I remember enjoying Mass Effect but I never remember anything specific about it. People still praise it through the roof so I go on YouTube to remember key scenes (the dialogue with the Reaper is reliably excellent) and say to myself “oh yeah, I guess that was good!” I wish it made a more lasting impression.
ME2 was the best for me, simply because a well-executed “recruit your Ronin for a suicide mission” plot never gets old.
Although ME3 could also be called my favorite if I’m on a three-game playthrough. There’s amazing amounts of fanservice at that point.
red_guy
3463
Same here. Well, maybe one or two less '>'s between ME1 and ME3.
ME1 had an entire galaxy with things to do, introduced us to the moral minefield of the Krogan rebellion (and allowed me to play a part in that, by deciding the fate of the Rachni queen), and allowed me to zone out while driving the Mako to the next marker in a style that would award me Olympic metal in the halfpipe. It also makes the player omnipotent halfway through the game, and awards more money than you can ever spend once you level up enough. Its gameplay is far from perfect, and its story contains many cringeworthy passages, but it has a strong sense of identity and radiates joy because of that.
ME3 is much darker, but has better story telling, tighter gameplay, and - after downloading the Extended Cut - manages to wrap things up. And Conrad Verner’s role in this episode brought a big smile to my face. ME3: Citadel restores some of the lighter atmosphere and has an excellent combat simulator simulator.
ME2 has you willingly work together with a group of people who are pure, black-hearted monsters, and spends its hours explaining how working for an evil organization that uses its “human resources” for experiments in torture is OK, as long as you’re doing it with friends, and as long as those friends have reasons for joining the evil org other than “I’m here because I enjoy turning people into husks”.
I mean, I can forgive Gabby and Ken for their ignorance; they were grunts lured by paychecks and propaganda, and never saw anything other than an engine room. But Shepard, who has witnessed them turning people into husks or creepers, or feeding people to rachni, and had the privilege of informing Admiral Kahoku how his team had been lured - by Cerberus - to a Thresher Maw, and later on the privilege to retrieve Kahoku’s corpse from a Cerberus base? Come on.
By all means: do! I agree with absolutely everything rhamorim wrote, and based on what you wrote, I honestly believe you would like ME 3 a lot. I know I did: the series as a whole has been one of the best gaming experiences ever for me!
CraigM
3465
Red guy: The Cerberus of ME1 and the Cerberus of ME2 are not remotely the same organization. It is literally impossible for them to be reconciled. In ME1 they were a renegade Special Operations division, in ME2 they were this huge underground paramilitary and spy network. Mercenaries, intelligence agents, shadowy backers, the whole deal. There is no connective tissue there. It was purely a name pulled from a side story. There is no logical reason for the name to be there, as the organization we see could never have grown from where they were in ME1 so quickly.
Good grief they have invented technology to bring the dead back to life! That isn’t possible in the span of a few years. And why would they think Shepard is this super special ‘Savior of the Universe!’ suddenly? They were trying to kill him before.
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
So basically anything Cerberus is not worth considering beyond that. I’ve already spent more time considering them and their role here than the writers for ME2 ever did.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of stuff that may not have made the transition to the second game correctly because the lead writer left the studio.
robc04
3467
Mordin - pure awesome. I can ignore other weaknesses, maybe be blind to them, when a game has the pure awesomeness of Mordin.
And I think I’m repeating myself (probably from somewhere earlier in this thread several years back) but the Mordin replacement in ME3 is pretty great too, since my Mordin died in the suicide run at the end of ME2. That’s what I get for playing on the insanity difficulty, I guess.
robc04
3469
Aw man. I think a piece of me just died right now.
Don’t worry, I’ll bury it right next to Mordin.
Of course you will. Someone else would have gotten it wrong.
Alan_Au
3472
ME1 has the best narrative and the worst inventory management.
ME2 has the best mission design and the worst resource collection minigame.
ME3 has the best combat system. The reliance on story continuity is both its strongest and weakest point. It’s fun seeing the consequences of decisions you made 80 hours ago, but I also feel like it’s constrained by the limitations of previous storylines, which I think this played into the widespread dissatisfaction with the original ending.
Bateau
3473
ME2 > ME1 > ME3 for me. I really liked ME2 because the writers made sure that Shepard’s timeline was in sync with the player’s - two year gap for both. It made all those small reunions with certain characters (you know who I mean!) even more special. I also liked the overall tone of the game, it felt more like being on adventure than being on a mission. And level design was absolutely insane in some areas. Ilium is as close to my sci-fi ideal as it gets, I loved all the quests on that planet, especially the Shadow Broker dlc. Hands down some of the best sci-fi stuff I’ve seen in games. I also liked the inventory streamlining and while I initially thought the combat was an improvement, after playing ME1 again recently I think ME2’s combat is actually the weakest in the series.
ME1 will always have a special place in my heart, it was one of the first games where I genuinely felt like I was playing a blockbluster game with movie-like production values. At the time those facial animations, voice overs, soundtrack, camera work, and the way they told the story through cutscenes felt really special. I still remember fawning over Ashley’s subtle raised brow on the Normandy (as soon as you’re off Eden Prime). Endgame scenes (Paragon route) are to this day some of the most epic scenes I’ve ever seen. I still get goosebumps just thinking about it.
ME3 continued to raise the bar in gameplay refinement and graphical fidelity but I thought the writing was off at times. I don’t mean the actual content (endings and such) but rather the style, it went into cringeworthy territory in a few places, as if the writers were trying too hard to produce epic/memorable scenes.
CraigM
3474
One thing you sell short regarding gameplay for ME2 is just how damned much fun Vanguard was.
My second playthrough was as this pinball of death, IT WAS AMAZING. It made combat the most fun it has been in the series.
And like all things ME2 it was semi ruined by many of the abilities not working on armored or shielded enemies. Why does armor stop you from getting tossed around by a singularity? Dumb idea.
Yeah I worry about pushing combat differences too hard when I switched from boring old soldier to awesome adept in ME3. Was it the mechanics or the class? Those big dumb explosions never got old.
Bateau
3476
ME3 improved mechanics, that’s for sure. That said, my favorite adept is actually the one from ME1…
Scuzz
3477
I recently replayed all three games, ME3 with the new “ending” and the Citadel DLC. This is a favorite game of mine. Sure it is not perfect and there are parts that seem repetitive but there is also some excellent writing requiring you to make tough decisions. You are forced to make choices that effect the rest of the game, not many games require that. You can be be truly a good or bad guy with some of those decisions, but hey, the universe is in danger.
I never played the multi-player.
I think you really need to play ME3…if only to see what becomes of the characters you have learned to care about.
Yes, yes, and yes. ME1, particularly the ending, was epic and cinematic; it really should have been a movie (on its way to a trilogy) by now. Tying up those story lines in ME3, watching those decisions pay off one way or the other, so amazingly great.
I don’t want to refight 80 pages of ME3 ending but part of the reason people cared so much was that the trilogy had risen so far, it had a long way to fall, and it wasn’t an ending so much as the end.
Soma
3479
And Cerberus (or just TIM) is the only one bothered enough to resurrect Shepard, shouldn’t Shep at least give it the benefit of doubt? The way the story was being written, there was meant to be moral ambiguity with Shep working for Ceberus. In the end, Shep is meant to say fuck it, the deal with the devil is off, or say gratitude ends with an empty intact collector base.
IMO TIM is the best character in ME2 (but goes full on retard/evil in ME3).
But the combat is the worst in ME2. Like you I love the Mako in ME1, and ME3 is a real meaty 3rd person shooter. But combat in ME2 is just tedious. It could have been a turn bases game, with power cooldown time being enemy turn.
Wow. I can’t even imagine ME3 without Mordin. He’s such an important part of a 3rd of that game. And there’s a Mordin replacement? A whole character that I’ve never seen? My estimation of the amount of work they had to put into ME3 has to be seriously revised upwards on this news. Wow.
