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eggoreviews · 4 years

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My Top 25 Games Advent Day 16 - Mass Effect 2 (#10)

“They tell me it’s a suicide mission. I intend to prove them wrong.”

Here we have another example, and in my eyes the best example, of the product of Bioware being at their absolute peak. Mass Effect 2 is a nigh on masterpiece of a game that, even after almost a decade, still holds up extraordinarily well in every aspect. I love the Mass Effect series (well, the main trilogy anyway) for its cinematic storytelling, its interesting and unique plot concepts and gameplay elements, its intricate setting and, crowning all, its always unforgettable companion characters who go on your journey with you. The series’ second instalment, at least in my eyes, does all of this absolutely perfectly without 3’s wonky ending and 1’s slightly outdated settings and mechanics. If I called Dragon Age: Origins the Lord of the Rings of gaming, here’s Star Wars.

Mass Effect 2 doesn’t fuck around. It starts you up on the original ship from the first game, before immediately blowing it up and killing Commander Shepard, the vaguely cheesy space hero we all love so much. After Shepard’s revival at the hands of Cerberus, Mass Effect 2 kicks off with an epic space opera story taking you all across the universe, with espionage, emotive character arcs and an oppressive, genuinely fearful atmosphere created by the game’s big bads, the vastly superior alien race known as the Collectors. It’s amazing how they managed to blend that overriding fear of an enemy so powerful it could wipe out everything with this giddy excitement to explore. Whether that be the plethora of planets you can seek out, mine for resources and explore or some of the more densely populated space stations, such as the vast cityscape of the Citadel or the seedy, neon underworld filled with criminals and night clubs, Omega. Mass Effect’s universe truly has a life of its own and it tells such a grandiose story within it that it’s impossible not to become immersed. Each and every area you visit is packed full of memorable characters of various diverse species, like the awesome looking Turians and Krogans, down to the hilariously blunt Elcor, who communicate by prefacing everything they say with how they’re feeling. On top of this, a bountiful selection of engaging side quests and an overarching main story that largely involves you seeking out each of your party members to hunt down the Collectors make this a truly perfected combination of a well-realised sci-fi setting and story.

Drawing on those companion characters for a moment, I would say that this is one of the best, most diverse and engaging cast of characters you can find in a game, as each of them follow their own individual character arcs and have unique relationships with Shepard depending on your actions and the behaviour you exhibit towards them. The likes of Jacob (the guy you start with who is admittedly a bit boring), Miranda (the biotic who was experimented on by her family to make her ‘perfect’), Garrus (the kickass Turian who is everyone’s favourite and also has gotta be the canon love interest for male Shepard), Mordin (the quick-thinking, quick-everything Salarian doctor with a surprisingly dark past), Grunt (a wartime experimental clone taken by Shepard as a replacement for their original target, Grunt’s creator), Jack (a highly powerful, erratic biotic in a maximum security prison), Samara (Asari matriarch who can step on me and also everyone), Thane (the coolest, chillest assassin in the galaxy), Zaeed (amercenary veteran with a sick ass scar), Kasumi (cool space thief) and Tali and Legion (oneQuarian and one Geth, both interesting and unique characters in their own right, these characters draw upon the central conflict between the two races explored in the first game’s main story. In the sequel, the slow development of the two from sworn enemies to allies is something to behold, especially as both are so lovable on their own). Went on a bit of a tangent there but I felt it was important to include everyone in that list. The best part about this is you spend the entire game building your relationships with these characters, choosing a romance option, decking Shepard and the gang out in the best gear, upgrading your ship with the materials you mine from planets. And then it all comes down to the finale, the so-called ‘suicide mission’ in which anyone and everyone can die depending on your choices and upgrades beforehand, as well as any decisions you make during the mission. It is genuinely incredibly difficult to save everyone first try and is a great example of how to ensure the choices you give to your player have weight and lasting impact; in Mass Effect 2, everything is on your shoulders and no one’s survival is guaranteed.

As I said before, I don’t think it would be wrong to call this the Star Wars of gaming, and it wouldn’t take that title without a lot of pew-pewing and excellent use of the sci-fi genre. The gameplay and gunplay (which is the majority of your experience) is slick and well-executed, even feeling intuitive and fun almost a decade later. Even that final boss encounter, that I will never really understand the potent hatred people seem to have for it, is an awesome final test of what you’ve learned and how you’ve improved along the way, pitting you up against an all-out giant Terminatoresque killing machine as an excellently overblown ending to a game full of dramatic encounters to shoot at. Alongside this, the visuals are superb and do little break immersion even as time has gone by and I would argue that this game still holds some of the best graphics you can find from the previous generation. And last but not least, this game’s spicy ass mechanical sci-fi soundtrack is definitely something to flap about, especially when it comes to the combat and that Suicide Mission score is nothing short of incredible.

So now I’ve ranted aimlessly for three chunky paragraphs about each singular aspect of this game that I adore, you can probably see why this title has such an enduring memory to me. Playing this game for the first time at 12 years old off the back of the also amazing Dragon Age: Origins, Bioware took their perfected formula of knowing exactly how to craft a story, setting and excellently realised characters and shot it up into space both figuratively and literally. In my eyes, Mass Effect 2 is Bioware’s greatest title and it’s honestly more than a shame that we haven’t received anything from Mass Effect in recent years, aside from the less than great Andromeda. A Mass Effect 4 would kill me dead, but at the very least an original trilogy remaster would keep me ticking for a hot minute. Get on it, Bioware. Pls.

Standout Moment Award: Probably already mentioned this, but of course it’s the suicide mission. An unforgettable epic of a quest and one of my favourite overall game finales to date.

Standout Character Award: Thane Krios. The ice-cool, terminally ill assassin takes today’s award for being an all-around great dude.

It’s been a long ol’ month, but we’re finally getting there. Today, I kicked off my top 10 games of all time. From here on out, it’s going to be beyond difficult to stop myself from descending into rambles, but I’ll do my best to keep myself coherent. Tomorrow: No. 9; An odd creature with floating appendages takes off to save some blue things in dire distress.

#gaming #eggoreviews #best games advent #mass effect 2 #me2 #mass effect

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imaginaryelle · 7 years

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ME Andromeda Meta: Lazy Writing in Kadara

I was reading a post that brought up some good points about Sloane and Reyes and the Kadara questline earlier (mostly its highly questionable uses of POC stereotypes and tropes, and especially its treatment of women of color), and I started responding but realized this was just way too long to add on. (This is very long, you’ve been warned)

I want to start this by saying that I like Reyes. I like Sloane too. I want to see everyone’s interpretations of them both. As characters, they are probably the most intrinsically interesting people to come out of Andromeda for me, aside from possibly Drack. But. The writing of the game does not serve either of them well, and fandom (any fandom) has a definite tendency to simplify complex characters down to one or two easily-digestible traits. That’s not a deal breaker for me; I’m happy to read fic about them and admire art and encourage creators to write and draw and edit from now until the end of time (unless it’s character bashing. I’m not cool with cutting characters down to ONLY negative traits, see: Sloane, Liam, Jill).

There’s an argument to be made here that this fandom is very young yet, and complexity will increase as creators feel more comfortable and at home with the characters, too, especially as we all stop feeling like we have to defend the fact that we like the game. I’ve seen some of that change happening already, and I’m really happy about it because I have high hopes for people remembering/realizing that it is possible to enjoy something and still allow it to be flawed, that criticism is not the same as hate (and vice-versa), or even just recognizing that other people’s criticism of a thing is not a threat to your own enjoyment it. Make all the AU timelines, flesh out new details and headcanons, tweak the storyline until you’re happy, or at least until you can live with it. It’s your sandbox, go play. I personally have a goal, with my own writing, to add to the complexity of the world presented in Andromeda, to make it make sense within itself and be more than what Bioware gave us, and that means that I have trouble approaching any of the characters without fully considering their characterization, their role in the game, and the out-of-game influences that can be seen in their portrayal. (This is why I have trouble just writing straight fluff, even when I want to.) For a lot of characters, this all comes together fairly smoothly. I write Gil because his story is one that doesn’t work very well without headcanons and expansion, and I haven’t yet written Reyes or Sloane because there is just a ton to process there.

Reyes and Sloane, the Nexus leadership, Kadara and the Initiative, the Krogan, the Angara, etc., are all presented with very simplistic choices attached in-game. Sometimes those choices are extremely frustrating to me, because there are a LOT of potential problems in there, but what happens in Kadara is some of the worst of it, in my opinion. And watching fandom react to it mostly makes me feel my age, because when I was 20, and especially when I was 15 and just getting into fandom, I probably would have been a lot closer to what seems to be the general fandom consensus: Kadara is cool and Reyes can be a sweetheart and Sloane is a bitch. But that was 10-15 years ago for me, and that more-than-a-decade gave me access to a lot of education and observation and life experience. And most of what that experience has taught me is that no form of media is created in a vacuum, and to take in my media a little more critically, and what I can see of the impulses and biases that influenced Kadara’s creation, and then, by proxy, fandom’s reception of it, are terrible. They’re insidious to mainstream Western (and especially North American) culture, and their effects are far reaching. And I’m not saying that Bioware is inherently terrible (though I do think they were incredibly lazy about this), or that fans who love that simpler interpretation are terrible. You see Kadara and Reyes and Sloane’s stories differently? That’s great. Play with that. Create your stuff. I’ll be happy to see it and to cheer you on and we can talk about it if you want to. There’s an important distinction here: I don’t hate anyone for any of this, I just think it’s important to recognize what happened here. Okay? Okay. Here we go.

What’s so bad about Kadara?

Part of me loves Kadara. Part of me’s with Jaal on hating it. Either way, Kadara, for me, is the most poorly written part of the entire game. It makes no sense, there’s no internal logic, it’s just a thrown-together jumble of people-are-terrible-when-they’re-desparate, pirates-are-still-cool-right and shock-value-masturbation. Sloane and Reyes both get shortchanged by the writing and the plot, but the game absolutely steers the player toward favoring Reyes at Sloane’s expense. So let’s explore some of that, shall we?

First-up: General Design and Presentation.

Visually, Kadara port is populated by a thin veneer of space-pirates-are-cool over racism, classism, and possibly homophobia. Like, I’m not going to say that neon-colored hair is inherently gay culture, but it definitely influenced my impression that no one on Kadara was straight. Everyone there has been otherized as much as possible within the game’s constraints:

-They have bright, non-natural-colored hair.

-They have scars and facial tattoos. One man has lost an eye. Sloane has heterochromia, a visual distinction that is not available to Ryder and which only appears in one other place in the game (the representative of the hydroponics protesters who actually has lines, and who also has neon hair and facial tattoos. Are you seeing a pattern here?)

-A huge majority of the humans with speaking roles are POC.

-They have completely different armor, even though there’s no reason for it to exist because they should mostly have started with initiative supplies. They mostly wear darker colors, and they certainly never wear white and blue (because white and blue are, after all, the initiative’s colors: purity and honesty/trust/responsibility in Western color theory).

-The landscape in the port is very jagged, things piled together for function rather than planned aesthetic, because they have to make use of what they have and don’t have the luxury of designing something classically beautiful even though the angara and then the kett were living there before, wtf is this bioware? I mean, I enjoy chunky neon as an aesthetic, but really?

-Every member of the Outcasts brooks no compromise in an in-your-face way that generally is presented as uncultured thuggery. Even the asari and salarians speak more harshly.

Just think about that for a moment. Compare it to the visual of the Nexus, with its smooth rounded lines, its white and chrome and blue, its chill conversations about strawberries and bureaucratic power struggles, mostly had by predominately white people with natural-color-hair and no scars or tattoos, who are incredibly secure in the idea that they don’t really have to worry because someone else will ultimately take care of the biggest problems. (That someone else being the POC and POC-coded techs in engineering and the Pathfinder.) The Nexus is the epitome of a high-tech white collar office in space, and I kind of hate it every time I have to go back. The first time I wandered around Kadara, I spent some time going “oh, so this is where all the cool and interesting people ended up!” and determining that my Ryder (and, honestly, myself) would probably have ended up there if they’d been awake at the time of the Uprising, because hey, cool hair, people who are tired of the establishment’s bullshit and gatekeeping (because the Initiative is absolutely the establishment in this scenario), making their way with whatever’s at hand, this is my zone!

And that is so many levels of fucked up??

Kadara under the Outcasts is quite literally painted and populated with examples of non-white, non-wealthy, non-straight visual culture and they’re the bad guys?? What kind of lazy excuse for world building is this?

Then, on top of all that, we have the Outcast Leadership. Sloane’s power is very obviously painted as an overbearing warlord dictatorship:

-She charges protection fees even though credits should have no meaning in the exiles’ lives when labor, skilled craftsmanship, water and food are at a premium and serving the community with labor/resources would make about 1000 times more sense.

-Her representatives beat people in the streets for not being able to pay those fees (again, where? exactly?? is anyone getting money from??? what do they even want it for????), or exile them into a hellscape where not only is the water on fire but people (not wildlife! people!) will literally eat you.

-She encourages and promotes the use of a highly addictive drug that…. makes it harder… for people to pay protection fees? What?

-She is a conqueror who kicked the Angara out of their own port for… who knows? What reason? I mean what logic does it take to exile the people who make the water filters from your own group of exiles who need clean water?

-There’s even a datapad out in the badlands that indicates she’s encouraging people to go out and settle because “no one owns that land, free land!” even though the angara are obviously there. Like, good job shifting the imperialist colonist theme onto the “bad guys” bioware, sheesh. The initiative doesn’t exactly have a drastically different plan to start with. (and I’m not going to talk about the nexus quest smallpox reference here. there are some things that just. goddammit)

-She holds public executions. Of kett, mostly, and of the angara who betrayed the Moshae, because that’s what the local angara say they want. Public executions, in current cultural context, are the tool of terrorist groups and authoritarian regimes. There is no “good” cultural association to be had there.

And on top of all that, they made Sloane a black woman. They made this totally illogical, drug-peddling, domineering villain figure who is openly critical of the player character a black woman with two different colored eyes and a big scar on her face. Again, how lazy can you be, bioware? Was even a moment spent examining your work for racist bias?

So yeah. Some pretty messed up stuff, right? Well, now for the good part.

This all then influences the PLOT:

There are a lot of good points to be made about the plot’s depiction of women and the ways it restricts Ryder. That’s not really what I’m writing about, but I do think it’s important to acknowledge that this story repeatedly requires Ryder to side with Reyes and commit violence against women, and especially women of color, before you ever get to High Noon. What I’m writing is mostly about the ways the plot steers player perception.

In addition to a surface combination of Zevran’s flirt approach and Dorian’s general looks, drinking, and sense of A PAST, Reyes is the focal point of all but one main-plot missions on the planet. He is presented as a friend through contacts Ryder is already on good terms with (the Angaran Resistance), and helping him is EXPLICITLY listed as something Ryder needs to do to get a settlement going. He’s witty, jovial, flirts only as much as Ryder flirts back, and asks for Ryder’s help. He is presented as someone who, while capable, needs assistance, and he’s openly thankful for and appreciative of services rendered.

Sloane, meanwhile, in addition to all the baggage from above, is presented as an obstacle. She stands in the way of Ryder getting what they want, whether it’s Vehn Terev or a settlement on the planet. Ryder becomes the supplicant, and no one likes being a supplicant, folks.

So that’s point #1 for plot: Reyes gives Ryder the opportunity to do something, to make progress toward a goal, while Sloane is a roadblock. There is no sense that Sloane is even open to negotiating for a settlement at this point.

Now, in the course of Ryder making progress on those quests the plot so helpfully provides (even SAM will say “perhaps we should check in with Mr. Vidal, Pathfinder” after you complete a step), Ryder is sent through several parts of Kadara that do not do anything good for Sloane’s image, but benefit Reyes.

-The Charlatan is feeding people in the slums after Sloane kicked them out. For free.

-The aforementioned cannibalism is discovered via a protection-fee-related quest (on the map it’s not very far from the end of one of Reyes’ quests. Also see: people-are-terrible-when-desperate)

-Aforementioned land-grab policy datapad is available in the angaran settlement just off a main road. (another tick-mark for people-are-terrible-when-desperate, woo for pointless revenge murders)

-In the course of helping Dr. Nakamura, (another explicit quest step) Ryder learns Sloane is making Oblivion on purpose, and that Kaetus has sent a message indicating a distinct lack of care about the addiction rate or health of people who are addicted. (people are terrible?)

-Sloane apparently doesn’t even try to protect her wind-energy supply?

-Reyes helps fight the Roekaar, working as an on-the-ground partner to Ryder in a mission Ryder is invested in because of pre-Kadara content. In the process, they kill the group’s female angaran leader.

-Reyes is personally ambushed by a bunch of other smugglers (led by his WOC ex-girlfriend/drinking partner, whose involvement, as others have pointed out, really wasn’t necessary to the plot and just means Ryder is Killing The Competition). This serves four purposes: it presents Reyes explicitly bisexual/biromantic if Ryder is male, presents him as a possible victim to attack, makes Ryder kill a second woman who attacks Reyes, and gives Reyes some vague fridging-related manpain with his lines about making sure she’s buried properly because “she doesn’t deserve this”

-Collective representatives with lines will say that the Charlatan is more in favor of the Nexus and the Pathfinder than against them. Sloane is vocally anti-Nexus.

-Reyes gets you into a party Sloane didn’t want you at, steals some liquor, gets an Impulse Distraction Kiss and has Sad Backstory Conversation bonding + Drunk Kissing on a rooftop at sunset. (There are probably official TV Tropes names for these things but whatever)←this mission, just as a note, is NOT required by the plot, but it IS highly likely most Ryders will do it. Bioware gave it a vidcall invitation and everything, and it’s really the only chance Ryder has to just hang out and be goofy at a party in the whole game.

-Sloane glares at the Pathfinder for sitting in her chair (seems totally reasonable? I don’t like other people sitting in my computer chair, I don’t know about you guys) and is implied to have physically removed them without ever saying a word.

Things that require a bit more fancy driving and digging into things and are unlikely to be found if you’re just doing the main plot, and may not be discovered at all:

-A room literally covered in blood from Collective forces torturing an Outcast for information

-A Collective base with cells and prisoners, where people are also being tortured for information.

AND THEN:

Sloane demands Ryder’s help hunting down the kett. Not even in person. Through Kaetus. This is a direct threat to her power if it got out, supposedly (because no one on Kadara except Reyes has ever heard of spin coverage, I guess?), but she’s not going to ask, she’s going to hold the need for a settlement over Ryder. And the game literally makes it impossible to refuse. Ryder has to do it. Or at least, Ryder has to do the annoying tracking part. Sloane is totally capable of showing up and killing kett and being condescending once the time-consuming part’s done. You know what people hate even more than being the supplicant? Having that supplicant status lorded over them for annoying favors.

So, for point #2: In sum, by the time High Noon happens, the player has very definitely been primed to think:

-Reyes is Ryder’s friend, if not romantic partner

-Sloane is a very bad person who is mean to Ryder.

AND, point #3: Ryder has already killed two women who tried to attack Reyes.

The choice then, in whether or not to save Sloane, is a heavily weighted one, and it’s important to note that that is what the choice is, too. It’s not a choice of one or the other, because it’s impossible to kill Reyes even if you want to, but Sloane goes down, with no resistance, to one bullet in a gutshot. The same gutshot from Ryder barely slows Reyes down in his escape. And that’s because Kadara’s story was never about Sloane. She is expendable for the narrative. If she wasn’t, she might have been actually allowed some subtlety or logical consistency. More screentime, at the very least. But she wasn’t. The plot was always about Reyes. That’s why you get the emotional high of a romance scene with him right then and there if you want it, even though it should be totally strange to have sex right next to a place where you just watched someone die. Right? We’re not pretending that’s normal, are we? (please, writers, go AU on that location unless your Ryder is actually into that or something)

It’s entirely possible to read Reyes as not knowing about some of the darker things his people did in his service if the player desires, if the player even know about those things. It’s also completely possible to read Reyes as being genuine in his interactions with Ryder. Maybe he is. Maybe he isn’t. Maybe he’s playing puppet master on everyone, including Ryder. We don’t know. The story makes him easy to love, if that’s what you want. But Sloane does not have the luxury of that interpretation leeway. The narrative has explicitly painted her as the villain here, even though none of her actions make logical sense. She exists to be Reyes’ opponent. It’s lazy as hell, but that’s what it is. She is barely even a character, as far as the game is concerned. Reyes’ storyline can only exist in opposition to something terrible enough that people will take any way out, and Sloane became that thing to suit the story. It has nothing to do with her actual character as seen in the Uprising, and everything to do with her function as a plot device. As far as the story is concerned she never had any real power. She was always going to fall. This imbalance is exemplified in the fact that Reyes is there with a crew of followers, and Sloane has no allies except possibly the pathfinder (whose good opinion Reyes has explicitly courted) because Reyes has quite systematically removed or stolen them (Ryder can even remark on that). He goes as far, in the end, as having Kaetus beaten half to death and using a sniper in what he frames as a duel. He has defeated her on every possible front except her life. And after everything he and Ryder have done, both together and separately, the narrative pull to just let Sloane die is enormous. The story has not presented any compelling reasons for Ryder to like her, and has handed over whole handfuls of reasons to at minimum engender apathy towards her if not active dislike. Her death completes the story pattern, and allows for new beginnings and change to move in. The player has to struggle against a life-time’s worth of story-consumption to break that pattern.

Some people get there because they see the sniper move as grossly unfair, or because they’re pissed Reyes lied to Ryder so much. Some people came to the game already loving Sloane (and from what I hear, she’s an extremely relateable character in Nexus Uprising). Some people think Reyes is a slimy manipulating jerkwad. But however they get there, the most infuriating part is that those players don’t even get rewarded for that struggle. There is no sense of completion or closure, because the story wasn’t designed to let Sloane live. Instead you just get a holding pattern, and the certain knowledge that Reyes will be back, because someone, somewhere, is working on the next act in his play. And even if you do let Sloane die but want to tell Reyes you don’t approve of him or his methods, the one comment Ryder is allowed to make only results in Reyes calling them a dick. There is no emotional narrative payoff for disliking Reyes, whatsoever. So then you probably get a pretty fair number of people who go “Well, that was unsatisfying, I guess I’ll just decide I don’t like Sloane and hate her more intensely because that will make things work properly.” And the fact that the narrative supports that, that the willful death of a woman (a woman of color!) who had power in favor of a man we’ve just learned lied to us, is the end goal of this plot, is an objectively terrible thing and makes the entire Karada arc an example of some of the worst habits in modern mainstream storytelling.

So, again. I like Reyes, and I like Sloane. I’m happy to cheer everyone on in their support and interpretation of either of them, or both, or neither. But when you create your own stories, I hope you pay attention to what you’re doing. Recognize your own biases, your own laziness, and try not to let yourself do what bioware did here. Give your worlds a sense of internal logic that doesn’t depend on stereotypes and knee-jerk prejudices. Let your characters be people instead of plot devices. Let them have flaws and charm, dark traits and redeeming features, no matter what role they fill in your story. Don’t stack everything one way. It’s not easy. I’ve been working on it for years and probably still have a long ways to go. But it’s important if we want the world to change.

#me a spoilers #andromeda meta #kadara politics #text post #long post

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