I finished Mass Effect 2 last week. Some random rambling thoughts:
The original Mass Effect, which I played through and finished last month, had one of the best endings I’ve experienced in any game, so the Mass Effect 2 finale came as a bit of a disappointment to me. The whole game was spent building up to this mission through the Omega 4 Relay, but in the end, what was found on the other side of the relay was pretty much exactly what one would expect: A Collector base where they were using the humans they’d been abducting throughout the galaxy.
I have to admit, the sight of a Human Reaper did surprise me, but I’m still ambivalent about whether that was cool. It certainly looked intimidating and made for an interesting moral decision at the end, but I found the original Reapers more scary than the Human Reaper.
One advantage the original Mass Effect had in terms of story-telling is that it was a blank slate, and they really upturned expectations by appearing to be a story about hunting down a rogue Spectre, but in the end turned out to be about something very different. That was really cool. Mass Effect 2 didn’t really have any surprises for the players, but it did have some really standout sequences. It started off with that awesome sequence of the original Normandy getting destroyed. The section where Shepard walks through the portion of the Normandy exposed to space still sticks in my head as the defining scene of Mass Effect 2. It’s too bad that the suicide mission at the end didn’t really live up to that spectacular beginning.
The other sequence that I really enjoyed in the game was searching the (abandoned?) Collector ship at the midpoint in the game. That was a really creepy sequence, with a nice payoff: finding out that the collectors were originally Protheans.
One thing I’m surprised that they didn’t play with is that from the beginning of the game, it is assumed by the different parties that the Reapers are behind the Collectors somehow. That this all turned out to be true and no unexpected revelations took place in that area was a bit surprising to me.
Overall the game had some great missions, especially the DLC missions, and the mechanics of the game are just surprisingly good. I think Tim James mentioned in another thread that he thinks that the action portions are still RPG approximations, but I disagree with that. Except for weapon inaccuracies, in this game if I aimed at something I hit it, and in that way it was much more like a shooter in its core mechanics. I didn’t encounter any situation where I aimed at something but missed because of possible stat number-crunching RPG-ness under the hood.
I think the main reason that I feel the ending of this game leaves one with a feeling of dissatisfaction is that it defers so many of the consequences of the decisions you made in the game. I kind of wish I’d started off the whole trilogy closer to the release of Mass Effect 3 now, so that I could see sooner just what will be the result of so many of the decisions I made in this game. Mass Effect 3 can’t get here soon enough.
P.S. The only casualty I had in the suicide mission was Zaeed. I shouldn’t have put him in charge of the second team. That’s what I get for putting a DLC character in charge of a team I guess. His description in the dossier led me to believe he’d survive, but I guess I was wrong. It makes me want to replay that whole mission just so that I can get the No One Left Behind achievement, but I wouldn’t be able to resist changing my Paragon decision not to use the Human Reaper in our war against the Reapers. That’s just a decision that’s too tempting. But I want to save that decision for a female Shepard Renegade playthrough right from Mass Effect 1.
