Me and Mass Effect

It's only fair that my first post on my geek life comes from the geek thing I'm currently doing.

And that geek thing is playing through the Mass Effect series again.

Image from bioware.com

This might be my favorite video game series (favorite stand-alone is reserved for another game). For those of you unfamiliar with it, the Mass Effect series centers around Commander Shepard, and his/her battle against a galaxy-ending threat.

Mass Effect featured a customizable protagonist, with fully-recorded dialogue for both male and female Shepard. You could change facial features, hair color and haircut (though there aren't really many options there), and race. So that's a level of player integration I really like and it immediately sucked me in when I started playing the first time.

It also had the option to have a relationship with other characters throughout the series. In the first game you were limited to two choices: a human woman for the male Shepard, a human man for the female Shepard, and an alien for both Shepards. This is the alien:

Not female. Seriously.
Image from masseffect.bioware.com/me2

Technically she's not female, because the kind of alien she is is non-gender specific. If you want to know more then here's a link to the wiki for the games. But yeah, she's anatomically female and the fact that both Shepards can pursue a relationship with her, but both Shepards can't romance the male squadmate, is a male-driven lesbian fantasy. Still, they inadvertently gave the option for an LGBT relationship which is a good thing even if that might not have been the original intention.

Anyway, the next games open up even more options for romance. My first time through the first game, I romanced Ashley, the female human. But in the second game I couldn't help but romance another character.

"I got better. I got you." - Tali'Zorah, breaking my heart.
Image from masseffect.bioware.com/me2

That's Tali, a Quarian. She was a squadmate in the first game, but not a romance option. I didn't actually intend to fall in love with her (clarification: I'll probably say that when I talk about fictional characters. It's not some creepy obsession and I'd still take a real relationship any day so no worries, but I'll be using language like that a lot when talking about characters). I was just trying to wait until the next game when Ashley would be a squadmate again.

But then I really loved Tali. She was sweet, badass, a little awkward, and cared about more than just herself. Plus she's a really cute drunk. I never regretted my choice to pursue a relationship with her.

And I think that was one of the biggest lessons that Mass Effect taught me: first relationships aren't your only relationships, and they won't be your best. You should be open to new experiences, new people, because you never know who you could fall in love with.

Probably not an alien with an Eastern European accent, but still.
Image from masseffect.bioware.com/me3

But it's not the only thing I learned from Mass Effect. During the games you can make Paragon or Renegade choices, which amount to whether your Shepard will be nice or a dick. I can never choose Renegade, which was more of a self-realization that I genuinely don't enjoy being a dick (see the Little Sisters in BioShock for further evidence).

The most important lesson, though, was that even if you do everything right, bad things can still happen. This is a series where the final mission in the second game is called a suicide run by every character. At some points you can manage to keep everyone alive if you completed the necessary steps, but at other points a character's death is unavoidable.

Life can work the same way. There are going to be times where, against everything you do, something goes wrong. And that's okay. It doesn't mean you're a bad person, or that you messed up. What matters is accepting the bad and looking to the good.

I'll leave it with my favorite song from the first game's soundtrack. It resurfaces in later games too, so I think it's the best choice.

Stay cool. Be beautiful. And always geek out.