Every Choice Still Costs Something

The crew of the Normandy had a way of making me feel responsible for them that I’ve never quite replicated in anything else. Not attachment in the soft, passive sense—something more like duty. Jack would get herself killed if you didn’t handle her right. Mordin had a moral framework that was going to collide with yours eventually, and you had to decide when to push back. That accountability is what separates Mass Effect from most of what the medium offers.

Few series have lodged themselves in my memory the way this one has. It changed what I expect from narrative games—I’m basically allergic to anything that asks me to sit back and watch. I need to be able to make things happen, even bad things. The best moments in these games were always the decisions that had no right answer, only weight.

Mass Effect 2 is the high point for me. The first game is brilliant but stiff, more interested in worldbuilding than people. The third tilts too far into action and can’t quite stick its landing. The second found this extraordinary groove—almost entirely a character study disguised as a space opera. Go find your team. Earn their trust. Then ask them to die for you. Jack, the tattooed psychic who turned her entire personality into a defensive weapon. Kasumi, who treated existence as one long ongoing heist. Jacob, who I never fully warmed to, which I think was the point.

When Mass Effect: Andromeda was announced, the hope was that it could do the same thing in a new galaxy—no Reapers, no Shepard, no weight of trilogy decisions. I wanted to meet new people I’d eventually be willing to sacrifice. What Andromeda ended up being was messier and less realized than that, and I made my peace with it. But the wanting, in December 2016, watching that first trailer—that was entirely real.