FULL REVIEW
Part 7: The Three-Headed Dog
The transition to Mass Effect 2 is bold, exciting, and aesthetically pleasing. The writer(s) take a dare that ultimately pays off by game’s end, though at the onset some plot elements are stretched too thin and require more suspension of disbelief than some players may be willing to invest. Despite this, the start of ME2 is neither inconsistent with the ending of ME1 nor contradictory by its own lights.
The More Things Change...
Within three minutes, Shepard is dead and the Normandy is destroyed. Changes do not get more radical than that. Except that the script quickly walks it all back: the hero lives, the ship is rebuilt, and the player is let loose in the galaxy... so it may feel like we wasted an hour to advance time, don a new livery, change the registry number, recolor the menus orange, and add a Cylon-voiced AI to the ship (the amazing Tricia Helfer). This sort of allegiance shift that a lead character could carry out gradually over a whole game, if at all, is achieved by authorial fiat in two cutscenes and a short mission.
New players may not make much of this, but asking returning players to buy in is a tall order. Was there good reason to do all of this, and was it consistent with itself and with what we knew of the Mass Effect universe? My answer is yes to both questions, but with qualifications.
Welcome back to the Normandy! It’s orange and run by a Toaster.
We learn that Cerberus has channeled “virtually unlimited resources” into the so-called Lazarus Project. The Illusive Man’s (TIM) stated goal in the opening sequence is to prop up Shepard, so that she may uplift humanity and gain more influence with the Council, who still don’t believe the Reaper threat. Supposedly, this plan will improve humanity’s galactic standing, which is already on the rise after the nomination of the human Councilor.
Shamus Young, an influential voice in Mass Effect scholarship, is adamant that this retcon (retroactive continuity) deviates from the premises laid out in ME1 and, worse, that it contradicts itself, eventually spiraling into what he aptly terms “story collapse” by ME3. The first two pieces of evidence that he brings to support this view are the ME2 opening crawl and his interpretation of space politics. I think he has a point about the former, albeit overblown, and none about the latter. Indeed, the main argument of my ME2 review as a whole is that there is no story collapse at all: there is story change, sometimes in questionable directions, but always logical.
There are three possible opening crawls for ME2: one if the Council die at the end of ME1, one if they live, and one if the player started a new game without either importing a ME1 save or installing the “Genesis” graphic novel recap. These are the same in the original trilogy as in the Legendary Edition. Here are the three crawls, respectively:
Click on the arrows to scroll through the images. 1) Council was sacrificed. 2) Council was saved. 3) New ME2 game.
The first two represent the content of ME2 more accurately, while the third is overstated. Young only considers this latter crawl for no particular reason. It does not seem that a new game has a special claim to canon, and if anything it has less. Still, I agree that saying that humans “seized control of the galaxy” is an exaggeration, as the Council in ME2 is at most human-inclusive, and even that to the other Councilors’ chagrin. But for Young these are not just exaggerations, but flat-out contradictions:
if the Humans lead (or control) the council, then why would they attempt to quell rumors of the Reapers? That’s the source of their political power
Except that it isn’t. The source is that they saved the Citadel. That’s the spirit of the ME1 ending: “thank you, humans, for saving the galaxy with your big-dick energy,” not “oy vey, maybe Shepard was right about the Reapers.” Literally nobody says ‘Reapers’ except for Shepard and Anderson, and literally everybody else prefers to remain in denial. A Reaper-ready alarmist platform benefits no one, and least of all humanity. The human Councilor is new, outnumbered, and won’t commit political suicide by endorsing a fringe view. If Udina is Councilor, he has no issue keeping Anderson quiet, whether or not Udina himself ever believed in Reapers. If Anderson is Councilor, he still has Udina in one ear and a slew of diplomats in the other reminding him that he’s out of his league; in his own words: “it feels like I’m beating my head against a wall.” By itself, the belief that Shepard was right has the political clout of an elcor comedian, so I’m not sure how rumors about the Reapers is “the source of their political power.”
So there’s no inconsistency: just a badly written, overstated opening crawl that misrepresents the game that we are about to play. The reverse would have been a big deal (i.e., if the ME2 script had portrayed humanity as being suddenly popular and actually in political control), but as it is we can just write off that one crawl and carry on.
...but you can still roam freely because you saved the galaxy that one time, mmmkay?
The Illusory Man
Unfortunately, Young’s argument gets even further off-track:
The council won’t trust Cerberus, but they’ll follow Shepard. Because [s/]he’s “A hero, a bloody icon.” So Cerberus wants to help Shepard, because humanity will follow Shepard. But they feel they need to help because... nobody is following Shepard? This becomes all the more nonsensical once you attempt to meet with the Council and they refuse to work with you (much less “follow” you) because you’re working for Cerberus. These problems aren’t just “plot holes”. This is a premise that is inherently contradictory. This isn’t one part of a story disagreeing with another part of the story, this is each part of the story disagreeing with itself.
Again, the only way that this is contradictory is if we omit crucial information. The Council doesn’t turn Shepard away only because she works for Cerberus, but because her only evidence is a vision unsupported by facts: the same reason why they mistrusted her in ME1. And even if the Council were actually human-controlled, it may still disavow Shepard so as to not look soft on human supremacists like Cerberus, who are an embarrassment for the Alliance’s well-polished, Council-friendly policy. At most, all of this makes TIM unduly optimistic that Shepard can turn the Council toward human interests, but that is certainly not a contradiction. Again, Young’s argument boils down to one version of the opening crawl clashing with the game’s actual content, a very minor issue that he blows way out of proportion. Not to mention that the opinions of one character (“they’ll follow her") and those of another (“you are working for Cerberus”) do not have to match up. At all. As a side note: in the Legendary Edition, the initial conversation between TIM and Miranda contains more details than in the original trilogy. For example, Miranda mentioned whether Shepard saved the Council or let them die. This addition, however, has no positive or negative effects on the consistency of the plot.
And here’s the kicker: even if all of this was contradictory, which it isn’t, TIM’s stated goal is not his actual goal, so what he says to Miranda in the prologue couldn’t possibly matter less. We know from later in ME2 that his plan has nothing to do with humanity, Shepard, the Council, or “they’ll follow her.” His motive is to get his grabby hands on Collector tech, which he thinks (correctly) will inch him closer to the Reapers. The whole game is a fetch quest, sold to Shepard & Co. and to the players as a heroic mission to defend the galaxy. Then we do not know whether TIM’s ultimate motive is power lust, human supremacism, or a step toward controlling the Reapers. ME3 answers that question, but within ME2 we can only speculate. But whatever we speculate, we know that TIM’s stated goal is a noble-sounding, convenient, and not at all self-contradictory lie.
Young is right about one thing, though: later in the game, we learn that even TIM’s secret plans are poorly laid out and that much of his dialogue is meaningless. For all his arrogance, TIM is actually pretty much in the dark about the Collectors and his mission for Shepard amounts to “let’s hope this gets me info about the Reapers, but I’m not sure it will, and oh look I just got really lucky with the dead Reaper, how very convenient.” This, plus the fact that Shepard is pretty much required to be stupid for the ME2 plot to work, are some fairly serious problems that I will tackle in a future post.
President Bartlet has really moved up in the world...
To conclude the current post, the question still remains “why Cerberus at all?” Couldn’t we just skip ahead another way? Retirement, injury, assignment, spiritual retreat, sabbatical, attempted political career, unsuccessful Reaper hunt, etc.? In fact, why skip ahead at all? Some might say Cerberus doesn’t even add anything that the Alliance couldn’t. I think that the game would work fine without Cerberus, but works better with it. First, it sets up a sorely needed intra-human character conflict: nothing is duller than a united species with no troubling dissent. Second, it is a morality tale about who Shepard is as an individual, a glaring absence from the ME1 script, although ME2 could and should do more with this premise than it does. Some of these issues could have been tackled in an Alliance story too, but there’s no reason why they must be; and I love the slow, damning realization that Shep is working with the bad guys and needs to cut loose. Third, ME2 is a typical second chapter of an epic trilogy, exploring a side plot while building on an aspect that will turn out to be crucial in the final chapter. Many trilogies do this: Star Wars (Luke’s Jedi training), The Lord of the Rings (uniting the human provinces), The Matrix (breaking the cycle of the One), etc. Yes, one could skip straight from 1 to 3 in many of these with minor fixes to the plot of 3, and Mass Effect is no exception, but that’d be pretty silly.
So this line of criticism really boils down to the opinion that “ME2 without Cerberus would have been more in line with the tone of ME1.” That’s not incorrect, and I respect it, but I also think that the tone of ME1 was banal, that its plot had run its course with Sovereign’s death, and that all of it was worth taking someplace new.
In the next part, I discuss Shepard’s death and resurrection in more detail, focusing on some ethical and psychological aspects that are regrettably under-analyzed in the script.
All of this happens in about 60 minutes.
Part 8: Shepard Is Dead, Long Live Shepard!
Shepard’s resurrection is obviously hasty, from the science of it to the analysis of its philosophical and psychological features. While I don’t care about the former, the latter is a more serious issue. For all its attention to character development and growing Shepard into a leader, ME2 is unforgivably cavalier about dissecting the mortality of its protagonist.
Planetfall
There are at least three major points of contention about Shepard’s death and resurrection: (1) that it is unjustified space magic, (2) that Shepard and everyone around her are insufficiently fazed, and (3) whether the new Shepard is the actual Shepard. I don’t care about the first, but I’ll discuss it briefly anyway. The latter two are important and there’s a lot to say.
A common argument is that Shepard’s body was beyond repair and couldn’t be rebuilt. Assuming it didn’t burn up in the atmosphere of planet Alchera, it would have been a fleshy soup after crashing. I don’t know much about the science, so I defer to seemingly more experienced people: see here and here, for example. Some argue that Shepard never crashed but remained in orbit until Liara or whoever found her body. The opening cinematic is unclear. What looks like burning up on reentry to some is a compression artifact to others, and there’s no other evidence that Shepard did or did not crash. The N7 helmet recovered on the surface in the “Normandy Crash Site” DLC could be a spare, and we simply aren’t told enough about how exactly her body was recovered. Miranda’s and Wilson’s logs on Lazarus Station report that Shepard’s body “suffered significant cellular breakdown due to long-term exposure to vacuum and sub-zero temperatures,” which is consistent with either remaining in orbit or crashing on an icy planet without oxygen like Alchera.
Others argue that even if Shepard did crash, enough of her body may still be intact to allow reconstruction. Some people even survive orbital falls, so it may not be a stretch that a heavily-armored body didn’t turn into Shepard-soup; and she may have died from oxygen deprivation and not the fall itself. Perhaps it is best to withhold judgment and assume that several believable explanations could exist, even if we aren’t told a specific one.
At any rate, the rest of the body doesn’t matter as much as the brain. We may think that in order for Shepard to survive, her brain would have had to be recovered almost intact, properly oxygenated and electrified, and kept in stasis while the body was reconstructed. By today’s standards, the recovery would need to happen within minutes of Shepard dying, which doesn’t seem to be the case in the game. Compare this to the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Mortal Coil,” where Seven of Nine reanimates Neelix’s brain tissue 18 hours post-mortem... and even then only using Borg technology that is centuries more advanced than anything we see in the Mass Effect trilogy.
At the same time, this matter is fairly irrelevant to me. While the saga occasionally postures as semi-hard science-fiction (and even then mostly in the Codex), that’s not its main appeal and I’m okay with having few answers here. After all, why worry too much about scientific realism in a game where people literally shoot fireballs from their hands...?
Alchera: your first grave.
The Lazarus Project
More importantly than the how, the technology used to rebuild Shepard says something about what exactly was rebuilt. Miranda references “organic reconstruction” as opposed to “bio-synthetic fusion,” which are fancy ways to say “put the original pieces back together” vs. “create flesh with flesh printers.” But again, the brain may work differently. Neuroscience is a young field today and still has no definite model of brain function that’s comparable in predictive usefulness with those of other physiological processes. Instead, the game assumes a materialistic model of the mind: the brain is a fleshy thing that can be patched up with fleshy spares. We are not sure to what extent this is actually the case, but again we have to believe that it is for the story to work.
More complex still is the relation between brain and mind. In the field of philosophy of mind, the dominant theory of the 20th and 21st centuries is eliminative materialism, the idea that minds are just brains and that all mental properties are physical properties. Rival theories range from property dualism (brains and minds are the same, but minds have unique explanatory properties), to functionalism (minds are defined by what they do, not by what they are, and may run on non-biological hardware), to old-fashioned substance dualism (minds are souls or some other kind of spirit that inhabits and controls the brain). Currently, eliminative materialism is better supported by the empirical evidence, and also enjoys extra-scientific popularity due to the secular shift in 20th-century philosophy. It also requires fewer explanatory assumptions by yet-unobserved phenomena, so it has higher theoretical elegance.
Enough lecturing. My point is that on an eliminative materialist view, it’s much easier to imagine that Shepard’s mind may have remained intact following the reconstruction of her brain. Perhaps our mind—consciousness, awareness, memory, categories, ideas, judgments, etc.—results from a highly specific arrangement of flesh, such that as soon as the Shepard-flesh was arranged in the right way, the Shepard-mind immediately emerged, no matter how long the flesh had not been in that arrangement. Even so, there are still hurdles, such as describing how material processes can give rise to subjective conscious experiences, what Australian cognitive scientist David Chalmers terms the “hard problem of consciousness.” Even on eliminative materialism, views like the one described above would have to solve that problem.
So if Cerberus rebuilt Shepard’s brain exactly as it was before the accident, Shepard was effectively reborn or reactivated in the exact moment that her new brain was powered on. How long her brain had been without oxygen/electricity, and how damaged it was, are irrelevant: all that matters is that the right bits are in the right place now. Of course, for this option to work someone must have previously scanned Shepard’s brain while she was alive to create an extremely detailed map of it, down to the quantum state of all subatomic particles in all neurons. The technological level of the Mass Effect species seems amply sufficient to perform such a task, although it is unclear why Shepard would ever submit to such a scan. Also, the existence of this technology would have farther-reaching consequences. One could create minds, replacing the natural process of mind-formation-from-natural-structures with an artificial one. That is, if we know that brain-stuff X gives rise to person Y, nothing but laws and money prevent us from 3D-printing as many copies of X-and-Y as we want. A galaxy that had already outlawed AI research, like this one, would be especially sensitive to this problem, although I do not recall any instances in which any of this is discussed. (Cerberus hardly operates within the law, at any rate).
"I'm Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite crappy monument in the Terminus Systems."
“Is That You, Shepard? Is This Me?”
There’s a rather uncomfortable essentialism running through the first few hours of ME2. The Illusive Man wants the “real” Shepard back, not a clone or a chip-controlled automaton as Miranda would have liked. One assumes he’s talking about her brain, since we know that the Lazarus project has made many augmentations in the rest of Shepard’s body. Some were probably required as they would be today: artificial joints, intramedullary nails, etc. Others may have been tactically convenient: if you’ve got the galaxy’s best human on your table, why not add some cool gadgets? (Incidentally, this may be a valid canon reason for Shepard’s class change between ME1 and ME2, especially if the class in ME1 requires no biotic implants. And yet, despite all this, Shepard’s storm speed still sucks). So, again, it’s Shepard’s brain that TIM wants “just as it was.” He gives no reason for that, save that only “the real” Commander Shepard can save the galaxy, whatever the hell that means.
What’s more interesting is whether Shepard herself still feels like Shepard. The script doesn’t tell us, and I hate that. There are no dialogue trees dedicated to this question, save for a few off-hand remarks. Shepard’s shock at the beginning is also very mild given what she’s going through. “Oh I’ve been gone two years? Fancy that. What, all my friends and colleagues are gone? Okay I get it, they’re not available.” Where is the ethical, spiritual, and psychological turmoil of being alive after what must have been a slow and conscious death? If Shepard made peace with herself and her gods or whatevers in her final moments, the script contains no trace of that. We know that the realization of impending death leaves a deep scar in the psyche of those who have experienced it and survived, but again Shepard seems unfazed. To top it off, there is no hint of spiritual curiosity, such as Benezia’s frightened realization that “there’s no light.” I’m not saying that Shepard should pull a Granny Weatherall (read that short story if you haven’t, by the way), but she just doesn’t seem to care at all.
Perhaps we can explain away some of this. Maybe Shepard struggled until the very end to restore her suit’s oxygen and had no moment of clarity or near-death experience. Maybe she’s sufficiently simple-minded, or accustomed to living on the edge, that this is no different that her usual Tuesday night on the battlefield. Maybe she’s spiritually naïve or irreligious and expected nothing of death except its permanence, so waking up alive is just a cool bonus. Maybe it all felt like such a rush that she has effectively blocked any memories from Alchera, and as far as she’s concerned she got knocked out cold while trying to escape the burning Normandy and next thing she knows, bam!, two years have passed.
The closest the script gets to analyzing these issues is with Shepard and Liara after the Vasir fight in the DLC “Lair of the Shadow Broker,” but even then, it’s mostly in the context of their romance if Liara was the ME1 love interest. (I have not played all possible romances in ME2, so this topic may come up elsewhere... but even if it does, it really ought not to be relegated to a part of the game that most players will miss). My disappointment mostly stems from the fact that character development is this game’s strongest suit and that the script does not typically shy away from philosophical inquiry. And while I do enjoy the Collector plot, ME2’s main focus is on the creation of well-rounded characters, including and most crucially Shepard herself. I’ve said before that the Shepard-Cerberus relationship is a morality tale, and also that Shepard must come into her own as a galactic leader outside the comfortable confines of the Alliance, two features of the game that will be crucial to ME3. So it’s upsetting that what should be a crucial part of our lead character’s psyche—the struggle with her own mortality—remains criminally under-analyzed for no good reason at all.
In the next part, I discuss a plot hole in the early stages of ME2 concerning Sovereign, and offer a quick fix for it.
Part 9: One Doesn’t Just “Geth” Sovereign
ME2 offers weak reasons for writing off Sovereign as a geth ship and for why nobody on the Citadel believes in the Reapers. While not story-breaking, this is a problem that could have been fixed with more attention to detail. Here I offer six simple lines of dialogue that would have patched this hole.
As Good as It Geth
A problem with the ME2 early-game script is the paucity of reasons for why everyone believes that Sovereign was a geth ship instead of a Reaper. The dialogue trees are fairly elaborate, as if the authors realized that this needs to be explained, but the explanations still lack credibility. Here’s what happens, paraphrased:
Gabby & Ken: The Council dismissed your warnings as “delusional.”
Shepard: What about Anderson/Udina?
Gabby & Ken: He “lost political clout” and the Council “bacsklid on the Reaper menace.”
Shepard: Why didn’t you study the debris?
Anderson: The Keepers took most of them before we could study them.
Shepard: What about Ilos?
Anderson: No one found the hologram Vigil.
Shepard: Sovereign was too advanced to be geth.
Council: The geth are resourceful and always come up with new shit.
Shepard: So y’all think I was lying?
Council: Saren put all this Reaper stuff in your head, as in the geth’s.
The debris explanation is sensible but overblown. Anderson says they recovered “not even half of that thing.” Sooo about, what, 40% of a Reaper? That’s a lot of Reaper to study! The Ilos explanation fares better, as the geth probably blew up the ruins and archives after using the Conduit. As for Saren, a more likely answer would have been simply that they don’t trust Shepard’s visions: placed in a similar situation, and with Shepard dead, I too may have dismissed it all as nonsense.
Congratulations on coming out of the first game with zero physical evidence!
It really boils down to the acknowledgement that Sovereign’s technology was too advanced to be geth. It may sort-of look geth-ish, squid-like design and all. Players may buy that since we know that some geth designs are Reaper-inspired, but no one on the Citadel at this point is privy to that fact. Anyway, saying that Sovereign was probably geth because the geth always build new stuff is like a caveman who called a rifle a spear because people always build new spears.
A slightly more credible explanation could have been that nobody in the galaxy knows much about geth technology other than the quarians, whose diplomatic relationships with Council races are strained. But even that would be an argument from ignorance: “we don’t know that it wasn’t the geth, since we do not know much about the geth, so let’s say it was probably the geth.” Yeah, no. I have failed students in my logic classes for less shitty arguments than that.
“It’s not the geth!”
What upsets me is that this issue had an easy fix. Again, the writers mist have appreciated its urgency, since it’s the first thing Shepard asks the Council and five dialogue entries are dedicated to it... more than to Shepard’s own resurrection, incidentally: see previous post. But these explanations are lackluster and could have been improved with minimal effort. To be fair, whether people on the Citadel believed that Sovereign was geth is fairly inconsequential to the plot of ME2... but it does matter, and a lot, to ME3. Here’s some examples just off the top of my head:
-
“The Keepers took most debris. The rest self-destructed due to a mechanism that we barely understand, a reverse particle-synthesis technology similar to our own minifacturing but much more advanced.” This might be the Trekkie in me talking, but it baffles me that the Mass Effect saga is so adverse to good old-fashioned technobabble, especially as it prides itself in being semi-hard sci-fi.
-
“The debris we recovered contained no vital systems that would reveal its purpose.” Most of every machine is junk, from a standpoint of functionality, so this would be sensible.
-
“Something definitely doesn’t add up about that ship, but two years is too short a time to investigate, so we are agnostic about the Reapers for now because it would be politically irresponsible to precipitate a decision.” It is government work, after all. In this sense, the asari Councilor is the better-written of the three: she is moderate, noncommittal, and says nothing of consequence if she can avoid it—the perfect public servant!
-
“This top-secret investigation is above your pay grade, Shepard: we wouldn’t tell you if you were a Spectre, and surely not while while you’re wearing that Cerberus uniform.” I am surprised this card is not pulled a lot more in this game.
-
“A special unit has been looking into your warnings for years and is yet to find anything consistent. Thanks for wasting billions of taxpayer credits on a hallucination.” Special Reaper Unit. These are their stories. Dun dun.
-
“Scholars have debated the exact nature of the debris, but it’s not exactly considered a respectable field at this time.” Avina, of all people, hints to something like this: “references to the term [Reaper] exist in some para-historical theories on galactic extinction cycles.” Likewise, in the “Leviathan” ME3 DLC we learn that the study of Sovereign is a minor field plagued by peer stigma usually attached to fringe research. Nice to hear, but too little too late.
I’m charitable about this issue because it is largely inconsequential and could be fixed easily without requiring major story changes. Perhaps I’m too lenient, but if a so-called plot hole can be filled with one line of dialogue rather than require a major narrative overhaul, it was never going to be a serious enough threat to the consistency of the game’s storytelling.
In the next part, I discuss how ME2 portrays the underbelly of the galaxy beyond the shiny bulkheads of the Citadel.
Slide through this mini-gallery to see all the main explanations in the script for why Sovereign was supposedly geth...
Part 10: The Dark Side of the Galaxy
Other than Cerberus, the biggest change in ME2 is the setting. Away from the cushy borders of Council space lies the Terminus Systems frontier. After hearing so much about it in ME1—with a hefty dose of Orientalist exoticism, too—it is a treat to be finally able spend so much time in the galaxy’s backyard. However, the repetitiveness of the first few missions mars this experience somewhat, and the game is surprisingly harder to get into than it has any right to be.
Omega: What a Pisshole
The first four recruitment missions in ME2 are all remarkably similar: stay down, survive enemy wave, rinse, repeat. This is a cover shooter and it shows. The environments are repetitive, too, full of rusty bulkheads and a bleak architecture that is much less futuristic than anything we saw in ME1. Of course this is a deliberate choice to represent the underbelly of the galaxy away from Council space: as Miranda comments, Omega is pisshole, and for that very reason it is also a feast for the eyes. The art direction perfectly captures the feeling of a lawless slum and merges it with the seedy splendor of a third-rate casino. The best description I have heard for it is “a turd in a silk dress,” and it feels glorious to walk into Afterlife. This is precisely how I always expected disreputable space nightclubs to look like, not the artificial squalor of Chora’s Den but the actual squalor of a place where corpses can (and do) turn up with alarming frequency.
Despite how fun it is to explore Omega, the two missions set on the station are very similar to each other and suffer from repetitive gameplay. But unlike in ME1, whose combat mechanics were antiquated even in 2007, ME2’s repetitiveness is somewhat tempered by the fun shooting action and the improved enemy AI, so even a relatively bleak mission remains entertaining. Still, Omega doesn’t reach its full splendor until the eponymous DLC in ME3, where the station truly comes alive and players can feel like they’re actually exploring it for all its worth, from the air ducts to the eezo mines.
When do Expel 10 play here again?
Grunt’s recruiting mission on Korlus is by far my least favorite in the game, as there is absolutely no inventiveness in either combat or level design. The final boss also presents nothing that we haven’t already met: a big mech, a merc with shields and armor, and a bunch of krogan clones, so having them come at you all at once doesn’t make much of a difference. But the worst aspect of this mission is the pretext for the switcheroo between Okeer and Grunt. It is totally unclear why Okeer needs to sacrifice himself for his legacy and why both he and Grunt could not have survived whatever it is that Jedore was doing to the tanks. Indeed, this feels like one of the plot’s frequent contrivances to force things to work, even if there is no need for them to work in this particular way or when they wouldn’t have worked at all otherwise.
So both narratively and gameplay-wise, the high point of the game’s first half is busting Jack out of the clink. The space prison is a common trope and ME2 doesn’t add much to it, but the reason it’s common is that it’s so damn cool. The level design finally takes a turn for the best, combining traditional elements of prison drama (e.g., Escape from Butcher Bay) with more experimental sci-fi (e.g., Fortress and No Escape). Combat is also improved, with a much-welcome mix-and-match of tight corridors and spacious rec areas. And even though we don’t really see Jack in action, her two scenes are highly entertaining. Side note: later in the game, when you bring Jack along as a squad mate, she is pretty damn weak and dies easily... yet in these cutscenes she destroys three large mechs with one hand motion without breaking a sweat. While it is not uncommon for games to take a poetic license, especially in cutscenes, this one is a bit of a stretch.
Where do I buy one of those mechanical arms? I could use one in my classrooms.
Well, so long as you have "the reach" and she has "the flexibility"...
Niftu Cal is the true protagonist of the Mass Effect trilogy.
Part 11: Loyalty Isn’t Grey
The loyalty missions in ME2 are a creative and innovative mechanic that adds much to the experience and that is excellent buildup for ME3. Their quality ranges from good to excellent, and all succeed in advancing what is arguably the game’s main goal: to develop Shepard into a galactic-wide leader with enough clout and charisma to be able to unite the galaxy under one banner.
The Loyalty Missions as a Narrative Tool
The act of recruiting is common to video games. At some point, someone joins your team because they’re an asset to it, and after that their allegiances are rarely questioned: once you’ve become part of the hero’s journey, your development is pretty much over and your character is purely instrumental. Recruiting was a big part of ME1, too, where we spent half the game picking up talented aliens (Liara, Garrus, Tali, Wrex) to add to an all-human squad. And recruiting is also the name of the game in the first half of ME2, whose stated goal is to “assemble the team,” since many of Shepard’s old allies are unavailable for one (dumb) reason or another.
But recruiting is only the first part of a two-step process. It takes charisma to convince someone to join you, but anyone can have charisma. It takes dedication, strength, and care to get them to stick around. In ME2, crew members initially join up for relatively fickle reasons: Tali and Garrus because they were old friends, Mordin and Samara because they want a new challenge, Jack because of her history with Cerberus, etc. These reasons are good enough to help someone out, but they’re not going to make anyone want to die for you.
Yet that is precisely what Shepard is asking this “company of honorable heroes” (Samara’s words) to do, so it stands to reason that she should give something back. The loyalty missions are a great tool to develop interpersonal allegiances. The absolute best thing about loyalty missions is that they are not required: once the recruiting is done, about 20 hours into the game, you can proceed with the last few story missions and end it all within a few hours. But of course, that leads to a pretty nasty ending, as any member of the team who is not loyal will inevitably perish in the suicide mission. In 2010, some first-time players learned this the hard way, and it’s only because I play games as a completionist that I didn’t have to witness such carnage: I certainly didn’t know until the very end that ensuring a team member’s loyalty was the defining factor of their survival odds.
Although, to be honest, the signs were there. The game advertises loyalty missions as more than just side quests. They are indicated on the galaxy map in the same way as main story missions; they are introduced (via Kelly) by fully voiced and animated cutscenes; Shepard says often that she wants everyone “at their best”; and the Cerberus debrief at the end of each mission reads that the character Shepard just helped should be “clear-headed enough” for the upcoming mission. Hindsight is 20/20, but in retrospect, it should have been obvious that loyalty missions would have some effect at the end. Still, I can’t blame players for not expecting another super-linear gaming experience like in ME1, where almost nothing you did had any effect whatsoever on anything else, and let alone on the ending. (Let’s keep this in mind for ME3, too, since a common complaint is that our choices throughout the trilogy don’t matter at the end... yeah right).
Jack is the definition of "scaroused." Too bad that she is not a FemShep romance option.
Loyalty Isn’t Grey: You’re Either Loyal or You’re Not
What I truly love about these missions is how their narrative content has nothing to do with the eventual suicide mission. All loyalty missions are pure, unadulterated world-building and character development. Most of them are about restoring lost family connections: Jacob’s father, Miranda’s sister, Thane’s son, Samara’s daughter, Kasumi’s partner. Others are about old acquaintances or scores to settle: Garrus’ traitor, Jack’s torturers, Zaeed’s accomplice. And the best ones deal with galactic politics in ways that will have consequences in ME3, such as Mordin’s quest to retrieve the genophage cure data, Grunt’s change of Krogan society, and Tali’s and Legion’s missions that help define the geth as so much more than the AIs gone crazy of ME1.
Indeed, the geth and krogan missions contain some of the best writing in ME2. Legion’s loyalty mission on the heretics’ base is an exploration of the nature of artificial intelligence with a level of philosophical sophistication that is seldom seen in videogames. The authors are particularly skillful at navigating two interrelated concepts: the nature of individuality and the quality of freedom. This isn’t new in sci-fi: Star Trek, for instance, was at its best when exploring the human condition through the Borg antagonists, especially thanks to Seven of Nine’s seasons-long story arc in Voyager. But the treatment of these issues in ME2 leaves nothing to be desired, both for its depth and for its emotional attachment. It is so very difficult to write a synthetic persona that we genuinely care about, and the authors succeed with Legion, who is easily the game’s best-written character. And from a moral standpoint, the writing doesn’t get much better than the debates between Mordin and Shepard about the purpose of the genophage. The dialogue trees are incredibly deep and multi-layered, spanning topics as diverse as research ethics and socioeconomics. What these debates are missing, of course, is a krogan voice: for that, we have to wait until ME3, when the genophage story arc comes to near-perfect fruition.
But the most original and interesting part of the loyalty missions is that it is possible for these loyalties to conflict. When your characters are well thought-out, their goals and ambitions may conflict and you may have to make a choice. I’m not talking about making a moral choice during a loyalty mission that may cause you to fail it and lose that character’s loyalty, though that too is certainly possible (which is great). Rather, I’m talking about the two occasions when players positively have to settle a conflict among NPCs. This happens twice in the game, first with Jack and Miranda and then with Tali and Legion. In both cases, it is possible to resolve the conflict and keep everyone loyal with a very high Paragon or Renegade score. Here, then, the leader’s charisma makes a comeback: it may not be sufficient to maintain meaningful relationships, as I’ve said, but it is definitely necessary, and only a Shepard who is strong and trustworthy could keep everyone happy and in their lanes. Through this excellent mechanic, which is sprung on the players completely by surprise, the game introduces a further layer of psychological realism that isn’t found anywhere else in the trilogy.
Thane has the most beautiful backstory of the ME2 romance options.
Natural Stories
An old adage in writing goes something like this: “write good characters and the story takes care of itself,” meaning that if you create believable people with realistic ideas and desires, some conflicts will naturally arise among them, and of course conflicts are the soul of every story. I think that adage is true for stories that center on interpersonal relationships, like most crime dramas and romances. But science-fiction often needs more, as the world that the characters move through is often even more important than the characters themselves; hence the art of so-called world-building. And even though everyone knows that world-building matters, most commentators relegate it to an ancillary role, a garnish to create detail and boost the immersion of players or readers. Instead, world-building is so essential that it can take care of both the characters and the story, so much in fact that the old adage can be so revised: “write good worlds: the characters and the story take care of themselves.”
Setting a proper socioeconomic milieu goes a long way toward creating a compelling story, and the Mass Effect trilogy does this extraordinarily well. Virtually all the character conflicts in ME2, especially as we appreciate them through loyalty missions, are born of a well laid-out world where it is absolutely inevitable that characters with these problems will exist. Because in the final analysis, what makes characters believable is not that they are special or unique, but that they are necessary: they simply had to exist in the world where the story takes place.
So here we have a universe where:
-
the galaxy is a loosely governed amalgam of relatively self-contained biomes, some utopian, some dystopian
-
all species in the galaxy rely exclusively on a technology that they did not create and do not fully understand
-
some people have special abilities whose origin is not fully understood and that set them apart from the rest
-
artificial intelligence is possible but has a history of becoming uncontrollably destructive toward organic beings
-
an especially violent and warlike species also happens to have a much faster growth rate than all other species
Almost all the intra- and inter-character conflicts in the trilogy result directly from these five modest and believable traits. Indeed, you hardly need anything more to create a compelling narrative universe. A galaxy with no central government and a hodgepodge of trade systems will have great inequality and competition, and thus also slavery, racism, crime, and various power enclaves vying for control. And although there is a potential great unifier (mass effect technology), there are also many dividers (power, money, skill), as this particular galaxy has failed to unite under an ideological banner. Thus, it will be impossible to control the natural diversity of goals, values, and ambitions.
These traits alone justify the existence of the genophage, the Terminus Systems, Citadel life, biotic experimentation on kids, and the geth. These specific cases, with names and locations and histories, are mere instantiations of the general kinds that this universe, so characterized, mandates. And not only are these traits sufficient to create these stories, but those stories are also necessary: once you design a universe with these traits, you have to include these stories, because they are a natural consequence of a universe where things work like this. This is why politics and economics are the most important things to know when writing science-fiction, ironically much more so than science itself.
This is also why the geth and the quarians are at war (Tali, Legion); why horrific child abuse is bound to happen (Jack); why the genophage was only a matter of time (Mordin, Grunt); why countless lives are stunted by fickle allegiances over honor, money, and other pseudo-values (Garrus, Zaeed); why some people neglect family (Thane, Miranda); why the asari scorn on intra-species mating (Samara); and so on. All the stories that we see in the loyalty missions are solid in their own right, but the reason that they are is, in the last analysis, that they are placed in a world where they simply must happen.
Some may take all of this to mean that ME2 leeches off ME1 world-building without adding any of its own. That’s a valid take, but I prefer the reverse interpretation that ME1 had such amazing opportunities for story-telling and ignored most of them in favor of a linear plot with a two-dimensional villain. But then again, this is what the middle chapters of trilogies are for, so ME2 does what it’s supposed to do by building on the great ideas that ME1 introduced but never fleshed out.
Unfortunately, sometimes ME2 focuses so much on world-building that it fails to properly characterize its main antagonist. This is the subject of the next post...
I'm not already crying... I'm not already crying... I'm not already crying...
The vast assortment of characters, locales, and stories in the loyalty missions is ME2's strongest asset.
Part 12: The Delusive Man
The main story missions in ME2 are puzzling, dramatic, and full of potential plot contrivances. While they make decent sense if we keep in mind the final goal of the game, they showcase a needlessly cryptic Illusive Man (a naïve writing choice to create drama where there should be none) and a Shepard who is far too trusting (this too, presumably, to prop up the plot artificially).
Between Horizon and the Collector Ship
After Horizon, The Illusive Man (TIM) tells Shepard to continue assembling her team while he researches how to prevent the Collectors’ next move. Surely enough, three recruiting missions later (and/or however many loyalty or side missions the player wants to take), TIM says he has found a way: a turian patrol has temporarily disabled a Collector ship and sent a distress call before being destroyed, so Shepard should go investigate. It sounds like a trap, and Shepard says so, and TIM agrees, and everyone on the Normandy also agrees, so they all go in expecting it to be a trap. This much is clear.
One of the three big reveals in this mission is that it was so obvious that it was a trap that TIM already knew that it was and kept it hidden from Shepard. The turian distress call was fabricated and there was no way he could have thought it was genuine, so he tricked Shepard by passing it along as genuine. But of course none of this is consequential: TIM lies to Shepard about the circumstances that led him to believe the Collector ship may not be a trap (the turian story), which does not matter since Shepard and everyone else already act as if it were a trap, which is what any seasoned officer would do. So TIM is: (1) fabricating a useless lie, while he could have just given no explanation and said “hey this is probably a trap but go check it out anyway”; and (2) hoping that EDI won’t find out that the turians’ call is fake, which of course she will. These two problems mean that TIM is naïve, sloppy, needlessly grandstanding, or at best indifferent to what Shepard thinks. These are unflattering traits for the game’s supposed villain, and alas this isn’t the last time they show up.
The second big reveal on the Collector ship had been foreshadowed on (and before) Horizon: the Collectors are targeting Shepard personally. The seemingly disabled ship that Shepard is boarding now is the same one that attacked Horizon and even the same one that destroyed the original Normandy at Alchera. However, when EDI and Joker reveal this, Shepard comments: “the same ship dogging me for two years? way beyond coincidence” Whoa, not so fast. For all we know, the attack at Alchera was incidental: Normandy SR-1 was looking into disappearing human colonies, so the Collectors shot it down. No personal connection to Shepard is necessary to explain this. At most, Shepard can be a little surprised that this is the same ship that she fought on Horizon... but even that is not amazing. Maybe they have only one ship. Maybe they took it personally on Horizon and are seeking revenge. There are many possible explanations that would not warrant the conspiracy-laden reaction that Shepard (egged on by Joker and EDI) seems to have.
Of course, the root of the problem is that Shepard is already primed into believing that the Collectors may have a personal interest in her due to TIM’s insistence that they do, despite the fact that he has zero evidence for that fact. Before Horizon, he tells Shepard that Ashley/Kaidan being stationed there means the Collectors are targeting Shepard’s acquaintances. Except it doesn’t mean that at all. Shepard was an Alliance commander and must have served with thousands of humans, so what’s special about one of those turning up on a colony that is now under attack? Yes, the Collectors do in fact have a personal interest in Shepard, but TIM and Shepard have no clue about that before Horizon. Their (and our) first evidence of that fact is when Harbinger taunts Shepard in combat on Horizon itself, a fact acknowledged both in voiceovers and in the mission-end debriefing. Thus, as there’s no sensible evidence before Horizon that the Collectors’ mission is personal, Shepard shouldn’t be suspecting this by the time she boards the disabled ship. And, consequently, it should not come as a shock that this is the same ship from Horizon, and let alone the same ship from Alchera. So these lines of dialogue by TIM and Shepard are mere distractors, apparently thrown in there for the only purpose of deceiving the audience into believing that this plot may be about something else than what it is actually about. And while audience deception is a valid narrative tool, as I’ve argued at length in Part 4, it must be logical and subtle, and these lines are neither. Of course, this does not affect the eventual revelation that it makes sense for the Collectors to take a personal interest in Shepard and to lure her into a trap—but TIM has no way to possibly know any of that by this point of the story. To use a common phrase, it’s as if TIM has already “read the script,” which should not happen in a well-written story.
Two bullshit excuses. First image: after Horizon. Second image: after disabled Collector ship.
Between the Collector Ship and the Derelict Reaper
As intensely as Shepard reacts to this being the same ship from Alchera and Horizon, her reaction to learning about TIM’s deception is underwhelming. In the post-mission debriefing, the two exchange some mildly heated lines full of sophomoric drama about trust, putting people in danger, blah blah blah. As a career officer, Shepard is used to superior officers putting subordinates in harm’s way without explanation (lol sorry Jenkins), so this shouldn’t be a big deal and is clearly amped up to make TIM appear ruthless, a cheap writing device overused by the ME2 authors.
More importantly, this dialogue reveals TIM’s true goal of sending Shepard & Co. to the Collector ship. Initially he had said he wanted them to find information about the Collectors’ home world, a valid goal in its own right, but now it turns out that he wanted to verify that the Collectors use an Identify Friend/Foe (IFF) system, which TIM eventually plans to use to cross the Omega 4 Relay. When Shepard rightfully complains why he didn’t just say so, since they could have snagged it from aboard this very ship, TIM’s answer is elusive: he didn’t even know whether the Collectors use an IFF system, let alone where to find it, and apparently EDI learned that they do use one while managing their ship’s cyber-attacks during the mission. Fair enough, I suppose. I don’t have a problem with TIM’s motives for this mission. The problem is that Shepard is too trusting and insufficiently inquisitive.
Another problem is how quickly the next step is introduced: now that TIM knows what they need to survive the trip through the Omega 4 Relay, namely a Collector or Reaper IFF system... they just happen to find a dead Reaper that’s been oh so conveniently hidden for 37 million years! Just like that, out of the blue, TIM drops the biggest plot bomb of the game. I will set aside the obvious logistical problems in being able to find something that was so well hidden that hundreds of galactic cycles didn’t come across it: this Reaper is 37 millions years old, and each cycle lasts approximately 50,000 years, so you do the math. This, too, could have been fixed by a single line of dialogue that claimed that the derelict Reaper was hidden deep inside a nebula or in a stable black hole’s event horizon, thus making it impossible to find unless one knew where to look; and that TIM learned where to look from the Collectors’ data banks, thus establishing a privileged line of information that only Cerberus had access to but one else. It is much easier to believe that in 37 million years no one has come this close to whatever subservient drones the Reapers create from each cycle’s apex species, as they did with the Protheans and the Collectors. This one, too, like the whole geth/Sovereign snafu on the Citadel, is not a major hole if it can be fixed with a single of dialogue. Nor does it reveal a fundamental problem with character design, as getting the IFF is a multiply-realizable plot point, meaning that the way it is actually achieved is incidental (as long as it doesn’t contradict anything else in the story, of course, and the derelict Reaper doesn’t: as annoying as a deus ex machina may be, it is not illogical). But surely it is yet further evidence of sloppy writing and/or that the left hand of the writing team didn’t know what the right hand was doing.
Of course, if TIM only learns of the derelict Reaper from the Collectors themselves, the whole subplot with Dr. Chandana and the Cerberus team is shot to hell, which sucks since that is such a good plot. A way to fix that would have been to not unlock the dead Reaper mission right away, thus giving Chandana’s team time to get there, get indoctrinated, kill off each other, etc. This would have been a more sensible choice that only required minor adjustments in the mission order.
These contrivances are annoying, not because they’re plot holes but because they make a mess of the game’s supposed main antagonist. While TIM’s motives do make some sense by the end, his web of lies and misdirection is not consistent. Granted, it does not need to be: since his main purpose is to inveigle and obfuscate, it doesn’t much matter what kind of wool he tries to pull over Shepard’s eyes, so long as the wool is in fact pulled. And, as I said before, nearly everything that TIM says until the last mission is a lie and shouldn’t be believed, for that is the eventual upshot of the game. But it would be nice if Shepard didn’t have to be so goddamn dumb for the plot to hold up. I am not saying Shepard should also “read the script” to counter whatever TIM eventually plans to do: I am saying that Shepard should detect the inconsistencies in his many-flavored lies way sooner than she does, and that her failure to do so is bad characterization on the authors’ part.
In this part I only touched upon the dead Reaper, which I analyze in much more detail in the next one, with an emphasis on game design and art direction.
The Collector ship has highly spectacular artistic design. Genuinely creepy shit.
The revelation that the Collectors are just repurposed Protheans should have received a lot more attention than it did.
Part 13: God Is a Verb
Despite the obvious contrivances of having a de facto deus ex machina, as I discussed in Part 12, the derelict Reaper is the most fascinating, engaging, and all-around awe-inducing mission of the whole trilogy. It is unadulterated Mass Effect lore, seamlessly integrating plot development with a creepy indoctrination story arc... and a surprise ally at the end.
“In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming”
The logs from Dr. Chandana’s team, accessible through computer terminals during the mission, tell the disconcerting story of a gradual loss of individuality. The eeriest comment, spoken by the lead scientist, is “God is a verb.” After weeks aboard the derelict Reaper, the team began to understand that indoctrination is not a moment but a process, a subtle, relentless act of creation, less like an intruder that overpowers your mind and more like axiomatic truth-conditioning. Indoctrination appears to work via the cognitive and mnemonic rewiring of a sentient being’s logic centers, as if one were to become absolutely convinced that 2+2=5 or that the law of non-contradiction is contradictory. This view would match Saren’s own account from ME1, where he describes indoctrination as the gradual replacement of one’s thoughts with other thoughts, alien and yet self-produced, which become undeniable and perfectly rational over time. Hence the eventual impossibility to recognize indoctrination “from within,” as it were, and hence why Saren and TIM are patently deluded when they insist that they can control their own usefulness to the Reapers. But of course there’s much more to this mission than a few lines of dialogue about the mechanics of indoctrination.
For one, the atmosphere is positively Lovecraftian:
While I love the art direction and environment design through most of ME2, this right here is the creative peak. A sapient use of depth, light, and shadow delivers a mood that Dr. Chandana describes as “the walls curving down on you,” which mirrors Shiala’s description of Sovereign from ME1. It’s hard to draw an environment that is simultaneously spacious and claustrophobic, but the Reaper is precisely so. It goes beyond the corpses on stakes, the dragon’s teeth of the geth: it’s how they’re arranged and illuminated, almost ceremonially as Shepard remarks. This is not self-serving shock value, but an example of how understated visual information can do more than exposition to establish urgency. Granted, atmosphere in general is neither the goal nor the strongest suit of this trilogy, and certainly we get creepier space-demonic visuals in games like Dead Space where ambience is a primary concern; but this is as good as it gets for Mass Effect.
On the negative side, the level design is repetitive and borders on “too much of a good thing.” After the Nth narrow catwalk with husks popping up on all sides, combat begins to feel redundant. Depending on difficulty level, player skill, and squad powers, this mission feels like either a boring task that you must accomplish time and again until the resolution delivers you from Sisyphean hell; or a series of crazy-hard fights that you must survive even though you just cleared a similar one (that distinctive feeling of “I’ve literally just proven my skill to you, game designer, so why do I have to do it again?”). Less is more, combat-wise, and it should be quality over quantity, something that the ME2 doesn’t always do. Unfortunately, the final room is just more of the same, with literally dozens of husks storming the team from every which way. This is why it’s crucial to bring squad mates with good crowd-control powers, such as Tali’s Attack Drone or a biotic’s Throw Field. On the bright side, the final room could be even worse: there could have been a boss fight with some large-ass Reaper monster, which would be immersion-breaking and silly, so at least it’s nice that there’s no such thing.
Did someone order a Reaper, brown dwarf-broiled, well-done, human filling, crispy on the outside?
Shepard-Commander!
Legion is not really a part of this mission. It has one line and it’s only in action for five seconds, although it’s visible through Shepard’s scope on a high catwalk early on. But its introduction is shocking. We have never seen the geth speak, nor did we know they could. And certainly we have never seen the geth wear N7 armor, use a sniper rifle, save human lives, or address individuals by name. The script delivers these surprises with rapid-fire quickness in a brief cutscene through an excellent use of show-don’t-tell, with absolutely no expository explanation. Legion’s presence also reinforces the recent discovery that husks are Reaper tech instead of geth: as Tali remarks, “geth origin never made sense to me.” Are y’all on the Citadel taking note? So when we see the geth, and they are not the enemy, for the first time we can acknowledge that these three factions (player, Reapers, geth) are actually all distinct.
The full extent of Legion’s importance and character depth is revealed when it is activated aboard the Normandy after the mission. Of course, the player may decide not to, but why do such a thing?! The conversation with Legion is among the most literate of the trilogy, covering topics ranging from the nature of individuality to fundamental rights and the possibility of culture for artificial lifeforms. This is also the only conversation in the game, maybe along with Mordin’s reminiscence of the genophage modification project during his loyalty mission on Tuchanka, where players miss out on a lot of key world-building and characterization by not exhausting every single line in the dialogue tree.
After rescuing Legion and doing his loyalty mission, which also contains outstanding dialogue, the table is set for the final mission... which is discussed in the next part.
You may not like it, but this is what the peak geth body looks like.
Part 14: The Suicide Misison
ME2 ends with a bang—literally, if you choose the most popular of the two final options. But the spectacular cinematics merely cap off a well-designed mission with rewarding combat and innovative choose-your-squad mechanics. Few AAA titles grant players this level of choice, and although the final tally of who lives or dies may feel like a lottery, if one has been following the plot carefully it is quite possible to make erudite choices. So even though there is only one possible ending (in many flavors), careful squad administration is required to get the best outcome in terms of survival.
The War at Home
For all intents and purposes, the attack on the Normandy should not happen, because the leaps of logic that are required to justify this part of the plot are... well, leap-y. The Reaper IFF turns out to be a trap, disabling Normandy’s systems and transmitting its position, and the Collectors are on it pronto. For this to work, they or Harbinger must have rigged the IFF. For that to work, they had to manipulate it while it was still on the derelict Reaper. For that to work, they had to assume this was going to be Shepard’s plan to begin with. Therefore, for its IFF to serve as a trap, the entire derelict Reaper ploy must be a trap, too, prepared or at least taken advantage of by the Collectors. How could this have worked? Well, perhaps the Collectors always knew that this derelict Reaper existed, so they carefully leaked information about its whereabouts to Cerberus. Then they sabotaged the IFF, the only way the humans could have conceivably accessed the Omega-4 Relay; they may have done so directly or by indoctrinating the Cerberus team that was studying it. Cerberus bites the lure, TIM bites, Shepard bites, et voila, the fish is caught.
While this hypothetical sequence of events is more or less logical and compatible with the rest of the plot, it has two major problems, the same two problems that plague most of ME2’s main story arcs. One is how incredibly naïve TIM, Shepard, and everyone else have to be to walk into this trap. The other is how poorly the game’s script explains these events. The former is maddening enough, but the latter is worse from a writing standpoint. The activation of the IFF and the Collector attack happen in the complete absence (repeat after me: the complete absence) of any such explanations, motives, logic, etc. Instead, the script gives us a useless post-attack briefing where Shepard complains that “now it’s personal” because the Collectors attacked the crew. No shit, Sherlock, but why? And how?
I cannot stress enough how important this is. Why attack? Surely not to harvest the crew: a couple of dozen humans seem irrelevant when they have already taken hundreds of thousands. Not to kill them, either: a direct confrontation is a lot less trouble, considering that the only time they took a shot at the Normandy they destroyed it in two minutes. And also not to gain intel about Shepard or Cerberus, for which there is no indication in the script, neither from the Collectors, nor from EDI, nor later in the game. I simply fail to see what the point of the Collectors’ attack is.
Of course, the “point” is to create urgency for the players. Throughout the game, Shepard is chasing the Collectors and trying to anticipate their next move, so it makes good dramatic sense that they anticipate her next move, catch Cerberus with their pants down, and strike first. I like that idea, in general. But it must be motivated, damnit, and it must give players a sensible reason why the Collectors would bother instead of eluding Shepard or shooting her out of the sky. The script must create a sensible causal story, a chain of events from A to B to C, where A is the Collectors’ motives to attack, B is how they do it, and C is what they gain. Alas, this is not the case.
To wrap up my complaints about this section, the game also gives a laughable explanation for why the crew is abducted but not the officers, including all of Shepard’s squad mates. Let’s follow the sequence of events as shown in the script. After the IFF is installed, EDI needs to run tests to make sure that it isn’t dangerous. Check. These tests may destabilize Normandy’s systems, so the ship is a sitting duck. Check. Therefore, Shepard cannot use the ship to travel to her next destination. Check. Therefore, the solution is for Shepard and all officers to leave on a shuttle for the next mission, so that she may “decide later” who to pick. Huh?! I’m no strategist, but wiser options were available. If you know your ship will be vulnerable, why not ground it or hide it in a nebula or something? And why can’t Shepard decide right now who to bring? Why leave Normandy in literally the weakest possible position while performing literally the most dangerous action that the crew undertake during the game? It’s criminally negligent that no explanation whatsoever is given for any of this.
Again, of course the point of this is to create urgency for the players but without depriving them of the possibility of picking certain squad members for the final mission. But this is a mistake. For one, recall that an invisible mission counter “behind the scenes” is activated when the crew is abducted, such as that completing even just one mission before trying to rescue them will kill half of them, including sweet Kelly Chambers. For this reason, and also because the (yet-fabricated) sense of urgency does work, most players will launch the suicide mission right away, hot on pursuit of the Collectors. But then why would it really matter to allow the squad to be abducted? The crew is rescued early into the mission, leaving all the squad members that had been abducted available for the rest of it. There is already plenty of opportunity to choose and change your team in medias res, so the game could have easily allowed nearly all of Shepard’s squad to be abducted, except for the two she had left with. This could have still left some room for the game to “help” players by signaling that this squad selection was going to be more important; e.g., if EDI had said something like: “Choose carefully, Commander: I will be running tests on the IFF during your next mission.” Wink wink nudge nudge hint hint. Literally any of that would be much preferable to fifteen characters taking a shuttle and leaving the Normandy a sitting duck.
In the end, the only positive aspect of the Collectors’ attack is Joker’s rescue. The scene is eerie, scary, and extremely effective from a gameplay standpoint. The interactions between Joker and EDI are hilarious, and the attack provides the perfect reason for EDI to become unshackled and thus a truly free AI... a topic that, incidentally, is very poorly analyzed in the script after this mission, save for a few optional lines of dialogue with EDI herself. So, in the end, the Collector attack does succeed in its main goal: to make us scared of them and to realize that the shit has hit the fan. And on the surface it works just fine. But when the dust settles and you start thinking about what you just saw, nothing holds up. Personally, I’m a lot more forgiving than other players. I don’t allow these inconsistencies to spoil my fun and I still love ME2, including the Collector attack mission; but this part of the script is objectively bad writing, and it must be acknowledged as such.
The sight of sweet Kelly dragged by her hair by a Scion is never not terrifying.
The Vents and the Long Walk
Once we get over the fact that we should never have been put in this situation to begin with, we find that the much-hyped suicide mission is actually a blast to play. The game challenges its own mechanics by forcing us to pick a more detailed and mission-specific team than in regular missions. The introduction of team leaders, specialists, escorts, and guards—some of which are chosen at the beginning and some during the mission—makes for an entertaining and more realistic experience. Plenty of guides exist on how to choose to ensure that everyone survives. It is not immediately obvious that some characters may die. Usually, all the heroes make it out alive. But players will (or should) remember from the ME1 that the authors have no qualms killing off main characters, even squad members, so whenever Shepard says that some may not make it out alive, we should heed these warnings. Thus, in order to choose the ideal squad, players should pick up on the many clues that are given throughout the game. For example, when asked who should lead the second team, clearly we should pick someone with military command experience. Miranda and Garrus are obviously good choices; Mordin and Jack are obviously bad ones. Likewise, when the game asks for a tech specialist, players should consider which squad members have Engineer-class powers or a tech-savvy backstory: Tali, Legion, and Kasumi come to mind, while Samara or Zaeed are clearly bad ideas. The script makes this a little more difficult when Jacob volunteers for the specialist job, but attentive players should be able to see through this. Some other decisions later in the mission are less clear-cut, such as choosing who to escort the crew back to the Normandy. One may be tempted to choose someone with a soldier background, as the idea of “escorting” evokes images of “defending from danger.” Yet this may be a bad choice, because assigning a strong character to the escort means to weaken the team to “hold the line,” which may result in the death of someone. But again, it should not be too difficult for a player who has paid attention throughout the game to pick the right person for the right job; and, as I said, plenty of guides exist.
The suicide mission is enriched by innovative combat mechanics that enhance the experience. One is the aforementioned tech specialist crawling through the vents, who must be protected and assisted from the outside. A series of timed check-points forces Shepard & Co. to make short work of the Collectors to activate the next heat release valve. This urgency is balanced by the relative paucity in the enemy forces, which consist of drones, guardians, assassins, and the occasional Harbinger drop-in. The second part of the mission, the so-called “long walk,” is slightly more challenging. While Mordin’s antidote could protect a squad in the open air against a Collector swarm, it is ineffective against the very large swarms in the Collector base. Protection through a biotic stasis dome is the alternative, and here comes another player choice: while in theory “any biotic could do it,” as Miranda says, only Jack or Samara/Morinth (whose backstories establish as especially powerful) will ensure everyone’s survival. The long walk forces players into ranged combat, which is ideal for classes like Soldier or Infiltrator but problematic for Vanguards and Sentinels. Still, combat in this section is not prohibitively difficult.
The mission returns to a more standard combat system for the final part. After three more key decisions—who escorts the crew back to the Normandy, who goes with Shepard, and who is left to hold the line—the mission continues in a straight line to its resolution. Combat gets substantially harder, with more assassins, husks, scions, and more frequent Harbinger drop-ins as Shepard inches closer to the center of the base. I was pleasantly surprised that a bullet sponge like the ugly Praetorian didn’t make another appearance after Horizon and the Collector ship: fending off Scions and Harbinger on the moving platform is exquisitely challenging, and especially fun as a Vanguard.
And then the shit hits the fan...
The vents and the long walk are creative and entertaining mission dynamics.
Human Larvae
I hate boss fights. They’re a remnant of old line-shooters and bar arcades, when games were just games and the medium was insufficiently mature to tell a compelling story. Final bosses also make little sense story-wise: a fighter so good that it is considered a “boss” would fight the heroes face-on instead of throwing minions at them. Conversely, if it were so weak that it couldn’t fight worth a damn and that’s why it’s throwing minions, then it won’t be a worthy opponent to begin with. Either way, boss fights have little reason to exist in modern games. (This is compatible with having elite enemies in each mission, of course, so-called “level bosses,” as it’s often realistic for commanders to remain behind the lines until the end). ME1 did a final boss fight well. The main antagonist, Saren, is only slightly stronger than other elite enemies, and it’s even possible to not fight him at all. His Reaper upgrades, then, are another story, but that makes sense, as that is a truly alien presence that has a compelling story reason to be the “boss.” Given all this, how does the ME2 final boss measure up?
Unlike in most traditional final boss fights, the ME2 boss isn’t also the enemy mastermind. That would be the Collector General who is possessed by Harbinger, and thus Harbinger itself, but the game wisely keeps these out of reach and saves the latter for ME3. (Also, does anyone else think of the Collector General not as a “Collector who holds the rank of General” but like an Attorney General or a Postmaster General instead? No? Just me? Okay then). Instead, what we fight is a monster that by all accounts isn’t even conscious, an abomination of flesh and steel powered with the life-essences of thousands of liquefied human beings. In a way, dramatically speaking, we are fighting ourselves, trying to escape a fate as horrid as that of the Protheans-turned-Collectors. This monstrosity didn’t need to have human form, and I think it is more than a little ridiculous that it does, one of those cheap shots to fabricate drama. But if the goal is to drive home that this is the essence of all those who were lost, then it is effective.
What this abomination didn’t need to be (but actually has pretty good reason to be) is a human Reaper. That revelation, more than anything else that happens in ME2, comes the hell out of left field. So that’s what the Collectors were doing all along. Suddenly, all the nonsense about targeting humans in retaliation or because of Shepard are tossed out the airlock. The Reapers are directing the Collectors to build a Reaper from human DNA in the shape of a human. Why? Culpably, the game gives vague and cursory reasons for this. EDI comments that this may be the Reaper equivalent of reproduction, but much more could and should have been said in light of ME1. We know that the harvest was interrupted when Shepard defeated Sovereign, and that the Reapers are stuck in dark space. Since presumably it’ll take them a while to travel to the Milky Way without mass relays, the Reapers activate their hidden minions, the Collectors, and direct them to do a smaller-scale version of what they have been unable to do: to begin the harvest. Then it’s unclear why target humans instead of turians or asari. Perhaps Shepard really did get their attention by killing Sovereign, or perhaps the Reapers believe that humans are weak and that they can make colonies disappear without a fuss. Be that as it may, the decision to create a human Reaper makes some sense given what we knew from ME1 about the Reapers’ nature and purpose.
But again, ME2’s biggest problem is not that the plot is inconsistent or contradictory, nor that it deviates from ME1 in bad ways, but that many of these changes are poorly motivated, explained, described, or supported in the script. Writing has at least two stages: the idea and the realization. The ideas behind ME2 are excellent, in my opinion, and they take the saga almost exactly where I believe it should have gone; but the realization is often hasty and superficial, which diminishes the game’s overall quality. This is all the more maddening considering the attention that was dedicated to characterization and character development. It’s almost like ME2 ran on a finite resource, a zero-sum total of writing skill that was allocated in large part to the characters and in culpably small part to continuity and plot consistency. And while, as I have said, it is the primary goal of a trilogy’s second chapter to explore the characters and/or a side plot, these tasks must be done sensibly and in the full respect of the story’s integrity, and that is often not the case in ME2.
In the next post, I wrap up the review of ME2 by discussing its outstanding DLCs.
While the concept of a human Reaper is somewhat sensible (retroactively, in light of ME3), it never fails to be a little ridiculous.
I can already hear the fanboys scream "retcon!!!!!1one" when EDI defines the Reapers as organic-inorganic hybrids.
Part 15: Damn Legendary Content (DLC)
The DLC (downloadable content) additions to ME2 are more than afterthoughts. When spaced out carefully, they become an integral part of the game’s experience and even change the overall plot interpretation. Their sheer amount (21 in the original release, all included in the Legendary Edition from the start) and size (20+ hours of extra gameplay) merit separate, analysis, especially as some pave the way for story arcs that matter to ME3.
Lair of the Shadow Broker
This is by far my favorite DLC of the trilogy, for two reasons: (1) Liara’s rapport with Shepard evolves significantly during this mission, especially if she’s the love interest; and (2) it has better plot, cinematics, combat, level design, art direction, and music than most ME2 regular content. The script is fresh and fun, alternating somber introspection with off-the-rails wit and banter: for instance, now we know what the asari mean by azure! The final twist is not unexpected, though some may find Liara’s transition from gifted archaeologist to shady information dealer jarring. I think that many relevant skills are transferable, and that life just took that kind of turn for her after retrieving Shepard’s body; and we know that many asari, given their lengthy life spans, frequently change fields or professions. Indeed, Liara’s progression through the trilogy may be said to mirror the asari life stages on a smaller time scale: maiden (youthful enthusiasm), matron (ruthlesss resolution), and matriarch (wise administration). Once we accept Liara’s position on Illium as an information broker, her logical next step is to become the Broker. In fact, I enjoy the variable nature of the main mission throughout this DLC: it begins as a whodunit, then it shifts into a kidnapping investigation, and finally becomes a full-out hunt for the Shadow Broker. What it never was is a mission to replace the Shadow Broker with a young asari, and it isn’t until the very final room that Liara glimpses a yet-unforeseen opportunity—and she grasps it, as she well should.
One thing I especially enjoy about this DLC is that the Shadow Broker’s ship becomes a hub that remains accessible for the rest of the game. The videos and dossiers are entertaining and add to the lore, and the ability to retrain squad powers is useful. The investment opportunities and the occasional mineral deliveries are also okay. Overall, this is precisely the sort of content that could (should?) have been part of the main game, although it would have been difficult to motivate this mission without then being able to also recruit Liara for the suicide mission. But given the importance of her role in ME3, I’m quite alright with her sitting this one out.
Arc Projector + Tactical Cloak = taking no damage from the Shadow Broker even on Insanity.
Overlord and Arrival
More than any other DLC, “Overlord” feels like it was written for ME1, from the combat to the plot to the ambience. Except that unlike most side missions in ME1, this one is well-written and dramatic. It starts as a standard rogue-AI story with a mad scientist, but soon takes a turn for the best. Many of the Hammerhead sections are filler, though some (the downed geth ship) are visually spectacular. But when we get to the core of Atlas Station, the buildup pays off and we’re rewarded with a superbly creepy and genuinely heartbreaking story. It’s not surprising that even the most tolerant Shepards will feel adversarial toward Archer, as evidenced by the fact that even the Paragon option allows you to pistol-whip him! The story’s human dimension receives ample attention and is well integrated with the geth-related sci-fi. However, a famed downside of this DLC is the ableist portrayal of a person with autism as a mathematical savant with lower social skills who’s made a target for immoral experiments by an able-bodied person. It’s stereotypical as fuck and an exploitative portrayal of autism. This is hard to forgive and forget, especially as the mission draws near its conclusion, and while it does not negate all the positives, it is definitely the trait about this DLC that stands out most vividly.
Conversely, “Arrival” is a boring mission whose only redeeming quality is that it’s essential to ME3. For this reason, it ought to be played as the very last thing before closing out ME2 and moving on to the next game. I will not say much about the boring parts: an underground prison, a bunker, the usual lab facility with narrow corridors and a million doors, etc. Trite stuff and boring combat. The only parts of this mission that matter are at the very end, when we appreciate the true scope of Kenson’s discovery: the Reapers are literally two hours away from invading! Obviously, the mission is to delay them by any means necessary, which in this case requires destroying a mass relay and sacrificing the lives of over 300,000 Batarians who inhabit its star system. It’s a hugely consequential moral decision, which thankfully receives plenty of attention in ME3... and even then, not as much as it should have, probably because this content was optional and not part of the main game in ME2. Which brings me to the main question: why wasn’t this part of the main game?! It would be an excellent bridge between the trilogy’s last two installments, and if players had been made to play this after the suicide mission, the authors of ME3 may have been able to do more with it. As it stands, seasoned players know that “Arrival” is crucial and when to play it, but new players will either overlook it, thus missing out on crucial lore; or do it too early into their ME2 run, thus breaking their story’s narrative flow. Neither of these options should have been possible.
David's red eyes were a bug in the Legendary Edition, but I thought they looked better than the original textures.
All the Rest
The many DLCs in ME2 range from pretty good to hopelessly derivative, and none reach the level of “Lair.” While all are included in the Legendary Edition, in the original game they had to be purchased and added one by one. In addition to the aforementioned three, two more have a full narrative mission that also adds a new squad member: Zaeed Massani and Kasumi Goto. The former is a basic mission with nothing to say, but it requires a very high Paragon score to do the right thing while keeping Zaeed loyal. The latter, instead, is refreshing and humorous, with an innovative setting and loads of fun interactions and combat. It also has a final boss worthy of the name, as well as the possibility of acquiring the game’s best SMG (the Locust) very early on, which is immensely helpful to all non-soldier classes. And while neither Zaeed nor Kasumi are particularly special as squad members, the more the merrier in such a choral game (and Kasumi’s unlockable bonus power, Flashbang Grenade, is useful to rear-guard classes like Infiltrators and Engineers).
Two more DLCs provide a semi-structured narrative, mostly via text and a few voiced entries. “Firewalker” introduces the Hammerhead vehicle, which while not as awkward as the Mako it’s a pain to drive and shoot for as long as we have to in this mission and in Overlord. “Normandy Crash Site” is a good plot device, so good in fact that I recommend it be done as the very first thing in ME2 after Freedom’s Progress. It’s very bland, gameplay-wise, but its setting is suggestive and some of the text entries are interesting, such as Pressly’s journal. Other DLCs include armor, weapon, or outfit packs. Some are cool, some are not, and ultimately none are relevant.
The next part begins discussing ME3 from its startling opening sequence: the Reapers are here!
Click the logo for the full review of Mass Effect 3, or click here to return to the MELE review index.
