Mass Effect holds a special place in the gaming zeitgeist. It’s this big enormous beloved series with just as many frustrations levied at it for a variety of reasons. After all, that which is most beloved also becomes the most criticized. Mass Effect Legendary Edition is less full remake and more a “recapture,” that’s to say it’s attempting to recapture what it was like to play these epic RPGs when they each first released a decade ago. As such, they can at times feel their age?even with all of its improvements, the first Mass Effect still feels like a game that came out of 2007. Granted, the series was well ahead of its time in 2007, but be prepared for a number of elements that date the game.
However, that’s part of its charm, and essential for going into Mass Effect as a series. Anything less, or any bigger changes, and you’d start to change what Mass Effect means on a bigger level. Understanding what this large grumbly beast of a series actually is is critical to enjoyment of it. Yes, Mass Effect 1 languishes in loads of spoken exposition via dialog trees, and the “skip dialog” dialog button is the same as that for selecting a dialog option, which can make fast readers select options they don’t want to. But I’ll be damned if I wasn’t poking around every corner and talking to everyone I could at every opportunity. I spent significantly more time dabbling in local planetary gossip and intergalactic p...