(This is Legendary Edition btw)
I hear so many good things about this series, moreso about the later ones than the first one though. So I got the ME2 demo on Steam and...I didn't like it. I liked being able to customize a character but it looked plasticy and the gunplay felt rubbery. Part of that might have been me preferring to play third person games on console and first person on PC though. So Legendary Edition came out and I thought I'd give it another shot, especially if they fixed up some of my gripes. I always hear how great the characters and choices are, which were some of the things I liked from BioWare's previous games and wanted to see come to fruition. This time we'll start with the first game proper.
When you hover over an item, it makes a circle but no button appears in the middle, instead, it's at the top of the screen, which is weird. There's a map but you have to go into the menu to access it and it's kinda uninformative sometimes, or maybe I'm just using it wrong. But once you visit an area, you can fast travel to it, if it's a world that allows it. The pause menu itself doesn't tell you a whole lot when it comes to controls either, in fact, it doesn't tell you anything, some stuff it doesn't demo for you so you kind of just have to experiment.
The sprint is shaky like a high school student's Powerpoint presention transition so I prefer not to use it. The music is pretty nice at times, it's really noticeable on the Normandy.
I don't think I would've had the patience for this sort of thing back when I first tried it but playing KOTOR made me a bit more tolerant for the things that it carries over. In fact, I was hoping that it'd be better playing it versus watching it and I think that's the case, there's a certain atmosphere to it that you can get into.
You can definitely tell it's aged, despite being a remaster, the graphics are fine for the most part (Feros makes you blind as a bat though) but the lines can seem robotic (specifically with Shepherd) and animations stiff, there are good animations though too, just some are stiff. The photo mode is fun to play around with but limited in the elevator. Why would I want to take pics in the elevator you might ask, well that's when Liara does her-
https://64.media.tumblr.com/4917091bc90146b34611c18786246a31/8741bc43372f5f9d-87/s540x810/9d6633e46672cb91558d41846bae1853cf10a3f2.pnj
https://64.media.tumblr.com/a21d7d9d2318a32504a110441b88a008/8741bc43372f5f9d-4e/s540x810/c35673b2ae71104f11b9977fa776245b405e50e8.pnj
Twitter flagged this one as NSFW, lmao.
Uh anyway, sometimes choices can seem like a Telltale game where you pick one thing and it says another, some options have the same dialogue or responses, I'm not going to really complain about it though since it's not just this game that does that.
The elevator rides give you context to current quests as if it's breaking news or an infomercial. Depending on who you have in your party, different characters will have different things to say and have conversations with each other, even remarking at the landscape and certain things in the area. This isn't the only game to do that but it's all these elements combined that just add to the atmosphere I was talking about. When Liara's mother dies, everyone that I had in a party with her by that point had told me that I should check on her, is that chemistry or what?
Seeing the societal structures of all these aliens is very diverse and interesting to pick apart, it makes me interested in not only the character but think twice when I come across one of their species. Like say there's a krogan, I'd start out by just taking it out but after getting Wrex you decide to just not equip him when fighting them to avoid making him slaughter his own species. Then when he tells you about the Genophage, you feel guilty for killing them yourself. Then when he asks to be the one to bring an end to it, it makes you feel sad. In some ways, these guys are betrayed by their species, that and they're the ones betraying them to be on your team. Deep stuff.
I think eventually it even gets to be like Fire Emblem where you have optional recruits and if you're not careful, you can lose party members permanently but for now that's not really a problem. You sort of make what you will of the combat, you can choose to command your party members around but you don't have to. You can choose to do stuff with your weapons (ie upgrading, switching out) but you don't have to. You apparently pick a class at the beginning but I don't think I did that. I think you need to make a custom character while I just picked plain old default John Shepard, which I wouldn't normally do but when I tried the ME2 demo, my character looked funky to stare at all the time. Worry not, what you lack (in my case, decryption) can be resolved by equipping a party member with that ability so yes, there's a "skill tree" of sorts but I don't find it all that complicated, maybe to use but not to upgrade.
I think it'd benefit from having actual bosses, there are special characters you fight but they aren't all that different from regular enemies. And the villain is a little cliche with his "if you can't beat em, might as well join em" mentality and only speeding up the process. I know he thinks he's doing people a favor but I think it would've been better written if there was more than that. Say Sovereign gets revealed and now Shep knows what he's up against, Saren could've revealed that he wanted people to find out through him so that people would be made aware (like the council that never listens) and do something about it. And yeah he knew it was inevitable but he wanted to act as the warning. Something like that seems like it could've serviced the story better but we have a lot of other great stuff to look at.
I actually expected a lot of what I got to be in the later games and that this one would be bare bones but this is far from bare bones, I actually have no idea what to expect for the later titles' gameplay because this one introduced everything I knew of. I clocked in around 17 hours, it was a good experience that I found myself excited to come back to. 4/5
I hear so many good things about this series, moreso about the later ones than the first one though. So I got the ME2 demo on Steam and...I didn't like it. I liked being able to customize a character but it looked plasticy and the gunplay felt rubbery. Part of that might have been me preferring to play third person games on console and first person on PC though. So Legendary Edition came out and I thought I'd give it another shot, especially if they fixed up some of my gripes. I always hear how great the characters and choices are, which were some of the things I liked from BioWare's previous games and wanted to see come to fruition. This time we'll start with the first game proper.
When you hover over an item, it makes a circle but no button appears in the middle, instead, it's at the top of the screen, which is weird. There's a map but you have to go into the menu to access it and it's kinda uninformative sometimes, or maybe I'm just using it wrong. But once you visit an area, you can fast travel to it, if it's a world that allows it. The pause menu itself doesn't tell you a whole lot when it comes to controls either, in fact, it doesn't tell you anything, some stuff it doesn't demo for you so you kind of just have to experiment.
The sprint is shaky like a high school student's Powerpoint presention transition so I prefer not to use it. The music is pretty nice at times, it's really noticeable on the Normandy.
I don't think I would've had the patience for this sort of thing back when I first tried it but playing KOTOR made me a bit more tolerant for the things that it carries over. In fact, I was hoping that it'd be better playing it versus watching it and I think that's the case, there's a certain atmosphere to it that you can get into.
You can definitely tell it's aged, despite being a remaster, the graphics are fine for the most part (Feros makes you blind as a bat though) but the lines can seem robotic (specifically with Shepherd) and animations stiff, there are good animations though too, just some are stiff. The photo mode is fun to play around with but limited in the elevator. Why would I want to take pics in the elevator you might ask, well that's when Liara does her-
https://64.media.tumblr.com/4917091bc90146b34611c18786246a31/8741bc43372f5f9d-87/s540x810/9d6633e46672cb91558d41846bae1853cf10a3f2.pnj
https://64.media.tumblr.com/a21d7d9d2318a32504a110441b88a008/8741bc43372f5f9d-4e/s540x810/c35673b2ae71104f11b9977fa776245b405e50e8.pnj
Twitter flagged this one as NSFW, lmao.
Uh anyway, sometimes choices can seem like a Telltale game where you pick one thing and it says another, some options have the same dialogue or responses, I'm not going to really complain about it though since it's not just this game that does that.
The elevator rides give you context to current quests as if it's breaking news or an infomercial. Depending on who you have in your party, different characters will have different things to say and have conversations with each other, even remarking at the landscape and certain things in the area. This isn't the only game to do that but it's all these elements combined that just add to the atmosphere I was talking about. When Liara's mother dies, everyone that I had in a party with her by that point had told me that I should check on her, is that chemistry or what?
Seeing the societal structures of all these aliens is very diverse and interesting to pick apart, it makes me interested in not only the character but think twice when I come across one of their species. Like say there's a krogan, I'd start out by just taking it out but after getting Wrex you decide to just not equip him when fighting them to avoid making him slaughter his own species. Then when he tells you about the Genophage, you feel guilty for killing them yourself. Then when he asks to be the one to bring an end to it, it makes you feel sad. In some ways, these guys are betrayed by their species, that and they're the ones betraying them to be on your team. Deep stuff.
I think eventually it even gets to be like Fire Emblem where you have optional recruits and if you're not careful, you can lose party members permanently but for now that's not really a problem. You sort of make what you will of the combat, you can choose to command your party members around but you don't have to. You can choose to do stuff with your weapons (ie upgrading, switching out) but you don't have to. You apparently pick a class at the beginning but I don't think I did that. I think you need to make a custom character while I just picked plain old default John Shepard, which I wouldn't normally do but when I tried the ME2 demo, my character looked funky to stare at all the time. Worry not, what you lack (in my case, decryption) can be resolved by equipping a party member with that ability so yes, there's a "skill tree" of sorts but I don't find it all that complicated, maybe to use but not to upgrade.
I think it'd benefit from having actual bosses, there are special characters you fight but they aren't all that different from regular enemies. And the villain is a little cliche with his "if you can't beat em, might as well join em" mentality and only speeding up the process. I know he thinks he's doing people a favor but I think it would've been better written if there was more than that. Say Sovereign gets revealed and now Shep knows what he's up against, Saren could've revealed that he wanted people to find out through him so that people would be made aware (like the council that never listens) and do something about it. And yeah he knew it was inevitable but he wanted to act as the warning. Something like that seems like it could've serviced the story better but we have a lot of other great stuff to look at.
I actually expected a lot of what I got to be in the later games and that this one would be bare bones but this is far from bare bones, I actually have no idea what to expect for the later titles' gameplay because this one introduced everything I knew of. I clocked in around 17 hours, it was a good experience that I found myself excited to come back to. 4/5