So I've greatly enjoyed my week long sojourn into the world of Mass Effect 3. Most importantly, I managed to keep up some semblance of a social life and really enjoy Spring Break. My greatest triumph was getting my parents hopelessly addicted to Game of Thrones, because it is awesome. But I'll talk about that more in detail next time.
In a nutshell, I loved every minute of Mass Effect 3, except the last 15. Everyone who has completed Mass Effect 3 knows exactly why this is and it's not because that means there's no more Mass Effect. All in all, I'd give it a 9.7/10. The weapons, armor and resource gathering (the actual game) is by far the best in the series. It fixed things I didn't even know was wrong with the series. I didn't think I would ever prefer carrying less guns to a fight, but Mass Effect 3 made it happen. By rewarding the player with faster power recharge time for carrying less guns (and much, much stronger powers), it encourages you to find the balance that works best for you. I'm quite attached to my M-11 Wraith Shotgun with high caliber barrel and targeting VI to optimize the spread of the buckshot, with optional tungsten bayonet. Her name is Claudia and she is the greatest shotgun man has ever made.
Claudia, before getting dressed up for the night
Also, it's provided me with a lot of material to write about and you can be sure that March will be just as busy as February was.
So I'm less than 180 minutes away from the release of Mass Effect 3! It's been an incredible fortnight, but I didn't cover nearly as much as I wanted to. But before I am utterly consumed by the fight against the Reapers (Harbinger can suck it!), I'd like to talk about the little people. After all, the minor characters are often our favorite (isn't that right, Boba Fett?). And these aren't just minor characters, these are the minorest of minor characters! To qualify for this list, the character can't be a major fight, appear in more than one mission, or have any real consequence whatsoever.
You take the three on the right. I'll take the innumerable armada in the background. LET'S DO THIS!
5. Mr. Thax (Mass Effect 2)
We don't every meet Mr. Thax, so that's why he's fifth on the list. However, we do know that he's a krogan andhas his employees (also Krogan) speaking in a very dignified fashion. The fact that I was the first person in internet history to write "Lord Wrexington of Urdnotshire" should indicate that I hold proper Krogan near and dear to my heart.
4. Richard L. Jenkins
The L stands for Luther. What else would it be?
Sure, Richard L. Jenkins may have had five lines of dialogue before being unceremoniously gunned down by Geth Drones five minutes into Mass Effect. But in those five minutes, he managed to look damn good in a beret. Not many men can say that. And he wasn't around nearly enough to be annoying. So that makes him a better teammate than Kaidan and Jack already. Jenkins, you may be completely useless in a firefight and not understand the most basic concepts of infantry tactics, but you never once wiped your brow to try and impress me. I salute you.
3. Li the Turian Mechanic
"Hey did you catch the game last night? No, too busy saving the galaxy? Bummer. It was great."
Li, who has a much more complicated and hard to pronounce Turian name (and he goes by Li in the game, so it's not racism), is a mechanic on the frozen planet of Noveria (because you gotta have an ice world). What stands out about Li is that he is, remarkably, the closest thing to a normal person in either game. He knows about current events, but is mostly just interested in keeping his comfortable mechanic job. Sure, he can talk about the crazy things that must be going on in Peak 15 or the scandals surrounding Administrator Anoleis, but he'd rather talk about cars. Plus, he's one of the few people who is unconditionally nice to Shepard. In a galaxy of extremes, Li is a bastion of mediocrity and he revels in it.
Ranking all 16 Squad Members from Mass Effect really took a lot out of me(the whole shooting match was 9,000 words long and covered 25 pages in MS Word!), but it's rapidly becoming one of the most popular pages on the EMPH. So after a brief recess (read: desperately finishing Mass Effect 2), I've picked up the blogging torch and have decided to keep the Mass Effect fortnight rolling... by taking things casual and talking a bit about what I've been up to this week.
What I've Been Reading (well, technically Listening To if you want to be pedantic)
There's Hunger! There are Games! It lives up to what the title promises.
As a grad student/tutor, I have a spend a lot of time each week commuting to class, with about a 15 minute ride to the parking lot and a 15 minute hike from the parking lot to the actual classroom. And since I'm a grad student in Economics, that means I find all of today's music strange and terrifying. I decided to switch things up by trying audiobooks courtesy of Linebaugh's eBook system (which has a small library, a long wait list, and a frustrating interface) and Amazon's Audible.com (which has a free 30 day trial and two free audiobooks, and if you try to quit it, they'll offer your three months at $8 a month). Astute readers may figure out that I already listened to the abridged version of World War Z back in January. Last week, I got another credit and decided to see what all the fuss about the Hunger Games is about.
Now, I have a lot I want to talk about today and don't want to end up with another 4,000 word update, so I'll save a more detailed review for later. In short, I really liked The Hunger Games. I thought the main character was interesting, I thought the names were brilliant (so brilliant that it will require an entire separate article to discuss), and that the pacing was very strong. Furthermore, I understand precisely how the author is manipulating me with each new development, but it's done well and it never distracts you from what's going on. I still had an emotional reaction (read: I actually felt the emotion she was going for) when the sweet innocent character might as well have been wearing a t-shirt that says "I will die a slow and painful death". Also, I found out that there's a federal law which stipulates that any book with a female protagonist must have two and precisely two love interests for her to pick between. But those are just nitpicks. I honestly liked The Hunger Games better than Harry Potter, because Suzanne Collins doesn't make up the ending as she goes along ("Magic cannot be used to bring back the dead, Harry. Except Buckbeak. We'll totally use the Time Twister to save Buckbeak." ~Albus Dumbledore)
What I'm Watching
Contrary to The Hunger Games, we're 7 seasons into this and we've yet to meet your mother. Still good.
If you aren't watching How I Met Your Mother, you must either be in a place without enough electricity to power a television or a grad student who has work and class every week night. If you're the latter, watch the episodes online! If you're the latter, how are you reading this anyways?! HIMYM is tied with 30 Rock for my favorite comedy on TV right now. But unlike most comedy shows, HIMYM never designates one character to be the butt of every joke (like J.D. in Scrubs). There's not one character who's always right (like Elliot in the later seasons of Scrubs) and there's not one character who always ends up on top (like the Janitor in Scrubs). Basically, I'm saying this show is much better than Scrubs. The characters are outlandish enough to be entertaining but grounded enough that you can still relate to them. The most exaggerated character, Neil Patrick Harris's Barney Stinson, has significant abandonment issues and is struggling to be a better person in recent seasons (which also make for some of the most powerful episodes). But most of the time he is trying to sleep with as many women as possible and concocting elaborate schemes to do so. That said, Barney is totally going after a woman who is all wrong for him. DON'T DO IT BARNEY! I KNOW YOU CAN HEAR ME THROUGH THE BLOGOSPHERE! ROBIN IS THE WOMAN FOR YOU!!!!
Man, that's probably the closest I'll ever experience being on Team "Love Interest's Name".
What I'm Playing
Yeah, bet you never would have guessed that.
So I could talk about Mass Effect 2, but I'm worried we'll have Mass Effect overdose. I've already had one dream this week where I was navigating a starship away from the Reaper Invasion. In a nutshell, I got my final "canon" import ready for Mass Effect 3. I've completed all the quests, saved all the people I wanted to save, blown up all the robot space stations I wanted to blow up, gathered all the guns I want to shoot, and introduced this strange emotion we call "love" to all the attractive alien women I wanted to (Captain Kirk style, awwwwww yeah). Bring it on, Mass Effect 3!
In many ways, this has been the hardest update to write. The differences between the quality of these last five characters is so minute that I've actually changed the overall ranking twice since the last post. Also, I've noticed that the posts have been getting longer and longer as time has gone on, making this the most difficult to write in terms of sheer volume as well. We know that only five remain and that they're the best around, but only one can say that nothing ever keeps them down.
5. Ashley Williams (Mass Effect)
Wait a second...That's Victoria from How I Met Your Mother. Apparently, her actress is Ashley Williams.
No, that's Ashley "Ash" Williams from Evil Dead
There we go! Who knew there were this many famous Ashley Williamses?
Apparently famous name aside, Ashley Williams is one of the best thought out characters in the Mass Effect universe.There's always more to this character than meets the eye. She has a minor role in Mass Effect 2 and is poised for a bigger role in next week's Mass Effect 3, but I'll be focusing mostly on her time in Mass Effect 1, since that's where we got to know her. When you first see her, she's on the run after a bunch of robots launched a surprise attack on Eden Prime, an agrarian colony whose primary exports are rainbows, smiles, and the laughter of small children. You help her out because her armor is pink and this a video game, ipso facto she is completely helpless. However, she turns out to be the most-effective non-Shepard member of your team on Eden Prime (although this is because the alternatives are Kaidan the Awful and Richard L. Jenkins, who dies 3 minutes into the game and was so irrelevant that I didn't rank him. He'd still be above Kaidan though!). Ashley isn't so much an everyman as she is a strong conduit to the everyman of the 22nd century. Back in 2007, I didn't have any strong opinions on the involvement of Turians at Shianxi because what are those things? (Short answer: Turians = Space Romans, Shianxi = Only Human Colony to ever surrender to aliens, specifically the Space Romans). However, Ashley lets you understand the anxieties of humanity integrating into a galactic community without shading your opinion one way or the other. By the end of Mass Effect 1, Ashley respects the contributions of her alien teammates. And isn't that the foundation of tolerance and trust?
Ashley is a woman of tradition. In many ways, her views are old-fashioned, but understandable and easy to relate to. She comes from a family where generation after generation has served in the Alliance military (which is impressive considering that the Alliance is just 40 years old by the time of Mass Effect 3). Unfortunately, she has the ignominy of being the granddaughter of the only human to surrender to aliens. But rather than perpetually complaining about it like certain Kaidans who won't be named, she uses that as motivation to try harder. She's also a poetry enthusiast and enjoys the works of Alfred Lord Tennyson, who was all about sucking it up and winning one for the team. Since she's the only soldier on the team, that makes her a warrior poet, which means that she must also fight like a true Scotsman (according to Braveheart, at least). Lastly, she's the only character who openly admits to being Christian and is not a villain, and that could be in any game, not just Mass Effect (Shortest Top Five Ever: the Top Five Christian Protagonists in Video Games. Off the top of my head: Ashley, Liam Neeson in Fallout 3, Cole Phelps from L.A. Noire,is Batman a Christian? I think he celebrates Christmas, and ummmm... a fifth guy). She's the most familiar thing to the player in an entire galaxy of strange aliens, cultures, and emotionless "wounded soul" guys.
But I digress. The best moments for Ashley comes when she realizes that the Reapers are actually a race of sentient warships who predate time itself and whose power is beyond the scope of human comprehension. I'm going to paraphrase here, but she says that "my rifle may as well be a pea shooter if I'm up against a warship" but won't give up the fight. That is the ultimate sassback in the line of duty. "I'm hopelessly outgunned and certain to die, but WHATEVA! I DO WHAT I WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNT!!!!"
Apparently, Spectre's get free makeovers
Finally, I like where her character is going. She had virtually no role in Mass Effect 2 other than to show up at the end of Act I and be super mad that you didn't call her. You can try to explain that you were clinically dead most of that time and she was at work when you tried to call, but she'll still be mad at you. You can say she's being over-emotional and that'll just make her even madder. So I guess that makes her probably the most realistically written female in any game ever (Note to all fine honeys: there was no "You're right, I'm sorry" response. I tried my best to find it though!). However, by Mass Effect 3, we find out that Ashley has become a Spectre (sort of like a Space Government Sponsored Badass, charged with cracking skulls that armies can't effectively reach). This is the best kind of writing because it explains the stuff that didn't make any sense in previous games while retaining plausibility. Ashley was at the end of Act I because the Alliance was grooming her to be awesome and awesome people understand dramatic timing. Her files were classified and she was impossible to reach because, in Shepard's absence, she was the most qualified human secret agent type.
Most importantly, Ashley's survival means that Kaidan dies. Ignoring the previous 800 words, this act alone makes her worthy of a top five spot. In fact, let's watch that glorious moment together!
YES YES YES! NOTHING IS LEFT OF KAIDAN BUT MEMORIES! ANGSTY, ANGSTY MEMORIES!
Coming tomorrow night! Ironically, I spent the night talking about Mass Effect and watching documentaries on Mass Effect rather than writing a blog post about Mass Effect. It's far too late to get the full final five up tonight (which I estimate will be at least 3,000 words) and I need to go into detail because now my picks are getting controversial, as many of my close friends left one of my Top Five to die. But I need to post something, or else the Mass Effect momentum will be lost in the dark space between mass relays. So I will leave you with Martin Sheen explaining the story.
Yesterday, we had a major milestone in Mass Effect squad members: they started to get good. Now, this is where my job gets tricky as it's no longer a matter of whether or not the character is awesome, but how awesome are they.
8. Tali'Zorah nar Rayya/vas Neema/vas Normandy
"Look me in the visor and say that!"
Tali Three Names in Two Games is the first of the squad members to feature heavily in both games. In Mass Effect 1, she's this shy, super curious alien gypsy (or "Quarian") who happened to be in the right place at the right time or, arguably, the wrong place in the wrong time. But I'm confident she was in a place to get an incriminating voice file of the bad guy in Mass Effect 1 at a time when Commander Shepard and his crew were busting skulls in her neighborhood, thus thwarting the bad guy's inevitable cover up attempt. Throughout the course of the Mass Effect 1 adventure, Tali spends her time in engineering being awed by how awesome the SSV Normandy's Tantalus Warp Core is. Most impressively, she never made a single "tantalizing" pun. Later on, you find out she's on a rite of passage with her people to find something, as the ancient Quarians would say, "totes legit". Then you give her a data disk with all the Geth's homework assignments on it, thus enabling the Quarians to cheat like crazy.
In Mass Effect 1, Tali is mostly there to give you a culture lesson on the Quarians and add depth to the universe. As a character, she's not particularly exciting or interesting. Luckily, Tali returned with a vengeance in Mass Effect 2. For starters, she's in charge of a Quarian Spec Ops team that you run into on your first mission. Unfortunately, Quarian Spec Ops is about as useful as the French Army in World War II. If memory serves, by the time she joins up with your squad, there is one survivor in her unit, and even his survival is contingent upon your ability to blow up 30 foot tall robots with lasers for eyes. But I'll get into the details of Tali's military career a bit later. As a result, Tali is pretty much at home only with Shepard and is incredibly protective of him. Rather than being relentlessly curious, Tali develops a backbone and is capable of making her own decisions. Her loyalty mission is extremely close to Mass Effect 1 in spirit and is a very moving story. The only downside is there's not really a strong dilemma to go along with it, but that's a minor blemish.
"Ow! My spine! It totally got crushed!"
But now I'd like to talk some about her military career, short and inglorious. It isn't really Tali's fault, it's more a product of her having heavy expectations from her superiors and little respect from her subordinates. For once, I will bore you with minutia, so fine honeys, do your thing. We know Tali's father is a very important figure in Quarian culture and she did well on her pilgrimage. We know from Tali's loyalty mission that her father was extremely ambitious. So from the start, Tali's assigned a mission that probably won't work out under the best circumstances. Tali's father really wants her to be like him and lead the Quarians on a grand campaign of ass-kicking. The thing is Tali was a member of an ass-kicking, name-taking crew, but she was never a primary ass-kicker or name-taker. She was an engineer and was good at breaking robots' programming. But because of family pride, she winds up over-promoted. Her soldiers know this and don't really respect her. She's just a teen girl with a famous father to them. As a result, they ignore her orders in the first mission of the game and they get their spines crushed. Her soldiers seem to be more loyal after that, from what little we see, but their mission is just too much.
