Sadly, I dropped the game about quarter of the way through on my first run.

It was the perfect blend for a power fantasy, where you are a bad ass hero out to save a universe that denies you. You can customize your face, race, and personality, and you even get to play as a rogue champion abandoned by an ungrateful society. It doesn’t require a big learning curve, the closest thing to “magic” would be Adrenaline. I can understand the appeal: you can use all the guns and allows you to use an ammo type that fits any situation.

According to statistics, the Soldier class is the most popular. Yet, to the uninitiated, it was an accessible game that catered to a much wider audience.

They even had Mission Cleared screen at the end of every level, breaking the fragile immersion an RPG fan as myself felt that made the genre special from the other genres. To me, Mass Effect 2 had a “jet lag” in presentation, and it deviated from Mass Effect so much that the RPG fan in me was put off. Personally, I felt the move was off-putting, being at the time an RPG player first and a shooter second. It presented itself friendly to the shooter crowd by adopting a more action-centric core, striking a perfect balance between the two. Mass Effect 2 was in the right place at the right time. Nier came out the same year, but its genius won’t reach cult status until NieR Automata seven years later. It was a time when the popularity of the console RPG was starting to transition into a more mainstream variety, pivoting away from the highly popular Japanese RPGs marked by the strange creative choices made by Final Fantasy XIII. It didn’t win the Game Awards that year (still known as Spike Video Game Awards), as the honor went to Red Dead Redemption, which was an excellent game in its own right. Mass Effect 2 was not a perfect game, but it was a game that came at the best possible time.

Mass effect redemption scans