With the mixed reception, failure to meet financial expectations, and eventual abandonment of Anthem, BioWare became yet another victim of EA's money-driven decisions hollowing out the spirit of the company, and the disappointing release of Mass Effect: Andromeda just two years earlier made this blow hit just that much harder. Before all of this happened, though, their legacy as a studio responsible for continuously making innovative and gripping RPGs was virtually untainted, and since Mass Effect is probably their most popular original IP, I wanted to have the first game in the series serve as my intro to their games. Although I have been quite busy over the past month and had to devote most of my time to other things, my actual playthrough of Mass Effect only took roughly 12 hours, and while not every element of this game clicked with me, I still liked enough of its elements to say that I've enjoyed my time with it overall.

When it comes to these kinds of space opera games, I often find their core stories more interesting than their backstories and other bits of extra information, but I was surprised to find that this wasn't the case here. Don't get me wrong, the plot of Mass Effect had me invested right from the outset, but I found the game's lore to be genuinely fascinating, and I ended up having a lot more fun reading about the different races, wars, planets, politics, and technology that surrounded Commander Shepard's attempts at stopping the reawakening of the Reapers than I thought I would, and they also complimented the sleek art direction and awesome synth score. The varied cast of characters in Mass Effect also helped sell this game's world to me, because even with the stiff, robotic animations and use of real-time cutscenes where textures only render about half the time, the game's solid writing and especially great voice acting made each member of my crew feel three-dimensional. Despite the binary morality system at play here where you can only really choose to be either explicitly good or explicitly bad, the more major decisions you make throughout Mass Effect are able to transcend that entirely, as they heavily affect the outcome of the story while also having enough layers to them to make choosing the best option a much more complicated process than it initially seems.

In terms of its writing, presentation, and role-playing elements, Mass Effect was really strong, but what held it back for me was its actual gameplay. The game's combat is definitely playable, but it shows its age in almost every way, with the imbalanced weapons, clunky menus for using your abilities, and a barely functioning cover system made each shootout feel less like a game of tactical decision-making and more like randomly firing at whatever's in front of you and hoping that you don't get killed in the process. Speaking of which, the squad-based elements of Mass Effect didn't work at all for me, as the limited commands and genuinely awful AI from my squad mates just ended up making me use them as distractions or human shields more than anything. The worst element of Mass Effect would easily be the Mako, with its unreliable controls and the repetitive enemies and layouts for its sequences made using it feel like a chore during the campaign and a complete waste of time whenever it came to the already forgettable side content. Despite its flaws, I still enjoyed my time with Mass Effect overall, and while I do plan on completing the trilogy at some point, I'm pretty sure that my next BioWare game will be Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.