This Video Game Review Is Only 2 Years Late

(Or, Why I Love Mass Effect 1 and Not Mass Effect 2)

Mass Effect 1 is a strange game.  It's an RPG that doesn't care how much ammo you have, or where the dead bodies have fallen.  It's an RPG with real-time combat that cares about your aim, or using the terrain to get good cover, or what part of the enemy you've shot.  Or, at least, it's an RPG that can care about those things.  And if you're me, and fail utterly at first person shooters, it has a pause system that lets you take time to aim, and an optional auto-targeting system so that "aiming" mostly means "deciding which target to hit."  And you can take the time to pause, scope out the good hiding places, take a shot, and pause again.

But despite the oddities, ME1 is an RPG.  The gameplay depends on making choices about the storyline, resource management, skill management, and dialog.  You can spend forever tweaking your equipment (should Ashley get the +20 poison damage or the armor piercing upgrade to her assault rifle) and balancing skill sets (if I take Tali with me I can open boxes, but she always dies first in combat).

And it's a really good RPG.  The writing is fantastic.  The romance plots get a little clunky, especially if you're playing FemShep, because Liara is hippy-dippy-soul-melding-girl and Kaiden is a bit too puppy-like.  Ashley, on the other hand, is sweet and tough and funny and it's really too bad that she's totally not into women.  It's not Joss Whedon, but the characters are likable, and the story is engaging, and it hurts when I leave Kaiden on Virmire, even when I'm playing for the 4th time and have been keeping him at arms length the entire game because I know what's going to happen.

The departures from normal RPG gameplay are well-chosen and appreciated.  I don't really want to take tours after each battle, stopping by each body so I can loot them.  I'd rather just assume, like ME1 does, that I'm going to loot them, but we don't really need to go through the motions.  Same with skill sets; if Tali's on my team, I don't need to actually switch players to open something, we can just assume that she's the one doing the electronic overrides.  And the semi-real-time combat works for me, and it worked for my Halo-playing boyfriend.  He turned the targeting off and practiced his head-shots.  I left it on, and played it like KOTOR.  Win-win.

Mass Effect 2 is both more and less of an RPG in the worst possible ways.  Ammo matters again, and bodies need to be actually looted.  Which means that I'm going through the battlefield again, walking over each body, picking up ammo.  I'm also weighing my shots, deciding if an enemy is worth using up the gun I want to kill it with.  On the other hand, the optional targeting system is gone, the weapons are harder to use, the visibility is lower, the weapon and armor upgrade systems have far fewer options, and there aren't even statistics on effectiveness.  I no longer know that one pistol does 45-66 damage with 10 shots before overheating, while the other does 38-50 damage and overheats after 15 shots.  I just get a paragraph describing each item, with very little practical information.  I think, although it hasn't been confirmed, that each weapon is simply better or worse than the next in its class. 

Even the writing sinks a little.  Shepard comes back from the dead a lot sleezier than she's ever been, leaning casually against the table making eyes at everyone in the crew, giving them cheesy pickup lines in their first conversations.  The romances in ME1 start out in mutual admiration and respect.  The romances in ME2 start out like a bad party hookup.  I don't like this Shepard. 

I just want to give up, read the Wikipedia for the plot, and move on to ME3 and hope it's better.  Except that is a terrible way to get the plot, since so much of the story is dependent on player decisions.  If I don't keep my character from ME2 to move on to ME3, there might be another dead Wrex.  And dead Wrex is NOT okay.  So I turned it down to easy mode, which feels especially wimpy when I was playing ME1 on hard, and I get pissed because it's too easy, except that making it hard makes it hard in the wrong ways.  I can only choose between "dull and playable" and "exciting and impossible."  And even on easy I still die sometimes, feeling like there's nothing I can do to stop it.

So I stop a lot.  And knit.  Or order KOTOR 1 and 2.  And save the universe very, very slowly.  And hope that ME3 is worth it.

Don't tell me.  I want to wait and see.