The Epic Mass Effect Intro Post
Mar. 15th, 2012 12:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eponymous_roseBecause I do these for all my fandoms, eventually, have The Epic Mass Effect Introduction Post! Mass Effect was sort of my gateway gaming experience, and I finally got into it after seeing a post on my flist, so hey, maybe someone else is just waiting for an excuse?
Okay, and also I wanted to do something geeky for Pi Day. Happy 3/14! Well, belatedly, because it took me longer to write this up than anticipated.
Mass Effect is a trilogy of sci-fi games for the Xbox, PS3, and the PC (I've only played the PC versions of all three) - the first came out in 2007, the second in 2010, and the third just came out last week. It's produced by Bioware, a Canadian video game developer that I first heard about via its employees doing an awesome smack-down of someone on the forums complaining about the same-sex romance options in their games. So that's a plus. (Note for Dragon Age players: yeah, Mass Effect does better than nearly any other sci-fi game I've encountered when it comes to acknowledging the existence of queer and/or female gamers, but that's not saying much. Expect a bit of a step backwards on that front, though the games do eventually stagger into the 21st/22nd century.)
Logistics-wise, Mass Effect is a cross between an RPG and a shooter, with its primary focus being interactive storytelling. Being someone who rarely has the patience for RPGs, and who finds shooters boring as heck, the way I latched onto this game surprised me. Generally speaking, you wander around the universe in a more-or-less free-form exploratory way, you stumble across plots, and you eventually find your way back to the overarching story. Whereas most games would have dialogue cutscenes between battles, the Mass Effect games keep it interactive throughout - so you can decide how your character responds to any given query, probe for more information, be sarcastic or sympathetic or totally uninterested, have your character get romantically involved, and occasionally make massive, galaxy-shaking decisions. Those decisions (and your user-created character) carry over from game to game, and affect your gaming experience in a variety of ways. Essentially, the game adapts to your decisions.
So it's up to you: should you be someone who upholds the law at all costs? Someone who does whatever it takes to get the job done? Someone who spends all their time (and credits) buying new fish for their fish tank? The choice is yours!
(This is a more-or-less spoiler-free intro! That took some doing, let me tell you.)
The Universe
So what's this Mass Effect thing all about? Like most sci-fi franchises, there's some pretty extensive worldbuilding going on - in fact, I'd say the first game is mostly worldbuilding (the second being mostly character development and the third being mostly plot). Or, uh, worldsbuilding. If you're a sci-fi fan, none of the concepts here will be mind-bogglingly new - it's a well-constructed universe, but it's definitely constructed on familiar foundations.
The year is, er, 2148, we'll start there. Humanity's doing its thing, starting to settle the edges of our solar system, getting resigned to the fact that we may be alone in the universe... and then explorers on Mars happen across a great whopping cache of alien technology. Long-abandoned and, I would imagine, very dusty alien technology, including data proving that said aliens were studying Cro-Magnon humans back in the day. Oh, and some information about something called a "mass relay" orbiting Pluto.
Now how the heck did we miss that?
As you may have guessed from the name of this thingummy and the name of the game, this is, in fact, a Very Important Thingummy. The "mass effect" is this universe's way of getting around what scientists call the Space-Is-Really-Fucking-Huge Problem. Essentially, think of them as running on plot-device-ium, in close proximity with handwavium (seriously, they have some pretty detailed explanations for all this in the game's Codex, give it a read-through if you have a few minutes). The end result, as I understand it, is that there's an element called Element Zero (eezo) that acts weirdly in electric fields - essentially, it allows you to increase or decrease the mass of any objects inside that electric field. Which, uh, lets FTL travel happen. Among other things.
Please click the above link to view a brief comic-form explanation that will answer allll your questions.
See? Easy as pie.
That Makes No Sense At All, But Whatever
Don't argue with me, bold subject heading! It's science, okay?
Anyway. Back to humanity. Their scientists can't reproduce the mass relay technology, but they do figure out how to activate the one sitting in their cosmic backyard, and send a crew through to, well, figure out what the heck's on the other side. Said relay spits the crew out in the Arcturus system... which also happens to be home to three other mass relays! Suddenly the galaxy seems a lot smaller. When the crew makes a triumphant (i.e., not disintegrated into component atoms) return to Earth, they're hailed as heroes, and Earth starts preparing for first contact in earnest, knowing it can't be far away.
So. Here's the thing. The Protheans, the long-extinct race that apparently invented mass relay technology (fun fact: if the name of the race is capitalized, they're probably extinct and either revered or feared), scattered these things all over the galaxy. And, as you might expect from the wacky characters depicted in the above comic, humanity's not alone out there. You might also expect that not all these races are keen to join the Big Happy Galactic Family, and occasionally jumping through an unexplored relay into an unexplored system can result in xenophobic retaliation up to and including genocidal destruction.
Fortunately, with what persists throughout the series as humanity's greatest virtue (i.e., sheer dumb luck), humanity's first random wanderings into activating dormant mass relays (like the one near Pluto) do not lead them into that kind of situation. Instead, in 2157, they catch the attention of the turians, a race with a strong cultural devotion to lawkeeping, duty to the whole over duty to the self, that sort of thing. You might imagine they don't take kindly to humanity blundering about in ways that could threaten the entire galactic community. Did I mention that they have lots and lots of guns and ships? Under the principle that ignorance is no excuse for endangering billions of lives, the turians attack the explorers, launching the First Contact War.
Humanity has officially met alien life. And pissed it off. Good job, humanity.
Only one of the would-be explorers escaped the turian attack and returned to the colony of Shanxi to tell the tale. In retaliation, the colony's commander sent out a force to attack the turians. Somewhat predictably, the turians attacked and occupied Shanxi, occasionally maintaining order by the simple expedient of dropping chunks of debris on the planet from orbit. Humanity sent out a bigger fleet, commanded by Admiral Kastanie Drescher, whom I am mainly mentioning because she has an awesome name. The turians, who'd thought humanity was pretty much limited to that one colony, were unprepared and forced back.
The turians figured to hell with trying to teach humanity a lesson, and started mobilizing for full-scale war. This... would probably not have ended in humanity's favour.
Fortunately, the Council intervened.
The Council?
Glad you asked, bold subject heading! Galactic civilization has been churning happily along for millennia without humanity's input, and part of that churning has involved establishing a seat of government aboard a surviving station, presumably left behind by the Protheans, called the Citadel.
Oh, and it's ridiculously huge. And gorgeous.
Basically, when asari (we'll get to them soon) explorers first found the Citadel, it was all ready for operation, maintained by a bunch of mysterious and utterly unfazeable bug-dudes known as Keepers, either incapable of or uninterested in communication. If something goes wrong, the Keepers will wander in and fix it. If new races discover the Citadel, the Keepers help them adjust. Their numbers mysteriously remain constant - if a Keeper is killed, another will take its place. The whole thing's very weird, but hey, don't look a gift space station in the mouth, I always say! The Protheans are mostly regarded as extremely benevolent sciencey-types, so it doesn't seem too odd that they'd leave a gift for future civilizations, as a legacy after their mysterious and total extinction.
Er. Okay. Maybe a little odd.
Anyway. The Citadel Council is essentially composed of representatives from the three most important/advanced/useful races in the galaxy (namely, the asari, the salarians, and the turians - we'll get to them soon as well). Other races of note get embassies aboard the Citadel, and are allowed to petition the Council. Many races don't recognize the authority of the Citadel Council, but since they're the ones with all the guns, it tends to be more of a murmur of discord and a "well fine, we'll stay over on this side of the galaxy, then!" approach rather than out-and-out war.
Anyway. Where was I? Oh, yes. Humanity and the turians are fighting. The Council intervenes, mostly because they're interested in humanity's demonstrated adaptability in spite of their... novel approach to diplomatic relations, and manages to broker a truce.
The results of this first contact situation are pretty much as you'd expect: humanity gets xenophobic, and the rest of the galaxy thinks of humanity as a bunch of blundering aggressors. Greeeat. On the plus side, though, humanity finally gets to take its place as the Freakin' New Guy of the galactic playing field. They also get their act together and form a Systems Alliance to consolidate human forces. In 2165, humanity is granted an embassy on the Citadel, which comes as a bit of a surprise to everyone involved.
Our story gets started some 18 years later, in 2183.
Okay, but wait, who are these people?
You're just full of pertinent questions today, bold subject heading! Let's get this organized. That's right. I'm dropping the underlines. All up in here. Yeah.
The Human Systems Alliance
Well, I just described their past pretty well up there, with one exception: I neglected to mention the whole issue of biotics.
See, element zero has some weird effects on people. There were some starship accidents in the 2150s that dumped eezo over populated areas, and some kids were exposed in utero. The effect can go one of two ways: either you develop horrible cancer and die, or you basically get superpowers.
Glowy superpowers!
Biotics, with proper training and neural implants, can generate their very own mass effect fields, which essentially amount to variations on telekinesis. Because every sci-fi franchise needs a little magic!
Humans Of Note:
Commander Shepard
Shepard: Just once, I'd like to ask someone for help and hear them say, 'Sure! Let's go, right now. No strings attached.'
Click for source. Did I mention this fandom has lots of amazing, amazing fanart? Because this fandom has lots of amazing, amazing fanart.
Okay, I mostly picked that one because it's a gorgeous piece of fanart, but rest assured: Shepard is customizable. Your Shepard will be either voiced by Jennifer Hale or Mark Meer - from now on, I'll be referring to Shepard as "she" and "her", if only because I've never actually played as the male Shepard and would probably confuse myself otherwise. You get to mess around with a variety of options from there to get a Shepard of your very own! (For those of you who are on par with me when it comes to such creative decisions, there's also a series of presets you can cycle through.) Just make sure you like the Shepard you've created, because you'll be seeing a lot of her through the next three games: with the notable exception of one scene, she's the POV character throughout.
Shepard's 29 years old at the start of the series. Her/your past is also customizable, but it comes ready-packaged; you can choose from one of three. One possibility is that you grew up as an orphan on the mean streets of Earth and enlisted with the Alliance navy at the age of eighteen to get away from the gangs and such. Another is that you were a colonist kid, but said colony was attacked by slavers and, uh, all your friends and family are dead, sorry, but an Alliance patrol saved you and you enlisted soon after. The least angsty past involves being a spacer, the daughter of Alliance military officers - you enlisted to follow in your parents' footsteps. Whichever past you choose, you'll have relevant incidental dialogue (and in the latter case, occasional e-mails from mom), and each past gets its own little subplot in the first game.
Shepard's also a well-regarded up-and-coming officer in the Alliance, currently a Commander in rank and a graduate of the elite N7 special forces program. The way you got that reputation is up to you as well, at the start of the game. Three options, once more. You might have been the sole survivor of an incredibly difficult mission that went badly wrong, you might have been a war hero who held off a slaver attack nearly singlehandedly, or you might have done things like murdering surrendering enemies, in which case your reputation mostly boils down to "complete jackass, but a complete jackass carrying a big gun". These affect the game in somewhat more subtle ways, which is a good opportunity for me to segue into an explanation of the Paragon/Renegade system.
The Paragon/Renegade System
Remember how I mentioned that you get to choose lots of the dialogue in cutscenes? Some of those options will be more law-abiding and goody-two-shoes-ish (Paragon) and others will be more ruthless and you're-a-complete-jerk-ish (Renegade). The more paragon/renegade options you choose, the more paragon/renegade points you gain, which open up new dialogue options that either charm or intimidate whomever you're interacting with, as your reputation grows. In the first game, the charm/intimidate dialogue options are basically cheat codes that will let you get away with pretty much anything you want. In the second and third games, sometimes even your best charm or intimidation strategies won't be effective, but hey, at least you tried, right?
Renegade/paragon interrupts are something that was introduced in the second and third games - when somebody's talking, sometimes an icon will flash on the screen, giving you a chance to interrupt the speaker in a paragon way (i.e., offering a comforting hug, standing up for someone) or in a renegade way (i.e., shooting someone in the foot and/or throwing them out a window). They're wicked fun.
I should mention that even though the Renegade path sounds like it makes you a bad guy, you're still on the side of saving the galaxy - it's just that you're willing to sell your soul if necessary to do it. The Paragon path has more inhibitions and restrictions that occasionally shut out potential subplots. It's a pretty cool mix. Paragon and Renegade fans will staunchly defend their different approaches to the game. For what it's worth, I've tried both, and enjoyed both.
Okay, back to Shep. You also get to pick Shepard's Class in the game, which is another big decision you'll want to consider carefully that mainly affects how the combat part of the game goes. (Note: I could not figure this nor the weapons upgrade system out the first time around, so I wound up winning the entire game by doing a lot of running away and occasionally firing the first assault rifle you have equipped. I don't recommend trying to win the game this way, much as it makes the other games seem ridiculously easy once you figure out all the cool superpowers, because it is very stressful and involves a great deal of yelling at the screen. If you get stuck, ask!)
The options are: Soldier (expertise in all weapons), Engineer (you get to sabotage your enemies' shields, set up drones to attack them, that sort of thing), Adept (you're a biotic god! nah, just a biotics expert - you can freeze people in stasis and fling them around and whatnot), Infiltrator (you can turn invisible and snipe things a lot), Sentinel (...I had to look this one up, I'm sorry Sentinel players, I'm sure it's an awesome Class - apparently, using biotics and weapons and armor, it's the human equivalent of a tank, very sturdy and hard to destroy), and Vanguard (your general strategy involves a biotic charge, which entails running at the enemy super-fast, and then having fun with a shotgun at close range). Again, choose carefully! I usually play Infiltrator, although I've also tried Engineer and Vanguard, both of which I heartily enjoyed.
So! Now that we've established this, where does Shepard fit into the story? At the start of the series, a brand new experimental ship of human/turian design (they're getting along a bit better these days, though things are still a little tense), called the SSV Normandy, is just departing for her shakedown cruise. The Normandy's a small frigate with a notable talent for stealth, which, these days, amounts to jamming and masking emissions - anyone looking out the window will still see her, plain as day. Shepard is the first officer, under the command of the legendary Captain Anderson, who is Made Of Awesome.
Yes, I'm a fan of starships.
The first game opens with the Normandy on a totally benign shakedown cruise to investigate something on the idyllic human colony of Eden Prime. And they complete the mission and everyone goes home, the end. ...yeah, not quite. For one thing, there's a turian Spectre aboard (the Spectres - "SPEcial Tactics and REconaissance" agents - are essentially the Citadel Council's answer to James Bond; license to kill, run around the galaxy, and generally fix problems too delicate to solve with a full-scale military invasion). And he's not exactly brimming with helpful explanations. So you're being kept in the dark on this one, and the crew's getting antsy to find out what's really going on...
Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko
Shepard: The Council represents more races than I thought. No wonder they're careful with newcomers.
Kaidan: They probably just want to keep everything running. It has to be hard keeping all these cultures working together.
Ashley: Or maybe they just don't like humans.
Shepard: Why not? We've got oceans, beautiful women, this emotion called love. According to the old vids, we have everything they want.
Kaidan: When you put it that way, there's no reason they wouldn't like you. *pause* I mean, us! Humans! Ma'am.
Ashley: ... you don't get much shore leave, do you, LT?
He's quite good at staring dramatically into the middle distance.
Aha, the Mass Effect Wiki tells me he's a Sentinel! Clearly I am qualified to write this overview.
Kaidan, voiced by Raphael Sbarge (who is in everything, by the way, so you probably know him), is a Marine in the Alliance military. When Kaidan's mom was pregnant with him, she was downwind of a transport crash in Singapore, and he was one of the lucky ones that got the superpowers. Well. Sort of lucky. He also got dragged off to attend a school for biotics, which he'll tell you about if you corner him sometime and ask - it wasn't a great experience. He also has outdated biotic implants that give him intense migraines, although apparently those are comparatively mild side effects compared to the becoming-violent-and-schizophrenic ones others have exhibited, so again, Kaidan's sorta lucky. After that nasty experience at the biotic school, Kaidan eventually enlisted, and made his way rapidly up the ranks.
On this mission, Kaidan's been assigned to be in charge of the Marines aboard the Normandy. Personality-wise, he's quite sweet and has a total crush on Shepard (male or female, although the former takes longer to develop due to BioWare being slow on the uptake). His opinion when it comes to aliens is very laid-back for a human in these xenophobic times: "they're jerks and saints, just like the rest of us." His general opinion on humanity is that they're trying to move too quickly into positions they're not ready for - a Renegade-ish Shepard can argue with him about this and even push him into a more xenophobic stance. And he's pretty kickass in a battle, with his glowy superpowers and all.
Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams
Ashley: Huh. Nobody died.
Kaidan: I could shoot someone if it'd make you feel better.
Ashley: Nah, I'm good.
Okay, so staring dramatically into the middle distance may be a job requirement for these people.
Ash, voiced by Kimberly Brooks, is a Soldier in the Alliance who ends up aboard the Normandy after... the totally benign and inconsequential events on Eden Prime. Yes. Quite. She's got a background as a spacer, and despite some teenaged rebellion at the prospect of following the family business, she enlisted after high school. She started making an impact right away, getting rave reviews from her instructors and taking on leadership positions quickly and effortlessly - apparently she's a tough leader, but a fair one.
Despite her great background, she's found it extremely difficult to move up through the ranks due to some family history (which she'll open up about if you press the issue enough). She'd always wanted (and been denied) a shipboard posting, and after Eden Prime she gets it, though not in the way she'd hoped. Ashley also has some issues with authority and while her bluntness is great in a field commander, it makes her lousy when it comes to anything involving diplomacy. She's also deeply religious, and very close with her family, especially her three sisters. Also, she quotes poetry from time to time.
A lot of Ashley's background is based on the notion that aliens are the enemy, and that humans have to fight and claw their way to the top of the totem pole. As a result, she's pretty much outright xenophobic in the first game (although a Paragon Shepard can talk her down to a certain degree, and having to work side-by-side with aliens changes her mind quite a bit on that front as well).
Captain David Anderson
Pressly: If he melted down all his medals he could make a life-sized statue of himself.
Okay, now that's a dramatic stare. Well done, Anderson.
Our fearless leader! Anderson, voiced by Keith David, is in command of the Normandy - he has a long and extremely successful special forces career behind him, as a graduate of the same N7 program Shepard went through.
He and Shepard have an easy rapport pretty much right from the start, and I am such a sucker for that - in this sort of situation, the boss is usually set up as an antagonist to our hero, but having unconditional support is really fun. And useful, playing as Shepard - Anderson's a good guy to have on your side. When things start getting political, he backs Shep all the way, and he only keeps her out of the loop when it's absolutely necessary. Anderson's a soldier at heart, but he's actually pretty good at the political side of things as well.
He's also got a relevant past and backstory that'll come out the more you play - I recommend pestering him about it at every opportunity, since it's a pretty dramatic story (and apparently expanded in the spinoff novels?). Shepard's role as his protégé also develops over the course of the games.
Jeff "Joker" Moreau
Joker: Yeah, this is 98 percent of my job. I just watch buttons flash. Sometimes I press one.
Eh, screw staring dramatically into the middle distance. Squinting sceptically works.
Joker is the Normandy's pilot, and, I should add, a major fan favourite. Voiced by Seth Green, he has a tendency to get all the best lines. Seriously, the guy's quotable as hell. "Why is it always claws and guns? Why can't we piss off a fuzzy planet? Still dangerous, but hey, bunnies."
He's one of the top pilots in the Alliance (he'll contest the "one of" part), and is full of sarcasm and an often totally inappropriate sense of humor. He also has a brittle bone disease that even stumps 22nd-century science, meaning things tend to go badly if he receives even a minor contusion - think lots of broken bones - which seriously limits his mobility. Again, he'll somewhat snarkily open up to you about it if you ask him, though the guy's a minefield of defensiveness. He actually got his nickname for being super-serious and never smiling throughout his training, though he was the one smiling at graduation when all that hard work paid off.
Ambassador Donnel Udina
Udina: Do the words 'political shitstorm' have any meaning to you?
Ooh, new move! Clench your fist at the middle distance!
Udina, voiced by Bill Ratner, is Earth's ambassador on the Citadel, which puts him in a decidedly difficult situation. His goal is to advance humanity as quickly as possible; this puts him at odds with the more conservative and cautious Council, as well as the other races that feel humanity is moving to galactic prominence with... unseemly alacrity.
He believes humanity should have a seat on the Council (currently occupied, as I mentioned before, by only the asari, the salarians, and the turians). As a result, any perceived flaw in humanity's performance is a big issue, and Shepard's performance during the, erm, totally routine and innocuous mission to Eden Prime falls under that category. He mistrusts Shepard more and more as the game goes on and as her assertions become more and more farfetched. He also has a difficult relationship with Anderson, especially when it comes to backing Shepard's latest harebrained scheme.
Okay, enough about the humans. What about the awesome aliens?
You read my mind, bold subject heading! I maintain that the first game only really picks up speed once you get your non-human crew complement aboard, so maybe this intro post will gain a similar boost.
The Turian Hierarchy
Remember our good buddies from the First Contact War? Well, now they're not-so-sarcastic good buddies, at least willing to do things like build totally awesome stealth ships with us, if somewhat grudgingly. Just as Kaidan is fine with turians and Ash is not a fan, the turians are divided in their opinion of humans. I should mention that fandom as a whole is pretty dang fond of turians.
The turians, as mentioned before, value the good of the whole over individual needs. If a turian is promoted to a higher rank, and then fails in some way, it's the officer who made the promotion who's reprimanded for having done so before said turian was ready, thus endangering those lower on the command ladder. The majority of off-planet turian society falls into the category of "the galaxy's peacekeepers", either as soldiers or as cops. Their role on the Council is essentially to have the biggest guns and make sure nobody else gets out of line. They're all about public service, and actually created C-Sec (Citadel Security), a police force for the Citadel, and that civic-mindedness gives them a lot of respect in the galactic arena. Sometimes, as in the case of the krogan genophage (more on that soon), their ruthless devotion to meting out justice makes them some pretty determined enemies.
Physically, turians are pretty awesome-looking.
Pictured above: pretty awesome.
They have the three-fingered hand that actually seems more common in this universe than the five-fingered one. They also have a metallic carapace, and are analogous in many ways to Earth birds. Or dinosaurs. They wear face paint to distinguish their colony ("barefaced" is slang for someone untrustworthy... or a politician). Their home planet, Palaven, developed life based on dextro-amino acids, which essentially means that turians should not eat human food, and vice-versa.
Turians of Note
Garrus Vakarian
Garrus: It's so easy to see the galaxy in black and white. Gray? I don't know what to do with gray.
Pictured above: ridiculously awesome.
You know how there's always that one pairing that just eats fandom? From what I've seen, that pairing is Garrus/Shepard. If you're scratching your head at that one, trust me, you'll get it eventually, even if you don't ship it yourself. Garrus, voiced by Brandon Keener, is a ridiculously popular character, and I will admit to also being a bit of a fangirl. Just a little.
When you meet him in the first game, he's a member of C-Sec's Investigative Division (think detective) pursuing a case that's relevant to Shep's interests... and he's just been pulled off said case, so he throws in his lot with Shepard to get the job done. One of the writers has mentioned that he's meant to be a bit younger than Shepard, although it's never stated in canon - regardless, he's a bit of a hotheaded idealist at this point, and has a pretty rocky relationship with rules and regulations and red tape in general. While he initially followed in his father's footsteps, joining the military at fifteen and then becoming a C-Sec officer, he's starting to rebel against his father's strict by-the-book approach to life.
Shepard takes him on as something of a protégé, and he's extremely motivated to look good in her eyes, which means that you, as Shepard, have a chance to push him pretty strongly into either Paragon or Renegade territory. Either way, it's generally a good idea to tamp down some of those look-before-you-leap urges he gets. Oh, and stock up on armor for him, because he does just run straight into hordes of zombie robots at the first possible opportunity, which doesn't go over well at all. You're a sniper, Garrus. Learn to take cover.
He's also very good at calibrations.
Nihlus Kryik
Nihlus: Some of us see the potential in your species. Some of us see what you have to offer to the rest of the galaxy.
Pictured above: facepaint awesome.
Remember that Turian Spectre (i.e., James Bond In Space) I mentioned waay back when? The one hanging out aboard the Normandy on its oh-so-innocuous mission to Eden Prime? That'd be Nihlus.
Voiced by Alastair Duncan, Nihlus is one of the Citadel's most decorated Spectres. Since Spectres are essentially answerable to nobody, their ranks tend to include people who have major issues with authority, and Nihlus is no exception - he's far more inclined to go off on his own than to trust anyone else. This hampered his military career, but after being mentored by a Spectre, Saren Arterius, and getting accepted into the Spectres, Nihlus really hit his stride.
Unlike many turians, Nihlus thinks humanity is full of potential, and generally supports their ambitious stance when it comes to galactic politics.
The Asari Republic
The asari are generally regarded as the mediators on the Council, the voice of experience... and with good reason, as they tend to live for upwards of a millenium, and therefore have plenty of interest in keeping things as politically stable as possible. They're from the planet Thessia, and are generally respected as the most powerful species in the galaxy, being the first not-mysteriously-extinct species to manage interstellar flight.
A mono-gendered race with a generally feminine appearance (and mostly identifying as female when interacting with other races), the asari have an extremely adaptable reproductive ability that allows them to reproduce with partners of any gender or race - the product of such a union will always be an asari, albeit one with newly randomized genes. The asari also have extremely powerful biotics abilities, and tend to make ridiculously powerful Spectres.
Occasionally asari have a bit of a "oh, look, you're trying to think, how cute!" approach to the rest of the galaxy.
The asari go through three roughly defined stages of life, the Maiden stage (curiosity, exploration, restlessness), the Matron stage (around the age of 350, settling down), and the Matriarch stage (past 700, becoming a respected advisor). Keep in mind that these are very broadly-defined categories. Asari in the Maiden stage can become commandos. Asari in the Matriarch stage can be bartenders.
Asari of Note
Liara T'Soni
Liara: Our travels are somewhat different from my normal excavations. I would prefer lengthier studies... and fewer explosions.
When in doubt, badass scientists are the way to go.
Liara, voiced by Ali Hillis, joins the crew of the Normandy later in the game, for reasons that'll become clear after the first few hours of gameplay. She's an archeologist, pretty much in her late teens by asari standards (106 years old), and has spent the past fifty years studying Prothean technology. She's one of the few people actually asking the question: "Wait, why did all these incredibly powerful beings suddenly go extinct?"
Personality-wise, Liara is shy and not great with people, and often has to extricate her foot from her mouth when her scientific curiosity overpowers her common sense:
Shepard: Sounds like you want to dissect me in a lab somewhere.
Liara: What? No! I did not mean to insinuate... Ah, I never meant to offend you, Shepard. I only meant... that you would be an interesting specimen for in-depth study. No! That's even worse!
Shepard: Calm down, Liara, I was only joking.
Like Kaidan, she has a major crush on Shepard, male or female, and I should mention that Ali Hillis and Jennifer Hale (playing femShep) have fantastic bantery chemistry whenever they're doing a scene together. Let's just say the "Lair of the Shadow Broker" downloadable extra is well worth buying.
Liara's got some family issues that you're going to wind up knowing about (and you can ask her for more details in order to pick up on a really subtle clue in the second game). Even more than most of the characters, she gets darker as the games go on.
The Salarian Union
The final Council race, the Salarians are sorta regarded as the geeks of the galaxy. They have a super-quick metabolism that makes them think, talk, and move at superspeed, making other species seem really slow and dull-witted. This fast metabolism, though, takes a toll physically, and they rarely live past forty. Salarians also generally don't have a sex drive, and tend to reproduce more out of necessity than anything else.
Salarians are generally very good at thinking outside the box, so they tend to go in for jobs that involve research, espionage, or both. The Salarian Special Tasks Group (STG) is what the Council eventually used as a template to create the Spectres. Salarians don't really have war heroes, as such - their best tend to be infiltrators and spies, and if they do their jobs well, nobody has ever heard of them. "We are trained for espionage - we would be legends, but the records are sealed." The Salarians also follow the notion that a war should be won before it begins, so they have a tendency to strike first, without warning - on the offense, they don't bother declaring war; on the defense, they tend to attack as soon as intelligence reports suggest an enemy attack is remotely possible.
In short: it is very hard to keep secrets from the Salarians.
Unfortunately, you don't get too much interaction with Salarians in the first game, and I don't want to spoil the following games. Rest assured that there is Salarian awesomeness in your future.
The Krogan
Here's where we get back to history for a bit. About two thousand years ago, the Council made accidental contact (remember what I said above about running willy-nilly into mass relays sometimes having dire consequences?) with a race of extremely hostile insect life, known as the rachni. The war was not going well, but a salarian research group discovered the krogan, an extremely war-prone and violent race that had just nearly wiped themselves out via nuclear explosions prior to discovering spaceflight. The salarians culturally "uplifted" the krogan and got them off their planet, where they proceeded to breed rapidly. After a couple generations, they were all too happy to join the fight with the rachni, and they wound up pushing them back. And, with the overzealous approach the krogan are known for, they basically exterimated the rachni altogether.
The Citadel Council thought this was pretty awesome and started giving the krogan major rewards, in the form of planets to colonize, and the krogan started pushing their luck and expanding still further, attacking and colonizing worlds where other Council races already lived. Eventually, the Council ordered them to stop. The krogan, predictably, didn't care what the Council thought. A war broke out - the Krogan Rebellions - and lasted for nearly three centuries.
This is where the turians really entered the picture - they were fairly new to the galactic playing field at the point, but they had the military strength and tactical know-how to go head-to-head with the krogan, so the Council took them on board. Still, the battle was not going well, mostly by virtue of the fact that the krogan reproduced so rapidly that their numbers were replentished constantly.
The salarians developed an extremely controversial "deterrent" known as the genophage, a bioweapon that would essentially kill the krogan off slowly, without resorting to that nasty "genocide" thing explicitly. The genophage ensures that only one out of a thousand krogan pregnancies isn't stillborn. Ouch. The turians, in desperation, went beyond the initial "deterrent" side of things and deployed it everywhere, infecting every single krogan out there. That stopped the war, but over the past thousand years, the krogan have been declining steadily in numbers. The general hopelessness of the situation (no cure has been found for the genophage) has made the krogan a very individualistic and self-interested species, under the assumption that if there's no hope in finding a cure through science or politics, you might as well be a mercenary and do your own thing.
Understandably, the krogan are not fond of aliens.
Generally speaking, the krogan have no interest in the weak or the selfless, and treachery is more admired than hated. The krogan attitude can best be summed up as "kill, pillage, and be selfish, for tomorrow we die."
Krogan of Note
Urdnot Wrex
Kaidan: I haven't spent much time with krogan before, Wrex. I have to say, you're not what I expected.
Wrex: Riiight. Because you humans have a wide range of cultures and attitudes, but all krogan think and act exactly alike.
In case you were wondering, your crew will have a surfeit of awesomeness.
Wrex, voiced by Steven Barr, is one of the rare Krogan Battlemasters, in that he has both weapons expertise and biotics abilities. He's also a bounty hunter and a mercenary, and is very good at his job - he was a tribe leader from a very young age, and despite his battle-hardened air, he has an idealistic desire to see his people released from the curse of the genophage. Like pretty much everyone else in this game, he has some family issues (he'll enjoy telling you stories if you win his trust).
He's taciturn, blunt, but also has a tendency to use his reputation and wordless menace rather than out-and-out violence to get what he wants. For obvious reasons, he doesn't get along with Garrus when they first meet, and generally thinks of him as naive, though they eventually form a sort of bizarre teasing rapport. One thing Wrex admires is leadership and battle prowess, so he starts looking up to Shepard - although you do have to work to cultivate and maintain that respect, because he always keeps his own interests first and foremost, and if the situation comes down to choosing what's best for Shepard versus what's best for the krogan, things can go badly wrong.
Wrex also has really awesome deadpan humor and gets a lot of the best lines. He's also good to bring along for long elevator rides, because he'll ask hilariously awkward-in-enclosed-spaces questions of the other squad members like "Who would win in a fight, you or Shepard?" He's a lot of fun, overall, and obviously an asset in battle.
The Quarians
Like the krogan, the quarians are a bit of a plot-advancing race, so it's time for another history lesson. Any similarities to Battlestar Galactica are... probably intentional, really.
About three hundred years ago, the quarians were experimenting with Virtual Intelligence (i.e., programs with rudimentary intelligence and adaptability, not actually sentient). As you know if you have watched any sci-fi ever, this rarely goes well. Sure enough, the VIs they'd created to do their busy work, the geth, started verging into all-out AI (artificial intelligence) territory, gaining sentience. In a brutal example of genre-savviness, the quarians decided to exterminate the geth before things got out of hand. The geth were not keen on being exterminated. A war ensued, which the geth won, and the quarians were forced off their planet, to wander the galaxy in a flotilla of salvaged and secondhand spaceships, scrounging for materials wherever they could.
All this time aboard sterile spaceships - and a dearth of parthenogens on their home planet - means that quarian immune systems are basically shot to hell, and so quarians are forced to wear enviro-suits at all times. Even a minor rupture in the suit can result in a fatal infection.
But hey, if you've gotta live in a hazmat suit, you might as well have a pretty awesome-looking one to live in.
Like the turians, quarian life is based on dextro-amino acids (as opposed to levo-amino acids - Mass Effect fans tend to perform slightly better on high school biology tests, I suspect), so again, quarians should not eat human or asari or salarian food. They do, however, enjoy turian cuisine (after it's been appropriately purified to avoid microbial infection, of course). I keep bringing this up because the game runs some jokes about it, and it comes up in fandom a lot as well. So, uh, consider this a guide to The Care and Feeding of Your Awesome Alien Pals.
Basically, since the quarians are entirely reliant on their fleet for survival, their entire culture revolves around it. Their rite-of-passage tradition involves young quarians going out on a Pilgrimage to find and bring back something of value to the Fleet. This can make other races pretty hostile towards quarians, as the general impression is that when the quarian fleet comes to a given system, they'll strip it of resources (and the by-necessity-technically-proficient quarians will take on jobs for less pay than others). Quarians tend to keep to themselves as a result.
Quarians of Note
Tali'Zorah nar Rayya
Tali: I'm pleased that the imminent destruction of all organic life has improved your career opportunities.
Proof that any game can be improved with the addition of an engineer who has an affinity for shotguns.
Tali (the "nar Rayya" just says which Fleet ship she was born on) is a young quarian on her Pilgrimage whom you pick up early on your journey. She's also an extremely talented engineer, and basically thinks the Normandy's experimental Tantalus drive is the coolest thing ever. Her enthusiasm for all things electronic wins over the human Normandy crew faster than any of the other aliens aboard, and she's pretty widely adored in fandom as well.
Tali and Garrus have awesome, adorable, teasing banter throughout the games, occasionally teaming up to complain about the quality of the dextro food on the Normandy, and Tali also seems to get along pretty well with everyone (this makes sense - living in cramped quarters on a starship your whole life, you have to learn to make friends pretty quickly). She's a fan of crowds and noise, and often feels at home in the busier parts of the Citadel.
She admires Shepard a great deal, and is grateful for the opportunity to prove herself and complete her Pilgrimage. Adding to her ambition when it comes to the Pilgrimage is the fact that her father is a Very Important Person aboard the Fleet, so all eyes are on her to do something spectacular. Of course, said ambition often gets her into situations where she's waaay out of her depth, but with this crew, what else is new?
Wow, that was a lot of information
You said it, bold subject heading! My hands are sore from typing so much. And I've left out a bunch of other races, and there are a ton of characters I don't want to introduce for fear of spoilers. Just keep in mind that Mass Effect 2 essentially boils down to intense character development for twelve different characters. It's a fun time.
How about gameplay?
If you're new to shooters, it might take a little while tostop running into walls adapt to the controls - the PC controls are pretty standard, with the WADS keys (like arrow keys) controlling your feet and the mouse controlling the direction you look, and there's the option of inverting them if you prefer. Once you're used to these controls, though, you're good for pretty much any of a massive array of games (Portal uses the same navigation system - it's pretty much the standard). We'll put it this way: I started playing with no idea what I was doing, and it only took a few minutes to adapt.
Oh. When you're exploring uncharted planets in the Mako tank, though, trust me. Nothing improves the maneuverability of that thing, and nobody's any good at driving it. Cartwheels off a cliff are standard operating procedure. They fix it in game 2 and make fun of it in game 3.
These games are pretty well put together and hard to break, but the Mako can generally find ways to screw things up. Hilariously.
The dialogue wheel is the mainstay of the conversational part of the game - generally speaking, if you choose the center-right option, you can skim through a conversation without missing anything. Options toward the top tend to be Paragon, options toward the bottom tend to be Renegade. The center-left option will usually be "Investigate", which lets you get in some extra dialogue and find out more about a given situation. Options in red are Intimidate dialogue choices, and options in blue are Charm dialogue choices (generally speaking, you should pick these whenever you're able, because awesomeness will happen). Options in grey are not selectable - they mean you don't have enough paragon or renegade points to be that awesome. Sorry.
The other mainstay of the conversational part of the game is Shepard's all-purpose way of extricating herself from any given conversation: "I should go." You will catch yourself saying it after playing for too long.
What else? Explore! The game is generally set up so you can just follow the main plot and ignore the rest, but there are pretty awesome subplots hanging around if you talk to people, land on random planets, or just hang around in elevators listening for suspicious news reports. And those subplots will sometimes have consequences in later games, or, more frequently, will be the seed for some running joke.
Okay, for all the gentle mockery up there, I really do think this is a seriously impressive trilogy of games - especially given its sometimes self-deprecating sense of humor - and I'd be thrilled to see more friends giving it a shot. Don't take it from me - the first game had great reviews, the second won Game of the Year, and the latest game in the series has received perfect scores from something like 50 big-name reviewers, so far. Bioware is pretty darn good when it comes to listening to the fans and making the right changes. So if you've ever wanted to tool around the galaxy in your own ship, now's your chance!
But, you know, make sure you have the time. It took me a while to get into the first game, but without even realizing it, I got completely sucked in. Even if you just blast through and only do the main plots and ignore most conversations, you're still looking at about 60 hours for all three games. Taking your time, it's more like 100 hours (it's like... three seasons of a TV show). And because of all the decision trees, there's a ton of replay value. And ME3 has a new multiplayer mode that's a lot of fun as well. And there's the downloadable content for extra gameplay. Er. Yeah. It's a lot of great stuff.
The cool thing is that the first two games are often on sale via Steam (all you have to do is install the Steam platform, find the game you want, make the purchase, and it's yours to download whenever you want - I often have to uninstall and reinstall due to disk space issues, and I've never run into trouble). I got the first and second games for $15 total. Given how many hours of awesome that works out to, that's a pretty sweet deal. Full-price, they're $20 each, which is still a fantastic deal. The third game just came out, so it's still expensive (and only available to download via Origin, which is EA's answer to Steam), about $60, but it should come down in price fairly soon.
And with that, I will finally stop typing. Whew. If you know folks who might be interested in the game, feel free to send them here! If you're already a fan and have spotted the many mistakes I've made in this post, please do point them out. Or just point and laugh. That works, too.
I should go.
Okay, and also I wanted to do something geeky for Pi Day. Happy 3/14! Well, belatedly, because it took me longer to write this up than anticipated.
Mass Effect is a trilogy of sci-fi games for the Xbox, PS3, and the PC (I've only played the PC versions of all three) - the first came out in 2007, the second in 2010, and the third just came out last week. It's produced by Bioware, a Canadian video game developer that I first heard about via its employees doing an awesome smack-down of someone on the forums complaining about the same-sex romance options in their games. So that's a plus. (Note for Dragon Age players: yeah, Mass Effect does better than nearly any other sci-fi game I've encountered when it comes to acknowledging the existence of queer and/or female gamers, but that's not saying much. Expect a bit of a step backwards on that front, though the games do eventually stagger into the 21st/22nd century.)
Logistics-wise, Mass Effect is a cross between an RPG and a shooter, with its primary focus being interactive storytelling. Being someone who rarely has the patience for RPGs, and who finds shooters boring as heck, the way I latched onto this game surprised me. Generally speaking, you wander around the universe in a more-or-less free-form exploratory way, you stumble across plots, and you eventually find your way back to the overarching story. Whereas most games would have dialogue cutscenes between battles, the Mass Effect games keep it interactive throughout - so you can decide how your character responds to any given query, probe for more information, be sarcastic or sympathetic or totally uninterested, have your character get romantically involved, and occasionally make massive, galaxy-shaking decisions. Those decisions (and your user-created character) carry over from game to game, and affect your gaming experience in a variety of ways. Essentially, the game adapts to your decisions.
So it's up to you: should you be someone who upholds the law at all costs? Someone who does whatever it takes to get the job done? Someone who spends all their time (and credits) buying new fish for their fish tank? The choice is yours!
(This is a more-or-less spoiler-free intro! That took some doing, let me tell you.)
The Universe
So what's this Mass Effect thing all about? Like most sci-fi franchises, there's some pretty extensive worldbuilding going on - in fact, I'd say the first game is mostly worldbuilding (the second being mostly character development and the third being mostly plot). Or, uh, worldsbuilding. If you're a sci-fi fan, none of the concepts here will be mind-bogglingly new - it's a well-constructed universe, but it's definitely constructed on familiar foundations.
The year is, er, 2148, we'll start there. Humanity's doing its thing, starting to settle the edges of our solar system, getting resigned to the fact that we may be alone in the universe... and then explorers on Mars happen across a great whopping cache of alien technology. Long-abandoned and, I would imagine, very dusty alien technology, including data proving that said aliens were studying Cro-Magnon humans back in the day. Oh, and some information about something called a "mass relay" orbiting Pluto.
Now how the heck did we miss that?
As you may have guessed from the name of this thingummy and the name of the game, this is, in fact, a Very Important Thingummy. The "mass effect" is this universe's way of getting around what scientists call the Space-Is-Really-Fucking-Huge Problem. Essentially, think of them as running on plot-device-ium, in close proximity with handwavium (seriously, they have some pretty detailed explanations for all this in the game's Codex, give it a read-through if you have a few minutes). The end result, as I understand it, is that there's an element called Element Zero (eezo) that acts weirdly in electric fields - essentially, it allows you to increase or decrease the mass of any objects inside that electric field. Which, uh, lets FTL travel happen. Among other things.
Please click the above link to view a brief comic-form explanation that will answer allll your questions.
See? Easy as pie.
That Makes No Sense At All, But Whatever
Don't argue with me, bold subject heading! It's science, okay?
Anyway. Back to humanity. Their scientists can't reproduce the mass relay technology, but they do figure out how to activate the one sitting in their cosmic backyard, and send a crew through to, well, figure out what the heck's on the other side. Said relay spits the crew out in the Arcturus system... which also happens to be home to three other mass relays! Suddenly the galaxy seems a lot smaller. When the crew makes a triumphant (i.e., not disintegrated into component atoms) return to Earth, they're hailed as heroes, and Earth starts preparing for first contact in earnest, knowing it can't be far away.
So. Here's the thing. The Protheans, the long-extinct race that apparently invented mass relay technology (fun fact: if the name of the race is capitalized, they're probably extinct and either revered or feared), scattered these things all over the galaxy. And, as you might expect from the wacky characters depicted in the above comic, humanity's not alone out there. You might also expect that not all these races are keen to join the Big Happy Galactic Family, and occasionally jumping through an unexplored relay into an unexplored system can result in xenophobic retaliation up to and including genocidal destruction.
Fortunately, with what persists throughout the series as humanity's greatest virtue (i.e., sheer dumb luck), humanity's first random wanderings into activating dormant mass relays (like the one near Pluto) do not lead them into that kind of situation. Instead, in 2157, they catch the attention of the turians, a race with a strong cultural devotion to lawkeeping, duty to the whole over duty to the self, that sort of thing. You might imagine they don't take kindly to humanity blundering about in ways that could threaten the entire galactic community. Did I mention that they have lots and lots of guns and ships? Under the principle that ignorance is no excuse for endangering billions of lives, the turians attack the explorers, launching the First Contact War.
Humanity has officially met alien life. And pissed it off. Good job, humanity.
Only one of the would-be explorers escaped the turian attack and returned to the colony of Shanxi to tell the tale. In retaliation, the colony's commander sent out a force to attack the turians. Somewhat predictably, the turians attacked and occupied Shanxi, occasionally maintaining order by the simple expedient of dropping chunks of debris on the planet from orbit. Humanity sent out a bigger fleet, commanded by Admiral Kastanie Drescher, whom I am mainly mentioning because she has an awesome name. The turians, who'd thought humanity was pretty much limited to that one colony, were unprepared and forced back.
The turians figured to hell with trying to teach humanity a lesson, and started mobilizing for full-scale war. This... would probably not have ended in humanity's favour.
Fortunately, the Council intervened.
The Council?
Glad you asked, bold subject heading! Galactic civilization has been churning happily along for millennia without humanity's input, and part of that churning has involved establishing a seat of government aboard a surviving station, presumably left behind by the Protheans, called the Citadel.
Oh, and it's ridiculously huge. And gorgeous.
Basically, when asari (we'll get to them soon) explorers first found the Citadel, it was all ready for operation, maintained by a bunch of mysterious and utterly unfazeable bug-dudes known as Keepers, either incapable of or uninterested in communication. If something goes wrong, the Keepers will wander in and fix it. If new races discover the Citadel, the Keepers help them adjust. Their numbers mysteriously remain constant - if a Keeper is killed, another will take its place. The whole thing's very weird, but hey, don't look a gift space station in the mouth, I always say! The Protheans are mostly regarded as extremely benevolent sciencey-types, so it doesn't seem too odd that they'd leave a gift for future civilizations, as a legacy after their mysterious and total extinction.
Er. Okay. Maybe a little odd.
Anyway. The Citadel Council is essentially composed of representatives from the three most important/advanced/useful races in the galaxy (namely, the asari, the salarians, and the turians - we'll get to them soon as well). Other races of note get embassies aboard the Citadel, and are allowed to petition the Council. Many races don't recognize the authority of the Citadel Council, but since they're the ones with all the guns, it tends to be more of a murmur of discord and a "well fine, we'll stay over on this side of the galaxy, then!" approach rather than out-and-out war.
Anyway. Where was I? Oh, yes. Humanity and the turians are fighting. The Council intervenes, mostly because they're interested in humanity's demonstrated adaptability in spite of their... novel approach to diplomatic relations, and manages to broker a truce.
The results of this first contact situation are pretty much as you'd expect: humanity gets xenophobic, and the rest of the galaxy thinks of humanity as a bunch of blundering aggressors. Greeeat. On the plus side, though, humanity finally gets to take its place as the Freakin' New Guy of the galactic playing field. They also get their act together and form a Systems Alliance to consolidate human forces. In 2165, humanity is granted an embassy on the Citadel, which comes as a bit of a surprise to everyone involved.
Our story gets started some 18 years later, in 2183.
Okay, but wait, who are these people?
You're just full of pertinent questions today, bold subject heading! Let's get this organized. That's right. I'm dropping the underlines. All up in here. Yeah.
The Human Systems Alliance
Well, I just described their past pretty well up there, with one exception: I neglected to mention the whole issue of biotics.
See, element zero has some weird effects on people. There were some starship accidents in the 2150s that dumped eezo over populated areas, and some kids were exposed in utero. The effect can go one of two ways: either you develop horrible cancer and die, or you basically get superpowers.
Glowy superpowers!
Biotics, with proper training and neural implants, can generate their very own mass effect fields, which essentially amount to variations on telekinesis. Because every sci-fi franchise needs a little magic!
Humans Of Note:
Commander Shepard
Shepard: Just once, I'd like to ask someone for help and hear them say, 'Sure! Let's go, right now. No strings attached.'
Click for source. Did I mention this fandom has lots of amazing, amazing fanart? Because this fandom has lots of amazing, amazing fanart.
Okay, I mostly picked that one because it's a gorgeous piece of fanart, but rest assured: Shepard is customizable. Your Shepard will be either voiced by Jennifer Hale or Mark Meer - from now on, I'll be referring to Shepard as "she" and "her", if only because I've never actually played as the male Shepard and would probably confuse myself otherwise. You get to mess around with a variety of options from there to get a Shepard of your very own! (For those of you who are on par with me when it comes to such creative decisions, there's also a series of presets you can cycle through.) Just make sure you like the Shepard you've created, because you'll be seeing a lot of her through the next three games: with the notable exception of one scene, she's the POV character throughout.
Shepard's 29 years old at the start of the series. Her/your past is also customizable, but it comes ready-packaged; you can choose from one of three. One possibility is that you grew up as an orphan on the mean streets of Earth and enlisted with the Alliance navy at the age of eighteen to get away from the gangs and such. Another is that you were a colonist kid, but said colony was attacked by slavers and, uh, all your friends and family are dead, sorry, but an Alliance patrol saved you and you enlisted soon after. The least angsty past involves being a spacer, the daughter of Alliance military officers - you enlisted to follow in your parents' footsteps. Whichever past you choose, you'll have relevant incidental dialogue (and in the latter case, occasional e-mails from mom), and each past gets its own little subplot in the first game.
Shepard's also a well-regarded up-and-coming officer in the Alliance, currently a Commander in rank and a graduate of the elite N7 special forces program. The way you got that reputation is up to you as well, at the start of the game. Three options, once more. You might have been the sole survivor of an incredibly difficult mission that went badly wrong, you might have been a war hero who held off a slaver attack nearly singlehandedly, or you might have done things like murdering surrendering enemies, in which case your reputation mostly boils down to "complete jackass, but a complete jackass carrying a big gun". These affect the game in somewhat more subtle ways, which is a good opportunity for me to segue into an explanation of the Paragon/Renegade system.
The Paragon/Renegade System
Remember how I mentioned that you get to choose lots of the dialogue in cutscenes? Some of those options will be more law-abiding and goody-two-shoes-ish (Paragon) and others will be more ruthless and you're-a-complete-jerk-ish (Renegade). The more paragon/renegade options you choose, the more paragon/renegade points you gain, which open up new dialogue options that either charm or intimidate whomever you're interacting with, as your reputation grows. In the first game, the charm/intimidate dialogue options are basically cheat codes that will let you get away with pretty much anything you want. In the second and third games, sometimes even your best charm or intimidation strategies won't be effective, but hey, at least you tried, right?
Renegade/paragon interrupts are something that was introduced in the second and third games - when somebody's talking, sometimes an icon will flash on the screen, giving you a chance to interrupt the speaker in a paragon way (i.e., offering a comforting hug, standing up for someone) or in a renegade way (i.e., shooting someone in the foot and/or throwing them out a window). They're wicked fun.
I should mention that even though the Renegade path sounds like it makes you a bad guy, you're still on the side of saving the galaxy - it's just that you're willing to sell your soul if necessary to do it. The Paragon path has more inhibitions and restrictions that occasionally shut out potential subplots. It's a pretty cool mix. Paragon and Renegade fans will staunchly defend their different approaches to the game. For what it's worth, I've tried both, and enjoyed both.
Okay, back to Shep. You also get to pick Shepard's Class in the game, which is another big decision you'll want to consider carefully that mainly affects how the combat part of the game goes. (Note: I could not figure this nor the weapons upgrade system out the first time around, so I wound up winning the entire game by doing a lot of running away and occasionally firing the first assault rifle you have equipped. I don't recommend trying to win the game this way, much as it makes the other games seem ridiculously easy once you figure out all the cool superpowers, because it is very stressful and involves a great deal of yelling at the screen. If you get stuck, ask!)
The options are: Soldier (expertise in all weapons), Engineer (you get to sabotage your enemies' shields, set up drones to attack them, that sort of thing), Adept (you're a biotic god! nah, just a biotics expert - you can freeze people in stasis and fling them around and whatnot), Infiltrator (you can turn invisible and snipe things a lot), Sentinel (...I had to look this one up, I'm sorry Sentinel players, I'm sure it's an awesome Class - apparently, using biotics and weapons and armor, it's the human equivalent of a tank, very sturdy and hard to destroy), and Vanguard (your general strategy involves a biotic charge, which entails running at the enemy super-fast, and then having fun with a shotgun at close range). Again, choose carefully! I usually play Infiltrator, although I've also tried Engineer and Vanguard, both of which I heartily enjoyed.
So! Now that we've established this, where does Shepard fit into the story? At the start of the series, a brand new experimental ship of human/turian design (they're getting along a bit better these days, though things are still a little tense), called the SSV Normandy, is just departing for her shakedown cruise. The Normandy's a small frigate with a notable talent for stealth, which, these days, amounts to jamming and masking emissions - anyone looking out the window will still see her, plain as day. Shepard is the first officer, under the command of the legendary Captain Anderson, who is Made Of Awesome.
Yes, I'm a fan of starships.
The first game opens with the Normandy on a totally benign shakedown cruise to investigate something on the idyllic human colony of Eden Prime. And they complete the mission and everyone goes home, the end. ...yeah, not quite. For one thing, there's a turian Spectre aboard (the Spectres - "SPEcial Tactics and REconaissance" agents - are essentially the Citadel Council's answer to James Bond; license to kill, run around the galaxy, and generally fix problems too delicate to solve with a full-scale military invasion). And he's not exactly brimming with helpful explanations. So you're being kept in the dark on this one, and the crew's getting antsy to find out what's really going on...
Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko
Shepard: The Council represents more races than I thought. No wonder they're careful with newcomers.
Kaidan: They probably just want to keep everything running. It has to be hard keeping all these cultures working together.
Ashley: Or maybe they just don't like humans.
Shepard: Why not? We've got oceans, beautiful women, this emotion called love. According to the old vids, we have everything they want.
Kaidan: When you put it that way, there's no reason they wouldn't like you. *pause* I mean, us! Humans! Ma'am.
Ashley: ... you don't get much shore leave, do you, LT?
He's quite good at staring dramatically into the middle distance.
Aha, the Mass Effect Wiki tells me he's a Sentinel! Clearly I am qualified to write this overview.
Kaidan, voiced by Raphael Sbarge (who is in everything, by the way, so you probably know him), is a Marine in the Alliance military. When Kaidan's mom was pregnant with him, she was downwind of a transport crash in Singapore, and he was one of the lucky ones that got the superpowers. Well. Sort of lucky. He also got dragged off to attend a school for biotics, which he'll tell you about if you corner him sometime and ask - it wasn't a great experience. He also has outdated biotic implants that give him intense migraines, although apparently those are comparatively mild side effects compared to the becoming-violent-and-schizophrenic ones others have exhibited, so again, Kaidan's sorta lucky. After that nasty experience at the biotic school, Kaidan eventually enlisted, and made his way rapidly up the ranks.
On this mission, Kaidan's been assigned to be in charge of the Marines aboard the Normandy. Personality-wise, he's quite sweet and has a total crush on Shepard (male or female, although the former takes longer to develop due to BioWare being slow on the uptake). His opinion when it comes to aliens is very laid-back for a human in these xenophobic times: "they're jerks and saints, just like the rest of us." His general opinion on humanity is that they're trying to move too quickly into positions they're not ready for - a Renegade-ish Shepard can argue with him about this and even push him into a more xenophobic stance. And he's pretty kickass in a battle, with his glowy superpowers and all.
Gunnery Chief Ashley Williams
Ashley: Huh. Nobody died.
Kaidan: I could shoot someone if it'd make you feel better.
Ashley: Nah, I'm good.
Okay, so staring dramatically into the middle distance may be a job requirement for these people.
Ash, voiced by Kimberly Brooks, is a Soldier in the Alliance who ends up aboard the Normandy after... the totally benign and inconsequential events on Eden Prime. Yes. Quite. She's got a background as a spacer, and despite some teenaged rebellion at the prospect of following the family business, she enlisted after high school. She started making an impact right away, getting rave reviews from her instructors and taking on leadership positions quickly and effortlessly - apparently she's a tough leader, but a fair one.
Despite her great background, she's found it extremely difficult to move up through the ranks due to some family history (which she'll open up about if you press the issue enough). She'd always wanted (and been denied) a shipboard posting, and after Eden Prime she gets it, though not in the way she'd hoped. Ashley also has some issues with authority and while her bluntness is great in a field commander, it makes her lousy when it comes to anything involving diplomacy. She's also deeply religious, and very close with her family, especially her three sisters. Also, she quotes poetry from time to time.
A lot of Ashley's background is based on the notion that aliens are the enemy, and that humans have to fight and claw their way to the top of the totem pole. As a result, she's pretty much outright xenophobic in the first game (although a Paragon Shepard can talk her down to a certain degree, and having to work side-by-side with aliens changes her mind quite a bit on that front as well).
Captain David Anderson
Pressly: If he melted down all his medals he could make a life-sized statue of himself.
Okay, now that's a dramatic stare. Well done, Anderson.
Our fearless leader! Anderson, voiced by Keith David, is in command of the Normandy - he has a long and extremely successful special forces career behind him, as a graduate of the same N7 program Shepard went through.
He and Shepard have an easy rapport pretty much right from the start, and I am such a sucker for that - in this sort of situation, the boss is usually set up as an antagonist to our hero, but having unconditional support is really fun. And useful, playing as Shepard - Anderson's a good guy to have on your side. When things start getting political, he backs Shep all the way, and he only keeps her out of the loop when it's absolutely necessary. Anderson's a soldier at heart, but he's actually pretty good at the political side of things as well.
He's also got a relevant past and backstory that'll come out the more you play - I recommend pestering him about it at every opportunity, since it's a pretty dramatic story (and apparently expanded in the spinoff novels?). Shepard's role as his protégé also develops over the course of the games.
Jeff "Joker" Moreau
Joker: Yeah, this is 98 percent of my job. I just watch buttons flash. Sometimes I press one.
Eh, screw staring dramatically into the middle distance. Squinting sceptically works.
Joker is the Normandy's pilot, and, I should add, a major fan favourite. Voiced by Seth Green, he has a tendency to get all the best lines. Seriously, the guy's quotable as hell. "Why is it always claws and guns? Why can't we piss off a fuzzy planet? Still dangerous, but hey, bunnies."
He's one of the top pilots in the Alliance (he'll contest the "one of" part), and is full of sarcasm and an often totally inappropriate sense of humor. He also has a brittle bone disease that even stumps 22nd-century science, meaning things tend to go badly if he receives even a minor contusion - think lots of broken bones - which seriously limits his mobility. Again, he'll somewhat snarkily open up to you about it if you ask him, though the guy's a minefield of defensiveness. He actually got his nickname for being super-serious and never smiling throughout his training, though he was the one smiling at graduation when all that hard work paid off.
Ambassador Donnel Udina
Udina: Do the words 'political shitstorm' have any meaning to you?
Ooh, new move! Clench your fist at the middle distance!
Udina, voiced by Bill Ratner, is Earth's ambassador on the Citadel, which puts him in a decidedly difficult situation. His goal is to advance humanity as quickly as possible; this puts him at odds with the more conservative and cautious Council, as well as the other races that feel humanity is moving to galactic prominence with... unseemly alacrity.
He believes humanity should have a seat on the Council (currently occupied, as I mentioned before, by only the asari, the salarians, and the turians). As a result, any perceived flaw in humanity's performance is a big issue, and Shepard's performance during the, erm, totally routine and innocuous mission to Eden Prime falls under that category. He mistrusts Shepard more and more as the game goes on and as her assertions become more and more farfetched. He also has a difficult relationship with Anderson, especially when it comes to backing Shepard's latest harebrained scheme.
Okay, enough about the humans. What about the awesome aliens?
You read my mind, bold subject heading! I maintain that the first game only really picks up speed once you get your non-human crew complement aboard, so maybe this intro post will gain a similar boost.
The Turian Hierarchy
Remember our good buddies from the First Contact War? Well, now they're not-so-sarcastic good buddies, at least willing to do things like build totally awesome stealth ships with us, if somewhat grudgingly. Just as Kaidan is fine with turians and Ash is not a fan, the turians are divided in their opinion of humans. I should mention that fandom as a whole is pretty dang fond of turians.
The turians, as mentioned before, value the good of the whole over individual needs. If a turian is promoted to a higher rank, and then fails in some way, it's the officer who made the promotion who's reprimanded for having done so before said turian was ready, thus endangering those lower on the command ladder. The majority of off-planet turian society falls into the category of "the galaxy's peacekeepers", either as soldiers or as cops. Their role on the Council is essentially to have the biggest guns and make sure nobody else gets out of line. They're all about public service, and actually created C-Sec (Citadel Security), a police force for the Citadel, and that civic-mindedness gives them a lot of respect in the galactic arena. Sometimes, as in the case of the krogan genophage (more on that soon), their ruthless devotion to meting out justice makes them some pretty determined enemies.
Physically, turians are pretty awesome-looking.
Pictured above: pretty awesome.
They have the three-fingered hand that actually seems more common in this universe than the five-fingered one. They also have a metallic carapace, and are analogous in many ways to Earth birds. Or dinosaurs. They wear face paint to distinguish their colony ("barefaced" is slang for someone untrustworthy... or a politician). Their home planet, Palaven, developed life based on dextro-amino acids, which essentially means that turians should not eat human food, and vice-versa.
Turians of Note
Garrus Vakarian
Garrus: It's so easy to see the galaxy in black and white. Gray? I don't know what to do with gray.
Pictured above: ridiculously awesome.
You know how there's always that one pairing that just eats fandom? From what I've seen, that pairing is Garrus/Shepard. If you're scratching your head at that one, trust me, you'll get it eventually, even if you don't ship it yourself. Garrus, voiced by Brandon Keener, is a ridiculously popular character, and I will admit to also being a bit of a fangirl. Just a little.
When you meet him in the first game, he's a member of C-Sec's Investigative Division (think detective) pursuing a case that's relevant to Shep's interests... and he's just been pulled off said case, so he throws in his lot with Shepard to get the job done. One of the writers has mentioned that he's meant to be a bit younger than Shepard, although it's never stated in canon - regardless, he's a bit of a hotheaded idealist at this point, and has a pretty rocky relationship with rules and regulations and red tape in general. While he initially followed in his father's footsteps, joining the military at fifteen and then becoming a C-Sec officer, he's starting to rebel against his father's strict by-the-book approach to life.
Shepard takes him on as something of a protégé, and he's extremely motivated to look good in her eyes, which means that you, as Shepard, have a chance to push him pretty strongly into either Paragon or Renegade territory. Either way, it's generally a good idea to tamp down some of those look-before-you-leap urges he gets. Oh, and stock up on armor for him, because he does just run straight into hordes of zombie robots at the first possible opportunity, which doesn't go over well at all. You're a sniper, Garrus. Learn to take cover.
He's also very good at calibrations.
Nihlus Kryik
Nihlus: Some of us see the potential in your species. Some of us see what you have to offer to the rest of the galaxy.
Pictured above: facepaint awesome.
Remember that Turian Spectre (i.e., James Bond In Space) I mentioned waay back when? The one hanging out aboard the Normandy on its oh-so-innocuous mission to Eden Prime? That'd be Nihlus.
Voiced by Alastair Duncan, Nihlus is one of the Citadel's most decorated Spectres. Since Spectres are essentially answerable to nobody, their ranks tend to include people who have major issues with authority, and Nihlus is no exception - he's far more inclined to go off on his own than to trust anyone else. This hampered his military career, but after being mentored by a Spectre, Saren Arterius, and getting accepted into the Spectres, Nihlus really hit his stride.
Unlike many turians, Nihlus thinks humanity is full of potential, and generally supports their ambitious stance when it comes to galactic politics.
The Asari Republic
The asari are generally regarded as the mediators on the Council, the voice of experience... and with good reason, as they tend to live for upwards of a millenium, and therefore have plenty of interest in keeping things as politically stable as possible. They're from the planet Thessia, and are generally respected as the most powerful species in the galaxy, being the first not-mysteriously-extinct species to manage interstellar flight.
A mono-gendered race with a generally feminine appearance (and mostly identifying as female when interacting with other races), the asari have an extremely adaptable reproductive ability that allows them to reproduce with partners of any gender or race - the product of such a union will always be an asari, albeit one with newly randomized genes. The asari also have extremely powerful biotics abilities, and tend to make ridiculously powerful Spectres.
Occasionally asari have a bit of a "oh, look, you're trying to think, how cute!" approach to the rest of the galaxy.
The asari go through three roughly defined stages of life, the Maiden stage (curiosity, exploration, restlessness), the Matron stage (around the age of 350, settling down), and the Matriarch stage (past 700, becoming a respected advisor). Keep in mind that these are very broadly-defined categories. Asari in the Maiden stage can become commandos. Asari in the Matriarch stage can be bartenders.
Asari of Note
Liara T'Soni
Liara: Our travels are somewhat different from my normal excavations. I would prefer lengthier studies... and fewer explosions.
When in doubt, badass scientists are the way to go.
Liara, voiced by Ali Hillis, joins the crew of the Normandy later in the game, for reasons that'll become clear after the first few hours of gameplay. She's an archeologist, pretty much in her late teens by asari standards (106 years old), and has spent the past fifty years studying Prothean technology. She's one of the few people actually asking the question: "Wait, why did all these incredibly powerful beings suddenly go extinct?"
Personality-wise, Liara is shy and not great with people, and often has to extricate her foot from her mouth when her scientific curiosity overpowers her common sense:
Shepard: Sounds like you want to dissect me in a lab somewhere.
Liara: What? No! I did not mean to insinuate... Ah, I never meant to offend you, Shepard. I only meant... that you would be an interesting specimen for in-depth study. No! That's even worse!
Shepard: Calm down, Liara, I was only joking.
Like Kaidan, she has a major crush on Shepard, male or female, and I should mention that Ali Hillis and Jennifer Hale (playing femShep) have fantastic bantery chemistry whenever they're doing a scene together. Let's just say the "Lair of the Shadow Broker" downloadable extra is well worth buying.
Liara's got some family issues that you're going to wind up knowing about (and you can ask her for more details in order to pick up on a really subtle clue in the second game). Even more than most of the characters, she gets darker as the games go on.
The Salarian Union
The final Council race, the Salarians are sorta regarded as the geeks of the galaxy. They have a super-quick metabolism that makes them think, talk, and move at superspeed, making other species seem really slow and dull-witted. This fast metabolism, though, takes a toll physically, and they rarely live past forty. Salarians also generally don't have a sex drive, and tend to reproduce more out of necessity than anything else.
Salarians are generally very good at thinking outside the box, so they tend to go in for jobs that involve research, espionage, or both. The Salarian Special Tasks Group (STG) is what the Council eventually used as a template to create the Spectres. Salarians don't really have war heroes, as such - their best tend to be infiltrators and spies, and if they do their jobs well, nobody has ever heard of them. "We are trained for espionage - we would be legends, but the records are sealed." The Salarians also follow the notion that a war should be won before it begins, so they have a tendency to strike first, without warning - on the offense, they don't bother declaring war; on the defense, they tend to attack as soon as intelligence reports suggest an enemy attack is remotely possible.
In short: it is very hard to keep secrets from the Salarians.
Unfortunately, you don't get too much interaction with Salarians in the first game, and I don't want to spoil the following games. Rest assured that there is Salarian awesomeness in your future.
The Krogan
Here's where we get back to history for a bit. About two thousand years ago, the Council made accidental contact (remember what I said above about running willy-nilly into mass relays sometimes having dire consequences?) with a race of extremely hostile insect life, known as the rachni. The war was not going well, but a salarian research group discovered the krogan, an extremely war-prone and violent race that had just nearly wiped themselves out via nuclear explosions prior to discovering spaceflight. The salarians culturally "uplifted" the krogan and got them off their planet, where they proceeded to breed rapidly. After a couple generations, they were all too happy to join the fight with the rachni, and they wound up pushing them back. And, with the overzealous approach the krogan are known for, they basically exterimated the rachni altogether.
The Citadel Council thought this was pretty awesome and started giving the krogan major rewards, in the form of planets to colonize, and the krogan started pushing their luck and expanding still further, attacking and colonizing worlds where other Council races already lived. Eventually, the Council ordered them to stop. The krogan, predictably, didn't care what the Council thought. A war broke out - the Krogan Rebellions - and lasted for nearly three centuries.
This is where the turians really entered the picture - they were fairly new to the galactic playing field at the point, but they had the military strength and tactical know-how to go head-to-head with the krogan, so the Council took them on board. Still, the battle was not going well, mostly by virtue of the fact that the krogan reproduced so rapidly that their numbers were replentished constantly.
The salarians developed an extremely controversial "deterrent" known as the genophage, a bioweapon that would essentially kill the krogan off slowly, without resorting to that nasty "genocide" thing explicitly. The genophage ensures that only one out of a thousand krogan pregnancies isn't stillborn. Ouch. The turians, in desperation, went beyond the initial "deterrent" side of things and deployed it everywhere, infecting every single krogan out there. That stopped the war, but over the past thousand years, the krogan have been declining steadily in numbers. The general hopelessness of the situation (no cure has been found for the genophage) has made the krogan a very individualistic and self-interested species, under the assumption that if there's no hope in finding a cure through science or politics, you might as well be a mercenary and do your own thing.
Understandably, the krogan are not fond of aliens.
Generally speaking, the krogan have no interest in the weak or the selfless, and treachery is more admired than hated. The krogan attitude can best be summed up as "kill, pillage, and be selfish, for tomorrow we die."
Krogan of Note
Urdnot Wrex
Kaidan: I haven't spent much time with krogan before, Wrex. I have to say, you're not what I expected.
Wrex: Riiight. Because you humans have a wide range of cultures and attitudes, but all krogan think and act exactly alike.
In case you were wondering, your crew will have a surfeit of awesomeness.
Wrex, voiced by Steven Barr, is one of the rare Krogan Battlemasters, in that he has both weapons expertise and biotics abilities. He's also a bounty hunter and a mercenary, and is very good at his job - he was a tribe leader from a very young age, and despite his battle-hardened air, he has an idealistic desire to see his people released from the curse of the genophage. Like pretty much everyone else in this game, he has some family issues (he'll enjoy telling you stories if you win his trust).
He's taciturn, blunt, but also has a tendency to use his reputation and wordless menace rather than out-and-out violence to get what he wants. For obvious reasons, he doesn't get along with Garrus when they first meet, and generally thinks of him as naive, though they eventually form a sort of bizarre teasing rapport. One thing Wrex admires is leadership and battle prowess, so he starts looking up to Shepard - although you do have to work to cultivate and maintain that respect, because he always keeps his own interests first and foremost, and if the situation comes down to choosing what's best for Shepard versus what's best for the krogan, things can go badly wrong.
Wrex also has really awesome deadpan humor and gets a lot of the best lines. He's also good to bring along for long elevator rides, because he'll ask hilariously awkward-in-enclosed-spaces questions of the other squad members like "Who would win in a fight, you or Shepard?" He's a lot of fun, overall, and obviously an asset in battle.
The Quarians
Like the krogan, the quarians are a bit of a plot-advancing race, so it's time for another history lesson. Any similarities to Battlestar Galactica are... probably intentional, really.
About three hundred years ago, the quarians were experimenting with Virtual Intelligence (i.e., programs with rudimentary intelligence and adaptability, not actually sentient). As you know if you have watched any sci-fi ever, this rarely goes well. Sure enough, the VIs they'd created to do their busy work, the geth, started verging into all-out AI (artificial intelligence) territory, gaining sentience. In a brutal example of genre-savviness, the quarians decided to exterminate the geth before things got out of hand. The geth were not keen on being exterminated. A war ensued, which the geth won, and the quarians were forced off their planet, to wander the galaxy in a flotilla of salvaged and secondhand spaceships, scrounging for materials wherever they could.
All this time aboard sterile spaceships - and a dearth of parthenogens on their home planet - means that quarian immune systems are basically shot to hell, and so quarians are forced to wear enviro-suits at all times. Even a minor rupture in the suit can result in a fatal infection.
But hey, if you've gotta live in a hazmat suit, you might as well have a pretty awesome-looking one to live in.
Like the turians, quarian life is based on dextro-amino acids (as opposed to levo-amino acids - Mass Effect fans tend to perform slightly better on high school biology tests, I suspect), so again, quarians should not eat human or asari or salarian food. They do, however, enjoy turian cuisine (after it's been appropriately purified to avoid microbial infection, of course). I keep bringing this up because the game runs some jokes about it, and it comes up in fandom a lot as well. So, uh, consider this a guide to The Care and Feeding of Your Awesome Alien Pals.
Basically, since the quarians are entirely reliant on their fleet for survival, their entire culture revolves around it. Their rite-of-passage tradition involves young quarians going out on a Pilgrimage to find and bring back something of value to the Fleet. This can make other races pretty hostile towards quarians, as the general impression is that when the quarian fleet comes to a given system, they'll strip it of resources (and the by-necessity-technically-proficient quarians will take on jobs for less pay than others). Quarians tend to keep to themselves as a result.
Quarians of Note
Tali'Zorah nar Rayya
Tali: I'm pleased that the imminent destruction of all organic life has improved your career opportunities.
Proof that any game can be improved with the addition of an engineer who has an affinity for shotguns.
Tali (the "nar Rayya" just says which Fleet ship she was born on) is a young quarian on her Pilgrimage whom you pick up early on your journey. She's also an extremely talented engineer, and basically thinks the Normandy's experimental Tantalus drive is the coolest thing ever. Her enthusiasm for all things electronic wins over the human Normandy crew faster than any of the other aliens aboard, and she's pretty widely adored in fandom as well.
Tali and Garrus have awesome, adorable, teasing banter throughout the games, occasionally teaming up to complain about the quality of the dextro food on the Normandy, and Tali also seems to get along pretty well with everyone (this makes sense - living in cramped quarters on a starship your whole life, you have to learn to make friends pretty quickly). She's a fan of crowds and noise, and often feels at home in the busier parts of the Citadel.
She admires Shepard a great deal, and is grateful for the opportunity to prove herself and complete her Pilgrimage. Adding to her ambition when it comes to the Pilgrimage is the fact that her father is a Very Important Person aboard the Fleet, so all eyes are on her to do something spectacular. Of course, said ambition often gets her into situations where she's waaay out of her depth, but with this crew, what else is new?
Wow, that was a lot of information
You said it, bold subject heading! My hands are sore from typing so much. And I've left out a bunch of other races, and there are a ton of characters I don't want to introduce for fear of spoilers. Just keep in mind that Mass Effect 2 essentially boils down to intense character development for twelve different characters. It's a fun time.
How about gameplay?
If you're new to shooters, it might take a little while to
Oh. When you're exploring uncharted planets in the Mako tank, though, trust me. Nothing improves the maneuverability of that thing, and nobody's any good at driving it. Cartwheels off a cliff are standard operating procedure. They fix it in game 2 and make fun of it in game 3.
These games are pretty well put together and hard to break, but the Mako can generally find ways to screw things up. Hilariously.
The dialogue wheel is the mainstay of the conversational part of the game - generally speaking, if you choose the center-right option, you can skim through a conversation without missing anything. Options toward the top tend to be Paragon, options toward the bottom tend to be Renegade. The center-left option will usually be "Investigate", which lets you get in some extra dialogue and find out more about a given situation. Options in red are Intimidate dialogue choices, and options in blue are Charm dialogue choices (generally speaking, you should pick these whenever you're able, because awesomeness will happen). Options in grey are not selectable - they mean you don't have enough paragon or renegade points to be that awesome. Sorry.
The other mainstay of the conversational part of the game is Shepard's all-purpose way of extricating herself from any given conversation: "I should go." You will catch yourself saying it after playing for too long.
What else? Explore! The game is generally set up so you can just follow the main plot and ignore the rest, but there are pretty awesome subplots hanging around if you talk to people, land on random planets, or just hang around in elevators listening for suspicious news reports. And those subplots will sometimes have consequences in later games, or, more frequently, will be the seed for some running joke.
Okay, for all the gentle mockery up there, I really do think this is a seriously impressive trilogy of games - especially given its sometimes self-deprecating sense of humor - and I'd be thrilled to see more friends giving it a shot. Don't take it from me - the first game had great reviews, the second won Game of the Year, and the latest game in the series has received perfect scores from something like 50 big-name reviewers, so far. Bioware is pretty darn good when it comes to listening to the fans and making the right changes. So if you've ever wanted to tool around the galaxy in your own ship, now's your chance!
But, you know, make sure you have the time. It took me a while to get into the first game, but without even realizing it, I got completely sucked in. Even if you just blast through and only do the main plots and ignore most conversations, you're still looking at about 60 hours for all three games. Taking your time, it's more like 100 hours (it's like... three seasons of a TV show). And because of all the decision trees, there's a ton of replay value. And ME3 has a new multiplayer mode that's a lot of fun as well. And there's the downloadable content for extra gameplay. Er. Yeah. It's a lot of great stuff.
The cool thing is that the first two games are often on sale via Steam (all you have to do is install the Steam platform, find the game you want, make the purchase, and it's yours to download whenever you want - I often have to uninstall and reinstall due to disk space issues, and I've never run into trouble). I got the first and second games for $15 total. Given how many hours of awesome that works out to, that's a pretty sweet deal. Full-price, they're $20 each, which is still a fantastic deal. The third game just came out, so it's still expensive (and only available to download via Origin, which is EA's answer to Steam), about $60, but it should come down in price fairly soon.
And with that, I will finally stop typing. Whew. If you know folks who might be interested in the game, feel free to send them here! If you're already a fan and have spotted the many mistakes I've made in this post, please do point them out. Or just point and laugh. That works, too.
I should go.
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Date: 2012-03-15 09:00 pm (UTC)How is it for being able to stop / pause / pause-and-then-accidentally-wander-off-till-next-week the gameplay on short notice, though? Do you have to wait for... the equivalent of a commercial break? *knows almost zilch about video games*
no subject
Date: 2012-03-15 09:07 pm (UTC)Also, the game is generally set up in terms of "missions" with downtimes in between - the missions will take about an hour, and are natural endpoints at which to stop playing for a while. It took me about four months to finish playing the first game because I kept forgetting about it, so I think that's pretty much what you're talking about. ;) (Granted, once I was hooked, I finished the second game in three days.)
no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 02:38 am (UTC)(Also, damn you. Metaphorically, anyway. You're so. damn. good at squeeing about things. And the sensible part of me know I really, really cannot get into this fandom / game / thing at all. CAN. NOT. So many reasons - decisions to make, and motion sickness, and fast-paced-ness (i.e. having a pace at all ;P) and all that fabulous character development that I am absolutely certain will hit my various family-issues triggers at points, and the fact that this is a war video game and characters will get killed and things will be dark and I cannot handle that sort of stuff. Just can't. o_O But damn you. ;P)
no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 02:55 am (UTC)Now, not-so-hypothetically, I'm not gonna do that. ;) It's a timesuck, and it sounds like you really don't need that right now. Wait until summer? The games will still be there (in fact, given Bioware's love of releasing new downloadable content every few months, there'll be even more game to play), and you'll have more time to enjoy 'em. I held off for six months after buying my copy, because I knew I'd get sucked in. ;) (Strangely enough, I first started playing during my NASA internship, because there was waaaay more downtime than I expected.) So, yes, keep the games as a reward for finishing the term, maybe?
no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 04:14 am (UTC)Well, a week after I finish the term I have to jump into an accelerated remedial-chemistry summer class I cannot afford to fail, so I'll have even less time at that point - but maybe better time-management skills by then? At least I won't be floundering around trying to pace several different classes at that point.
(Or maybe second summer term. I forget what I'm even taking then, if I decided; I just need to take something in order to get round my uni's incompetence with the budget and get the rest of my loan money. ;P Also it'll get me into sophomore territory, whee!)
But... yeah. I really shouldn't even be thinking about video gaming at all ever, because STUFF - primarily the fact that decision-making action-y reaction-timed stuff isn't fun for me, it wears me out. Also, motion sickness. :P But I've already spotted at least three characters in your summary that I want to get to know? o_O Are there not things called playthroughs that people do, that are like turning a video game into a movie so people can watch it without playing it, or are they only for stuff less complicated than this? *the annoying exigencies of fandoms being tied to canons of specific media types*
**********************
On a more positive note, I just wrote the outline for my English term paper! (Comparing the three major mountain-ranges of Middle-Earth, is what it's turning into.) Also half of one of the assignments I'm behind on, also did a major chunk of new research that looks like it may solve one of my biggest problems WHEEEEEE, also wrote a progress-report e-mail to my professor (who's, um, getting kind of worried over the fact that I haven't turned in any homework in over a month. But I have an outline! Which will be handed in ON TIME! Also if I *koff* go to bed early? ;P I have an okay chance of pulling together at least the first draft of my bibliography that's also due tomorrow. YAY SOURCES. I have never had so many sources for one paper in my life that I actually had uses for. :D
(Also, thanks for the link for Leechblock! I'd heard of it, but couldn't remember the name, but it is Helpful. *g* Annoying as heck, but helpful.)
no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 04:53 am (UTC)Out of curiosity, which three characters caught your eye? I will see if I guessed right. ;)
And gah, CONGRATULATIONS on all those accomplishments! I'm glad things are coming together for you (especially on that awesome Middle-Earth/geology paper of awesome).
(Edit: Oh, and for that playthrough, make sure to avoid the comments if you want to avoid spoilers for the whole thing. They pop up here and there.)
no subject
Date: 2012-03-16 12:43 pm (UTC)Heehee. Kaidan and Jeff at the absolute top of the list in the extra-credit sort of section, with Nihlus next (those were the three I was thinking of), Anderson and - originally - Garrus in the "sounds boring but I bet he isn't" section (until I noticed Garrus was a detective working more or less off-the-books; that bumped him up a couple notches, but "young hothead" is still one of my least favorite character types), and a tentative interest in Wrex and Liara.
...yyyyeah. When I say I tend not to notice female characters, I really tend not to notice female characters. :-( I'm trying to work on it? ;P
(And avoiding YT comments is a thing what I always do anyway, yes. Basic sanity precautions 101. *g*)
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Date: 2012-03-16 04:42 pm (UTC)I've watched through some of the playthrough, and the person playing seems to know what they're doing, which means fewer characters are gonna die. Yay! (ME2 in particular is nasty if you're not sure what to prioritize - it's possible to lose just about everyone in the game if you're not careful. Although being that bad at it kinda takes talent.) Also, just flipping through, I've found dialogue I never encountered before in my, er, four previous playthroughs, which is kind of awesome. And the game is kind of hilarious in movie-mode like this - you never really realize how awkward the conversations can be until they're all laid out like this, heh. I imagine the second and third games will flow a lot better, since the dialogue system is more polished.
Aaanyway. Yes. I'm glad a few folks are trying the games out, in whatever form! It'll be nice to know people aren't just rolling their eyes and going "not another post about those stupid games". ;)
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Date: 2013-02-28 10:00 am (UTC)