Mass Effect Legendary Edition – Mass Effect 1

Playing this series was a request from my Twitch community, and so I’m here today to give it a fair shake. We’ll break down what worked, what didn’t work, what was fantastic about the game, and what will likely never get the improvements it deserves.

So, let’s dive in.

If there is one thing in Mass Effect that I can sing praises about until the sun comes up, it’s the cinematics. Now, granted, I have played the Legendary Edition and not the older games, so I’m aware that parts of the games have seen significant graphical updates, particularly in the lighting department. But let’s talk about the animated sequences that really make the game shine.

I was truly blown away when I saw the cinematic sequences for the first game. They have a film-like quality to them that the animation team should truly be proud of. When we look at science fiction, at series like Star Trek and Stargate, we expect the big cinematic sequences, the ships flying through space against a backdrop of stars, moons, planets, and swirling nebulas.

On that, Mass Effect absolutely delivers. As a huge fan of Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis, the visuals for the spaceships in flight were gorgeous and satisfying, an absolute joy to watch. And I know that I’m absolutely guilty of stopping in the middle of a stream to just watch the ships fly by. The sequences are smooth, well-lit, and the camera movements frame every moment in the epic detail you want to see from RPGs.

Another place the game excels is in the overall story. There’s a clear threat that establishes itself early on, a frustrating but compelling struggle to convince others of the threat ahead, dirty politics, and treasonous plots. If you’re looking for a game to make you righteously angry, Mass Effect is more than capable of that. And Commander Shepard is incredibly capable of expressing that level of frustration.

Now, for characters. Mass Effect’s array of characters in the first game is somewhat limited, but incredibly interesting. Though you start off with your two human companions, Ashley and Kaiden, going on to recruit four aliens to round out your team is an intriguing and quite Bioware-standard way of bringing their worldbuilding into close proximity with the player. Suddenly you have access to several differing designs and viewpoints, and that helps thrust you into the immersion of the world.

That said, this is where the game started to lose some points with me. As a writer, I’m both extremely plot-driven and equally character-driven. So while companion dialogue was interesting and their viewpoints and life experiences varied greatly, the amount of dialogue we get with them is decidedly…limited. As is their party banter.

As we know, companion dialogue and party banter are central components to many Bioware games, and having come out of the Dragon Age series and into Mass Effect, I was expecting this to continue being true. But…unless I wanted to be riding the elevators at the Citadel all day with various combinations of companions, the fact is that I was never going to get all of the interesting possible banter between them simply because there wasn’t much to be had while simply wandering around the game world. And I might have wandered aimlessly around the game world MORE if there had been party banter to be had.

This was a disappointment to me in the first game, though the developers would go on to improve it somewhat in the second and third games. But with the fairly limited scope of most missions, with many of them spent with a couple of companions just driving around in the Mako, it feels like there should have been more of an emphasis on ambient party banter in order to really flesh out companions and help the player grow a stronger attachment to each of them.

And even back on the Normandy, once you’ve exhausted all of their dialogue options, we rarely see additions of new dialogue, except for in cases like Garrus gaining a mission that Commander Shepard can embark on to go chase down a doctor who has been doing some rather naughty things and that Garrus has an axe to grind with from his C-Sec days. Which was a fantastic addition because it really set in motion Garrus’s vigilante arc going into the second game. Like with Anders in Dragon Age Awakening and dragon Age 2, it really helps to show the “descent into darkness” that Garrus goes through. But unlike Anders, Garrus gets hauled back out of it by duty and the galaxy coming to an end around them.

I feel that more dialogue, more accessible party banter, and more companion sub-plots would have really helped the story in Mass Effect 1. True, we’re supposedly on a time limit as we chase Saren across the galaxy, but that doesn’t stop us from being able to investigate every planet in every system on our way there, then looping back around to pick up anything we might have missed.

Which…brings me to another one of my gripes with this game. While the level design of the game and the environments we get thrown into are varied and beautiful and incredibly well done, navigation in the game is…problematic. And this is the reason why I had to play the game a second time before reviewing it, because otherwise this review would have been just a laundry list of my frustrations with the game, rather than being able to extoll its virtues and point out its flaws in equal measure.

Navigation in Mass Effect 1, and really in the series as a whole, is not new player friendly. Maps alternate between being so detailed as to be cluttered and difficult to navigate such as the Citadel, or so lacking in detail that all you have is an elevation map with markers on it and no clear way of reaching some of the destinations. Which resulted in quite an exciting, aggravating, and hilariously unhinged series of adventures in the Mako.

Which then makes me question what sort of military training Garrus has had as a Turian to be able to withstand the motion sickness that my driving undoubtedly caused as I tried to drive the Mako up sheer cliff faces.

When I was informed that the original Mass Effect game and the Legendary Edition had a decade between their releases, one of my first thoughts was “well then why didn’t they fix the navigation system?” And even after playing through it a second time, that sentiment remains true. The game’s navigation system could use a better minimap with both compass and layout map, better mapping system, more signposting, and more obvious ground trails to follow, because as a new player, I was completely lost as to where I was and where I needed to go. and I often found myself accidentally doubling back on missions and getting turned around because of the sheer amount of repeated assets in every corner of the combat maps that made every corner look near identical.

What didn’t help was the relatively low amount of details that your quest journal/mission log gives you. Coming from more content-heavy RPGs like the Elder Scrolls, Runescape, and Dragon Age, I grew used to expansive quest journals that would note down your initial quest, who you’ve talked to, what you’ve done, where you’ve been, and what your next step is, according to the information you’ve received so far in your task.

Now, for the early release, I could be a bit more forgiving, as quest journals were just becoming more prominent in RPGs. But for the remastered Legendary Edition…? They could have just gone next door to the Dragon Age team and gone “Hey, got any tips for an informative mission log?” and I’m sure that there would have been answers to that question. For that matter, asking about navigation probably wouldn’t have hurt either. They wouldn’t need to go as far as the later Veilguard system of navigation, but I don’t feel that a functional navigation system and quest journal for a role-playing game was too much to ask for.

Despite the game’s navigational problems and general unfriendliness towards new players, when I played through it a second time, wanting to give it a fairer chance to wow me, I got MUCH more story content than I had the first time. Mainly because, for my second run, I was informed that I could actually land on a lot of the different planets and do missions on them, gather resources, etc… I even had a powerpoint given to me that detailed where to find everything for the collections I was working on that soothed my completionist heart in ways that the first playthrough did not. And though the terrain of the various planets could be frustrating to navigate at times, being able to drive around in the Mako knowing that there were planets out there with loot to find also made my loot goblin heart happy.

The issue? These options are NOT clearly signposted. We’re not really made aware that Planet X has resources on it or Planet Y might have a quest on it. We get tags for major quests and side-quests that we’ve picked up, but apart from that, at a glance, the rest of the galaxy just seems to be there for decoration and not serve a real purpose. I find this to be a shame, because once I understood that exploring a lot of the planets was an option, I spent hours upon hours driving around trying to find as many hidden treasures as I could. Also, the scenery is gorgeous.

Now, for another storytelling gripe. I will preface this by saying that I played through the Dragon Age series before Mass Effect, which means that I’ve seen what Bioware is capable of when it comes to romance and companion bonds. So when I learned that romance was an option, I was excited to see what it looked like in Mass Effect. To my disappointment, content for bonding with your companions was…minimal, with only a few dialogue options and maybe a couple of cutscenes depending on who you picked, with only 1 or 2 options available.

So, what seems to have been the case is that they had talented science fiction and fantasy writers on staff, but the romance writing was…lacking. Of course, companion dialogue overall was very limited to begin with, but companion romance dialogue was even more limited.

Another of my gripes with the game, and in fact the series as a whole, is the oversimplification of keybinds on PC. For interact, sprint, cover, and later jump functions to all be on a single key makes maneuvering awkward and results in copious cover breaks and sudden stops when you’re interrupted because you accidentally interact with something you didn’t mean to while trying to accomplish another function of the key.

Overall, a great game that would be made even better with a few navigation and quality of life fixes. As for the companions, we always have fanfiction for that.

And there we are, my breakdown of Mass Effect 1 after playing it twice through in April of 2026.

May you always catch your dragons sleeping,

Celeste, The Musing Mage