It's not over yet

After five days of playing Mass Effect 3 nearly non-stop like a God damn steamroller, I've finished the game. I might have finished the game, I might have even reviewed it, but it's not over by a long shot. You might even say it's only just begun. Up until Mass Effect 3 was released, and up until I had the final Achievement from that game under my belt, I felt wrong playing as anyone other than my "The" Shepard. I modelled him after myself - as far as I could with Mass Effect's dated character editor. His opinions were my own, romances were dictated by who I'd like to be with if I was him, and friendships/rivalries were formed according to my own personal takes on people. First impressions counted, and they were usually correct. Never before have I felt one video game franchise being such an honest escape from grim reality as Mass Effect. It's like another world for me, or it was.

Now that The Shepard's story is over, I can look at Mass Effect as a game.

My evil side brought to life as a
FemShep.

I'm restarting the trilogy with a polar opposite of my true Shepard, that I have named Nina. Instead of the background file combo I've grown used to - Vanguard / Earthborn / Sole Survivor - Nina is Soldier / Spacer / Ruthless. I have pictured her as the kind of woman who spots liabilities easy - a little too easy - who does absolutely everything it takes to get jobs done even if it means sacrificing a whole lot of good folk, and when it comes down to her or them, she always comes first. By far. She's the kind of girl who reads The Art of War each night before bedtime. To her, life IS war. She's like a female version of Jack Bauer, way nastier though. In short, she's batshit crazy.

While I'm hacking through the Mass Effect trilogy for practically the third time within a year, I'm working on a HUGE article/feature called "Looking Back at Mass Effect", which chronicles the life and choices of my true Shepard, from the beginning of Mass Effect to the end of Mass Effect 3, and covers my thoughts on the trilogy as a whole. This might take such a long while that I'm probably gonna have to push publishing the feature to a much further date. I'm still sticking with my plan to begin storming through my collection soon enough, after all. I just thought that all Mass Effect fans out there might enjoy hearing what I'm brewing up.

Hope you liked the review - as long as it was - and I hope everyone out there who downright hated Mass Effect 3 can respect my fair take on the game. It was not perfect, I admit that, but storywise, it was pure Mass Effect as far I'm concerned, and that's all I dared to truly hope from it.