[quote name='dothog']So I made an aside about ME2 in GGT and was about to expand on it, but I'm bringing it here.
I was seriously misled about ME2. I had a few friends who said that, gaming aside, as a scifi experience ME2 was effectively a modern marvel, that it competed with contemporary scifi in lit and film. And that's just not the case.
There are so many flaws. It's not just the fault of the morality system (or whatever you call the paragon/renegade thing). The simplest complaint is that the writing is just boring. Not only in terms of the overarching narrative, where somehow I'm super pissed at this Cerebus thing but never given the option to tell them to shove it. I get that they have to do some shoehorning, but jesus, that seems like an obvious path that they've blocked off.
However, I was told to overlook the main narrative, my friends told me, "Look at the loyalty quests, that's the meat and potatoes." Well I've played three of them thus far, and they were trite. Jack's was particularly banal.
That whole character of Jack...not even bad fanfic would stoop to full body tattoos and dress-belt-for-halter-top in making a "bad girl." It's embarrassing. I know sex sells, and they want to sell something, but jesus. Jack is a part of this narrative, and that kind of lazy characterization (i.e. some hollywood pitch of "sexy female Weapon X") is just dumb, it takes away from the narrative. I can't take scifi seriously that starts with these extremely weak cutouts.
I just don't get it. I might return to it and stick it out, but ME2 is not great scifi. You strip away the scifi element, and you're left with okay but not terrific squad based FPS play and a shitload of dialogue cutscenes with dialogue that isn't particularly engaging. If it were like Falllout, where there can be entertainment to dialogue, that's one thing, but this stuff is so dry.
The way the Mordin guy talks, for instance...I get it, the broken sentences, the phrasing, he's somehow anti-social and analytical and detacted. But he's a
in genius: make a complete sentence, dipshit! It's got nothing to do with his species, I've run into other salarians who could communicate. Ugh. The characters are so bad.
The game is just not the scifi story telling experience it's cracked up to be. It might be good relative to gaming, but across media, it's not good. I don't know why critics were all over it. They're all liars, or they just haven't experienced enough thought provoking scifi. They think the scene where Luke finds out Vader is his father is great scifi. It's not. That's good soap opera stuff, and that's what ME2 is going for.[/QUOTE]
Yup. Sounds about 90% right.
It's not hard sci-fi story telling on the level of a Alastair Reynolds, Frederik Pohl or early Steven Baxter. Those are novels. And in most sci-fi novels the characterization is poor, really poor. (Scientist guy and girl scientist who loves him. But isn't as smart as him)
The characters in ME 2 are mostly carrictures but they have slightly more depth than most video gaming cliches, and the game at least attempts to give them an arc and meaning for the stories besides just, "Let's run in this room. shoot stuff, and find the key."
You're really trying to compare novels, movies, and video games against each other. Each is its own medium with different strengths and weaknesses. ME 2 tells a science fiction based story with some soap opera mixed in. It's a genre of it's own called Space Opera.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_opera
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceOpera
And when viewed as a Space Opera (melodrama in space) as opposed to a Sci-Fi Story (pages detailing centrifugal force and how space elevators work) it does a pretty good job of telling an entertaining, melodramatic story.
(The combat is a little boring and repetitive though. Weapon variety is far too limited)
still to finish.
Still worthless to the narrative of ME3.
