Category: Episode Enneagrams

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”

In 2007 Bioware swung for the fences: our Shepard avatar vs. the villainous Saren, organic life vs. machines, upstart humans vs. an unfathomably old cycle of destruction. These are the themes of the first Mass Effect game.

ONE

Humans are only one sentient species among many. We’re actually a fresh addition to the activity of the galaxy. We’re ambitious, though. Shepard, one of the best humanity has to offer in terms of fighting ability and determination, has a chance to become the first human Spectre, a special forces rank. On a routine mission to show what she can do, Shepard faces an unknown problem.

TWO

The Turian Spectre set to judge Shepard is surprised by another Spectre, Saren, who shoots him in the back. It’s a stark moment. The Geth are a shocking enemy, something humanity has never seen and other races haven’t seen in centuries. They’re minions, though, and Saren is their leader. His presence here is obviously the Trouble that’s resolved at the endgame battle. The Reapers are the overarching villain, but in this story the specific antagonist is Saren.

THREE

This really isn’t a story about humanity fitting into an established galaxy. This is war with the unknown — with history, actually. Shepard interacts with a Prothean Beacon, an artifact, that implants a confusing vision in her consciousness. What does it mean? Why is the rogue Spectre after the same information? Can humanity have a place in how the galaxy answers these questions? 

Continue reading “The Story Enneagram of Mass Effect 1”

It’s hard to find a more epic end to a game than this one. The fight up the outside of the Citadel tower is exciting, Geth Destroyers and Krogan Warlords everywhere. Meanwhile, the Reaper ship Sovereign makes it inside the Citadel’s arms before they can close and attaches itself to the station. Like a creepy cockroach it suctions onto the point of the Citadel Tower. We must climb the exterior, coming ever closer to its massive wiggling arms.

Continue reading “Citadel: End Game”

We sneak through the Mu Relay to stop Saren in his quest for the Conduit. After fighting his Geth we follow him into an ancient Prothean facility. Although the battles are juicy, the main purpose of this mission is for exposition. We encounter a VI, Vigil, who tells us much.

The Reapers spend their down time in Dark Space until a civilization is ripe. Then they activate a mass relay hidden in plain sight on the Citadel — it’s that silly statue that hums in the water feature — and enter the governing heart of the galaxy. From their they control everything and decimate at their leisure.

Continue reading “Ilos”

It’s the mission where you decide whether or not to shoot Wrex! I’d forgotten!

Obviously more happens than that, but what a moment. In my first playthrough, and I was a huge Wrex fan, the tension was devastating. Luckily I had enough paragon points to save him.

So, why is this even in contention? The research facility at Virmire, now run by Saren, has developed a cure for the Krogan genophage. This challenges Wrex’s loyalties.

This is also the mission where I must choose whether Kaidan or Ashley dies. Dang! So huge! The stakes are critical and the role-playing is intense.

Continue reading “Virmire”

Our first mention of the mysterious Cerberus — a corporation? a research laboratory? — comes from an odd report included in a data dump at Feros. Cerberus has requested and received samples of the Thorian, it appears. When we check out the clue, an entire small colony has been turned into husks. Zombies, basically. They’re not much different from the Thorian Creepers that ExoGeni made.

Then Admiral Kahoku sends us to look for his missing soldiers. We find them dead on a planet. Someone set a beacon as a trap on top of a Thresher Maw nest. The giant sand worm, spitting acid, almost kills us in the Mako as we try to investigate the site. Cerberus, Kahoku angrily informs us, is an Alliance black ops organization. Did the soldiers get too close? Did Cerberus try to use them as experiments? It’s hard to tell. No one is held accountable, but Kahoku will pursue them anyway. 

After a desperate message from Kahoku, we go looking for him throughout three Cerberus research facilities on an isolated planet. The first holds Thorian Creepers. The second holds a swarm of just-hatched small Rachni. The third holds an adult Rachni standing over the dead body of Kahoku. When we kill it and attend to Kahoku’s corpse, we see that he hasn’t been mauled. Needle tracks line his arms. Because of his investigation they turned him into another Cerberus experiment, an attempt to fuse alien DNA with a human to create a super soldier. What a way to go.

Eventually we end up at a Cerberus facility with a data terminal. After we clear the bunker and leave, I’m contacted by an agent for the Shadow Broker, an information dealer. Kahoku had a deal with them; that’s how he found the Cerberus research base. Now the Shadow Broker would like the information I discovered. At this point there seems to be nothing in it for me. Maybe there will be a turnaround later. I give them the data, though, because Kahoku was a very sympathetic story.

(By the way, this is Ace Shepard. I created another biotic for a better run-n-gun style. Like Athena, she’s also a paragon.)