But in the beginning, they're just Earth's first Spectre (basically the galaxy's super-cops) tasked with chasing after a rogue Spectre called Saren who is working with a mysterious race of aliens called the Reapers that kill every living thing in the galaxy every 50,000 years for. That he or she becomes the person you make them. Eventually, you'll come to understand that Shepard exists as a vessel to be filled.
Quick aside: For those of you (like me) who don't come to Mass Effect: Legendary Edition with a decade's worth of series nostalgia already built in, let me give you a fast primer: The big story is a trilogy (planned and ruthlessly structured as such from the very beginning) that follows the life and career of one Pick-Your-Gender Commander Shepard (I played him as a man), a decorated, dedicated, reasonably capable human soldier who, early on, is basically a mayonnaise sandwich of a human - the dullest, blankest, most sir-yes-sir-iest doof around. Strip it down to its narrative underpants - forget the overarching threats, the calamitous aliens, the ticking-clock plot to destroy all life in the galaxy - and this is a story about a bunch of buds with a fast ride and somewhere to be. It lent structure and gave literary confines to the messiness of the universe's pew-pew Götterdämmerung. And that's what the Mass Effect series really is.
And I'm a double-sucker for ships that are also home to the characters that fly on them - for the Enterprises and Serenities of the galaxy and stories that are basically tales of giant flying apartment buildings full of space weirdos riding around and having adventures. And like all road trip stories, what matters isn't where you're going, it's how you get there.īut I'm a sucker for cool spaceships. A big, dramatic, very shooty road trip story. Here I am, most powerful Space Cop in the galaxy, and I'm wasting time scanning bug monsters and trying to stop a drunken general from spreading rumors about his girlfriend? All I got were fetch quests, dialog wheels and a clumsy, clunky, overly talky, decade-old cover shooter that no amount of updated textures, color shading or lens flare was going to fix.
Everyone had a story they needed to tell me. Everyone had a problem that needed to be fixed. Going in, I didn't have the nostalgia of a veteran player (it's a series I missed when it first blew up the games world in 2007), so I saw only this busy, silly, overcrowded galaxy full of disjointed whistle-stop worlds always in some sort of terrible peril. See, I did not like Mass Effect at all when I started playing. If it hadn't been for the Normandy (gorgeous, sleek, the most advanced ship in the Alliance fleet and personal ride of Commander Shepard, star of the series), I might've just quit the newly remastered Legendary edition of the beloved trilogy after the first few hours. In the beginning, it was the Normandy that I fell for, not Mass Effect.
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