I have a tendency to think myself into circles about Mass Effect. While I am generally extremely confident when I don’t like something, I struggle to be confident about when I enjoy things, especially when those objects have enough clear and obvious flaws that the only immediate recourse is to explain myself with personal criticism, the logic being that if I defensively deploy past pain that others will “understand” why I come to certain conclusions without me having to really show any actual math.

A lot of my own experience with Mass Effect is rooted in that sort of personal attachment. While I would never grant an object the power of “saving my life” regardless it was a zone of comfort that I was able to shelter in now and again. More importantly, it was an exposure to a certain Kind Of Game that I had not been exposed to before. I doubt I was the only one, as the root of why Mass Effect as a series took off the way it did was due to a certain kind of gamer wanting a more narratively focused experience (it shared it’s release year with Bioshock and Uncharted, also games that appealed to console audiences). It’s actual innovation (using that term gently) was to streamline many of the mechanics already found in a litany of PC games for a cleaner experience that would be palatable to a wider audience of people. Like many mainstream hits which are designated as “Canon” classics, it’s acclaim is mostly due to efficient marketing.

Mechanically speaking if the idea is to give the player the ability to shape a narrative based on their own values and desires, it’s tempting to call it a failure and leave it at that, and I don’t think you would be wrong to do that. The morality system, beyond it’s simple and often politically noxious ideas of good/bad, doesn’t actively encourage the player to roleplay as anything besides two different characters: the good cop and the bad cop. Anything in between those shades feels not only like you have fallen between the cracks of what the writers prepared for, at times it can seem like they are actively punishing you for deviating from the path. For a series advertised around player choice the creators were maybe a bit too unimaginative with regards to the actual morality of the player, that a person who believed the rachni queen should be killed in 2007 may think differently in 2012 never crossed their mind.

Yet for all these issues, I’m not going to lie...it really does still hit. I still find myself swept up in the whole thing, not in the sense that I forget the flaws but that the flaws put the qualities that I enjoy or find moving in sharper quality. Beyond the maudlin reasons I could find to explain why a story about people finding reasons to live in the face of inevitable death would be meaningful to me, it’s also just a really strong narrative backbone. Even after all this time it’s characters have endured, because watching characters change and regress and fail and grow is still very moving, not to mention they have a voice cast that really fucking puts the work in, at times salvaging writing and character beats that just would not fly otherwise.

Beyond that it shows such strong confidence in it’s lore, the confidence of a dumbass nerd in high school who keeps telling you about the sci-fi novel he’s going to write. “Okay but what’s it about?” you ask. Of course he doesn’t understand the question, he just wants to tell you about the new alien he came up with, it’s like a glowing squid guy. And you know what? His passion makes it hard to deny that the squid sounds pretty fucking cool and you let it slide. Few years later you see him on facebook taunting covid death counts in red states for voting wrong, you block him, wonder why you were even still following him to begin with, move on with your life. Fast forward a few months, you’re getting blasted at home and remember that squid. It was a pretty fucking cool squid. Who told you about that? Don’t remember. Maybe you made it up yourself.

This whole thing has mostly been to illustrate that while Mass Effect may not be very important as a piece of art, goddamn it sure hits a lot of my own buttons. It’s surprising lack of polish makes it patently obvious in the moments where it’s a slick corporate product or a limp dicked centrist wet dream, but also reveals when they actually do land on something interesting or ambitious. Whether it’s “good or bad”, “a success or a failure”, that’s all irrelevant in the end to me, boring to be truthful because it has such a clear answer. It is probably the platonic ideal of “an amazing work of art that objectively is trash”, the epitome of White Elephant Art but like...have you ever seen an elephant though?? It’s a hell of a thing.