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Some Issues with Mass Effect 2
So, last week I played Mass Effect and loved it, modulo a few niggles (see these posts). I've been playing Mass Effect 2, and while in a lot of ways it's a better game it's gone for Darker and Edgier and has taken some of the problematic aspects of the old game and crossed the line into creepy badness. I'm still definitely going to finish it, but there's that element of "Why can't I quit you/how long until you upset me again" fear that is, for example, familiar to many fans of Supernatural.
Warning: contains sexual assault triggers (though very vague ones) and also spoilers (though the first section isn't spoilery, and the spoilery section is marked)
EDIT: I played it some more and the next few hours of gameplay were pretty much solid awesome. Stupid Bioware.
Without spoilers, my main two issues thus far:
1) In the same way that Dollhouse acted like "Is rape always bad?" was a complex moral question that needed to be asked over and over, Mass Effect 2 (and to a lesser extent Mass Effect 1) seems to have "Is eugenics and genocide always bad?" On the plus side you usually have the option of saying "WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU OF COURSE IT IS(*)" but it's starting to creep me out.
2) In general there's this creepy objectivist subtext about certain people/species being inherently better than others. Admittedly, I'm very sensitive to that sort of thing and it bugs me in lots of fiction, but for example the change from most of the enemy ground troops being faceless robots and zombies in the first game to aliens who are "genetically inclined to be stupid and violent" in the second is…blah.
I've heard the game is problematic and weird about disability, and I've noticed that too, but it's not affecting my enjoyment as much thus far.
AND NOW, SPOILERS
Nothing that ruins the main plot if you're thinking of playing but want to know what you're getting into.
The side mission that made me stop playing and decide to rant now rather than later when I have the whole picture:
One of your crew, Jacob, asks you to follow a distress call left by his father's ship that was lost ten years ago. When you get there you find out that the ship crashed on a jungle planet, killing the captain and putting Jacob's father in charge. Also, the food on the planet causes brain damage over time. It turns out Jacob's father, unable to deal with command, hoarded the safe food for himself and the officers, made himself king of his now mentally disabled crew using the women as a harem(**) and overall went very Heart of Darkness. This would just be a bit meh and disturbing on a gender/disability front (though not necessarily unrealistic, I guess) were it not for the fact that Jacob and his father are black. So you have a black man inherently unworthy of command going bad when he gets above his station and raping a bunch of mostly white women, and you also have another black man having women come up to him and say "You have his face! His evil face! You will hurt us!". There's enough black and otherwise non-white/POC humans in this game that it's ok to have one be evil every now and then, but personally the subtext in this mission creeped me and my African American character out.
The whole "joining an evil xenophobic organisation that does experiments on people" thing is making me constantly uncomfortable, as is the way that for a long section of the game nobody else seems to think it's that big a deal. I think part of the premise of the game is making you play as and see the POV of the "bad guys", which is a perfectly reasonably story telling approach and sometimes really cool, but the writers were too intellectually lazy to, for example, make any of the bad guys for groups you end up fighting with very sympathetic or have much variety in the attitudes of the "bad guys" you talk to, they're all either "every man for himself" or see mercenaries/private industry as "the only way to get things done", there are no violent political extremists etc. EDIT: Ok, I've met and recruited more people and have a much wider variety of POVs. Still, that took a LOT of gameplay to get to. This has been getting better though and you're supposed to feel a bit uncomfortable, but on the whole if you find anyone with a whiff of Nazi scientist about them unlikable then you're really not going to end up being friends with some of your coworkers.
(*)And in some of the artificial situations they create the answer may not actually be quite that simple, but I don't care, call me oversensitive but I'm just happier taking a hardline anti-genocide approach.
(**)Initially they were a harem for himself and "the officers", implying that the officers were all straight men. Clearly my bisexual female Commander should be proud of herself for breaking through the glass ceiling!
Warning: contains sexual assault triggers (though very vague ones) and also spoilers (though the first section isn't spoilery, and the spoilery section is marked)
EDIT: I played it some more and the next few hours of gameplay were pretty much solid awesome. Stupid Bioware.
Without spoilers, my main two issues thus far:
1) In the same way that Dollhouse acted like "Is rape always bad?" was a complex moral question that needed to be asked over and over, Mass Effect 2 (and to a lesser extent Mass Effect 1) seems to have "Is eugenics and genocide always bad?" On the plus side you usually have the option of saying "WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU OF COURSE IT IS(*)" but it's starting to creep me out.
2) In general there's this creepy objectivist subtext about certain people/species being inherently better than others. Admittedly, I'm very sensitive to that sort of thing and it bugs me in lots of fiction, but for example the change from most of the enemy ground troops being faceless robots and zombies in the first game to aliens who are "genetically inclined to be stupid and violent" in the second is…blah.
I've heard the game is problematic and weird about disability, and I've noticed that too, but it's not affecting my enjoyment as much thus far.
AND NOW, SPOILERS
Nothing that ruins the main plot if you're thinking of playing but want to know what you're getting into.
The side mission that made me stop playing and decide to rant now rather than later when I have the whole picture:
One of your crew, Jacob, asks you to follow a distress call left by his father's ship that was lost ten years ago. When you get there you find out that the ship crashed on a jungle planet, killing the captain and putting Jacob's father in charge. Also, the food on the planet causes brain damage over time. It turns out Jacob's father, unable to deal with command, hoarded the safe food for himself and the officers, made himself king of his now mentally disabled crew using the women as a harem(**) and overall went very Heart of Darkness. This would just be a bit meh and disturbing on a gender/disability front (though not necessarily unrealistic, I guess) were it not for the fact that Jacob and his father are black. So you have a black man inherently unworthy of command going bad when he gets above his station and raping a bunch of mostly white women, and you also have another black man having women come up to him and say "You have his face! His evil face! You will hurt us!". There's enough black and otherwise non-white/POC humans in this game that it's ok to have one be evil every now and then, but personally the subtext in this mission creeped me and my African American character out.
The whole "joining an evil xenophobic organisation that does experiments on people" thing is making me constantly uncomfortable, as is the way that for a long section of the game nobody else seems to think it's that big a deal. I think part of the premise of the game is making you play as and see the POV of the "bad guys", which is a perfectly reasonably story telling approach and sometimes really cool, but the writers were too intellectually lazy to, for example, make any of the bad guys for groups you end up fighting with very sympathetic or have much variety in the attitudes of the "bad guys" you talk to, they're all either "every man for himself" or see mercenaries/private industry as "the only way to get things done", there are no violent political extremists etc. EDIT: Ok, I've met and recruited more people and have a much wider variety of POVs. Still, that took a LOT of gameplay to get to. This has been getting better though and you're supposed to feel a bit uncomfortable, but on the whole if you find anyone with a whiff of Nazi scientist about them unlikable then you're really not going to end up being friends with some of your coworkers.
(*)And in some of the artificial situations they create the answer may not actually be quite that simple, but I don't care, call me oversensitive but I'm just happier taking a hardline anti-genocide approach.
(**)Initially they were a harem for himself and "the officers", implying that the officers were all straight men. Clearly my bisexual female Commander should be proud of herself for breaking through the glass ceiling!