Legion said:
Rogue 09 said:
Would somebody please explain to me how Mass Effect is a good story? Villains are various and never well developed, the main character is completely wooden no matter what path you choose, and (speaking of choosing paths) the whole game is basically an invisible hallway simulator. It's a space game where there is no space gameplay. You are captain of a point and click ship. It was no different than the Kings quest games. Move something around and click on anything that lights up.
Terrible series. I had high expectations for it and it delivered on none of them.
Mass Effect 1 had potential (that wasn't lived up to in the sequels), the stories for the other two were poor.
The driving force behind the series and why it has such a huge fanbase are the characters, Bioware excels at making decent characters. I have never seen a series where people get so passionate about them, and it's normally them and their arcs that people are fond of, as opposed to the actual main plot of taking on the Reapers.
As a Mass Effect fan, I have to agree (sort of, I disagree that the stories for ME2 and 3 were poor, or at least, if they were poor, ME1's wasn't any better. ME2 is actually the best story of the three for me.)
The main story arc is relatively standard fayre for anybody who's played any kind of RPG before. Not necessarily bad per se, but certainly rather generic (although, as generic, all-powerful, world-ending plot devices go, the Reapers
are pretty damn imposing, even if there is an element of "Please, I'm a Gamer! I've saved three different Galaxies this afternoon alone. What have you got?")
But yeah, where the series really excels is its focus on characters. There's a line I recall by Mordin in ME2, when he's talking about his nephew... I can't remember exactly what was said, but the gist of it was that, while saving the Galaxy is a noble goal, no mind can possibly care about every single being in the Universe. To be really invested in a fight, you have to be fighting for something personal to you. I care about the story in Mass Effect not because there's anything particularly special about the plot, but because the characters to me are more realised as fully-formed personalities than in any other game I've played, and I genuinely care about getting the best outcome for them in their world.
