Entry #4 Mass Effect Trilogy

 Welcome Aboard the Normandy!

Image Source by ChristianaT via Pixabay

Just this past weekend, I finished a playthrough of the Mass Effect trilogy, and I would like to review my experience playing and what I thought about the nearly decade-old game. If you are unfamiliar with the Mass Effect games, it is a video game based in the distant future in the Milky Way galaxy where you play as a human, Commander Shepard, in the earth’s military forces. Due to a series of events, you must work with other alien races to save the galaxy from the trilogy’s villains, whose goal is to eradicate the human and alien races. The Mass Effect trilogy, which was first released in 2007 and then remastered in 2021, is a third-person shooter game that has roleplaying elements where your relationships with the other characters are important and entangled with the main storyline. I would like to go over aspects of the games that I liked and disliked; maybe at the end of this blog, you may decide to give it a try or another try if you have already played it. 

Aspects I liked 

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While I admit that when I first started playing the trilogy, it took a while to capture my interest, as I continued playing, I became enraptured by the storytelling aspects and the focus the game placed on the relationships. In these games, you are Commander Shepard, which means you must make decisions that can have a lasting impact on the story throughout all three games. The relationships you have with the other characters also affect your playthrough, whether for good or bad. 

Although these aspects make the game feel more meaningful and allow endless replayability, I am a bit biased because I enjoy choice-driven games. Choice-driven games have a way of being able to pull you into the world that is being created and make the choices feel momentous to the player. The version of the game I played was the Mass Effect Legendary Edition. I was able to import the character I made from the first game throughout the others, and all the choices I had previously made were also carried over. 

Another aspect of the game that I enjoyed was the focus it placed on your relationships with other characters. Your relationships with your crewmates also affect the main storyline and the characters themselves. The fate of the other characters at the end of the trilogy depends on the choices made throughout the game. The main character, the player-controlled character, and the crewmates may even meet tragic ends, depending on the choices previously made. 

Aspects I disliked 

On the other hand, there were elements of the game I did not enjoy, those being that the controls for each game were changing and some of the choices were phrased differently than what the main character said when chosen. It felt like the controls were changing every game; after you got used to the controls in the first game, they changed in the second, and so on. The changes made the game feel a bit off-balance and disorientating during the change from the first game to the second game. In the first and second games, the choices were often not very clear about what would be said if you chose that option. These elements made my gaming experience feel odd and unenjoyable at times. 

Final Thoughts 

To conclude my review of the Mass Effect trilogy, the aspects of the game I enjoyed were the storytelling elements the game made by having the player make important decisions throughout the games and the emphasis that was placed on relationships with the characters within the game. The aspects of the game I disliked were the controls changing every game, and the choices were not always clear in meaning. I would love to know if you have played this trilogy before and your thoughts on it; did you agree or disagree with my review? If not, I hope this will help you decide to give the game a chance!