The Continuing Adventures of Miranda Lawson and Shepard the Space-Perve

I’m roughly 20 hours into my play through of Mass Effect 2, and I’m starting to take real advantage of the freedom Bioware’s title offers. It is allowing me to express myself.

The first 15 hours were, admittedly, a bit of a thankless trudge. As with its forebear, Mass Effect 2’s attractive presentation and pleasing emphasis on conversations are tempered by clumsy combat and levels that are too often dominated by dull, linear metal corridors.

The narrative thrust is based around the threat of invasion and annihilation of some sort of galactic alliance by some sort of uncompromising alien danger known as the Reapers. Obviously, this threat is not recognised swiftly by the government of the alliance, because, well, shut up. So, it falls to me, playing the role of Commander Shepard, to attempt to thwart the looming destruction of all that is dull and linear in the galaxy by bringing together a rag-tag group of disparate alien combatants. The mission is bankrolled by an organisation called Cerberus, which appears to be a cross between a fascist terrorist group and an intergalactic corporation of unknown vocation. Either way, it’s a cool-sounding name so they have my full support. Also, they gave Shepard a new version of his ship, the Normandy, which was nice of them.

This being the sixth title in the ongoing Knights of the Old Republic series a Mass Effect game, the initial structure involves mincing off to various corners of the cosmos to recruit said combatants. This encompasses all the varied zany antics we’ve become accustomed to in Bioware releases, grounded in the dull, linear metal corridors we’ve apparently grown to love.

My favourite crew-member (whose bosom isn’t spilling out of their clothing) is Jacob. Here is a list of things I know about Jacob:

1) He is a tall, handsome man, commonly found in the armory.
2) If there is a Normandy fight club, he doesn’t talk about it.

Also of note from the first 15 hours – Shepard bought a space hamster for his quarters.

So, I’m now presumably around halfway through the game and Shepard has successfully rounded up a confusing menagerie of alien things wearing leather flight suits/hilarious fake stormtrooper costumes, all with the explicit objective of saving the galaxy/cosmos/universe/space hamster from the evil Reaper threat. We’ve shot the Reapers’ soldiers in the face several times already, but at some point in the near future we’re clearly going to need to shoot them in their main face with a larger gun to stop them.

However, all this is usually forgotten when I chew the fat with my team. Once they’re on-board, each of them wastes no time in insisting that we take time out from the mission (to save civilisation itself from destruction, lest we forget), for example:

“Can we go find my Dad? I think he might have died in place X.”
“Can we go find my sister? I think she might be in place Y.”
“Can we go find my daughter? I heard she was in place Z.”
“Can we go and destroy a friendly military installation? It’s just outside place Z. I don’t like it.”
“Can we stop for ice cream? A guy in place X had a flyer for a new stall that just opened at place Y. I like ice cream. We’ll need that flyer too. I didn’t pick it up because I was tired.”

It is said that completion of those requests is required to gain the loyalty of Shepard’s team. Unfortunately, I couldn’t give a flying brown one about their loyalty because, as I quickly discovered, their use in combat is on a par with that of an insubordinate trifle with a wet toilet roll sticking out of it. They are nothing more than an irritating distraction to Shepard as he miserably doles out the requisite six sniper rifle headshots to each enemy he encounters.

So, ignoring my team’s constant pleas for us to head in the opposite direction to our mission, and despite their abject ineptitude in “battle”, we’ve still been making good progress in gaining intel on our enemy.

Sadly though, we’ve lost focus over the last few hours. The reason for this loss is round and looks quite firm.

I caved in and took on Miranda’s loyalty side-quest. You might think it was because she’s attractive, but such a conclusion would be unfair and in fact would be a little insulting to me. The true reason is that her back-story is genuinely the most interesting. You see, she was the result of an experiment to create something, which went horribly wrong/right, and now she is conflicted by several important and memorable feelings on the matter.

After completing her loyalty mission, the content of which I’m unsure of (but I can confirm that it involved metal corridors, specifically of the dull and linear kind), Shepard was rewarded with a new outfit for Miranda. This simple addition has single-handedly crippled our efforts against the Reapers. My Shephard has become consumed by a simple question. In which outfit does Miranda’s bum look better? The white one, or the black one?

Before this conundrum ravaged his soul, Shepard’s free time was spent in his quarters making his space hamster pop out repeatedly (no). Now the walls are plastered with photos of his second-in-command’s bottom, as the Commander paces to and fro. The long dark corridor that leads to the cockpit has been converted into a photo-development studio. We explained the new mission to the Illusive Man, and he signed off on it instantly, agreeing that this new cause was markedly more important than the previous one. The studio runs non-stop 24 hours a day. Jacob and Shepard take shifts. It has brought them closer together.

We’re now working through the remaining loyalty missions after all. We need to discover new worlds, and the new dull, linear metal corridors they hold, so that we can compare Miranda’s outfits in as many different lighting conditions as possible.

So, I’ve engaged with Mass Effect 2 after all, despite my misgivings. I definitely haven’t been driven mad by tedium. Oh no.