Cause and Effect

For many years, I stayed well away from Western-developed role-playing games. I grew up with the Nintendo and then later the PlayStation. Most, if not all, of my favorite video games first saw the light of day in Japan. When I got interested in role-playing games, it was titles like Final Fantasy VII, Lunar: Silver Star Story and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue, Breath of Fire and many more that drew me in. These games formed my idea of what it meant to play an RPG. They were tightly controlled games, with a very definite idea of where the story was going, and an equally definite idea of how you were going to get there and who you were going to get there with. There was no deviating from the plot. There might be excursions here and there, little side-quests to help you level up, find extra loot, maybe flesh out a hidden plot point or two, that sort of thing. But in the end, you were going to face the enemy a certain way, and there was no real choice in the matter. Any time something resembling a choice was presented, it was patently false. You hade two choices: You can say “Yes” and go save the princess, or you can say “No” and be told why you’re a terrible person before being presented with the “choice” once more.

I’m not saying this was right or wrong. It is simply what I was used to. I was so used to it, in fact, that it became part of what kept me away from Western RPGs. I was used to that linearity, that completely scripted narrative. Without the usual succession of kings and queens and helpful old men in caves telling me where to go next and who to kill once I arrived, I felt sure I’d be lost.

Then Mass Effect came along.

The first time I played it was at a friend’s house on the Xbox 360. I wasn’t really sure what I was playing at first. It looked interesting – the technology was sleek and sharp-looking, and the environment of the opening area was intriguingly natural – but then, it was bound to look interesting. This was also one of the first current-generation console games I’d seen up close and personal. There seemed to be RPG elements to the game, but this was hardly new, or interesting. I’d been seeing “RPG Elements!” or something similar as a bullet-point in box copy for years at this point. It was becoming difficult to find a game that didn’t have some form of character progression system in place. As ubiquitous as RPG elements were, you might as well also say “Has graphics!” or “Includes sounds!” to help differentiate one game from others.

When I finally got a decent gaming-capable desktop PC some years later, I was browsing Steam when the game came up on sale for $19.99. And I thought, why not? If my PC can run Crysis, it can probably run pretty much anything, up to a certain point. So I bought the game and downloaded it, went with a generic male Shepard with the default face (not wanting to deal with the character creation system very much), and clicked through the part where I was supposed to select my Shepard’s background and skillset before I realized quite what I was doing.

Then I was in the game, and it didn’t matter.

There’s a lot I could probably say about the gameplay, but that’s pretty well been taken care of by this point, I think. The mechanics of Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 have been dissected in detail, to varying degrees of finesse, by people who have made it their professional business to opine about video games far longer than I ever considered doing it. Suffice it to say that much running around and shooting things from cover is done, in between bouts of talking to people to gather information about what’s happening and how one might proceed.

I will take a moment to point out that BioWare, Mass Effect’s makers, have done something unusual these days in making Mass Effect 2 such a different game, mechanically speaking, than its predecessor. Oh, the two are pretty similar, but Mass Effect 2 ditches a lot of the party member customization options. It lets you control which skills your non-Shepard party members develop, but it lets them determine their weapons and equipment for themselves. Shepard’s own equipment, particularly his armor, is now altered on a modular basis instead of swapping out whole suits.

What this ensures, basically, is that all the juggling of numbers and tweaking of statistics is where it always was meant to be: in the background.

Part of what I love about Mass Effect is that it feels so fresh and different coming from my background. Most of my idea of what constitutes a role-playing game came from my experience with console RPGs originally developed in Japan. My whole idea of what gameplay implied revolved around concepts like turn-based (or quasi-turn-based) battles which occurred by way of random encounters; grinding for experience, money, rare drops or all three; and of course the ever-present dominion of linearity.

The other part of what I love about Mass Effect is that it is more truly a role-playing game than any other I’ve played, in the critical sense that it lets you truly play a role. Shepard is who you want him or her to be. Every interaction with other characters and with the story involves choices. Most games seem to want to impress you with their story. Mass Effect aims to give you a scenario, and let you impress yourself with how you handle it. I don't know about most people, but this kind of escapism is why I got into role-playing games in the first place.

Sure, some choices are minor, amounting to a simple difference in dialogue options. Some decisions are major. Do you let a once-extinct but recently revived species – one which brought the galaxy to its knees millennia ago – live, or do you allow them to be destroyed? Do you sacrifice the heads of government so you can focus on the primary antagonist in the short term, or do you divert attention and manpower to saving them in order to make sure there is some stable government in the long term when the conflict is ended? Be careful how you choose; the decisions made in the first Mass Effect will be carried over into the second, and those made in the second will be carried into the third.

The decisions aren’t always easy, and are rarely, if ever, black and white. Most choices in games that actually let you choose are rarely this well handled. Most games give you two choices, usually quite binary in nature. The spectrum ranges from saintly good to Snidely-Whiplash-moustache-twirlingly evil.

Mass Effect does away with the good and evil paradigm altogether, and characterizes its choices instead in terms of Paragon and Renegade. Paragon choices usually break down into actions that are either diplomatic and willing to compromise in order to satisfy all parties where talk is concerned, or options which are traditionally heroic (no one gets left behind, we’re doing what’s right even if it’s the far more difficult thing to do, etc.) in terms of actions and deeds. Renegade choices generally are more “the ends justify the means” types in their overall outlook and justification. A Renegade Shepard has no problem threatening a criminal during interrogation, and pummeling said criminal into paste should the need arise.

The games usually are very clear about which choices are Paragon and Renegade. What they are deliberately vague on is whether one choice is more “right” than another. Usually, when a choice is presented, there are good reasons (or what certainly appear to be good reasons, given what you know at that moment) for any of the options presented. Assuming you make the choices based on what you as a player feel is right, as opposed to what you think the game wants you to choose, you will probably wind up leaning toward one of the extremes of Paragon and Renegade, but probably also with some decisions made in the other direction as well.

Recently, I started a new playthrough of Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. I knew the third installment was coming soon, and I wanted to have the events of the previous games relatively fresh in my mind. I also wanted to make a more unique Shepard than the one I’d made the first time around, and handle some decisions differently in both games. I decided to do this probably no more than a year (likely even less) from when I originally finished Mass Effect 2. It’s rare for me to do this for any game, particularly in the RPG genre, where games run into the dozens of hours just as a regular thing.

On a final note, I would like to mention the writing in Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. I’ve experienced precious little video game writing that is this good, and this good on this consistent a basis. Sure, the Portal games have good writing, but there are only a few characters in those two games combined (GLaDOS, Wheatley and Cave Johnson are pretty much it). And while I certainly don’t want to belittle that work, to have such good writing (and high-quality voice work!) in a series of games with perhaps hundreds of characters both major and minor, in situations where you are, through the protagonist, directing the dialogue on the fly, and are in the presence of several different possible combinations of party members who have to react to your words believably…that takes skill.

It helps, too, that the characters are both believable, interesting, and humorous. Particularly valuable is the humor. I don’t normally require a huge amount of comedy in my games, but when you consider that you are going to be into this game for possibly a couple dozen hours or more, especially when the situation the game presents is pretty damned grim, the ability and the opportunity to laugh here and there is greatly appreciated.

I’ve even considered buying some of the tie-in novels for this series. Never seriously, or for long, but that the thought has crossed my mind at all should tell you something about how much I like these games.