Mass Effect 1

[jaggedwolf]

Legendary Edition is here and my life has been taken over by replaying. Finished the first game and I couldn't stop taking screenshots.

Shepard

The woman, the legend.

I’d forgotten how...fortifying it feels to play as Shepard, and playing Paragon only adds to that. Paragon!Shep doesn’t feel naive or harmless compared to Renegade!Shep, just someone whose cost-benefit equations are different. She aims for the win-win and pulls through, often because she can back up those pretty words and ideals. There’s a great speech a Paragon Shepard can give in the second game where she lists the sacrifices she’s made of other people, but I’ll save that for ME2’s post.

Stuck to Earthborn/Sole Survivor Soldier as always. No matter how you play Shepard, she’s the woman who always gets back up and gets the job done. I’m fond of the shading of this background. (And of more dakka as a combat tactic) In the early game, folks constantly bring up Akuze to Shepard. The Cerberus sidequest then reveals Toomes, adding to the brutality of the background - not only did Shepard watch the other marines die as she barely got out, she (unintentionally) left behind one of her men and he paid greatly for it.

Earthborn doesn’t get as much play but I like the note that you can run into your old gang friend while accompanied by two alien squadmates, and he makes clear the gang was pretty anti-alien. Shepard handles it very coolly. Earthborn also makes it grimly funny every time a human tells Shepard “well, all I know abou XYZ is what they taught us in school” and Shepard nods while internally going “....ah, school, right.”

The final thing I’d forgotten is that ME1 makes it clear Shepard is a stranger to directly working with aliens at the game’s start - she’s never been to the Citadel before, Nihlus’s presence on the ship is unusual, she has questions and fumbles about alien cultures and physiologies.

Anyway, I love playing Shepard, I’m barely managing to tear myself away from ME2 long enough to write this post.

Squadmates

Kaidan

Oh, boy. This was the first time I accidentally triggered his romance initiation, which wasn’t a big deal to back out of. It unfortunately led to a bug where he suddenly tells me about killing Vyrnnus without any previous dialogue on Brain Camp. Dialog bugs can seem minor, folks, but they mess with immersion and make one lose investment in a character. (See: The poor prioritization of dialog for Nyx in Hades, which may have been bad design rather than a bug.)

I get that the thing he supposedly has going for him is that he’s a completely settled person whose realizations all happened in the past and so he doesn’t need Shepard to fix his issues. This is not appealing to me because if I am playing a Bioware RPG I want to help fix my video game friends’ issues, not have niceness taken for romancing.

That’s not why he dies on Virmire, of course. I just like Ashley more, and I don’t like fulfilling death wishes.

Tali

Great intro - unhardened enough to be tricked into Fisk’s meeting, prepared enough to pull out her shotgun when it all goes to hell. Unfortunately her dialog is a lot of infodumping the Quarian codex entries, aside from the first mention of her dad’s position on the Admiralty board. She shares Kaidan’s “too settled” issue. She stands out as the only alien squadmate perfectly aligned with her species - Garrus chafes at the rigid community-mindedness of turians and particularly his father, Wrex only gave up on trying to build up a peaceful clan on Tuchanka because of his father’s betrayal, Liara runs towards the past away from her mother’s power and any kind of active diplomacy with people.

I brought her to most missions this playthrough, though, and she has some great dialogue bits and knowledge to share.

Garrus

I’m surprised by how little I have to say about him here. ME1 Garrus is very much a renegade-ish hotshot cop who wants to break the rules and goes “fiiiiiiine” when paragon Shep chides him for it. Is kinda rude about quarians and krogans in the elevator. Like Tali, dialog was easily exhausted, I cycled through his final “Thank you” conversation too many times to count.

Ashley

It was nice hearing “skipper” again. Her wariness about non-humans makes a lot of sense in ME1, where people are constantly saying terrible things about each others’ species, even as I want her to move past it. Species and their governments are mostly intertwined, and Ashley’s take relies more on cynical militarism than essentialism, which is why a paragon Shepard (who’s also never served with aliens) can nudge her along. It’s also Garrus and Wrex that she’ll mention, not Tali or Liara. I doubt it’s a gender thing from Ashley. Given stereotypes of quarians as thieves while Tali hangs out next to the secret prototype drive and Liara being Benezia’s daughter, it strengthens my suspicions it’s a military thing.

Honestly, she might be the only squaddie that actually talks about the other people on your team in ME1 during Normandy convos - other than concerns about the aliens, she’ll tell you to check up on Liara after Benezia’s death. Also taking her around when talking to people is fun because she gets miffed when anyone disrespects Shepard and she’ll yell at that Terra Firma guy.

Wrex

He has so much to talk about! Wrex isn’t the only alien companion that serve as slight outliers to their species but I like his contrast the most given his introduction as a merc. His failed attempt to build a clan focused on growing sets up his arc for the next two games very nicely, and his agreement to bomb the Virmire breeding facility felt like a bigger sacrifice than I’d remembered. Love his snarky little reply to Garrus going “oh wow Wrex, you’re so different from other Krogan”

Liara

I’m so used to ME2/ME3 Liara that I’d forgotten what a stumbling-over-her-words-nerd ME1 Liara was - she’s so frickin funny, at some point she apologizes for implying she wants to inspect Shepard in a lab. If I weren’t doing my usual Shepard/Liara romance I’d probably be annoyed by how quickly it starts, but I am and so hypocrisy dictates I do not count it as a con. The awkwardness stands out to me way more than it did a decade ago, yet that one conversation later Liara goes “sikes, we should focus on Saren instead” does make it work for me. ("Fun" fact: Liara/Femshep literally got Mass Effect temporarily banned in Singapore.)

I brought Liara and Tali to most everywhere. I think players often label both characters as across-the-board innocent/idealistic in ME1, and I don’t agree. They are both young compared to the rest of the squad - early 20s it feels like - and Liara is quite awkward with people, but even here they are quite pragmatic. (I, uh, also don’t think they have their first kills on Shepard’s mission or anything). Tali can clash quite heatedly with a Paragon Shepard’s take on the geth, and Liara doesn’t try at all to convince herself that her mother is innocent.

Gameplay

So much easier than I remembered! I never finished the Rogue VI mission on my first playthrough, dying too many times on the final base and this time it was a breeze. To be fair, Mass Effect was the first shooter game I ever completed.

I did come to loathe the inventory system. So clogged up, and by the end of it I had more weapons and armor and creds than I’d ever need….though Tali never got new armor.

The Charm/Intimidate setup of morality thresholds + skill points was fine by me, since ME1 usually leaves me with no desire to pick Renegade choices. Couldn’t stop Ethan Jeong on Feros from getting killed, but he’s a dick so I didn’t really care. I’ve still never not skipped the first part of the final battle with Saren. It is funny that ME2 is where persuasiveness starts being tied to consistency in Paragon/Renegade-ishness, since ME2 is also where Renegade moments shine as additions to an otherwise Paragon playthrough.