I beat Mass Effect on New Years Day. Took me just over 45 hours. I reached level 50 with my character (the level cap on your first play through) and I completed every single one of the side missions I came across except one (and that one was not a typical side quest which you can complete by finishing one objective, I had to find several artifacts scattered across the galaxy and I came up a few short).
Final thoughts? The game was thoroughly enjoyable and any issues I have with it are minimized by the absolutely spectacular finale. The game's last couple of hours are some of the most enjoyable I have experienced in gaming. The story reveals itself at a great pace and it truly reaches a massive scale towards the end, with the fate of the entire galaxy hanging in the balance. The much touted "tough decisions" you have to make do live up to their hype, as they gave me a moment of pause before choosing my path - and best of all - left me wondering afterward if I made the right choice and wonder what might have been if I chose otherwise. Any game that can evoke those thoughts in a gamer has done something right.
The game nails the storyline, the voice-acting, the music, the insanely deep and detailed universe (reading all the Codex entries is mind-numbing. Bioware went all out in creating a sci-fi universe with a rich history), the conversation system is sublime and the character models and facial animations are amongst the best in the business (the character Wrex - and Krogans in general - looks freakin' amazing during conversations!).
And then, there are the flaws. Most technical, others design choices. On the technical side of things, the game could have used a few more months of polish. As I mentioned in my earlier impressions, the game stutters frequently, the frame-rate drops and textures take forever to load during scenes. This is especially distracting during the game's climactic cut-scenes towards the end, since nothing is more of a mood killer than watching a greatly directed cinematic with an emotional score fall all over itself because everything has a flat-shaded look for 5 seconds while the textures load. When you're caught up in the moment those annoying texture fill-ins scream "THIS IS A GAME!!!". Not good.
I also encountered a few instances of my character getting awkwardly stuck in the environment. The worst being when I "impaled" myself when surveying a mineral deposit in an unchartered world. See, when you survey a mineral a small beacon appears next to it, signifying that it was already surveyed. I guess I was standing in the exact spot where that beacon was scripted to be placed, because my character was stuck in it and no matter what I did I could not free myself. Time to boot up a previous save.
I also came across several instances of my teammates getting stuck behind objects and me having to backtrack to get them. One time I marched right into battle and began noticing that I was getting my ass kicked. When I looked back, I was taking on all the enemies by myself because both my squad mates got stuck behind crates two rooms back. Funny? In hindsight, yes. At the time it was just annoying.
My other negatives involve design choices and I've covered my biggest problem in my previous impressions post as well. They involve the side-quests mostly and how some of them are so trivial it is comical to think that Commander Sheppard would take time out of his "saving the world" duties to do them. Some could argue that they are optional and I do not have to bother with them, but I am a completionist, I want to do and see everything I can, so I feel like I am "forced" to do them and take myself out of character.
Now that I have beaten the game I realized that the main quest is actually pretty short. If one concentrates just on the main quest they could probably beat the game in under 10 hours. That seems really, really short for an RPG. I would have gladly traded 75% of the side quests for a 50% increase in the main game's length. The core missions are also so much better than the side quest, since about 80% of the optional missions have you doing the same thing: visiting a planet, finding the one facility that you can enter, and clearing out the enemies. The "final" confrontation of these can usually be resolved with diplomacy or brute force. Throw in the fact that Bioware really only created about 4 or 5 different facilities to actually visit (the layout of these places repeat ad nauseam) and things begin to feel a bit artificial.
In general, my main complaint is that it seems like Bioware tried to artificially extend the game's length by adding too much filler. The conversation system is fantastic, as I mentioned, but it seems like maybe there are too many dialogue options. Why do I want to ask about the background of some 3rd string character that I will never speak to again and has no real importance to the story? Some might see that as Bioware making their game extra deep. I just see it as Bioware wasting resources that should be applied to expanding that actual meat of the game, the main quest, and focusing on that.
I'm not even going to comment on the weird inventory system and the hassle of having to manage your ever increasing inventory and selling items off constantly for fear or reaching your item limit and then having to reduce new items to omni-gel . . . ok wait, I guess I just did comment on that.
All in all, like I mentioned at the beginning of the post, the game's fantastic main narrative and pulse pounding finale is enough to bypass these flaws and leave Mass Effect etched in my mind as one hell of a thrill ride. This was initially planned as a trilogy and I hope that is still the case, because I cannot wait to see how things turn out.
