Hi games, I still highly recommend the Mass Effect Legendary Edition if you haven’t touched it yet, if you like story-driven games and great lore and characters. In its best moments that franchise is literally a plateau for video games even today. I would even argue that we now are in an era of gaming that is enriched by licensed properties, whether you look at Fortnite and its fiesta of licensing, Insomniac “defining” the PS5 with Marvel’s Spider-Man, or Eidos Montreal before they were acquired and now “divested” by Embracer trading off the legacy of Deus Ex for Guardians of the Galaxy.

Mass Effect felt like the biggest and last foray into completely unique and creative IP in games. I’m not discrediting others like the Last of Us or Fallout but Mass Effect is the one I go to when I think of something that was just riveting in concept right at the start, and then it became so beloved that a lot of gamers know all the stupid details of its lore by memory, such as the fact that if you put an electrical current next to a Mass Relay it creates a mass effect jump, and that’s how everyone travels “near-instantaneously” across an entire galaxy in that fiction. Or why they called it ‘Mass Effect’.

But as the franchise went on there was an attunement in combat and arguably a regression in roleplaying. Some say the third game improves the roleplaying but it’s a strange thing to conclude because it also regresses on how many dialogue options you have to define your own character’s “style”, resorting to a more Witcher 3/Cyberpunk/Adam-Jensen esque auto-dialogue, whereas it started in a more “Baldur’s Gate 3 but voiced” kind of way.

I think there are a lot of franchises like Mass Effect where it iterates over a number of sequels by becoming "bored" of its own roots, and start streamlining and finally doing away with things that made it what it was. It’s like when KoRN (Nu-metal band) decided to make pop-like songs or Metallica famously “selling out”. Yet, that’s where a huge portion of the fanbase is now. People love the most generic Mass Effect game, the one that plays almost like a copy of Gears of War, the one with the least amount of interactive conversation options, or the one with the vaguest story-writing.

The franchise became better and better in how good it feels to move Shepard around in combat, enter cover and shoot guns and abilities, and better graphically while losing a lot of the original aesthetic and gradually declining in player choice or “illusion of choice”. It’s always frustrated me that the public story on Mass Effect is that it’s this unanimous “trilogy which had a controversial ending” when to me, ME1 is basically a flawed classic, ME2 is just a great action/RPG and ME3 is this game-design regression and yes, the ending was pretty garbage.

Did you play Legendary Edition and how did you feel about the “evolution” of Mass Effect? Do you think it only got better and better? I sure didn’t think so.