this is a very charming game.

i initially started playing it because of my friends, who were all surprised that i had somehow missed out on it. well, i was surprised to find out that literally EVERYONE in the world had played these games in the late 2000s. and that everyone romanced garrus. i now truly believe that if i walked up to a crowd of random people and asked them about mass effect, they'd all tell me that garrus is the perfect husband. guess i have no choice but to find out what the deal is with this alien man.

well! this game IS fun. my thoughts:

1) the gameplay is janky, but not as janky as i thought it'd be. look, i don't like FPS games. this is the first one i've played in a long, long time. but i got used to it pretty quickly! i played on the easiest setting, using my steam deck (so, using a controller instead of a mouse and keyboard) and i thought it was pretty comfortable. i really liked using liara's abilities - she made it very easy to pick off enemies.

the gameplay sequence for the main planets goes like this: get dropped off somewhere. run and find a group of hostile enemies, maybe four or five. kill them. then run to the next group. you can't save while the enemies in front of you are alive, but you can save before or after that. it really felt like the devs were thinking about people who were playing this game primarily for the story. thank you, old bioware.

2) i really loved the worldbuilding. just loved it. the lore, the sense of history, everything. LOVED getting a new codex entry that would help you make sense of the world. for example, it'd tell you why turians usually wear face paint, and then you'd look at garrus, and then you'd look at saren, and you'd think ah! very fun.

also, the salarians are super cute to me. i know they're kind of ugly but they look kind of like hairless cats.

3) the characters. i'm told that they develop more in the second game. but i did end up liking them a lot! i liked wrex - he was always the most level-headed in the elevator conversations. i found it funny how RUDE garrus is to tali and wrex, though. turians really do think they're superior to krogans and quarians, huh? i'm told he calms down a lot later on. it really is funny, though! it makes him seem kind of very young and naive, like he's not used to interacting with non-turians, despite his very important line of work. i really liked liara, too. she's so enthusiastic about the prothean ruins in the last mission, which made exploring them feel much more emotional and bittersweet.

i don't have many thoughts about the human characters.... except that the humans look kind of weird. older graphics, yes, but i remember them looking a lot less weird in dragon age? well, my shepard was perfect and beautiful, of course. very difficult job, being the most beautiful person in the universe.

onto the next game!

played on steam via the legendary edition