Owls and Newts

So last week I made a reference to Knights of the Old Republic, a game by Bioware.  Bioware, as you may or may not know, is a company which makes the dicks of fanboys grow hard as they prepare to take one long, painful shaft up the bum.  Seriously, people, BioWare’s games are as follows:

Baulder’s Gate, Baulder’s Gate 2

Neverwinter Knights

Knights of the Old Republic

Mass Effect and some kinda expansion pack

Sonic and the “Who the fuck cares? They made a goddamn sonic game.”

Admittedly, there isn’t a bad game on that list (No, the sonic game doesn’t count because it’s sonic.  We know it’s epically retarded from the moment a blue hedgehog was involved.), but none of them really stand out as “exceptional” or “genre-defining.”  Just a sort of basic-quality “good.”  I suppose, upon further inspection, that I really shouldn’t have expected as much as I did out of “Mass Effect” because, well, just look at the track record!  But we’re not here to talk about Knights of the Old Republic OR Bioware.

We’re here to talk about Knights of the Old Republic 2.

Yes, yes, their stories are connected (kinda) and this is the sequal, but the story was so much better than the story of Knights 1, and the depressing part is, the story was never finished!  In fact, KotoR 2 was in so many ways a better game than Knights 1, it’s distressing that Bioware gets this credit for being such an awesome developer while Obsidian is known as their lap-dogs.  Obsidian, known for Neverwinter Knights 2, Fallout universe’s next installment, and KotoR 2, are basically the bitches who pick up the franchises Bioware is “too good for.”  Well now they’re playing lapdog to Bethesda, but Bethesda’s actually made genre DEFINING games (The Elder Scrolls: Arena and The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall were some of the first, if not the first, sandbox games ever created), and created the holy grail of RPG design: The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind (a wholly imperfect game with a world that I still get lost in… even though I know where everything is!).

Anyways, my point is: Obsidian usually takes the scraps of good games other people made, and tries to make them even better. Having not played NWK2 or the new Fallout thing (the Fallout universe is fascinating, but iso graphics just piss me off) I really can’t judge them as a whole, but they succeeded with KotoR 2.  See, unlike the first in the series, KotoR 2 does something fantastic and something new.  Actually, two things new, but first you have to learn about the game system before I describe what makes KotoR 2 have such a wonderful storyline.

KotoR 2 is Star Wars d20, simplified and dumbed down for the console tards who bought it (read: me, though that’s not fair because I’m an exceptional optimizer at d20).  Basically, the game rolls a d20, adds modifiers, then decides whether you hit or missed.  Then it rolls damage from a certain number of a certain kind of dice, adds modifiers, then decides how much damage you did.  You get a party of three, where you control one active member and can pause at any time, you get a handful of “feats” which can be combat oriented (but really you just have the one, possibly Flurry but more likely Critical Strike just for the 5-20 threat lulz), and a handful of “force powers” (but really you have a host because you went Consular/Jedi Master since everything else is a waste of fucking time and energy).  You can switch between your active party members, and the ones you aren’t controlling are run by some AI that couldn’t outsmart a 2 year old.

Anyways, you get weapons which can be upgraded several ways (and the sheer staggering possibilities are insane.  There’s usually three or four upgrades you want to put in your weapon, but you don’t have enough slots for them all.  I’m not kidding, obsidian knocked this one out of the park), such as new crystals for your lightsaber (cyan, silver, viridian… oh so beautiful), energy focusers for your pistols, and, erm, blades for your swords.  They really did a great job duplicating the way D&D demands higher level weapon.  And sure, some options are clearly better than others, but there are still several “good” options and usually not one option that’s clearly better than the others… except your personal crystal.  Oh god, your personal crystal.

Anyways you can also wear armor (which interferes with your force powers, so… no) plus a host of shields and other little goodies you collect that make things insane (circle of saresh, which btw is why you play Jedi Master instead of Sith Lord) and deflect laser bolts, whatever.  It’s star wars!  Oh, one more thing: a conversation mechanic which not only makes sense when it keeps track of light side vs dark side, but which also changes your influence with certain characters, unlocking even more dialogue!

So right, our story begins with you being unconscious, and waking up in a dead mining platform in the middle of podunk no where.  Everyone else is dead, and while you start looting the dead bodies for teh lootz (c’mon, light or dark this is the whole point, right?  loot and xp!), one of the dead bodies gets up and talks to you!

It turns out to be this old woman who’s about dead, who tells you some pretty cryptic shit and then says, basically, “we need to GTFO.”  Your character agrees, which is entirely unsurprising, and so you make your way forward and run into this guy, Aton Rand, who’s in prison for… something.  Anyways, you let him out and he tries to do some fancy shit with the comms system, which fails (typical) so you have to go dig around in the old mining shaft with all the old mining robots trying to kill you.

What happens next is this brilliant investigation thing in which you find out who sabotaged your ship, killed all the Peragus staff, and kept you asleep while preparing to steal you and collect a bounty on your head.  Hint: it’s epic, and it made me fall in love with the story.  Anyways, now you kill the first boss (sigh… that was like a great chapter in a story with its own climax and resolution), and you gtfo onto this weird-ass republic cruiser that showed up out of nowhere.  Deux Ex?  Sort of.  While on board, this guy, Darth Sion (not to be confused with Scion, the manufacturers of the worlds most ugly cars, at least until Cube: Mobile Device arrived on the scene), orders his Assassins to murderlize you.  They epic fail, while you figure out that basically, this cruiser had picked up an unidentified space ship, moved a Sith Lord to a Kolto tank (healing tank) without knowing wtf he was, and then the Sith Lord broke out, took command of the ship, got a bunch of assassins to run it, and came here looking for you.

At this point it’s starting to come out that you’re either the last or one of the last of the Jedi, and the Sith are currently trying to hunt you to extinction.   We know that your character has a rough past with the Jedi, and that not happy things have happened.  Anyways, Sion himself decides to take you on, and Kreia says some wise-ass shit that makes you think “HOT DAMN this is a character!” and you decide to crawl through some kinda fuel tube to get to your ship.

Here you hook up permanently with some robot T3-M4, and you blast your way to your ship, take off, and Kreia mysteriously appears on the ship.  I mean, serious rule of cool shit going down here, and we find out how she survived later (hint: another avoided deus ex!).  From there, you manage to escape the ship, but someone blows up the rest of Peragus and takes the republican vessel down with him.  Sion is down for the count, and now Kreia, Atton, and yourself start talking about wtf is going on.

You land at a planet called Telos, which was once orbitally bombarded to submission by Revan himself (yes, Revan is canonically male), and you get to land at the orbiting platform which heads the “telos restoration project,” A project to save they dying world of Telos from, well, Death.  This is the first real instance of the “multiple paths” system.  Previously, on Peragus, your light vs dark was dealt with by, well, not being an asshole.  I suppose I want to berate Obsidian for the stupid “kick the puppy” bullcrap that makes you dark-sided, though I must admit they do a decent (not fantastic, just decent) job of portraying evil as me-centric while good is them-centric.  I also can’t rip into them for stereotyping evil, not with the shennanigans about to be pulled.

Anyways, you have the choice of working for the righteous and honorable Ithorians, a group of slugs who want to bring life to Telos, and the evil, scumbag Czerka Corporation, who wants to bring money to its pocket books.  We’re asked to side with whomever will get the job done, and to be honest I lean towards Czerka, even after working for the Ithorians… and that’s saying something.  The game tries to paint Czerka as a blood-sucking evil enterprise while the Ithorians are working heart and soul for the planet, but with the amount of money Czerka is dumping into Telos, unless there was literally zero planned governmental oversight I can’t imagine them failing.  Especially since there are (reportedly) many other lucerative projects that are waiting for the Telos project to be completed before they can be green-lighted.  The Ithorians, on the other hand, are easily bullied and simple.  They couldn’t restore a slightly rusted table, let alone a planet!

So whichever you chose, you eventually meet with the Exchange, who admits they don’t have your ship, so you fly down to the surface, get shot down, meet Bao-Dur (great guy, great mechanic, some of the worst voice acting this side of the original Godzilla dubs), and trundle along until BAM!  You meet up with some mercs who want you dead.  Hint: those are the guys who shot down your shuttle.  Anyways, you go through this long dungeon like thing (linear, of course) and meet this weird HK-50 droid that blows up.  Or maybe it’s an HK-51, I forget.  In ANY case, the point is that there’s a race of assassin droid hunting you down, and they’re created here.  But that’s getting ahead of ourselves, we’ll get to the cut content when we get to it, eh?

Anyways, you steal ANOTHER shuttle and fly to some kind of polar base and get shot down AGAIN, this time by the HK-50 droids, who walk up to you and you kick their ass in a fight.  Then you have a meeting with Atris, and the real story of this game starts to get under way.

In this meeting we discover literally EVERYTHING that has lead up to this moment, that left you trapped on Peragus with the Sith hunting you.  You were exiled by the council for going to war with the Mandalorians… and you were the only one of those who left who decided to come back.  At the same time, the Jedi severed your force connection, but wait, there’s more!  Atris… loved you.  Here she says something along the lines of “you chose war over the council, over…” and she stops.  She was about to say “me” and the dialgoue directions really point out that Atris loved the Exile… and that perhaps the Exile loved her back.  I’d like to take this moment to note that canonically, the Jedi Exile is a female.

The vast majority of this level is all dialogue, and about half to three-quarters is skippable, but any idiot who’s playing KotoR 2 for the combat is a… well… an idiot.  This level, while mostly (again) dialgoue, reveals so much about the major players in this conflict.  Kreia is far-seeing, and knows Atris, as well as what Atris is up to.  Atton has some past “issues” with Jedi (this comes up later), and then there’s the Handmaiden.  The Handmaiden basically says she was born of some guy and some woman who shacked up.  Her dad was Echani, same as all the other handmaiden’s sisters, but her mom was… someone else.  Mysterious, eh?  Kreia and Atris are two of the most manipulative creatures I have ever encountered, but god DAMN Kreia is a fantastically written character.  This is genius in its purest form, ladies and gentlemen.

There’s also some cut content which reveals two things: 1) the Handmaiden is chasing you (if you play male) because Atris ordered her too (and the sisters think that the Handmaiden betrayed them), and 2) Atris is why you were aboard the Harbinger (remember that cruiser mentioned earlier, taken over by the sith lord?) in the first place.  Atrist gets a lot more manipulative, so stick around!

Anyways, we get to a nice little trial scene, which is fantastic and wonderful.  But wait, what’s this?  You were devoid of the force when you entered the council chambers?  So the Jedi didn’t isolate you from the force!  Well, well, well, this’ll take more investigation, now won’t it?

I’d like to say that this is something KotoR 2 did the best out of any game I’ve seen so far.  The Let’s Play over on Something Awful touched on this, and I’d like to continue it: the final boss of Telos is Atris.  The climax of everything that happened on Peragus and Telos is right here, in this chamber, when you talk to Atris.  No combat, no nothing.  How many of those other developers would’ve said “ah, we need BBEG fight NAO!”?  Instead, the chapter closed with a dialogue tree, a test of wills between you and a jedi.  This is why so many people complained about the game, by the way.  It was all together deeper and more complex than your average idiot could handle, quite unlike the original KotoR, which had all the depth of your average Prisoner’s Delimma, which is to say, idiots think it’s amazingly deep and complex, while intelligent folk (hopefully all of my readers) see it for what it is: superficial philosophy, touching on exceedingly basic principles.

Another fantastic thing about Obsidian, and why i want to see their writers poached by Bethesda (I’m going to play whatever fallout crap they peddled to Obsidian because it’ll be fantastically written) is their ability to open a storyline.  Throughout this game you’ll find that a great many storylines, main and side, pop up.  The problem is, these lines don’t usually end.  Whether this is some fault of the writers, or if it’s because Lucastards pushed the release date is unclear.  However, there is a written end to the story (that I happen to like) which leaves a great many questions unanswered.

Anyways, back to the story.  After Telos we’re given a handful of options, Dantooine, Nar Shaddaa, Korriban, or Onderon.  On each planet we discover more about our past and where we’re from, as well as why we’re where we are today.  Dantooine and Onderon are about planets about to secede from the Republic and Civil War, Nar Shaddaa is a little more gritty, and Korriban is what’s left over after Civil War.  After this, you revisit Malachor and finally the game ends.

The small twists and turns along the way make this game very much worth playing, in my opinion, even though the end isn’t finished.  If you complete KotoR 2 and still have questions, let me know and I can tell you what the real ending is

Photograph

It was a chilly afternoon, as most stories do not often start during chilly afternoons. A young man takes a shot from his polaroid camera and patiently waited till the photo was developed. His pale fingers touch a clean tip, the corner freezing ever so slightly. He shakes it, frantically hoping the photo would develop faster, and shards of ice fell off, shattering into each other and falling as diamonds would onto the snowy floor.

He looks at it, the slowly developing photo, with its blotches of undeveloped film. You couldn’t really tell which one was which. Well, I couldn’t. The white photo spots were practically the same color as the winter background he had attempted to capture in said photo. I always tell him that he couldn’t really capture our beloved Winter in such a simple medium. But he insists he needs it. He needs a picture.

After looking down at his unfinished photograph, he goes back to waving it like a mad man, showering the area with more snow (not like it really needs more). I have to cling onto his collar to even keep on his shoulder.

Jack looks at it again, the slightly more developed photograph (not me, sadly. I think he’s used to seeing me on his shoulder when he goes out now). The tinge of blue from the sky is starting to show. More ice crystals start to form from the held corner, sparkling against the light.

“Bah. It wasn’t a very good picture anyway,” he says. He throws the polaroid picture on the floor and walks away. Wind spins around him, brushing snow over the fallen photograph. Now, I know most of you will probably be bothered because big ol’ Jack Frost is littering and doing bad stuff to Mother Nature and all. But really, Jackie’s not big. Or old, for that matter.

He reaches home and drops his coat by the door. It’s been many years, or so he says, since he moved out of his parent’s home, and he’s adjusting… slowly. Really slowly. For many of the months he sleeps, refusing to leave his icy cottage. And I am left with nothing to do but care for his slumbering body.

Jack makes us some hot chocolate and does it just the way I like it, which is not very hot at all. One would venture to say I like it chillingly cold. But so does he. He sits on the couch, and I on his end table. I think if I sat on his couch, I’d just sink right in. Not saying I’m fat–I’m really not, I promise–but his couch is ever so soft.

We sit there in silence, sipping away at our formerly-hot-now-cold chocolate. There’s really not much to do anymore, now with the Spring season coming in, and all his beautiful snow turning into rain, his intricate frost patterns melting away. It’s really quite depressing, but what must be done must be done. It was beautiful while it lasted. I think that’s what made him want such a lasting piece as a photograph. Winter itself is so temporal, with all its memories melting against the cruel sun. No love for the cold Winter days.

I am not sure what my Jack wants from a simple photograph. Doesn’t he have all of winter encompassed within me? He used to say this every day, but it has been many moons since he had looked upon me that way. I have grown as jaded as he.

Before I can say something, he gets up. He looks at me, his little winter sprite, and sighs. No love from the cold Winter. She leaves as quickly as she comes, and Jack is dissatisfied with his love being as flighty as she is. He retires to his chambers and slams the door, ice falling to the ground and making a mess of the floor. I’ll clean it up later.

Maybe next year will be better, I think to myself as I fade away, becoming nothing against the waking Spring light.

Urgent!

What is it with game developers these days? They hype and hype and hype, and deliver a product that is so close to perfect and yet leaves us with a resounding “meh.” I can think of several games which were on the brink of something fantastic, and yet utterly lacking on just a couple of points. Fable was outstanding and amazing in most ways, especially how it delivered the story, but the unusable ranged combat, broken magic system, and tiny, linear game world with a short story doomed it to being merely ‘good.’ KotoR 2 was incomplete, starting off as one of the most epic tales ever spun in Star Wars history, but eventually petered out into nothing as the storyline was never finished. Oblibbions, supposed spiritual successor to Morrowind, had the same open world vibe as Morrowind, but everything was too samey and fast travel just executed it all… along with the fact that, well, the crown of immortality and keyless ‘key only’ locks. It seems to happen most often with the RPG genre, and I can’t for the life of me describe why. Maybe it’s because RPGs are inherently more complicated than other games, as they’re really the only type of game that absolutely must have a storyline that flows seamlessly with the plot?

On that I’d like to take a sidebar for all you people who complain about there not being kids in games or not being able to kill kids in games: grow up. Look, you can’t sell a game where kids can be killed because the current political climate of every game-releasing nation won’t allow it. And you know what? It’s not that big of a deal. It does not hurt game play and if you complain about it I will hunt you down and stab you, because there are much better things to complain about. The fuck you want to murder kids for anyways?

Right so anyways, which game am I on about today? Riiight… Mass Effect. Mass Effect couldn’t be deeper in the uncanny valley if it tried, which it did. First comes the character creation, which is fine and includes some (extremely) basic roleplaying options, which come into play later. Sort of. Then comes the epic intro scene, in which cheesy dialogue lines are sprayed by self-important nutjobs, Captain Anderson and Admiral Hackett, as they discuss how you’re perfect. After this lavish praise, there’s some more epic awesomesauce and then it drifts into the helmsman “Joker” talking to Lt. Kaiden Alenko. This intro scene has a bit of cheese but is overall very good at setting the stage for the game… after all this game is all about doing something exciting and amazing and then being bored for an extended period of time.

Then you’re dropped off on a planet where you have to secure some kind of artifact or something from an attack by the Geth, who haven’t been seen for a long time. There’s a SPECTRE there to watch you, and supposedly he’s going to be testing you to see if you can do the job. This makes no sense however, as he immediately sprints off to solve the problem for you leaving you to wonder why you were even brought along in the first place. Fortunately he dies before the problem is solved, killed at the hands of Seran, another SPECTRE who’s gone rogue. You go through the first area and kill off hoards of Geth, learn to play the game, disarm some bombs, and get possessed by an ancient artifact. At this point I was already bored with the story.

First I want to take some time out to talk about level design. Calling Mass Effect an RPG, especially a Persistent World RPG, is crazy. Mass Effect is, at its core, a first person shooter with some sort of RPG element haphazardly tacked on at the end. It is this gameplay which first firmly places Mass Effect in the uncanny valley, the fact that each level up path has one (and exactly one) special ability to go with it, that all the upgrades are basically identical, that the numbers on your guns mean next to nothing (beyond “higher is better”), that you’re forced to have certain abilities as class abilities, and finally that you can only use your health packs once every like ten minutes. Even the level design was horrendously railroaded. It is impossible to find one level in Mass Effect that isn’t linear, “go from point A to point B, shoot everything in between, flip a switch, go from point B back to point A, shooting everything.” That, my friends, is Halo, which is not an RPG.

Second I want to talk about how this story started and what they should have done differently. Once upon a time I took a Java class, and I wrote what is now known as the “people generator.” Not the “random people generator,” but the “people generator.” This program worked in such a way that if you inputted someone’s first and last name, as well as their haircolor, and ran the program, it would tell you their first and last name as well as their hair color. There was no further point to the program, nothing you couldn’t do by writing the info down on index cards and reading that info a second later. Mass Effect’s opening “background selection” felt like the People Generator. It’s like the game said, “oh, what kind of badass are you?” and I said, “I want to be… “survives anything” badass.” A few seconds later, the characters are going, “Shepherd is “survives anything” badass,” which has no addition to the plot and is never discussed again, except through random completely interchangeable dialogue options later in the story. Easter eggs are awesome when you find them because you feel smart, you feel like you figured something special out. In Mass Effect, these little blurps always felt like someone placed an easter egg right in front of you on the table, and asked, “where’s the easter egg?” I felt patronized, and most of all, bored to tears.

If Eden Prime is under attack and I have the ability to clear the whole mission myself, wtf is our military doing? Also, why am I alone? This is a Human colony, and everyone is talking about how Eden Prime is a symbol of Humanity’s ability to colonize, so why the hell isn’t there something more substantial defending its spaceport than a handful of easily thrashed marines, and for that matter, why is our tiny ship the only ship that’s coming to help? Couple that with the fact that the guy who’s supposed to be evaluating your abilities jumps on ahead of you and dies and the game starts off with the stench of the contrived. Eden Prime was overwhelmed because otherwise Shepherd couldn’t be badass, Nihlus ran off and was killed because otherwise there would be no difficulty for Shepherd in getting into the SPECTRES, and Saren had to try and blow up the artifact rather than take it with him because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to enter the main quest. When your characters are doing things for the sake of moving the story forward, there’s a problem. It breaks flow, and is bad storytelling. Characters need in game motivations, reasons to be doing what they’re doing other than “the story must progress.”

You go back to the big central area of the planetary government thing and are told, “By the by, we don’t believe you that Saren is evil and stuff, so find us evidence or shut up.” What do you do next? Find evidence, of course! Someone’s already been investigating Saren, for whatever reason, and fortunately he has a lead, which you pursue and find evidence that Saren considered Eden Prime a victory. Confronted with this, the Council 180s and declares Saren a criminal and orders you to find or elliminate him. What happened to trials? I guess it would have made more sense to me personally if the game had been decided that Saren was under arrest, and then Saren skipped bail, and then you were after him. The decision is made by the council in a matter of seconds though. They’re presented with evidence and immediately make you a SPECTRE. Once again the game’s authors just shatter immersiveness and flow, making the story feel ridiculously rushed.

So in tradition Knights of the Old Republic fashion, they hand you three planets you must travel to and you go to them in whatever order you want. This supposedly ‘huge’ game world is huge, probably about the size of two Morrowinds. Unfortunately, it’s empty. There are dozens of systems to explore, which for the most part is just reading a boring diatribe on the average temperature and day length, finding out there’s no minerals there, and going to the next system. Occasionally you find some kind of dog tag or something like that, which supposedly creates these ‘mini quests’ which really aren’t quests at all. It’s like the COG tag thing from Gears of War, except stupid. er. Stupider. Sorry about that, I was confused for a moment.

At each stage of these three planets you learn pretty much nothing about the plot, except that Saren is doing some weird shit all over the place. You never even find out why Saren is doing this weird shit! For example, on the planet Noveria, you meet Matriarch Benezia, who reveals the big shocker that Saren isn’t controlling people’s minds, but that his ship is. Which is interesting, and plot relevant. What is Benezia doing on Noveria, you ask? The best answer I can give you is, “she needed someplace to be.” The plot line of Noveria is that the containment failed on a station that was researching… well no one knows what. But whatever it was was getting loose, and so Benezia went there to… help the situation or something like that. Except she didn’t go help the trapped people, and instead just sort of sat around in the bottom levels of the base doing absolutely nothing. This leads you to a situation in which you can either free or kill the last Rachni queen, which is a great side-story and all, but it’s a bloody side quest Benezia’s involvement is so token it’s absurd, she just is sort of there as a way for the developers to say, “see? This belongs in the main quest, I swear!” Oh, you may say, but that’s just one third of the total missions. Not true, every single mission is like this.

Therum. Benezia’s daughter is working on some Prothean artifacts. You go to her but who’s there first? The Geth, with a bloody fleet. Why? You never know. Liara obviously would respond better to a kidnapping than her mother asking her to come over for tea, according to the writers, which makes so little sense it is mind boggling in its absurdity. Besides, there’s this huge battle over her to gather her up so she can make the huge revelation that she doesn’t know anything relevant. A huge mission and absolutely no story significance other than Liara is now a part of your party. That is a side quest, with some Geth thrown in so we can make it look like a main quest.

Feros. You arrive and the Geth are attacking some city some ways away, for the purpose of attacking the city. Did any Human fleets respond? Hell no! Why not? Because, um… because otherwise Shepherd wouldn’t be so gorram badass. Well aside from the fact that Earth’s navy is about as useful as Santa Claus when it comes to protecting Earth colonies, why are the Geth here? Because Saren was here. Why was Saren here? One express purpose: to feed someone to some plant thing which almost (but not quite) taught him something important. However the plot line of Feros is, “this big plant took over the population, kill it to save the population!” Saren’s involvement is token, once again just so the writers could poke you and say “main quest!” and then sprint across the playground giggling.

Let’s review the plot lines of the three main quest planets: Noveria, someone was trying to control a massive, sentient insectoid race called the Rachni, and it blew up in their face. You have to contain the problem, and either let the queen live or die. Therum, Saren hates Benezia’s daughter and wants to capture her for no reason. Also he set up a random-ass base in the middle of nowhere so he could do so. You save her. Feros, a human research company discovered that there was a plant that could control people’s minds, everything went to hell in a hand basket, and you had to kill the plant.

Exactly one of these makes sense for the main quest, but is inherently stupid for one reason: the person you rescue has no plot significance at all, which means that of the three main quests, exactly zero of them have any plot relevance at all. Finally, you get to go to Virmire, which is where there’s actually a main quest.

Throughout this whole game Mass Effect gives the vibe of a game that’s trying to rip off Morrowind, and isn’t doing a very good job. For instance, in Morrowind the first thing the main quest giver tells you to do is go level up by doing quests for other people. This is done by Mass Effect by, well, the admiral calling you every thirty seconds and sounding like a goddamn douchebag. In Morrowind, the first quests you do for Caius Cosades are only tangentially related to the main quest. You’re asked to find out about the sixth-house cult and the nerevarine cult, and the quests come when people with the information you need have things they want in exchange for their information. This is mirrored by Mass Effect in that your quests aren’t related to the main storyline at all. I’m not saying this was on purpose, but it’s definitely something I noticed: Mass Effect’s storytelling seemed to try and duplicate Morrowind’s, but fell short in every way.

Now Virmire is the best planet in the whole main quest, and is also the biggest let down. Reread that sentence, and weep for that is in essence Mass Effect’s story in a nutshell: “the best part was also the biggest disappointment.” Virmire is the best planet because it is the first time you’re actually doing something against Saren, and it’s also the biggest letdown because the game’s storyline almost turns from “evil guys over there, kill they ass” to something deeper, a gray area in a struggle between good and evil. On the planet Virmire, you go rescue a bunch of spies who report that Saren is close to unlocking the secret to countering a genophage. Now, the Genophage was used by the Turians to kill off (read: drive to extinction) a sentient race called the Krogan, of which there is a member in your party. There is also a member of the Turian race in your party, and everyone’s talking about this.

Obviously, the Krogan in your party (Wrex) is pretty excited at this whole, “let my species reproduce again” thing but understands that any Krogan that are born will be slaves to Saren. So he’s conflicted and understands that the research station must be destroyed, but he doesn’t like it. Pretty much everyone else is going, “ra, ra, kill the krogan!” There were two great ways this story could’ve been taken and one way that it was taken.

First: Saren’s been working for Sovereign, and realizes that Sovereign intends to kill everything. Saren recognizes that Sovereign is unstoppable at the moment, but under the guise of building Sovereign an army with which to help take over the galaxy he’s building an army of Krogan because he believes the Krogan could fight back.

Second: Saren started working for Sovereign because Sovereign knew how to reverse the Genophage. Saren, a Turian, has always felt guilty over the xenocide of the Krogan, and he wanted to make amends for his species by reversing the terrible deed.

Third: Saren started spawning the Krogan to force a quasi-ethical choice for Shepherd, only there’s no real choice because the only choice is “kill all the Krogan again,” and it doesn’t even make sense that Saren would be working on the Krogan anyways since he already has more Geth troops than he needs, and he can always simply recruit more Krogan anyways.

So the story at Virmire becomes, “Saren is making an army, and you have to blow up the production facility.” Sweet! We’re finally facing off against Saren! This marks the first time in the whole main quest, in the whole game, that you actually manage to stop Saren from achieving an objective that would have helped his cause in one way or another. Long story short: you blow up the production facility, figure out what Sovereign is (a reaper) and what its goal is, and start chasing Saren to see who can get to the holy mcgauffin first. Hint: him.

Going back to the council, they tell you that you’re wrong (for the umpteenth time… they told you you were wrong about everything and anythign you did in this game), that the Reapers aren’t a threat, and then they ground you and lock you out of your spaceship because apparently you’re not a SPECTRE anymore. They kick you out for… apparently for letting Saren get away despite the fact that it was you and a small spy team versus Saren and Saren’s personal armies. Plural. More than one. So you hijack your own ship and bust out of the station, with everyone pissed at you because… well it’s never explained except that it might cause war with the Terminus systems, though who the fuck the Terminus systems are is never explained, nor why you’d be risking war with them.

Anyways you end up on the plant Ilos, where Saren is searching for the conduit which is located on the planet somewhere. He starts digging around trying to figure out exactly where it is, and you follow one step behind. Eventually you find it, but not before you discover exactly what the reapers are and what they plan (giant machines, kill everyone), and how it’s all part of some cycle. There are other interesting facts about the game world thrown in here as well, like how the mass relays were actually Reaper technology, and other stuff like that. In the end, it’s just that the Reapers apparently eat sentient life and so they’ve come to activate the gate and eat, cause they’re hungry. Fine. Next you jump through the conduit, end up in the middle of Citadel Station, and stop Saren from activating the conduit by killing him. Game over, except the end.

The end! Here’s a choice for you: establish a new regime of government dominated by humanity as an autocracy over every other species, or continue the current regime of government, an autocracy dominated by three other species? If you’re like me, you’ll realize you aren’t given a choice. Especially since I had to set up an autocracy dominated by humanity since I decided that keeping everyone from dying was more important than saving a council that had been a thorn in my side from the beginning of the game. The end of Mass Effect didn’t feel like I was choosing anything, more that I was going to get something shoved into my orifice, and I could choose whether it was a glass or plastic dildo. That’s not a choice, because I’m still getting fucked.

While we’re on the topic of the council, they are the most frustratingly written pieces of shit in this game. The only words out of their mouth are “you’re wrong” or “you’re an idiot.” I swear, you find a Rachni queen, and if you kill it, they demand to know why you didn’t try to keep it alive. If you release the Rachni queen, they bitch at you for releasing it. Not even once do they show concern that someone was keeping a Rachni queen alive somewhere, at least not until you touch it. The giant mind-controlling plant? You get bitched at for that despite the fact that there was no way to do anything different. They also bitch at you for saving Benezia’s daughter, because… well they just stop offering reasons after a while. It’s more of a generic conversation that goes like this:

Shepherd: Yes, council?

Council: You fucking suck shepherd, you should’ve done this totally differently.

Shepherd: what do you mean by ‘this’? You’re being really vague, and I don’t know what yuo’re talking about.

Council: STFU and don’t do it again.

Shepherd: What is ‘it’? What do you want me to not do again?

Council: As always you’re free to do whatever you want. Council out.

Your conversations with Admiral Hackett are even more perplexing.

Hackett: You need to do this thing for me.

Shepherd: Uh, ok, I’m not a member of the ANS anymore bro. I’m a SPECTRE, I work for the council, not you.

Hackett: You’re still a member of the ANS.

Shepherd: Not according to you, the council or Captain Anderson.

Hackett: Well you’re still human so you have to help us.

Shepherd: Um… huh?

And as for Ambassador Udri or whatever, he’s just a blight on this game, and his only job is apparently to tell you you’re stupid for everything you do. The world is just not enjoyable, with everyone who has any authority alternately telling you that you’re wrong or stupid, or trying to tug at your heart strings. In the end, I told Joker to fuck the council because I hated them, and when Ambassador Dumbass wanted me to make him king of the galaxy I just wanted to introduce him to my pimp hand… or more accurately my pimp assault rifle.

All in all, this game has some great side quests and a few moments that were almost exceptional scattered throughout the game next to moments that were exceptional. The storyline is shit, however, and is completely contrived and forced, much like the more recent Harry Potter novels. Every step of the way I feel like I’m being shoved down a ridiculous path that I don’t want to take. The dialogue system contributes to this, along the lines of Ass Effect over on Something Awful. I feel like if I select the dialogue option “console him” my character is just as likely to say “Fuck you you whiney bastard now on your feet asswipe” as “I’m sorry you lost your mother, wife, and kids.” This never leaves… and in the end I felt like I wasn’t playing the game, I was watching someone else play it and occasionally giving him ideas on what to do.