sarahjay
Written on Jan 7, 2019
So Mass Effect: Andromeda is a game about the races in the Milky Way sending colony ships to the Andromeda galaxy as a backup plan for when the Reapers show up, except literally no one knows this because the story is set either prior or during Mass Effect 2 (can't remember, can't be bothered to google). It makes very little sense, presumably because the explanation for who was behind all of this was going to be revealed eventually in either a DLC or sequel, one of which we are for sure not getting and the other... status extremely unknown. At this point we may as well just assume it was Cerberus and the Illusive Man and be done with it.
One of the best things about the universe of Mass Effect for me is its diversity of alien races. One of the worst things about Mass Effect: Andromeda is how they left out basically half of these. I'm sure there was logistical reasoning that went into this choice, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. This book is about the ones that were left out of the game, plus the batarians. I still don't understand how some of the batarians managed to get to Andromeda and be in the game. I can't remember if that was explained anywhere but it is very annoying.
The way Bioware "solved" this issue was to shove all of these other races, the non-Council races, onto a shared ark hosted by the quarians. This book takes place 30 years before they're supposed to arrive in Andromeda, when the ship wakes the main characters up from cryosleep in order to investigate a weird virus that's killing a bunch of drell. Eventually it spreads and starts killing members of every race (the others being the batarians, hanar, elcor, and volus) and the story is about them figuring out who planted the virus and how to cure it. The descriptions of the disease are very graphic and gross and go on for maybe too long and that is frankly the main reason why the rating I gave this book isn't higher.
I haven't been able to figure out if this was always going to be the plot of this book, or if it was a prequel to whatever was supposed to happen in the DLC we never got. Bioware seems to have claimed the story they had for that content went into this book. I can't think of a way Ryder could have swanned into this situation and not somehow made it worse, considering what is revealed to be the reason behind the virus being spread (it was intended to lay dormant in the drell who would serve as carriers to spread the virus to all the Council races in Andromeda, so the "leftover" races could reign supreme in the face of their very reduced numbers). It could have been an interesting story line if Ryder HAD been able to show up and have everyone react extremely negatively to her presence, so I am 100% sure they would not have done that. She would have shown up, experienced brief hostility, then solved everything in a three mission story arc and at the end everybody would be like "well, thanks for the help! We all know now we were wrong about humans. You truly are the best race of us all, we are blessed that you deign to associate with us." Ryder is infallible, somehow, bizarrely. Shepard always was too, but at least there were consequences for her choices, actual stakes. But no, not for the happy-go-lucky baby Pathfinder. Maybe we save those for the next game. That way we might not have to decide what they are.
That was my biggest issue with ME:A. Nothing you do matters. Everything turns out the same every time. No one important is at risk of dying. You don't get to be a renegade or a paragon - you're just Ryder and whatever you decide to do is fine. The story will barely be different. I know, I played the game through four times. Can I explain myself? No. (Yes I can. I wanted to see all the romance options for female Ryder. My review on that: VERY UNDERWHELMING.) (I mean also the gameplay was really fun. They nailed that part of it, in my opinion.) And look, I have a soft spot for some of the dumb shit Ryder did, and I find her voice actor incredibly endearing. But the tone of the entire game is just... weird. These people are all in a very bleak situation and none of them seem to truly grasp that. (Also, it was really hard for me to shake the manifest destiny/colonialism vibe the premise had that they of course didn't explore whatsoever.)
I liked every character in this book more than every character in the actual game (except for the criminally underutilized Reyes who should have been a squadmate with his own DLC). That was probably not supposed to happen. I don't know. Catherynne M. Valente is a very good writer who very clearly knows a lot about the Mass Effect universe and I loved that about reading this book. The alien races featured here all deserve more attention and respect than they've ever gotten from the actual games, and it was really refreshing to read about a side of the universe where humans are not inexplicably featured despite being the freshest ones on the galactic scene (though there is still a weird amount of human cultural references in here, even while multiple characters express disdain for them as a race - but at least the elcor Hamlet stuff has in-universe precedence).
There's literally no point to reading this book unless you are very familiar with not just the Mass Effect games but also with Andromeda, which I realize a lot of ME fans don't care about. I care about it to the point of ridiculousness, and by that I mean - I feel in my soul how good it could have been. If they had just tried. If they had just leaned into the darkness of ME3 a little. If they had just made it feel actually bleaker, if they had just added consequences. If anything about it had felt difficult at all. If they'd killed someone off! The thing about playing Mass Effect is that you are constantly worried that if you fuck up even one thing, characters you care about will die, probably very dramatically right in front of you, with very emotionally distressing parting words. And sometimes they'll die even if you DID make all the right choices. Because that's what would happen if any of it was real. You don't get to save everyone. Not everybody gets to live. ME3 especially is about trying to maximize results while minimizing consequences and in the meantime convincing yourself you're okay with what you have to sacrifice. Remember Legion and Tali? That shit was hard. Unless you did everything right a whole game ago, you had to choose between two entire races of people. But in Mass Effect: Andromeda, a game where you play as someone who has left their whole existence 600 years in the past and whose dad sacrifices his life for them right in front of them, you get to the end of the game and your entire crew is fine and you're fine and all the side characters are fine and it's fine. Somehow no one needs therapy.
This is the point of this "review" where I realized I had no point and none of this was going anywhere. We all know Andromeda could have been better. I applaud Bioware for getting such a good writer to write this book. Get Catherynne M. Valente to write the actual game next time. Or Becky Chambers. That is my dream.
tl;dr I wish the drell had been in the game. They sexy AF. That's it. Goodbye. Nobody read this far.