I imagine that anybody who follows me is long past the moment of “oh Mass Effect is actually extremely fucking wack, politically” so I’m not going to spend a lot of time here on how deeply evil this game is except shoutouts to Wrex you deserve better, anti-shoutouts to Garrus I know you’re everyone’s boyfriend but you’re one of the most evil people of all time, rest in piss Ashley, awful awful woman.
Instead I want to talk about the thing the game is actually ABOUT and what it struck me as being really about when taken in its totality. At first glance Mass Effect seems like it’s sticking pretty much beat for beat to the early Bioware formula: tutorial, three discrete levels in any order, fourth level with a context shaking twist, and a funnel level into an endgame scenario. But Mass Effect has something that none of the other Bioware games that follow this specific formula do: a shit ton of completely optional side content. And while I think you can certainly derive what I got out of this game if you ignore it, which mostly people do, because it is obviously unfinished and largely uncompelling in the way you want a story-driven RPG to be compelling, I think that engaging in every single bit of it really helped this game reveal itself to me.
Now I have to come clean up front and admit that I am simply an enormous pervert (mako enjoyer). I like how it controls, this gigantic, floaty, unwieldy thing that will swing sharply in whatever direction you indicate at even the lightest touch, that takes forever to start or stop but is always a moment’s notice away from flipping fully onto its back because you ran over a small rock, that unless a surface is literally like 90 degrees vertical you can p much scale it no probbo. But you can get good at it! There is consistency to its floatiness, there is art and skill to the propulsion you get from its jump and the ways you can manipulate your airborne angles with it if you’re positioned correctly. The Legendary Edition says they “improved” the mako but all they really did was make it heavier which may have made driving it immediately easier but ironically makes climbing mountains and getting out of harsh terrain much more difficult because you have more mass and can’t accelerate as much from a stop or a precarious angle.
And yet driving across infinite essentially identical planets brings me so much joy, one of my favorite feelings in all of video games. It’s amazing how much you can change the feel of a place by changing the dominant color scheme, or adding a second color, or putting a harsh filter over the screen, or putting a massive moon in the sky, or environmental hazards, or any combination of these things. These places don’t feel distinct but Mass Effect, contrary to popular opinion, is actually a beautiful game, one that made up for limited animations and less-than-cutting-edge graphics with an incredible command of color and filters and art design. That stuff all stands out even in its largely featureless wildernesses, where you only company will ever be one of four kinds of salvage operations, a random boss fight, or the planet’s designated side quest location, of which there are maybe seven unique maps divvied across like 30 planets?
These maps are enormous and truly empty. If they’re dotted with small scraps of stuff for you to loot it’s almost never shit you care about or even shit with a story to tell. There’s no music and no ambient dialogue from your companions and no sound of any kind other than the wind and the noise of your engine encroaching on the silence of a planet that does not care. Because this is what Mass Effect is ultimately about: that the world is big, bigger than we can understand and certainly bigger than we can master. That to think we can know it is arrogance and that to think we can tame it is suicide.
Everywhere you go in Mass Effect you find people who have overextended, who have fucked around and found out. Usually they’re long dead. Sometimes this is dramatic, like their ship went down and they were killed by a large worm monster but mostly it’s just that something went wrong with their ship and they crashed on one of the overwhelming majority of planets in even the charted galaxy where no one lives, and even with their distress beacon going they’re too far out for anyone to ever find them because they were brave enough to be out here for a reason that suddenly seems very small in the scope of the death the universe is about to hit them with. Even the little largely scientific descriptions of planets that you get when you first scan them are often filled with small stories of people who died there for whatever reason. Explorers, pirates, settlers, whatever. All kinds of planets. All kinds of reasons. Always dead.
But it’s more than just this. Mass Effect isn’t just about how Nature Is Scary and We Need To Respect it. I think it’s becoming evident that Mass Effect is about how no matter how times we’re warned about this, we just won’t learn this lesson. We refuse it, we reject it. It’s a game where literally every main plot scenario is driven by people who have Fucked Around And Found Out, re: some primordial phenomenon, usually natural. Liara investigates prothean ruins alone and messes with shit she, the known universe’s foremost prothean expert, doesn’t understand and gets caught in a deathtrap, saved entirely by happenstance. On Feros, Exogeni Corp. unearths the thorian, a singular and ancient life form so old and obtuse that it defies the classifications we’ve used for plants and animals for hundreds of years, and even when they realize that it’s dangerous, and killing people, and possibly irreversibly destroying their brains, they just let it happen for research, until things spiral further out of control. Binary Helix is doing almost the exact same shit on the Rachni, who very quickly massacre everyone at their remote research base in response to the abusive way they’ve been resurrected. Let’s not forget either that the Peak 15 research base is cut off from the outside world by the extremely hostile and untamed weather conditions of Noveria itself; part security feature for shady corporations, equal part menacing trap when something goes wrong.
The thing is though, this doesn’t just happen, right? None of these things are innate to the conception of personhood. Most of the people you meet in these games are not enthusiastically being evil scientists and frontiersmen, they’re normal exploited workers trying to eke out a living in a world that’s forcing them. These disasters are the logical endpoint of the hypercapitalistic world that every species has to buy into hard to participate in galactic society. Everyone’s doing it. It’s a huge focus of the game, how deep we are in the rot. The game doesn’t fully realize how bad this is; sure, corporations are often the villains but their place as the glue that runs society and holds it together, the idea that all news, all entertainment, all life is filtered through a corporate veneer even less veiled than our own real life one is taken for granted. A runoff of the game constantly trying to make you feel like your choices matter and it can see what you’re doing is that every news report you might overhear in an elevator is about corporate colonies you visit, every shop is selling weapons and armor and all gossip is about military outfits and their trevails against pirates and extrasolar robotic boogeymen. The military and the frontier and the private business are all the same thing and while this world is broadened somewhat in the sequels, in Mass Effect they’re near the ONLY thing.
This need to not only study but to replicate and synthesize and weaponize the thorian, to recreate and subjugate the rachni, to create a bred army of mindless krogan slaves. The way the human government implants children with ever improving but ever-dangerous biotic amps with devastating lifelong side effects and abandoning them with no support as soon as the next generation of hardware comes along. Even simply the constant, omnipresent need to expand, to colonize new planets and dominate their ecosystems and strip them of everything valuable and force them into a state of habitability and relative comfort for the few species who exist in the realm of citadel space. What can these things be driven by but the demands of capital? Of eternal growth? Of wealth over humanity? Constantly in this game we’re punished for being this way but never does anyone figure it out.
Then there are, of course, the reapers. The ultimate expression of nature’s unknowability. Sovereign enters this story like a sledgehammer, and taken at face value (and without a reason not to do so), his words suggest the terrifying and infinite reality of our smallness in a world that rejects our attempts to reign it into our shitty and selfish frameworks. The protheans are ancient and mysterious? Sovereign is older, and killed them, seemingly and somehow. The rachni nearly wiped out everyone in the galaxy? Sovereign is so unconcerned with the might of the galaxy’s fleets that he doesn’t even acknowledge them in the game’s climax, he just moves through ships like they’re air, destroying them almost unknowingly, and it takes the combined might of literally everyone who is physically able to show up to kill him. He’s one reaper of untold numbers. The thorian was frightening because it defied classification and because it had brainwashing pheromones? Sovereign seems to warp perception simply by its presence. He is not only an AI like the geth but a truly living machine. He sort of explains stuff to you but it doesn’t even feel like he really cares all that much. He says scary stuff but it doesn’t feel like he’s trying to scare you; he’s just like this. “You exist because we allow it. You will end because we demand it.” What does he mean by this? It doesn’t matter. Understanding Sovereign isn't important. It might be to us, we WANT to understand, but he doesn't care if we do or not. We don’t matter. We can’t impose ourselves onto Sovereign. Even when we win the fight, how many other Sovereigns are on their way? Infinite, it seems. Living on a real Earth in 2022, as it begins to die more publicly than ever, and begins to turn on humanity in ways more and more obvious to the naked eye, and we continue to harvest it anyway, Sovereign hits me harder than before.
Where this reading stumbles, of course, is that Mass Effect itself doesn’t realize what a compelling case it’s made against its heroes and its world and every leadership body that populates it. Mass Effect is not a game that is saying on purpose to Drop The Meteor, that the Earth will be better off. The game ends, no matter how heroically or cruelly, with the defiant assertion of our right to conquer, our correctness in our way of life. It doesn’t realize how damned that sounds in the wake of how vile everyone in authority we meet is, how many victims we are. That in so valiantly preserving a status quo so rotten they are only digging a deeper reactionary hole.
I don’t think these feelings will be followed up on. I don’t recall Mass Effects 2 and 3 having the kind of relationship to the natural world that this game has, and obviously their narrative and thematic throughlines emerge strongly if discordantly from one another. Andromeda is deeply concerned with explicit colonialism in a way that only exists on the edges of Mass Effect 1. But as a stand alone experience I think Mass Effect hits. It is distracted by its vile politics and military aggrandizement but by insisting on staying out in the weeds in my stupid rover or pouring over planet descriptions for like 2/3rds of my time, that stuff fades in my memory just a little bit, even just a week out from finishing the game again. Much better to cruise across the plains and over the mountains, and feel small, and find nothing on the other side.
Instead I want to talk about the thing the game is actually ABOUT and what it struck me as being really about when taken in its totality. At first glance Mass Effect seems like it’s sticking pretty much beat for beat to the early Bioware formula: tutorial, three discrete levels in any order, fourth level with a context shaking twist, and a funnel level into an endgame scenario. But Mass Effect has something that none of the other Bioware games that follow this specific formula do: a shit ton of completely optional side content. And while I think you can certainly derive what I got out of this game if you ignore it, which mostly people do, because it is obviously unfinished and largely uncompelling in the way you want a story-driven RPG to be compelling, I think that engaging in every single bit of it really helped this game reveal itself to me.
Now I have to come clean up front and admit that I am simply an enormous pervert (mako enjoyer). I like how it controls, this gigantic, floaty, unwieldy thing that will swing sharply in whatever direction you indicate at even the lightest touch, that takes forever to start or stop but is always a moment’s notice away from flipping fully onto its back because you ran over a small rock, that unless a surface is literally like 90 degrees vertical you can p much scale it no probbo. But you can get good at it! There is consistency to its floatiness, there is art and skill to the propulsion you get from its jump and the ways you can manipulate your airborne angles with it if you’re positioned correctly. The Legendary Edition says they “improved” the mako but all they really did was make it heavier which may have made driving it immediately easier but ironically makes climbing mountains and getting out of harsh terrain much more difficult because you have more mass and can’t accelerate as much from a stop or a precarious angle.
And yet driving across infinite essentially identical planets brings me so much joy, one of my favorite feelings in all of video games. It’s amazing how much you can change the feel of a place by changing the dominant color scheme, or adding a second color, or putting a harsh filter over the screen, or putting a massive moon in the sky, or environmental hazards, or any combination of these things. These places don’t feel distinct but Mass Effect, contrary to popular opinion, is actually a beautiful game, one that made up for limited animations and less-than-cutting-edge graphics with an incredible command of color and filters and art design. That stuff all stands out even in its largely featureless wildernesses, where you only company will ever be one of four kinds of salvage operations, a random boss fight, or the planet’s designated side quest location, of which there are maybe seven unique maps divvied across like 30 planets?
These maps are enormous and truly empty. If they’re dotted with small scraps of stuff for you to loot it’s almost never shit you care about or even shit with a story to tell. There’s no music and no ambient dialogue from your companions and no sound of any kind other than the wind and the noise of your engine encroaching on the silence of a planet that does not care. Because this is what Mass Effect is ultimately about: that the world is big, bigger than we can understand and certainly bigger than we can master. That to think we can know it is arrogance and that to think we can tame it is suicide.
Everywhere you go in Mass Effect you find people who have overextended, who have fucked around and found out. Usually they’re long dead. Sometimes this is dramatic, like their ship went down and they were killed by a large worm monster but mostly it’s just that something went wrong with their ship and they crashed on one of the overwhelming majority of planets in even the charted galaxy where no one lives, and even with their distress beacon going they’re too far out for anyone to ever find them because they were brave enough to be out here for a reason that suddenly seems very small in the scope of the death the universe is about to hit them with. Even the little largely scientific descriptions of planets that you get when you first scan them are often filled with small stories of people who died there for whatever reason. Explorers, pirates, settlers, whatever. All kinds of planets. All kinds of reasons. Always dead.
But it’s more than just this. Mass Effect isn’t just about how Nature Is Scary and We Need To Respect it. I think it’s becoming evident that Mass Effect is about how no matter how times we’re warned about this, we just won’t learn this lesson. We refuse it, we reject it. It’s a game where literally every main plot scenario is driven by people who have Fucked Around And Found Out, re: some primordial phenomenon, usually natural. Liara investigates prothean ruins alone and messes with shit she, the known universe’s foremost prothean expert, doesn’t understand and gets caught in a deathtrap, saved entirely by happenstance. On Feros, Exogeni Corp. unearths the thorian, a singular and ancient life form so old and obtuse that it defies the classifications we’ve used for plants and animals for hundreds of years, and even when they realize that it’s dangerous, and killing people, and possibly irreversibly destroying their brains, they just let it happen for research, until things spiral further out of control. Binary Helix is doing almost the exact same shit on the Rachni, who very quickly massacre everyone at their remote research base in response to the abusive way they’ve been resurrected. Let’s not forget either that the Peak 15 research base is cut off from the outside world by the extremely hostile and untamed weather conditions of Noveria itself; part security feature for shady corporations, equal part menacing trap when something goes wrong.
The thing is though, this doesn’t just happen, right? None of these things are innate to the conception of personhood. Most of the people you meet in these games are not enthusiastically being evil scientists and frontiersmen, they’re normal exploited workers trying to eke out a living in a world that’s forcing them. These disasters are the logical endpoint of the hypercapitalistic world that every species has to buy into hard to participate in galactic society. Everyone’s doing it. It’s a huge focus of the game, how deep we are in the rot. The game doesn’t fully realize how bad this is; sure, corporations are often the villains but their place as the glue that runs society and holds it together, the idea that all news, all entertainment, all life is filtered through a corporate veneer even less veiled than our own real life one is taken for granted. A runoff of the game constantly trying to make you feel like your choices matter and it can see what you’re doing is that every news report you might overhear in an elevator is about corporate colonies you visit, every shop is selling weapons and armor and all gossip is about military outfits and their trevails against pirates and extrasolar robotic boogeymen. The military and the frontier and the private business are all the same thing and while this world is broadened somewhat in the sequels, in Mass Effect they’re near the ONLY thing.
This need to not only study but to replicate and synthesize and weaponize the thorian, to recreate and subjugate the rachni, to create a bred army of mindless krogan slaves. The way the human government implants children with ever improving but ever-dangerous biotic amps with devastating lifelong side effects and abandoning them with no support as soon as the next generation of hardware comes along. Even simply the constant, omnipresent need to expand, to colonize new planets and dominate their ecosystems and strip them of everything valuable and force them into a state of habitability and relative comfort for the few species who exist in the realm of citadel space. What can these things be driven by but the demands of capital? Of eternal growth? Of wealth over humanity? Constantly in this game we’re punished for being this way but never does anyone figure it out.
Then there are, of course, the reapers. The ultimate expression of nature’s unknowability. Sovereign enters this story like a sledgehammer, and taken at face value (and without a reason not to do so), his words suggest the terrifying and infinite reality of our smallness in a world that rejects our attempts to reign it into our shitty and selfish frameworks. The protheans are ancient and mysterious? Sovereign is older, and killed them, seemingly and somehow. The rachni nearly wiped out everyone in the galaxy? Sovereign is so unconcerned with the might of the galaxy’s fleets that he doesn’t even acknowledge them in the game’s climax, he just moves through ships like they’re air, destroying them almost unknowingly, and it takes the combined might of literally everyone who is physically able to show up to kill him. He’s one reaper of untold numbers. The thorian was frightening because it defied classification and because it had brainwashing pheromones? Sovereign seems to warp perception simply by its presence. He is not only an AI like the geth but a truly living machine. He sort of explains stuff to you but it doesn’t even feel like he really cares all that much. He says scary stuff but it doesn’t feel like he’s trying to scare you; he’s just like this. “You exist because we allow it. You will end because we demand it.” What does he mean by this? It doesn’t matter. Understanding Sovereign isn't important. It might be to us, we WANT to understand, but he doesn't care if we do or not. We don’t matter. We can’t impose ourselves onto Sovereign. Even when we win the fight, how many other Sovereigns are on their way? Infinite, it seems. Living on a real Earth in 2022, as it begins to die more publicly than ever, and begins to turn on humanity in ways more and more obvious to the naked eye, and we continue to harvest it anyway, Sovereign hits me harder than before.
Where this reading stumbles, of course, is that Mass Effect itself doesn’t realize what a compelling case it’s made against its heroes and its world and every leadership body that populates it. Mass Effect is not a game that is saying on purpose to Drop The Meteor, that the Earth will be better off. The game ends, no matter how heroically or cruelly, with the defiant assertion of our right to conquer, our correctness in our way of life. It doesn’t realize how damned that sounds in the wake of how vile everyone in authority we meet is, how many victims we are. That in so valiantly preserving a status quo so rotten they are only digging a deeper reactionary hole.
I don’t think these feelings will be followed up on. I don’t recall Mass Effects 2 and 3 having the kind of relationship to the natural world that this game has, and obviously their narrative and thematic throughlines emerge strongly if discordantly from one another. Andromeda is deeply concerned with explicit colonialism in a way that only exists on the edges of Mass Effect 1. But as a stand alone experience I think Mass Effect hits. It is distracted by its vile politics and military aggrandizement but by insisting on staying out in the weeds in my stupid rover or pouring over planet descriptions for like 2/3rds of my time, that stuff fades in my memory just a little bit, even just a week out from finishing the game again. Much better to cruise across the plains and over the mountains, and feel small, and find nothing on the other side.
15 Comments
that’s what i’m telling u
Fuck yes, Mako Enjoyers rise up!! I love that goofy lil tank/rover thing. And the rest of the review is great, too!!
Truly it is good to be among friends. I’m playing 2 right now and I’m not gonna say that the firewalker feels terrible or nothin but i certainly don’t LIKE it. Just another example of James Vega being right and cool actually
YES, Mako fans unite. While everyone spent years moaning about it, I have 100%ed this game twice and enjoyed every second of planet scanning/roving, and by God I'll probably do it a third time at some point. Could never really articulate why it was so appealing outside of being relaxing and Star-Trek-y, so thanks for doing it for me lol. That whole side content system is what makes ME1 unique and superior, for me.
I was like completely obsessed with Mass Effect as a teenager and I still know a lot of the codex and stuff by heart it turns out, but I definitely have enjoyed it more upon returning to it after like six or seven years away rather than playing the whole franchise every year like I used to do. Despite how much my overall opinion of BioWare’s work has depreciated over the years I think ME’s universe is still one of my personal favorite sci-fi ones and I do really like all the flavor text even if I think the actual content is frequently really extremely bad lol
ME1 in particular just a pleasant game to hang out in when everyone shuts the fuck up but DESPITE EVERYTHING (and it’s a big Everything in 2) I am having a nice time with 2 as well
Even at the time I thought replacing the Mako with just looking at some wave graphs and shooting probes was shit in the funniest way. No we're not even going to try this is just nothing now. You can probe Uranus and the computer says probing Uranus
iirc the mako replacement dlc was like free day one dlc but guess who did not have internet to get dlc bay beeeeeeeeeeeee it’s okay tho because it sucked ass
think the funniest (atrocious) part of the Hammerhead was how it was the main travel method for the Overlord DLC which means you have a terrible and floaty vehicle going through a terrible and boring DLC with terrible and offensive writing
Truly overlord’s sins will never be fully tallied
one of the most "what was Bioware doin with this" things they've done, which is quite a tall order
at least it's the most skippable DLC of the series next to Pinnacle Station
at least it's the most skippable DLC of the series next to Pinnacle Station
looking back on this i would say that the most "what was bioware doin with this" in my head is jade empire lol just remembered that existed the other day holy shit guys
I really love how you note that the most obvious angle on this game would be to critique its politics and then choose to talk about the themes happening throughout and the euphoria of planetary traversal. It really informs the multitude of elements a game can present between horrid politics, unintentionally poignant parts of a world, and the beauty of virtual space. Great review from you as always!
@bellshade thank you!! Mass effect 1 in particular works on this level in a way its sequels don’t because of all the extra Stuff that this one has that gets stripped out of those in favor of a laser focus on the narratives which are like, y’know, often rough in the worldviews they present. But like everything that is bad in me2 and 3 is bad here too, WORSE in a lot of ways because I genuinely think it reads a lot of the time like the writers on this game didn’t expect players to empathize with people like the krogans, xenophobia in general is treated as a normal and defensible and sometimes good thing, you’re often encouraged to not try to understand other cultures, etc.
and i didn’t want to just write a list of all the shit that sucks in this game if you’re a leftist because like people have done that thoroughly and better than i would. so i did want to write about the experience i had which was genuinely joyous and wonderful a lot of the time and almost all of that came from types of content that is gone from the following games which focus with much more intensity on their Cinematic Narratives (which is not a bad thing imo, just a difference in approach). (the bad thing is that they’re mediocre shooters).
but in exploring stuff you simply cannot get away from the game’s politics, which do inform every single bit of the game world. i can’t claim that i think mass effect’s world and scenario were designed badly or sloppily, and in fact i think they’re the best thing about the franchise. they’re just also vile. so yeah i guess this was a very roundabout way of saying that i wasn’t thinking to like specifically avoid ragging on ME’s politics as much as i feel like what i’m putting on the table is a synthesis of the written elements and the play in a way that’s unavoidable given how thoroughly the politics permeate the game.
i do find myself thinking about Mass Effect 1 a lot now since this last time i played it, which i cannot say for ME2, which i got bored of after like fifteen hours and did stop playing entirely after i was away from my PlayStation for a week, not because i chose this but because i FORGOT about it, which i couldn’t imagine doing with the first game, so that’s not nothing i guess.
anyway. yeah. just kind of musing.
and i didn’t want to just write a list of all the shit that sucks in this game if you’re a leftist because like people have done that thoroughly and better than i would. so i did want to write about the experience i had which was genuinely joyous and wonderful a lot of the time and almost all of that came from types of content that is gone from the following games which focus with much more intensity on their Cinematic Narratives (which is not a bad thing imo, just a difference in approach). (the bad thing is that they’re mediocre shooters).
but in exploring stuff you simply cannot get away from the game’s politics, which do inform every single bit of the game world. i can’t claim that i think mass effect’s world and scenario were designed badly or sloppily, and in fact i think they’re the best thing about the franchise. they’re just also vile. so yeah i guess this was a very roundabout way of saying that i wasn’t thinking to like specifically avoid ragging on ME’s politics as much as i feel like what i’m putting on the table is a synthesis of the written elements and the play in a way that’s unavoidable given how thoroughly the politics permeate the game.
i do find myself thinking about Mass Effect 1 a lot now since this last time i played it, which i cannot say for ME2, which i got bored of after like fifteen hours and did stop playing entirely after i was away from my PlayStation for a week, not because i chose this but because i FORGOT about it, which i couldn’t imagine doing with the first game, so that’s not nothing i guess.
anyway. yeah. just kind of musing.
MeowPewterMeow
1 year ago
(this ones a banger my friend)