Here I am, 6 hours into Mass Effect.
Mass Effect is basically a gigantic sci-fi epic in video game format. There’s action, but there’s also a ton of talking between characters and backstory.
My god, the backstory.
There is literally a page of text for every single available weapon in the game. For a gun! I mean, I pretty much get what a gun is, but somehow they still find a way to create a page of text explaining the history of this gun and where it’s made and who invented it and why his widow’s house is haunted and so on.
So once you throw in spaceships, scientific discoveries, alien races, and a political scene that I still don’t quite comprehend…well, you can understand, at least in terms of time spent, why I had to turn up the volume on the historical narration while taking a shit in the nearby bathroom just so I could multitask and learn what the hell a Krogan is and what is wrong with their sperm (not kidding).
I’m totally fine with this. What the hell? I’m into a richer, more developed world. I can dig that. I got plenty of shits to take, time to kill.
The problem for me comes when someone is putting me at the forefront of intergalactic politics and I’m not even sure how to jump or whether I’m even physically capable of doing so.
You play a guy, Commander Shepherd. Now you don’t play exactly the same Shepherd that everyone else plays because you can somewhat customize your backstory, which gives you different options. You can also customize Shepherd’s appearance. It’s telling that I tried to imagine what exactly I thought I might look like in 20 years or so, and that the result was something I can only describe as Popeye in the middle of recovery from a very serious alcohol problem. I mean, the guy is ugly to the point where I find it a little distracting. I guess he’s talking to weird aliens, so their standards of beauty may be completely unrelated to the human standard, but at this point I’m a little concerned that I may have preemptively closed the door on any potential romantic subplots. As did whoever created the abomination above.
Anyway, what’s weird to me about 6 hours in is that you have to spend a lot of time getting back story. I think I’ve asked 50 people “What can you tell me about [robotic alien race]?”
Now, if there were somewhere around a dozen alien races in my real life, I’m pretty sure that I would take the time to familiarize myself with the bulk of them, at least on a cursory level. Sure, I probably would struggle if you asked me to tell you much about the Laotian people, but I could take a stab. And they don’t have completely different physical structures and appearances that resulted in intergalactic conflict. As far as I know. Again, my knowledge here is limited.
So walking around asking everyone about everything, I keep feeling like someone is going to snap and say, “What the fuck? How are you a captain of a ship and you don’t even know where you are or where you’re going or what a Quarian is?”
There was one awkward conversation with a pilot, I believe voiced by Seth Green, who apparently has the same bone disease as Samuel L. Jackson in Unbreakable where thinking about his bones causes them to shatter in a million pieces. He’s overcome his setbacks to pilot spaceships, however he doesn’t take kindly to someone asking, “Wait, there’s a disease that causes your bones to disintegrate? Tell me more.”
Maybe this is something people in this society know, in which case I’m being an asshole and violating their mores terribly and for which I ‘pologize. But in the game, you’re basically a newborn baby…who is also a war veteran.
There’s a real divide between what’s happening in the game and what’s happening between the player and the game. It’s almost like you’re in disguise, hoping that no one will find out that you don’t know shit, which kind of plays into my personal anxieties a little more than I would like.
While we’re on the topic of people-pleasing, lots of unreasonable requests from people, which is terrible if you’re someone who hates to think that there’s someone out there who doesn’t like you. So sure, I’ll ask some guy I don’t know, on the behalf of someone else I don’t know, if it’d be cool to recover his dead wife’s body from a research facility.
You get conversation options, but they kind of end with either, “I’ll see what I can do” or “Fuck you and your dumb dead wife’s corpse, you piece of shit.” I’m really more in the market for something like, “Huh, that’s really something. Well, as you can see by the weird aliens with guns behind me, we were just on our way somewhere, but good luck with that wife corpse thing.”
So between worrying about being outed as a total fraud, being disliked by total strangers, and feeling that time will be very unkind to a face already molded by some kind of cruel something, I have to say this game is really playing to my fears nicely.
Oh, and fuck this stupid car.
Seriously, fuck this thing. Hard to steer, impossible to use the guns. I don’t think there are even bullets in the mounted machine gun. I think it just makes a noise. I have better luck driving to a bad guy, getting out and using the car as cover, shooting the bad guy, and getting back in. So it’s like driving around a large wall that I can get behind when necessary. Hooray the Future.