It wasn’t. Krogan biology was adapting. Slowly, Krogan women were beginning to deliver more and more healthy children. So Mordin took it upon himself to…fix the Genophage. He made the executive decision to go beyond study and update that atrocity’s particular Github, then reapply the Genophage to the entire Krogan species — and, because such a judgment is inextricably bound up in making such a decision, he reaffirmed his belief that it was the moral and just thing to do. The original authors of the Genophage were war criminals beyond measure, yes, but all they had to go on were simulations and mathematical models. Mordin saw the way the Genophage broke Krogan society, studied it closely, and concluded that not only was it worth it — it was optimal. He compares the Genophage approvingly to gardening.
Mass Effect 2 Legendary Edition: The Dirty Dozen, for the Dozenth Time
An article by
Jonathan Bernhardt Reviews Video Games June 16, 2021 0
I’ve now completed
Mass Effect 2 for either the seventh or the eighth time, and I have some thoughts on the matter.
First, the occasion: we’re going through all three of the original
Mass Effect games in their remastered form, the Legendary Edition that BioWare released in May as some sort of victory lap slash mea culpa slash distraction from the complete tire fire that the studio’s original work has been for the past five or six years.
Previously we covered Mass Effect, which felt like a transition into a genre that never was — RPG shooters would survive and thrive in the 2010s, but they’d look a lot more like
Bioshock than they would
Mass Effect. The biggest third-person shooter/RPG hybrid with active cooldown powers other than the
Mass Effect series in this time period is probably
Alpha Protocol. I love
Alpha Protocol. I’ve written about it before on this site. It does not reach the heights of
Mass Effect 2, and it spawned no progeny for reasons beyond the infamous debacle over its Metacritic score and Sega’s lack of vision as a publisher.
Mass Effect 2 remains the king of whatever these sorts of games are.
The game starts with possibly the best sequel pitch in modern video games: You, Commander Shepard of the Normandy, have been ambushed and killed by an unknown foe, dying to save your crew (and if appropriate, your loved one from the first game). Resurrected by your enemies, you are asked to put your differences with them aside and lead a suicide mission into the heart of the galaxy to save humanity. You can’t do it alone. You have to put together a team.
The accoutrements certainly help; all of the living characters from
Mass Effect return in some fashion, some as party members and some as very important plot NPCs. Seth Green is once again excellent as Jeff “Joker” Moreau, the Normandy’s pilot. The casting of Martin Sheen as the leader of the referenced previous enemies, the Illusive Man of the human supremacist organization Cerberus, is nothing short of brilliant. In 2010 he was only a few years removed from the jewel of the second act of his long career in television and film, the role of President Jed Bartlet on Aaron Sorkin’s
The West Wing. Bartlet is a reasonable-seeming, incredibly charismatic leader of men. He is also a fanatic who, in the rare instances where he is unable to talk someone into something, simply deploys all of the power available to him upon them like an earthly agent of God. In
West Wing, this fanaticism is for the American project as interpreted by Reaganite and Clintonian professional-class liberalism. In
Mass Effect 2, it is for the zero-sum, total and complete advancement of the aims of humanity, done as elegantly as possible or as brutally as necessary. In practice and in Sheen’s performance, there is very little daylight between the two.
Looking good, Mr. President!
The simple act of building the team, though, is what the game revolves around, and what makes it the purest expression of what BioWare has shot for in all of these titles. It is character-focused to a fault — the characters are the narrative. How you interact with these people (indeed,
whether you interact with these people; you don’t have to recruit all of them or even any of them to technically complete the game) determines how the plot resolves itself. Do you listen to them? Do you value them? This will have deterministic effects on how your suicide mission resolves, and this makes narrative sense: the reason you do everyone’s loyalty missions isn’t to fill a quest log or tie up loose ends or see content, but because their loyalty and buy-in will matter when push comes to shove.
That’s for the end of the game, though. In the beginning, the first thing the player will notice is how much better everything about playing
Mass Effect 2 feels compared to its predecessor. Aiming is snappier, ammunition for weapons is handled with a standard clip/reloading system instead of the overheating concept from
Mass Effect, cooldowns have been simplified to a shorter global cooldown on all activated abilities instead of longer cooldowns on each skill, and the wonky physics system has been scaled back to turn powers into reliable, predictable applications of damage and debuffs rather than sandbox-y interaction machines. The game definitely tilts more towards the shooter end of things than
Mass Effect did, but that’s to its benefit: it emphasizes skill and tactics-based gameplay that rewards knowing what powers hard counter what defenses or enemy types, rather than strategic exploit-based gameplay based on using Adepts to trivialize entire encounters with power interactions. (It helps that Adept is still probably the most powerful class in the game, though Vanguard is close, and for some players much more fun.) Part of this was just a dedication to streamlining a pretty clunky combat system from the first go-round, but part of it was business: Consoles were on the rise in the market and the conventional wisdom was that PC gaming was waning. BioWare wanted a playstyle that better fit a controller, and they got what they set out to achieve.
Sometimes you want to worldbuild so much you end up with a luxury resort essentially named “Hotel Dick.”
There is, in fact, a lot of this game that’s informed by its age. There aren’t any more close-ups of Miranda’s ass, perhaps, but most of the stuff that’ll make you blink a little bit can’t be fixed by changing a camera angle. There’s the fact that the developers attempted to balance her out with the male counterpart Jacob, who also has a finely toned ass, also wears a painted-on jumpsuit, and also has extreme problems with his father. Whereas Miranda’s story leaves the disconnect between the rather tame stated designs Miranda’s father has for her and her younger sister and the violence which with Miranda reacts to the idea of either of them returning to him up to the reader to untangle, Jacob’s loyalty mission lets it all hang out there: Ronald Taylor is an absent father who, after his starship crashed on a world with psychotropic drugs, went around getting every woman on his crew doped up on space weed so he could put them in his harem. There’s a particularly odd juxtaposition if you’re playing as female Shepard trying to romance Jacob, because over in his dialogue tree, she’s turning every work conversation into a comment on how hot his body is, or leering “the Alliance lost a
fine soldier, Jacob.” Do you get it? You expected the male superior officer to harass the female subordinate, but instead it’s the other way around. Is your mind blown? At least the voice work is top notch.
There’s the entire Jack character, of course; the badass biotic bitch who will have casual sex with Shepard but will have to be taught that’s unhealthy by a firmly abstaining Shepard before they can get into a meaningful, long-term relationship. Male Shepard only, though, as Jack is the crowning achievement in BioWare’s still-ongoing tradition of making all of their queercoded female characters straight — it’s pretty well established fact now that BioWare management changed direction on Jack at the last minute
after making up a Fox News segment in their heads to scare themselves with. That they thought it would be okay if they just gave you another Asari woman to sleep with, when the Fox segment that prompted this panic attack specifically went after the Liara/Shepard female romance from
Mass Effect, is the epitome of how all these companies who would be changing over to rainbow logos for June less than a decade later handled their business back before Pride was used to sell hamburgers.
There’s David in the Overlord DLC, an incredibly insulting caricature of an autistic man who sits about monotoning square root calculations and acting as his brother’s lab recorder, whose neurodivergent condition is presented as giving him not a figurative but a literal computer brain that can interface and share data with the evil Geth mass consciousness. Most directly his autism manifests by giving him the apparent mental age of a nine or ten year old, and turning the denouement of the DLC story package into a custody battle while he remains strapped to some Hellraiser device. It’s easy to see where things went wrong: the writers were chasing a storyline that was able to pack the most emotional impact possible into three or four hours of content, and that meant shorthand, shortcuts, and emotional dirty pool. And they were almost certainly told that no, they couldn’t use an
actual child. So this is what they went with instead, and they’d probably do it differently now.
It’s a genuine relief, then, how much better the writers did on the subject of genocide.
Damn, I never thought of it like that before!
Two years after the release of this game,
Mass Effect 3 tried to pay off two massive, trilogy-long plotlines building directly off of two of the best character moments of this game, and while the enterprise as a whole more or less fell on its face, the cure for the Genophage and the Quarian return remain the most beloved parts of the flawed project. This is because the characters involved in them were beloved, and they were beloved because both previous games did the hard work of providing players with meaningful if simple and binary choices that paid off, setting the stage for the next game to build further. Though wild fan favorites now, when we meet them in
Mass Effect 2, Mordin Solus and the Quarians of the Migrant Fleet are still very much on trial in the court of narrative morality (and in Tali’s case, literally on trial) for their vast, civilization-scale crimes against the Krogan and the Geth. While Tali, Legion, and the Quarian fleet are great, it’s worth putting them to the side to look closely at the best-written, best-conceived single mission in all of
Mass Effect: the loyalty mission for Dr. Mordin Solus.
Mordin is a fantastic character. Players immediately fell in love with him, and it’s easy to see why. He’s the complete package: the quirky, confident, motor-mouthed super-genius who doesn’t take shit from anyone, is thoughtful, warm, and funny in private conversation, and is always able to pull some piece of sci-fi tech nonsense out of nowhere to save the crew’s bacon. The Salarians were the last of the big five alien races to get their team member slash mascot, and Mordin is right there with Wrex, Garrus, Tali, and Liara.
Mordin Solus is also, without hyperbole or deception, the greatest monster of the last 50,000 years of galactic civilization. And that might comfortably include Sovereign.
First, a primer on the Genophage: A sterility plague that works by forcing miscarriages in all but 1 in 1,000 live Krogan births.
Mass Effect is a bit vague on this but
Mass Effect 2 clears it up decisively and intentionally: the Genophage does not work by preventing conception. It works by making all but .01% of Krogan fetuses develop into a newborn that is clinically braindead and cannot survive outside of the womb. It is an atrocity. Mordin Solus didn’t make the Genophage, however; he was simply assigned to study it with a group of junior researchers and make sure it was still working.
It wasn’t. Krogan biology was adapting. Slowly, Krogan women were beginning to deliver more and more healthy children. So Mordin took it upon himself to…fix the Genophage. He made the executive decision to go beyond study and update that atrocity’s particular Github, then reapply the Genophage to the entire Krogan species — and, because such a judgment is inextricably bound up in making such a decision, he reaffirmed his belief that it was the moral and just thing to do. The original authors of the Genophage were war criminals beyond measure, yes, but all they had to go on were simulations and mathematical models. Mordin saw the way the Genophage broke Krogan society, studied it closely, and concluded that not only was it worth it — it was optimal. He compares the Genophage approvingly to gardening.
Mordin tells you all of this and more during a whirlwind interrogation in the morgue of the lab where Clan Weyrloc attempts to backsolve a Genophage cure; a lab Mordin furiously condemns in the harshest terms as monstrous, deviant science whose barbarous methods could bear only poisoned fruit.
Not satisfied with just the standard Salarian/Turian party line about Krogan birth rates leading to a savage tide overwhelming the galaxy, Mordin pulls out all the stops: that his whole team unanimously agreed the Genophage had to be restored, as if they were a democratic legislature instead of a military unit he commanded; that the Salarian ‘wheel of life’ religious doctrine (Much like your people’s Hinduism, Shepard!) tells him that all those dead Krogan babies were simply borne into their next lives; that all Shepard needs to do is run the data —
the impartial algorithms he and his team programmed themselves were quite clear that the Krogan were too savage and violent to sustain peaceful civilization. The numbers can’t be racist, Shepard! In a particularly sublime and grotesque moment he turns pro-choice rhetoric against the player, reasoning that fetuses are not babies and because his Genophage stopped all neurological development, these stillborn deliveries are just the expulsions of undifferentiated natal tissue, no matter how emotional the mothers understandably are. At every step he assures you that not just every argument against the Genophage but the suffering of the Krogan that you so piously wield has been heard and seen by him, and that when he decimated their decimation to the tenth generation, he did it because he cared.