A Mass Effect Valentine
“Listen, Shepard, this may be a bad time, but… I bought you this card.”
Yes, it’s Valentine’s Day/Aching Solitude Awareness Day (delete as appropriate). What better time to take in a good love story, or lend a hand making sure it ends happily ever after? What’s that? You’re out on a hot date? Screw you then, I’ll be over here in World of Warcraft.
Oh, all right. Let’s do this first.
After the amazing Alistair romance in Dragon Age, I was curious to see how (the absolutely fantastic) Mass Effect 2 was going to handle the issue of love. In short… it’s a mixed bag. When they work, they’re fine, but only a few of the seven options really gel, and all of them share a few particularly annoying flaws. Most notably, it’s tough to really get to know characters when Commander Shepard, Hero Of The Entire Goddamn Universe, is only given one real chance to talk to them between each mission and generally gets blown off with a curt dismissal the rest of the time. To strike up a relationship with your crew in Mass Effect is to bounce effortlessly between randomly telling people how much you want to dock with their pants, and being That Guy In The Office – the creepy smelly one who keeps trying to make everyone look at pictures of his cat.
His dead cat.
You don’t want to be That Guy.
When your crew deigns to talk with you though, things get interesting. Not only are they all beautifully well-written and great to spend time with, romantically, they present an interesting spectrum of choices – every character representing a different type of relationship as much as acting as a love interest in their own right. In each case, the romance comes after doing them a favour, which forces you to spend some time with them, often getting past their prickly first impressions and showing the true personality you might otherwise have completely overlooked.
The bigger your crew gets, the more options become available. Right at the start for instance, you get the Action Movie choices, so called because their romance is largely down to them being present and the right gender for a ‘heart’ moment in a blockbuster flick, rather than them particularly compelling in their own right. For men, it’s Miranda of the Vacuum Packed Buttocks. For women, it’s Jacob, the latest in a long line of Bioware’s First Male NPCs to be less interesting than a balsa wood statue of himself. They’re clearly the defaults, if only because they’re the only ones who warranted special shirtless character models, while everyone else has make love in their standard wardrobe. Luckily, after their blandness, the rest of the crew shows up to offer more interesting angles and curves, from Thane’s melancholic broken-bird personality, to Jack doing double-duty as a tameable wildcat and dispenser of violent quickies in the cargo bay.
(I only know this from YouTube however, having taken her out on a mission exactly once, and even then, only in the hope that the secondary outfit you unlock by making crewmembers loyal to you would include a shirt to replace her ridiculous hate-bikini. My ship has a dress code.)
Oddly, the two I ended up liking the most were two of the characters I liked least in the first game: Tali for male characters, and Garrus for Shepardesses. Back in the first game, Garrus rarely got to join missions because Ashley was more fun and a better soldier, and I was always annoyed at the way that Tali gets forced on you regardless of whether you want her or not. Both became much more interesting in the sequel, both as standard characters and romance partners.
Let’s take a closer look at them, shall we?
Garrus – Calm Before The Storm
“I’m Commander Shepard, and this is my favourite lap on the Citadel…”
Garrus is one of the few cases where a romance coming out of left-field genuinely works. He’s simply reminiscing about the way his race, the Turians, prepare for high-risk missions by beating the living crap out of each other to blow off steam and calm their nerves. In particular, he mentions one female soldier who stuck in his mind for being his match both in the ring and in her quarters afterwards, summing the experience up as “More than one way to work off stress, I guess.”
A bit like Alistair, much of the fun of what follows comes from the mix of Garrus’ established ass-kicking prowess and… less developed social skills. When a female character responds to this story with a sultry “It sounds like you’re carrying some tension. Maybe I could help you get rid of it…”, his immediate reaction is “I… ah… didn’t think you’d feel like sparring, Commander”. It takes another hint before he finally cottons on, and from that point, clearly spends every waking second trying to work out what he actually wants from the experience, and how to get it without ruining what they already have. The result is an interesting dynamic, effectively swapping round the usual roles of game romances – the NPC doing all the heavy lifting in the relationship and handling the details, rather than the player treading on egg-shells and fretting about screwing everything up.
Randomly, if you’re wondering about those ‘details’, let Mordin (my favourite character in the game by a long, long way) explain. In more detail than anyone needs.
This romance is notable for the attraction being based on respect, rather than the relationship being an effective reward – and for the complicated elements happening when the player isn’t around. From being taken completely by surprise that Shepard would even suggest the idea (even reassuring her that he doesn’t have a cross-species fetish), Garrus clearly spends every waking moment from the suggestion to the big night doing little but thinking it over – the basic plumbing, what would happen to crew morale, and exactly how he feels about her. Any time he gets onto the subject, his cool demenour slips like buttered Teflon – his dialogue turning into gawky metaphors, his nerves masquerading as professional concern. When he shows up for the date, it’s with whatever the Turian equivalent of sweaty hands are, stammering cross-species chat-up lines, clutching a bottle of wine and putting on hilariously bad mood music.
For her part, Shepard immediately shuts off the music and tells him he talks too much. But in a friendly way, of course, and in the end, it works out like they both hoped.
What I like about this romance is that it keeps things unspoken, and makes good use of time. Mass Effect 2 doesn’t feel long enough – either in real time or game-time – for any of the characters (with one exception) to form much of a bond, making sudden declarations of love inherently hollow.
Here, love isn’t really on the cards. Garrus sweats the details, and Shepard’s escape clause is the dreaded Let’s Be Friends speech, but at heart, they’re Comrades With Benefits more than partners – two self-sufficient individualists brought together because neither of them has anyone else to be with. It’s tough to see them continuing the relationship after the credits, but in a way, they don’t have to. The time they spend together is far more about sealing the bond they already have than forging a new one, and anything else is a bonus. It’s particularly telling that while the majority of the romance scenes end with the characters either lying back or kissing or getting started with the dry-humping in a corner, theirs closes on a quiet meeting of heads and a fade-to-black. Respect is at the heart of their sequences, right to the end.
Tali – Coming Out Of Her Shell
Bioware never lets you see her face. Why? Because of how much everyone wants to see her face. I wouldn’t let you see it either.
Tali’Zorah’s relationship is the other one that I really enjoyed. Where the Garrus sequences are about respect, hers focus on intimacy. Her race, the Quarians, are effectively space gypsies – travelling the galaxy in a flotilla of patched-up ships, and usually first to be blamed if anything goes missing when they’re around. They’re also intergalactic pariahs for creating a race of artificial soldiers called the Geth, which promptly achieved sentience and turned on them. The result is that the Geth are now seen as a menace, the Quarians lost their home planet, and as a result of natural weakness and their horrible living conditions, pretty much all their immune systems. As a result, they’re stuck in environmental suits almost all the time, even on their own ships.
I really, really like the Quarians. The one thing I really missed seeing in the first game was the Flotilla, so it was great to see it put in an appearance in Mass Effect 2. Like most of the species in the universe, they’re not coded as good or bad, although their insular nature tends to mean that you see them on their own, usually as the underdogs. What’s particularly clever about their background is exactly why this is. Young Quarians go on a Pilgrimage as a rite of passage – leaving the fleet to bring something of value back to it that will effectively buy them a place on one of the ships. Their goal is effectively to earn the right to belong, the importance of which is only reinforced by their experience of the alternative – being alone in the universe.
Tali is no different. Her subquest in Mass Effect 2 has her put on trial and facing exile for purely political reasons after the death of her father, and while that can be resolved in a few different ways, the most dramatic element is constant throughout. Quarian naming structure includes the name of the ship – we meet her in Mass Effect as Tali’Zorah nar Rayaa, which becomes Tali’Zorah vas Neema in Mass Effect 2. Returning to the Flotilla, she finds that she’s now known as Tali’Zorah vas Normandy, after Shepard’s vessel, in a clearly painful attempt to distance her from her people and make it easier to sway public opinion against her. What neither the Quarian Admiralty, nor Tali herself, are ready for is just how much Shepard is prepared to go to war for his crew, to the point that Tali quietly and proudly keeps her new name even if everything goes perfectly.
All this makes the romance that follows (for Male Shepards – Tali doesn’t swing both ways) much more convincing than most of the others. Tali knows that Shepard has her back, and not only that, is probably the only person in the universe she can genuinely rely on. She’s written very well, as someone who knows how bad her situation is, but doesn’t spend much time complaining about it – she’s loyal to her people even when they don’t deserve it, and for the most part, simply accepts her fate. The one part which really seems to get her down is the lack of any real intimacy, the fact that nobody can see her face, that she can’t really touch anyone. One of her best lines is about the way that her peoples’ immune systems are so weak, one of their most meaningful Quarian experiences is simply sharing another person’s air for a while. With the suicide mission looming, Shepard’s offer to take things to the next level is more than simply a chance to make out. It’s someone she respects and trusts finally giving her the chance to be herself after a lifetime of being forced to hide from the world and always think of the greater good. No wonder she jumps at the chance.
As for the big event, it’s by far the best staged of the romance sequences. I have a feeling that if you choose the “I’ve Changed My Mind” option, whoever wrote Tali’s dialogue will actually track you down and punch you in the face. And you Deserve It. Heartless, heartless brute…
Man, I Feel Like A Woman Today
This is really more of an aside than anything else, but still worth mentioning. Probably the ropiest element of Mass Effect 2’s romances is that canonically, Commander Shepard is male. You can choose a female character instead, and I recommend doing that just because of Jennifer Hale’s phenomenal voice acting work, but on several occasions, the copy-and-paste nature of this becomes very clear. Most obviously, the same character animations are used throughout, which really comes back to bite the game when it comes to romance. All of the ‘bed’ scenes are clearly staged to show Shepard as the all-conquering Hero Of The Universe with his doting gal to one side – not quite as a conquest, but definitely as a reward.
Simply swapping positions breaks the subtle staging cues (the girl being slightly lower, the camera focusing on the guy, the nature of the poses making him seem like the stronger of the two) in a faintly jarring way considering that she’s both the hero, and the universe’s biggest hardass. Not of course that there’s anything wrong with the universe’s biggest hardass wanting a cuddle every now and again. Just ask Yeoman Chambers, if she’s not already in your quarters.
A far more overt, and much funnier example, is when you invite a guy up to the Captain’s Quarters after the game. They inherit a pose intended for the female characters, and Garrus in particular… doesn’t suit it very well. At all. In a game with such phenomenal attention to detail, these are tiny, inconsequential things, but still unfortunate oversights.
It was then that Garrus realised: if he annoyed her, she could melt his brain with her mind. And might. Bad time to really need the toilet…
By far the biggest mis-step though is Bioware’s approach to Shepard’s sexuality. Not the lack of a ‘gay option’ necessarily, but the weak explanation for it.
Here’s how the games are different: Dragon Age is a first person narrative, where you’re taking on an origin and a role, and you are that character at a fundamental level. It’s fundamentally about defining your character, including those kinds of concepts. In Mass Effect it’s more a third person narrative, where you have a pre-defined character who is who he is, or she is. But it’s not a wide-open choice matrix. It’s more choice on a tactical level with a pre-defined character. So they’re different types of narratives, and that’s intentional.
We’re not saying that one approach is better than the other. In our previous games, as we did in Jade Empire, as we did in KOTOR, as we did in Baldur’s Gate, and many games before and in the future, we enable those kinds of choices, whereas in Mass Effect it’s more about Shepard as a defined character with certain approaches and worldviews, and that’s just who he or she is. So we constrain the choice set somewhat, but enable more tactical choices and enable a deeper, richer personality, because it’s more focused around defining one character, it’s not as wide open. But that’s by choice.
It’s first person versus third person narrative, and the types of choices you get to make within that are related to that, whether you’ve got a pre-defined character or a wide-open character. Some of our games have been wide open, and some have been more constrained, and we’ll probably continue both kinds of character development in the future.
In short: huh? Dragon Age definitely gives more control, but with Shepard, you design and customise everything from his/her face to his/her background to whether or not he’s a him or a her. What’s really going on is the old gay/lesbian double standard yet again. A female Shepard can make out with a blue-skinned space babe and the ship’s surprisingly slutty communications officer because That Is Hot, whereas a male Shepard getting together with, say, Jacob, would make the game Fox News’ favourite whipping-boy no matter how well the romance was handled.
As with the incredibly coy sex scenes, it’s no surprise that Bioware decided to play it safe, but it’s a shame that the explanation is so ridiculous. It’s more notable here because of how many choices the game does give. If it was simply one or two potential romance partners, I doubt anyone would have noticed or cared. At the very least though, if Shepardesses are officially straight, they deserve some non-Asari eye-candy once in a while. It’s only fair…
“Officially, I’m not a girl.” “Me either. Dance.”
Quibbles aside, Mass Effect 2’s romances are more effective than the overwhelming majority out there. A suicide mission isn’t a big threat unless you care about your team, and these character focused sections do a great job at making you at least understand them, even if you don’t end up liking them enough to get into their armour. With the number on offer, the odds are good that everyone will find at at least one theme or crewmember that hits the spot.
And if not, no matter. There’s always Mass Effect 3.
(P.S. Sorry, Ash. We can still be friends, right?)
Despite the clearly awful original trailer, it’s actually well worth giving Subject Zero a chance. I really warmed to her over time and her romance felt very natural, Shepard is clearly the first person who has really cared for her instead of just using her, and she is deeply confused by this.
I ended up surprising myself by choosing her in the end.
Posted by Dante on February 14, 2010