Review of Mass Effect Legendary Edition – old love does not rust

I really tried to get someone in the newsroom to write this review who hasn’t played Mass Effect at all. Unfortunately, just these weeks, a large part of our authors deal more with school exams, so they hid the trilogy until the summer. So I had no choice but to personally evaluate the modeled remastered trilogy. It’s a hell of a task, because some games are almost inappropriate to stick any marks. As I stated on our stream from the game, Mass Effect means to today’s generation of players what the Star Wars movie trilogy meant to the previous generation: the best personification of the sci-fi genre. It’s hard to recommend this trio of games more strongly. When evaluating the Legendary Edition, we will focus on the evaluation of the remaster and the packaging itself, rather than the original games.

• Platform: XSX (peer-reviewed version), PC, PS4, X1, PS5
• Date of publication: 14. 5. 2020
• Developer: Bioware (USA)
• Genre: Action RPG
• Czech localization: born
• Multiplayer: born
• Data to download: 88 GB
• Game time: 70+ hours
• Accessibility: 18+
• Sales version: box and digital
• Price: 1799, – CZK (Xzone)

Legendary trilogy

My personal relationship with the Mass Effect brand began before the release of the first part with this trailer:

Despite its brevity, this trailer perfectly captures the core and atmosphere of the series: as the commander of a unique spaceship and special strike force, you travel through the galaxy to intervene where needed, making many difficult choices to live with. As you get to know the different alien races and assemble your retinue, a very successfully dosed central plot slowly revolves in the background, revolving around the suspiciously identical mythology of many cosmic civilizations: ancient records tell of a “divine” race of thinking machines returning in cycles. reap “organic life.

It’s fascinating to watch from a distance how well all three parts of the game work even after all these years and fit perfectly into the mosaic of a single, perfectly connected story. It is in this interconnectedness that the great power of the Legendary Edition as a package lies, as it offers an easy way to enjoy all the content of the main games and their (often excellent or even absolutely essential) DLC add-ons, which were organically incorporated directly into the main games for this edition. And although there is a great deal of progress between the individual parts not only in terms of plot or playability, but also in terms of storytelling, a certain naivety and antiquity of the first part contrasts appropriately with the captivating personal plane of the second to culminate in an absolute war epic in the final three.

Partial modernization

Goosebumps jumped out while I was playing, and my emotions rumbled in exactly the same way as in 2007, 2010 and 2012, when I played the individual parts for the first time. It is, among other things, a tribute to an excellent script, acting performances and also unique music, from which a composition for the introduction of the third part is specially „Leaving Earth“From the film composer Clint Mansell (films Requiem for a Dream, Fontána) can chop me up even when listening to a thousand times. Also thanks to it, the magnificent “movie” introduction of ME3 is quite possibly the best introduction in the history of video games, at least for someone who has already experienced the previous two episodes and has something to do with what’s happening on screen.

But I successfully tested this passage on non-players who don’t know anything about the series – and it touched them in exactly the same way. With this example, I want to prove that even in 2021, the Mass Effect trilogy did not lose any of its narrative power. The legendary edition helps to appreciate the quality of the trilogy with its unified controls and interfaces (UI), which of course benefited the gameplay of the first part the most. Still, don’t expect any miracles: weapons and “spells” are fun, but enemies haven’t taken up much intelligence, and sometimes your partners get in the way.

Even in 2021, the Mass Effect trilogy lost none of its narrative power.

Unfortunately, in terms of content and technology, the Legendary Edition represents the “necessary minimum”. From a technical point of view, this is allegedly due to the fact that the games were created on Unreal Engine 3 and their conversion to the fourth generation engine (or something else or better) would be too demanding. Therefore, we “only” improved tens of thousands of textures and models, thanks to which the game (originally created for 720p and 30fps) looks good on large 4K TVs – the age of its graphics reveals only a sparse environment of older two parts, sometimes funny awkward character animations and absence of modern graphic effects. It sounds awful, but it’s not – the game on modern TVs (I have more than a two-meter diagonal) looks really nice and maintains its unique, slightly retro-style, inspired by JJ Abrams’ Star Trek movie remake (long live the lens flares). The fluency of 60 fps (even up to 120 fps on the Xbox Series X, although not so stable) has a crucial share in the good impression of graphics and gameplay – see. traditionally perfect analysis of experts from Digital Foundry:

Of course, PC gamers can laugh to all this to a certain extent, who are able to get further with the original versions of this trio of games thanks to all sorts of modifications, etc., than the official Legendary Edition did. But even they should not underestimate the value of one conveniently integrated package for new players who simply do not want to solve all sorts of modes or search for all DLCs and think about their order. But all players will undoubtedly cry over the content ailments of the Legendary Edition: in the first place you will not find any extra bonuses (eg special editions of games had great “making of” videos included at the time), although they clearly talk about the package of this cult trilogy, as well as some more impressive main menu (on the stream I mentioned Halo: Master Chief collection as an example, which looks much better).

We should not underestimate the value of a comprehensive package for new players.

There is also a plethora of all sorts of (rather cosmetic) bugs, thanks to which sometimes a character gets stuck in the animation or uses a very unnatural expression. And especially our people can also whine about the absence of Czech. The community will probably solve this in time, but only for the PC version of the trilogy. As a result, I’m again laughing at the quality of the games in this package, but I can’t applaud the Legend Edition as such. It’s great to have her. But it is not perfect.