I can point at all my favorite games of all time and talk about their merits of gameplay or story, but the Mass Effect trilogy is alone among those for making me gush about the characters as if they were close friends, or bringing me to tears more times than any book or movie ever has.

These games mean the world to me, which is so weird thinking back to 2007 when I stood alongside the older KOTOR fans thumbing their nose at the original Mass Effect for being a 'dumbed down' KOTOR and a sell-out product for BioWare. (& today we have original Mass Effect fans thumbing their nose at 2 and 3 for being 'dumbed down' or comparatively poorly-written, which just kills me.)

I still don't really think the original Mass Effect is a great game on its own -- the characters barely rose above archetypes; conversations were lifeless and exist only to push the plot or world-building; gender was barely recognized; romance was nothing more than dorky 12-year-old boy fantasies; the plot was, beat for beat, a blatant reskin of every single preceding BioWare game, the lore itself a mashup of Star Trek and Star Wars even down to alien species being based on dorky or offensive human stereotypes; and the gameplay was too-often bogged down by cookie-cutter design.

Alongside the sequels, though, BioWare shocked the heck out of me and delivered an experience more meaningful than I ever expected from a video game. It feels like they took a risk with Mass Effect 2, pushing the save-the-world story to the background and putting the focus on smaller character-driven stories. Making all the small details of the world and its many characters the highlight of the sequel to such a bombastic title is exactly why this trilogy is as powerful as it is.

All your decisions suddenly mattered not because you were roleplaying the Prophesied Dork Loser for the umpteenth time, but because you suddenly had a bunch of friends you sincerely cared about, with stories you wanted to see to their conclusions.

Yes, in the end, those very choices are nothing more than an illusion, but they rarely, if ever, felt like an illusion. That's why this series has and will last.

The ending didn't seem as bad as I remembered. Its greatest sin is perhaps playing it safe and not dropping any new surprises. But you know what? It's, like, 10 minutes out of well over 150 hours here, and I think we all know the journey is the bit that matters most.

<3 <3 <3 Helena Shepard x Liara T'Soni <3 <3 <3