If you tackle the endgame of Mass Effect 3 with enough military strength, you have an option to synthesize all organic and synthetic life rather than destroying or controlling synthetics. If you chose the synthesis ending in Mass Effect 3, read: All Systems Red (2017), the first novella in Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries series Spoilers for the Mass Effect series throughout. Bonus: almost all of these books have sequels, so go ahead and fall in love with space drama all over again. In this list, I went for literal feelings-not books that have game-like mechanics, like Piranesi‘s resource-gathering and Gideon the Ninth‘s co-op dungeon crawling, but books that struck similar emotional resonances to those I felt playing Mass Effect for the first time or tackling some of the problems you solve as the first human Spectre. LoreQuest is a series about books that make you feel the way video games do. It’s possible to feel skeptical about the game’s implicit politics and explicit mechanics while feeling genuine affection for its characters and letting the symphony of well-timed emotional notes land their punches. Yet Mass Effect is a rich text, and it’s possible to be critical of it while still wanting to replay and unlock every possible dialogue option, and to trigger every possible encounter in the first two games so that you can reunite with every possible character at the end of the known world in Mass Effect 3. And as Zainabb said in last August’s roundtable, the pleasure of exploring the discoverable universe is interwound with the pleasure of controlling and/or colonizing it: the space cantinas are Shepherd’s to raid, the space crates are Shepherd’s to loot, and the Krogan coming-of-age ceremony is simply waiting for Shepherd to crash. It’s certainly worth thinking critically about how (and why?) sexual dimorphism in aliens is represented-not to mention human and alien sexuality, and the mysteriously limited romantic options for a gay male Shepherd. ![]() It’s worth thinking critically about why even Shepherd’s diplomatic duties typically involve guns. As Kael’s Diary of a Hardline Shep points out, Commander Shepherd’s “extrajudicial space cop” status sure hits different in this decade. Sometimes when we talk about this series, it’s easier to focus on what we don’t love about it. As an entirely new audience discovers the joy of the original trilogy via the Legendary Edition, I’ve been thinking about what drew me back to the series again and again.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |