Death (Spoilers)

Death has three components in Mass Effect 2. There is death at the beginning where you get your ass spaced. There is death during gameplay where you just get to reload at the most recent savepoint. Lastly, there is death during the final mission ... said death is permanent and carries into Mass Effect 3 though how I do not know.

The death at the beginning leads with your character spending two years getting himself rebuilt by Cerebus. Though the first death is heroic and cool since you save your pilot when your ship gets attacked and you end up getting spaced.

Death during actual gameplay is interesting in that it's like most modern games where you can just reload but gameplay can be so very very hard at higher levels that you simply die in minutes. Without the reload there would be no way to complete the game.

Your teammates can also die but you get a special power called unity which allows you to revive them in midcombat at the cost of 1 unit of a not so rare item. Or at least at the highest level of the ability it only costs 1 unit. Still it changes how you play - especially at higher difficulties since it is sometimes better to send a teammate in to die, draw the enemy out, revive the teammate and have them flank the badguy. It's saved me more than once especially on the smaller, denser levels.

The final part of death is the one that scares me the most personally. You can literally kill off a character you've spent two games developing. Your character has certain relationships, armour you;ve found, weapons ... you have an attachement with your character only for him to be torn from you at the end. I have no idea how it will work in Mass Effect 3 if you have a save where your main character died, but it will be interesting.

Morality

This post is all about Morality in Mass Effect. Similar to a lot of other Bioware titles and some other games ... you have dialogue options and choices during quests. Save this alien ... stab this man in the chest with some form of electrified wrench ... this list goes on. Even during the first game during character creation - you choose to make your character a hero ... or perhaps a man willing to do anything needed to accomplish his goals. Morality therefore becomes very ambiguous during gameplay. Sometimes its more beneficial to be evil - something I discovered when playing on the harder difficulties. If I stab the mechanic in the chest then its all the easier to defeat the final boss of that mission since the mechanic didn't fix his ship. This leads to some very interesting questions that have to be asked as little as I like doing so.

What sort of morals is the game teaching us?
Why is being bad/evil sometimes the more beneficial options?
How do these morals crossover into real life?

I don't have answers to these, it's something everyone needs to answer for themselves.

Brief overview of Storyline (Contains Spoilers)

The storyline for the Mass Effect series is utterly mind blowing. At first it sounds like a mixing pot of bad science fiction cliches - hateful aliens, ancient aliens trying to tell us something, enslaved aliens, aliens trying to commit genocide. Just a bad mix of cliches all around. Yet, Bioware pulls it off. It's that simple. Bioware took all these cliches and made one of the best games ever out of them.

The game follows the story of Commander Shepard who's background is fairly customizable during character creation. Basically you play as Commander Shepard - you become the first human galaxy wide agent for the basically specieist alien council. Your purpose is to figure out why a bunch of alien built robots are back and attacking planets. You go around and build your team and as you do so you may complete numerous side quests most of which have some little background details on the universe you are playing in. Eventually you discover that the alien robots are working for some other older, nastier alien robots that are hellbent on wiping out life in the known universe ... again. Turns out these aliens have been doing on a cycle for eons and the alien artifacts of the ancient aliens were all about transmitting the data of what the hell happened to them as sort of a warning. Eventually you fight this rogue agent you've been chasing - who happened to be controlling the first group of evil alien built robots and in turn was being controlled by his flag ship which happened to be a member of the ancient genocidal alien race.

In Mass Effect 2, the story takes a couple of fun twists. First, you end up working for a human blackops group you ran into a few times in the first one called Cerebus - said group is all about Human Superiority and doing what it takes to ensure humans come out on top. Cerebus is the only ones to believe you about the evil genocidal aliens so they help you out. Then it progresses like the first game - assemble a team - do some quests - eventually do the main story line ... though this game will force you to do some certain main story missions at x-times in gameplay whether you want to or not. Also you have to pay attention to keep upgrading your ship since the last part of the main story involves attacking the other group of aliens the evil genocidal aliens enslaved ... who happen to be the ancient aliens from the first game who were trying to warn the current species of the galaxy ... can you say plot twist? Also, if you don't upgrade your ship and your party memebers weapons ... people start dying during the final mission. It can be a bit of a problem to suddenly have your team knocked down to like 4 people at the end of the final mission ... or for your character to die at the end ... then you don't get him in Mass Effect 3.

Intro to the blog

Well, this is a restructuring of my original Mass Effect 2 blog which for some reason refused to eventually let anyone view it ... including myself. The purpose of this blog is to look at in depth the Mass Effect series and in particular Mass Effect 2. This blog is for the art-250 class Video Games & Culture at Hartwick College.

General Information:

Developer: Bioware
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Release Date: 1/26/10
System: X-Box 360