T w e n t y S i d e d

In Mass Effect Andromeda, you can play as either Scott Ryder or Sara Ryder. Unlike Commander Shepard, you’re not hot-swapping the gender of the protagonist. If you play as Sara then you have Scott as your sibling and if you play as Scott then you’ve got Sara for a sibling. Your sibling ends up stuck in the fridge for most of the game and they’re not really relevant until the very end, but the Ryder twins really are two different peopleThey still have a lot of identical dialog, but you know what I mean. and not just a Maleshep vs. Femshep aesthetic choice.

For the purposes of this write-up, I’ll be discussing the plot in terms of having Sara as the main character. As with my series on the Mass Effect trilogy, it’s just easier to pick one sibling rather than juggle neutral pronouns and use slashes to refer to Sara/Scott or Scott/Sara.

It Begins

Sara wakes up in the Cryo Bay at the end of their 600 year voyage. The dialog does a pretty good job of explaining the premise to the player without dropping into heavy-handed exposition mode. I mention this now because while some of the dialog in this game is shamefully bad, there are spots like this where it keeps things reasonably brisk and efficient by the standards of the genre.

The ship has just arrived in the Heleus Cluster, which is part of the Andromeda galaxyWithout the mass relay network, we can no longer have a galaxy-wide adventure. I really appreciate that the writers stuck to this and didn’t feel the need to go “big” again.. Sara is on the “Pathfinder” team. Her Father, Alec Ryder, is the Pathfinder for the human ark and is in charge of scouting out their prospective home. 600 years ago they picked out several promising planets in the Heleus ClusterThe story explains that scientists used a mass effect relay to “look” into the distant galaxy, which is how they were able to see so much detail over such insane distances. This is one of the details I’m willing to handwave as part of establishing the new premise. that could be suitable for settlement.

Alec Ryder is an N7, which is the same designation as Commander Shepard. I’m sure this is a deliberate move on the part of the writer, to have a Commander Shepard stand-in to hand the franchise over our new hero.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Andromeda Part 4: Habitat 7”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

So the writer left behind The Quarians, Volus, Elcor, and Hannar, even though they would all have really good reasons to go and we’d have good reasons to want them alongThe writer also left behind the Batarians, Vorcha, and Yahg, but screw those guys. Nobody cares about them and they wouldn’t make for good company on this trip.. But then the writer decided to bring…

The Krogan

Why? Why would you do this? The Krogan are a dangerously invasive species. It’s not just that they’re incredibly tough and good at fighting, it’s that they’re prolific breeders and naturally disposed to violence.

Centuries ago, the galaxy was getting its ass kicked by the Rachni space-bugs. The Salarians discovered the pre-spaceflight Krogan, realized their combat potential, and brought them to space. Armed with space-armor and zap-guns, the Krogan gleefully wiped out the Rachni. The problem is that once the war was over, there were now millions of heavily armed and incredibly bored Krogan spread all over the galaxy. A single Krogan female could (at the time) lay 1,000 fertile eggs a year. Free of the brutality of their homeworld, their population exploded. There was no way to contain them. And once they ran out of worlds to settle, they invaded the council worlds.

I don’t know if the death toll was in the millions or billions, but it was a pretty large number. So the Salarians cooked up the “genophage”, which would make 99% of Krogan eggs infertileActually 99% egg failure would still allow every female to have 10 children a year. But let’s not argue about this. The series was always changing its mind on what the Genophage was and how it worked.. Thus Krogan population growth was checked and the galaxy was saved from being consumed by the Krogan.

So the Council perpetrated an atrocity to save the galaxy. It’s one of those interesting bits of worldbuilding we inherited from Mass Effect 1, and which later writers could never wrap their heads around. For the most part the later stories took the rhetorical position of “the Genophage was pure evil and they shouldn’t have done it”, which ignores the nuance that made the entire thing so interesting to begin withI don’t mind if the PLAYER comes to this conclusion, but for me I always felt like the game favored the Paragon way of thinking and the more nuanced “it’s not that simple” renegade position was never properly articulated by any of the characters..

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Andromeda Part 3: Colonialism Rules!”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.