Someone should tell the producers of this game that the name should be changed from Stray Gods: The Role-playing Musical to Stray Gods: The Interactive Visual Novel Where Characters Sing Their Lines Sometimes

Because this game is not a musical.

See, I'd like to think of myself as a musical enthusiast and by enthusiast I mean listening to the OBC recordings and watching slime tutorials on YouTube (iykyk). I know my fair share of musicals, both the standard live ones and the original movie musicals. The worst offense I could thing this alleged musical could do was to put songs at the wrongest times possible which is a common offense in movie musicals and Riverdale musical episodes.

Oh no, it was worst than that.

The moment the first song played, I sat there for a moment and questioned my perception of reality.

No, seriously, just what the hell are these lyrics?

Like a boat, lost at sea
With no sails, not a breeze

That is not a song. You cannot convince me that is a song. It's like if Hamilton opened with

Can someone please take a chance on me?
I'm here to make a legacy

And every single song I've heard is like that. There's no rhyme or reason. Even musicals that have conversation pieces within their songs have purpose and musicality. The aforementioned Lin Manuel Miranda is honestly so good at this (despite being annoyingly cringe).

I have to wonder has David Gaider ever seen a musical? Have any of the writers, producers and designers broke down ANY musical and studied it's composition? It truly does feel like Gaider and team thought that musicals = people singing lines. On that note, did no one on the team thought to hire a musical director or composer to assist with the game? Austin Wintory scored this game and while his work on Journey is beautiful and breathtaking, he has no musical credits and the score proves that he's wrong for this job.

That I think is the main problem with this game. The team behind it is so focused on hiring named talent that they didn't hire proper talent for the job. The studio is based on Australia which I know has a huge musical scene. They could lose a Troy Baker or an Ashley Johnson to hire local musical directors and composers to help with this project. No one held them at gunpoint and said to hire all of these known voice actors.

I'm seriously wondering if the musical component to this is a joke. Like did the dev team sat around a table and thought "Hahaha a game musical would be funny am I right?". It's an insult to RPG games and musicals everywhere.

Musical enthusiast, don't listen to the gamers saying you should play this game. They're lying. They don't know musicals like we do. Skip this game and listen to EPIC: The Musical instead if you haven't. At least the cast in there could actually sing.

This completed the dudebro-ification of the Mass Effect trilogy and to this day, 10 whole years since I completed it, I still don't know who I should be mad at. Is at EA for converting this to a generic third person military shooter with RPG elements? Is it at the Monster-chugging dudebros who ignore the "Customize Shepard" on their screens and act like Commander Shepard is a defined character with Mark Vanderloo's face as opposed to a character defined by the players?

Or was this the intended point of Mass Effect all along? In before someone yells at me that Drew Karpyshyn had a different ending in mind, the endings do not explain why Joker is a sleezy bro all of a sudden, Ashley's makeover, everything about EDI or inserting an Asian caricature man who is NOT a character to me. Frankly, I don't know if anything would've changed about the other 90% of the game if Karpyshyn never left Mass Effect.

In fact, despite only liking the red ending, the endings of this game are one of the few times this game pulled its head out of its generic third person shooter ass to remember that it could have some meaning. Control and my beloathed, Synthesis had good concepts indeed. Too bad they were so poorly executed.