revanus, on 14 January 2012 - 12:06 AM, said:
Mass Effect 2.
I loved the first game. It was dark, immersive, and epic. It was a great RPG, in the KoToR vein. I loved the armor intricacies, the different brand camo patterns, and the sense of a cataclysm bearing down and making everything seem desperate.
In Mass Effect 2, we got a game that had a story, but had abandoned the RPG. Inventory didn't exist. Helmets could not be swapped on and off without visiting the ship. It didn't matter what I collected or grabbed--I could autopilot my way to equipment and combat victory.
And most of my original storyline was irrelevant. Liara was an entirely different character. Grunt is a horrible replacement for Wrex. Mining sucked. There was no real villain, except for the nebulous existential threat of a Reaper invasion. And it was tiring to fight the same bunch of collectors over and over again. The storyline had no real twists, other than the shape of the ultimate boss.
All in all, I finished the game, and felt gipped.
I find it funny everyone trolls about how ME2 was somehow less of an RPG than the original. The ammo powers are there, in a new, more streamlined format, you can actually change certain components of armor rather than having to constantly replace the last with another, generic suit, and you didn't have to constantly cycle through new, "upgraded versions" of the exact same gun. Rather, you could just keep your favorite weapon (which had entirely new and exciting formats, such as a rapid fire Shotty as compared to a giant, Krogan BFG) and upgrade that instead of having to constantly renovate every time you take upgrades from an item box...
Also, although a normative statement, I found the gravity of your choices ingame to be much greater than the original, (trying not to include too many spoilers) such as choosing to cure a certain species' reproduction-crippling disease or allowing it to reside, or rewriting/destroying an entire complex of advanced AI killing machines.
As to Liara, she was the epitome of a stereotypical, submissive "yes sir" girl in the first Mass Effect. No real character, no motive for even helping (aside from family issues in the beginning), completely bland character. In ME2, she actually
serves for a purpose. Now she is getting flack for not being the iconic alien man-fetish she once was. In my opinion, this was a perfect rewrite for a character that didn't even need to exist to begin with.
Finally, revanus, did you even finish a quarter of the side plots? If I recall correctly Shepard fights the Collectors
three times in a few major battles, all of which required thought and were quite difficult, even on veteran setting. There is an enormous amount of content even aside from the side-character plots, including a vehicle that completely rewrote the horrible mistake that was the dreaded Mako. ME2 retained all of the core RPG elements from the first, and it even went as far as to expand on your personal, previous adventure in the first.
All in all, this game deserves none of the criticism you mentioned above. Yes, Grunt was bad, I agree. But he was there for a purpose. Wrex will be master and commander of the biggest, baddest army helping you fight the Reapers in ME3, that is, if you decide it's worth playing
Edited by Lord Trogus, 21 January 2012 - 04:02 PM.