#me1. ❖﹙ one more goddamn day when i know what i want ⋄ and my want will be considered tonight. ﹚

[frecklef0x]

Mass Effect 1: Playthrough Masterpost

At last, I have finished Mass Effect 1!

I have heard some mutuals say they wish they could play it again for the first time, and you kind of can--through me! I’ve been posting little “episodes” of live-tweet-stream-of-consciousness as I play, and now I’ve compiled them into one post to make my life easier.

Anyway, here’s the first one, the rest are under the cut. :)

frecklef0x plays mass effect: (ME1) episode one

My ass looks great in this uniform, first of all

Impaled robo zombies, yikes

Cheap shot, Saren, smh. How will I pass my spectre test now?!

Why does he have robot eyes? Is he like, Geth-Turian? Why? Is he a robo zombie also? Was it the beacon???

Cool beacon nightmares, I'm sure this is fine

This Kaiden guy has implants? ORTEGA?!??!?

"Call me princess again and you'll be picking your teeth up off the floor" lol obliterated

The citadel elevators are very realistic, five minutes of tense silence huh

Ya girl got a PROMOTION and a DOPE SQUAD time to catch a TRAITOR

frecklef0x plays mass effect: (ME1) episode two

First things first, gotta go find the blue scientist to join the gang

This galaxy is HUGE! How many of these places will I actually be able to go?!

Only two friends at a time????? D:

Ah, a distress signal, let's see wha--A DESERT CENTIPEDE NOPE ABORT ABORT

Robo aliens? In MY Theronian mining facility? Its more likely than you think

Running over dudes in my Mako is extremely satisfying tbh

*runs over geth troopers* *runs over geth armature* *runs over geth colossus* ... *backs over geth colossus*

Working elevators in the ancient ruins ✔

Oooooooh man hope this nerd is gay

Wrex, a friend of yours? Nope, not a friend, too murdery

"ShAaaAame about the ruins Shep, sOooOo much collatoral damage, SHEP" stfu Council, "ruthless" was in the resume when you promoted us, 10/10 would shoot lasers through archeological digs again

When Kaiden calls us "ma'am" I am, uh, into it

frecklef0x plays mass effect: (ME1) episode three

Time to talk to the gang! Gotta meet the fam proper

Oh dear seems we got a shmee of racism on board, compatriots

Wow Raina, good foot-in-mouth moment with Wrex there huh...sorry about the eventual extinction of your race, lost this round of Pain Olympics

OH SHIT OH SHIT BLUE HOTTIE BIGENDER? THIS IS NOT A DRILL???

“hi I’m Kaiden wanna hear about my last crush ;)” “hi I’m Liara wanna hear about Asari mating rituals? ;)))” damn we really slidin right into the DMs no chill

Garrus: fuck rules and red tape amiright Raina: oh u right ;)

Guess I’ll actually do a mission now LETS GO LESBIANS LETS GO

Honestly rolling out with Tali and Liara is a mood, squad goals

Raina @ every corporation on Noveria: I would sell you to satan for one(1) corn chip

This reactivation puzzle is some shit

I see some Mistakes were made

We already killing moms at this stage damn BioWare

FUCK FUCK BENEZIA KILLED ME AND I LOST A FUCKTON OF PLAYTIME

THERES LIKE NO AUTOSAVE IN THIS BITCH FUUUUUUUUU

fuck fuck fuck god damn it gotta shoot a bunch of deranged baby bug people again god DAMN IT

Okay we killed Liara’s mom in front of her hope that’s fine

And we let mama bug go free because after talking to Wrex, Raina’s like “this galaxy is a little trigger happy with the genocide, good luck out there bug mama ❤️ be cool please”

I have literally watched the scientist in the hot labs get killed three times now

So far the debreifs with the council have not gone very well

“You let bug mama go?! How many generations until they take over everything???” “My money’s on two :D Place your bets now assholes or stfu :DDD”

Asked Liara if she was okay and she seems pretty Cool With It

I hope to one day return to Noveria and Death Star it into oblivion

frecklef0x plays mass effect: (ME1) episode four

Talked with Tali and this situation with the Geth and the Quarians is giving me an existential crisis

You “inspect” my beautiful ship? You got somethin’ to say about my crew??? Talk shit get hit, bitch I will kill you

Yoooo my old earth gang, yeah what the hell, I’ll help ou—oh nope nvm he’s a xenophobe, you hang him and I’ll shoot his friend in the face, thx for your time

Went to the citadel to finish some assignments, left tasked with twice as many

“dOn’T cUt CoRneRs” fear not dear Kaiden, I have a permit: this piece of paper that says I do what I want

Still with the elevators, I really cannot with this

“You make it all sound so...dangerous...” ;) ;))))))

frecklef0x plays mass effect: (ME1) episode five

Headin’ to Virmire to rendezvous with the Salarian team

A cure for the genophase?!?!?! :D

Oh wait oh no are we for real gonna talk about destroying the cure like Wrex isn’t standing right here omg

SHIT GUYS NO NOT LIKE THIS WREX PLEASE

Phew for a conversation that basically started with guns drawn, it went pretty well... “What Saren has isn’t even a proper cure, he’s just fucking with the Krogans at this point. Are we gonna stand for that? Or are we gonna murder?” “Damn Shep, you right, we gon’ murder”

Okay Ashley, go join the aliens, try not to die

Shadow Team!🎵 tearing through the base 🎶 disabling all the     defenses 🎵 (you gotta sing it to the tune of the Trogdor song)

We free the prisoners!!! :)

We shoot the prisoners??? :(

“Raina? How can you shoot them where they stand?” So it’s more merciful to let them explode? NAH FAM

This scientist is responsible for the mind control stuff? For Benezia? Fine     I’ll let her go but I hope she explodes

We did not learn our lesson concerning beacons I see

Wait if even Saren is worried about his mind control ship does that mean there are larger forces involved here?

Oh. Oh fuck

Ugh Ashley I EXPLICITLY TOLD YOU NOT TO DIE

(so we really never found any info about that genophase cure huh? disappointing)

Oh Seren, you dumb dumb. You absolute fool. Clown man.

When Raina slings Kaiden over her shoulder to carry him to the ship—mmmmmmmmwoooow I am very bisexual

Bruh Raina takes every council call and she disconnects pissed off every time

WAIT I literally just hung up with the council, ASHLEY is DEAD, and Kaiden needs a DTR RIGHT NOW?!?!? Boy, NO, READ THE ROOM

This has been a stressful day

frecklef0x plays mass effect: (ME1) episode six

Shepard will avoid her feelings and go to Faros instead

Seeing Ashley’s figure greyed out and her locker inaccessible makes me sad

Wrex and Garrus, let’s go shoot some geth 💪 

A mind controlling planet—of course!

Shep gets all her renegade points shooting capitalists

Saved, uh, about half the colonists

If I have one more bad acid trip I stg

Oh nope here’s another one

Shep needs a nap

frecklef0x plays mass effect: (ME1) episode seven

Ah, the council. Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal.

At least Liara is good at pep talks ;)

Joker, you cockblock

Haha DUDE we airborne, you THOUGHT

Now that I am exiled from the Citadel, guess I’ll run some galactic errands:

o   Killed corporate scientists who though we would rescue them lol

o   Destroyed a bunch of geth camps helping Tali on her pilgrimage

o   Disabled a nuke and killed some pirates

o   Shut down some evil Cerberus experiments

o   And illegally traded information!

Okay time to get back on track

So we may or may not be flying to our doom

OH GOD LIARA LOVES ME!!! RAINA, YOU DISASTER, YOU DID IT AAAAAH ❤️❤️❤️

frecklef0x plays mass effect: (ME1) episode eight

You know what I love? Being murdered by geth armatures

All these Ilos ruins be looking the same

Security panel is only kinda helpful

Oh, luckily I know Prothean now!

“CANNOT BE STOPPED” wow very encouraging, thanks

After that super motivating message and disabling security, its time to go down, down to goblin town

Vigil? Oh word?

My girlfriend is GEEKING out

I knew something what wrong with that fucking Citadel

Vigil: information is power. Also Vigil: What does it matter why they do what they do? All that matters is you stop them

“non-essential” personnel die first, huh? GROSS, VIGIL (gotta be honest that hits different in 2020)

Garrus gets it, I knew we liked that guy

Okay, find conduit, save galaxy, break millennium-old genocide cyle, nbd

Ugh Mako you gotta do me dirty one last time I see, I hate this thing

THE CONDUIT STRAIGHT YEETED MAKO

The citadel robot says we’re doomed : )

This shootout is SO fun, seriously

Saren get it toGETHER

Renegade Raina can kill with a conversation apparently, well done then

Concentrate on the Sovereign—why am I gonna save a council that hates my guts, sorry, but I have a JOB to DO that you ACTIVELY HINDERED

Great, zombie husk Saren, just what I needed as I mull over the possible consequences of my galaxy-altering decision

GO JOKER GO

Humanity-only council seems…questionable. Raina didn’t love the council but this sits wrong. Couldn’t we just appoint a more diverse council, including a human?

Anderson seems like a good enough dude, so…we’ll see.

TIME FOR WAR BOYS, GODDAMN WHAT A GAME

[athena1138]

🔥 mass effect

Oh hell yeah. Alright let's see. 

 Firstly, I fully relate to the Council and other Council species. Humans 100% forced themselves into their affairs way too fast. I mean, only 50 years after first contact and here we are trying to impose ourselves in their federation? Nah, man. Like, obviously, it was good because Shepard could become a Spectre and save everyone, but I completely understand why everyone hated the humans. 

 Secondly, I also understand why the Council is so hesitant to believe Shepard. Again, they've only personally known humans for 50 years. They don't know what game we're playing. But everyone gives them shit because they're (rightfully) hesitant to believe Shepard saying literal machine gods are coming to eradicate everyone? I mean come on. *I* wouldn't even believe Shepard and I *AM* Shepard. 

 Thirdly, I don't know how I feel about the indoctrination theory, the one that says that Shepard has been being indoctrinated since day 1. Idk. I mean, I can see the evidence for it. And it would help solidify the weirdness of ME3, but overall I don't know. It just doesn't... feel right. 

 Fourthly, ME3 ended well. I know, I know. Nobody thinks that. But I think that. I've never had a problem with how it ended. My TWO complaints are that 1,) if you destroy the Reapers, Edi supposedly has to die and I can't do that to my man Jeff. I just can't. 2,) The Normandy gets stranded on that planet. Without the relays, it'll take them AGES to get home. That's it. Those are my only two complaints. Everything else was good, I thought. 

 Fifthly, Andromeda was a GOOD GAME DAMMIT. My one complaint was that after all that shit, we don't even get to explore Meridian or meet Mom. I mean, yeah, the potential is there for future games to do it, but dammit I wanted it in Andromeda. 

 Sixthly (I'm just gonna stop with the numbers.) Liam Kosta is a fucking dick. YEAH I SAID IT. I just. Oh my god. I hate him so goddamn much. Like. Ok. At first, I thought he was cute. I was dtf. But then his loyalty mission came around. I've talked about this before, but I'm not gonna go looking for that post so here it is: Not only is it not his responsibility to "learn how to live" in Andromeda (because, y'know, that's MY responsibility as a Pathfinder,) but he went around the backs of not only the Initiative but the Angaran government, too. Which. Fine. I could've lived with just that. But no. It gets worse. He went around MY back to ask MY settlement, my shining example of competence, my first demonstration that I'm not a complete fuckup Podromos and asked LITERAL SETTLERS for help before asking me. Putting them in danger. And he gave out Nexus data to boot. Like that's not his job in the LEAST. AND THE FUCKER IS JUST SO CAVALIER ABOUT IT ALL!!! He's like. Not even sorry. Not really. When the PF talks to him first, he's just talking like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar who's also still in PlayMode and hasn't realized Mommy isn't fucking playing around. Then, on the entire fucking mission, he's either cracking jokes or he's criticizing the PF like this is THEIR fault. And I think the worst thing about the entire situation is, I'm not even allowed to get mad!!! There are NO options to SERIOUSLY express how fucking angry I am in the game. I just. Holy fuck. If I were the actual PF, Liam Kosta would've been kicked off my fucking ship after that. 

 While I'm on characters I dislike, I really just can't like Miranda. I just can't. I've tried. I really have. But nah. She grates on me like nobody's business. I don't hate her, per se, but I'm not a fan.

 Oh, and, I said this a few days ago, but I hate Shepard's dress with a passion. Yeah. I think that about sums it up.

 I'm sure I have more, but it's been a while since I've replayed the series. I'm about halfway through ME1 again, but I stopped to work on my DA fanfics before I got set on the ME track again. (It didn't really work. I've written 2 Liara fics and started a handful of James or Garrus fics lol. Oops.)

[thunderheadfred]

Director’s cut: ok so a scene I’ve got annotated - Akuze. Hudson. I love Hudson so much. Any commentary you can give on the Valentine’s Day From Hell is welcome because that’s a scene that’s stuck with me and inspired me for a while. 💖

I’m still screaming about ‘annotated’ btw, THANKS

So I went digging through my Red Streak tag (oh god, this fic has WAY TOO MANY PAGES on my blog, and holy shittttt it’s old lmao) and only found ONE CHUNK of meta from when I was writing Akuze, so the rest is just gonna have to be from memory, and my memory is BAD, haha. Anyway, the whole Akuze thing was seriously me just like… pandering to a long, long list of my own private Mass Effect headcanons in a way that was only nominally relevant to the plot, but people seem to enjoy the shit out of that chapter, so I guess it’s true that you should just write what you want to read. 

First of all, I have always had this truly dipshit private notion that Creedence Clearwater Revival should be played whenever the Mako is deployed in ME1 because… IDK, I just think “Fortunate Son” would sound pretty fucking sweet blasted out of a space tank on an alien planet. Growing up in the 90′s meant that a strange brand  of Vietnam “war is hell” nostalgia polluted my brain, and now I’m just stuck thinking Creedence = ironic war music. Which, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with Meatloaf, the music I ACTUALLY referenced, since the whole chapter wound up leaving heavily into an 80s action pastiche BUT MY POINT IS, IT STARTED WITH CREEDENCE.

Anyway yeah. From early days I had wanted to incorporate this musical Mako HC into a thresher maw fight (originally it was going to be a random encounter, I think, just for team-building) and I can’t remember how exactly, but I ended up listening to I Would Do Anything for Love at some point while brainstorming and instantly REQUIRING a Meatloaf-accompanied thresher maw vs. tank battle to exist. And goddammit, nobody ELSE was going to write it, so I did it myself, canon be damned haha. I’m not sure when Hudson from Aliens decided to show up, but at that point, I was just rolling with the punches. I figured I could blame the diagetic 80s soundtrack on Hudson, kill him off, and maybe get away with how ridiculous it all was. Like, hands in the air, it’s not my fault.

OH YEAH I ALMOST FORGOT - the reason this whole mess ended up being a flashback shoehorning Wrex into Shep’s backstory was that A) I wanted the krogan to have a more direct link to the thesher maw mythos in ME1, and B) I never understood why Wrex was even THERE in ME1. He doesn’t have a lot of compelling motivations to stick around, unless he and Shepard have some unfinished business or… something?? He’s one of my fave characters but I never quite believed how instantaneously cooperative he was? So I gave him and Shep some doofy shared history, idk. 

Anyway that was a lot of babbling and I don’t know that I actually explained a single goddamned thing, but thank you for asking and I’m always THRILLED when people love that chapter, since it was such a wild card. THANK YOU

Director’s Cut

[meggannn]

late replies bc i am an asshole

@tetrahedrals said: oooh that nightmare! i may require there to be fic about that

and now that i’ve put it out into the world, i’ve doomed myself to writing it, so you may get your wish....

@tetrahedrals said: also love the detail about Kaidan. How does she react to losing him on Virmire, given that she doesn't want to be 'the person who’d leave behind a cremate because it was tactically reasonable'? (ah sorry, you've written me an essay and im asking more questions!)

oh yeah, she does not take Virmire well at all. like, AT ALL. kaidan the first person she’s lost under her command in a long time (excluding jenkins, because honestly that happened so fast and she didn’t really know him, you could argue she only saw him as a temporary subordinate for the eden prime shakedown). when she tells kaidan she’s coming back for him, she means it so thoroughly she convinces herself it’s possible to rescue both him and ashley -- the facts are against them, but when haven’t they been? they can beat the odds again! and then saren comes, and time’s run out, and kaidan’s gone. and she kind of doesn’t register it, half of her mind’s still whirling about how to save him, it takes her a few seconds to realize that fight’s over, now you need to complete the mission first and save who you can second.

so once they’re back on the normandy, it hits her like, shit, we just lost a crewman. there will be one bunker empty tonight. i’ll have to clean out kaidan’s locker and inform his family. i’ll need to write up a casualty report. i haven’t done that in years. how is this real? what should i have done differently?

she screws her head on for the report back to the council, but when they ground the normandy, lmao it’s just one insult after another. she loses a cherished crewman AND her ship AND her mission AND her entire hand AND some of her confidence as a commander in like the same two days. it’s not a good week.

and no look listen you are one of only like three people who gives a shit about my ocs, i will talk about them with you for however long you ask and will thank you endlessly for every question you send

@al-spudnik said: Gahhhhhhhhhh your character profiles are so COMPLETE this is just such a delight thank you

thank you for giving me a chance to blab about them!!

@al-spudnik said: I especially grok Shep vs. ME1 Garrus whining about his dad, cuz holy hell, Jane should shake him around for taking his dad for granted sometime too, that is a fantastic inspiration for some conflict.

well-meaning but complicated father relationships really interest me (NOT unhealthy ones, i get sad cause there are so many of those idk if we need more), so garrus’s relationship with his dad fascinates me and i prefer to think they disagree out of a generational gap, or conflict of beliefs, than out of any malice or abuse as i sometimes see written.

@al-spudnik said: (This reminds me of that aha moment I had reading Pompeii where you had EB Shep distrusting cop Garrus, which I'd never seen before but seems SO OBVIOUS in retrospect? I love your characters, goddamn

THANK YOU i really thought hard about that moment, how she would feel, if it’s been so long it would even affect her anymore, but i think i ultimately decided eb shepard would absolutely still subconsciously freeze around running into a cop when she doesn’t intend to, even well into her military career, as a sideffect of participating in illicit activities and seeing how corrupt they could be back on earth. due to that i can’t help but feel she wouldn’t be that fond of garrus in the beginning (she wouldn’t actively dislike him, but she’d absolutely think him reckless and would be concerned if she gave any indication she was encouraging his behavior, he might become a corrupt cop like she saw as a kid). i’d say that changes only around the end of me1/their me2 reunion once she sees his worse habits come out of a desire to do good, and that’s more likely to make himself miserable than anyone else.

[lesbianalicent]

mass effect: andromeda review

abandon hope of not seeing spoilers, all ye who click the cut

overall: 3/5 main story: 3.5/5 dialogue: 5/5 fuck all of you it was hilarious combat: 5/5 worldbuilding: 2/5 squad: 4/5 overall gameplay: 2/5 side quests: 1/5

this is gonna be long, y’all, i have A Lot To Say

so, first thing’s first: ryder is a treasure and probably the best protagonist that bioware has come up with since hawke or shepard. inquisitor whom??? they’re absolutely hilarious and whenever they open their mouth i know something delightfully terrible is going to come out of it. i find it interesting that the older folks who play this game (late twenties and over) HATE the dialogue but the younger folks who are around ryder’s actual age don’t? it’s an interesting split that i could write essays on just bc of how ryder talks bc it’s so similar to how i talk.

god she’s such a little asshole i love her i would die for her.

THE PROS: -fantastic combat that is probably the best that bioware has ever done, not having a set class is wonderful and being able to switch to do whatever you want is [prayer hands emoji] i can finally be the biotic infiltrator combo of my dreams -I LOVE BEING ABLE TO PROJECT MY DADDY ISSUES ONTO RYDER THANK YOU FOR THAT BIOWARE -kissable!! turian!! gotta Kiss That Turian!! -the tempest crew feels like a tight knit family, they feel Real, hearing them banter on the ship itself is lovely and seeing how their relationship grows over the course of the game is delightful. the movie night single handedly saved me. the emails and the message board killed me dead. -nakmor kesh is my girlfriend -liara t’soni cameos -SAM, i love that ai i hope he knows that. he’s a very different character than edi and i really like that? i like the relationship he has with ryder it’s a lot different than shepard’s relationship with legion and with edi -the little easter eggs scattered around, like hunting dr. okeer’s research and finding zaeed’s son -the main story missions really felt like mass effect, and there’s some great choices you have to make that i hope will have actual effects later in the series -STUNNING scenery, holy shit -nomad banter -peebee/vetra, specifically. thank you sheryl chee for my life. -THE RYDER FAMILY WHAT THE HECK I LOVE THESE ASSHOLES -loyalty missions were a lot of fun, liam’s specifically is SO funny i love that boy -i would die for the tempest’s crew THE CONS: -too big. way, way, WAY too big. like take the hinterlands and make it into several PLANETS big. it’s exhausting and it was neat at first but by the end i just wanted it to be done, i had to resort to doing a speed run just so i wouldn’t burn myself out on the first try. if i wanted to play an open world game i’d play world of warcraft or skyrim, honestly. the open world aspect of it is dEFINITELY one of the game’s biggest weak spots, and i’m def gonna save my completionist run for when some mods and patches come out so i don’t burn myself out real quickly. i still haven’t recovered from my dai completionist run and that was a year ago. -the loyalty missions are fun and interesting, but except for cora’s they really didn’t seem to have much of a point other than unlocking romances. in me2 the point of the loyalty missions was that the crew would draw a line with shepard somewhere, things you said and did could lose their loyalty and if you lost their loyalty the characters could and often did die in the suicide mission. these seemed more like personal quests, they didn’t even unlock new outfits :/ -okay. listen. i understand that garrus is a fan favorite. and i love him too. but holy shit liara had a VOICE cameo and he still got the most references. that goddamn archangel paintjob? “reach and flexibility”? having his picture in the codex? his goddamn father being in a flashback? liam mentioning a scarred turian vigilante? meanwhile kaidan and ashley get nothing, lmao, Okay. like shit even shepard only got referenced ONCE like come on y’all. not even gonna mention the battle of the citadel? that was a big goddamn plot point, especially since ryder was RAISED ON THE CITADEL? you’d think that the sovereign attack would be traumatizing. -dragon age characters got references but ash and kaidan don’t.........lol.........i see you bioware.............. -what was even the point of editing shepard’s gender -if you’re gonna have references you should at least have a little reference for every major character like the game is so fucking big you could have done it without being in your face. ellen’s role with biotics? reference baat. general williams and shanxi. wrex when talking to drack’s clan urdnot friend. -i really wish they’d have at least had some major choices from me1 imported in, like “did the council survive, who was the virmire survivor, was everyone recruited, did wrex survive” etc.  -speaking off, there’s plot holes for days. i can’t get a confirmation on when in 2185 they left, but if they left before shepard woke up and they didn’t ever recruit garrus in me1 then WHY would garrus’s dad talk to alec about it. the fuck my dudes. -yeah. plot holes for days. i’m tired and a bitter OT fucker. -gil’s.......entire.............storyline............lol GOD bioware...... -having the two crime lords being the latino man and the black woman. i see you bioware. -sloane’s entire storyline god bioware........... -the remnant are literally just synthetic protheans and the kett are organic reapers -i’m tired of this trend in bioware games where they use the “SILLY MORTALS YOU CANNOT EVEN COMPREHEND OUR ACTIONS, THEY ARE BEYOND YOUR UNDERSTANDING” like with the reapers it was cool, corypheus was a disaster and quite frankly so was the kett but whatever. -activating the monoliths and having to do sudoku. why.  -not prioritizing quests properly. you could miss one of the biggest twists in the game bc you don’t finish that fetch quest to get all the memory triggers, and that twist was the main one that i actually wanted to see (shepard and the reapers and liara’s SOS) -PEEBEE’S SEX SCENE GOD. TOO MUCH. BIOWARE. -JAAL WITH HIS VAGINA HEAD GOING DOWN ON SARA RYDER. FUCK.

that’s all i can think of atm but my main issue with the game is that bioware doesn’t seem to know how to prioritize quests, it’s SO BIG, and they treat their mlm like garbage. also racist tropes ahoy.

i’m really excited to see where they take the franchise tho! definitely got some solid future plot points with whatever the fuck the remnant were, whatever the kett are after (ugh...), discovering what happened in the milky way, who killed jien garson, who is the benefactor (my money is illusive man and tann’s power hungry froggy ass had her killed and it was unrelated just coincidental), ellen ryder’s recovery, the quarian ark, etc.

i hope they keep the same squad for the next game! continue the romances as well as add in new ones, maybe add a couple of new squaddies. i like having the same characters overlap in different games, it makes you actually care about them. add in scott/sara as a squaddie! LESBIAN/GAY SQUADDIES. keep ryder as the protag or so help me god..........

it really, really makes me miss the original trilogy tho. and playing it knowing there’s a bunch of ppl who wont ever touch it but will play andromeda hurts me deeply.

[atllas]

Musing about the hate at Mass Effect: Andromeda that I don’t understand.

I don’t get the hate for the facial animations?? I personally think they’re pretty okay? Yeah some facial expressions are derpy, but come on guys, even in real life we, as humans, make some cringy ass faces every day. 

You know what I really like about the facial animations? The eyes. They dart around instead of staring straight at whoever is talking to them, and that gives a more realistic look. Our eyes are constantly moving, even when we do talk to someone or are staring at something. Idk about others, but that was one good thing I noticed about the facial animations that everyone is going batshit insane rage over.

Y’all should know by now that Bioware isn’t about how pretty the game looks my dudes. They’re about stellar writing and amazing characters and character development. From what I’ve seen so far, the writing for ME:A is more akin to ME3′s Citadel DLC. Do you know how awesome that is? The BEST DLC and one of the top favorite missions in the entire series is gonna be the kind of writing for an entire game. The gameplay video that came out for Liam’s loyalty mission was fucking hilarious, and I love the fact that I can pick four different answers for Ryder during dialogue instead of Nice Choice or Mean Choice cause it helps deepen Ryder’s personality.

Do you know how awesome it is that I actually have trouble deciding who I want to bring with me on missions? Garrus was always a solid pick because he was my favorite character in all three games. In ME1 it was always Garrus and Wrex. ME2 was always Garrus and Legion. ME3 was always Garrus and Javik. But now in MEA, I’m actually have a hard time deciding who I want in my squad because I like them (Cora is eh, but even she isn’t too bad). Yeah, I’ll mostly keep Vetra because she’s my main romance option, but Drak is awesome, PeeBee is cute, and Liam is my brotp. I don’t know anything about Jaal so I can’t say if I will like him or not yet tho. But still, thats a whopping three out of six squadmates that I really like and will have difficulty deciding who I want to bring with me. Hell, I’ll probably have to start cycling members out.

So kudos to you Bioware, I’m so goDDAMN EXCITED FOR THIS GAME NONE OF YALL CAN FUCK UP MY HYPE

[zydrateacademy]

Retrospective Review: The Entire Mass Effect Franchise

Andromeda is coming out in a week (as of this writing) and I feel like I want to revisit the franchise. I’ve done a post like this a few years ago when my blog was new but didn’t really settle in on a style and it was kind of garbage with a lot of pointless paragraph breaks. First, some quick insight. I was born in ‘89. That means I was too late to life to be considered an “80’s” kid, and the 90’s were half over before I was able to form real likes, dislikes, or memories. It’s a strange bit of flux because most of my “Nostalgia” is usually in the form of Legos as opposed to comics, games, movies, etc.

It’s a flux that’s kind of leaked into my daily life. My family is not, and never has been particularly affluent. Every extra ten dollars we find, we think “YES. A few days of gas” or “YES. Lunch money.” We’re not poor, we’ve never had a lot of room for amenities. We update our computers basically once every 5-10 years based primarily around income tax returns. Whatever hand-me-down I get from person who was able to afford their new computer, it was always better than what I had. A problem that has recently been remedied when I was employed for two and a half years as a part-time cashier still gave me enough to buy my own completely up to date computer that will last me the next five years on its own. Stick with me, I’m getting to the point. As a result of all of that, I tend to not be able to get games as they come out. Especially not games that turn into these huge franchises. A few games hold special places in my heart BECAUSE of the very fact that I was able to start with them. Mass Effect is one of those series. I started with it on the Xbox, probably borrowing it from a friend initially and playing it in bite-sized chunks before getting it used (likely bought for me like everything else was). The story starts out well. Your character (do I even really need to name them at this point?) is on the track to becoming a Spectre, a sort of special service agent for the entire alien government. During the screening process, another Spectre goes rogue and the entire game is building up a sort of power base against him while discovering a secret of the universe that may lead to the death of everyone in it. Damn. Ramped way the hell up, didn’t it? I suppose that’s fine, as studios don’t exactly expect all their games to shoot off the way they do sometimes. Mass Effect was good for its time. A fairly basic shooter with some RPG elements, in the older days where putting a point in your skills increased damage by 4%, and other things like that. It was incremental, but it had a cool idea based around a boring mechanic. Every few levels in the huge variety of skills you had at your disposal, you’d get a new ability or some kind of boost. Put enough points in “Fitness” and you’d unlock an ability called Immunity, an active ability that reduced taken damage by a flat rate for a few seconds. It’s interesting how the following two games basically dropped that idea, gave you the same 4-5 abilities (that vary per class), called it a day, and just built everything around those. It made the second game a certain kind of boring because every playthrough was effectively the same. You hotkey your main one or two attacks and just shoot stuff when it’s on cooldown. The second game’s story went sideways rather than forward, a point against its favor when looking back at the series as a whole. It continues, presumably a few months after the events of the first game and your ship gets shot out of space and Shepard literally dies immediately. In the introductory sequence establishes that you were picked up by the Cerberus organization and basically rebuilt like goddamn Robocop. I was expecting a “We have the technology!” type dialog but alas, we were deprived. Cerberus was an organization briefly mentioned in some tiny fetch quest in ME1 when you discover a small outpost had been husk-ified. To their credit, this definitely tied into what they would end up doing en masse in ME3 but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. They come to ME2 full force as Shepard is more or less forced to work with them when the mere association makes the alien council backpedal their support for Shepard, whom they presumed dead. As a result, you don’t see a lot of them in ME2. The whole story culminates in fighting a sort of human-based reaper that the collectors (who you later discover were reaper-possessed Protheans. Christ this series is weird) have been building by harvesting human colonies just on the edge of the government’s jurisdiction. Because of this they refuse to respond to the abductions and Shepard joins Cerberus to figure out this mystery and solve it. With bullets. Or whatever the hell comes out of guns in this universe. Something something mass effect fields. The entire game is basically the Dragon Age 2 problem all over again. It feels like it takes place in a single setting even though it doesn’t. It’s mostly padding. Half the game is loyalty missions as you run around to make sure your minions are happy enough with their lot in life, so they’re suicidal enough to do the suicide mission at the end but not suicidal enough to shoot themselves on the Normandy because they’re just not quite sure their father is still alive or not. I never liked this aspect of the game. Every where I turned, someone on my team was whining about something that barely mattered in the grand scheme of things. You could argue that settling their business gives them enough drive and morality to survive the mission at the end. If they didn’t have the morale, maybe they would be too sad to move out of the way of certain bullets. I get that, morale is a huge thing and I suffer from the gain and drain of it on competitive multiplayer games. I feel it, but it’s exhausting to try and manage it across a 20 to 40 hour game. Especially since the mechanics were dumbed down as I alluded to earlier. In the end, ME2 barely matters on a story standpoint and mostly served to update the graphics, systems, and mechanics from the first. To that end, they did fine. ME2 looks fine, even by today’s standards. In a more combat-oriented game, ME2 functions as a successor.  This brings up to ME3. It opens up about a full year after the events of the second game, where Shepard is being punished for their actions in the Arrival DLC of ME2. Never got around to doing that DLC? Tough shit, as they reference it throughout the entire first act of the game and even later when you meet a Batarian on his deathbed. I played through it maybe once and I still don’t really understand what happened or why it was my fault, but there you go. Basically, in the second scene the reapers attack and fucking finally, the goverment lets Shephard get their best murder on and fly out to kick some actual ass. This is even lampshaded by Legion (a Geth teammate you acquire in late-game ME2) who told their own people that the reapers were coming and were believed immediately and began prepping. “Must be nice”, Shepard says. Indeed.  The entire game is spent gathering war assets for the finale of the series. The more you have, the better it goes on a story standpoint. If you scrape for every asset you are capable of, there will be less loss of life. More soldiers on the field, more field assistance, and generally a slightly less bleak atmosphere (which is still pretty goddamn bleak). The mechanics are a crisper version of ME2′s. You still only have 4-5 main abilities to use per class but the leveling system is a bit more nuanced and more in-depth than before, which edged towards ME1′s style without being too stupidly gratuitous like adding 4% to damage. They saved that for actual gun modifications. The cover system has remained through the entire franchise (As it will continue in Andromeda) and it mostly serves to give you shield recharge while reloading your gun and not much else. Mass Effect 3 is probably my favorite of the entire franchise. Some are beholden to the first game as classic nostalgia, and I don’t know many who talk about 2 very much. However mostly decry the third game for its flawed ending and I chalk that up to a PR misunderstanding, or just bad wording on Bioware’s part. See, the sting mostly comes from when they claimed that “Oh the ending won’t be a simple A, B, C matter...” That’s exactly what it became. In the end you had the choice between destroying ALL synthetic life, taking control of the reapers for yourself and effectively fusing your consciousness with them, or if you gathered enough assets, full on synthesis. This basically fuses organic life with synthetic code, making everyone a sort of hybrid and thus rendering the Reaper’s flawed logic completely moot, and they fuck off into the void of space all over again. However for those who actually watched the endings, with the help of the extended cut, there’s a lot of nuances that that simple choice does not immediately seem apparent. In the extended cut you can see the multitude of your choices play out. Did you cure the genophage? You witness the rebirth of Tuchanka and see it get rebuilt in grand buildings with Krogan mothers celebrating their children. What did you do about the Geth/Quarian conflict? You see the results of that as well. Yes, the ending decision did boil down to an ABC choice but the ramifications of a few choices that you made since the first game still absolutely had an effect. A mass effect, if you will (please kill me). Ultimately I feel like there’s a lot more to do in ME3. I’ve played it for a few hundred hours, changing something big every time I do it. I take on a different lover, I switch sides and sabotage the genophage (which I will never ever do again because holy shit). I hop between Paragon and Renegade because it’s fun to watch the world change before my eyes as I decide to murder people that I would not otherwise have done. I do run out of things to do however as the level cap is 60, and if you’ve imported a ME2 save you’re probably already level 25-30 so it takes a single playthrough to max out. After that point, doing NG+’s only change a bonus power and maybe you can fiddle around with different weapon types and adjust playstyles. Which I did often. While I wrap this up with a sort of game-by-game summary, I want to give an honorable mention to ME3′s DLC, The Citadel. It’s often considered the ‘true’ ending to the series and is my personal headcanon post-final battle regardless of lives lost. It takes place on the Citadel (obviously) while most of your crew is on shore leave while the Normany gets cleaned up as it presumably does every time you dock anywhere across the franchise. Shepard’s life is never simple as it turns out there’s a plot against their life and must scramble to figure out another mystery. It’s an incredibly funny DLC with a ton of humor and mostly acts as a tone-shifting breather for the general “We’re all fucked” aura the game mostly gives you. It even ends on a “We’re all in this together” high note with most of your crew (And some from ME2 come back!) overlook a beautiful view while in the titular Citadel. So. We’ve reached the conclusion with my overarching thoughts on the franchise as a whole. It’s good. It’s an experience, and I highly recommend playing through it because there’s a lot to talk about. I’ll give a basic rundown. Mass Effect 1: Fine game, but has not aged well on a visual standpoint. Story is perfectly solid and moderately self-contained without originally relying on a whole franchise to carry it. RPG elements are excessive and each individual upgrade doesn’t feel like it does much until the higher levels. Mass Effect 2: Basically sidesteps its predecessor. Weak story that takes the plot nowhere but with crisper, actionized mechanics and less inventory menus to worry about. Mass Effect 3: Is the culmination of everything they learned from the last two games. More nuanced RPG systems that seem like a middleground between 1 and 2. Story comes to a solid conclusion, and I don’t agree with all the constant whining about how the endings ruined the entire game for some people. Grow up. I’m sure the game has some kind of anthology pack you can buy on sale at this point and I’d recommend giving it a go. If you’re a newcomer to the franchise, be prepared to set aside anywhere from 50 to 200 hours between the three games. If not, Andromeda takes place between the events of 2 and 3 while taking place in a completely different galaxy and will very likely only slightly reference the previous games. There’s the occasional nod, like you meet a sibling of the Turian female in Omega. Other little nods like that but it won’t be necessary to go through all three to enjoy the full experience of Andromeda. Can’t wait!

[akuzeisms]

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