Poll: Female Shepard vs Male Shepard - Mass Effect Series

[Dragonbums]

Personally, because I'm a woman I always choose FemShep to represent me anyway.
However I really do like Jennifer Hales' voice acting. The one thing FemShep lacks that MaleShep has is the wide variety of emotions that make for funny meme joke pictures.
Hate to say it, but aside from the slight smile- FemShep just doesn't have that much in range of facial emotions outside of stoic and snidely amused.

Mark Meer doesn't interest me. However power to anyone who likes his stuff. Bottom line is we all like Mass Effect and I'm really tired of seeing 7 page long threads of people arguing over which two voice actors are the best. Especially when they go into insulting one another *cough*biowaresocialnetwork*cough*

 

[Innegativeion]

No contest for me.

Jennifer Hale is leaps and bounds more pleasant and interesting to listen to compared to Maleshep's VA, IMO.

 

[CloudAtlas]

I prefer the female Shepard, by a large margin. My first time playing Mass Effect was as male Shepard, and, in a doomed attempt to recapture the experience I had the first time, so was my second run. My third time, however, this time as woman, turned out to be a much better experience.

The male Shepard is essentially your run-of-the mill action hero: white, in his 30s, an army guy, and full of not always witty or appropriate one-liners. He's the guy you find in every second game and every second action B-movie. He's pretty boring. Now I know that protagonists are deliberately designed to be somewhat bland, so as to make it easier to self-insert, but that just didn't really work for me in Mass Effect. Mass Effect is a game that touches upon deep questions of morality, of life, death, and love, so in order to identify with, to self-insert into a hero, he just needs to be more of an intellectual character. He needs to give me the impression that he thinks about those questions too. And he definitely doesn't make a joke to his love, after recapturing her home planet for her long-exiled people, despite great losses, in the middle of great, desperate war: "Claim it fast, it's a buyer's market".

Now the female Shepard is, of course, just the same, but at least she's a woman, so she's already a much more unique character. Yea, I realize, a bad-ass action girl is quite the trope too, but it's not nearly as pervasive as the male counterpart. And I guess the unstoppable-yet-ultimately-unfulfilled desire to self-insert isn't as strong with her. And of course the voice acting is somewhat better too.

 

[kyuzo3567]

For whatever reason I find Mass Effect more compelling with a female lead. It's not the voice actors or anything, I like both, but it just feels better with femshep.

Maybe it's because sci-fi stories with male leads are a dime a dozen, whereas a badass like Femshep only comes along every once and awhile in fiction, so I tend to like her better since she's more unique.

Exactly how I feel. It's more interesting seeing a woman saving the whole galaxy while kicking asses left and right.
This is one of the reasons I liked Ripley and Sarah Connor too.

Just wanted to add my agreement to this as well, I usually play male characters in my RPGs but this series just seemed to scream to be led by a female protagonist

 

[TheVampwizimp_v1legacy]

When I'm faced with this choice of male or female, I always play both, if the game is good enough to support 2 playthroughs. I always start with a male, as I am also male and I like to roleplay as much as possible, trying to do what I would do in the situations the character faces. Then I play as a female to see what's different.

In the case of Mass Effect, I really don't have a preference. They're equally fun and interesting; the game is not so different between the sexes that it matters too much, mostly it's the romances, which balance out pretty well I think.

For most people it seems to come down to the VAs. The popular opinion is that Jennifer Hale is way better than Mark Meer, but I don't particularly agree. I do think that Hale is a better VA than Meer, and in the first game she does a clearly superior job. ManShep is rather droning and disconnected at times. But by ME2 he does a fine job, and he's even better in 3. I really don't get the hate for ManShep's voice. Even in comparison to FemShep he's not bad, just a little less good.

 

[Xan Krieger]

I was always a male shepard because as a straight male I love the women he can romance. Ashley, Miranda, Jack, Kelly (the redhead in the 2nd game), he got closer to all those beautiful women than I ever have gotten (to an actual beautiful woman).