8/03/2013

Gamer Cinema: Mass Effect Paragon Lost


The Mass Effect franchise has a lot of great characters. If they were to make a movie about one of Commander Shepard's allies, there's a lot of good material. Garrus, Mordin, Tali, etc. have great personalities and interesting backgrounds that would make for fantastic movies. James Vega however, I doubt would be at the top of anybody's list. A newer character introduced in the last game, Vega is pretty much a boring meathead much in the vein of Jacob & Kaiden before him. To make matters even worse, while many of the Mass Effect cast has stories where they don't really talk about what happened so that leaves plenty of material. Vega tells you all about this incident in Mass Effect 3, so if you played the game, odds are you know what happens.

The story takes place in-between Mass Effect 1&2, with Vega trying to rescue a colony from the grips of the Collectors back when nobody knew the Collectors were behind the abductions of whole human colonies out in deep space and were merely whispered legend. It's a perfectly functional story and Vega's crew is pretty typical and not particularly interesting for the most part.

Ok, now I'm going to get into spoilers here, because it's essential to explain my issues with the ending and it's continuity. But again, if you played through ME3 you should have a rough idea what happened because Vega talks to you about it in the game. So Vega gets this supposedly important info on the Collectors, he sacrifices the colonists for it, and so by the end of the movie the Council knows what's going on. And yet in 2 they seem to be completely ignoring it. I mean they even already have an antidote to the collector bee things that paralyze people, why aren't they doing anything with it? Yeah you can sort of say the Council is being their usual secretive self since Shepard is working with Cerberus in ME2, but then they should have Spectres out there protecting colonies or something and Cerberus could've easily gotten their hands on the antidote making recruiting Mordin for the purpose of developing an antidote pointless. Pretty much the only thing I'll give the movie points for is that it has no problem killing off nearly everybody.

So at the end of the day you've got a functional movie but it's about one of the less interesting characters of the Mass Effect franchise that doesn't gel with the continuity of the franchise very well. In other words you'd be better off spending your time and money on some dlc to experience more of the Mass Effect universe.

That's all for today I should have another post up Monday with thoughts on this week's upcoming releases (and maybe Pikmin 3 impressions if I can mange to rent a copy).


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