It has....taken me a while to be able to write about this game. The game has some terrible parts and awful narrative structure, the same narrative structure that has plagued
to alleviate this (and The Witcher 3 STILL has issues here). It's also a game that copied some of the worst parts of
, although ME:A did it better (not much of a compliment). Yet, some parts of this game are fantastic, and dare I say, the best in the series. It's a complicated game.
For those that don't know, ME:A is about Pathfinder Ryder and the Andromeda Initiative. You are part of an Arc that left the Milky Way around the time of ME2 and arrive in the Heleius Cluster of Andromeda 60 years later (there are no Mass Relays here so you are limited to a star cluster but there is still a ton of them you get to visit). Once you arrive, shit goes wrong, the other arcs (Salarian, Turian and Asari) are missing, golden worlds that looked good from afar have turned dangerous, there is a weird phenomenon called "The Scourge" which is fucking up spaceships and planets alike, and the Nexus (which arrived earlier than the arcs and has other aliens so it's not ALL humans) is in disarray. The goal of the game, is to fix everything....and oh yeah, establish colonies on planets to live on. Lofty goals, maybe TOO lofty, as it leads to a pretty good game, sometimes great game, with a ton of flaws.
Lets get this out of the way....yes, the much talked about animations are awful. They are weirdly at their worst in the first few hours that are heavy on cutscenes, but get better, not great, as the game goes on. I'm not entirely sure if I just got used to them, but hey. There has already been one patch for this and they did get better but I swear main character Ryder is an alien in human skin trying to mimic a human smile.
. It explains how game animation works and talks about what possibly went wrong here. Most people seem to think the switch to the Frostbite engine was a major reason, as animation coding needed to be rebuilt from scratch, but Dragon Age Inquisition was on Frostbite and it was fine (...if still a bit stiff at times).
I can live with poor facial animations (I never got the walking animation bugs FYI), but the bugs and glitches however, were terrible. It has MANY of the same ones I had with DA:I. Rare crashes during autosaves. One hard crash while flying around on the galaxy map. Texture pop-in that got worse as the game went on but only for Tempest take-off/landing cutscenes. And of course, getting to a part of a map that is impossible to get out of because you are surrounded by death pits but there was a container there of loot so why could I get there if I couldn't get out of it also autosave is horseshit in this game I'm rambling.
The game lacks polish and it is by far its biggest flaw. One patch has already come out and some of it works better, but that's not the point....
Anyway....I still like this game. I think some of the complaints are not warranted. Some people complained about the UI. It's fine. It is needlessly complicated but it's fine. Some people thought the crafting system was confusing. It's fine. You just got to craft things twice, once with "science points" and then again with traditional resources. It's dumb as hell but I understood it. Some people thought the dialogue was awful. It's fine. It.....okay.....
The writing. It....it's complicated. There are times when it is so bad I want to force Bioware into hiring me as a writer because even I am better and I fucking suck at writing dialogue. However, sometimes, especially late in the game,
this is the best dialogue in any Mass Effect game. I don't understand. It's like two different teams wrote each half of the game. Just how much did the Dragon Age team help with this game because a fuck load of the bad dialogue feels like Dragon Age. I like....er, I am lukewarm on Dragon Age but a lot of the dialogue there always feels forced and exposition heavy. Same thing with ME:A. The first few hours are horrendous mostly due to hours of exposition and forced drama in characters we just met. Of course some spoken exposition is always going to be needed but this went wayyyy overboard.
Everything is explained like you are an idiot and the dialogue goes out of its way to explain certain things on the map are optional. How about not putting side quests in the opening act? In the part of the game you want to have tight pacing, this is terrible. This is a crisis situation and you want me to check out some alien lab? Why?!?! Can't I come back to this? (You can't). The pacing for the entire game is all over the place depending on how you played it (By far the longest standing issue with open world games and yes this one is) but the first few hours is really bad.
After a rocky opening action mission and getting a mountain of side quests as you run around the Nexus (this games version of The Citadel)*, the game finally gets better once you get on the Tempest (this games version of the Normandy) and go to the first planet, Eos. Here you really see the structure of the game and again, it's mixed. They did try to copy Witcher 3 here with "secondary missions" being just as good as the "main missions" and yes, holy shit, actually relate to each other! It...it's entirely in the narrative though, doesn't really effect gameplay, but it's better than nothing.
*This is oddly similar to previous games where your first time on the Citadel led to unlocking dozens of side quests. It is something I wish the series would tone down. Don't have to go blank slate but right now it's a bit much.
I can't tell if the design is paying homage to the Citadel or just being a lazy, slightly altered copy.
Priority Ops are the main story missions and they are generally great. Allies and Relationships is almost a copy of Witcher 3's secondary quests, where you get missions for your squadmates, various other important characters, as well as finding the missing Arcs. Here is also where you get the Loyalty Missions which are fantastic and easily some of the best missions in the game. Most of the stuff in this section is just as well produced as the Priority Ops as well. The Heleus Assignments section is pretty good and what I wish ALL side quests were like. They have decent stories themselves, some pretty good even, although they don't quite have as high a production value as the last two sections.
Then....there is the Additional Tasks section where, I mean, come on. "Additional Tasks". It's in the name! These are busy work fetch quests, some of which take a long time to do, some stretch across multiple planets, and the rewards are pathetically useless by the time you complete them. There isn't even any good story bits. Unless you are a completionist, you're better off skipping these.* Why in the hell does game after game feel the need to do the "Ubisoft open world bullshit side quest" thing? It's driving me crazy. At least here, not all of them appear on the map cluttering it up, but some do. This is a bit of a Catch-22 though as if you decide to finish up a task later, goooood fucking luck finding the area you need to do it in. Also, the map is pretty cluttered anyway so, why even?
*Important note: The Allies and Relationships mission, "Unlocking SAM's Memory Triggers" sure LOOKS like a pointless fetch quest but please do this one. The payoff is pretty good (if a bit predictable) and has a lot more story involved than scanning fucking rocks.
Even with a legend, it still took me a while to know what all these icons are.
The meat of the gameplay though is very good. Combat is the best in the series. It's even more fluid now, allied AI seems better (or, at least I didn't see the AI do something egregiously stupid, only glitchy stupid stuff), and enemy AI, IMO, is a lot better. They actually try to flank you now! Snipers stay far away. Krogan enemies act like tanks. They use fucking grenades (what a thought!) to flush you from cover. You can't just stop and pop an entire fight anymore.
You are given a jetpack like jump/dodge which really helps even if it leads to a tendency (for me anyway) to start hoping around like an idiot if you get in trouble. Guns come in three flavors; the thermal clip ones, the plasma clip ones, and the energy beam cool down ones. I....stuck with the N7 Valkyrie the entire game lol. What can I say? It's low-medium weight and like the strongest assault rifle in the game. Don't judge me. You can also mix and match abilities as classes are gone*. You can have combat, tech, and biotic powers all in one build. I...basically just made an Engineer because it worked for me all game. Again, don't judge me. Overload/Incinerate/assault turret or Remnant VI? Come on. Your defenses are useless against me! (Though it is weird I went that route. My first play through is usually biotic heavy).
*The classes are now profiles which you can equip according to what skills you have unlocked for passive buffs. They feel kind of pointless. I had the Engineer combat drone passive and I don't really know what it did. It is nothing like previous games combat drones. It just hovers over my head and sometimes explodes.
Exploration is good. For all the bugs and glitches, the game still looks very pretty. It's not open fields of nothing like DA:I but there is a little bit of that. You also get the Nomad, this games version of the Mako, which thank the gods, is actually really good. It can climb mountains Mako style if you want but the important part is that it is a lot faster, upgradeable, and actually handles smoothly. It's NOT a tank like the Mako, so it has no guns, but you can still run over enemies which is always fun.
Some of the visuals are really great.
The crucial pillar to the Mass Effect series has always been its story and characters. It's....complicated, just like mostly everything else in this game. The story is pretty good, great at times, but awful in the first few hours. I don't want to spoil anything here so I'll write a second spoiler filled post, but just know that this is very much a story setting up a trilogy. Some stuff does get a resolution but bigger picture things do not. IMO, it walked that tightrope pretty well, unlike a lot of universe building movies, but mostly because this game is like 80 hours long. Movies don't have that kind of time.
There are three new aliens. The Angara, the Kett, and the Remnant (....sort of). The Angara are the new friendly race and their big things are; they don't hide emotion (leading to some weird acting), they have large convoluted families, they are missing a lot of their history which feels highly improbable even with the explanation of The Scourge fucking things up, they have been fighting a war with the Kett for eons, and they are designed like the
Twi'lek from Star Wars only with the head tentacles attached and some have cat faces. A major character, the Angara called The Moshae, has a creepy doll face instead.
I think she was in a horror game.
The Kett are the new villains. I didn't like their design at first but that grew on me. They are kinda Collector-ish, not as much as I previously expected going into the game, but it's still kind of there. I like that they are kind of a Theocracy which is a government system not yet used in these games. The main villain, The Archon, is a Kett and decent enough for a villain. I actually think the game needed more time with him as the potential was there for a great villain, especially after you learn more about him, but much of the game ignores him. He is there for key moments, and those moments are pretty good, but without enough development he just ends up being kind of forgettable.
They always scowl.
The Remnant are sort of villains, sort of benign, and definitely robots. They are not the Geth as they act more like VI's than
AI's, which is probably a good thing. Most of the mystery around the games story deals with the Remnant. Also, luckily, they aren't that similar to the Protheans,
thank your mother, but Ryder is the only one who can use their technology and Shepard was the only one who could read Prothean beacons........yeah. Fucking plot convenience.
The characters range from pretty average to really great. The game actually tries to involve NPC's a little more despite most still being exposition dumps. You can talk to a lot of randos in outposts but it's always a "What brought you to Andromeda?" and "How are you doing?" type of small talk that starts to get grating after a while. Major NPC's sometimes have quests relating to them and range the spectrum of great to goddawful. I will say that a lot of them have far more character than previous games in the series. The Angara, the Nexus leadership, other Pathfinders, Krogan exiles, and Kadara exiles have personality. Some are heavily related to the B-plot and some just send you on fetch quests. Overall though, it's more good than bad.
The Tempest crew and Squadmates are good. Not great, but good. Kallo is fine but he is no Joker. Suvi has a nice accent but is boring scientist lady who is also religious?....uh, trying to break archetypes Bioware? Gutsy. Not sure if it worked here. There is also Gil, who is alright. He is kinda characterized as the "normal guy" but he's not that boring. His character goes to some weird places later on. The ships doctor, Lexi, is I dunno. Gotta take a rain check on her because she was so bugged out for me.
I like, even love, all of the squadmates except Cora. Cora needed more. She loves, loves, LOVES the Asari Commandos, to the point where I wanted to ask her what the hell she is doing here and why she didn't just move to Thessia or Illium. In the next game, I want a subplot where I can get Cora and Lexi hooked up (Peebee doesn't seem her type). Maybe then she will stop talking about it.
I like your hair though.
The other problem with Cora is, if I had to guess, a dropped subplot about Ryder becoming Pathfinder. Ryder's dad Alec dies, Ryder becomes pathfinder, and Cora is like, "as his 2nd in command I'm totally okay with this 100% even though I shouldn't be what is this nepotism bullshit?" Later on, Cora confides in you that she was pissed at Alec for passing her over for Pathfinder but not pissed at you, then, the plot just vanishes. Poof. Gone. What happened?
Why didn't she seem more pissed off about this or hell, she SHOULD have been pissed at you even if that isn't logical (but would still be a normal emotional human response). Obvious story potential never explored.
Ryder! Could! Have! Had! A! RIVAL! There is soooo much potential drama there to make for a great story. Something I want Mass Effect to try to get away from is the "everybody loves Shepard" trope. Cora could have been easily a rival that you have to win over. Some of the early game stuff makes me think this was intended but eventually scraped, yet parts of it were left over in the finished game. Damn man. That would have been cool as shit.*
*I should note, that a lot of Cora's characterization fails due to plot and not from scenes intended for character development. Cut scenes with her are okay. Also, her loyalty mission is really good, even if it takes her Asari worship to agonizing levels.
Liam is great though. I'd argue he's better than Kaidan and Jacob. Probably a little better than James even. He is kind of just in it for the adventure, he's got jokes, he's more laid back, and tries to bring normalcy to the crews new home, aka, movie night. Also, he brought a couch to Andromeda. He's great.
Yeah.
Vetra is solid. I was a little worried she would be female Garrus but nah. They play up her femininity with a surprisingly good sister story arc* while also making her a badass mercenary who may or may not be doing things legally. She kept me in the dark about her work and I let her. She also has a lot of too cool for school going on which is always appreciated.
*Some of it was from world exploring banter. Peebee and Vetra have a good discussion about this in the Nomad.
....I don't know what her visor does.
Peebee is almost the exact opposite of Liara. Reckless, not all that committed, quirky, and a tech geek. She is basically a Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope but with a smart dork twist. I know "Remnant Tech Expert" is kind of close to Prothean expert a la Liara, but it's pretty much the only similarity. Also, I'm glad that "Peebee" is a nickname for Pelessaria B'Sayle (sorry spellcheck) because that name would be so stupid otherwise. Well...it's still kind of stupid. I picture a bee taking a piss.
I wonder if the eye paint works like eye black.
Drack is awesome. No offense to Wrex, but I like having a Krogan around that doesn't talk about the Genophage constantly. Drack doesn't seem to care, which ties into him being old as shit. Him being old as shit though.....I'm a little worried he is gonna die at some point in the series. Seems obvious, but then again I thought the Cora thing was obvious so....meh. Also, while not on the level of "shoot Wrex", there is a pretty tough decision to make with him later in the game. It uh, it doesn't really matter but hey it's there.
His armor looks beat to shit.
And of course, Jaal is the super newbie as also being Angaran, which makes him the hardest character to get down. Jaal ends up being just okay to me. The whole "showing emotion" thing sometimes leads to some weird acting, as well as the actor and animation teams forgetting that they are supposed to show emotion. Its a bizarre mix of acting too human or not human enough. Jaal does have some great moments and can be really comedic at times though. His loyalty mission is
outstanding as well. It had the same kind of feels that ME2's loyalty missions did.
That is a lot of collar.
As for how you talk to characters, well, I had already played Dragon Age: Inquisition so I didn't mind the "new" dialogue wheel. This is practically a carbon copy. Paragon/Renegade is gone, which is a good thing as you no longer feel compelled to max out points to unlock later options. You can mix up response styles without damaging a later option. The options are relegated to emotional vs logical and sarcastic/joking vs "stale seriousness". Sometimes you can pick one of all four, sometimes only two. It's mostly fine but occasionally the phrase prompt doesn't seem to match the dialogue that comes after. Like, "I didn't mean to say that". I noticed it happens more often during the pick 2 options which is frustrating. Not a huge gripe with me but I see people complaining about this a lot.
It's adequate.
So....why is this game so complicated?
The story and characters, Mass Effect's strengths, are good but lacking. The gameplay is better than its ever been but the lack of polish makes it not always work correctly. Every single aspect about this game is "it's bad, but" or "it's good, but". It's just so damn conflicting.
I think a good example might be all the random enemy camps strewn across the maps. They are just small areas where you fight a group of baddies, many actually have a task attached the first time, but enemies respawn when you leave the area/planet. These are the equivalent of DA:I's rifts in number and luckily, aren't all grouped into one massive fetch quest and don't appear on maps. They only seem to exist, after the initial task (if the camp even had one, some don't), for xp grinding, for making the worlds populated, and for....I dunno, getting into a random fight if you are bored? Their existence from a developer standpoint seems to be so that the planets aren't just large empty expanses, and that is a problem.
The game does have a meta-point to these camps, "make the worlds safer for colonists", but it damages the main structure of the game. It's hard to make it feel like you are accomplishing anything when the Kett always return. Sure, large set piece areas don't respawn, but it never feels like the colonies you set up are safe. This might just be how things are narratively, the Angara have been fighting the Kett forever, but from a gameplay standpoint it's unfulfilling. In the second half of the game, I am blowing by the enemy camps in the Nomad because I got places to be...but
I shouldn't be doing that. There is an enemy presence here that needs to be dealt with. Yet, I have no incentive too, knowing they'll just come back.
I don't really have a possible solution to this without making the worlds smaller and/or more linear. Probably a majority of the game is these camps, even though the disparity isn't nearly as bad as it was in DA:I, but the game might have been better if they were reduced in favor of more attention to the set pieces (or, you know, QA). It's a dangerous argument to make in gaming because everyone and their mother rips on games being too short, even if they should be a short, but Mass Effect Andromeda might have been better as a shorter game. It took me around 80 hours to complete. I think the game could easily be dropped to 60 hours and be better for it. Less filler, more awesome.
Or just burn the down.
One thing Mass Effect Andromeda did really well is get me excited for a part 2. There is a lot of potential here with plenty of left over questions for the narrative to explore in future games. As much as I ripped the first few hours of the game, the last few are the complete opposite. They are fantastic. Mass Effect usually "brings the epic" with the last mission and this one too is great. Hell, it even addressed a minor complaint of ME3's final mission, which was genuinely shocking to me.
As it stands, ME:A is a good but heavily flawed game. I think some of the hate is overboard especially with the voice acting and writing (there is like a gajillion lines of dialogue so of course some lines are gonna suck). The game is not a masterpiece either where even the most hardcore of fans must admit there are parts to the game that could be better. I still enjoyed the game, even though I am biased, but it doesn't measure up to the original trilogy. Hopefully, Bioware/EA learns from the mistakes, because if part 2 repeats the same mistakes, I might not be so forgiving.
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