My Best Friend Is A Talking Pie: Mass Effect

A good action RPG - not quite the same thing as a good adventure RPG; see: Oblivion - is hard to come by. That is to say, there aren't too many of them. Edmonton-based BioWare is not only one of the top-rated companies to work for in Canada, period, but they make darn fine action RPGs, too.

Mass Effect (Xbox 360) is one of those, a more than worthy successor to BioWare's famous Knights of the Old Republic games. With a good enough main story, more side quests that you can shake a stick at (many of them interesting), a great (and very fun) combat engine, an all-around first-rate design and character creation, and one of the best endgames ever, Mass Effect is the best time I've had with an action RPG since, well, Knights of the Old Republic II. You play as Commander Shepard, Alliance Navy, and start the game by selecting not only your combat class (standard-issue for any RPG), but a personal history and psychological profile as well. Those last two affect or govern conversations, dialogue options, and some side quests. You can be a spacer, following your parent's footsteps into the Navy; you can be a colonist who saw your family slaughtered by pirates, or an Earthborn orphan who ran with gangs and joined the Navy young in order to get out of trouble and have a fresh start. For a psych profile, you can be known as a war hero, the sole survivor of a massacre that wiped out your unit, or a ruthless soldier for whom the end always justify the means. Each personal history comes with a unique side quest involving your past, but some profiles, like the sole survivor, overlap with side quests anyone can take. Fun stuff, and it adds a new dimension to the action-RPG world. Obviously, the main quest involves you and the crew of the SSV Normandy saving all organic life in the known universe. Standard, but there's nothing wrong with standard - and this game does standard very well, and throws in enough speedbumps along the way.

Also, Mass Effect feels nice and big. The KotOR games could feel very restrictive at times, and small, but there are very few instances in Mass Effect that remind me it's not a sandbox game. There's plenty to do, and far to travel. It's a far fuller game than KotOR. Scaleable enemies permit you to burn through the main quest in, I don't know, you could probably do it in six hours if that was all you did in the game, but to put things into perspective, I finished my first play at around twenty-one hours...with roughly a fifth of the side quests completed. And those were just the side quests that I'd unlocked in my journal, so there's some nice bang for your buck. Speaking of KotOR, there are also some fun Star Wars references, including your very own Trench Run (Death Star not included), a very familiar-looking maintenance shaft, and a world that bears a striking resemblance to a fleshed-out version of the final planet from the first KotOR game.

My favourite thing about Mass Effect, especially in contrast to KotOR? The Paragon/Renegade scales, and the dialogue options that govern them. In KotOR, the Dark/Light Sides were on the same scale, so you were either one or the other, and if you earned yourself Dark Side points, they'd cancel out an equal number of Light Side points. Plus, the Dark Side dialogue options tended to be brainlessly violent - in other words, not that interesting. That drove Corey nuts, especially in KotOR II where Kreia keeps going on about how the Dark Side is all about subtle manipulation...but none of your dialogue options reflected that scene. In Mass Effect, the Paragon and Renegade points are kept separate, on two different scales, so you can earn both. More reflective of real life, actions that are classified as qualities of a renegade are not necessarily evil; likewise, actions that are classified as qualities of a paragon are not necessarily good. For example, I got Renegade points for encouraging Kaiden's affection, which made me laugh very hard, but which I saluted, because love is good, but romancing a subordinate officer should get you Renegade points! You can also get points in your Charm and Intimidate skills without ever using a level-up, just by getting Paragon and Renegade points in normal conversation - though I wouldn't recommend not putting any points into Charm and Intimidate, as they're actually very useful in this game, and can lead to some great plot twists. Also, Corey's testing out how many points you can get just from your Paragon/Renegade scale, and he currently has a level 37 character...and only three Charm/Intimidate. It's a nice system, leads to some very interesting conversation options, and I salute it.

Which brings us to the dialogue! The conversations of Mass Effect are fully cinematic - I mean fully. You know how an RPG usually involves you selecting a response from a list of text, and an animated character responding cinematically? Mass Effect presents your dialogue options in one- to five-word summaries, and then has them fleshed out by your character talking - carrying on an actual, two-sided conversation. This has its downsides, though; for one thing, the actual dialogue can turn out to be very different from what you thought was meant by the dialogue summary. As well, in what's perhaps the biggest downside of Mass Effect, the game doesn't download conversations to run off your hard drive based on your gender/profile - instead, it caches every conversation. Caches. Every. Conversation. This results in a good deal of slowdown; as well, it's hard on the Xbox - my pleasure derived by playing Mass Effect is tempered by hearing the poor brand-new console grind and labour in ways it doesn't have to with other games. But hey! The script is good, and so are the cinematics, and so is the voice acting! Veteran voice actor Jen Hale (of the Metroid Prime, Soul Calibur, X-Men Legends, and Knights of the Old Republic series, amongst tons else) does the female Shepard; fellow Star Wars alumnus Raphael Sbarge is back as yet another sci-fi love interest, Lt. Kaiden Alenko; Brandon Keener is fantastic as ex-cop Garrus Vakarian, and several members of the Halo trilogy cast round out the main crew. On top of that, you've got several Star Trek veterans, including Marina Siritis (TNG's Counsellor Troi) as a key villain, and plain ol' random "why are you in a game?" actors, like Seth Green (Buffy) as the Normandy's pilot, Joker, and my personal favourite, Lance Henriksen (Aliens) as an off-screen admiral who contacts you for jobs he'd like done in a quiet and sensitive (and potentially lethal) fashion. It's nice work, and I need to be feeling pretty impatient to skip Mass Effect's dialogue. And the character conversations are mostly interesting, as well as the characters themselves. For example, one character has a degenerative physical condition, and is very aggressive about having earned their place on the crew and about the fact that they want no special treatment. The same character also makes wonderfully insubordinate comments after every main quest mission prior to endgame, which suggests that they do in fact coast on the expectation of special treatment - you only get a couple of chances to chew them out for insubordination, once in the very first conversation of the game, and once in your very first informal conversation with that character. Interesting.

There are some very interesting choices in this game, too, enhanced by the fact that the game does not decide whether you've been good or evil. Genuinely interesting questions about the means and the end are raised. You can talk your way out of a fight by convincing your adversary to commit suicide for the greater good - and, if you do it by using the Charm dialogue options, you get Paragon points for it. The moral dilemmas are actually interesting and problematic, as are the politics. Also, in the hour-long endgame, you have several Talking Pie decisions to make, one of which occurs early in endgame and affects your primary crew. If you've seen that classic Simpsons episode with Alec Baldwin and Ron Howard, than you know what kind of decisions I'm talking about. If you haven't seen it, there's a good chance you're also not the sort who's interested in Mass Effect - but if you are, well, I won't tell you what Talking Pie is...you'll just have a nice, stressful little surprise, and wish you'd saved earlier.. :D I chose to do my first play not as Elly playing Mass Effect, but as a real roleplay, modeled on Alien's Ellen Ripley. A true roleplay tends to be more intimate than distancing, and I raised myself a whole slew of questions as I answered every query with, "what would Ripley do?" - because that's the beauty of the roleplay. I'm not doing it, she is. But, I am. All-in-all, as good for introspection as it is fun. Mass Effect as a whole takes video-game roleplaying to a next level, which is great...but it also means things can get wierder than usual. For example, there is an optional romance sub-plot, a normal RPG nicety. It includes the standard military/horror "let's make love tonight, because tomorrow all organic life may be extinct" clause. However, in a game with fully cinematic conversations, that means that you can end up watching your character and chosen love interest Do It...which, depending on your point of view, is either awesome or creepy (I choose creepy). Potentially, this is a very big apology for the forcibly unrequited love from Knight of the Old Republic II - I can't imagine the slew of angry e-mails and porno fanfic that followed that one - however, I suspect that's not the only motivation. As a female character, you can choose bat for the other team with an exotic same-sex alien. Your Normandy's belowdecks are full of speculation as to your sexual preferences, and I had to undergo two separate conversations to convince hetero love-interest Kaiden that I wasn't a lesbian, and you have to confront the alien directly in order for the rumours to cease. Since, if you play as a male character, there's no same-sex option (or rumours) for you, I'm crying foul on some group of developers/programmers/designers shameless use of Mass Effect as an outlet for their girl-on-girl fantasies. It is interesting to note, though, that said exotic female alien is a complete bimbo - for a research scientist, she's amazingly dimwitted, slow, and full of the kind of inane and stupid dialogue that isn't the norm in this game - if her colouring were different, she would be the personification of the Dumb Blonde. So maybe someone on the development end decide to cry foul themselves.

Exploitation and cacheing aside, my only other complaints with Mass Effect would be that there are too many identical side quests involving hitting a planet, driving around, surveying stuff, and killing mercenaries, and that I'm not sold on this game's land vehicle. The Mako is a solid concept, a fully-armored, six-wheel, low-riding rover that is the means by which you're dropped onto planets, but - Corey and I disagree here - I don't find it handles very well. Probably because of its construction and concept, it's far clunkier and less maneuverable than my reference point for sci-fi game land vehicles, Halo's Warthog. It doesn't pull smooth, fast turns like the Warthog, and I like it less overall. Yes, they're very different vehicles in very different settings - the Mako is built for zero-atmosphere, low-gravity engagements. Still. The Warthog has a horn. When the Warthog gets damaged, its horn sounds like a jalopy horn. Warthog wins.

There's far too much good stuff about Mass Effect that the bad stuff can't possibly override. Some may find the combat too easy; personally, I like that. I don't want hard, stressful, adrenaline-filled combat from an action-RPG, I'll go play Halo 3 (thanks, Glenn!) if that's the sensation I'm after. Still, you can beat the game on "Veteran" to unlock "Hardcore", than beat it on "Hardcore" to unlock "Insane", so the options are there if that floats your boat. The assorted engines (combat, dialogue) are great, the plots and characters are interesting, the environments are gorgeous, and the score combining 90's action-movie music with shades of Babylon 5 doesn't hurt either. For an idea of the game's sense of humour, the music on a planet filled with horrible mutants uses sterotype circus music as its base, capitalizing on the general populace's horror of clowns. Mass Effect is a year or so old now, and can be had for under $20 if you shop right. Then, you can play through it with every single profile, do every endgame possible, and use those saves to influence the world of Mass Effect 2, due out...I don't know when. Well, you'll have a lot to keep you busy while waiting.