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If I Can't Play It, I'll Write About It

I took today off so I could play Mass Effect Andromeda.  After going to see Get Out, which is an awesome movie worthy of the praise it gets, I got home and tried to play some.  Turn the Xbox on and find out that Xbox Live is down.  Of course the game requires an online connection so that means I can't play it at all.  Hooray for technology.

Now I've already played some, and while the critical feedback on the game is meh, I still in enjoy what I've played.  But I'm not going to talk about the new Mass Effect, I'm going to talk about the old Mass Effect games.  Games that are regarded much higher than the new one.

So, the Mass Effect trilogy (1-3) are some of my favorite games.  Mass Effect 1 had the best story.  Mass Effect 2 had the best characters. And Mass Effect 3, well, it played probably the best and it wasn't that bad.

There are a lot great things about the series.  Your choices do matter at times, not so much at the end of ME3 though.  The game is rather epic in scope and I'm one that loves both space and exploration so they all hit that really well.  One thing that they also do is your character can have relationships with the NPC characters, ranging from just talks to doing the digital nasty if you play your cards right.

In the first game I ended up with Ashley (sorry Kaidan your death was necessary).  But that relationship didn't really go that far after the first game.  The second game introduced a new set of characters for the player to romance.  Some returning characters from the first game and some new ones.

The main new interest was Miranda, played by Yvonne Strzechowski from Chuck and Dexter, and she was ok.  To me though the only option was Jack.  She was the bad ass biotic character that had a troubled and tortured past.  Easily put, she had issues.

To me she was the most real of all the characters.  Her character was well written and played out.  It also helped that in the actual gameplay of the game, she was an easiest choice to have in your party as she was super powerful. 

But unlike most of the romances where the end of the line is you end up banging, Jack's played out differently.  It never happens.  Sure there is a bit of a makeout session on a bed (cause video games yo), but that's it.  It ends with the two just lying in bed next to each other.  All the things that lead up to this are Jack telling you more about her past and basically confiding in you.

Mass Effect 3 kind of ruins things in that before the DLC came out, there was very little with Jack.  You could decide to stay in the relationship with her, but there isn't much in the base game.  They add more in DLC, but I was done before any of that ever came out.  At some point I'll get to it, but that's a ways away.

They're video games, but allowing people to have relationships is always an interesting thing to add to a game.  There are some games that are solely based on relationships.  And most of the games and Mass Effect to some extent, the end goal is always the same thing.  For one character at least in the series, there was no real "end goal".  You were just there to get to know and get close to a person that you found interesting.  A true accomplishment for a game, where most other ways tends to kind of go for the other end of things.

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