Mass Effect is a wonderful trilogy and I’m absolutely ecstatic that I finally had a chance to play it for the first time with the Legendary Edition. It’s something that’s always been on my radar, lingering in the back of my mind – “I should get around to that.” I never did. At long last, thanks to the recent remaster, I dove into the second game. It was like being at an all-you-can-eat buffet where every platter was filled with spicy hot wings, succulent cheeseburgers, gourmet fridge raiders, and cheesecake. The side and the dessert. The main course, a plate with a big pile of meatloaf, sits right in the center, but that’s not why I’m here.
I’m here for the planet probing, the exploration, the side quests, the anomalies, and the sprawling hubs. Except for the Citadel. They well and truly butchered the Citadel, and that’s about the only point in the first Mass Effect’s favor. The second game’s optional content and DLC is where it excels, and that was evident from the get-go. It opens up with you aboard the Normandy alongside your Alliance crew, not long after the ending of the last game. But rather suddenly, it all falls apart as your ship is literally torn to pieces by an unknown threat. You die. That’s an awful shame, but a shady band of human supremacists resurrects you so it’s all good. Naturally, you oughta do some main quest prologue fluff to reach the meat of the pie, the parts where you’re free from the clutches of linearity. One of the first things I did when I could finally breathe wasn’t visit Garrus to embark on his wonderful loyalty mission at Omega. No, I visited the Normandy crash site.
Here, I sauntered about the snowy bittersweet fields with memories flashing back as I collected dog tags of fallen comrades amidst the wreckage. It was a great way to start such an adventure, reconciling with the past so that I could fully move on from it. Looking at things from Shepard’s perspective, it made perfect sense for their character, at least regarding the personality that I’d cultivated thus far. Yet, that wasn’t the main path, it was entirely optional. Much of this filler was where I truly developed my Shepard, built a connection to them, and made them something more than the hard-ass commander kicking reapers to the curb. That’s because, immediately following this visit to the past, I began my intergalactic cartography mission to chart the galaxy, gathering resources, upgrading the new Normandy, and meeting my crew.
Among the rabble, I found two engineers lurking in the depths, wallowing in self-pity, along with a bitter old chef, not unlike the ones I know in real life, and the famed Doctor Chakwas who had returned to the ship. Good ol’ Chakwas, how I missed you in the third game following your untimely demise. Each of these had a little mission for me. These boiled down to routine fetch quests, but the subsequent interactions and the way it made the Normandy feel more like home was worthwhile. The trek was bog-standard, yet the aftermath was anything but. Sharing that drink with Chakwas was a pivotal moment in my Shepard’s path, as it’s what cemented my decision to repent for the sins of butchering Wrex in a renegade run to pushing forward as a reluctant paragon, and that resulted in a pretty grey character that tried their damndest to be good, even if they blundered occasionally. A human, through and through. A lot of conscious decisions to shape my Shepard came from these little tidbits, but I still had fun being a bit of a prick like when I tricked the krogans on the Citadel into thinking I’d caught them some native fish when, in reality, I’d popped to the pet store and bought one instead.
But aside from the quaint little narratives, there are the epic sagas too. For one, probing so many planets landed me on another wreckage, that of an Alliance freighter of some kind, only it was dangling on the edge of a cliffside. It all felt very Uncharted – pun intended – as I began to explore. Each step rocked the boat, and it was an anxious climb for some loot, and the only way to find this abandoned ship was to fly around the galaxy map, probing every planet in sight and hoping that some anomaly would rear its head. Doing so isn’t needed at all. It helps with the endgame suicide mission, but you don’t have to be as extensive as I was, yet that flying around was part of why I loved the second game, so finding these little side quests every now and then was just a cherry on top.
Throw in the other DLC alongside the Normandy crash site, and you have a well-rounded collection of perfect distractions. The Reapers and collectors are rearing their heads around the Omega 4 Relay but who gives a damn when I can help Liara take down the Shadow Broker? There is some questionable side content regarding an autistic savant character that absolutely should have been left to the wayside with this remaster, but most of what’s there is fantastic, with the Lair of the aforementioned Shadow Broker being the best quest in any Mass Effect game, chock full of awesome set-pieces and wonderful character interactions with two top-tier boss fights. One against a Spectre, the other against a spider-like creature with a shield, looking like something right out of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Going back into the Mass Effect games, replaying them once more after beating the three in turn, the first’s side content feels bland and uninteresting, while in the third, there’s that nagging feeling of pressure to plow on while Earth is under siege. Part of that pressure bleeds into how the optional content evokes, whereas 2 let me go at a leisurely pace, doing what I want, and it embraced that. It’s what gives it so much replay value, what makes it the best of the bunch, and it’s why I played it so much.
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