Welcome to Late to the Party — EndSights.com’s look to past games that we didn’t quite finish. We’ll be looking in-depth at some of the most beloved franchises and games that we are ashamed to admit that we have not completed. Enjoy!

[Editor's Note: This article has many spoilers. If you'd rather not get Mass Effect spoiled, beat the game and then read the article.]

BioWare’s Mass Effect came out in November 2007, but it wasn’t until last weekend – a full 19 months after its release — when I finally finished the game. You see, I have quite the checkered history with the sci-fi RPG. I purchased Mass Effect shortly after the game released, highly anticipating my next BioWare adventure. Having played some of their previous work a couple years prior, most notably Jade Empire and Knights of the Old Republic, I was pumped to get my hands on the game. As I was playing, everything seemed to be going pretty well. That is, until I hit Noveria. For whatever reason, the Matriarch Benezia battle game me an extreme amount of trouble. When I did finally defeat her, I forgot to save, died soon after fighting the Rachni in one of the labs, and was transported back to the battle, where I again struggled to defeat her.

Having defeated her the second time (and this time, remembering to save), I finished Noveria. But instead of continuing onto Feros, the experience soured me on the rest of the game. Why wasn’t there an auto-save directly after a major confrontation with a boss character? Why should I have to jump out of the experience, fiddle through the menus and save? Eventually, I ended up selling the 360 version, buying the PC version and subsequently completing ignoring that I owned the game, and then repurchasing a 360 copy after I heard about the ability to import your Mass Effect character into the game’s sequel.

This time, I wasn’t going to let my pet peeves ruin the game. I would finish it.

After running through the Eden Prime mission and landing on the Citadel, my first order of business was to attempt to complete as many side missions as I possibly could. This would be my guiding philosophy throughout the entire experience – for one, I wanted to attempt to get any background information on the world in an attempt to enrich the main storyline. Secondly, I wanted the added experience from the quests and enemies I would complete and kill, in the hope that the fateful Benezia battle would be much easier for me to complete without getting frustrated. While I did complete a large majority of side missions, I was disappointed at a number of things in their design. The first is a common complaint among most Mass Effect players – the side planets are boring husks.

When you pull up the mini-map on these side planets, you’ll be given a number of markings to signify different points of interest. They usually come in three different varieties – debris, anomalies, and then your actual quest objective points, which will be some form of a building. The debris and anomalies are always throw-away fetch quest missions—you’ll receive writings from an Asari matriarch that (to my knowledge) you cannot read, Turian insignias, and other additional worthless items. Sadly, between the matriarch writings, insignias, metals and gasses, I did not manage to complete a single one of these “assignments”, so I cannot actually respond if they had any meaningful payoff. My gut tells me that there wasn’t.

The actual objectives points aren’t always a whole heck of a lot better. Most of the building interiors are re-used art and design assets, which really sucks any sense of discovery from the side missions. These missions also usually take on the same properties and are devoid of variety – go through a couple doors, then the third door you’ll face a group of enemies in one main, big room, kill said enemies, go in the back of the building structure and interact with a character or object of interest, and then leave. These side stories generally do not add a whole lot to any of the main characters or to the universe, with a couple of exceptions. There are side missions that I undertook that were specifically geared toward my main two squad members – Wrex and Garrus. The Wrex mission, for example, had me retrieve his family armor that was taken from him, while the Garrus mission sent me after a doctor that he was investigating back when he was with C-Sec for harvesting organs. These missions were too far and too few, sadly. Many of them would have you investigating whether or not an individual was dead or not, (which they were, every time) taking out rogue characters from the galaxy, or some other menial task.

The different side planet design didn’t help matters, either. As I said before, there are only a handle of things within these side planets that are interactive. Outside of that, the planets are completely barren of anything interesting to look at or explore. Most are mountainous deserts, devoid of personality or defining traits. Admittedly, there are a good number of planets in the game for you to explore, but I think that Mass Effect’s side planets are a prime example of why quality trumps quantity. Why recycle art assets to send players through the same tasks (with slight alterations)? Why create a planet when you cannot inhabit it with interesting story arches and characters? If BioWare doesn’t care about it, why should I?

Another thing that bugged me about the side missions was the descriptions of the different planets. The descriptions focused too heavily on the geological composition of the planet, and less about the history of the planet in regards to the different life forms in the galaxy. Again, it comes back to the side mission point: If BioWare cannot come up with something better than the planet having traces of argon in the atmosphere, why should players want to get invested into that part of the universe? The only planets that got any sort of proper descriptions were the main planets of Ilos, Noveria, Feros and Virmire, and at times, the side planets where you could land and explore.

After I was satisfied that I had exhausted my side mission options and started on the main quest, I started to really get into the character interaction, which is arguably where BioWare succeeds the most in this and their other games. BioWare has a knack for creating some really distinct and memorable characters, and with individuals like Wrex, Liara, Garrus and Ashley, they did not lose their touch. In between most missions I was able to interact with at least one of these characters and get to know them and their race a little bit better. These interactions yielded a lot more than I expected in terms of connecting me to the world and these different characters – much more than the entirety of the side missions combined. I got to learn about their family histories – Wrex killing his father, Ashley fighting in the Alliance fleet to try and clear up her family name, (her grandfather surrendered his ship when he was in the military) why Garrus was in C-Sec, and Liara’s reclusive personality traits. Of course, there were other characters that you could interact with – Tali and Kaiden – but I found these characters to be somewhat limited in my playthrough. Perhaps if I added them to my squad, it would have opened up more about them?

I was slightly disappointed that there was not more about Wrex, Liara, Ashley and Garrus to explore. It’s not actually a negative comment to make, because there was plenty included in the game itself, but the characters were so interesting to interact and get to know that I felt compelled to constantly go around the Normandy after every mission was complete, with the hopes that I’d be able to learn something new from these characters.

One thing that did stick out like a sore thumb is the character interaction wheel. While it was brilliant in its conceptual design — replacing the full text of what your character would say with neat phrases or states of thought — the implementation of moral choices via the wheel was awfully contrived. If memory serves me correctly, this is the same approach that BioWare has had for some years – the top speech choice is the “good” choice, the middle being neutral, and the bottom one being the “evil” choice. Making binary choices in games has become more and more chic, but I’m not sure this approach is the right way to go about it. I believe in moral ambiguity – I don’t believe that there is necessarily a hard and straight “right” and “wrong”. Yet, in Mass Effect, BioWare seems to force moral certainty on everyone vis-a-vis the tremendous gap between the “good” and “evil” choices. I defined this about a year ago in an editorial, and I think it states the dichotomy quite well:

“Unlike my Puritan brethren, I don’t believe in the concept of Original Sin. The vast majority of human beings are peaceful, decent human beings. If you accept that, then what rational, decent human being would make the moral choice to be the evil, dark caricature that [Mass Effect] portrayed? Discounting people that are simply role-playing the evil side to see how the game ends, no one chose the evil path with conviction that they were doing what they believed was right. Because of this, the “moral decisions” that gamers had to make in these games were akin to choosing between the evil, handlebar-mustached desperado that tied up the damsel in distress to the railroad tracks, or the handsome, kind-hearted cowboy that saved the girl, killed the bad guy and got Ms. Distressed in the sack.”

Despite this, BioWare did have at least a couple of decisions that were impactful but weren’t as cut and dry. Two of these decisions are made on Virmire, the first being what to do with Wrex. When he finds out that Saren has discovered a cure for the genophage, he seems uncooperative at first – this cure would save his race from certain extinction. When you confront him, he pulls his gun out on you. Do you engage? Do you try to reason with him? In the back of your mind, you’re asking yourself if this guy will stop you from your mission of stopping Saren, but at the same time, could you really blame him for attempting to prevent the extinction of his race? Another decision you have to make on Virmire is to save Kaiden or Ashley. The two are both pinned down and under heavy enemy fire. You only have time to save one of them – which one do you choose? Because my only interaction with these characters were in between missions, I went with the character I had the most affection for, and that was Ashley. It wasn’t the most revolutionary decision idea ever, but it was effective in its execution and at the very least broke BioWare out of its stark moral binary approach for a moment.

I have spent an extraordinary amount of time on the more ancillary bits of Mass Effect, but the main story is really the bread and butter of what makes Mass Effect tick. Each of the areas has something unique to offer from a narrative aspect. Feros introduces you to the Thorian controlled colonists, Noveria to secretive corporate thugs, Ilos to the last remnants of the Protheans, and Virmire to the Reapers. I think the real treat, however, was experiencing the Citadel, and the mystery behind the structure. When you first arrive, it is instantly the most gorgeous place you’ve visited in the game up into that point, and it was not surpassed after I completed the game. I was not prepared for how attached I was to the Citadel and its individual parts until the attack by the Geth and Sovereign ripped the living hell out of it. Seeing the Citadel in ruins, and the subsequent fighting on the outside of the Citadel Tower were some of the highest quality gameplay and experiential moments Mass Effect had to offer. During that time I forgot that my AI tag-team of Wrex and Garrus were glorified damage sponges who rarely followed commands, and just enjoyed the movement from cover to cover with Shepard, taking out the Geth and with deft shotgun blasts. The idea of fighting on the outside of the Citadel Tower is brilliant in and of itself, but the inspired design was impressive and showed that perhaps BioWare was the company to do a true shooter/RPG hybrid — even if the prior content in Mass Effect still revealed a number of kinks that needed to be ironed out.

After stopping Saren from allowing the Reapers to destroy the Citadel, I was faced with a couple more choices. First, do you send the Alliance fleet that came to support the defense of the Citadel to attack Sovereign, the enormous Reaper? Or do you first divert them to save the Citadel Council? The choice is somewhat ruined by BioWare’s decision tree – saving the Citadel council was deemed the “good” thing to do, while directly attacking Sovereign being the bad thing to do. I think this decision was a missed opportunity by BioWare – by putting the decision within the confines of their good, neutral, and evil decision wheel, they have pre-judged what could have been an ambiguous choice. The Citadel Council members did not believe you about Saren, the Reapers, and question your decision making after they made you a Spectre. In addition, saving them might have proven to be a costly tactical mistake and allow the Reaper to wipe out the entire combined Citadel fleet. But, because it was deemed the “good” choice, I decided to simply go with that, because I figured everything would work out better because of it.

Of course, it did. The Council was saved, Sovereign was defeated and humans were offered a seat on the Citadel Council. Another decision must be made at that point, and it’s not moral binary choice, but it’s definitely one of the easiest decisions you must make – Who to put on the Citadel Council? Your mentor, Captain Anderson; or Ambassador Udina, who kept your ship grounded when you were attempting to stop Saren at Ilos. If anyone chose Udina and felt it was honestly the right decision, they must have been sleepwalking through the entire game.

There could be plenty more for me to talk about—the music, the graphical pop-ins, the ins and outs of the gameplay system, equipment management, alien character design, and more.

That’s for you to continue in the comments section—what was your opinion on what Mass Effect did well and what it could have improved on?