Only one video game has brought me to tears, and that game was Final Fantasy X. Tonight, a second game brought me to tears, and that would be Mass Effect 3.
Some people dismiss video games as mindless entertainment. As just shoot-em sprees that dumb down the population. Some would argue the same of movies. Some would argue the same for everything not a book; and I’m sure some could argue the same for books. They are all different ways of expressing and displaying a story. Yes, if you look at a game like Castle Wolfenstein, where the plot is “fuck! Nazis are attacking! Kill them all!,” or its offspring Doom (either the movie or the game), where the plot is fuck! Aliens are attacking! Kill them all!,” to Love and Peace, yeah video games are mindless entertainment. But compare a Final Fantasy to a romance smut novel, and its the book that is the mindless entertainment. All forms have their great pieces of artistry, and all forms have their cheap entertainment. There have been movies that have redefined how people look at science fiction, and books that cause no original thought. There are video games which are only about blood, and video games that have compelling story lines where you only play through the action to get to the next bit of the story.
From here on out, I may be spoiling major parts of the game. I am not reviewing these games as video games, but under the concept that video-games can provide just as amount story, emotional attachment, and the reader can learn just as much as from a book. That video games can be just as good of a tool to tell a story as a book.
The Mass Effect series has a huge amount of story through it. The base concept is one I’ve talked about before with Babylon 5, and the council science fiction. There are a bunch of alien races that all have united, and the three strongest of the races rule on a council that rule over the laws of the galaxy. Space travel is done through a series of “Mass Effect” relays. While the game never mentions the Higgs-Boson, the concept is that we find ancient alien technology that allows the races to create “Mass Effect” fields. These fields reduce an objects mass, allowing for faster than light travel, and with that comes space travel. This is one of the theoretical applications of the Higgs-boson. Humans are one of the most recent races to be allowed onto the Citadel, which is a giant base station that serves as the hub for galactic life. It also an alien relic. While I don’t necessarily like the relic bit, it is important to the overall story.
The base storyline is that an entity from dark space is coming to destroy all sentient life in the galaxy. The first game you learn about these Reapers, and that they come whenever sentient life reaches a certain level of intelligence, and then these races are exterminated. The reapers have done this for many “Cycles,” for longer than the known history of the galaxy. In the first game, you stop the Reaper known as Sovereign from taking over, and so reinforcements are sent. In the sequel, another reaper known as Harbinger is sent to assess the situation. In this game, we learn about what monstrosities the reapers commit upon the sentient races, and get more of an idea of what the reapers desire. You manage to stop Harbinger and his race of Collector’s, but that does not mean you won. The third game is all out war, against these giant monstrosities, which not only outnumber the collected races, but also have technology well beyond our own. They come straight for all the major races homeworlds. Being a human, you get to be on Earth when they strike. The rest of the game is you attempting to align the races as well as make a super weapon to fight back against the reapers. The entire game you get to listen to battle reports on Earth, and well...Earth is losing. In the end, victory is achieved, but not without making some very difficult choices.
The series of games allows you to make decisions as you go through. Are you going to be the paragon, the renegade, or something between. The choices you make affect you throughout the series. An example is that in the first game, you find a captured Rachni Queen that you can either kill or save. The rachni were an insect like race where the queen is the only one needed to rebuild the hive. There is a huge backstory on the Rachni that you can choose to learn about, but basically they nearly annihilated all life before they were beat back and supposedly every single one was killed. Human scientists found one remaining egg, which turned to a queen, and they started cloning the Rachni for their own purposes. If you save the Queen, you run into her in the third game, and she desires to help you. If you killed her though, the reapers make a clone-like race which are hell bent on seeing you fail. You didn’t know what the consequence would be, and either could be hard. Not all the “Good” decisions are the ones with positive outcomes either, and some evil decisions turn out to be one that needed to be made at the time, and save you a lot of time and hardship by the finale.
As the game goes through, you build a team to go with you. While this team changes somewhat between the games (only three characters are playable through all three games saying you download all the additional content), all the characters and decisions from the first follow you through to the finale (if they survived!). The team grows alongside you, even in each individual game. For example, one of the lead characters is Liara. In the first game she is a fledgling archaeologist looking into the preceding race known as the Protheans. She is young for her race, and naive, and you save her from a simple trap. She grows, develops, and by the end of the third game she is the leader of an intelligence organization where she is laying the traps. Many of the characters go through similar changes.
She is also a possible love interest. In the game, you get to choose to be male or female, and from that you develop relations with your crews. If you do the right things, some of these relations can lead to sex, or even love. Some of it is in your hands, some of it is based on your choices. Through the series, the game allows for lesbian couplings, and the third allows for a gay coupling as well. It treats each coupling the same, there is no more of a big deal talked about the gay man and his losing of his husband than there is of the wife who lost her husband, or the soldier who lost his wife to the reapers. Your character gets to experience love, and lost, and you can choose to listen to the developing tales of others love lives. In the second game, as the game plays through you can walk through the ship and listen to the crew. One crew member’s families were stuck on a planet expected to be attacked by the collectors, who leave no survivors. You get to listen to a replay of a tape of his son’s birthday party. You get to hear that the planet was being evacuated. You listen to him losing contact with his family. We hear that the collectors did attack the planet. And you overhear from the character, crying at his table, what happened. If that doesn’t evoke any emotion, if you’re not interested in what happened to his family...I don’t know what to say in that case.
The part that made me cry is that I played as the male Shepard, and romanced the character named Tali. Tali is a Quarian, and the backstory of them is they created a synthetic race known as the Geth to help them. What they noticed though is that their Virtual Intelligence (VIs) were becoming Artificial Intelligence (AI), and were becoming smarter and smarter. Before things got out of control, the Quarians tried to kill off the Geth. This caused the Geth to rebel, and the Quarians fled their homeworld. Much like Battlestar Galactica, all the quarians live on a fleet of ships, called the flotilla, that fly through space as they plot to retake their homeworld. They wear body suits that regulate their bodies, and after a few generations of this, all their natural immunities have gone away, and now they are forced to be in their suits at almost all times, or potentially get fatally sick. You also learn that the Quarians live somewhat like the Amish in that when the Quarians reach a specific age they are cast out to learn about outside society, and they can (and more often than not) choose to return to the flotilla with a gift to help the fleet.
In the first game, you meet Tali during her pilgrimage, so she is young and learning the galaxy, although not quite as naive as Liara starts. While you don’t get to romance her in this game, a close friendship is obviously struck. In the sequel, you save her from an attack, and some flirting begins (paraphrased: “are you flirting with me?” “Now why would I do that? I mean, you’ve only been my knight in shining armor twice now, and what girl wouldn’t fall in love with that. I mean, did I just say that...I’m going to go back to working on the engine...”). You are there when her father dies, you are there to clear her name when the Quarians suspect her of sabotage, and you watch her grow from these experiences, and your character can grow as well. Despite the riskiness of the whole act, Tali finds a way to quarantine a room so that she can remove her suit and couple with Shepard. She appears halfways through the third game, and is still much in love with you, but the weight of the Quarian world is on her shoulder. Still, in this game the words of “love” are exchanged between the two of you multiple times, as well as some great emotionally bonding scenes, including one silly one where Tali gets drunk by drinking through an “emergency induction port” (aka: a straw). You help liberate her homeworld, and for the first time she gets to be home. Shepard points out that she now has a home, and she hugs him and tells him “I already have a home.” These particular words have great significance to me, but still I think it demonstrates the emotional connection that has grown.
So why did it make me cry? We get all this connection, all this closeness, and the game ends with your character losing a war. You are running to your final objective when a reaper lands to attack you and your team (note: full reapers are taller than skyscrapers). It grievously injures your party, and Tali can’t go on. You carry her to the evac ship, and she cries out “Shepard, don’t leave me behind!” And the way she says it... I just watched the clip again, and the water works almost started again. Especially considering that the game continues, and the choice I made sacrificed Shepard... and Tali is left alone.
But a good book is more than just the emotional connection. It should explore themes and ideas. As discussed above, it already covers some science fiction, and when I use those words I meant theoretical application of actual science. Another science fiction theme is Synthetic, or AI, versus Organic. Throughout the entire series there is a lot of AIs, good and evil and inbetween. As mentioned with the Quarians, the Geth took over the Quarian homeworld in a war, and throughout the first game and the majority of the second game, the Geth are your major adversary as they worship the Reapers as the ultimate form of synthetics. Of course, there are also the Reapers, which are AIs bent on repeatedly destroying all organics. But then you meet EDI, which is the AI that helps coordinate your ship, the Normandy, and at one point you have to “Unshackle” her, letting her be a full AI without restrictions. In the third game, she acquires a synthetic body, and becomes one of your key team members. Throughout the game, while she has lots of questions about humans, she eventually falls in love with the pilot, Jeff “Joker” Moreau (played by Seth Green) and decides to become more and more human, and is most definitely a positive AI. There is also Legion, a collection of Geth programs (Geth are not their physical bodies, but the individual programs), and while he does not regret the war on Quarians, he does want peace between his race and the Quarians.
Despite the good AI, characters repeatedly mention that AIs and humans are always destined to war with each other. The reason I like the best is given by Javik in the middle of the third, which is: Organics do not know their purpose, nor whom their creator is, so they can make their own purpose and can imagine an infallible God. Synthetics are created with a purpose that they know, and they also know who their creators are and more importantly that their creators are fallible. These fundamental differences are what will always lead Synthetics and AIs to war. You further learn its the reasons the Reapers exist; to “preserve,” in a very sick way, both organic and synthetic races of the cycle before the war between AI and Organic continues.
With that also comes the question of doing what needs to be done. You have to make many hard choices throughout the game. The very concept of the reapers is, while a monstrous solution, is a solution that prevents all organics from being destroyed and allows evolution to continue again. The game isn’t saying there is no right nor wrong, but that not all choices are so clear cut. The Rachni queen is an example, releasing her could release a race that once almost destroyed all the galactic races, but killing it is genocide. Another significant choice is that there is a major mass relay near the Batarian homeworld. The specific Mass Relay is the ones the Reapers use to get into the galaxy. Destroying it will greatly slow down the oncoming Reapers, but in doing so you will destroy the homeworld of the Batarians. Now, Batarians are a race who view slavery as a cultural right, so they are total assholes... but you are destroying their homeworld! Do you make the choice to destroy the relay and kill millions, to potentially save billions?
One great writer, Isaac Asimov, spent much of his career writing about the potential problems with AI, alongside many other authors who have explored similar scenarios. This video game gives the same inspective depth as other books. The story is there, and displayed through dialogue. The major difference is that you have some choice how you respond to what a character says, and that you are watching and listening to a character on your screen as opposed to reading it. Countless books, especially post-WWII era, have explored the idea of doing what must be done. This game was able to explore those concepts, but in a different fashion. The game put us in the shoes to make the decisions, and it teaches the lesson. While similar to some books, its a different tool to teach the same lesson.
The game does have lots of violence in it. Much of the game is running around with your team killing Geth, Cerberus agents, Reapers and their minions, and doing lots of little side missions, some of galactic importance and others are settling personal vendettas for individual characters. But, between the gameplay is an in depth story line. A friend of mine hates playing video games, but the story was so interesting that she asked to be invited to listen to the plot points, or would sit beside me reading a book and paying attention when I got to dialogue. It, like many other video games, has spawned a series of books, comic books, and a potential movie. It’s not the mass violence that has attracted people to create these other pieces of art, but the rich and beautiful world and the in depth storyline that not only provides in character growth, but can gleam new thoughts upon the gamer / reader / viewer.
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