Mass Effect 2 has been out about a month now and while it has sold very, very well and garnered near-universal critical praise there has been a vocal element around the internet whining about all the things wrong with it.  Given that I found the game to be damn near perfect, I think these people are crazy but to each his or her own. Not every game is right for every player. What bothers me about the complaints is the most common among them, that Mass Effect 2 is not an Role-Playing Game (RPG). This really annoys me and is unmitigated horns-waggle.

The reasoning behind this claim seems to revolve around two main issues. The first is the streamlining of many of the systems from the first game, namely item collection and experience point collection and allocation. In the previous installment, you could collect a preponderance of weapons, armor and upgrades which you could then equip to whatever members of your party who could use them. While this is fairly standard, the menus and upkeep of all of these lead to a lot of players complaining so Bioware streamlined this down. In Mass Effect 2, you have a baseline armor set, which you can customize in color and design, that you add to or alter with specific pieces you find in the game or develop by doing research projects. You can’t customize any of the other party members’ armor at all. Weapons are a similar deal. Each class has baseline weapons they can use and you start off with entry level versions of those weapons. As you progress through the game, you find new weapons and upgrades to be applied to those weapons. You choose each characters’ load out before every mission according to what they can have.

Experience was similarly streamlined with experience (XP) awarded for finishing missions and completing tasks as opposed to earning the XP from vanquished enemies. Leveling does not have you dealing with specific attribute points but rather allocating points to skills and powers. There aren’t as many options here as the first game as everything required points such as handgun skills or shotgun skills and biotic or tech powers. In Mass Effect 2 you have your powers which you spend points on to make them stronger, eventually culminating to a specialization that allows you to choose the emphasis you want to place on the power.

The second issue is the combat. Generally speaking, RPG combat is either turn based, where you choose ‘attack’ ‘block’ ‘magic’ ‘run’ and then sit back and watch flashy animations and cgi carry out the action without you needing to do anything or ‘real time action’ which is still just a bunch of number crunching under the hood while you press attack over and over hoping that you will not run out of healing potion before the swarms of enemies overwhelm you. In Mass Effect 2 you get third person shooter combat that involves a lot of firing out of cover. The difference between this and the first game is that while you still used cover and shot at enemies from a third-person perspective, you weren’t aiming at anything. You put your reticule on the enemy you wanted and pressed fire over and over unless you wanted to go into the power wheel and throw some force powers at them. Mass Effect 2 takes away the behind the scenes die rolls and allows you to aim yourself and skill becomes a factor in determining if you will win the engagement. Through upgrades and skill points spent you are still getting the influence of stats on the battle but it is no longer a static set of rules determining the outcome of the encounters. While you can map some of your powers to hot keys on the controller, you are still going to be popping into the power wheel quite a bit, especially if you want to tell your squadmates what powers they should be throwing out.

So basically the crux of the ‘NOT AN RPG!!1!!1!!’ argument is that you don’t have a bunch of inventory to customize and you actually have to play the game during combat. Oh and there is the lack of specific attributes to tend to as well. Before I address how wrong-headed I think it is to try to disqualify the game based on just these traits, I need to address them specifically as they pertain to Mass Effect 2.

The menu and inventory system in the first Mass Effect sucked. It was really clunky and there were so many items to deal with that it became a tedious mess to arm and armor your people. I didn’t even worry about it most of the time unless I started dying a lot all of a sudden and then I slogged through. The streamlining done for the second game made a lot of sense and it works very well. It is not as if there is nothing to customize and nothing to find. There are plenty of things to do to your armor and weapons and I still found myself torn between this gear or that and I would save money up for the next upgrade. There is a lot to do and collect here. Just because it is easy to deal with and user friendly doesn’t mean it has somehow undermined the purity of the RPG. The same goes for attributes and experience. There were not discreet stats in the last game either in terms of str, int,dex, etc. What there is, aside from the individual powers and abilities, is a stat set that every character has that raises percentages for that character like damage inflicted, health, and, in the case of the player-character, alignment. This stat is essentially all the basic stats rolled in one. Given that there is a branching specialization found here, you are very much in control of which particular attributes your character enhances and emphasizes.

On the combat tip, having third person mechanics for combat does not automatically mean that it is not an RPG. It is not a shooter with lite RPG elements, nor is it ‘barely an action-RPG’ as I have read around the interwebs. It is an RPG with third-person shooter combat. Much like Oblivion is an RPG with first person melee combat or Fallout 3 is an RPG with first-person shooter/VATS combat. Or Final Fantasy (any of them) is an RPG with turn based combat. There are so many different sorts of RPGs out there with so many different sorts of combat system it is pretty much impossible to say that one particular type excludes the game from the genre altogether. I will allow for it being an action RPG but I still prefer calling it an RPG full stop.

So, having established that I think the charges against the game are wrong on their face, I have to say that I believe that the central reason that Mass Effect 2 is a proper RPG as opposed to a watered down hybrid is that bit about role-playing. I think it is sort of sad that many gamers conflate role-playing with stat maintenance and item collecting. There is a lot more to playing a character than how much they can carry or how much mana they have.

If you look at table top role-playing, which is, of course, from whence these games are derived, you will find the stats and the die rolls and all that but the backbone of the experience is essentially pretending to be your character and interacting with other players and NPCs (non-player-characters) as that character. The turn based die rolls were born out of necessity because that is pretty much how it has to be. When you get into realm of video games, you have a computer to calculate all numbers for you so there is no need to bog down with such a clunky mechanic. That we have been slavish to AD&D rule sets for so long is really kind of ridiculous. But whatever, the combat isn’t the important thing here. If there is one thing that Mass Effect 2 really exemplifies it is role-playing. Through your choices both to your characters origin and background and your interactions with other characters, you become a very defined and unique character. My Shepard is going to be very different than yours. Even amongst my multiple Shepards, they are all very different. This, again, is based on the choices the player makes to customize and define the character. The interactions with other characters are the real meat and potatoes here and offers up a rich and unique experience that allows the player to really connect to the character and the world in a very immersive way. This is the very essence of role-playing and it has nothing to do with the combat or the stat tracking and tweaking.

A common counter to this is the notion that story and character interaction are commonplace in most games now. There has to be a story and you are always playing a character. But this is an overly simplistic interpretation. If I am playing Bioshock 2 any real connection I feel to my character is incidental. I am guiding him through the game and pulling the trigger for him but that is essentially the end of the depth there. Sure you can choose who you want to save or kill which eventually effects the ending you get but playing a faceless cipher is not the same thing as having a fully fleshed out avatar with depth of choice and personality. When you play Metal Gear Solid you are playing Solid Snake’s story. When you play an RPG you are playing YOUR story. And in the case of Mass Effect II you are definitely doing that. Sure, your character has a name so other people can talk to him/her but it is your choices that guide the story and the way people treat you.

I have a very hard time with the notion that, because you are collecting items and minding specific stats, a game in which you play for 10 minutes at a time before watching an hour’s worth of cut scenes and make no real meaningful decisions other than running to this place or that and pressing attack at the right time is real role-playing where a game where the majority of the emphasis is on actual character interaction and choice is disqualified because you don’t micro manage anything and you have to actually aim when you shoot. It just makes no sense.

I suspect a large chunk of the reason that some people are resistant to allowing for changes to the accepted RPG formula has to do with tradition and what they have grown up with or grown used to but just because something has always been a particular way does not mean it should always stay that way. JRPGs have been doing more or less the same thing for the past 20 or so years and when Square Enix announces that Final Fantasy XIII won’t have towns or random encounters, fans lose their minds as if some great crime has been committed. It is no wonder that there isn’t much innovation on that side of the RPG pond. But it clearly isn’t much better on the Western end of things either.

The real problem here is that many people confuse not liking something with that thing’s overall validity. Just because you don’t care for the inventory streamlining in Mass Effect 2 does not mean that it has no inventory system or that it is inadequate for the genre.  You sucking at shooters doesn’t mean that Mass Effect 2 is not an RPG. To hear detractors talk, Bioware has done the equivalent of making a football game with no football when in reality what they have done is make a progressive RPG with third person shooter combat and a ton of immersive character interactions.

For an industry that is always on the cutting edge of technology, many of its consumers are reluctant to adopt anything that challenges the established norms and conventions. These same people then turn around and complain that there aren’t enough unique experiences and new IPs and that everything is just a sequel or retread. It is hard to justify innovation when it is typically met with jeers and whining. Mass Effect 2 is doing fine and the majority of players apparently get it, but it is infuriating to see it maligned by those determined to limit genres and hate on things to be cool. I feel really bad for them really, they are letting petty bull crap get in the way of having a great experience. That is too bad.