Most Underrated Game: One Year Later

MassEffectAndromeda 2018-03-22 21-50-17-609 by prmjb, on Flickr

I jumped into Andromeda again for the anniversary. And damn, I've missed those guys. Such a great fun game.   Plenty of runs to go. 

Other than what you said about the Javik DLC is true, your popcorn analogy is terrible, sorry.

No, I meant you are probably right about the reason why "From Ashes" came out the way it did, however, it's not really like "popcorn" at movies, it's more about having sound on your movie. Would the game somewhat make sense without him? Probably. But it is a crucial part of it, - understanding the Protheans - as they are a major part of the history of MET. IMHO.

I love them as well, and my collection is growing quite nicely. My favorite are the Mass Effect, MEA, Dragon Age, Fallout 4, Overwatch, Witcher 3, and The Art of Deus Ex Universe books. The MEA one is a pretty good size, chock-full of beautiful images. 

Eh, Ii don't think MEA can really complain with the way things turned out. I did enjoy many aspects of it, but there was more than enough wrong with it that it was never going to be a huge hit like previous BW games have been. (I've said many times though and still believe that its much better than ME3 and DAI - but those games had advantages that MEA didn't have, such as being the concluding part of an established series, coming out in a very lean time for RPGs etc etc).

It was alright and over the course of the game I felt myself getting onboard with it properly in a way I hadn't since DA2, but it was obvious MEA just didn't have that 'cool' factor that western fans demand and that alone was enough to guarantee its fate IMO however undeservedly.

Still, I still think you'd really have to stretch to say MEA was an undervalued gem or anything. I see it more as 'it was good for people who like this sort of thing'. It was more niche than usual, less cool than usual and the relative sparsity of big heroic moments and opportunities for Renegade style play didn't play to the crowd. But I felt all that stuff was getting out of hand in BW games anyway and felt very forced (as it does in Witcher as well IMO). Save me from that Fantasy Red Dead 'tough, surly badass brawls, seduces and self righteously sneers at those with causes' his way around the country.

It just all feels so cliched, like you're playing 'Self righteous Hero: Might makes Right Edition' or 'John Hero: American Man' etc. Along with all the Sheperd shilling and the rest of the nonsense, its long ago started to feel like parody as characters like Geralt growl 'I've got no Emotions' to the point where I feel the only acceptable follow up to that would be to have happy singing beavers pop up behind and croon 'NO EMOTIONS, JUST MAGIC POTIONS! SWORD OILS, BATH LOTIONS!' 
 
Anything to undercut this tiresome 'You're the most badass, most bestest and strengthiest person ever - nobody gets to tell you No' idiocy we keep getting pampered with. So I feel like I comfortably fit the 'person who likes this sort of thing' re MEA's approach.

But frankly if we're talking Most Underrated of last year, then I'd argue for The Sexy Brutale instead of MEA.

Exactly, a matter like the fate of the Quarian ark needs to be dealt in a proper sequel, not a DLC
DLCs should be limited to optional subplots

Its interesting in the Initiative videos that only 4 ships are shown, human, turian, asari and salarian, before the release of MEA. Why wasn't the quarian ship not included? The other thing is that the Nexus looked to be able to have 4 that could dock to it, not 5. Is it because Bioware didn't manage the time they had very well that the best they could do is have audio from someone's omnitool mentioning them at the end of MEA?

You don't defeat all the Reapers in ME1, does it mean the game is incomplete ?

In MEA, your main goal is to find a home for humanity which you do with Meridian. Saving the arks is a major plot, but not the main plot since you can complete the game without saving two of them. Also, the quarian Ark wasn't part of the first wave so wasn't overdue yet unlike the asari, salarian, and turian Arks which are the ones you agree to find and you can find all of them so that questline is also finished in MEA. 

I always think of how TotalBiscuit was part of a boycott due to the fact that they cut him out of the main game and made him Day One DLC.

I don't think it was underrated at all. I tried my hardest to like the game, giving it multiple playthroughs with different "personalities" (as different as Ryder can be, anyway), and I put about 150 hours into the multiplayer, since ME3's MP was what kept me invested in the franchise between 2013 and 2016. After all was said and done, I think I wound up with about 240 hours total in the game and 97% completion for achievements (only missing the one for maxing out all profiles), although in retrospect I wish I had stopped playing after finishing my first playthrough at the 30 hour mark and moved on to something else.

If it didn't have the Mass Effect name attached to it, I have no doubt that I would have done exactly that.

I can start off by saying that I enjoyed the combat. The raw gameplay is some of the best that Bioware has pumped out, although after spending nearly 2000 hours on ME3MP (which was also handled by the Montreal studio), I had no doubts that I would enjoy the gameplay of Andromeda - the ways that they evolved the sandbox that Edmonton had set up for them in ME3 were pretty impressive. I also like the idea of being able to freely switch classes at any point, although I do wish that there was still some restriction, like tech classes can only switch to other tech classes and the same for biotics, but being able to mix and match powers from the different profiles was fun at first while trying to figure out the best combination of abilities for my playstyle.

Unfortunately I can't really say the same for the rest of the game. While I liked how Ryder was more of a blank slate than Shepard, ultimately not having a defined personality lead to Ryder being treated as a bit of a doormat by just about everyone. Sure, you had more control over how Ryder expressed him/herself, but you had significantly less control over what Ryder said. These are not the same thing. It seemed like you had no choice but to go along with what the writers intended the outcome to be, the only thing you could affect was how hard Ryder wailed and gnashed their teeth about it.

Speaking of wailing and gnashing of teeth, I found the main antagonist to be the least interesting villain in the entire game. Even that one asshole Krogan on Elaaden was more compelling than the Archon. While there is some interesting backstory to the Kett presented in the Codex, the way they were portrayed across the game made them feel like little more than re-skinned Collectors, minus the air of mystery. Abducting races to study what makes them special? Check, except the Kett did it through brute force and not any particularly special technology. Repurposing their captives into more soldiers? Check. The only thing that substantially differentiates them is their religious fanaticism, and that isn't nearly interesting enough to make them stand out, in my opinion.

The Angara were a huge missed opportunity. Here we are traveling to a whole new galaxy, and all we get are some fat quarians. The Angara would be just as at home in the Milky Way, which might as well be where the game takes place since the only new races we see are the Angara and the Kett (which are extragalactic invaders). Every other race we come across throughout the course of the game came with us from the Milky Way, which is a bit of an issue as it instills a sense of pointlessness in the decision to set the game in Andromeda. I get it, we only have access to a small portion of the Andromeda galaxy and there's bound to be more sentient life out there, plus any new races introduced can't be too alien since it would be difficult for the average player to connect to them in the way that a game like this requires.

Seems like a good segue to talk about squadmates, or at least what I remember of them. Jaal left a lot to be desired, but he wasn't offensively bad. I didn't like how emotional he was, it seemed like he was ready to cry at the slightest of interpersonal issues. Cora on the other hand was pretty bad. Far too obsessed with her time as an Asari Commando, needlessly standoffish towards Ryder for the first half of the game, about as endearing as wallpaper paste for the second half, and too thirsty for approval. Liam wasn't much better, but at least he had a personality to him. Shame it wasn't one I liked. He was a bumbling fuck-up, lived like a frat boy, and acted like one too. Peebee was obnoxious, straight up. I couldn't find a single redeeming quality in her, and I was actually upset I didn't have the option to shoot her, throw her out the airlock, or at the very least kick her off my ship after the events of her loyalty mission.

Vetra was a mixed bag. I liked her, but I think that's mostly due to my bias towards Turians and not down to any relevant aspect of her character. There were some sweet moments in her romance, but outside of those she was a bit like Cora in the sense that she seemed to be overwhelmingly focused on one aspect of her life (Sid) and devoid of any real substance outside of that. Drack was probably my favorite character in the game. While he wasn't without his problems, it's hard to not like a Krogan.

The main plot of the game was very predictable and repeated a lot of the same beats seen in the original trilogy (which in and of itself was predictable and repeated a lot of the same beats seen in other scifi works), which isn't necessarily a problem as long as it's put together well. Andromeda wasn't. The desire for the player to have complete autonomy in how they chose to progress through the game meant that there was never a sense of urgency to anything. It didn't matter if you did the next mission now, in ten minutes, or in ten hours because the game never put anything on the line or otherwise compelled you to see what happened next. The only time there was ever a hint of this is at the very end of the game where you temporarily take control of your sibling, but even this fades after the first few minutes and you remember that there's nothing really at stake. The events of the game still play out the same no matter what you do and it's virtually impossible to fuck up.

That said, the game does have some very strange outcomes to the few "tough choices" it does give you. A good example of this is the interrupt at the end of Jaal's loyalty mission. The leader of the nondescript terrorists has your loyal and trusted squadmate at gunpoint and is about to pull the trigger. You are given the option to shoot him and save your friend's life, or do nothing and allow your friend to be shot (and almost certainly killed, according to all the information you have been given up until that point). Surely then, the logical choice is to take the shot and not let your friend be publicly executed. You would in fact be wrong, because on top of your friend being tremendously pissed at you afterwards, the terrorist leader is such an inept marksman that if you decline to shoot him, he manages to almost completely miss a pistol shot from ten feet and your friend escapes with little more than a scratch. The cherry on top of all of this is that the act of him somehow missing causes a large amount of the support he had garnered to simply vanish in an instant, because reasons I guess.

There's still things I haven't mentioned yet, from how the majority of sidequests in the game boil down to fetch/kill quests that feel like they were ripped out of an MMO (and yes, those pointless additional tasks do count as sidequests by definition), how the "open world" areas were mostly empty wastelands devoid of any originality or noteworthy features apart from the waypoint to your next objective, to how the user interface design was some of the worst I've seen from a triple-a game. I could also talk about how the multiplayer was completely homogenized to the point of mediocrity in comparison to its predecessor, but I figure people here in the singleplayer section don't really care about that.

So that's my take on the game. Mediocre at best. Perhaps the flaws that people actually talked about, the bad animations, were overblown, but there's no denying that it was pretty embarrassing for big ticket game from a well-respected studio that had been five years in the making was released in that state, regardless of its connection to any established franchise.On the other hand, perhaps all that flak was well-deserved given the greater context around the game. I just wish people had focused on the substance of the game instead of the paint on its surface.

You are free to disagree, however if you're going to claim that I'm regurgitating something verbatim (as in, word-for-word), I would like to see some proof of that.