Friendly fire inbound. Screenshot: BioWare / Kotaku
If you have a friend or significant other in your life who won’t shut up about how they’re on their umpteenth playthrough of the Mass Effect series, chances are you’ve slipped up and said something you probably shouldn’t have, possibly even questioning their love of BioWare’s space opera.
With an upcoming entry in the Mass Effect series that features fan-favorite squadmate Liara T’soni (and the possible return of Commander Shepard) hanging over the head of the Mass Effect fandom, here are some things you probably shouldn’t say to fans if you don’t want their morality alignment to plunge from Paragon to Renegade.
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Garrus is the Mass Effect community’s collective baby. They love him. They will die for him. They will kill for him. But they also don’t like being reminded that Garrus has the same arc for the first two games and was one of the least compelling romances in Mass Effect 2. His romance is basically a bit that gets stretched out into a booty call right before the final mission.
In theory, Garrus and Shepard’s shared history should lend itself to one of the better romances in ME2, but that game, broadly, has problems making all its relationships feel as substantial as its predecessor and especially its sequel do. But it’s mostly just jokes about “reach,” “flexibility,” and pushing him toward either a Paragon or Renegade conclusion. Just like you did in ME1. But man, Garrus is a standout in Mass Effect 3. That’s the version of the character people remember. Shepard’s confidant, their right hand, and his swagger and lack thereof gives you emotional whiplash in the best kind of way. He rules. Eventually. But don’t tell anyone that if their favorite cop turned war hero is pretty boring in the beginning. — Kenneth Shepard
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Anyone who tries to tell you that Andromeda is just universally worse than BioWare’s original trilogy is wrong, but don’t tell them that. Because Andromeda was a glitch-ridden, poorly structured, open-world sludge of a game, it feels like some folks want to sweep its accomplishments under the rug. The verticality and freedom in its combat are unmatched, its relationships got off to a much better start than the original trilogy’s, and its party-wide banter and storylines were worlds apart (literally) from how the characters of the trilogy felt like they lived on islands until Mass Effect 3.
While it certainly had its issues, Andromeda put forth a lot of strong starts that felt more forward-thinking than the original Mass Effect did. Too bad it’s unclear if we’re getting a sequel to its story, with the fifth game seemingly going back to the Milky Way. Pain. — Kenneth Shepard
It must be fascinating walking through life being so blissfully unaware of how wrong you are. Yes, Kai Leng is voiced by Troy Baker, an admittedly cool-seeming guy despite being occasionally misguided in his earnestness to be a storyteller, but Kai Leng’s brand of being a cyber ninja clashes with the tone. He’s a dork, an edgy mess of a man whose motivations are so painfully transparent and simplistic that not even the Shadowbroker would waste her computer’s RAM keeping a tab open with his whereabouts. Unlike most of the characters and world-building in Mass Effect, which occasionally reveal fascinating new wrinkles upon a replay, the tale of Kai Leng in Mass Effect 3 doesn’t improve upon repetition.
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The Asari are the Mass Effect equivalent of Star Wars’ Twi’leks, with all the in-universe fetishization that comes along with it. One of the more fascinating aspects about the blue-tiful aliens is that they can mind-meld with any foreign species and use that process to procreate. It’s how they’ve stayed alive for eons. While many Mass Effect players have come to accept the Asari as humanoid space supermodels, their true form might not be as they appear.
If you eavesdrop on a bachelor party on Novaria, you can hear a human, a Turian, and a Salarian debate about why they find the Asari attractive, saying it’s because of how they resemble their own species. This is odd because Turians are basically giant rock birds, and Salarians are gangly gecko-looking dudes. The conversation skirts dangerously close to the possibility that the Asari are mind-controlling other races so that they appear most attractive to them before the group handwaves the notion away to enjoy the merriment of their bachelor party. Personally, I believe Asari are likely weird shape-shifting tentacle monsters, which is fine.
Depending on how levelheaded your resident Mass Effect player is, they might be inclined to agree with this point, especially if they played the trilogy before the release of Mass Effect Legendary Edition. Mass Effect DLC like Arrival is integral to the series’ overall story, which is why it’s so baffling that EA released it all piecemeal with separate price tags from the base game.
While many fans can forgive BioWare for all of Mass Effect’s DLC by virtue of one of them being the beloved Citadel DLC, it’s hard not to find a majority of its additional content being sold at a separate price point as blatantly stingy. Arguably the strangest thing to come out of Mass Effect’s DLC situation was that Javik, the last of the Prothean race and a catalyst for the game’s whole story, was initially released as day-one DLC for Mass Effect 3 rather than being incorporated into the game proper.
Heartbreaking: Ashley Williams, that space-racist literature nerd you let die on Virmire, made a good point about the Citadel race’s stakes in humanity’s concerns. Although Williams is more famously known for making snide remarks about how she can’t tell the difference between the animals and the aliens, deep deep deep within her “spacism” is a kernel of truth about how the intergalactic community will turn its back on the human race when it is in crisis.
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The main crux of Mass Effect 3’s storyline involves Shepard currying favor with other aliens he’s assisted countless times throughout the series to aid Earth in its fight against the Reapers who are destroying his home planet. Instead of just, I don’t know, doing Shepard a solid and throwing Earth a bone in its fight against the giant space lobsters, most of the council races treat the situation as a quid pro quo for him to assist them in their own matters first. This arrangement is made all the worse when you discover that virtually every species is taking advantage of the situation to orchestrate each other’s downfalls behind closed doors.
Congratulations, you just revived a decade-long discourse over one of the most controversial endings in video games. While the mere announcement of “Mass Effect 4” calls into question which of the third game’s multiple endings was “the right call,” claiming that any of its endings are canon is likely to ruffle a few feathers among Mass Effect fans, especially if they’ve already co-opted the idea that the Citadel DLC was the true ending of the trilogy.
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The U.S. Congress may have dropped the bombshell that we may or may not have already encountered alien life, which led to many Mass Effect fans puckering their lips for some alien smooching. But odds are, if we haven’t met alien life by now, we never will. Call me a downer if you want, but they probably wouldn’t come here to bang anyway.
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Some alien race that’s already explored its own solar system and advanced far enough in tech to reach other galaxies like our own is likely on some Viltrumite-type conquest shit either because their own planet is no longer hospitable or they see ours as another prize to claim. So I don’t know about you, but I’d choose to remain hush-hush if what awaited us across the stars was another species with a bigger gun and a hair trigger. On the other hand, even if we do want to discover alien life, we are far from having the necessary technology. So I wouldn’t hold my breath on being able to cuddle a Krogan anytime soon.
Either outcome has kept me up at night for the better part of a week, and I am inconsolable about the fact that I’ll probably never have an Elcor friend or a Turian partner.
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