And now that I have finished the game, I can comment on your review :P
I think we've covered most of the issues when you commented on my LJ about this, but for the other points:
-I do agree that it would have been nice to have a better defined antagonist. Saren in ME1, while not the final antagonist, was still a visible presence throughout the game, and I felt kind of sorry for him at the end because he's sort of like an example of what you might end up being if you jumped off the slippery slope (similarly, Benezia). I don't feel any real connection to Harbinger or the Collectors in general, so it was harder to grasp the main conflict.
-The majority of ME2 seems to be about the characters, which worked out well for the characters, but because of the modular format of the game (each character's quests being self-contained) they could not integrate this into the meta-plot. As someone from a jRPG background I feel that this is an intrinsic issue with games that focus on "choice", because everything has to be easily written in and out, nothing but the most basic things (in terms of characters, this is Miranda/Jacob and maybe Mordin) can have a huge impact on the metaplot because the player may not have access to it.
-I'm not a fan of GrimDark myself, because I feel it to be somewhat puerile. I get that some people like it, but I'd have preferred a bit more of a choice, if that is what the game is focused on, to make my experience less so.
-With regard to the same-sex romance thing, I have to say that whatever decisions they make are probably less based on homophobia than marketing - after all, they are a game company, not civil rights activists, and I can only assume that they considered the amount of resources required to implement it to be not worth the % of audience for whom it would be a major draw, as it is ultimately a fairly small part of the game (and I say this as a female gamer who plays mostly mainstream games; it's nice when it happens, but for the most part I do not expect my particular interests to be specifically catered to because I know I'm a minority).
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ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2010-02-09 07:10 pm (UTC)I think we've covered most of the issues when you commented on my LJ about this, but for the other points:
-I do agree that it would have been nice to have a better defined antagonist. Saren in ME1, while not the final antagonist, was still a visible presence throughout the game, and I felt kind of sorry for him at the end because he's sort of like an example of what you might end up being if you jumped off the slippery slope (similarly, Benezia). I don't feel any real connection to Harbinger or the Collectors in general, so it was harder to grasp the main conflict.
-The majority of ME2 seems to be about the characters, which worked out well for the characters, but because of the modular format of the game (each character's quests being self-contained) they could not integrate this into the meta-plot. As someone from a jRPG background I feel that this is an intrinsic issue with games that focus on "choice", because everything has to be easily written in and out, nothing but the most basic things (in terms of characters, this is Miranda/Jacob and maybe Mordin) can have a huge impact on the metaplot because the player may not have access to it.
-I'm not a fan of GrimDark myself, because I feel it to be somewhat puerile. I get that some people like it, but I'd have preferred a bit more of a choice, if that is what the game is focused on, to make my experience less so.
-With regard to the same-sex romance thing, I have to say that whatever decisions they make are probably less based on homophobia than marketing - after all, they are a game company, not civil rights activists, and I can only assume that they considered the amount of resources required to implement it to be not worth the % of audience for whom it would be a major draw, as it is ultimately a fairly small part of the game (and I say this as a female gamer who plays mostly mainstream games; it's nice when it happens, but for the most part I do not expect my particular interests to be specifically catered to because I know I'm a minority).