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thebakedbeans · 7 years

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Mass Effect Narrative Review

And here’s the second narrative review I promised. This time I’m going to talk about Mass Effect, the trilogy not Andromeda. I also realize that these are more of rambling thoughts than reviews. So eventually I’ll need to call them something different.

I’d like to not talk about the ending though. There’s tons of articles and videos out there already talking about it and anything I have to say wouldn’t be anything new. Instead I’d like to talk about some stuff the trilogy did right. Let’s just jump right in and start with the first aspect that comes to mind: Shepherd’s party.

You get a lot of different party members in a lot of different games. But Mass Effect is one of the first games where the members really mattered to me. They all come with really well defined personalities as opposed to the standard tropes of what makes up a party (except for Kaiden, that dude is cookie cutter boring). Granted there are SOME tropes but I think the game for the most part does a good job of fleshing out organic characters with actual personalities as opposed to the routine values and responses you could expect.

One way it does this is by allowing you to talk to them as people with different attitudes and beliefs. They have different aspects to them that make them seem more human. For example, Ashley seems like the typical soldier. Comes from a long line of them, values family and unity. But then as the games progress you get to see that she believes in a higher power, support humanity’s self reliance, and that the army discriminates against her family b/c her grandfather was the first general to surrender to alien forces; so she works twice as hard as anyone else to improve. Those last two traits might be connected as she wants humanity to be only beholden to itself as her ancestor’s experience with aliens has been a negative one. Now I’m not saying these are well defined traits, but they’re enough to make her seem like an actual person. Someone with memories, thoughts, feelings. She seems like more than just the typical trope of a tough as nails soldier who follows orders and had a gruff exterior. Ashley might have those traits, but they’re not all that she is. That’s what makes personifies her and fleshes her out.

I’ll cite another example, Mordin Solus. At a quick glance, he seems like the typical run of the mill smart talking scientist. The type of person that then they speak, everyone else gets lost and asks them to repeat what they said. But after talking to Mordin and learning about him Shepherd learns more. Mordin is a great singer, and the type of guy to focus on the ends more than the means; but is also a deeply regretful man. Mordin has taken some real fucked up things in his past. Though he understands his actions were necessary, however still mourns the fact that it happened at all. Eventually he starts a clinic to heal the plagued, but still retains his do what is necessary outlook; dude kills some local gang members and leaves their bodies outside his clinic as a message. Shepard can even ask him about killing to which Mordin will reply something along the lines of healing people and killing people can both be helpful. It all fleshes out his character and changes him from the “scientist” into just another member of the crew with their own unique disposition.

The reason I bring all this up is because losing these companions is one hell of a blow to both the player and Shepherd. When I mention mechanics supporting narrative this is what I mean.

In the 3rd game, Mordin is going to die. It is preventable, but for the most players Mordin dies. Depending on what you said to him earlier, he might even sing a song that he sang for Shepherd in the previous game. That shit destroyed me. But it’s great to know that the pain that was felt by me as a player was echoed by Shepherd the character. After the mission people will all give their condolences and Shepherd will respond accordingly, but it was a poignant moment where I felt like I was fully synced up to what Shepherd was saying and feeling...utter devastation at the lost of my friend.

It happens again with Thane. The ill, dying assassin Shepard meets in the 2nd game. I helped that man reconnect with his son. Then in the third game that same son is with his father in the hospital donating blood so that his father can live. Seeing him there makes Thane feel all the more real as there were actual consequences and outcomes that occur from previous actions. Many games have characters go through arcs, but even if they learn in that arc they don’t really grow after it’s over. Thane does, he becomes loyal to Shepard. Which I choose to understand as him fighting that much harder and with more unity than otherwise because of the respect that Shepard earned from him.

And of course come the 3rd game Thane died on me. In this game his illness has progressed to the point where he needs to be hospitalized. But his last act is a heroic one, and I’d still like to think it was out of loyalty to Shepard (assuming you earned it in the previous game). As he lays on his deathbed his son reads a prayer. Thane was always a religious man so it befits him. Turns out though that the prayer was not intended for Thane, but for Shepard. There’s a line in the prayer that reads “and he/she will be a companion to you as he/she was to me”; and I remember putting Thane is my party all those times, levelling him up, using his skills. He was a companion to me indeed. That was the first time a game made me tear up. I was going to miss my companion. To me it was more than losing just a video game character, it was losing a friend.

You might think that I’m reading too much into the game or giving it too much weight. But I think Mass Effect gave the characters enough personality and vibrance to make their loss have actual meaning behind it. Other mediums do this all the time, and I see no reason why games would be any different. The narrative of the game has just as much an effect on me as any other story. The exception is that I am way more involved in Mass Effect’s story than many others as I have direct involvement in the lives of the characters. So to lose one, means I took an action that led to their death; in a way you could say that I played a large role in all my companion’s deaths. That weight is great though, like a compelling tragedy, the emotional pain makes the narrative that much sweeter.

Now I’d really like to emphasize how much effort Bioware put into the characters in Shepard’s crew. For almost every single person, I can answer the question “What do they do when they’re not on the job?”. Because for a lot of other character for a lot of other games that question remains unanswered. I literally have no idea what Fawkes from Fallout 3 does when he’s not following me. However I do know that James Vega works out and cooks food when he’s not on mission. Tali helps the helps run the ship’s systems on the Engineering deck. Samara does her weird biotic meditation. The fact that I can answer this question means there’s enough internal logic behind the people to make their actions and by extension themselves seem real. Their world does not revolve around Shepard’s, just like how my friends and family’s lives don’t revolve around me. Therefore I would treat them like I would treat any other person. And the more I treat them like real people the better my interactions with them become, then I’ll actually end up liking most companions; Shepard’s team feels like a real team to me because I know these people so well and what they can/can’t do.

The second point I wanted to bring up was the continuous narrative between games. Yes, there’s a lot of gripe about how the endings didn’t take into consideration your past actions. But there is still a fair amount of content that depends on previous events. Even if it equates to a mere war score number, playing the first game all over again really does make me ponder some more choices.

For an example, at the end of the first game Shepard has to make a major decision regarding the fate of the Citadel Council. Whether to spend resources to save them and the ship they’re on, or save those resources and let them die. If you haven’t played the sequels then the choice seems pretty black and white. You pick the option that agrees with your paragon/renegade status. But I went back and played all 3 games again. This time thinking “if I were Shepard, what would be the best decision?”. The answer I arrived at is that the best decision is the one that helps to stop the reaper invasion. So even if I’m paragon, maybe it’s better to let the council die so that the resources that would’ve been used to save them can be used to stop the actual reaper invasion once it happens. Turns out that that’s true in the third game if you played as I did, and I was able to use those resources in the final battle instead of wasting them in the first game.

That’s a real consequence for your action. Some may say that a war score number is a shallow way of conveying that action; but remember way back when I said that I enjoy games where the gameplay mechanics support the narrative? Well now it’s time to discuss that in more detail.

Overall I don’t think war score is a bad mechanic. In the end everything Shepard does is to stop the Reapers. A war score number is a metric to see what his past actions have done towards this goal. A short term and impulsive Shepard will have a very low war score as they should, and a Shepard that has thought through each choice will have a higher score. It ties a tangible mechanic to the narrative path that the player chose. So all the narrative that follows is because of the mechanics that created that outcome; and those mechanics themselves were created because of the previous narrative events that happened before. It’s like a cycle that runs on the player’s choices.

Not the most elegant method for sure, but it does the trick. The gameplay ends up reflecting what the player is doing. Which is really a huge part in what I look for in a strong narrative. Games like Fallout 3 or Fable don’t really change the way they play based off the narrative. In those games some people might like you and others won’t due to your morality. There’s never a point where the player doesn’t get to experience a huge chunk of content or entire groups of significant people might not be there because of what the player did (yes you can argue Metaton won’t be there if you blow it up, but there’s about 2 significant characters in the whole town and one of them still survives). Few games can match that level of narrative exclusivity.

It also makes each player’s experience unique. One player’s army may not be the exact same as another player’s. Sure there might be some strong similarities, but depending on previous actions there can be huge differences too. Saving Wrex means that the Krogan won’t be complete assholes, and killing him/letting him die means that the galaxy is real hesitant and untrusting of the Krogan. That’s a massive dichotomy that rests on a scene that spans less than 5 minutes. Again, serving as a reminder that what you do in each game affects the others down the road. It’s the whole butterfly flapping its wings type of thing. The galaxy’s attitude towards the Krogan depends on that one part in the first game, so fucking that part up can ruin the Krogan as a whole.

This type of storytelling lends a sort of permanence to the overall narrative and game feel. Mass Effect does have an edge though in that it was created with multiple games in mind so it can stretch the end results over a longer period; But I think the result is still strong, even with the ending controversy. The realness of the characters couples with the responsibility behind each move you take means that the trilogy really does have mechanical support for the story and emotional weight rivaling any other story from games, movies, books, etc. Hell I’d go so far as to say it’s pioneering better stories for games. Think about how many games now have decisions carry over from previous titles. Not saying Mass Effect was the first to do this, but it certainly is one of the most famous; and if we have more games that can do this or similar stuff, then I think we’re going in a great direction.

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