I’ve never replayed a video game. It just doesn’t happen, but I purchased a new TV with an offer for an Xbox Series X for £70. I didn’t feel like I needed an Xbox Series X, but it was £70 for the closest thing to a PS5, so why not?
The Xbox Series X led to Game Pass, which led to Mass Effect: Legendary Edition. I decided to replay Mass Effect and had a glorious experience that beat the original playthrough in some ways.
Why I Adore Mass Effect
The simple statement that explains why I adore Mass Effect is that it’s the perfect distillation of narrative and game.
It doesn’t get the plaudits it deserves in this category. Telltale games are great, but they aren’t much of a game. Until Dawn is one of my best gaming experiences, but it’s still not much of a game. Even if you go to The Last of Us, which has an enthralling and deep story, I don’t think it executes the balance between play and narrative as well as Mass Effect, as you’re forced to trawl through large game areas that gate-keep the next step in the story or character relationships.
Mass Effect achieves this perfect distillation in several ways.
The script for Mass Effect is spot on. It’s a brilliant mixture of layered world-building, ‘hell yeah’ space opera moments, and true meaning and emotion. It delivers in all the moments, large and small. The way it can position a character as one thing, but as you get to know them better, they become something else is fascinating.
You feel like the game has an Emmy award-winning cinematographer. I don’t think Mass Effect gets enough discussion on this element. The games, and not just in big ‘non-game scenes’, have excellent cinematography. At times, the way it handles the camerawork is reminiscent of Battlestar Galactica. The genius of it is that a great camera is even present in the role-playing scenes you’re making choices in. This makes scenes that might fall flat in other games feel like intense, dramatic scenes in which you make meaningful choices.
It focuses on decisions and conflict. The game focuses on decisions and conflict, large and small, and ensures you don’t go long before you have one to make. The game is also brave enough to leave you with the consequences of imperfect choices. For instance, I’ve not had the Paragon or Renegade clout in my play-throughs to save the Geth and the Quarians.
The way it interweaves game and narrative is impeccable. Mass Effect does this by proudly giving open-world concepts the finger. While areas like The Citadel and Omega are expansive and can be a bit boring with all the walking around (vastly reduced as the games went on), Mass Effect cuts to the action effectively with its mission structure. The primary missions are awe-inspiring, reducing the time between play and narrative via an intricate dance of game, moments of narrative which quickly have you controlling dialogue, and then back into the game in a way that is so smooth it’s genius.
It inserts micro-moments of choice. The addition of the Paragon and Renegade moments in Mass Effect 2 and 3 is a very clever addition to the series. They allow for moments of choice outside conversations that feel like instant directorial instructions to your protagonist. These allow instant badass moments, tenderness, or Star Trek-like altruistic interventions.
All the above reasons represent the talent behind the game, just doing the work. Mass Effect feels like the CRPG equivalent of a top-tier TV show where the writing and production teams have just done the work. They’ve broken down the script. They’ve got every dollar they can out of the budget with a well-planned production, and you feel everything matters, every dollar is present, and you’re experiencing a top-end product.
Why a Replay Worked
Despite my adoration of Mass Effect, I expected to start Legendary Edition but stop shortly into Mass Effect 1. This didn’t happen as I was enthralled from the game’s first moments to the end. I binged the games end-to-end, finishing one and going directly into the other.
The reasons for this are described below.
I went Paragon this time, while I focused on Renegade for the first time. I wasn’t sure how this would feel. I remember wondering in my first play through how Paragon would work – I felt like some of the choices would see me being treated like a chump or being taken advantage of. That is a bit of a naive view, looking back on it. The truth is the fiction of the milieu changes around the protagonist, which is what should happen. The whole game becomes more Star Trek-ian and altruistic, wrapping around your protagonist in a way that makes your choices valid. It’s beautiful when you experience it, and I felt the whole game was different. It’s very clever, however subtle or small the changes were.
Binging it changed the experience significantly. This was the biggest surprise since I fully expected to tap out sometime during Mass Effect 1. The original play-through meant I played the games years apart. I played Mass Effect 2 (2010) three years after Mass Effect (2007) and then Mass Effect 3 (2012) two years after its preceding game. The gaps between games had an impact as the experiences were transformed when each game was played immediately after the other. Shephard’s journey felt more holistic. The relationships are more profound. The endings are more poignant as the work put into making them meaningful has all been experienced in a short period.
The story or stories remain brilliant. I did wonder if the story across the games and the individual story in each game would hold up. Was it a time and a place? Would they now feel weak and basic? I shouldn’t have worried, as the stories felt more potent on this play-through. Like any great piece of narrative media, the story gets better with time. The Mass Effect series truly has storytelling right up there with the best of them, including lauded titles like The Last of Us. Yes, it’s a different type of story, different in each game, but as space opera leaning science fiction goes – it’s spectacular.
A selection of incredible and not-so-great DLC was woven into the experience. The Legendary Edition integrates all the DLC into the experience; this means you can progress through the game without realising you’re entering DLC. The Lair of the Shadowbroker (ME2), Leviathan (ME3) and Omega (M3) are superlative experiences within their games. It’s not all great, you can find yourself falling into some terrible DLC involving crap new vehicles, but those three DLC prestige experiences are worth the presence of the DLC integration.
The game has been upgraded, but fascinatingly, in ways that are hard to pick apart. The distance of time and my memory has helped in this regard. All three games feel like they’ve been released today, so the upgrade worked. I never once thought I was playing an old game; quite the opposite. I felt the games I was playing had much to say about the games being released now. The upgrade also ironed out the areas of the game that I remember being a bit frustrating. There wasn’t a single part of each game in the Legendary Edition that felt tiresome or frustrating – as long you avoid a few pieces of annoying integrated DLC.
I can rewatch TV shows and films so I can re-play Mass Effect. Mass Effect is an excellent game, but the way it merges gameplay and narrative is so well done that I can replay it because the experience feels more like re-experiencing a great TV show or film. It helped that I’d forgotten whole sections of it, and the DLC threw in exciting surprises and the Paragon experience was..different.
A Different Tabletop Experience
At the time, and maybe now, people questioned whether Mass Effect is a CRPG. At best, they might begrudgingly accept it as an action RPG. A good percentage just like to see it as a first-person shooter with light RPG elements. The true genius of Mass Effect is that it is a computer role-playing game; it’s just that the tabletop experience it emulates isn’t traditional tabletop gaming.
It feels like the sort of tabletop role-playing campaigns we run.
The way the game layers in meaningful choices and, at fateful times, spinning the narrative off in different directions is exactly like we want our tabletop games to progress. While it’s scripted, as it is a CRPG, it’s easy to imagine it being the opposite and all being woven out of playing to find out.
The way it ensures the whole world reacts to who your protagonist is and who they are is a truth—these feel like aspects in Fate and how we play generally. In this playthrough, Shepherd was a war hero, and this came up numerous times. It’s the same when they become a Spectre, and as they build a reputation across the games, the whole fabric of the world and the people within react to those facts and truths.
The way the game cuts to what’s important gets ever more efficient as you progress through each game. Mass Effect has an aggressive editor compared to traditional CRPG experiences. You don’t wander around between things. You are ‘cut’ to things. It feels like the game is more constructed around getting you to what’s important with minimum fuss and focusing on what happens there. It even manages to do this in ways that aren’t jarring. It helps that most missions can be started with a Mass Effect relay jump and a shuttle landing.
It also does the work to make sure the experience feels right. It doesn’t forget the little things. When the Admiral you’ve known since Mass Effect 1 comes on your ship in Mass Effect 3, it isn’t ‘he comes on’. It’s a short montage of him walking on with people saluting him. Mass Effect uses scenes like this all the time just to put in the micro-work to ensure you always feel embedded in the time and the place. It’s these little things we do in our campaigns that contribute more to the verisimilitude of a setting than copious amounts of written documents. It delivers authenticity in the briefest moments without much-accrued baggage, which we like to think we do.
The game even organises its ‘campaign’ like we might. Essential things are held in dramatic time, with more importance being assigned to when you choose to face them rather than when they must happen. Mass Effect 2, especially, feels like a Forged in the Dark game, with the galaxy map presenting numerous missions you can choose from. It’s as if the ‘setting’ has missions arising as you interact with it. Personal missions occur as the players address things in their individual stories. Occasionally, the GM inserts missions that might be about playing to find out if something bigger is going on.
Mass Effect feels like the tabletop campaigns we run, more so than something like Baldur’s Gate 3, which is glorious but feels like a different, more traditional experience.
And, Finally…
Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, my second play-through of the trilogy, was a glorious binge. I’d recommend anyone give it a go – especially if you’ve never played it or only had a single play-through when the games were initially released. A combination of choosing Paragon this time, playing them close together, the inclusion of key DLC and the upgrades I didn’t notice but are present means it’s worthwhile.
I never expected a replay to become one of my greatest experiences, but that’s how good Bioware used to be. I’ve missed them due to corporate stupidity. I’m hoping Dragon Age: The Veilguard does well, which seems to be a Mass Effect-isation of the Dragon Age franchise, so that we can return to Bioware at the top of their game.
Until then, play Mass Effect: Legendary Edition. It doesn’t have to cost much now; it’s a ludicrous bargain.