T w e n t y S i d e d
The Mass Effect Trilogy
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One of the great things about planning to make a trilogy in advance is that you can design a coherent three-game story arc ahead of time. You don’t have to weld a series of self-contained stories together, but instead can weave the tales together elegantly. You can set up foreshadowing and plant characters that will pay off in later installments, and you don’t have to hide the seams between the games with a bunch of messy retcons and plot hacks.
The usual franchise works like this: At the end of the first game the hero becomes super-powerful, defeats the bad guy, gets the girl, and retires. Then the sequel has to take away his powers, eliminate the girl, and resurrect the bad guy so the hero can come out of retirement. A writer that is able to plan ahead will be able to wrap up story 1 without walling off story 2 like this.
When you plan ahead for a trilogy, then everything can be made to fit, and the three games together can end up greater than the sum of their parts. So many games are written as if each game will be the last, and knowing you have three games to tell your story is a rare and unique opportunity.
BioWare took this opportunity, and pissed it away with Mass Effect 2. The core story is a really small part of the game, which is good because it’s also the worst part of the game. Everything else is polished, engaging, and witty, while the central story features some of BioWare’s sloppiest plot-work in years.
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The main plot of Mass Effect 2 not only fails to stand up to scrutiny, but it retroactively goes back and messes up parts of Mass Effect 1 which worked perfectly fine. It’s cheap, obvious, and tacked-on. It fails to exploit any of the great ideas set up in the original, and instead does a messy reboot and burns all of the bridges built by the first game. The only thing it keeps is the idea that “Reapers are coming from beyond known space to kill us all”. But it even screws that up, because it takes the very small number of things we know about Reapers and changes them for no good reason.
But what’s interesting is that this mess is carefully (perhaps even deliberately) quarantined, and the rest of the game is much more satisfying. Furthermore, the plot holes, while numerous, are all spiderweb cracks radiating out from two problem areas:
1) The first ten minutes of the game.
2) The last ten minutes of the game.
I’m going to go over the plot in detail, but I want to stress that I don’t think that BioWare has suddenly let a crayon-wielding imbecile write their games. This is something else.
I’ll talk more about this later.
From here on are heavy spoilers. Proceed at your own risk.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Mass Effect 2:
Plot Analysis Part 1 of 3″
