After finishing most of the games I had for xbox, I decided to relive the Mass Effect saga, seeing as they were going to re-publish it in a special version. I tried to use the original games with my xbox one, and they work fine plus I have all the DLC I've bought over the years or that they made available for free after some time.
Similar to RE, I'd like to talk about each game, starting with Mass Effect 1 (ME1). This is one of the first games I bought for Xbox 360, and when I saw the trailer I thought it was fake or misleading: It couldn't be that we had a long, well-developed sci--fi roleplaying game with such nice graphics and complex story. I thought I'd start it and it would be somehow reduced.
And well, while it had room for improvements, I have to say that no, ME was as spectacular as it seemed it could be. The game offers a lot of world-building, that is clearly inspired or derivative of other works of science-fiction, but that doesn't reduce its glory or its scope, which is massive. From the first seconds you get several choices and the game starts recording these and keeping them stored, to develop a story.
Mass effect defines a universe with aliens where humans have joined the intergalactic civilisation. You play as commander Shepard, a human, that is tasked as the first human member of an elite group of soldiers that can do pretty much whatever they want(Spectres), with the task to investigate what another "evil" guy from this group is doing and disrupt him. As you try to perform this task, you keep discovering that there's more at play, since the bad guy seems to be working helping the Reapers, giant artificial intelligences that kill all galactic civilisations advanced enough to space-travel every 50.000 years, which in this game are just some myth, a boogeyman, but that you believe are behind this.
As you play, you discover that the bad guy's ship is actually one of those Reapers and has mind-controlled the "bad guy", something the Reapers can do, start controlling everyone in their proximity. If you have enough persuasion points you can make the bad guy see this and he kills himself, and end up defeating both of them (well, you and hundreds of other ships, the Reaper is big and tough) right before they can invite all the others to start the galactic extinction process.
So, this first game puts a very strong foundation. It creates a rich lore with different alien species, makes the scope epic enough while being just an introduction to the overall story arch and starts recording these key decisions that will influence the overall experience: did you save this or that character, did you help someone in there, did you kill these others? Depending on your choices, the experience will vary, and it's quite cool.
Having said that, the game has numerous issues.
The first one is that the non-story part is a bit lacking: Combat feels slightly static and repetitive: You go into cover, maybe use some powers, shot some enemies. Not having bullets and depending on the "heat" of your weapon is cool and I think it was innovative, but the combat was very basic cover-based stuff, not very exciting and a bit strange. Powers are also not very practical, most biotics make people float in some way but don't do proper damage and feels like it's not that spectacular then. Tech abilities are a bit better but not much. Then, when you're driving the Mako, a kind of tank, you just keep blasting at people and it's not that interesting, really. Combat is something you do to advance, but it's not something cool or very enjoyable, basically.
Related to that, the exploring mechanics is cool in principle: You get to check all the planets in several galaxy sections, and you can land in some of them, some ships and some stations. However, the implementation of this results in a lot of very very similar terrains, where each planet that you can land has only a square of explorable terrain were you find some dead bodies and ruins and that's about it You spend most of the time trying to climb mountains with the Mako in order to get to some little point, no more than 5 per region, if that many. It makes you feel quite....alone, in what should be a vibrant populated galaxy. When you find structures that you can enter, all of them have the same look and distribution. You have the mine, the ship and the research bunker, multiplied by 10 or 20. You never find characters living there, only enemies with some exceptions where you can actually interact with some bad guy before they kill someone or before fighting, but that's it. Side missions always include going to such places, and therefore a lot of this ends up being like a chore because you already have done 20 of the same, before.
So, you have a lot of time spend in the game, if you want 100% completion or close to that, just repeating the same tasks, which is not ideal. However the main story quests are good and diverse, so that compensates this issue a lot, and the main quests are really great and interesting, and the places you explore are amazing.
Another problematic point is that, in this game and the third one specially, you can feel the USA military industry has influenced it. I'm hundred per cent sure of it. You, in theory, are a spectre and respond only to the council, but you accept your former military chain of command without question, taking missions and orders from them, and there's lots of instances of "patriotic" moments and comments about how good it was to serve the military. I mean, I get it, shooters in general tend to be militaristic, and you need fights in theory to make the game challenging. But there's a....tone, in the game, that defends a lot the military, explains its glories and shows it as they say with modern ones, that they're the people defending your freedom and fighting for you. However you soon see that you're fighting for the humans, and the other races sometimes can go fuck themselves, which is totally not fair. I mean, you do try to help other races, but when there's a human-other species conflict, the game tends to heavily side with the human one, to the point that is shameful and bothersome. There's stuff that humanity's army does, that would be painted as evil if it wasn't because it's the human army.
Related to that, there's a human bias in the game, as if humans are the best ones, more diverse, more daring, etc. This feels....very racist, sometimes. And the game gives you the option to explore this "racism" as a valid way to play the game, sometimes as "renegade" options, when maybe part of being "renegade" would be to say, "well, fuck humans, I'll help this other species now because I like them more". I kept finding this rather problematic. I mean, I understand in rpgs you are free to be an asshole, and it may be part of your choices....but there's "racist" options that are not painted as "bad" as they should be, in my opinion. Also, let's face it: humans are boring! You have a lot of other species to explore, and the game centres on humanity, as if you'd be unable to relate to some other species. I guess there's male idiot players that think like this, and there's too many of them, and the developers pandered to these groups, but well, these incel-type with no empathy can go fuck themselves as far as I'm concerned and the game industry should not cater to them.
In this first game, your supporting characters are also missing some definition. You start knowing them and you talk with them, but they don't say much. You can already do a type of "loyalty" missions for them, but they're very generic missions like the rest of side quests, and they only trigger a bit of conversations with them. However it's enough at least to start knowing them, and seeing glimpses of their personality, and they're already likeable, just not very developed yet, and they all adore you somehow without you having done much yet.
Another issue that the game has is sexism. Sexism is rampant in videogames, but well, as you create new species, the typical thing of giving the females boobs is quite common in here, while at the same time hiding some females of certain species that look weird already as males and probably the developers thought would be too unappealing to the standard male gamer and didn't bother to design, at least in this first game, where you only see males apart from female humans and Asari. And related to that, special mention for the Asari, a race of hot blue girls that are all girls and pair with any other species, clearly a sex fantasy of someone. Although in the second game you do discover that the way you see them as beautiful human-like may be them mind-controlling you a bit, since every other species sees them as beautiful and similar to themselves, a nicer explanation that does not remove the fact that all of them are beautiful in-game and tend to have quite big breasts....
Finally, it's worth mention that the game is quite derivative. We're not doing anything revolutionary here, the game uses tropes and ideas from famous other science-fiction works and movies, from Ender's game to Alien, Star wars, etc. You could still take it as a homage more than pure plagiarism: The game tries to evoke a feeling most present during science-fiction works of the 80s, as the developers mentioned.
However, even after listing these issues, the game is quite awesome. The side quests are tedious but necessary to get nice perks in later games, and the main plot is great and amazing. The Citadel gives you a sense of wonder that is difficult to describe, but feels amazing. Ilos is incredibly creepy and epic. The music accompanies you in great ways, especially when it's not the military sections, but the sections where you're in awe. And the interactions you can have, the choices and the people you meet, all create an amazing experience, like having really a first contact with alien life.
