Curious about the complaints surrounding Andromeda.

Uh-huh. And then the Reapers invade and you get your magic wave, game over.

Rhetoric nitpick: Who's the "we" here? If I tell you that you should skip some X, or all X, it doesn't necessarily follow that I personally prefer to skip X. I could be just giving you good advice for you.

it's easy to understand how we got there when you start thinking about alternate designs. Once you implement the MW species there isn't a huge budget left for new Andromedans. And if you're only going to do one new fully-animated species (in contrast to cameo races like the hanar, who don't need full animation suites and different looks), I can see why you want to go human-compatible with it. In retrospect they should have come up with a couple more cheap cameo races; hindsight is wonderful, of course.

As for the 'alien' elements, its not just about having non-humanoid designs, though I would be lying if I said I didn't want to see more of that, it was about the writing in general. The outward appearance of the Rachni certainly help distinguish them as 'alien' but it had more to do with the writing behind their dialog (IMO) that set them apart as different. Heck, look at Legion and how it expanded on the Geth in ME 2, it was a humanoid design yet the writing behind how it presented the Consensus and how the Geth viewed the universe compared to organics really made them foreign to our understanding. Players were forced to explore and try and wrap there heads around something innately different from us and our human norms, not incredibly deep by hard sci-fi novel standards to be sure, but certainly miles ahead of just having purplish-blue cat/lizard people who are instantly relatable to us and our culture within five minutes of meeting them. And definitely more engaging a prospect than just watering everything down so it can be romanceable.

I'd recommend the writers check out Jack Campbell's "Lost Fleet:  Beyond the Frontier" series.  The characters make first contact with several alien life forms, most of which are hostile.  And yet the hostile aliens are not exactly "bad guys".  It's their alien mindset and perspectives that make it virtually impossible to coexist or even communicate with them in a meaningful way.  And even the "nice aliens" are extremely difficult to understand.  The way they look at the world is highly pattern-based and symbolic.

Sure, the Geth didn't talk to us in ME 1, but little insights like the Geth shrine on Feros, or the Quarian music played after destroying the Geth base pointed to there being more to this collective intelligence than just being mindless murder bots. No such narrative exploration or little story hook into potential stories for the Remnant though. 

And it's not like aliens, like the Rachni, were so esoteric and outside our understanding that we couldn't possibly hope to comprehend them. They were different enough to warrant the 'alien' descriptor, but I found it no more difficult to understand and then empathize with the Rachni Queen than I did with Garus or Mordin. Andromeda certainly wouldn't have been hurt to vary the Heleus cluster and make it seem more 'alien' than how it turned out to be.

yes there are.
1. The true nature of the scourge.
2. What was the purpose in creating the Angara?
3. What is the relationship between the Yevarra and the Jardaan? Are the Yevarra Jardaan?
4.What was the AI on Voeld? Angarra, Jardaan or something else?

Sure these mysteries might not go anywhere...like the geth shrine on Feros...but they do point to a larger mystery.

I have to admit I loved this part in season 1.

In my personal and honest opinion, Andromeda, when viewed as a brand-new and completely separate franchise, it stands on its own. Now it has to be one of the more generic and white bread science fiction stories I've come across in recent memory, but it passes the basic litmus test for being a usable sci-fi world I suppose. The problem, and most of the reasonable complaints surrounding this game, stem from when the Mass Effect moniker is put on the front cover.

Despite the continued instance of the devs and other people to view the game as a fresh start, or a wiping clean of the slate, you have to understand when continuing a franchise, especially one as lauded as Mass Effect, carries with it a certain pedigree, one that you just can't avoid. If you are wanting to include Krogan and Asari, or biotics and mass effect technology in your narrative then you must be prepared for the innate comparisons that are going to be drawn between what was done in the past and what is being done now. Is it fair? Probably not, but then again if BioWare really wanted to avoid any such parallels then they shouldn't have made the game set in the Mass Effect universe. Much like what 343 Industries is going through with the Halo franchise, BioWare can't expect to continue their series without the fanbase looking back. Now I am not saying that I support those individuals who unrealistically set Andromeda up next to the entirety of the previous trilogy and use that unbalanced comparison to damn the game, but I am saying that as the supposed start of a new story arc Andromeda is rather lackluster, especially when compared to the first entry into the franchise, ME 1.

Sure, the textures have more resolution, the models have more polygons, and the gameplay is more fluid in the most recent title, but when viewing the game as a Mass Effect title and comparing it to the narrative nuance in ME 1, Andromeda comes across as one of the lowest ranked mass effect games (again IMO). Believe me, I don't have a problem with rose-colored glasses here, I know that ME 1 was far from perfect, but if you look at the varied lore and narrative world-building involved in the first game and then compare it to what is in Andromeda, one can begin to see the overall loss in quality. Now I don't want to bog down the remainder of this post with every tiny little infraction as that just seems needlessly nitpicky, I may dislike Andromeda's inventory system but that doesn't make or break the game for me, however I do want to focus on three major points of departure from ME 1 that I personally feel makes Mass Effect: Andromeda the weakest title in the franchise so far. A removal completely at odds with what initially drew me into the series in the first place. They are, in order of least important to most important, the open world design, constant Citadel DLC level 'humor' permeating everything, and a total lack of any 'alien' elements.



Open world is a topic that has been done to death so I won't spend too much time on it, but I do want to point out how it bogs down the game with needless filler content. As a completionist, I endeavor to finish all optional tasks and side quests set before me before moving on to the next major story point, both as a means of further experiencing the world I am playing in, and because I'm weird like that. The problem with this is that by the time I had achieved 100% habitability on Kaldera (or the planet where you encounter the Outlaws) I was totally burned out on moving on to the next world. Which, to me, it's a sure sign of bad game design, when a player actually dreads the prospect of more maps to run around in. I felt like I was working a job rather than enjoying a game; a feeling I experienced while playing Dragon Age: Inquisition as well. I especially loathed the quests that would have you go bunny hopping from system to system, going through loading cinematic after loading cinematic for no other reason than to just run from point A on Eos, and then jump back in the Tempest and travel to Voled so I could run to point B, all so that I could scan something and listen to SAM drone on about something totally insignificant.

"Well" I often hear as a common response, "if you don't like all the running around then just ignore it and focus on the story." To which my stance on that is: Are we now actively admitting that portions of this game are so dull and mind-numbingly boring that we should just skip them? That, despite large sections of the game being nothing but useless filler content, we should just give Andromeda a pass on said content? ME 1 had it's share of pointless fetch quests too, don't get me wrong, namely the mineral deposits and the medallion search, but the difference there was that it wasn't ingrained throughout the entire game, nor did the player have to constantly wade through them on their way to story missions. Speaking of the main story areas, the side quests within each one tangentially felt appropriate to the situation at hand. Helping the colonists on Feros out by fixing their water shortage and eliminating the Geth targeting them, or moving to hunt down the last remaining insane Rachni from Peak 15 on Noveria made sense given the situation and it was all self-contained within that one major plot point. In Andromeda, my Pathfinder is stuck playing delivery boy for NPCs who's quests have virtually nothing to do with the task at hand; "Help me Pathfinder, my dog ran away and I need you to find it!"



Moving on to my next point, it may shock the general fanbase but I really didn't like the Citadel DLC. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it would have to be one of the worse (narratively speaking) pieces of additional content in the entire franchise; maybe ranked just above Andromeda, because it was only a few hours of side content and not an entire game. Sure, the endings where horrible, and narratively disconnected with what came before, but BioWare received near universal backlash over them. With the Citadel DLC BioWare looked at the content's popularity and decided that this is what they should pursue in favor of having a nuanced story. Now why did I dislike the DLC so much that I only managed a single play though of it; and even then that was a drag? Primarily because of the constant quips, one liners, and meta jokes continually spewing forth from every character I ran across. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good laugh every now and then, but the Citadel was like that one friend at the movies who jabs you in the ribs and whispers in your ear "Did you get that reference?" or "That was funny wasn't it?" every time a joke is thrown out. It was way too much and way too forced for my liking. Despite ME 3 being a generally grim dark narrative I found myself smiling and laughing at things like Garrus' shooting contest, or Tali and Ashely's drunken rants. In the Citadel DLC though, my companions were all replaced with cheap doppelgängers who cartoonishly bumbled their way across the screen with a forced sense of 'humor'.

"How does all of this apply to Andromeda?" you might ask, well due to that content's ensuing popularity, BioWare wrongfully took (IMO) the notion that people want to see more narratives like it. Rather than having characters operate organically in what is initially setup as a serious do-or-die situation; what with things like being stranded on their own with no support, golden worlds being a bust, the primary Pathfinder dead, a hostile alien race only interested in conflict, etc. Instead everyone is cracking wise and trying to tell lame jokes like it's a sitcom. And it's not just the characters either, the underlying plot is seemingly infected with this brand of unceasing light heartedness to the point that quests like preparing for the Movie Night with the crew take on more in-game importance and require more in-game effort to achieve than it does in trying to stop the Archon and the Khett. The story can't even take its own antagonist seriously, and it's obvious that the developers and their unofficial tagline for Andromeda of "Pretty Good Banging" were too entrenched in the Citadel bible to treat the narrative with a straight face either.



Speaking of the the 'Pretty Good Banging' slogan, it was painfully obvious leading up to the game's release, and once it was out in stores, that Andromeda was completely avoiding any 'alien' elements. I mean, sure, the Mass Effect franchise has always been human centric, and showcased "humans as special little snowflakes" but ME 1 at least tried to present the universe as diverse with 'alien' aliens like the Rachni, Elcor, Hanar, the Thorian, and even the Geth to an extent. Not so with Andromeda. Despite being a game that was supposed to harken back to ME 1, and be about exploring the unknown and making discoveries we actually did very little of it. Andromeda is even more human than the Milky Way, with the new "alien" species the Angara doing the impossible and being more like us than even the Asari. Menwhile the Archon and the Khett have less personality and impact than the Collectors, and the Remnant are literally mindless robots to kill for XP and loot.

There is no investigation into trying to understand things like the Vaults, instead its all: "Wow this piece of technology can fundamentally alter the climate and biosphere of an entire planet in seconds; must be magic lolz. Let's turn this sucker on so we can get back to gathering those ingredients for our Movie Night." Aliens like the Rachni might not have been the best example of a non-human element in a science fiction story, but at least we had that variety present within the game at release. Maybe if Andromeda's writing team had more writers of the caliber of people like Chris L'Etoile we could have gotten to see something interesting and decidedly sci-fi, rather than meme heavy romance oriented humans with rubber masks on.

I often see counterpoints that Andromeda's total lack of 'alien' themes shouldn't be held against it, and that we will likely see such elements in future DLC or sequels, but my response to that line of thought is: Would you accept Andromeda if it shipped without any romance content or character customization, and with the vague promise that those features will be added in subsequent releases…probably?" As I have said, it was this alien diversity, not our human representation of differing sexual orientations, that initially drew me into this franchise. You can't expect to completely remove this part of the lore and world-building and not have me call you out on it, especially when ME 1 had both the romance content and occasional humor present alongside said elements.



TL;DR Mass Effect: Andromeda is a passable, if incredibly bland; science fiction adventure when taken on its own, but when made part of the existing franchise, it fails on several, important levels.

I'd recommend the writers check out jack Campbell's "Lost Fleet:  Beyond the Frontier" series.  The characters make first contact with several alien life forms, most of which are hostile.  And yet the hostile aliens are not exactly "bad guys".  It's their alien mindset and perspectives that make it virtually impossible to coexist or even communicate with them in a meaningful way.  And even the "nice aliens" are extremely difficult to understand.  The way they look at the world is highly pattern-based and symbolic.

Of course, Once Upon A Time. I used to watch the hell out of SGU, I'm amazed I didn't recognize him in Once Upon A Time...well, I only watched the first season of OUAT, but still.

This ties into a problem I had with the Archon and the Kett, the Kett are basically space nazis, the Archon had little on screen time and I felt the only thing he was missing was a moustache to twirl due to how hamfisted he is. I feel even a villain with no redeeming qualities can certainly be memorable if you see his horrific actions, look at Frank Horrigan from Fallout 2, the guy only appeared like 4 times in the game, but when he does, he's this 12 foot tall super mutant who is shown to laugh off plasma fire and even decapitates a fucking DEATHCLAW with a single punch, he even had no trouble having civilians get gunned down in cold blood. Kiriyama from the Battle Royale film being another great example, the music that plays when hes on screen, his sadistic and psychopathic actions, the way he never talks, and how it seemed super difficult to actually kill him, all this stuff combined to make him terrifying.

you're right.