Category: ME2

The majority of gameplay is not story. Interesting, eh? Gathering teammates and achieving their loyalty missions is what clocks the hours. This means lots of fighting, which is good. How much plot is left, though? Let’s see.

LEFTOVER NINE

First of all, Shepard’s dead. How we die and how we’re brought back, at least from Shepard’s perspective, is the end of another tale. Miranda has a movie, let’s say, where she struggles to resurrect a person with no life signs. Waking Shepard is the Eight of that story, but what is it for this story? Is this a Leftover Nine or a One? Is the state of the world at the beginning the fact that Shepard died, or what happens when Shepard’s alive again? Either option has a good argument for it. I’m going to call it a Leftover Nine and see how the story unfolds from there.

ONE

Shepard’s alive. She has no idea what’s happening. Her last memory is of being spaced. The station where she awakes is under attack. Miranda’s voice, a stranger’s voice, tells her where to go (and directs a tutorial). She meets Jacob, who continues the tutorial and leads the escape from the science station. 

TWO

Before they rejoin Miranda and leave this location, Jacob reveals that we’re on a Cerberus facility. Cerberus, a monstrous organization in ME1, has rebuilt Shepard. Working with Cerberus, owing life itself to Cerberus, must be the Trouble.

THREE

So, what happens next? Shepard meets the Illusive Man for the first time. I have a hard time justifying that as a Three, though. The Illusive Man comes In, but he never really goes Out, certainly not at a Six position.

Shepard completes the first mission and the Collectors are revealed, but only on video feed. Veetor the Quarian’s data — Collectors In — is a possible Three.

After Freedom’s Progress Shepard is reunited with Joker and the Normandy, hired and built, respectively, by Cerberus. Like the Illusive Man moment, Joker has an In but not an Out. The ship and the pilot carry through the Eight and Nine.

I’m getting an inkling of an Enneagram problem, lol. It’s possible the Illusive Man is the Six, he’s just in the wrong position. Let’s carry on and see. Whoo, boy, I think I’m right, though. Interesting.

Continue reading “The Story Enneagram of Mass Effect 2”

Through the Omega 4 Relay, our IFF integrated into the Normandy, we go with no expectation of returning. Prior to this each crew member has requested Shepard take them to complete some unfinished business. If the quest is finished to their satisfaction, they become loyal to Shepard. It’s hinted that their loyalty is important, and it is. Crew without the loyalty boost can die. If Shepard ends up with nobody left, she’ll die, too. Of course, on a first playthrough none of this is understood. Endgame in ME2 is gut-wrenching and nerve-wracking. Each phase of the battle through the Collector base has a specific way someone can fail.

When we get to the final battle we face a humongous human skeleton.

It’s a Reaper powered by the humans the Collectors have been juicing here in their base. Some kind of DNA broth mingles with Reaper technology? It’s not quite clear, and, of course, the whole point is to kill the thing. Whatever it is, it will never reach fruition.

And then it’s time to blow the Collector base. (Does that mean the entire race goes extinct? That question — something so vital to deciding the fate of the Rachni — is never raised.) The Illusive Man patches in and argues vociferously to save the base. A radiation pulse will take out all the Collectors, but the technology of this base can be saved. On the one hand, we have paragon Shepard who objects. Human goo powers this place. It’s abhorrent and morally offensive. On the other hand, we have renegade Shepard who can see the logic of the argument. All of this effort has been about eventually facing the Reapers, a super-powered machine race. Any knowledge gleaned from this base may be our only chance to defeat them. Don’t let the human sacrifice have been in vain.

If Shepard says no, the Illusive Man shows a very dark side of himself. He doesn’t just want to defeat the Reapers. He wants the tech in order to super-power humanity. This is our chance to use advanced knowledge to jump start the human race and control the galaxy. Cerberus has always been about improving humanity by any means necessary. For most of the mission he’s played nice, giving Shepard leeway to decide what’s best. If he’s denied this base, he becomes vicious. He’s only virtual, though, and the decision is Shepard’s.

And that’s where we end. Whoever lived is back on the Normandy with Shepard. Whatever the Illusive Man thinks, he says no more in this game. We stopped the harvesting of human colonies and learned a little bit more about the Reapers. Mostly, we made friends.

Integrating the IFF with the Normandy is tricky. Until the job is complete, the team (which means all companions) must travel by shuttle. This is a storytelling way of removing certain people so that the unnamed crew, and some of the background characters, can be captured without changing the gameplay.

While Shepard and the other fighters are away, a Collecter ship attacks.

In the IFF is a virus that even the AI EDI couldn’t detect. She can’t defend the Normandy. It’s up to Joker, the pilot with brittle bone disease, to help. 

It’s a clever sequence, where the player drives Joker with his limp from the bridge to engineering. Around him are Collecters harvesting the rest of the people on board. He’s able to patch EDI back into control. She tells Joker she will seal off his section of engineering and open the rest of the ship to vacuum in order to clear out the Collectors. Joker asks, “What about the other people?” “The crew is gone, Jeff.” The entire ship’s crew — the cook, the yeoman, the cute engineers — has been captured. 

After this, Shepard and our teammates return. We now have a choice: Immediately go through the Omega 4 Relay to rescue our people, or wait in order to strengthen the team. In gameplay terms, this means that two teammates haven’t completed loyalty missions yet and will be vulnerable to dying during endgame. The Normandy attack is automatically triggered when Shepard reaches this point, so it can’t be avoided. If she helps two teammates, the captured crew will not be saved. If she helps one teammate, half the crew will not be saved. It’s a vicious trade-off.

We know the Collectors come from beyond the Omega 4 Relay, a place that leads to the galactic core, all black holes and decaying suns. Anyone transporting in would immediately become sucked into the maelstrom and die. However, the Collectors use an IFF, an Identify Friend/Foe, that creates a safe space for them through the Relay. We need one to continue our mission.

And the Illusive Man knows of one. A derelict Reaper was discovered and a small Cerberus team sent to investigate. Contact with them was lost, and now we’re sent to investigate and pick up the device, a certainty on a Reaper ship. (We don’t ever learn why a Reaper floats dead. Not part of this story, I guess.)

Of course, the ship swarms with husks. On the one hand, this is a straightforward battle to the prize. On the other, though, someone mysterious saves us by sniping husks at a moment when we’re overwhelmed. The someone is a Geth wearing N7 armor. 

It even calls out, “Shepard-Commander.” At the end of the quest, when we’re destroying the ship’s mass effect core to detonate it, the Geth lies unconscious/deactivated at the computer terminal. We take it with us.

Back on the Normandy, we have the decision to reactivate the Geth and learn why it knows us. (Or we could just turn it over to Cerberus for experimentation.) The Geth, whose name becomes “Legion”, explains much. The Geth that attacked us in ME1 are called “Heretics”. They are a sub-branch of Geth who chose subservience to Sovereign — the “Old Machines”. The other Geth, the Legion Geth, disdain them and fight against them. Because Shepard also fights, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Legion joins our team.

The Turians send out a distress call. When we go to help, we find no Turians. It’s a Collector ship, seemingly abandoned. Turns out this is the ship that shot up the Normandy two years ago. The Collectors have a particular interest in Shepard.

We wander through the deserted vessel. A pile of dead human bodies, pods for carrying immobilized people, and evidence of science experiments are gruesome and creepy. At a certain point, though, we see a dead Collector on the lab table. Our Normandy computer is able to access the data. This Collector shares an exact and specific DNA match with the Protheans. 

It’s quite the gobsmack. Apparently the Protheans didn’t go extinct. They were subsumed by the Reapers and modified over time.

Of course when we get to the command center after our trip through the ship we learn it’s all been a trap. The Collectors faked the Turian distress signal. Here comes Harbinger to battle us the entire way back to our shuttle.

And, of course, the Illusive Man knew all along that this was a trap. He’s tired of waiting for random Collector attacks. He’s using us as bait to move the quest along. It’s despicable and untrustworthy, but what are we going to say? Please let another colony be ravaged first? He’s got us over a barrel and he knows it. The mission was a resounding success, and we’d look mighty petulant if we carried on with a grudge.

It’s funny how much gameplay is needed before the story continues. Shepard must assemble the first round of the team. Garrus is back, and many new teammates join.

Eventually, though, the Illusive Man calls with a planet that seems sure to attract the Collectors. Our alive crewmember from ME1 (Kaidan or Ashley) is on Horizon for an Alliance mission. Before we arrive the Collectors descend, their bug swarm immobilizing the colonists. They’re in the process of loading the frozen into their ship when we land and battle them.

On their ship is a leader who directly communicates with an unseen Reaper called Harbinger. 

Continue reading “Horizon”

Mass Effect 2 begins as cinematically as the last one ended. The Normandy is attacked by an unknown vessel. Escape pods jettison, but Joker won’t leave the cockpit even as the ship burns and tears apart. We know from talking to him in ME1 that he suffers from bone brittle disease. It’s up to Shepard, walking through a hull open to space, to find him and carry him to the last pod. Normandy explodes, though. Shepard manages to eject Joker safely before she’s blown free, life support failing.

And then Shepard is in a medical bay. Someone has brought her back from near death and rebuilt her. It is Cerberus.

We meet the Illusive Man, the leader of Cerberus and the one responsible for ordering Shepard’s rescue. His second, Miranda, oversaw the two years of reconstruction necessary to save us. (Both of these characters are voiced by stellar actors who look like themselves thanks to a great animation team. It’s a really fun start to the game.)

Meanwhile, human colonies have been disappearing. Slavers are blamed by the government, which is too busy with diplomacy among the nations to look into this oddity. Only Cerberus pursues answers, and only Cerberus remembers the Reapers and wants to counteract whatever they have planned next. This is the arc of ME2.

Continue reading “The Lazarus Project”