that looks exactly the same no matter where i am and then extraction i get that you wanted to include mako sequences in your game i mean the idea of it yeah it's very cool you get to land on these mysterious planets you get to explore around and look for treasures but the execution is just appalling i cannot imagine that everyone who worked on these sequences were completely okay with how they turned out not only are you better off taking a skyrim horse up these mountainous regions but the whole formula is just stale after the first two or so quests and the more that i play them the worse that i feel about this game the only thing that even remotely makes this whole ordeal bearable is the mission rewards you'll make heaps of money hauling loads of high-end upgrades and gain experience out the ass which is the only thing really keeping me the tiniest iota interested and that's a god damn shame because some of these missions really tie into later games when they improved everything and i find myself not caring about them nearly as much now for example after the missing marine's mission i get contacted by the same guy who i completed the quest for he claims that a human group named cerberus was trying to create super soldiers and that they were covering up their tracks by killing off anyone that knew he also claims that they've gone rogue and have become a threat to the alliance now cerberus becomes very very entwined in the mass effect universe in the sequels but this little side quest is their only appearance here and because the missions have me going through four different facilities which have nearly identical layouts and aesthetics i almost don't care at all this should not be this way but it is there were endless possibilities when it came to alternate settings and objectives we could have had cerberus bases disguised as old wreckage drifting out in space that were secretly functional maybe you board the wreckage take out the operatives and scientists and then pilot it towards another key cerberus base before ejecting back to the normandy that's off the top of my head and maybe the technology just wasn't there or the time or something but what we got is just pitiful and i really can't bring myself to complete any other side objectives in this game because of it so let's finally head off to vermeyer where we need to meet a recon team who have info on saren joker drops our wart hog off on [ __ ] halo and i get the option to tell him that he did a good job we've got a clean drop commander stay out of range and continue evasive maneuvers until i bring those aaa towers down so we pilot our way through the covenant elites here who have acquired unsc rocket launchers in addition to their covenant carbine and beam rifles of course the occasional jackal hides behind stationary shielding but our warthog makes quick work of that we disable the aaa guns open the gates and download installation zero four's silent cartographer schematics to continue on our way well when we drop into the solarian base camp they explain that sarin has set up a research facility here which has discovered a cure for the krogan genophage rex immediately perks up which makes sense claiming that we need to get that cure everyone else is like whoa whoa whoa [ __ ] no it's up to shepard to placate rex to which he tells the krogan that sarin's army of genophage-free krogan are nothing but tools rex relents claiming that he'll side with shepard in destroying saren's facility but that he wants saren's head in exchange what i don't understand is that well i mean isn't there an alternative can we attempt to download the research data so that it winds up saving rex's people it just seems kind of strange that it's either destroy the whole place or an army of krogan will destroy the galaxy with no middle ground anyways in order to carry on with this plan the solarians here are going to hit the front while we sneak around the back the solarian captain asked me to either part with ashley arcade ashley ashley i choose ashley so we power through this base that sarin had constructed taking out various annoyances to help out the solarium squad in whatever small way that we can this mission isn't that bad in fact compared to the side missions that i just drudged through it's a godsend eventually we make it through to the facility itself where saren was in the process of converting captured solarians to his side and then finally we make it to another beacon where shepard goes on another ride through ripley's believe it or not memory tour but then the real [ __ ] starts to go down when saren's ship starts talking to us you see seren's ship isn't some random alien craft it's a reaper itself the edgy [ __ ] begins talking down to us claiming that his kind constructed the mass relays and the citadel to guide the evolution of various species throughout the universe but we don't get any real meaty answers here nothing about how the machine race came to be or about why they chose to guide the evolution of species only to slaughter them at their apex [Music] so now it's time to nuke this place caden sets it up while i go to try and bail ashley out of the mess that she's in but halfway to her caden radios in and tells me that a huge amount of reinforcements are dropping in on him forcing me to choose between caden and ashley at caden caden i choose caden so i circle back and take out the four enemies or so before saren drops down on us in the loudest [ __ ] cutscene i think i've ever heard then he monologues which thank god that he does because i need answers so he claims that the reason that he's working with the reapers is because of how powerful they are if they wish the extinction of all organic life then maybe some of the organic life can be spared by helping the reapers okay i'm following the logic so far so the reapers need these conduits for something and sarin is helping to retrieve them the reason why he's been looking into the effects of the indoctrination wave which the reaper he's working for exudes is so that he can learn to control it so as to not become indoctrinated himself saren also claims that the geth look up to the reapers as gods as their final evolution the reapers of course view this as an insult and have no interest in devotion which is ironic considering that saren is literally devoting himself in the same way he just thinks that he can do better shepard tells seren that with all this crazy [ __ ] that he's been spouting off he already is indoctrinated while saren believes in his cause even if you hit him with the paragon answer he believes that he will save more lives by proving useful to the reapers than if organics were to fight their fates it's honestly not a horrible motivation well it's time to fight and saren hops on a hoverboard well that was way lamer than i'd hoped it would be yeah he tactically silver surfers over some explosive tanks before we get a cut scene where he escapes and we blast out of here on the normandy ashley [ __ ] dies then we watch the same cutscene almost verbatim that we watched where liara gives us the old mind melt right down to the part where she goes oh wow i didn't expect it to be so intense give me a moment shep anyways this time she recognizes the landmarks from a planet called ilos which is where the conduit that sarin is trying to get to is located we make a call to the council who doesn't believe anything that i have to say about the reapers which yeah i want to be mad at them but from their perspective it's just one person who got affected by a crazy flashback dreambeacon who's saying all this stuff still you'd think they'd afford a few teams shepard's way to help him on the off chance that he's right well like they were listening to me the council decides to rally some of the fleets to go after saren or so shepard thinks turns out their rallying is for defense of the citadel only as they believe that saren's attack is imminent they still don't believe shep and they ground the normandy when he presses the issue effectively rendering him useless again as much as i want to hate them for it i really can't blame this decision it's all very realistic in that regard so with nothing left to do liara invites shepard to the bone zone sorry to interrupt commander got a message from captain anderson or not yeah apparently the captain from the start of the game wants me to come meet him at one of the clubs here for something so we pop in on captain cockblock who tells us that we have to get the hell out of here to ilos shepard tells him that there's nothing that we can do to which the good captain tells him that he's going to either break into the ambassador's office or bypass the guards at the dock to free the normandy i opt for him to hit the docks and his method of bypassing the guard is head butting the guy like a complete badass before overriding the lockdown dude even gets shot in the back but boy does he do his job absolute legend we take our leave and head off to ilos before liara saunters into shepherd's room to go hey we have not banged yet so they bang mostly tactically censored but still technically a sex scene we'll take it after our fuck-a-thon joker lets us know that we'll be hitting ilos in five minutes so we head to the bridge where everyone screams at each other about how there's no safe landing options which will get us close to saren eventually we decide to mocko in from an unsafe distance as joker claims that he can pull off the maneuver all in all i actually love this cutscene [ __ ] feels super heroic so we drop in on saren and son of a [ __ ] the lighting goes wonky again [ __ ] amd so we head through this now brightly lit ancient ruin taking out enemies and figuring out a way further in when we do eventually make it towards where saren went were cut off by a wall of light which directs us further into a prothean ai or vi or some kind of eye it gives us some much sought after answers revealing a lot of the mystery which had been built up to at this point so the reapers have been doing this for like millions of years and like i mentioned before they built the citadel the relays everything which modern society uses in this game it's said numerous times that no one knows all the secrets which these technological marvels carry with them only that they were believed to have been built by the protheans well it turns out that the citadel is actually the most powerful relay of them all with its primary functionality being to lure any advanced civilizations to it only to open up a portal to dark space where the rest of the reapers wait the way they methodically exterminated every single prothean was unyielding the ones that they didn't kill were indoctrinated and enslaved these slaves were used to harvest and strip every world that the protheans lived on of all technology and resources before eventually the reapers would disappear back into dark space and wait for the cycle to repeat itself no one knows why they do it well the protheans had this top secret research base on ilos its existence was completely hidden from all files so it was spared from the reaper invasion the scientists here put themselves into cryogenic stasis while the reapers did their thing so as to attempt to conduct research after they left again this took much longer than they expected and the ai here had to slowly kill the power of nearly every single cryogenic tube save a handful of the top scientists this obviously was not enough people to repopulate the prothean race but they at least spent the last years of their lives doing as much as they could to ensure that the invasion wouldn't happen again this meant [ __ ] with the citadel systems to make sure that it wouldn't open the relay which is why saren is trying to undo what they did it seems that one reaper stayed behind this guy who we talked to earlier named sovereign and after he indoctrinated sarin he started using him to figure out why the citadel's relay system isn't working well turns out that the protheans jammed the signal which triggers the relay opening by using the conduit to warp directly to the citadel once they got there the scientists were able to mess with the citadel system which was in place to ensure that the relay would open and release the reapers and saren is now after this conduit so that he can hand over control of the citadel's relay to sovereign before we go the prothean ai gives us a copy of the program which controls the citadel foley hoping that we can use it to take control instead of sovereign if worst comes to worst so we blast through on the mako before making it to the conduit as this is happening sovereign has already rampaged through it full force with sarin in tow the unstoppable juggernaut flings itself through the other warships before making it to the closing citadel station meanwhile shepard and the crew fire themselves through the conduits and onto the citadel before they have to work their way through the gethink krogan soldiers i have to say throughout this game i felt pretty damn weak at almost any given stage the biotics from my adept class were helping but a rocket was almost always a death sentence it made me play a lot more tactically and i actually enjoyed the difficulty now i'm a walking killing machine the biotics that i use are almost always ready to go the barrier that i can cast can withstand nearly anything and it feels great i feel like a hero the difficulty curve is perfect all things considered and if i had been having this easy of a time the entire game it would have been pretty boring but we finally make it to saren and apparently the paragon option that i chose before did have an effect on him my words entered his brain and tried to release him from his indoctrination but sovereign sensed this and decided to augment saren's body with implants taking the indoctrination a step further once again i reach out to him with paragon pleading with the turian to see the error in his ways and i reach him instead of an epic hoverboard boss fight i get the speech option ending which ends with saren thanking shepard before shooting himself in the head holy [ __ ] that was cool i'm sure there was a big boss fight planned here but i really have to respect the dev who allows a speech option to win out in the final [Music] fight god damn it bioware now this would be a cool fight i mean it would but uh well after i get my biotics back it kind of looks like this before all of this shepard makes the call to hammer sovereign with everything that the alliance has or to save the council first and foremost before hitting sovereign i opt for the latter saving the council before humanity's fleet takes on this monstrous machine this whole scene is super fun to watch and it makes the whole fight that much more intense after sovereign unleashes some devastating attacks its shields go down before it gets obliterated by the humans in the aftermath rex and garrus get pulled out of the wreckage convinced that shepard's dead before he parkours up and strikes a cool guy action movie pose it's cheesy but it's kind of cool in its own way something that didn't click at all until now is the relationship between sarin's research and the ending the reason that he was looking into mind control wasn't to strengthen his control but to resist sovereigns the way that he shoots himself in the head is extraordinarily reminiscent of the colonist on pharaohs and i thought that this detail was a super cool callback that didn't click until now when all is said and done humanity is officially welcomed onto the council with nothing but praise for their heroics for once shepard gets to recommend which of the two humans here should join the council and uh i mean does anyone ever choose the ambassador the guy's been a gigantic prick the entire game and the captain has done nothing but help even taking a bullet to make all this happen so i pick the captain who gives his rousing speech before shepard marches off like a badass claiming that he's going to find a way to end the reapers once and for all and that's it don't start patting yourselves on the back just yet sovereign wasn't alone the rest of the reapers are still out there and i'm gonna find some way to stop them shepard's right oh i i guess we're going to end on the captain that's a weird choice you think they would have ended on shepard and together we will drive them back into dark space [Music] oh what the hell is this cheesy ass screen all we need is the mission time and completion plus shepard sitting in a bikini like samus at the end of metroid to round the screen out but yeah that's it so mass effect [Music] man where to start so this game sets up so much there are so many links and connections to later entries so much world building that isn't essential but it is very much welcome there are so many things that get me excited about these sequels which are presented here and i have a really hard time pulling myself away from that kind of nostalgia laden analysis because that's just it the title of this video demands that i look at this one part of the series and on its own the first game is easily the weakest game apart from andromeda i have not played andromeda there are muddy textures that riddle the game odd lighting choices sound imbalances and more gameplay faux pas than i can count there were so many times where i'd fire up the game and just be bored with the gameplay the mako mechanics obviously stick out like a sore thumb but that sore thumb only hides other diseased fingers on this game's hand the combat is okay for its time but dated now the exploration and level design is brutally underdeveloped walking from one upgrade to the next is almost swamp-like in the way that you have to slog through loading screens and cut scenes the dialog brings so much to the table while somehow being super shallow in the next breath conversations repeat themselves quite a few times as you march through various quests the only saving grace and i mean the only one is the story the lore the character development and even then a lot of that character development comes in later entries this series is fascinating and while it's definitely shaky in almost every sense of the word the first game brings so many bright ideas to the gaming universe so is mass effect as good as i remember no but it is still worth playing i almost hate to say it but you know how you'll hear a friend go oh man you gotta watch this series but just know that the first season is pretty bad compared to the rest that's what mass effect is the slow first season i really didn't remember anything sticking out as super cumbersome besides the mako bits but god there's just too much tedium for me to outright recommend this game as a standalone entry but combined with the sum of its parts this game sets up so much more for later entries it lends so much more background to a lot of the individuals and groups which you encounter in them and if you haven't played the first game but love two and three then i do recommend that you check it out i don't know how the legendary edition will turn out but i'm hoping that it will at least fix the mako driving and enhance the graphics but we'll see thanks for watching i've been meaning to get to the series for a very long time and i'm actually excited to get to 2 sometime in the near future i'm thinking of hitting the witcher first though and probably fallout 4 dlc that's about time for that anyways i've got those fancy shirts and pins and i don't know some glasses and all that from before all i know is that you wear the shirts on your torso and you put the pins wherever you want to pin things and stickers wherever you want to stick things and glasses wherever you want to glass things i've got a twitch where i stream mondays and tuesdays and fridays i've got a twitter where i tweet my videos out and sometimes i type something else before going nah no one wants to hear that and deleting it i've got a discord where no one should type anything on it and yet it still exists like a hub of white noise and i've got a patreon and that's it have a good one

Channel: The Salt Factory

Views: 787,282

Keywords: Mass Effect, BioWare, analysis, evaluation, good, bad, Shepard, Ashley, Kaiden, Liara T'Soni, Tali, Tali'Zorah nar Rayya, Wrex, Urdnot Wrex, Garrus Vakarian, Turian, Krogan, Quarian, Salarian, Asari, Benezia, Saren, Renegade, Paragon, Feros, Noveria, Virmire, Eden Prime, Citadel, Reapers, Prothean, Thorian, Geth, Mako, Normandy, Joker, Captain Anderson, Jarrod, Dr. Heart, Pilgrimage, Ilos, Relay, C-Sec, Kaiden Alenko, Ashley Williams, Conduit, Mu Relay, Saren Arterius, Spectre, Admiral Hackett, Dr. Chakwas, Luna

Id: _yaqm7YkjfQ

Length: 108min 48sec (6528 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021