The Top 16 Mass Effect Squad Members Part III: Then Things Got Awesome

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.



What was the point of all that? It's to show that Tali is only really at home on Shepard's ship. He or she is the only one who really gets the best way to use Tali's talents and isn't constantly judging her by her father's name. So why is she only 8th on the list? Because her character in Mass Effect 1 was so boring that I never took her out of the engine room. You can't just take off an entire game like that! It's better to have one game of really tight motives and story arc than to appear in two half-assedly. But it was really only the first game which was underwhelming so I guess quarter-assedly.

7. Miranda Lawson (Mass Effect 2)

Hair? Check. Make up? Check? Carnifex Predator Heavy Pistol? CHECK!

 I imagine this will be the first point of extreme controversy in my rankings. Miranda is one of the most polarizing characters in the Mass Effect universe, a lot of love for this character and a lot of hate for this character. I'm kinda in the love category, in that I like her better than 9 other squad members. "Love is preferring someone over approximately 55% of the relevant population" as the old saying goes. But Miranda is polarizing because she represents the most controversial move that Mass Effect 2 made: making Shepard work for Cerberus, a paramilitary human supremacist group. Now, the discussion of whether or not the focus on Cerberus was a good thing is a topic for another day in the Mass Effect Fortnight. For now, let's discuss the character of Miranda.

Miranda, whose name literally means "she must be desired" in Latin (is the Latin name a part of her appeal to me? Absolutely!), is one of Cerberus' best officers, both in terms of operation success and advancing humanity's domination of galactic fashion. She was heavily genetically modified by her wealthy father with a god complex to be the best human genetically possible. Fun fact: Miranda was originally supposed to be blonde to better resemble her voice actor, the blonde chick from Chuck; however, around the time someone read the words "genetically superior human" and "blonde hair with blue eyes" on the script, they died from the shame of the implications.

But back on topic, Miranda is highly motivated, very clever, a shrewd judge of character and the best at what she does. Mass Effect 2 is all about humbling her by bringing in the .01% of people more talented than her in one place. While she's got incredible genes and the best education money can buy, she's still not as good a leader as Shepard, not as good of an engineer as Tali, and not as good of a biotic as the horrible and obnoxious characters. As a result, we see an incredibly confident character lose a lot of her mojo, and then have to piece it back together and become a contributing member of the group. At the same time, she has her loyalty to Cerberus shaken by the events she witnesses. In a very brief amount of time, Miranda goes through a lot of character development and overcomes a crippling disability: sharing the same combat class as Kaidan. Her loyalty mission is great, but in a subtle way. Unlike most loyalty missions which are about revelation or revenge, Miranda's quest is strictly personal. No politician's life is at stake, no secret codes could fall into enemy hands, it's about Miranda fighting against her past. I don't want to give any major spoilers (because that would take too long and Lord knows I'm already over 1,000 words), but the loyalty mission also fuels her characters growth in regard to Cerberus.

6. Thane Krios (Mass Effect 2)

"Don't mind me. I'm just reflecting poetically about my tormented past."

Full disclosure: In the first draft of this list, I had Thane two spots lower. I was fully prepared to not like him. For starters, the Drell (Thane's race) just sort of appeared in the Mass Effect universe in Mass Effect 2. Never mentioned in the slightest in Mass Effect. What's more, Thane is the first Drell you meet and the only other Drell in the game is one from his loyalty mission. So the entire race feels tacked on. What's more, the developers admitted that they designed the Drell for the sole purpose of being sexy for the ladies. To be fair, the dudes got the Asari, an entire species of bisexuals who were usually strip club dancers. But Thane just seemed like too much schmultziness. He wears a leather jacket all the time. He has a terminal case of an unavoidable disease. He fell in love with his wife the moment he saw her. But then she died when crime lords decided to turn on him. Now his son is estranged because he spent too much time at work and not enough time with the ones he loved, but he'll make it right somehow...

I wanted to hate this guy, but I can't. In large part, because as I described his character, I realized that if Liam Neeson played this role, it would be the coolest thing ever. That's what Thane has going for him. He's a genuinely cool character. He's religious but not bigoted. He's a professional killer that prays for the souls of his victims. He spends his last years on earth not moping or whining, but waging a war of retribution. He's the best kind of badass: the completely calm badass ala Liam Neeson in Taken. Plus, the achievement you get for reconciling him with his son is called "The Cat's in the Cradle". Sure, if you examine closely enough, you'll see that Thane was constructed to be as cool as possible. But then again, all characters are written so they're all constructs. In a very brief amount of time, Thane is able to establish his character and approach Liam Neeson levels of cool without ever becoming  unbelievable as a person.