Same story as me except I thought the art specifically the back cover art looked corny and I almost put it down but my little brother said “my friend has that game and said it’s amazing” good thing I listened to him.

See, for me it was the first digital game I bought on a console For a little context, I was 14 in late 2009-early 2010, which I know is when I got a 360 because I had gotten it for Christmas along with Modern Warfare 2. At that point every game I'd ever owned were physical copies of games since I had only ever owned an NES, SNES, N64, PS1, PS2 and original Xbox (at that point i had never even played a game with online capabilities except for stuff like RuneScape on a pc that was 100% not built for gaming). Around spring break of that year (2010) I happened to have a few bucks to blow on a game (a relatively rare thing for me growing up) and came across Mass Effect on the Microsoft Store (can't remember if that's even what they called it over 12 years ago lol), saw that it was by the same people who created two of my favorite games of all time, those being Knights of the Old Republic I (didn't get to experience KotOR II until years later on pc with the Restored Content mod which is imo the single best Star Wars game of all time) and Jade Empire (still can't believe that BioWare hasn't done anything more with the I.P...). That was all it took for me to give it a shot and the game blew my mind at the time. So, yeah. That's my story of how Mass Effect became the first non-physical copy of game I ever bought. I kinda feel old now...

same fo me, except at like 8 years old, that and dragon age origins, god I love those games

A friend of mine let me borrow his copy back in ‘11 after I got a 360. I knew nothing about it, and was expecting to not like it. I ended up loving it, and playing through 1 & 2 before the release of 3. It’s easily my favorite game trilogy out there.

Very similar situation for me! I was in a Gamestop and asked the clerk, "anything you recommend? I just want something new to play" and they suggested MA 1 and boy was I happy with the recommendation.

Awe, you missed out on the painfully long loading screens and the sparsity of auto-saves forcing you to replay the entirely of Noveria if you died and forgot to manually save... Such an experience must be shared by ALL!!!!

@@benjaminfast5496 or spending 30 minutes driving the mako to get everything on a planet before going into the one base there and dying then realizing you last saved on the Normandy. It's the game that taught me to save often and save twice to make sure you saved lol

@@packadayhabit It's very much a "fool me once, shame on you, fool me ten times, it's time to take a break." And those random planets were awful to navigate, so I dreaded having to repeat them!

Chills the first time like no other

Sovereign paid the price for not having the proper Citadel docking authorization papers.

"You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it."

It was such a brilliant plot twist! Up until that point, you were thinking that Saren was the biggest threat, and that Sovereign was just an incredibly effective tool at getting what he wants, but then all of a sudden it becomes the complete opposite, you’re full of questions, you legit have no idea how to even approach the whole situation… like… “the ship is alive?!” Amazing, still unmatched to this day. Drew Karpyshyn is one hell of a writer.

Sovereign not only revealing to not be just some geth ship but also an actual Reaper was such a genius and unmatched reveal, easily in my top 3 scenes of the entire trilogy

Yeah but "hurr durr spayce waycist!". One line of dialogue on the Citadel about not being able to tell the difference between the animals and the aliens and people just latch on to that single line and never think past that. By the time ME1 wraps up, she has completely changed her stance on aliens and even stands up to Terra Firma. God forbid a character have a story arc. Miranda never got the vitriol that Ashley did, and she was a card carrying member of a human-supremist terrorist organization. I'm glad Bioware basically all but said that saving Ashley was the canon ending by featuring her in not only the ME2 launch trailers, but in both versions of the ME3 trailer. And also giving her a Play Arts Kai figure.

@@VaporeonEnjoyer1 As a matter of fact, Ashley admits that she disagrees with Terra Firma's bigotry early on. Unlike others, I wouldn't say Ashley is a racist or human supremacist, she's an isolationist. She thinks Humanity shouldn't work to becoming part of the Council, or shouldn't be a part of Citadel Space. She thinks Humanity should stand alone, because she believes that (and is proven right in ME3) when crap hits the fan, the Council will gladly feed Humanity to the Bear to save themselves. And I can't blame her for feeling that way; there are certain treaties you have to be a part of to have a place on the Citadel, and one of them restricts how big of a fleet you can build, including restricting the number of power Dreadnoughts you can have. I think on Council Members can have Dreadnoughts, and you can only ever build a fraction of what Turian Military builds. Maybe I'm missing something, but that just sounds stupid to me. Sorry, went on a bit of tangent. Basically, I'm not saying I agree with Ash on every point, but some of her arguments are valid. They're just worded poorly. Not sure if that's intentional, or not though

@@MyGamer125 Yeah I actually think she's one of the better written characters in the entire series, and the discourse around her was so damn frustrating when ME1 came out. If I had a dollar for every time I read "space racist" when it came to Ashley I'd have, like, $200. I swear people just seemed to bench her the second they could and never even talked to her in the Normandy.

Harboring that resentment towards aliens 100 years removed from the First Contact War doesn’t really help her case tho.

@@MikeP828 It's been only 26 years.

Dorrito chetah

Very passing of the torch or inherited will for sure. Love that as a one piece fan

One wonders how long Sovereign has been trying to usher in the Harvest. Given how quickly the Council buckled even without the decapitation strike on the Citadel, I doubt total victory would have taken more than maybe 50 years. Depending on when it was supposed to happen, the Alliance might not have stumbled into an unwinnable war, but a fresh graveyard. Can you imagine how intimidating it would be, learning that the threat that wiped out this massive galaxy spanning civilization was active within a human lifetime or two, and they might feasibly still be watching and waiting? There would have been none of the ambiguity of the collapse of the Protheans, they would have to know that this was a targeted extermination (and their own Prothean archives would definitely make new sense in that light).

Facts my dude. Kne of the greatest immersive subversions in all of storytelling from my perspective. Truely a superb story, through and through, and just trying to explain the mastercraft in it, is in and of itself an injustice to how good it really is to come to all of these realizations in a matter of seconds, and how just 1 or 2 peices of the puzzle just gobsmacks you in the brain. You almost feel like shepherd does after he gets ancient memories shoved into his cranial cavity, the way you shove 20 terabytes into a 2gig thumb drive.

YES! The Virmire reveal was the best thing I have ever experienced.

The 2nd one is pretty fantastic too 😎

The first one was the most realistic when it came to how your health AND your melee damage increase at the same time when you upgrade your fitness level. And the strength of your shields depends on your armor suit, NOT your fitness.

​@@iangatornot if you like rpgs. 2 was just a dumbed down action game with a good story.

I usually crash though all 4 every year or so. Great storytelling, and generally fun (outside of trying to get all the planetary stuff in ME1).

For me it's "You exist because we allow it, you will end because we demand it."

My favorite is what happens if you sabotage the genophage in ME3. There's a particular character that you must cinematically kill. It's heavy. It's the hardest choice I've ever made in a video game but I stand by it.

@@Xpwnxage You... you monster....

“Reaper? A label created by the Protheans to give voice to their destruction.”-Sovereign

​@@Xpwnxagefuck them salarians

2 didn't improve on gameplay. It dumbed it down to chase casuals.

My favorite as well. Mass Effect and Final Fantasy 7 are tied for Greatest ;)

@@OrbitalHUB dude hell yeah! Speaking of I can't wait for FF16, rebirth and reunion im so excited. Too bad the next mass effect isn't gonna be out for another 5 years though I bet

I hope we get Mass Effect 3. I feel like I’m one of about 2.5 people in the universe that actually loved ME3 (and the endings).

@percrunner1433 he did say in the ME2 video he was going to take a break and come back so it should be coming On the topic of ME3 it's tied with ME2 for me being the best game, it's the combination of everything they learned combat, gameplay, characters, mission/level design, setpieces and even story its fucking amazing and in top form, what I think it is is the ending made people equate their feelings about that to the rest of the game, and I think a lot of people believe this its just not talked about since the conversation is so old. For me personally on the ending specifically, I don't hate it but I dont exactly love it, I definitely think they could've done better but I'm not mad what we got it was fine

@@percrunner1433I’m the other person that loves ME3, there’s so, so many amazing moments, one of my favourites is liara making the device with records on our galaxy for the next cycle in case we lose, information on reaper’s, our cultures etc, then she asks what to write about shep…my god, is ME3 my favourite in the series? Maybe.

Glad to have read this comment...I was 5 minutes in and wondering if it was just going to be a rehash of the plot. I'll go ahead and give it a few more minutes to see if the analysis drops.

Thats kinda whole point. Turians are militaristic dicks and they couldn’t wage war for centuries and here are humans came along violating council space rules, they needed an excuse and they got it.

the charon relay was heavily protected due to its history in the previous galactic war. I bet seeing humans trying to activate the relay was like seeing some random dude wandering over to a secure area you’ve had sectioned off for years and immediately step on a landmine lol the council even set up patrols there, solely to keep others from getting close with that context in mind, it’s kinda hard to blame the turians for instinctively shooting first. i mean, i agree it was totally an act of war and not cool overall, but i highly doubt humans wouldn’t have acted similarly and freaked out. after all, turians and humans are pretty comparable in the that they’re both wary as heck with the unknown and ultra prideful to boot

Knowing us, I'm sure we'd find a way to completely ignore their advice.

@@urmominc904 humans can be pretty unreasonable, but the human military portrayed in the mass effect universe is a far cry from our current society. in mass effect, humans actually managed to do the impossible; the largest nations in the world came together as a united force and formed the systems alliance. I think such a feat would require objective leaders and a pretty decent measure of basic cooperation. I don't think humans would poke a bear, so to speak, unless they knew for certain it was a bear and if they had the firepower necessary to subdue it. and that's on top of getting warned - by the first alien species they've ever encountered - that they don't know the dangers of what they're messing with

How could they have even understood each other if it was first contact?

Same...except for the ME3 "dry and empty experience", cos the replaying value of that one mess, comes by the hand of the mods community.

@@Hellion73 even with the issue of ME3 i still thoroughly enjoyed it. If ME 3 is consider the worse of the 3 then i want every game to be mass effect.

Lol ME3 is not that bad at all. Andromeda is definitely the most lifeless.

Why not play? It’s worth it

Their reproduction always seemed a little too far fetched to be natural for me, but it all makes perfect sense when you find out in 3 that they were heavily altered by the protheans

The Asari are effectively a pet race of the DM but the DM is revealed to have been the ancient aliens all along

Claim your Package Ps5 you're the winner of the ongoing giveaway 👍👍 Telegrãm ônly to claim your package 📦 ...

is it bad that i opened this specifically to see if the poster understood Ashley's character or was a "hurr durr, space wacism!" heathen?

@@MFenix206 Not at all. It's so common on KZfaq that that is a perfectly valid action.

Or someone reducing Kaidan’s character to “boring guy who has headaches”. Jesus, the way people treat the human characters in this game simply because their not “cool aliens” is so fucking infuriating.

@@mal3nko That's how people are with any franchise with non-human characters. Bugs the heck out of me when genuinely good characters are treated like bland trash for not being wacky alien or super cool dark elf (because even regular elf is starting to get the treatment)

I think it’s the ‘aliens from the animals’ comment. Of all the things Ashley says in the game this is the most ‘space racist’ damning one of them all, to the point it almost stands out too much. I kind of wish Bioware had left the line out, it would clear up so much of the misunderstanding of Ash’s character. She’s Xenophobic, yes. But it’s not about race, as it doesn’t come from any kind of place of Racial Superiority. That’s why she’s able to call out Terra Firma. She dislikes aliens, but not for racial reasons.

This is a year late but gotta say, this is a great comment that improved my opinion on Saren! I recently beat Mass Effect 1 for the first time and the whole indoctrination aspect of Sovereign brings up a damning question: How much of Saren was actually him or was all the horrible things he did just because of brainwashing? The conversation between Shepard and Saren on Virmire implied that Saren was already being indoctrinated, he just hasn't realized it. And because it wasn't clear WHEN he was indoctrinated in the game from what I remember, it made me wonder if his actions during the mission with Anderson was actually due to his own free will. Mind control can sometimes muddy a character too much for me, to the point that they just feel like a blank slate or have me think "Should I even care about this 'character'? At the end of the day, I didn't really know them." Knowing that there's a story out there that actually goes deeper into Saren's character is a sigh of relief. I came out having a mixed opinion of him but thx to your explanation, he seems a lot more compelling! Wish the game could have somehow incorporated this exploration into his character tho. 👍

Definitely!

Claim your Package Ps5 you're the winner of the ongoing giveaway 👍👍 Telegrãm ônly to claim your package 📦 ...

Claim your Package Ps5 you're the winner of the ongoing giveaway 👍👍 Telegrãm ônly to claim your package 📦 ..

Rescue Liara first or she goes insane

Not a fan of Noveria. To many damn Elevators and the mission just drags on forever

I kept Wrex, but still got an unnatural satisfaction in sending Assley to a well-deserved early demise.

and then you get to 2 and its the most basic early 2000s cookie cutter hallway level design, EA truly murdered Mass Effect

Mass Effect 2 the worst? Now that's a hot take.

@@Arcessitor lol I know 😂

I go one three and two.

fan of origins but 3 is your favorite?? shit dog, 3 has objectively the worst actual choice... the dialogue was so dumbed down. 3 options if you got lucky, and no investigative options at all. 1 is definitely my favorite, combat sucks though lol

@@Arcessitor How? The story is fucking terrible filler. Shepard dying and being resurrected immediately in the first 10 minutes, being forced to work with space terrorists by using every half-assed excuse under the sun to try to justify not just returning to the Alliance because the game wants to be edgy and dark because Star Trek 09 just came out, no one believing Shepard about the Reapers, the God-awful Collectors and their stupid plan, the retarded giant baby Terminator boss fight, the dumb suicide mission that makes zero sense on infinite levels, etc. Mass Effect 3 has its problems but it's not nearly as bad as the stupid shit in Mass Effect 2. Nevermind the whole problem of the Crucible is Mass Effect 2's fault for not setting anything up and dicking around the entire time. At least Mass Effect 3 has more redeeming qualities beyond solving everyone's daddy issues

Claim your Package Ps5 you're the winner of the ongoing giveaway 👍👍 Telegrãm ônly to claim your package 📦 ...

The Asari resemble the species that is looking at them, I think

@@jbear3478 yeah that’s what I was thinking with the memetic shit, but in terms of design from a creation perspective it still feels kinda lazy when compared to the Turians or Krogan

@@jbear3478 That is ridiculous...if it's canon, it's tragic. That one detail takes my eval from 10 to 6. What an absurd load of nonsense. That's GoT style magic.

​@@KravMagoo it's not really canon. In the second game you can see a salarian, a turian and a human at a "bachelor party". All three of them insist how asari look like them because feature x is similar. That's where that theory comes from.

​@@KravMagoo It's not canon, just a few drunk people from different species arguing that the asari look more like them, you literally see giant asari statues on their homeworld.

Noveria before Feros cause of the Paragon hard test on Feros.

That coomer theory has been debunked years ago as nonsense for one simple reason: photos, videos, statues. It's nonsense.

@@lsq7833 sorry for not keeping up with the discourse.

big mistake

@@UsernameGeri Spoilers shmoilers

Well worth playing it yourself

Because space is large, and even a single galaxy is unimaginably massive. I remember reading in a codec that, even with FTL travel, only like 1-2% of the galaxy has been explored, because things are just that far apart out and if there isn't a Mass Relay nearby it takes waaaaaay too much time and fuel to get anywhere.

@@gunnarschlichting9886 it’s even less believe it or not, lower than 1%

Claim your Package Ps5 you're the winner of the ongoing giveaway 👍👍 Telegrãm ônly to claim your package 📦 ...

I think it'd be really cool if we got a side story that focused on the tensions between the Alliance and Batarian Hegemony. Been wanting something like that ever since I played a Colonist War Hero/Ruthless Shepard

Yeah it would be nice for them to be something other than "despite being 13% population fbi statistic" meme

I never even noticed

Claim your Package Ps5 you're the winner of the ongoing giveaway 👍👍 Telegrãm ônly to claim your package 📦 ...