I started up Mass Effect Legendary Edition again, because I've only played through the whole trilogy once years ago and it was on the old versions. This time I picked the Biotic class (already forgot what its actual name was) because I've never played with it. And... ehhhhh, I'm kind of having second thoughts about playing through ME1 again. I never understood all the hype about it even when I originally played it around ´09. Maybe because I didn't have much experience with western style RPGs at the time I failed to grasp the true scope of its innovations, but to me it always felt very awkward and clunky. Not just on a mechanical and storytelling, but even on a technical level: the sound mixing is straight up ass even in the legendary edition. Ambient sound effects right down to the characters' footsteps are incredibly quiet and lacking, making even the Citadel feel small and sleepy. And this is with the sound effects and music turned up way more than the dialogue.
The storytelling always felt like it expected me to take a huge amount of information for granted at the beginning. We see Saren for all of like 1 minute of screentime, and then we're told he's the biggest threat to the galaxy. It's very "tell, don't show" storytelling, where we barely get time to even settle into the setting, and then we're already expected to take Saren for Darth Vader when we barely know what Turians are. The Bioware style cutscenes look hopelessly quaint, but I can hardly fault it for that. The dialogue system was undoubtedly revolutionary for its time, but IMO it always hurt the setting that Shepard is supposed to be a super elite, acclaimed soldier, but all the Renegade dialogue options have them acting like a needlessly abrasive, short-sighted prick. All in all time has not been kind to the beginning bit of this game. I can't help but think of Yahtzee's recent
review of KOTOR 1, where he points out that over time trying to judge games by the standards of their time becomes basically impossible, because we've grown used to improvements since then. It's very hard to feel immersed in the setting in a post-Cyberpunk 2077 world when Mass Effect's way of feeding you information is to have every character be ready to burst into long-winded exposition, a lot of which I feel is information Shepard
should already know.
Eh, I'll keep playing, ME1 is a surprisingly short game anyway, it's not like I'm committing to Divinity OS 2 here.