I finally completed Mass Effect 2. It really is a great game, but for a game series whose primary strength throughout has been it's storytelling - I'm more than a little disappointed in the ending.Every once in a while I'll get excited about the prospect of an upcoming game. Very rarely will a game live up it its own hype. Mass Effect 2 is such a disappointment to me not so much because it failed to achieve its promise, but in that it ended up being such a near miss. They almost nailed it. Instead they dropped the ball in the final scenes. It appears to be a classic case of rushed production. Somebody decided it was more important to ship the game than finish it. I'm surprised more reviewers aren't calling BioWare out on this one.
Mass Effect 2 is an extraordinary game. It's an improvement over the original Mass Effect, which itself won dozens of awards - including the New York Time's 2007 Game of the Year. Just like everyone says, most anything that you might have taken issue with in the original - most notably inventory management - has been fixed. Personally, I didn't get into the new system for resource collection, i.e. orbital scans, but it was still an improvement over the tedium of terrain navigation in the Mako.
But still, all this is nitpicking. Mass Effect was great because of its storyline and character development. The story and character development in Mass Effect 2 is truly awesome. It's darker too, with seemingly more complex moral choices to make and more shades of grey to choose from. Character interaction in Mass Effect 2 was enormously fun, and I loved a lot of the dialogue and dialogue options.
Yet after a while a sort of cookie-cutter approach to character development becomes apparent. First you recruit a team-member by completing a mission. Second you perform a side-mission to further gain the loyalty of the team-member. But choosing to do the side missions was never difficult - more missions simply means more experience and more stuff. And who want's to leave an area of the game unplayed? On these side-missions you're forced to make moral choices, but surprisingly these choices have no effect whatsoever on the team-member. On more than one mission I betrayed the interests of the team-member and was immediately forgiven. And the intra-team hostilities hinted at never develop into difficult to resolve confrontations.
In Mass Effect you were forced to make a difficult decision - ultimately deciding who lives and who gets left to die. In Mass Effect 2, despite the darker themes and purported moral dilemmas, you never need make any tough choices - at least not any ones that have an impact on gameplay. I'd be shocked at anyone who didn't complete the final 'suicide-mission' without every team-member surviving. Apparently the only way to fail to do so is to intentionally rush to the ending without playing the available side-missions (no matter the decisions you make along the way.)
Although transferring a character over from Mass Effect means you get lots of feedback on the outcomes of little decisions you made in the first game, again this seems to be of no real importance. And there are plenty of glaring omissions in Mass Effect 2 - most notably any possible interaction whatsoever with the consort Sha'ira, or the Shadow Broker.
Worst of all the game makes an abrupt shift in the final scenes of the game. Simply put, the storytelling ends before the game does. It's an awkward switch from being part of a story to suddenly playing an arcade game. It happens just before embarking on the final mission, when the entire command staff suddenly leaves the ship, yet no compelling explanation for this - or even where you all went - is given. It feels forced. And the ending itself? It was just plain stupid.
Strangely enough, you can continue playing even after completing the final mission. Apparently BioWare intends to make further content available online and doesn't want you to have to start over to play it. This feature was probably behind the decision to release the game in it's current state, but it's doubtful additional missions can revive the game from total narrative collapse. I returned to the Citadel after defeating my enemies and rescuing humanity yet again - only to receive no acknowledgment that anything had happened at all. Finishing the game still leaves everything completely unresolved. Even the biggest theme woven into the intro and throughout the game remains strangely unresolved: Alliance, Cerberus, or Independent - Where do your ultimate loyalties lie?
In truth, Mass Effect 2 was the most fun I've had playing a game since I was a kid. It's sublimely enjoyable because the immersion and story are so good it's obvious that BioWare has delivered the goods - right up until it doesn't. It's an implied promise not kept. An impressive magic trick gone horribly wrong.
I've always loved games as a medium for storytelling. I still believe that one day games will exist on par with books and movies as a widely accepted forum for narrative expression. Unfortunately, I don't expect that to happen anytime too soon.
For BioWare, our core vision is one where we strive to deliver the best story-driven games in the world, with memorable stories and characters driving the flow of our games . . .
. . . into nonsensical cliché endings. I haven't been this disappointed in an ending since I stopped reading David Brin.
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