Something drastic will happen, and I'll think, "But if I'd known what that decision meant, I wouldn't have done it! It makes no sense for my character!" (I'm about eight hours in, and I've already seen a couple of glimpses.) What I'm afraid of is that I'll get to a point where a choice I made flippantly in Genesis completely alters my character's experience.
Now, I'll probably see the fruits of these choices as I continue playing ME2. Choose Udina or Anderson as a Council representative? Who cares? It didn't seem to matter much either way. Kill the Rachni queen? Sure, why not - I hate bugs. Let Wrex live or die? Um, he's a member of my crew, so he should live…I guess. I felt similarly about the other decisions Genesis presented. Without the context and characterization of the first game's story, I might as well have been choosing a shirt to wear. But I have no idea if that really made sense in the long run. Let Kaidan or Ashley die? All I had to go on was that one is "a good kid" and the other is "tough."Īs I intended to play Shepard as a Renegade (a harsher, more aggressive hero, as opposed to the more pleasant Paragon), I figured Ashley might have more value to my team. But since I knew nothing of the Mass Effect universe or the ramifications of my choices, I felt completely indifferent. Genesis boils the plot of ME1 down to six significant choices, which will later affect ME2's story. The limited interactivity of the comic didn't help me much, either. Placing Genesis before I had a chance to make my own Shepard blunted its effectiveness for me. Character creation is something I take seriously - probably too much so - because it's the best way for me to feel like I'm really in charge of the role I'll be playing. But that's it.įor me, the short scene before the comic wasn't enough to get me to identify with my Shepard. You do get to choose Shepard's gender at the outset, so the voiceover matches.
In fact, the character-creation process doesn't take place until after the comic is complete. In order to accommodate gamers' character choices (gender, hair color, etc.), Genesis never shows Shepard without a helmet and armor. It's played off as a sort of "life flashing before your eyes" recap of Shepard's adventures thus far. The Genesis comic doesn't kick in until after the opening scene of Mass Effect 2, where the Normandy is destroyed and Shepard is blasted out into the vacuum of space, effectively dead.