Keeping up with my contrarian tendencies to buy and play games way after they’re released rather than blow my money right away on the latest whatchamacallit like all the good fanbois are supposed to, I have finally started to play Mass Effect. I picked it up mainly because it supposedly has good writing and character development and an awesome dialogue system. While I already like the latter, [1] I haven’t gotten far enough into the game to make an informed judgement about the former, so I’ll leave that for later.

I will, however, say that the first impressions I get from the narrative are mixed. It may just be my personal preferences talking, but I think it takes itself too seriously. It seems to be a bog-standard “we have to save the world!” space opera plot, and the characters occupy a bit of a weird space, not being cheesy enough to be campy or unintentionally funny, but at the same time, too far removed from reality for their supposedly-weighty concerns to be all that interesting. It might just be a problem I have with the sci-fi/action genre in general.

I’ve actually been thinking lately about why most of my favourite games of all time are comedies rather than dramas, and I’ve come to the conclusion that in my view, the use of humour makes stories feel more authentic and believable. After all, when I’m around people I consider friends, the bulk of our interactions are filled with comedy, whether it be overt laughing out loud at jokes or wry, witty observations about our surroundings. Hence, if I’m going to care about characters in a game or any other artistic medium, they’ve got to make me laugh, or at least smirk. If you’re going to show me that two people have a close relationship, I won’t believe it unless they at least tease each other a little bit. Melodrama doesn’t really do much for me, except, as I implied earlier, in an amusingly ironic sense.

Plus, there’s the fact that while I’m an advocate of games that have something to say about the world, I don’t particularly enjoy being hit over the head with a message, especially if it’s the same old message about the Triumph of Good Over Evil™. Taking the irony and satire route is subtler and therefore far more palatable to my tastes, allowing me to laugh and think. Of course, I’m not saying that comedic games are always the pinnacle of brilliant satire, so much as lamenting that the lack thereof is a wasted opportunity. There has got to be some kind of middle ground between “frivolous waste of time” and “heavy-handed drama”; indeed, for a story to feel real, you’ve got to have a more diverse mix of emotions at play.

Anyway, all that rambling aside, I’m actually quite hoping that these initial impressions of Mass Effect wind up being proven wrong later on, and that there really is a lot more humour and humanity in the game to come. I’ll keep you posted if this proves to be the case.