For a game that wants to be about friendship and diversity, everybody’s an idiot except Shepard in the original Mass Effect, and it feels bad.By Phil Hornshaw on May 29, 2021 at 8:00AM PDT Nobody likes Udina. It’s pretty clear that, even when he’s working on your side, the human ambassador to Mass Effect’s Citadel council is kind of a piece of shit. At one point, Shepard chides him for caring more about the political gains of a mission to save a bunch of human colonists than the lives that mission actually protected. This career bureaucrat might work for humanity’s best interest at times, but he’s also a transactional, ambitious climber who at least has a secondary goal of advancing his own influence. He only gets worse as time goes on.It’s not just Udina that nobody likes, though. Despite providing Shepard with the unlimited power and near-total lack of accountability of the Spectres, the Citadel Council–a seemingly semi-democratic body comprising the galaxy’s most influential races–are largely an impediment to you getting the job done. On your periodic calls with them to debrief on your mission, which they authorized, they occasionally show frustration at your choices as you unilaterally make decisions that could threaten the whole galaxy or annihilate entire species. If you go Renegade in these moments, you throw it back in their faces. Your Paragon choices are more deferential, but only in an “ask forgiveness” kind of way. And plenty of dialogue options, Paragon or Renegade, express frustration with… Click below to read the full story from GameSpot
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Mass Effect Has A Big Disdain For Democracy
