Jared Rea

I’m coming up on the halfway point of what would be my second playthrough of Mass Effect were I not playing three characters at the same time. When it comes to making our grand end of the year selections, games like this take an already tough procedure and turn it something of Sophie’s choice. On one hand, it’s a technical disaster, rife with graphical mishaps and baffling design choices. On the other, all the flaws in the world don’t make Bioware’s universe any less inviting. Like any great roleplaying title, you’re completely convinced of your surroundings within the first ten minutes. Even if you’ll only ever see male Turians.

Halo 3, which I’ll argue is the most underrated title of 2007 at some other point in time, took my top spot this year, yet I’ll most likely go on to devote much more time to Mass Effect than anything else this side of Rock Band. I thought I was done with RPG’s but I now know what I was missing: a meaningful connection to my party. In most RPG’s, Western or otherwise,  I don’t believe I’ve ever truly cared what anyone else in my party thought of any given situation. When Aeris was sliced up in Final Fantasy 7, did you ever think to yourself, “I wonder what the black dude with a gun for an arm thought of me dunking her corpse in the lake.” Probably not.

When something happens in the Mass Effect universe, I become almost giddy at the thought of sprinting back to the Normandy to see how Wrex felt about the jerks we just encountered down below. I know for a fact that I hate Ashley because she’s racist against aliens and on her best days, a religious fanatic. In a space where we’re obsessed with doing it more violent than the last, Bioware managed to make a title where simply having a conversation with your crew is as engaging as pulling the trigger and their dialogue system can’t take all the credit for that.

It sounds like I’m regretting my decision to give Bungie the thumbs up for game of the year, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Mass Effect can’t reign over everything else on dialogue alone for the same reasons why Portal couldn’t on witty song and banter: the whole picture must be considered without letting one facet overpower another. Otherwise, we’d all be calling Crysis the game of the year for how it destroyed bank accounts.