I hardly knew him really. If he could be called a 'him'.
As the computational aggregate of myriad thinking machines, he was technically not a he. But by that quarter he was technically mindless as well, something I am certain he was not.
I'm talking about Legion, one of the last, and one of the best, members of my elite team assembled to deal with the Reaper menace on an all-or-nothing suicide mission to the heart of the galaxy.
I hardly knew him. But I knew that he was intelligent. I knew that he was good with a rifle. And I knew that I could count on him.
So it should come as no surprise when, in the denouement of Mass Effect 2, I almost bawled like a little girl when he took a rocket to the face and experienced the ugly reality of Canon Death. I paused, for a second, to reflect on what it means for a member of a hivemind machine race to experience what we humans can only clumsily refer to as "death". Shouldn't it really not mean anything? Isn't it sort of just like losing a finger, or drinking away a brain cell? But at the end of the day, when those who remained buried the fallen, and Legion lay in his coffin with his arms crossed and his systems cold... I realized that it wasn't the same. He was unique. He was my crew member. He was my... friend.
Q_Q
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So yeah, Mass Effect 2. Pretty much the bees knees. The first game was an excellent evolution of the RPG, but a clumsy telling of a fantastical story, and a yet-to-be-realized combat system. Sort of like a 12-year-old's rendition of The Illiad. All the right pieces were there, the combat was cathartic, but clunky, the world's expansive, but limited in scope, the conversations a revelation, but stilted, but it had yet to all come together in a coherent whole.
The sequel is the logical progression toward perfection that the series really needed. All the clunky and bloated parts of the first game, the menus, the unorganized piles of loot, the empty planets, have all been Occam's Razor'd to their basic elements. Back to formula, so to speak.
You're still *blank* Shepperd, bald space marine extraordinaire, Captain Kirk with a haircut and a GUN. But now instead of piles and piles of loot that you ended up just selling anyways, you upgrade your equipment maybe five times, and you only have to worry about four or five skill sets when you level up. To complement the downsizing of the PG in RPG, the combat goes much smoother. Guns have ammo and reload, the cover system works better, and now you get three hotkeys instead of one. Everything moves faster and gets more intense, and feels more like firing a gun than crunching numbers. It may seem like a dumbing down of the genre, but wow RPGs really need this. The player feels more like they're an active role in the story, instead of just an overlord choosing "attack" (or organizing fifty fucking types of armor). In Mass Effect 2, you don't play the role of Commander Shepperd, you are analogous to Commander Shepperd. He (or she) is your (possibly lesbian) avatar.
Not even a little lesbian
Of course, no one cares about the combat in an RPG if the story isn't compelling. In this area, I have to concede that Mass Effect 2 has Empire syndrome. It can be argued that the plot suffers as a result of being the middle child in a trilogy (I know it's a trilogy because the loading screens basically fucking announce Mass Effect 3), and it does sort of feel like you're tooling around waiting for the Reapers after they were such a huge threat in the first game but are only sort of behind the scenes in this game. But the emotion is there, and the agency is ever-present. There is a threat at hand, but this time your hadns aren't tied the whole game so as to not do anything about it. Still, you spend maybe 80% of the game assembling your (terrific) ensemble and preparing for a singular push against that threat, which can kind of distract from these EVIL FUCKING ALIENS PLOTTING THE DEMISE OF INTELLIGENT LIFE.
And then there's the issue of never actually meeting the primary protagonist personally. He's sort of just like Dr. Claw. You can see the strings and you can hear the voice, but you never get to slap on the cuffs yourself.
Okay, I highlighted a lot of negative points, but really, all the talky parts are great. The story is really more like a collection of essays, a character driven collage of names and faces, of heart and soul. You help these people because you want their gun parallel with yours, but you when they stand next to you and cover your six, they feel like your friends. You like some. You hate some. You love some. Podcast listeners are aware of my infatuation with the (sadly fictitious) Tali, but everyone else gives you adequate reason to be liked or disliked. You get attached. And though the finale of this game doesn't have the plot impact that the first had, the stakes are raised with the possibility that anybody could fall to Canon Death, including you if disregard the helping hands reaching out to you. I ended up being so nervous during the last battles, that I made some rough choices. They obviously weren't the right ones because my crew was considerably lighter on exit, but I got shit done and I saved the galaxy, and Jeff Shepperd will have to live with his mistakes as well as his triumphs.
Mass Effect 2 gets a one out of one.
Tali gets a 1000/1
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