Mass Effect Reflections and Ponderings
Mass Effect Andromeda unlocks for regular play tonight at midnight (eastern). That's probably just enough time to create a character before I go to bed. Whee! Well, regardless, it has been on my mind of late. Heck, thanks to the commercials, I have Rag'n'Bone Man's Human in my head. While I've seen it said that Mass Effect is like a more recent Star Wars in terms of genre impact, I don't think I can go so far. Still, it is a pretty major series.
Andromeda has caught a good bit of pre-release flack for wonky animations and iffy dialogue. Most of the time, this seems to be mentioned in the context of "sometimes it's good, sometimes it's fine, sometimes it's ridiculously bad." It's a presumably-valid criticism that I think I can live with. I'm still looking forward to the game and to seeing what they make of the setting and story with a new direction.
I still don't really like the way the original trilogy closed out. ME3 as a game was thoroughly enjoyable. Heck, I even played the coop multiplayer for months after finishing the campaign - I'm looking forward to more of that, too. But I was disappointed with the direction of the story since the beginning of ME3 made it clear the fight against the Reapers had devolved into a MacGuffin-hunt. That bothered me far more than the specific "press a button, get a color" endings to the game itself. Someone recently objected to my calling the Crucible a deus ex machina, saying it didn't appear out of nowhere but was threaded through the series. Even upon review, I don't really see that.
In ME, Prothean devices were a thing, but the plot revolved around discovering the Reapers, not even discussing any way to beat them in general. Sovereign was brought down by a combined effort of allied space forces. ME2 was about fighting agents of the Reapers - the Collectors - in an effort to delay and build up defenses against the Reapers themselves. Things like the Thanix Cannon were seen as technological improvements that might give an edge. The Illusive Man made the argument for taking Collector tech, regardless of moral implications, to help fortify against the Reapers. In one of the DLC missions, a mass relay can be destroyed to slow down the Reaper advance. All of that sets up a difficult, but relatively conventional, fight against the Reapers.
Only in the beginning of ME3 is the Crucible revealed as a presumed super-weapon against the Reapers. And even at that, it's sort of hillarious how much is thrown into building this thing even when it becomes apparent 1) it didn't save any previous civilizations, 2) no one knows what it actually is supposed to do, and 3) no one really has an idea how to finish/activate it until the last minute.
That's not the part that got all the media attention, but that's the part that bothered me the most. It placed all the importance on a single "magical" thing, which downplays the value of everything done in the previous games.
Andromeda shakes off the burden of a lot of that with a relative fresh start. There's a lot of possibility, though we'll have to see where it ends up going.
Andromeda has caught a good bit of pre-release flack for wonky animations and iffy dialogue. Most of the time, this seems to be mentioned in the context of "sometimes it's good, sometimes it's fine, sometimes it's ridiculously bad." It's a presumably-valid criticism that I think I can live with. I'm still looking forward to the game and to seeing what they make of the setting and story with a new direction.
I still don't really like the way the original trilogy closed out. ME3 as a game was thoroughly enjoyable. Heck, I even played the coop multiplayer for months after finishing the campaign - I'm looking forward to more of that, too. But I was disappointed with the direction of the story since the beginning of ME3 made it clear the fight against the Reapers had devolved into a MacGuffin-hunt. That bothered me far more than the specific "press a button, get a color" endings to the game itself. Someone recently objected to my calling the Crucible a deus ex machina, saying it didn't appear out of nowhere but was threaded through the series. Even upon review, I don't really see that.
In ME, Prothean devices were a thing, but the plot revolved around discovering the Reapers, not even discussing any way to beat them in general. Sovereign was brought down by a combined effort of allied space forces. ME2 was about fighting agents of the Reapers - the Collectors - in an effort to delay and build up defenses against the Reapers themselves. Things like the Thanix Cannon were seen as technological improvements that might give an edge. The Illusive Man made the argument for taking Collector tech, regardless of moral implications, to help fortify against the Reapers. In one of the DLC missions, a mass relay can be destroyed to slow down the Reaper advance. All of that sets up a difficult, but relatively conventional, fight against the Reapers.
Only in the beginning of ME3 is the Crucible revealed as a presumed super-weapon against the Reapers. And even at that, it's sort of hillarious how much is thrown into building this thing even when it becomes apparent 1) it didn't save any previous civilizations, 2) no one knows what it actually is supposed to do, and 3) no one really has an idea how to finish/activate it until the last minute.
That's not the part that got all the media attention, but that's the part that bothered me the most. It placed all the importance on a single "magical" thing, which downplays the value of everything done in the previous games.
Andromeda shakes off the burden of a lot of that with a relative fresh start. There's a lot of possibility, though we'll have to see where it ends up going.
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