Mass Effect 1 Legendary Edition Full Review

FULL REVIEW

Part 1: Welcome Back to the Milky Way!

Although the first part of the game stutters with both plot and character development, it introduces all the saga’s main thematic elements and lays the groundwork for the excellent second half of the game. It is the least enjoyable part of the series to play for me, but also the most necessary.

ME1 is divided into three broad narrative acts: the introduction (Normandy, Eden Prime, Citadel); the investigation (Therum, Feros, Noveria); and the pursuit (Virmire, Ilos, Citadel). The first act lays the thematic groundwork for the whole series and is mostly lore-building; the second focuses on action and character development; and the third is fully Reaper-centered. The plot is well-balanced and the pacing is right, though some of the drama is contrived.

This article focuses on the first act, which tackles two major themes: Shepard’s maturity as a leader and humanity’s place in the galaxy. These mirror each other and are intertwined carefully for the most part, despite some setbacks.

The first act also introduces a plethora of ethical, political, and metaphysical dilemmas: the moral and legal status of AI research, the geth revolt and the Quarian exile, the slow-motion genocide of the Krogan, racism & speciesism, corporate cronyism and hyper-capitalism, and so on. I will have a dedicated post for most of these, so I won’t dwell on them much right now.

It’s Legen -wait for it- dary!

To say that the Legendary Edition feels like a new game is an overstatement, but not by much. As is widely argued in fan circles, and as was expected by common sense alone, 14-year-old ME1 is the title that most benefits from BioWare’s facelift. In my opinion, fan-favorite mod ALOT still looks sharper, but the poly count is higher, the meshes more detailed than in the MEUITM mod, the animation smoother, and the lighting improved. But the most important changes in MELE1 concern the gameplay. The original game was a mess of poor camera work, clunky shooting, and questionable RPG choices, but the remaster makes several improvements.

First, the revamped leveling system is a pleasure. Whether you choose Classic Mode (60 levels) or new Legendary Mode (30 levels), it is now possible to fully level Shepard in one playthrough, something that was impossible in the original game. This also makes MELE1 more consistent with the leveling system in MELE2-3, where the level cap is 60 but across two games, as progress carries over from 2 to 3 (but not from 1 to 2, for obvious reasons).

Second, shooting is now actually fun. The ridiculous pew-pew guns from the original game have been replaced by weapons that shoot different and actually sound good. Weapon-specific firing modes give you all-new reasons to pick one over another rather than pure stats. The retextures are nice, too. The lack of a sniper rifle sway is a mixed-bag. On the one hand, it’s a loss of one of the game’s few real RPG elements, for in the original game you had to work hard at making the sniper rifle actually usable (through training and add-ons), and it was such a pleasure when you eventually did. On the other hand, the sway was excessive for the non-soldier class. Are we supposed to believe that a top-notch N7 operative like Shepard can’t hold a gun steady, regardless of training? Removing the sway fixes that, but honestly I would have liked to see it greatly reduced, not axed altogether. But we’re splitting hairs here. The improvements in the shooting models are mostly very well done.

One gripe that I still have is that the half-baked RPG elements have not improved in LE. Your squad choices still make little difference: other than Liara’s Singularity (a real game-changer) or Wrex’s near-invincibility, there is little benefit in choosing a careful weapon-power loadout, a long-standing complaint with ME1. Ironically, at the same time the game is also obscurely obsessed with certain stats, most of all Electronics and Encryption. Yes, it makes sense that if my squad’s Encryption level is too low I can’t open this box or that chest, but: (a) at least tell me how many points I need to have for easy, medium, and hard encryption, so that I may level my squad appropriately and pick the right members in the future; and most importantly (b) this is an action shooter, not a goddamn tabletop, so give me a mini-game or something to at least have a chance to interact with everything I see, especially as I won’t be able to return to these locations later. Alas, all of this is unchanged in MELE1.

I won’t say much about the Mako and the uncharted worlds for two reasons. One, I have never been into free-roam exploration in the original ME1, and the graphical changes here (albeit remarkable!) do not yet make me want to drudge through fractally-generated mountains to trigger one line of text like in some text-based adventure game. Two, there is very little that can be done to make the Mako enjoyable short of a complete physics rewrite: it was and is a frustrating mess. If BioWare wanted to really fix this, they could have taken the Nomad’s control system from Andromeda and applied it here, along of course with that game’s far-superior planet level design... but that is too much to expect from a remaster, so it doesn’t really bother me that we still have basically the same Mako.

As expected, I am spending waaaay too much time in the new Photo Mode...

Well, then, if the *geth* say so...

First Act Plot Overview

Despite the illusion of freedom on the Citadel and in the Galaxy Map, the game runs linearly for a few hours as we go along for the ride. The promotion of Shepard to Spectre makes sense, lore-wise, but it feels rushed because the possibility of her becoming the first human Spectre is mentioned only twice before it actually happens: by Nihlus on the Normandy and by Udina in his office. Fourteen years after the original game, I still experienced the same “...but why?” feeling through the first few hours, as Shepard is apparently hand-picked to be The Hero™ not by sensible and logical narrative forces within the script, but by the authors themselves.

More importantly, as influential Mass Effect critic Shamus Young has argued, the Council’s instant acceptance of Tali’s evidence against Saren is questionable. Saren is supposedly the best Spectre, a living legend according to Anderson, so the bar should be set very high to find him guilty of treason and to revoke his status in absentia. It is true, however, that discontent with Saren runs pretty deep, at least according to Garrus and Wrex. While he may be legendary, he is also insane, and if Garrus knows it, the Council probably know it, too. Nihlus, a fellow Spectre, is really the only one who seems to think highly of Saren. So while it was definitely convenient to find him guilty based on the audio recording of a Quarian teenager, it also did not come out of the blue and may have been a political expedient to get rid of an inconvenient player. Still, I wish that all of this had received more attention, and instead the script takes the easy way out by once more rushing to establish Saren as The Villain™.

A similar and more frustrating issue is Shepard’s facile willingness to believe in the Reapers. “It’s the Reapers, I know it!” How? You literally just heard of a myth about them, third-hand, via a Quarian kid via the geth, and all of a suddenly... boom! The Reapers explain the vision from the Beacon. Incidentally, Liara does the same after Therum, going from “I know every theory about the Protheans” to “omg it was the Reapers all along!” in two minutes flat. All this is especially maddening because in ME2-3 Shepard spends so much time insisting that shit’s going down and has to rub people’s faces in it. Remember when Scully saw aliens every week in The X-Files but remained blissfully skeptical, while Mulder saw very little and jumped to conclusions? It’s like that, but in space.

Of course, there is much more to say about Shepard as a hero in Part 2.

And the award for the worst eye animation goes to... Ashley Williams!

Part 2: The Hero Humanity Needs

The first three main planets are a hodgepodge of dated level design and stock characters, but lurking beneath a yet-unpolished surface is a captivating plot that is essential to the whole trilogy: Shepard begins to come into her own as a leader in the saga’s first real attempt at character development.

Plot Overview: Therum, Feros, and Noveria

Therum is little more than a run-and-shoot gallery with bland environments that look procedurally generated and a lofi disco-techno track. There is no plot advancement and nothing important happens here, so in many ways this is a tutorial mission designed to get the player acquainted with driving the Mako and fighting geth. I always play this planet first, partly because of this and partly because Liara is crucial to the plot and an excellent squad mate... and it is very, very odd that players don’t have to play Therum first! Indeed, they may play it dead last before the ending, which is entirely nonsensical. So the fact that the game does not channel you directly to Therum is, in my view, a bad design oversight. Nor is this the last time that this happens. For example, Virmire, the turning point of the story, can be done before either Feros or Noveria: if you’ve got some hours to waste, try playing it as soon as it unlocks and tell me if the resulting story isn’t a total clusterfuck. Likewise, in ME3 you can do the “Leviathan” DLC very early on, but several continuity issues pop up later, especially on Thessia.

As for Liara herself, her two conversations with Shepard about the Protheans and about the asari mating rituals are among the best writing in ME1, though admittedly that is a low bar to clear as the game is by far the least literary of the trilogy. I also love how understated Liara’s and Shepard’s attraction is (if a romance is pursued), growing out of mutual respect and appreciation rather than physical interest. It is unfortunate that the writers resort to the Shy Exotic Virgin™ trope with her, but this is one of the many character development issues that ME2 tries to fix, albeit heavy-handedly.

Feros is better than Therum both gameplay- and plot-wise, but the fascinating Thorian concept is sold way short. So there exists a being that is older than the Protheans, who possesses vast wisdom of the past and (arguably) has witnessed the rise and fall of the Prothean civilization... and we don’t even get to talk to it?! After a tedious hunt for geth among Generic Grey Rubble Texture #4, and a series of NPC interactions that would be put to shame by a 1960s Star Trek episode, the climax of the mission is an oozing plant and a dopey thrall who spends as much time talking about herself and Benezia as about the Thorian itself. Uhhh okay. The magnificent backdrop of the Prothean highway, the only innovative design found here, cannot rescue this mission from near-complete dullness.

(Incidentally, what were the authors smoking when they came up with such similar-sounding names? Therum, Thorian, Turian, Prothean. Seriously?)

Just imagine what this would have looked like with contemporary graphics...

Noveria, though still seriously flawed, is my favorite of the three starting planets. Port Hanshan and the industrial espionage side quests make for valuable world-building, as does the rachni plot. The writers managed to take the trite concept of the bug-like alien hive-mind and turn it into creepy space poetry. It is also rare for such villains to be pacifist and isolationist, so the story works and the moral dilemma that Shepard faces at the end is genuine.

Unfortunately, Peak 15 has two downsides. One is Benezia: what on earth is the point of this character? Surely not to teach us about indoctrination, whose insidiousness comes through much more thoroughly from Saren. Is it to provide an emotional underpinning for Liara? But her presence as squad mate on Noveria is optional, and even if you do bring her along she has but two short lines (badly acted by Ali Hillis, who was still finding her feet at this point). It seems like the only reason to write in Benezia was to have a Hot Villain Sidekick In Black Leathers™, which is campy as hell. Am I way off the mark about her? Am I missing something?

The other big downside of Noveria is the aesthetics. The Binary Helix labs are every late-1990s 3D-rendered sci-fi facility: glass doors, sleek lines, blocky walls, holographic overheads, etc. All the downsides of punk retrofuturism but none of the perks. Add a nightmarish level design where even returning players will get lost and a lot of logical discontinuities when speaking to the survivors at Peak 15 (not to mention how easy it is to have to kill everyone for no reason at all), and this is quite the frustrating mission. If it weren’t for Port Hanshan and the rachni, Noveria too would go the way of Therum and Feros.

The first two acts, which are playable in some 6-8 hours without taking detours, don’t exactly hook you in. I recall that they left me cold back in 2007 and that I almost put the game down, and I still have to make myself drudge on today. The remaster makes for slightly better immersion thanks to the improved graphics and gameplay, but it is still not enough. It is common to say, among fans, that ME1 has not aged well and that to make the best use of it one should immerse oneself in the lore. That is, indeed, what I do, reading every Codex entry as soon as it is unlocked, exhausting every line of dialogue with every NPC, and looking into every nook and cranny. But it is not a good sign that players feel like they have to do this, rather than get to do this, to get through the first game. No doubt that my personal preferences are dictating some of my reactions here, but no review is objective and mine certainly is not.

To conclude, of course the biggest problem with the first two acts of ME1 is that there are no antagonists worthy of the name. The Krogan merc boss on Therum is laughable; the Thorian never speaks; Benezia is a cardboard cutout with an awful script that Marina Sirtis almost makes bearable; and Saren disappears after Eden Prime for a good 8-10 hours. Only the rachni queen is fascinating, but also not a villain. It’s hard to stay interested for this long without an antagonist. Incidentally, this will be a problem for ME2 as well, though alleviated by the far superior protagonists, aesthetics, plot, and gameplay.

Port Hanshan is one of the few areas of ME1 (outside of the Citadel) that doesn't look like absolute dog shit.

Shepard-Commander in the Making

Through the first two acts, Shepard gradually comes into her own as a commanding officer. On Eden Prime she is mostly a spectator and lucks out in the end, and her wide-eyed wonder continues through the Citadel, where she just goes along with other people’s power games and learns the ropes of galactic politics, as she should. But by Feros and Noveria she makes the first moral decisions that will become a staple of the saga: kill the colonists or save them? kill the Thorian thrall or let her go? spare or execute the rachni? and so on.

While these decisions have marginal consequences in the here and now, they develop Shepard into someone who must make the call. This isn’t trivial, because this hero isn’t larger-than-life. She doesn’t have much power, nor very special abilities, nor natural leadership, nor a calling or predestination. She’s not someone who “oh yeah of course” gets it done: she must grow in that direction. As is well known, this saga is not an archetypal hero’s journey, and I have immense respect for a writing team that managed to make this happen in a medium like videogames.

It’s not all gradual, either. Shepard’s development lunges forward after her first meld with Liara. We get a sense that Shepard, though an outstanding soldier, has never truly introspected. Even the Paragon dialogue options are not really self-aware; indeed, in ME1 the only major difference between Paragon and Renegade is how much of a dick Shepard is and how many people she kills. Pre-meld, most are either military bravado or raw emotional reactions; but post-meld, the bigger picture begins to come first. Liara’s meld stabilizes Shepard, bringing to her a clarity of intent that is new to her. This more centered Shepard is crucial to the rest of ME1 and to ME2-3. I think this is a great asset for the saga: offering a lead character who grows psychologically, while also allowing players some say in that growth. It’s not perfect, and you can get some bland or contradictory Shepards as a result, but overall it’s an excellent writing feat that pays off in droves by ME2.

In the next part I discuss the portrayal of racism and bigotry in ME1 and in the trilogy as a whole, which is handled surprisingly well despite some questionable choices.

My Shepard for this Legendary Edition playthrough: Liv, named after my lovely wife.

Part 3: Cultural Speciesism, or Why Ashley
Isn’t Even the Worst Bigot in the Milky Way

Mass Effect uses racism for character development, although it is best described as cultural speciesism given the absence of systemic oppression in this narrative universe. Yes, Ashley Williams is a bigot, but she’s not the worst bigot in the game, and there are more important aspects of this topic to discuss anyway.

A note, first. One cannot say “there is no racism here because these are species, not races.” That is just wordplay, as the word ‘race’ can also identify a whole species, e.g. “the human race.” Also, science-fiction writers have always used alien species as placeholders for human races, which is a perfectly valid trope. And most importantly, intra-human and inter-species discriminations work through similar mechanisms: the ethically unjustifiable differential treatment of outsiders. The reasons why racism is wrong are also the reasons why sexism, ableism, classism, etc. are wrong—including discrimination among aliens.

I’ll use the term “speciesism” interchangeably with racism here. The term was popularized by Australian philosopher Peter Singer to refer to human discrimination against non-human animals, so it is quite apt in this context too.

Systemic Racism

First, there is almost no systemic racism in Mass Effect. Systemic racism is the institutional, organized, deliberate oppression of some races at the hand of others. The ME galaxy would be fertile ground for this sort of domination. Say, instead of rescuing the Drell, the Hanar could have kidnapped them from Rakhana and enslaved them, then felt bad about it, and now they would uneasily coexist on Kahje. This would have made the Drell-Hanar story an interesting analogy with modern-day U.S., but the writers just chose not to go there, and that’s fine.

The closest we see to systemic racism is the Salarian repression of the Krogan via genetic engineering, which may hint to various government-sponsored ethnic sterilization programs in the U.S., Japan, and Germany. But most of that plot actually centers on biological warfare, war crime ethics, and research bioethics, so the race component is relatively under-analyzed. While some Salarians do think of the Krogan as animals, that definitely does not include Mordin, who’s the moral core of the genophage story on the Salarian side.

There are of course multiple cases of systemic oppression in the saga, from the Protheans’ iron-fist colonialism to Illium’s corporate dystopia that fails to protect the weak, but these are not portrayed as racially motivated.

Cultural Racism

What the saga does have in droves is cultural racism: behaviors and attitudes toward members of different races that are coded as acceptable or even encouraged within racially defined social contexts. Whereas the main tool of systemic racism is the law, cultural racism relies on civil society, education, religion, family, and the media. It may vary greatly in scope, entity, and harmfulness, ranging from “Asian women can’t drive” to “Black men will rape your white daughters.”

Most species in ME display racial hostility toward other species, which is to be expected in such a diverse galaxy. But context matters. Any member of any race can be occasionally or individually racist toward any member of other races, but it takes time and tradition for those instances to amount to patterns of cultural racism; and of course only culturally dominant races can enact systemic racism, which requires established power structures. So some racial issues we see in ME are minor or isolated, based on stereotypes, anecdotal evidence, insensitivity, or emotional immaturity, and they do not necessarily constitute a pattern of cultural racism. Examples: when people wonder “what Quarians look like under the suit”; or when a Turian tells the Citadel customs office that “all humans look alike”; or when Garrus and Joker exchange racially charged jokes (but this one is more complex; see below).

The games are insufficiently nuanced to describe intra-species racial differences. We must assume for the sake of argument that each species forms a more or less unified front with regard to other species, a regrettable drawback of the species-as-races switcheroo. One notable but isolated exception is the asari ostracism toward purebloods.

In some cases, racial cultural attitudes are justified and not discriminatory. The Krogan have every reason to hate the Salarians, for example, since the oppressed have no duty to be neutral or fair to their oppressor. Humans too have some reason to be distrustful of some aliens, given the sentiment among Council and non-Council species that humanity’s fast-track progress through galactic ranks is undeserved. But anti-human resentment is very much a mixed bag that deserves a more detailed analysis, so I turn to that topic next.

Protip, Ashley: it is possible to think something and NOT SAY IT.

Human and Anti-Human Resentment

Anti-human resentment runs a mile wide and a mile deep. The turians, still bitter from the First Contact War and endowed with a rich military tradition, see humans as toddlers with guns. Other species are nominally less adverse but just as hostile. Everybody treats humans how the Vulcans do before the founding of the Federation in Star Trek. Ironically, it’s also how humans usually treat other species in science-fiction, and of course how Western colonial powers have infantilized nonwhites for centuries to facilitate their genocide. Executor Pallin, a minor turian NPC on the Citadel, puts it best: “humans grow too fast,” a likely nod to Sir William Petty’s infamous “the French grow too fast” that has influenced centuries of English foreign policy. Humans are at worst dangerous, at best space-weeds.

On the other side is a human exceptionalism bordering on ethno-nationalism. We’re a sulky bunch: we hardly need a reason, let alone a good one, to justify our own exclusionary jingoism. In just the first two hours of play, Pressly, Williams, Jenkins, Udina, even Anderson have overtly racist lines, culminating in Ashley’s much-publicized remark on the Citadel: “I can’t tell the aliens from the animals.” Joker even fetishizes asari women, as many human males do, according to Liara, an equivalent to the white-male Orientalist preference for Asian young girls. Given all this, one almost sympathizes with the anti-human turian politician Talid from ME2...

But aren’t the humans entitled to such resentment and distrust, since everyone hates them? Aren’t humans like the Krogan, who are entitled to hate the Salarians? Not quite.

For one, human resentment is purely reactionary and comes from a place of unearned privilege, not as a defense against oppression. Calling someone out on their privilege is not oppressive, and resentment over being called out is no reason for moral sympathy. One could try to argue that humans aren’t being unduly privileged after all, but I think there’s no question that other species, like the turians, find their PR-motivated uplifting after the First Contact War to be politically convenient. More importantly, it is one thing to be wary of a political problem, but quite another to use it an excuse to endorse every racial stereotype in the book. I think that’s what rubs me wrong about Ashley and Pressly, as I explain below: not that they have no reason to distrust aliens, but that their distrust becomes an excuse to rationalize other and entirely unfounded stereotypes.

So the question “is Ashley a racist?” is simplistic. Yes, she is, and she’s a garden-variety, unsophisticated, everyday racist, who hates the KKK (Cerberus, Terra Firma) but believes that “they” (turians?) are out to get “us” (humans), a persecution complex common to militaristic/nationalistic types. And while her concern for military security is justified on its face, justified beliefs are often used to mask unjustified ones; English philosopher Miranda Fricker calls this prejudicially motivated testimonial injustice. Ashley is an extremely well-written character in ME1, a realistic person who takes a few controversial facts wildly out of context, grants them a far higher status in her belief structure than she should, and rolls it all up in a narrative of (grand-)daddy issues. Sure, she has reasons for her beliefs, but all racists have reasons: bad ones. So it’s okay to say that Ashley’s behaviors are consistent with her personality and backstory, but it’s not okay to say that this consistency makes her non-racist. To say the latter is to invalidate all the work that went into making her a fantastic character that a morally good audience should find deeply unlikable.

Another reason why Ashley should not be the sole focus of this conversation is that many other characters’ racial and cultural attitudes are worth exploring. Take XO Charles Pressly, for example (he has the deck, by the way). His first comments to Shepard, early in ME1, are not especially troubling. Unlike Ashley, his reason for distrusting non-humans is not security, but pride: he believes that humans have always handled their problems independently and should continue to do so. A bullshit reason, for sure, but not horrible per se, and a paragon Shepard can put him in his place. Then we read his journal entries (“Normandy Crash Site” DLC in ME2) and we see how those comments were but a façade for more horrifying ideas, as is often the case with someone who insists they are not a racist: “all these damned aliens aboard the Alliance’s most advanced ship. I just don’t trust them. Esp[...] that damned asari. And a quarian! What does Shepard think this is, a zoo?” So he shares Ashley’s security concerns and her views about aliens and animals. Then, by the last entry, his tune changes: “I came on this ship firmly believing humanity was on its own in the galaxy, [...] Shepard brought all these aliens on board, and there’s no way we could have accomplished what we did without them. I am proud to say [...] die for any member of this crew, regardless of what world they were born on.” So Pressly’s narrative is actually one of a former racist’s redemption. Big whoop: racists who change their mind deserve no coddling and should be met with a nod of acknowledgment, if that, so I’m glad that this story is relegated to a tiny entry in an irrelevant side quest.

Lazy Racisms, Racy Lazisms

The saga contains plenty of examples of occasional racism unconnected to discriminatory patterns or systems. For one, consider the racially charged jokes between Garrus and Joker in ME3. These don’t indicate a broader pattern, since neither character is openly bigoted toward the other’s race in other contexts; yes, Joker is a sexist a-hole, and he does fetishize asari, but that’s another problem for another post. It’d be less okay with Garrus and, say, Pressly, given Pressly’s track record, because then we could suspect that Pressly’s “jokes” may not really be jokes, after all.

Moreover, these are exchanges between people on equal moral footing who are able to consent to the exchange, so neither is victimized. Contrast this with people belonging to racial minorities in racially oppressive societies, who sometimes feel forced to make light of racism in order to be accepted by the racial majority who hates it when they “play the race card.” Their relational autonomy in those cases is less than full and they’re not as free to consent to the exchange—but that’s neither Garrus nor Joker, who are fully in charge of their cultural positioning.

The only potential problem with the Garrus-Joker convo is that it is situated within a context of mutual distrust between their species, even if such distrust does not involve either of them as individuals. So while they are okay with lightening things up like this, no one person speaks for their race/species. “My Black friend gave me the N-word pass, so it’s okay for me to say it.” But your Black friend doesn’t speak for all Black persons, so it’s okay for you to interact that way with him, but that’s it. Likewise, another turian or human would be totally within their rights to find these jokes demeaning and ask Garrus and Joker to cut it out. Different contexts call for different standards. But again, unlike in the real world, humans and turians do remain on roughly even ground, as neither species has oppressed or enslaved the other, so the broader context is not one-sided. This makes it a little more okay, as both Garrus’ and Joker’s personal-cultural backgrounds are such that they can both consent freely to their exchanges.

In conclusion, what we see here in the beginning of ME1 is cultural speciesism motivated by attitudes, politics, and expediency. In a way, these are the ‘best’ conditions for racial tensions to occur. What makes racism particularly evil in the real world is its connection with a history of unilateral oppression. It wouldn’t be as bad to use racial slurs if they weren’t originally devised to dehumanize people and facilitate their genocide, but that’s simply not the case in the real world, when they did have such a history, which thus must be respected. But not so in Mass Effect, so what we get is a less nuanced universe where a speciesist character is still potentially sympathetic.

Of course, one may still argue that it was too convenient for the writers to concoct exactly the sort of universe that allows characters to be racist and get away with it. Perhaps it’s like those people who use selective colorblindness (“I don’t see race”) as an excuse not to have to admit their racial biases, the gutless faux-equality of lazy centrists with poor moral fiber. But, as usual, I like to give writers the benefit of the doubt and assume best intentions.

In the next part, I return to the main story of ME1 and discuss its most consequential NPC: Sovereign.

Part 4: Sovereign and Other Liars

The Reaper plot is fleshed out on Virmire in a stunning conversation with Sovereign, a well-rounded and fascinating character despite having only a dozen lines in the entire script. However, we should take its claims about the Reapers with a grain of salt. Sovereign has good reason to misrepresent the Reapers to Shepard, so it makes good critical sense to see its statements as subjective perspective rather than absolute truth.

A Very Virmire Vacation

After a string of planets in ruins, Virmire is an artistic breath of fresh air. It’s too bad that ME2 and ME3 never return to such lush locales, although the Legendary Edition does make some positive changes in that direction. Virmire begins with the usual drive-by shooting with occasional puzzles that already got old by now, but fortunately all of that is followed by four outstanding acts: the Salarian camp setup, the base approach fight, the conversation with Sovereign, and Saren’s attack, a great crescendo of dramatic intensity.

I’ve nothing to say about the Salarian camp that hasn’t been said already. It’s pretty simple: hold the line and don’t kill Wrex. The base approach is more challenging than most of the combat thus far, which feels right since we are assaulting the villain’s base. Saren’s attack is the game’s first fully scripted action sequence, and the player finally feels the gravity of what’s going on. What had been a broody lurking turian comes to life as a complex character that is genuinely eerie... although the Silver Surfer act is more than a little ridiculous.

Virmire is the game’s turning point for various reasons. (1) We learn much about the Reapers’ true goals, or at least what Sovereign thinks they are. (2) We see good inter-species cooperation with the Salarian STGs, a preamble of the assemble-your-team and unite-the-galaxy themes of the next two games. (3) Shepard’s newfound command confidence is fire-tested with the Ashley-Kaiden choice, whose aftermath however is regrettably under-analyzed unless you also romance one of them. (4) Saren’s inner struggle, finally revealed, invests his character with a sorely needed third dimension, although he is never a captivating villain. The script manages to juggle all these elements with good ability, and the result is a couple of hours of no-holds-barred adventure.

"Bit of a cloaca" (Mordin Solus, 2185)

Sovereign Über Alles?

The best part about discovering Sovereign’s goals is that we hear them from Sovereign itself. But not all is as it seems in its sharp words delivered with authority by voice actor Michael Jessop. Though short, this conversation is one of the series’ literary high points and deserves close analysis.

Here’s what Sovereign says about the nature of the Reapers:

“We simply are” and “We are eternal [...] the pinnacle of evolution and existence”
“We have no beginning. We have no end. We are infinite.” (re: “who built you?”)
“We are each a nation. Independent, free of all weakness.”

These statements may be taken as evidence that Catalyst and Leviathan in ME3 contradict what we knew of the Reapers until then. I think that’s nonsense, but I won’t make my case until my review of the ME3 ending.

Here, instead, is what Sovereign says about the purpose of the harvest:

“organic life is nothing but a genetic mutation, an accident”
“we are the end of everything”
“the cycle cannot be broken”
“your society develops along the paths we desire” (claiming that the Citadel and mass relays are Reaper tech)
“we impose order on the chaos of organic evolution”

These five statements set the Reapers apart from organic life, though without necessarily establishing them as synthetic, either. They could be a third substance, neither organic nor synthetic, or some synthesis of both, but there’s no evidence either way until the very end of ME2 (when EDI says something along those lines) and the end of ME3 (when Harbinger mentions a post-harvest new existence). Sovereign’s statements, plus the fact that the geth worship the Reapers as the “Old Machines,” makes us conclude at this point that they are probably synthetic or at least semi-synthetic. Sovereign’s statements also hint to the idea that extinction is cyclical, that it is planned or even logically necessary, and that the Reapers find order in destruction. What is notably absent from Soveiregn’s speech, along with the true origin of the Reapers, is the fact that each harvest creates a Reaper.

Once again, I won’t analyze the continuity of these statements with regard to ME2-3. But even at this point in ME1 we should already consider that Sovereign may be lying, exaggerating, withholding information, or itself not know the whole story. Again, this is neither based on later events nor intended to retroactively justify its claims. I mean literally that in the instant we first heard Sovereign say these things in ME1, back in 2007, we should already have taken them with a grain of salt, and that later events merely confirmed, a posteriori, this prima facie prudence.

Notice I said “take with a grain of salt,” not “dismiss as untrue.” There’s no evidence yet that Sovereign is lying. But we should suspend judgment about its statements being complete, true, or final. Why?

*Someone* failed the Prime Directive required course at Reaper Academy...

Is Sovereign Lying?

First: since when does the hero just take the bad guy at his word?! It is naïve at best and conniving at worst. Shep would do well to at least doubt what she’s being told, though we know that’s not her strong suit, given how quickly she endorses the Reaper theory based on a vision and a two-minute chat with a teenager. This first prima facie reason to believe that Sovereign is lying is not very important, but it’s there nonetheless.

Second: holy hyperbole, Batman! The natural reaction to hearing such bombast should not be “oh no we’re fucked” but “yeah well that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” Sovereign really out-Kirrahes Kirrahe at being a bit of a cloaca. Consider how each of these statements is inherently flawed:

“We are infinite.” But Sovereign is a temporal creature existing within linear time, talking consequentially, and making time-sensitive references such as “end” and “is over,” so whatever it is I doubt that it’s infinite.

“We are the pinnacle of evolution.” We had guys on Earth circa 1936 who said that too, not to mention that if the Reapers are infinite and eternal they haven’t been part of evolution at all: of course, the concepts of “pinnacle” and “evolution” are themselves temporal-relational.

“Organic life is an accident.” Everyone knows that it is, not to mention it’s disingenuous to hear it from a thing who owes its existence to organics. Charitably, we could explain this claim as something like “organics came about for no purpose, but we Reapers have been designed and intended and have a purpose”... but then they are not eternal, infinite, etc.

“We impose order.” Even if Sovereign meant that the end goal of all life is to finish, and that only when it ends has it reached its well-ordered completion... why bother preventing the natural devolution of organic life through the harvest, since it’s going to destroy itself anyway? This line may be explained retroactively by the knowledge that the harvest preserves life in Reaper form, and thus may be understood as a form of reproduction. But we can’t conclude any of that at this point, and there is no such indication until the end of ME2.

In short, most of Sovereign’s statements are difficult to take at face value. They are vague and semantically under-determined, meaning they could end up true (and some do), but Shepard has no reason to trust them at this point.

Third: it’s good practice to be at least moderately skeptical of anything in a story. Audience deception is a fully valid narrative mechanism: first misdirect, then make them suspect that they may have been misdirected, and finally drop a truth bomb. This works when the misdirection is believable and the suspicion is subtle enough that only the most perceptive audience will catch it. Mystery novels, for example, work precisely because readers could figure out who did it from the first few pages, but only if they’re very perceptive and a little lucky -- hence my mom’s insistence that my dad not spoil every single episode of Perry Mason, although he always guessed the culprit five minutes in. Most of the information that average viewers need is handed out piecemeal over the whole story.

So we should expect the conversation with Sovereign to be merely the first among several pieces of a puzzle, most of which we are yet to see. And while obviously it is mandatory that all the other pieces remain consistent, the first piece need not contain the Whole Truth™ or even most of it. It would be bad writing if it did. Who wants to continue playing if the main villain has already told you everything halfway through the first game? Why expect the next two games to simply repeat and reaffirm the same exact notions, instead of presenting new and exciting facts and/or ways to look at the same facts? For a story to remain interesting, gradually it must add new information that either changes previous events (while providing believable explanations for these changes) or shines a new light on old facts (while remaining consistent with them). Again, this only works if there’s reason to believe that misdirection is taking place at all, and so far there are three such reasons. Which leads me to reason #4...

Fourth: Sovereign gives ample signs of being unreliable. It is boastful, vain, self-important, and petty. On Ilos we learn that it is the vanguard, the lookout, the eternal left-behind. When it wakes and deems that this galactic cycle is ripe, it signals the keepers on the Citadel to begin the harvest. But that plan goes to shit thanks to the Prothean sabotage. So here we have a creature with a huge superiority complex whose only goal is to herald the harvest... and now that it cannot, it’s in full-scale Plan B mode: recruiting Saren, enlisting geth, seeking the Conduit, etc., all stuff that (presumably) it’s never had to do in previous cycles. As Vigil says, it is unclear when exactly Sovereign realized this and started preparing: it could have been a year or a century. Either way, it must have made it mad or at least concerned. Nor can we say that it has no emotions, as its speech is drenched in threats, disdain, and more sass than an episode of The Golden Girls. Together, all of these are signs of a Nabokov-level unreliable narrator.

Fifth: Sovereign has no reason to tell Shepard the Whole Truth™. Shepard hasn’t earned the right to know. By any accounts, she just recently stumbled onto this thing and has no skin in the game. The only reason that Sovereign pays any attention to Shepard at all is that she has activated a couple of Beacons, which makes her at best a minor annoyance. It’s true, though, that he also has no reason to deceive her. Right now Shepard is just a non-factor, and you would expect Sovereign to give her just the “party line” or the Reaper Stump Speech™. (Contrast this with Harbinger, whom Shepard intrigues, and the Rannoch destroyer, who actively debates her after she kicks its ass).

Sixth and finally: Sovereign may not even know the Whole Truth™. This is a stretch on ME1 lore alone, but it goes along with reason #3 that you should be a little skeptical by default. We know that Sovereign is a vanguard, so it is wise to assume right away that he is not the sole or the most important Reaper. You don’t trust the lookout with all the details of the bank robbery, our you wouldn’t have made him the lookout in the first place. So either it only has one piece of the truth pertaining to its own role, or it has only one perspective on the truth, again based on its role. Both possibilities are amply consistent with the thinking of a machine, whose parts are specialized for a task. And the line “we are each a nation” is all the more reason to believe that Sovereign’s statement is its own take on the Reaper purpose.

So, to recap: we should be wary of what Sovereign says about Reaper nature and purpose, partly because it is generally wise to do so in the opening parts of a longer story, and partly because Sovereign itself should inspire little confidence in Shepard and the players. This cautious suspension of judgment has almost no implications for ME1, where Sovereign is defeated during the attack on the Citadel and the only other important conversation in the game (with Saren before the final fight) doesn’t tackle the Reapers’ nature or purpose. But if it is warranted to take Sovereign’s statements with a grain of salt, then the interpretation of both ME2 and ME3 may change as a result.

A final note. Everything that I just argued is based on one big assumption: that texts must be interpreted, and only the statements of pure deductive logic have unequivocal content. That is, non-logical languages are semantically under-determined, so insisting that “things just mean what they mean” is naively simplistic.

Is anyone else reminded of a rapper who spends half a song claiming how badass he really is?

The Choice

A common inside joke on the Mass Effect subreddit is that players choose to save Ashley Williams on Virmire just so they can kill her themselves during the Citadel coup in ME3! That’s cold... and brilliant. While I don’t have nearly as much hatred for Ashley as some others do, I also often save her on Virmire, mostly because I like her character development in the other games. But regardless of the downstream consequences, the weight of this choice is not as heavy in ME1 as it should be. Aside from a couple of lines of dialogue, choosing to sacrifice either ally seems to have almost no repercussions on Shepard, the crew, or the mission. This is somewhat attenuated for a Renegade-Ruthless Shepard, who has sent scores of men to their death on Torfan, but it should have a much bigger impact on other combinations: for example, you’d expect it to be fairly triggering for a Paragon-Survivor Shepard. More importantly, if until that point Shepard has been romancing either Ashley or Kaidan, that too doesn’t seem to play a very big role in the script. If Shepard leaves their love interest to die, they do not seem bothered by it; and if they save their love interest instead, there is only one line of dialogue analyzing what would have to be a very serious sense of guilt for choosing with one’s heart instead of one’s mind; i.e., “sleep with your CO: they’re more likely to pick you when push comes to shove.” (For an excellent treatment of this issue, instead, see Star Trek: The Next Generation, season 6 episode 19, “Lessons”).

Personally, my choice is not driven by gameplay. The Virmire survivor is unavailable in all of ME2 and the first half of ME3, and the latter already has a soldier (James) and a biotic (Liara), so gameplay-wise, the consequences of the Virmire choice really only matter to the rest of ME1... which, if you play Virmire right before Ilos, as you should, really only boils down to two missions. The survivor’s char-dev in the next games is more important, which makes sense considering that both are already well-written in ME1: the career soldier from a conservative traditional family who struggles to integrate in an increasingly multicultural galaxy (Ashley) and the gifted biotic kid with a gentle temperament who was forced into violence by a ruthless instructor and who is afraid of letting go (Kaidan). These are valid stories fully in-tune with the universe in which they take place, and they find good coronation in ME3. So, really, the Virmire choice boils down to which character’s story arc you’d like to see completed in ME3.

The next part discusses the ending of ME1, with an emphasis on the choice to save or doom the Council.

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Part 5: A Vigil for the Council

Ilos is the narrative peak of ME1, rich in breathtaking locations and awe-inspiring dialogue. While it tells us little about the Protheans, it does introduce what ultimately matters about them. The unremarkable Citadel battle is followed by two Council-related choices that should have had a bigger impact on ME2-3 than they did. The final Saren battle, though apropos from a narrative standpoint, is quite underwhelming in my view.

Ilos Rising

I have always been conflicted about Ilos. The above-ground part is disappointing. Supposedly we find ourselves in the most exotic Prothean world, yet all we get is a rubble courtyard with creepy statues, ugly textures even by 2007 standards, and not! one! single! comment! by our resident Prothean expert about the cultural value of this moment. For all its emphasis on lore and world-building, ME1 almost completely neglects to characterize the Protheans in any significant way. While this has its advantages (see below), it is also quite annoying.

But all of that changes underground. The Prothean archives are a masterpiece of understated architectural drama, a wistfully beautiful marvel that has no equal in the trilogy; not to mention the soulful music (Jack Wall’s “Vigil”) that accompanies us from the time we drive in and throughout the Vigil encounter, and that will also serve as a generic dramatic theme in some of the trilogy’s most poignant scenes. Despite the dull courtyard and the inevitable Mako drive, Ilos is an exceptional mission and the narrative-expository peak of ME1.

As Vigil has been programmed with information about surviving the harvest, we learn a lot about this topic in a short time. The script balances well the myth of the Protheans’ extinction in the first act with the tragic history of their resistance and redemption in the second. But as I said, the characterization of the Protheans is very low on detail. We learn very little about their species pre-extinction, as Vigil focuses on the small cache of scientists that worked on the Conduit project. No doubt Ilos contains a trove of other archives that we never get to see because, y’know, the galaxy is ending. There’s much to say about the Protheans’ portrayal in this game vs. the sequels, so I will discuss this when we get to the ME3 DLC “From Ashes.” For now, suffice it to say that Vigil tells us so little about the Protheans that a vast array of socio-historical conceptualizations of their society would be retroactively consistent. Plus, it’s fun that the Protheans turn out to be imperialistic assholes just for cognitive dissonance with Liara’s naively idealized Space Pacifists™. Vigil’s narrow focus on a tiny part of Prothean culture inadvertently validates her scholarly bias, itself colored by self-perceptions of asari culture as enlightened and peaceful.

Shep y u so badass tho

Finale and Coda

While parts of ME1 do try to break new ground, gameplay-wise, the ending is average run-and-gun action mixed in with a long cutscene. The latter is much better than the former, as fighting the same few enemies has gotten old by now... though fighting them on the walls of the Citadel wards with a gigantic Reaper in the background is definitely very cool, from a standpoint of spectacle. I enjoy the option of convincing Saren to off himself depending on Shep’s Charm/Intimidate score, and the revelation that his upgrades aren’t just Reaper implants but a Robot Monster From Hell™ is unexpected. (Another) shootout ensues while the battle that actually matters rages on outside. Personally I never feel much connection to Saren as a villain, although I appreciate his dramatic role as the unwise Icarus who illustrates the gravity of indoctrination. He’s the villain that ME1 needs, but not the one I care about. By contrast, the Illusive Man in ME2-3 has a lot more villain potential, although most of his scenes are so badly written that he fails to fully live up to that potential.

So Saren is dead, Sovereign is in trouble, and Shepard must make two important decisions: (1) whether to save the Council at the likely cost of many human lives; and (2) whether to install Anderson or Udina as the first-ever human Councilor. The game seems to push toward killing the Council and picking Anderson—which is why it is fun to do the opposite: save them and pick that weasel Udina. (Fun fact: Udina’s given name is Donnel, which sounds like “donnola,” the Italian word for “weasel.” I doubt this was intentional, but it always gives me a chuckle). What irks me is that while saving the Council is rightfully shown as a Paragon choice, so is picking Anderson over Udina. But why? Because Anderson is a friend? But that would be more in line with Renegade Shepard, for whom allegiance trumps protocol and reason. In fact, the poorly-named “Renegade” reneges nothing except established authority: in ME1, Renegade Shepard is an immature hothead who is sensitive to values forged in battle, like honor, allegiance, and military bravado, so this is precisely the person who would choose Anderson. Instead, a Paragon Shepard may see the sensibility in picking an experienced politician to do a politician’s job; not to mention that Anderson states clearly that he does not want the job in the first place! Thankfully, Renegade Shepard is much more fun to play in ME2-3, but that won’t help much with these two choices.

Geth: Not Even Once™

The Council are clearly typecast as Weak Through Inaction™, a trope I despise: in fact, I find their behavior pretty sensible given the burdens of their station. But one of this matters anyway, because even if the game seems to let you decide how you relate to the Council, from diplomatic deference to full-on insubordination, Shepard’s choices do not change the ending one bit. At most, we can say that players are in charge of a small bit of continuity: if you hang up on the Council every chance you get but then elect to save them, you strain the credibility of your own plot. There’s also the running theme of humans not having earned the privileges they were granted by political fiat, so how you relate to other characters who have strong opinions about this (Ashley, Anderson, Pressly, etc.) may also influence your choice.

Still, your choice doesn’t affect the ending, which is the usual triumphant stuff. Nor does it change ME2, where you get either the same Councilors or three similarly voiced and textured stand-ins. Plot-wise, you have the chance to basically start from scratch with the Council in ME2, either gaining their trust or telling them to get lost. In some scenarios, ME2 flat-out assumes mutual distrust between Shepard and the Council, so saving them now only for them to be ungrateful later may feel inconsistent to some players. Of course, the root cause of these problems is that ME2 plays fast and loose with your choices at the end of ME1, which I will discuss in future posts.

The Udina-or-Anderson decision is the least useful of all, which is maddening. It doesn’t play a big role in ME2, which is fair, but it is flat-out erased in ME3. If we pick Udina here, he remains Councilor, but if we pick Anderson, he quits after ME2 and Udina steps in. This is handled decently in the ME3 script: Anderson never wanted the job, as one expects of a career officer, so he gave it a fair shot and then quit. But we still get the feeling that the authors just needed a bad guy as the human Councilor, so they ignored player choice from ME1. This and other retcons in ME2-3 don’t bother me too much, nor do I think that player agency should be the end-all be-all of video games. But still, this is a sleight of hand and I sympathize with players who care more than I do, because they have a point.

One last thing. All three games overuse the Politicians Are Snakes™ trope. It would not be so upsetting if it weren’t drenched in militarism, for it is “good” soldiers that “bad” politicians are juxtaposed to. Are we seriously supposed to buy that people who spend their lives in the field have clearer moral outlooks than those “silver-tongued assholes” in leather chairs? The Brains Evil, Brawn Good trope is puerile. I cannot subscribe to the soldier-as-hero narrative that even relatively smart games like this one continue to push, nor do I believe that politicians are smarter or wiser by definition. I wish these roles were explored in more level-headed ways without resorting to caricatures to gain the easy sympathies of less discerning audiences who have played too many WWII first-person shooters.

In the next post, I wrap up my review of ME1 by commenting on some loose ends and setting the stage for the uneasy transition to ME2.

You shall know The Shepard, and The Shepard shall set you free.

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Part 6: The Hero the Galaxy Needs

This post recaps the lore and world-building writing choices from ME1 that are particularly relevant to the next two games. While ME1 showcases some seriously brilliant stories, and while the LE makes its gameplay a little more tolerable, the game is still mired in trite tabletop-RPG tropes that have aged even worse than its graphics and level design.

Lore and Narratives

The first game lays the narrative groundwork by introducing all the main themes that are key to the whole trilogy. Some are obvious, such as the Reapers being the main villains despite appearing rarely in the first two games. Others are merely hinted to in ME1 but become thoroughly developed later, such as the Quarian-geth conflict and the organics-synthetics coexistence in general. While there are dozens of themes worth analyzing in the first game, this section limits itself to those that will be important in the next two games.

Organics and synthetics

In some ways, this is what Mass Effect as a whole “is about.” It portrays a galaxy dominated by organics and where synthetic life forms are either non-sentient (VIs, mechs, robots) or antagonistic (geth and rogue AIs). It is also a galaxy where AI research has been illegal since the geth uprising. Alas, no main story missions in ME1 deal directly with this conflict, which is tackled primarily through side quests, Codex entries, and Tali’s lines of dialogue. For this reason, the script has no opportunity to take a definite stance on this issue. There are no indications in ME1 that organics and synthetics have always been in conflict, nor that they must be by necessity. The issue is introduced and discussed in a remarkably simplistic manner, for it is assumed that the geth are evil and that there is good reason for AI research to be illegal. In fact, for all practical purposes, ME1 presents a galaxy already united in its understanding of the role of synthetics. And it is this understanding, which Shepard & Co. also share, that makes it possible for Sovereign to be so menacing: the Reapers are scary, but they are scarier because they are synthetic and because they claim that they want to wipe out organics (which is also why Sovereign is able to deceive the geth into worshiping it, of course). Therefore, Sovereign’s reports on the Reapers’ nature and their role in the organics-synthetics conflict are fully in line with the rest of ME1. In the next two games, this view becomes significantly more nuanced, partly thanks to the introduction of synthetic or hybrid squad members (EDI and Legion) and partly because of the huge role that the Quarian-geth conflict will come to play. This is one of the many ways in which ME2-3 do an excellent job at picking up the slack of ME1, whose script is forced (by necessity) to introduce certain topics but without giving them proper treatment.

Galactic politics

The galaxy of Mass Effect is very much a liberal post-colonial utopia, modeled after the original intent behind the League of Nations and the U.N. It is also possibly post-democratic, as there is no indication in ME1 that the Citadel is governed by representation. Councilors are appointed, not elected, and we know nothing of the government system at sub-Council levels. That’s fine, because ME1 chooses to focus on other political issues, such as the unaccountable power of Spectres and the uneasy coexistence among the species’ militaries. The game is also obviously human-centered, much more than the next two chapters, and the role of the Alliance in galactic politics is examined quite a bit. Humanity is portrayed as having a chip on their shoulder the size of a planet, as most other species resent them for having been unduly privileged by the Council following the First Contact War. I have discussed at length, in Part 3 of this review, why this is a realistic portrayal that tackles issues of race and nationality, and why humans are mostly wrong and need to learn to sit down and shut up. Humans in ME1 are basically “space Americans”: technologically advanced, heavily armed, and with a big superiority complex. Thankfully, many of Shepard’s paragon choices in the dialogue trees that deal with this topic present a balanced and reasonable outlook, especially in her conversations with Udina and with al-Jilani. Humanity must work hard to be accepted, and the galactic community’s respect must be earned, not given by fiat. This issue, too, will receive more nuanced and careful treatment in the next two games, especially ME3.

The genophage

When I first played ME1 back in 2007, I remember being fascinated by every little piece of information in the Codex. It was as much a reading experience as a playing one (also partly because of the bland and awkward gameplay), which is what got me into this series. And what struck me the most was the stories of the Rachni Wars, the Krogan Rebellions, and the genophage. These events are mentioned in three places: by Avina on the Citadel Presidium, in the Codex, and by Wrex on Virmire. I kept waiting for this story to become relevant to the overall plot, but alas it never did. While a potential cure for the genophage is the reason why Wrex can be killed or spared, that choice feels contrived and artificial unless the player has done their homework and read the Codex. In fact, even in prior conversations with Wrex on the Normandy—which are optional, by the way—we learn too little about the plight of the krogan to actually care. I remember that this infuriated me back in the day, especially as a philosopher. For all its emphasis on organics and synthetics, a metaphysical debate, ME1 almost entirely sidelines its juiciest moral debate, the genophage itself. Why was it necessary to sterilize an entire race? What alternatives were attempted? Was there opposition? Was there soul-searching? How public is this fact in the galaxy? Did all species subscribe to it? Why didn’t the krogan react by carpet-bombing every Council world? How did this influence other galactic politics? These questions find few answers in ME1, even in the Codex, so what upset me was that the script was sitting on this massive reservoir of dramatic tension that it was barely tapping. At the cost of sounding like a broken record, here too we should be thankful for the next two games, which place the krogan and the genophage stories center-stage.

Miscellaneous Observations

Eden Prime. This colony is often referred to as symbolic. For humans, it’s proof that we can make it alone; for our detractors, it shows that we are reckless to colonize so close to the Terminus Systems. It’s interesting that from here on out the expression “Eden Prime” comes to signify a humiliating defeat, like a Waterloo. Typical of humans to take an intergalactic accident and make it personal!

Space midwives. Even before Eden Prime, we learn that there is a Prothean data cache on Mars, which future Codex entries call an “observation post” and that we see in ME3 as the Mars Archives. I’m okay not knowing what exactly Mars was to the Protheans, but surely their ruins were the first breadcrumbs that led humans to the Charon Relay. This makes the Protheans resemble the Sentinel of 2001: A Space Odyssey and other midwife alien races in A.C. Clarke’s opus. Interestingly, on Thessia in ME3 we learn that the Protheans took a more direct approach with the asari, possibly going as far as providing direct assistance (“we didn’t want you to starve”). More on all this when I get to ME3, where the midwifery theme becomes crucial and we see several intriguing conversations about cultural anthropology, inter-cycle interactions, and preparations to ensure post-harvest continuity of civilization.

Manuel. The rantings of Dr. Warren’s assistant Manuel on Eden Prime foreshadow the whole saga. Now we know that he was likely indoctrinated through exposure to Sovereign, though it’s unclear why just him and not also those around him. This is a recurring issue, which sometimes we can write off as poetic license: this character is indoctrinated because that’s useful to the story, but that one isn’t because who cares. Fine by me... except when it comes to Shepard’s possible indoctrination, but that’s its own bag of snakes.

Saren’s alterations. Long before he is “upgraded” by Sovereign, Saren is already visibly cybernetically altered, yet neither Nihlus nor the Council nor Shepard seem to notice. Either this is another poetic license or that’s just how he looks after his own augmentations: I guess that “Turian+” or “TransTurianism” could be a thing, after all.

Why does Saren fear Shepard? It seems to me like he shouldn’t, and that his freakout to Benezia is basically the space-opera equivalent of the Villain’s Evil Cackle™ trope. Why care that someone else has accessed the beacon? He must have known there was no way for a human to understand it without the cipher, let alone that it might give his plans away. And we know from Vigil that the beacons are just warnings and nothing in them reveals the location of the Conduit... unless you’re Liara and “recognize the landmarks” of Ilos, whatever that means. So Saren may be just paranoid, or leaving hints behind in a feeble, quasi-subconscious call for help, the last fight of an indoctrinated mind—after all, it’s pretty dumb to leave beacons intact after using them, just as it’s pretty dumb to not destroy the Thorian after gaining the cipher from it.

The Shadow Broker. ME1 mentions the famed information dealer several times. He is supposed to be feared and powerful, no one ever sees him, he has people everywhere, etc. A big difference is that people like Wrex and Barla Von are open about working for him, while in ME2-3 everyone is a lot more hush-hush about even being associated with him at all. Obviously, the latter makes a lot more sense.

Admiral Hackett. He is one of the most important NPCs in ME3, and he first appears here in ME1 as the raspy voiceover that gives Shepard the UNC assignments. He is also heard giving orders during the final attack on Sovereign, so it is already clear that he commands the Fifth Fleet.

This concludes my review of MELE1. In the next part, I discuss the “Cerberus turn” and why I think that ME2 greatly improves upon its predecessor through some daring (though occasionally contrived) authorial choices.

Normandy SR-1, signing off.

Click the logo for the full review of Mass Effect 2, or click here to return to the MELE review index.

PHILOSOPH-ISH

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