Mass Effect 2 and the Hiroshima Dilemma

I recently finished playing Mass Effect 2 for the first time. Yes, I realize that I’m about a year late on this particular bandwagon. I tend not to buy games like this at full price and thanks to Steam’s incredible periodic sales, I get all the gaming goodness at half the price or less. I enjoyed the first game a great deal and couldn’t wait to get into the second, even going so far as to put down Final Fantasy XIII on the 360 to return to the world of Commander Shepherd. As a warning, if you are like me and don’t play most games on release, there will be spoilers in this post.

The Game

Let’s get the game critique out of the way first. While I loved this game, probably more than I loved the first, it is a deeply flawed game. Much of the mechanical complexity of the first game has been wrenched from this one like a heart from a chest cavity. While the first very firmly fell into the RPG/shooter hybrid category, the changes in character progression made ME2 feel much less of an RPG/shooter hybrid than a shooter with a thin veneer of RPG elements. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, but I felt Mass Effect 1 gave me more freedom to customize my play experience. The complete removal of inventory items is another of those simplified gameplay elements that I did not like. While I thought ME1’s preponderance of junk items and merchant trash was overboard, the complete removal of inventory in favor of weapon type upgrades and universal ammo leaned toward oversimplification. Of all the things I didn’t like, the menu system on the PC represents the most irritating. Anyone with a passing familiarity with menus on both consoles and PC’s could tell that the PC version’s menus were ripped straight from the console version with little thought to the differences in mouse and controller interface. Luckily the menus are a small portion of gameplay, but there really isn’t any excuse for such lazy design that burdens the player with extraneous clicks.

On the good side, the game’s graphic engine was a top notch upgrade from its predecessor. Whereas the first game’s graphics caused my machine to slow down and stutter at times, I experienced none of that with ME2, despite the sequel having superior graphic fidelity. The shooting elements were on par with the original if not slightly better and luckily they removed the annoying Mako planet-driving missions. The replacement for the Mako, a mining planet-scanning game, while tedious, did not cause me to giggle incoherently as my Mako flipped itself off of its back like an acrobatic turtle. All in all, Mass Effect 2 is a superior game to the first in the series, making me excited for the upcoming third installment in the series.

Hiroshima

What truly impressed me about Mass Effect 2 was its story, or more accurately, its narrative which was inextricably linked with gameplay choices. Good story-based games like the Mass Effect series make you live the story, or at least take pause to consider how your actions might affect the story from decision point to decision point. The makers of the Mass Effect series have got this formula down to a science. For those not familiar with the Mass Effect series, you play one character (Commander Shepherd), who must recruit a lineup of supporting characters to accompany him/her on missions. The player gets to choose two of the supporting characters per mission, and each character has a unique backstory, set of abilities and narrative arc. Each character also provides a “loyalty” mission in which you must choose that character as one of your character slots. Once you complete the loyalty mission, that character gets a new outfit and a new power.

It’s on one of these loyalty missions that I figured out just how well done the narrative portion of the story really was, and how important your choices are to the game’s overall narrative. During the completion of Mordin’s mission, I was literally struck dumb. Mordin is a scientist, and his work included experimenting with the genophage, a bio-weapon that was used to almost destroy the warlike krogan race in order to keep the krogan from wiping out the rest of the allied races. If you played the first game, you likely became enamored of the krogan character that is part of your squad, Wrex.

In the time before ME2 begins, Mordin had the chance to cure genophage. He and the lab assistant who is the target of your loyalty mission worked long and hard with the genophage, altering the rates at which it sterilized the krogans, whose birth rates are made so terrible by the genophage that female krogans are prizes to be fought over simply for their breeding capability. Mordin decided to keep the genophage active instead of curing it, citing simulations that proved the krogan would cause another war, a war they would likely win if they were cured of the genophage. During this mission, your conversations with Mordin lead you to a decision point. Do you condemn Mordin for his use of the genophage? Do you acknowledge that while the conscious decision to sterilize and entire race was a terrible one, it is an understandable choice compared to the millions of lives another war with the krogan would cause? Do you gleefully curse the krogan and thank Mordin for destroying the race?

Before I made my answer, I had to stop and think… not about gameplay effects, though those were certainly on my mind. Alienating Mordin would not have been good for my gameplay. I stopped a good two or three minutes to think to myself, what should I say? Not what should I say to move the game along, but were I given the choice, what would I really choose? That’s why I called this the Hiroshima Dilemma. I liken this moral choice to that faced by Harry Truman near the end of World War 2. He had to choose between two really bad options:

  1. Attack Japan with the atomic bomb, thus causing thousands of civilian casualties, or
  2. Invade mainland Japan, an amphibious operation likely to cause up to one million casualties.

Neither choice is a good one. Truman literally caused the deaths of thousands in horrific ways, but he did it to spare up to a million other lives. Either way, many someones would die. The choices in the game are of a similar moral weight. There was no singular right choice in which everyone can be saved and you can feel like the white knight. At best, you could consider your character as justified if not wholly righteous. That kind of moral ambiguity is all too often missing in video games, but it is the interactive nature of video games that make those choices so powerful. Certainly, I could do another play through and make different choices, and it would be interesting to see the effect those choices would have on the game.

In the end, I chose the middle path, one that forgave Mordin for his choice while acknowledging that it was a choice between bad and super bad. Many of the loyalty missions offer the same type of choices, some in more direct ways than the Mordin mission. The team responsible for such a great meshing of narrative and interactive should be commended. It is a fantastic game, its positives greatly outshining the negatives mentioned above.

September 12, 2011 at 7:57 pm | Video Games | No comment

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