Mass Effect 2 was considered a vast leap ahead for both the series in particular and Bioware as a company. Since its inception, the company was known for formulaic storytelling, with every game having some variation on the “get recruited by a powerful society and bring together the four MacGuffins” plot. This is slightly unfair – each of their games is so radically different in tone, aesthetic, and often theme that to complain that they have the same structure is like complaining that Friday The 13th is a rip-off of Alien. Nevertheless, ME2 was seen as a breath of fresh air, with a more thrilling and memorable plot and brilliant characters. What’s fascinating is that it breaks new ground in video games by, intentionally or otherwise, imitating the strengths of television.
Like all great long stories, ME2 is composed of multiple smaller stories; unlike most great stories, it’s an RPG shooter, which means all the plots must be advanced by Shepard killing people with guns and superpowers. We can’t move away from Shepard longer than a minute-long cutscene, and if we solve a problem without at least the opportunity for violence, then it must be a very special occasion.
The story opens with Shepard right where they were when we last had them – having defeated Saren and his geth, Shepard is left to clean up the remnants of the geth strongholds, when out of the blue a monster motherfucking spaceship rocks up and murders the absolute piss out of the Normandy. In trying to rescue a crew member, Shepard is killed; two years later, they wake up, resurrected by a secret black ops group called Cerberus. Cerberus was in the first game as a very, very minor player, a terrorist organisation responsible for some awful shit; their leader, the Illusive Man, sees Shepard as humanity’s last hope, and offers them a job solving the mystery of vanishing human colonies. Shepard discovers the colonies are being kidnapped by a race called the Collectors, and it’s decided that Shepard will lead a team through the Omega Four Relay to the Collector homeworld, which means building a team via dossiers and discovering everything you can about the Collectors, including their connection to the Reapers*.
From there, the structure is simple – you have a cluster of missions, you go to where the mission is, you complete the mission, eventually you unlock more missions. There are really two arcs here: Team Missions, and Collector Missions; to get the next Collector Mission you must recruit enough team members, to simulate the passage of time and the collation of data. The macro structure actually reminds me, of all things, of post-Buffy/X-Files pre-Lost television – you have a two-parter kicking off explaining the premise, then multiple standalones expanding the world, then a mind-blowing arc episode that pushes the story forward, followed by more standalones.
For the first couple of missions, the Team Missions are simple: you go somewhere looking for a specific person, and you convince that person to join the Collector fight. But the game even divides these ministories in half – on the one hand, you’re picking up information on the world they’re in. For example, when you hunt down Mordin Solus, you look for him on a crime-ridden asteroid called Omega (think of Escape From New York but with more alien strippers). As you look for him, people tell you about him – he’s set up a free clinic in the slummy section of Omega. You also find out more about the slums of Omega – they’re ridden with gangs, including the highly technically outfitted Blue Suns and the more brutal and stupid Blood Packs.
The slums are currently overrun by a plague that affects every species except vorcha (who are effectively cockroaches that speak broken English and fire guns) and humans; the gangs have been dealing with this by locking up plague victims in their homes to starve or fall to the plague and targeting humans, holding them responsible. Mordin, you’re told, has been taking in plague victims and humans and brutally murdering any gang members that even come close; people speak of him with awe and fear, and when you meet him, he’s all that they say and so much more.
The game’s writing could not be confused with anything approaching subtle. At one point, you come across some humans looting dead people’s houses; they may as well be holding up signs that say “We’re selfish dicks for you to yell at!”. But in some ways, this is to the game’s advantage – this isn’t Mad Men, where you puzzle over the meaning of an individual puzzle piece; this is a building where each individual brick has a clear purpose, and the pleasure is in seeing how the bricks fit together. Each and every team member you meet has a clear psychology, told through major moral choices; Mordin is a cheerful Ronnie Gardocki, who commits awful and sometimes monstrous deeds with perfect clarity of vision, and everyone else is just as fascinating.
When you recruit a team member, you also gain the ability to have conversations with them, and its through these conversations that you discover their pasts, and the reasons they hold the viewpoints they do – Jack, the hardened criminal who hates people and refuses to get close to anyone, was the subject of brutal experiments in childhood trying to unlock biotic potential through torture; Thane, the spiritual assassin with a terminal disease, has a son he hasn’t spoken to in some time. Over time, you unlock Loyalty Missions – the character has come to trust you and wants your help completing some task that will relieve catharsis for some past trauma, e.g. Jack wants you to help her blow up the facility she was raised in. Each Loyalty Mission ends in you, through Shepard, giving some advice on how the character can move forward – e.g. you can either tell Jack to kill the last representation of her trauma, or let him go and prove she’s above it.
This has two powerful emotional affects: firstly, that you’re slowly improving the galaxy one person at a time, and secondly, that you are bit-by-bit transforming a ragtag bunch of misfits into a crew.
Running in counterpoint to this is the Collector Missions, in which you learn more about both the Collectors (and through them, the Reapers, whom they serve), and the Illusive Man. Unlike everyone else, you learn almost nothing about TIM and everything about his philosophy; he’s not so much a character as he is a competing viewpoint to Shepard. On the Collector side of things, I’ve seen people criticise the game for not advancing the story – specifically, I’ve seen it worded as “the game starts with the Reapers coming and ends with the Reapers still coming”, which is technically accurate but misses out on just how much you learn about the Reapers. The game happily jumps from one tone and genre to another; when we focus on the Reapers, it turns into Lovecraftian horror, where we learn very specific details and are frightened by what we learn – over and over again, we come across the consequences of the Reapers terrible acts.
What unites both sides of this story is Shepard. For the first half of the story, Shepard is like Nick Carroway in The Great Gatsby, a detatched first-person observer acting as our gateway into a strange and beautiful world. In the second half, they become a tool much like the multiple endings of Spec Ops: The Line – a tool the game uses to ask the player to judge what they’ve seen, in a way more seamless than would be possible in a film, book, or some third medium. Like most of the game, Shepard’s possible moralities are simplistic, but powerful.
The game is escapist fun; it concludes with Shepard taking their team through the Omega Four Relay, discovering the true motivation of the Reapers, and asserting their morality loudly and defiantly – a Renegade Shepard gets to commit and extreme and ruthless but ultimately understandable act, while a Paragon Shepard gets to righteously blow something the fuck up on general principle. But its pleasures are in the same ballpark as Mad Men; entering a strange, detailed, imaginative world populated by diverse moralities, and watching so many ideas bounce off each other. It just happens to have explosions, robots, and thundering amounts of violent ownage in it as well.
*The closest cinematic equivalent is Aliens, where the hero is out of commission between each part, so they’re just as surprised by the world changing as we are, with the added bonus being that we know this world so well already and can be suitably shocked.