Ah, Mass Effect.  How I love thee so.

This series is, without a doubt, easily at the top of my list for so many reasons it’s hard to keep track of them all.  Needless to say, BioWare made something special with the first one…making my first trek to the Citadel a moment I will forever remember.  They crafted a story–I mean, it’s BioWare–that was so riddled with awesome that it was hard to talk about anything else for nearly the whole year afterward.  Then came Mass Effect 2 and, sweet Jesus, if ever there was a testament for a game that chipped away the less-than-perfect aspects of its predecessor while replacing those things with something entirely different or fixing them so that they were honed to near-perfection, this game would be it.  And, again, the story…holy crap the story!

Never has a game made me care about my party members with such ferocity that I would actually get angry when one died…actually felt loss to the point that I would revert to a previous save to try and keep them all alive.  Which I did…eventually.  The only game that’s come before this series where I was invested in my party even remotely as much was Final Fantasy VII…and that was partly because I could rename them all.

So, as you can guess, I’m pretty excited for the final installment in Shepard’s epic tale of galactic warfare.

Oh, and if I could afford an suit of N7 Armor–or possessed the capacity for making my own–there is a very good chance I would don it whenever playing any of the Mass Effect titles.

–Ray