43 hours well spent

For the past… week and a half, say, I’ve been almost entirely invested in saving the galaxy. Any moment not spent at work or asleep, I’ve been planning, strategising, negotiating and fighting to keep this universe safe for humanity, and beyond. Last night, at about 2am, that fight came to a head and I emerged victorious! For now.

I am, of course, talking about Mass Effect 2, my new Favourite Game. I became so absorbed in this epic adventure that now that it’s over, I feel slightly without purpose. To be melodramatic, that is.

A massive fan of the original Mass Effect, my late attempt of the sequel was down to my need to contrive a perfect play through to carry into the next game. You see, in the Mass Effect universe, decisions matter. Even small ones. I able to carry my Commander Shepard from the first game over into Mass Effect 2, where she could face the consequences of all her choices. The characters are so engaging that you really do get sucked into that world, with her. In this game (as with the original) I found myself agonising over seemingly insignificant dialogue choices, and second guessing mission resolutions. And by the time the final mission came I could feel my heart in my chest as I watched a band of characters I’d come to love march towards possible doom from which they would not recover. There comes a point that every member of your squad can die a sort of Final Death, which removes them from your team list permanently, and will render them unusable for Mass Effect 3 (or so I assume). Since the days a certain Final Fantasy 7 character’s abrupt demise left me heartbroken, I’ve been aware of how video games can manipulate our emotional attachment to our characters in order to pull the rug from under us, but I can’t recall a game where I’ve allowed myself to invest quite this much. Indeed, the ‘romance’ plotlines allowed between Shepard and certain characters have given me immense amounts of joy. The route I opted for was wonderfully hilarious, awkward, and ultimately very sweet, and I think the word ‘Squee!’ found itself overused on my tweet feed. When you create your character, you become her (or him, though for my money Jennifer Hale is perfection as Shepard). The variety of physical designs offered to your Shepard mean no 2 are the same, to the point where watching someone else on a play through can feel wrong: “who’s that person who has stolen my voice?!” You create her, guide her, and she belongs to you.

I’ll admit I also put off playing the game for a few weeks because I’d heard about a few changes in style and game play which I was unsure about. I’m more of an RPGer than an FPSer, and the original game combined aspects from both to what I felt was great effect. In Mass Effect 2, however, the RPG mechanisms of the game are more subtly integrated, and to me if felt like more of a shooter (though an avid FPSer may not share this view). They are still there in abundance, but the levelling and power systems, as well as the combat controls, feel like a more traditional shooter to me. And yet, it works. Brilliantly. This game has the most enjoyable combat I’ve experienced in a long time. True, there are some button discrepancies which take some getting used to (A is sprint, duck and cover, and climb. You do not want to climb when you should be ducking!) But those are minor niggles. The game play interacts with the storytelling in a way which gets you fully invested in every battle you become involved in. Other RPG elements which are gone from the first game are the ‘world map’ method of exploration. No more must you drive that damn Mako all over the show in a quest for treasures and sub quests (though I confess, I didn’t totally dislike that part of the game; it was just very slow). Now, such things are found by probing planets from orbit. This ‘mining’ activity (probing to find necessary minerals for upgrades) seems to have irked a lot of gamers, but having come straight off the original game, it is a definite improvement.

Anyone who knows me well, or has been following my twitter might say I have become too invested in this game. It is just a game, for goodness sake. It doesn’t quite have the ‘once you make a choice you can’t undo it’ urgency of Heavy Rain: reloading is always an option. And maybe upon reflection, the overall story arc is nothing new to the space adventure genre, but it’s the way this story is told – great writing, awesome voice acting, spectacular game play all contribute to taking an epic event and centring it on characters you really come to care about, then giving you control over their fate. A fate which will (again, we imagine) continue onwards into Mass Effect 3, and where the consequences of your actions will become more apparent. Despite clocking in with an excess of 30 hours game play (I clocked 43 this time), I think people will be playing and replaying in preparation for that perfect setup for the third and final chapter of this series.

Did I get a perfect play through? Almost. One minor character put a snag in my plans, much to my dismay. Beating the game was a bittersweet moment as a result, but no matter.

Import. Load. Start again.