Mass Effect 2
Apr. 14th, 2011 04:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dexfarkinI realized I had intended to do a write up, and got distracted by something shiny along the way. With the last of the major DLCs out now, it's worth revisiting the epic world of Commander Shepard and blue lesbian porn. Especially the blue lesbian porn, obviously.
So, for those uninitiated, Mass Effect 2 is the second installment in the Mass Effect universe. In the first game, humans have come out to the rest of the universe following the discovery of alien technology on Mars, and then a 'Mass Relay' which functions as a hyperspace gate out beyond Pluto. Now, as a member of Citadel Space, a multiracial collective of races and systems, strives to expand their colonies and take their place in the intersteller community. Obviously, they are about as welcome as a biker in a ballet school, and the three dominant races on the Citadel Council have (correctly, it turns out) kept
humanity constrained out of concerns for our capacity for aggression, violence, and all around dickishness.
Commander Shepard, one of the top human soldiers in the Alliance fleet, is being considered as the first human SPECTRE (a kind of secret special ops/police officer with total authority and little oversight). During the mission, Shepard uncovers a treasonous SPECTRE named Saren and is implanted with an alien cipher, giving hints about the ancient and extinct race that built the mass relays and other tech. During the course of the game, Shepard hunts Saren to discover that he is a pawn for a race called the Reapers, who appear every 50,000 years to harvest any race that has achieved spacefaring capabilities, and retreat to dark space. This time, Shepard and his team discovers and destroys the Reaper first.
The evil plan was to mate with our space station? That is fucked, dude.
Everyone still with me? Alright, good. In Mass Effect 2, you start off as Shepard again, but in your first few minutes, your ship is ambushed and nearly destroyed by an unknown ship, giving your crew barely time to evacuate. As Shepard, you make your way up to the main cabin, now open to space, and pull your pilot out of his seat and into an escape pod. Unfortunately, a blast hurls you into space as your ship breaks up, and micro-lesions in your suit start venting your air into space as you struggle and drift towards re-entry.
Wait, we need to exchange insurance information!
Yeah, the game starts out with your kind of horrific death. After suffiocating to death and burning to fuck on re-entry, your corpse is found and after a series of adventures which involves a bad ass Asari criminal queen voiced by Carrie-Anne Moss, is turned over to a human first group called Cebereus, who you tangled with during the first game. As the focus of the 'Lazerus Project', a name so obvious that it had to have been chosen to hit a Friday night deadline and the only person still in the office and sober was the seventeen year old high school intern, is used to rebuild your burnt pork looking corpse back to health. It's also a convenient way to retool your character if you're importing them from the first game, and want to take advantage of the new graphics to fix things up.
Now, one of the big advantages of this game is the feeling of continuity. It's a sequel, but it isn't a separate game and it really takes advantage of the familiarity that you built up with 'your' Shepard during the hours that Mass Effect requires. The other thing is that the character's place in the universe is already established, so the exposition is fairly short, allowing you to jump into the action quickly, but still feeling the immersive sense of the game. The final and huge element is the fact that you start the game already with questions to be answered; what happened to your old crew? What's the situation with the Reapers? What about your relationship? And so on.
Something that Bioware has done quite well is to extend the race/gender neutral elements seen in KotOR to Mass Effect. Identifying in some respect to your characters in an RPG is an important element in the immersive experience, and Bioware's character creation, twinned with the Paragon/Renegade morality trees really build a customized experience for anyone playing. It very quickly becomes a story that you evolve, and it is really rare to find that kind of personal experience in a game.
Mass Effect 2 also has an additional bonus of extremely well chosen voice actors/character models. In the first Mass Effect, Lance Hendriksen and David Keith played your superiors in the Alliance military, bringing with them their own gravitis to the roles. It helped anchor the tone of the game along the plot of this tough, military mission that had to be taken seriously. Grabbing Marina Sirtis as the bosumy yet evil Matriarch gave it a surprisingly important link to the broader sci-fi community. For a game like Mass Effect, it is difficult to built a space opera whole cloth without your influences showing strongly. BioWare decided instead to take certain common sci-fi elements unabashedly, and use them in a self-referential way in order to provide a touchstone for sci-fi fans. Sirtis' performance is opposite her iconic Star Trek Troi, but the familiarity of her voice as part of your aggregate science fiction history links the game to it without imitation. It's a very clever way to approach the challenge and make it a strength for the game. Also, there's Seth Green, but I'll get to him later.
I find it difficult to concentrate on stopping the Reavers right now...
The second takes this idea to another level, populating the voice acting with a laundry list of sci-fi related actors; Armin Shimerman (Buffy,DS9), Tricia Helfer (BSG), Michal Hogan (BSG), Robin Sachs (Buffy), Adam Lazarre-White (Heroes), Michael Dorn (ST:TNG), Shohreh Aghdashloo (X-Men), Adam Baldwin (Firefly), and Claudia Black (Farscape). But the most inspired choices came with the casting of Yvonne Strahovski from 'Chuck' as Miranda and Martin Sheen as the Illusive Man.
Speak with Josh and Toby before fighting the Reavers, Shepard. Break's over.
The Illusive Man is a key figure in the story; a pro-humanity advocate and the founder of Cerberus, the organization that brings you back from the dead. He is a kind of information node, collecting intelligence from all over the galaxy and running operations of tremendous scope for humanity's benefit. There's a strong neo-fascist approach to him, in the vein that he's willing to what's best for humanity, regardless of whether or not they agree with him. It's a mash up of intelligence spymaster and elder statesman, and in the hands of Martin Sheen, he provides a powerful presence that pulls the story together. Sheen's tremendous ability to convey both authority and empathy imbue the Illusive Man was a unique quality, and even when the decisions you make put you on the opposite side of his aims, there's still a grey area that he inhabits, instead of the normal black/white transition from ally to villain. Immortal Space President Bartlett really provides the core motivation for Shepard through the story, and as the pace accelerates, you find yourself reacting to his urgency.
At least it's not the Wienerlicious
Yvonne Strahovski provides the face and voice for Miranda, a genetically optimized human clone that escaped her 'father' and was hired by the Illusive Man. Loyal to Cerberus, she's one of the Illusive Man's right-hand people, and initially provides the 'company line' in missions for Shepard. With Miranda, much like with Liliana in DA:O, she's a character that quickly breaks away from her initial stereotyped construct. Miranda could have very easily been the fanservice paean; the attractive, Buffy-lite strong character who quickly learns Shepard is oh so much more wonderful than him and she must have him. BioWare quickly takes it down a different path. She is loyal to Cerberus, but she also possesses judgment of her own, and her opinion of her employer evolves along with her relationship (platonic or not) with Shepard as a leader. She's capable, hard working, and willing to challenge what she sees as a bad decision, and especially early on, shows a lot more practical ruthlessness in her approach to the mission than a Paragon Shepard does. Developing the relationship with Miranda is intriguing because first she has to respect Shepard before the options start to open. She's not the best character in the game, but she's a character who could have been very bad that instead turns out to be intriguing and a core part of the game's canon.
When do I get to play with my action figures?
Finally, there's Seth Green as Joker. Joker, the pilot of your ship from the first game, who suffers from a brittle bone disease, has quit the Alliance military to take an offer from Cerberus. You save him during your opening sequence in the second game, and he becomes one of the key framing devices. He's very often the source of comedy, but you also get a lot of intriguing depth from Joker, and he falls under player control for one of the most intense
sections of the game, when the ship is boarded by the Collectors, and the crew carried off screaming and shrieking. This horrifyingly depicted scene has you controlling a man with no weapons who can only limp around threats, trying to avoid capture long enough to keep control of the ship. Without a doubt, one of the top five greatest moments in any video game RPG. Joker's complex relationship with EDI, the ship's AI, is another element that swings between pure comedy and subtle depths, challenging the norm in game writing.
Through-out the game, you bounce around performing missions at the behest of the Illusive Man and recruiting squad members. All of this is in preparation to travel through Omega-4 Mass Relay. The key element here is that for every loyalty mission you do on behalf of a squad member, and for each ship upgrade you purchase, your squad has a better chance of surviving the final mission. However, it is possible to lose some or all of your squad members through bad decisions, poor planning, or just plain rotten luck. The suicide mission has wonderful intensity, and if you lose someone, it is surprisingly effective as an emotional blow, especially after dozens of gaming hours with them. The final battle, which involves destroying a human/Reaper hybrid being constructed by the Collectors is grand and gaudy in the big budget sci-fi film manner.
All of Shepard's surviving party members from the first game make an appearance, and two of them - Tali and Garrus - are recruited as part of the new team, providing continuity throughout the game. Those links, especially since the relationships between both NPCs and Shepard are very deep and advance nicely during the story. It ends off on a slightly haunting note about what is to come.
Zaeed - The Price of Revenge and Kasumi - Stolen Memory
Both of these DLCs add a new character to the squad and a new loyalty mission to complete. Zaeed, an older mercenary with a thick Aussie accent (dubbed 'Space Ocker' by us) who turns out to be the original founder of the Blue Suns mercenary company. The Blue Suns are a major antagonist at several spots in both games, and it is interesting to hear about the original circumstances under which it was formed. The DLC is a fight through a manufacturing plant, and it's really a tactical exercise with some tough different situations through out the level. There's nothing bad, but it's not really anything that stands out. Zaeed has some really fun war stories during the game, but he ends up the third option as muscle in the roster, and not at all if the Shepard is a soldier class.
Fear my mighty hand!
Kasumi is another story. She's a true rogue, with a cloaking ability and a close combat strike which can really carve up small squads of men. Kasumi's mission is about finding the 'grey box' - a type of neural storage - from Kasumi's ex-partner/lover. It is being held in the mansion of an art collecting criminal who's accent swings oddly between Scots and Russian. The mission is a real challenge, and Kasumi's banter is wonderfully dry and sarcastic and playful by turns, which really makes the mission fun to play.
Overlord
Overlord is the first of the real DLCs for ME2. The DLC starts at a massive satellite dish, where a Cerberus station has been attacked by the Geth. In stopping the Geth, the head of the facility admits that the facility is really a research facility about finding a way to meld a human mind into the AI neural network of the Geth. Like all well intentioned Frankenstein experiments, this one goes horribly wrong, creating a hybrid entity which has not only
taken the base, but it trying to use the satellite dish to broadcast themselves out into the universe in general, and thus, becoming the master of it. So, obviously someone who needs his face punched a lot, but you don't get the chance to do so. You have to travel to three stations to unlock the lab and make your way down to the physical body of the experiment.
First off, the DLC is visually very impressive. The dish environment is the usual bunch of hallways for ME, but the backdrop of the dish and the eventual transition of the fight out to under it is beautifully rendered. All of the exteriors, including a ravine cliffside and an active lava flow are stunning at the first brush, and create a sense of great scope and transition through-out the game. The final fight, which includes a technological crucifixion, is stunning in the manner in which it builds and then reveals the final stages of the project.
This is Ludwig Von! This is sick!
Lair of the Shadow Broker
The best of the DLCs, LotSB actually surpasses the lush visuals of Overlord with a remarkably rendered air car chase, a battle through a restaurant, an incredible ship powered by lightning travelling in the rings of a gas giant and finally a reveal of a new alien that is powerful and cunning. The Shadow Broker is a thread that runs through both games; a powerful information broker who works in the background and is never seen. Liara T'Soni, one of your
companions from the first game, has been actively hunting the Shadow Broker since your believed death, and when one of her people is taken, you have to help her track them all the way back to the Broker himself.
The DLC uses multiple locales, and none as well as the Shadow Broker's ship headquarters. The mission starts on the exterior of the massive ship, with its giant, lightning catching sails extended out into the storm. Electricity crackles along the length, and is captured in beautifully rendered nodes. The whole environment, with the noise of the wind, the crack of electric sparks, the urgency of the need to get inside; the entire section is exhilarating in a manner that is rare to find in any game; engaging, suspenseful and wonderfully balanced.
The final battle with the Shadow Broker is tricky from a tactical standpoint, and also has an heavy sense of menace about it. He's a nasty enemy, with his shield and ability to absorb damage, and has a brutal habit of knocking down your biotics quickly. The more you get into the history of the Shadow Broker, and his rise to power and replacement of the original Shadow Broker, the more the atmosphere grows. There's a hint of an unwilling 'Dread Pirate Roberts' story that emerges, which is fun to play with.
Easily the best DLC for any game I have ever played.
The Love Boat promises something for everyone...
Arrival
An Admiral from the first game contacts you about a captured agent named Amanda Kenson being held by Bratarians in a contested system. He asks you to go in alone to rescue her, which you do, employing almost a stealth game approach to tracking her down and than escaping the jail. Kenson was investigating a Reaper artifact, which she claims is proof of the Reaper invasion, and that this system is the Reapers' first stop. it contains a special mass relay, the
"Alpha Relay," which links to a wide variety of other locations, including the Citadel, and would thus expedite the Reapers' advance throughout the galaxy.
They have a plan to slam an asteroid into the Relay to destroy it, which would also destroy the system and kill half a million innocent settlers. Unfortunately, the Reaper artifact has enslaved her, and you spend the rest of the game gunning down mind-slaves and stopping Kenson from aborting the asteroid's path. It ends with the holographic projection of a Reaper speaking directly to you just prior to escaping via the relay just ahead of the asteroid.
Arrival is the odd DLC out because it isn't very good. It is about half the size of the other major DLCs, is mostly limited to interiors, and strips out one of the core elements of gameplay by taking away the squad based tactical combat. I understand the fact that opening up the NPCs would have been far more expensive, but there are ways to balance it out, like limiting it to specific NPCs or original ones for just that mission. The writing is also ham-fisted and over the top. Through most of the Mass Effect series, humour has played a heavy role, and yet, here there is just a succession of mediocre combat and overblown 'we will overcome' dialogue that chokes out innovation. It isn't a bad DLC, but it feels rushed, largely phoned in, and just doesn't provide the same bridge to future developments that it could of.
Craziest day spa I've ever walked into.
Conclusion
Mass Effect 2 represents the next step in what is possibly one of the best RPGs released on a video game platform. BioWare has a history of strongly written games - Baldur's Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age - but Mass Effect represents their strongest, most innovative foray into original material. Don't get me wrong, ME is space opera from start to finish, with all of the overblown elements that are represented in it. However, it's melded multiple elements into something fresh and original, which is supported by excellent writing and superior graphics in order to make it stand out from the rest of the market. Deft choices in voice acting, in pacing, and in design gives the game something unique on the market, and creates a fantastic environment in which to tell a compelling story.
Most importantly, BioWare is willing to tell that story. They take risks through-out the game, pushing the envelope for expectations and normally delivering effectively. It is not without flaws - one surprising omission is the lack of same sex relationship options, especially in light of BioWare's normal willingness to depict bisexual and homosexual relationships - but the overall experience is a remarkably deep, textured story with a final battle that is actually exhilirating and suspenseful at the same time. As a sequel for Mas Effect, it does what every sequel should; effectively continue the story and exceed the original in visuals and writing.
The key sign of success is that you end up caring strongly about these characters. Losing one in the final battle actually illicits an emotional reaction. There is a personal canon that you will develop in the process of playing that encourages surprising personal loyalty to it. An excellent game, a remarkable story, and a visual beauty to experience.
So, for those uninitiated, Mass Effect 2 is the second installment in the Mass Effect universe. In the first game, humans have come out to the rest of the universe following the discovery of alien technology on Mars, and then a 'Mass Relay' which functions as a hyperspace gate out beyond Pluto. Now, as a member of Citadel Space, a multiracial collective of races and systems, strives to expand their colonies and take their place in the intersteller community. Obviously, they are about as welcome as a biker in a ballet school, and the three dominant races on the Citadel Council have (correctly, it turns out) kept
humanity constrained out of concerns for our capacity for aggression, violence, and all around dickishness.
Commander Shepard, one of the top human soldiers in the Alliance fleet, is being considered as the first human SPECTRE (a kind of secret special ops/police officer with total authority and little oversight). During the mission, Shepard uncovers a treasonous SPECTRE named Saren and is implanted with an alien cipher, giving hints about the ancient and extinct race that built the mass relays and other tech. During the course of the game, Shepard hunts Saren to discover that he is a pawn for a race called the Reapers, who appear every 50,000 years to harvest any race that has achieved spacefaring capabilities, and retreat to dark space. This time, Shepard and his team discovers and destroys the Reaper first.
The evil plan was to mate with our space station? That is fucked, dude.
Everyone still with me? Alright, good. In Mass Effect 2, you start off as Shepard again, but in your first few minutes, your ship is ambushed and nearly destroyed by an unknown ship, giving your crew barely time to evacuate. As Shepard, you make your way up to the main cabin, now open to space, and pull your pilot out of his seat and into an escape pod. Unfortunately, a blast hurls you into space as your ship breaks up, and micro-lesions in your suit start venting your air into space as you struggle and drift towards re-entry.
Wait, we need to exchange insurance information!
Yeah, the game starts out with your kind of horrific death. After suffiocating to death and burning to fuck on re-entry, your corpse is found and after a series of adventures which involves a bad ass Asari criminal queen voiced by Carrie-Anne Moss, is turned over to a human first group called Cebereus, who you tangled with during the first game. As the focus of the 'Lazerus Project', a name so obvious that it had to have been chosen to hit a Friday night deadline and the only person still in the office and sober was the seventeen year old high school intern, is used to rebuild your burnt pork looking corpse back to health. It's also a convenient way to retool your character if you're importing them from the first game, and want to take advantage of the new graphics to fix things up.
Now, one of the big advantages of this game is the feeling of continuity. It's a sequel, but it isn't a separate game and it really takes advantage of the familiarity that you built up with 'your' Shepard during the hours that Mass Effect requires. The other thing is that the character's place in the universe is already established, so the exposition is fairly short, allowing you to jump into the action quickly, but still feeling the immersive sense of the game. The final and huge element is the fact that you start the game already with questions to be answered; what happened to your old crew? What's the situation with the Reapers? What about your relationship? And so on.
Something that Bioware has done quite well is to extend the race/gender neutral elements seen in KotOR to Mass Effect. Identifying in some respect to your characters in an RPG is an important element in the immersive experience, and Bioware's character creation, twinned with the Paragon/Renegade morality trees really build a customized experience for anyone playing. It very quickly becomes a story that you evolve, and it is really rare to find that kind of personal experience in a game.
Mass Effect 2 also has an additional bonus of extremely well chosen voice actors/character models. In the first Mass Effect, Lance Hendriksen and David Keith played your superiors in the Alliance military, bringing with them their own gravitis to the roles. It helped anchor the tone of the game along the plot of this tough, military mission that had to be taken seriously. Grabbing Marina Sirtis as the bosumy yet evil Matriarch gave it a surprisingly important link to the broader sci-fi community. For a game like Mass Effect, it is difficult to built a space opera whole cloth without your influences showing strongly. BioWare decided instead to take certain common sci-fi elements unabashedly, and use them in a self-referential way in order to provide a touchstone for sci-fi fans. Sirtis' performance is opposite her iconic Star Trek Troi, but the familiarity of her voice as part of your aggregate science fiction history links the game to it without imitation. It's a very clever way to approach the challenge and make it a strength for the game. Also, there's Seth Green, but I'll get to him later.
I find it difficult to concentrate on stopping the Reavers right now...
The second takes this idea to another level, populating the voice acting with a laundry list of sci-fi related actors; Armin Shimerman (Buffy,DS9), Tricia Helfer (BSG), Michal Hogan (BSG), Robin Sachs (Buffy), Adam Lazarre-White (Heroes), Michael Dorn (ST:TNG), Shohreh Aghdashloo (X-Men), Adam Baldwin (Firefly), and Claudia Black (Farscape). But the most inspired choices came with the casting of Yvonne Strahovski from 'Chuck' as Miranda and Martin Sheen as the Illusive Man.
Speak with Josh and Toby before fighting the Reavers, Shepard. Break's over.
The Illusive Man is a key figure in the story; a pro-humanity advocate and the founder of Cerberus, the organization that brings you back from the dead. He is a kind of information node, collecting intelligence from all over the galaxy and running operations of tremendous scope for humanity's benefit. There's a strong neo-fascist approach to him, in the vein that he's willing to what's best for humanity, regardless of whether or not they agree with him. It's a mash up of intelligence spymaster and elder statesman, and in the hands of Martin Sheen, he provides a powerful presence that pulls the story together. Sheen's tremendous ability to convey both authority and empathy imbue the Illusive Man was a unique quality, and even when the decisions you make put you on the opposite side of his aims, there's still a grey area that he inhabits, instead of the normal black/white transition from ally to villain. Immortal Space President Bartlett really provides the core motivation for Shepard through the story, and as the pace accelerates, you find yourself reacting to his urgency.
At least it's not the Wienerlicious
Yvonne Strahovski provides the face and voice for Miranda, a genetically optimized human clone that escaped her 'father' and was hired by the Illusive Man. Loyal to Cerberus, she's one of the Illusive Man's right-hand people, and initially provides the 'company line' in missions for Shepard. With Miranda, much like with Liliana in DA:O, she's a character that quickly breaks away from her initial stereotyped construct. Miranda could have very easily been the fanservice paean; the attractive, Buffy-lite strong character who quickly learns Shepard is oh so much more wonderful than him and she must have him. BioWare quickly takes it down a different path. She is loyal to Cerberus, but she also possesses judgment of her own, and her opinion of her employer evolves along with her relationship (platonic or not) with Shepard as a leader. She's capable, hard working, and willing to challenge what she sees as a bad decision, and especially early on, shows a lot more practical ruthlessness in her approach to the mission than a Paragon Shepard does. Developing the relationship with Miranda is intriguing because first she has to respect Shepard before the options start to open. She's not the best character in the game, but she's a character who could have been very bad that instead turns out to be intriguing and a core part of the game's canon.
When do I get to play with my action figures?
Finally, there's Seth Green as Joker. Joker, the pilot of your ship from the first game, who suffers from a brittle bone disease, has quit the Alliance military to take an offer from Cerberus. You save him during your opening sequence in the second game, and he becomes one of the key framing devices. He's very often the source of comedy, but you also get a lot of intriguing depth from Joker, and he falls under player control for one of the most intense
sections of the game, when the ship is boarded by the Collectors, and the crew carried off screaming and shrieking. This horrifyingly depicted scene has you controlling a man with no weapons who can only limp around threats, trying to avoid capture long enough to keep control of the ship. Without a doubt, one of the top five greatest moments in any video game RPG. Joker's complex relationship with EDI, the ship's AI, is another element that swings between pure comedy and subtle depths, challenging the norm in game writing.
Through-out the game, you bounce around performing missions at the behest of the Illusive Man and recruiting squad members. All of this is in preparation to travel through Omega-4 Mass Relay. The key element here is that for every loyalty mission you do on behalf of a squad member, and for each ship upgrade you purchase, your squad has a better chance of surviving the final mission. However, it is possible to lose some or all of your squad members through bad decisions, poor planning, or just plain rotten luck. The suicide mission has wonderful intensity, and if you lose someone, it is surprisingly effective as an emotional blow, especially after dozens of gaming hours with them. The final battle, which involves destroying a human/Reaper hybrid being constructed by the Collectors is grand and gaudy in the big budget sci-fi film manner.
All of Shepard's surviving party members from the first game make an appearance, and two of them - Tali and Garrus - are recruited as part of the new team, providing continuity throughout the game. Those links, especially since the relationships between both NPCs and Shepard are very deep and advance nicely during the story. It ends off on a slightly haunting note about what is to come.
Zaeed - The Price of Revenge and Kasumi - Stolen Memory
Both of these DLCs add a new character to the squad and a new loyalty mission to complete. Zaeed, an older mercenary with a thick Aussie accent (dubbed 'Space Ocker' by us) who turns out to be the original founder of the Blue Suns mercenary company. The Blue Suns are a major antagonist at several spots in both games, and it is interesting to hear about the original circumstances under which it was formed. The DLC is a fight through a manufacturing plant, and it's really a tactical exercise with some tough different situations through out the level. There's nothing bad, but it's not really anything that stands out. Zaeed has some really fun war stories during the game, but he ends up the third option as muscle in the roster, and not at all if the Shepard is a soldier class.
Fear my mighty hand!
Kasumi is another story. She's a true rogue, with a cloaking ability and a close combat strike which can really carve up small squads of men. Kasumi's mission is about finding the 'grey box' - a type of neural storage - from Kasumi's ex-partner/lover. It is being held in the mansion of an art collecting criminal who's accent swings oddly between Scots and Russian. The mission is a real challenge, and Kasumi's banter is wonderfully dry and sarcastic and playful by turns, which really makes the mission fun to play.
Overlord
Overlord is the first of the real DLCs for ME2. The DLC starts at a massive satellite dish, where a Cerberus station has been attacked by the Geth. In stopping the Geth, the head of the facility admits that the facility is really a research facility about finding a way to meld a human mind into the AI neural network of the Geth. Like all well intentioned Frankenstein experiments, this one goes horribly wrong, creating a hybrid entity which has not only
taken the base, but it trying to use the satellite dish to broadcast themselves out into the universe in general, and thus, becoming the master of it. So, obviously someone who needs his face punched a lot, but you don't get the chance to do so. You have to travel to three stations to unlock the lab and make your way down to the physical body of the experiment.
First off, the DLC is visually very impressive. The dish environment is the usual bunch of hallways for ME, but the backdrop of the dish and the eventual transition of the fight out to under it is beautifully rendered. All of the exteriors, including a ravine cliffside and an active lava flow are stunning at the first brush, and create a sense of great scope and transition through-out the game. The final fight, which includes a technological crucifixion, is stunning in the manner in which it builds and then reveals the final stages of the project.
This is Ludwig Von! This is sick!
Lair of the Shadow Broker
The best of the DLCs, LotSB actually surpasses the lush visuals of Overlord with a remarkably rendered air car chase, a battle through a restaurant, an incredible ship powered by lightning travelling in the rings of a gas giant and finally a reveal of a new alien that is powerful and cunning. The Shadow Broker is a thread that runs through both games; a powerful information broker who works in the background and is never seen. Liara T'Soni, one of your
companions from the first game, has been actively hunting the Shadow Broker since your believed death, and when one of her people is taken, you have to help her track them all the way back to the Broker himself.
The DLC uses multiple locales, and none as well as the Shadow Broker's ship headquarters. The mission starts on the exterior of the massive ship, with its giant, lightning catching sails extended out into the storm. Electricity crackles along the length, and is captured in beautifully rendered nodes. The whole environment, with the noise of the wind, the crack of electric sparks, the urgency of the need to get inside; the entire section is exhilarating in a manner that is rare to find in any game; engaging, suspenseful and wonderfully balanced.
The final battle with the Shadow Broker is tricky from a tactical standpoint, and also has an heavy sense of menace about it. He's a nasty enemy, with his shield and ability to absorb damage, and has a brutal habit of knocking down your biotics quickly. The more you get into the history of the Shadow Broker, and his rise to power and replacement of the original Shadow Broker, the more the atmosphere grows. There's a hint of an unwilling 'Dread Pirate Roberts' story that emerges, which is fun to play with.
Easily the best DLC for any game I have ever played.
The Love Boat promises something for everyone...
Arrival
An Admiral from the first game contacts you about a captured agent named Amanda Kenson being held by Bratarians in a contested system. He asks you to go in alone to rescue her, which you do, employing almost a stealth game approach to tracking her down and than escaping the jail. Kenson was investigating a Reaper artifact, which she claims is proof of the Reaper invasion, and that this system is the Reapers' first stop. it contains a special mass relay, the
"Alpha Relay," which links to a wide variety of other locations, including the Citadel, and would thus expedite the Reapers' advance throughout the galaxy.
They have a plan to slam an asteroid into the Relay to destroy it, which would also destroy the system and kill half a million innocent settlers. Unfortunately, the Reaper artifact has enslaved her, and you spend the rest of the game gunning down mind-slaves and stopping Kenson from aborting the asteroid's path. It ends with the holographic projection of a Reaper speaking directly to you just prior to escaping via the relay just ahead of the asteroid.
Arrival is the odd DLC out because it isn't very good. It is about half the size of the other major DLCs, is mostly limited to interiors, and strips out one of the core elements of gameplay by taking away the squad based tactical combat. I understand the fact that opening up the NPCs would have been far more expensive, but there are ways to balance it out, like limiting it to specific NPCs or original ones for just that mission. The writing is also ham-fisted and over the top. Through most of the Mass Effect series, humour has played a heavy role, and yet, here there is just a succession of mediocre combat and overblown 'we will overcome' dialogue that chokes out innovation. It isn't a bad DLC, but it feels rushed, largely phoned in, and just doesn't provide the same bridge to future developments that it could of.
Craziest day spa I've ever walked into.
Conclusion
Mass Effect 2 represents the next step in what is possibly one of the best RPGs released on a video game platform. BioWare has a history of strongly written games - Baldur's Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age - but Mass Effect represents their strongest, most innovative foray into original material. Don't get me wrong, ME is space opera from start to finish, with all of the overblown elements that are represented in it. However, it's melded multiple elements into something fresh and original, which is supported by excellent writing and superior graphics in order to make it stand out from the rest of the market. Deft choices in voice acting, in pacing, and in design gives the game something unique on the market, and creates a fantastic environment in which to tell a compelling story.
Most importantly, BioWare is willing to tell that story. They take risks through-out the game, pushing the envelope for expectations and normally delivering effectively. It is not without flaws - one surprising omission is the lack of same sex relationship options, especially in light of BioWare's normal willingness to depict bisexual and homosexual relationships - but the overall experience is a remarkably deep, textured story with a final battle that is actually exhilirating and suspenseful at the same time. As a sequel for Mas Effect, it does what every sequel should; effectively continue the story and exceed the original in visuals and writing.
The key sign of success is that you end up caring strongly about these characters. Losing one in the final battle actually illicits an emotional reaction. There is a personal canon that you will develop in the process of playing that encourages surprising personal loyalty to it. An excellent game, a remarkable story, and a visual beauty to experience.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-04-14 10:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-14 10:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-15 12:02 am (UTC)/helpful roommate note ;)
Skimmed your entry, but...
Date: 2011-04-15 12:12 pm (UTC)Re: Skimmed your entry, but...
Date: 2011-04-15 01:47 pm (UTC)BioWare's official canon is that Shephard is male. I don't think it matters either way, personally, and I haven't seen anything in either game that justifies either sex over the other as the official version beyond personal perference.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-15 04:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-15 04:51 pm (UTC)You played AC Brotherhood yet?
no subject
Date: 2011-04-16 03:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-16 03:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-17 04:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-17 06:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-19 10:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-20 04:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-20 04:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-21 02:21 am (UTC)