Finishing Mass Effect 1

I released the Rachni Queen. I didn’t see a good reason they shouldn’t have a chance at existence, especially if they could help me against the Reapers.

The Prothean world has a really annoying part where the land rover must navigate through the ruins. Not a big deal, except the gravity is extremely low in this area, which makes navigating extremely difficult. I actually lost the land rover once because it hit a bump and flew up so high that it literally went over the walls separating the map from the gray wastes. No recovering after that.

Vigil here, a copy of a Prothean’s mind, is informative, clarifying what the reapers did during the Prothean invasion. My favorite part is about the Keepers. Because the Keepers do such a great job, and are unobtrusive, nobody bothers them or tries to do maintenance work on the Citadel. If anybody would have bothered to check, they might have stumbled onto the Citadel’s secret. It’s a brilliant strategy.

I convinced Saren to break free of Sovereign’s mind control. Unfortunately, that meant to him that his best bet was suicide. I’m impressed. I have never seen a video game feature on screen suicide. It isn’t excessively graphic. You do see him shoot himself, and a spurt of blood, but his skull is not blown in half or any some such.

However, I am amused that Shepard insisted the group confirm the kill. Hey, good way to be sure a villain is not returning for the second game, heh.

A good idea, too, considering Saren gets transformed into boss mode. The battle itself is okay. As long as I kept on the move, Saren was practically unable to do anything to me. Having a boss fight was fun for a change (the other bosses never really felt like bosses to me). On the other hand, it was an unnecessary battle. I already beat Saren. That should have ended it. This is here only because the game designers thought it would be cool to have a final boss battle, no matter what. I prefer the Planescape: Torment approach, where you can avoid the final boss fight entirely and feel more satisfied about having done so.

I’ll end my thoughts for the first game with this goofy Shepard smile he gives as he pulls himself from the rubble after the fight. It looks better with the music playing in the background. But, gah, the smile looks goofy; I think it’s mostly the helmet’s fault. I never liked that helmet.

By the way, I saved the Council. The decision didn’t make much sense to me at the time. I don’t think the game explained the situation well enough, which ruined the tension for me. It felt like an uninformed decision, but not in the panicky “decide now, both decision routes are important” sort of way. Ultimately, I chose to save the council based on the idea that unifying various sides against a threat is better than one strong side. Same principle with playing an RPG. It’s better to have more people with average equipment than it is to have one person with the best equipment (usually). Having a single guy is dangerous because if he gets taken out, it’s all over, and the damage he can inflict by himself might not be as great as the damage that several party members working together can manage.

I’ll save some of my thoughts about the first game for my overall review of the Mass Effect series. For now, I’ll say that I had enough fun that I was soon convinced I wanted to play the entire series. The game has its flaws – I thought the paragon choices usually made far better sense than the renegade choices, and money is almost useless, but I overall enjoyed the game. Again, I will get more in-depth later.

For now, on to ME2.