Likewise. I also never found Shamus Young's takedown all that persuasive, because he frequently seems to forget that gameplay is the most important thing in a video game, not story. If it were a movie series, Mass Effect would have to be considered to have a final entry on the level of the third Spider-Man or X-Men films (maybe Godfather III, considering the contentious quality). But with both gameplay and enough satisfying story arcs (maybe consider them RPG adventures) that would comprise movies of their own, it's nowhere near the disaster he makes it out to be. Shamus's series on ME is like a steroidal version of his analysis of the Skyrim Thieves' Guild quest, where he rightfully lambastes the story without ever really stopping to ask, "But is it fun to play?" Which, IMO, it is.
There are a few issues with it beyond that, as well. He operates under this weirdly strict idea of what science fiction should be and disregards the parts of the first Mass Effect that don't fit the conception of the series he prefers, this inaccurate idea that Mass Effect is a details-oriented science fiction tale. Similar to gameplay never really factoring into his thought process, he never really talks about music or art direction, and most his arguments are grounded in how he
feels without actually analyzing the various pieces of what he's looking at
. There are also a lot of things he says he'll explain or analyse, and then simply doesn't. He also recollects some things wrongly in ways that happen to boost his argument which comes down to poor memory or poor honesty. When you get down to it, he liked the first game and didn't like the other two as much, and needed to basically vent about why he felt that way without really examining whether the first game was anything like he thought it was.
His big three points aren't wrong either but his arguments are all pretty poor. He talks up the details of the series, but doesn't seem to have ever looked into the production side of it all, where he might've found out that the codex entries and planetary data survey elements that provide all the smart guy worldbuilding details (and that the first Mass Effect even disregards when it gets in the way of drama) were basically written by one guy (Chris Etiole) who was given carte blanche to write whatever he came up with, which is to say he wrote technobabble, even if it was very good technobabble that a lot of people thought elevated the core plot. Shamus' arguments are built around evil EA coming in and perverting Mass Effect from details (good) to drama (bad) but EA didn't make them rush Mass Effect 2 and no one in the development team has ever said that EA made them tell a story they didn't want to tell or that studio interference led the series down the path it went. It was all Bioware and it was the same people who were behind the first game.
There were pretty major shifts between each game in the series, but it wasn't because some EA frat bros came in and made Bioware write stupidly. It was because Mass Effect was always a jumble of ideas built on the back of a game story that was never supposed to form a trilogy and Bioware never really figured out how to tell it well. Bioware had been open, even around the time of that retrospective, about some of their failed plans. Mass Effect 2 was supposed to start with the
Geth restoring Shepard to life, which is why Legion featured so prominently so early... but Bioware thought that would be too weird and had trouble imagining your two beginning party members. Mass Effect's central plot, envisioned by Karpyshyn, was supposed to be about Reapers trying to survive entropy which Bioware dropped
before Karpyshyn left the studio and even Karpyshyn has said (I think) they had thrown it out during the writing of the second game. Chris Etiole also wrote some of the best parts of Mass Effect 2, such as the Geth schism, but he was no longer part of Bioware when it came time to do Mass Effect 3, where everything fell under the control of Mac Walters and Casey Hudson, who had both been involved in the series from the beginning. Why did Etiole leave? Basically because Walters wasn't smart enough to understand his preferred take on the ending. The people, maybe even the one person, who did all the cool details stuff just left. That's it. So, it's funny that one of Shamus' points is that he's not going to bother figuring out who wrote what because it seems like one guy wrote all the bits he liked. Hudson, Walters, Karpyshyn and Etiole all probably had very different ideas on what Mass Effect was supposed to be and what it was going to explore and how it was going to tell its stories.
Heat clips were dumb, Cerberus was dumb, the Catalyst child was dumb, EDI getting tits was dumb, Aria was dumb, Mass Effect 3 was pretty bad beyond the awful ending, there's no shortage of bad decisions in all three games and contradictions and retcons, but the truth is that Bioware have never been as smart as a lot of gamers think and their general progression as a studio has been to get more actiony, more fan servicey, more player-centric, and to put drama over details even in their earliest games. Baldur's Gate 2 does a lot of what Mass Effect 2 does, and you can even sum it up in a Shamus-like diatribe: "The Bhaalspawn just happens to end up in a massive dungeon, far away from home, at the mercy of this incredibly powerful sorcerer who was never mentioned in the first game, along some guy with a hamster I never used. This is implausible and contrived, with zero foreshadowing or build up, and it hurt my immersion irrevocably." Dragon Age Origins introduces the Qunari as having such strict ideas of sex and gender that Sten can't even imagine that the female protagonist is a fighter, Dragon Age Inqusition suddenly makes them fine with trans people.
Which is why I have no idea there's anyone at all who expects Veilguard to be anything but shit. I feel like it will kill the studio unless they really think Mass Effect 5 is going to save them. Mass Effect 2 was the last good game they made.
tl;dr: Shamus' retrospective isn't useful for telling us any how's or why's beyond his own emotional response to the series, and Etiole probably should've led Mass Effect 3's writing.
