Achilles
Arcane
- Joined
- Sep 5, 2009
- Messages
- 3,425
So what is it? Because honestly, aside from the more coherent plot (that is, it has one and it mostly makes sense), lack of constant melodrama/romance everywhere, and decent world-building, pretty much everything is worse in Mass Effect 1. Most people say "the decisions you make matter" but honestly, there aren't really any more than Mass Effect 2 and 3.
I'll try to describe in brief the things that I liked in Mass Effect 1:
- It had a pretty cool sci-fi plot, one that had a clear beginning, middle and end, with decent escalation towards a good finale.
- It had great villains. Sovereign was the unknown factor, full of mystery. Saren, honestly there were times where you could sympathize with the guy and feel kinda bad for him.
- The story was full of promise. It's kinda like the Matrix, the first one was great but the sequels never lived up to that promise.
- I thought the main characters were great.
- It had more variety. In Mass Effect you had a mix of exploration, talking, learning about the galaxy lore, shopping/customizing your equipment, Mako segments and of course combat. In ME2 it's just mission-talk-mission-talk-sex-mission etc.
- It was more of an action-RPG than a shooter with perks. Not only because your accuracy was partly determined by stats, but also because the mix of percentage of combat to non combat content was different than the sequels.
There are tons of other nitpicks I have but I don't want to bore everyone with them. You'll notice that at no point do I mention combat, it's because I don't care at all how good the combat is. I hate, I loathe, I despise cover-based shooting. The rest of Mass Effect 1 was good enough for me to endure the combat system in order to get to the good parts. In ME2, it wasn't. I'm guessing it's the same for ME3.
TL;DR I'm a sci-fi storyfag people, move along, nothing to see here.