Read Ryder

I was musing on the thirty-minute walk back from work what a Mass Effect: Andromeda story would look like. Here's the thing; I like Ryder as a character and I like idea of the situation she finds herself in, but I hate the execution. Similarly, there are some fun ideas in the world building but it all falls very flat (and well before the end).

There is potential, though. With the death of the Pathfinder, the only man who seemed able to inspire the shell-shocked colonists and lead them to a new home, his daughter is in a unique position; potentially able to save the expedition if she is only good enough...and if she can only get others to trust her. In the game, though, there's almost no question and she really doesn't have to earn that trust. It just happens. No tension, like I said. I want to read the story where she has to fight for this, both against those who doubt her and against her own internal demons.

The expedition is desperate because their selected "Garden worlds" turned out to be anything but. They need to find fertile ground before they can even afford to thaw out the rest of the colonists. Let's leave aside any thoughts of hydroponics and space industry for the moment and accept this as a challenge. Except the game immediately undercuts this by showing; 1) Kadara, the requisite hive of scum and villainy where deserters from the expedition are surviving quite nicely, thank you. 2) Aya, the verdant homeworld of the Angara, an alien civilization that is open to diplomatic approach. 3) The Krogan colony, who look at the scorching sands and dangerous wildlife and say, "Hey, this is our kind of world!"

Instead Ryder spends the game running around solving Sudoku puzzles so some handy alien machines can magically fix the radioactive deserts and acid lakes. To which there is so little in-game effect most players stop bothering after the first few.

So...where is the option to colonize the Angaran homeworld by force? Or at least have some Milky Way faction strongly considering it. Or where is the option to recognize novel approaches (and needs, and physiologies) and recognize that the Krogan can colonize where humans can't, or that the shattered airless moon is actually just great for some nice big pressure domes, or that the rebels have figured out something useful and the colony leaders are either total idiots or there was a lot more to the attempted mutiny than anyone is saying.

And then there's the Kett. Who are sort of an organic version of The Borg; they've perfected a mutagenic virus that turns other humanoid life forms into more of them. They approach this with a religious fervor, truly believing that this is a gift they bring to other races. Well, where is a real philosophical exploration of whether they are right? Especially if it turns out the Kett form is an adaptation that can better survive the mysterious conditions of the Heleus Cluster than most of the Milky Way species can.

So, yeah, the problem is that one might, just might, be able to write a decent story with this material, but really you want to just trash half the world-building and do the damn thing right (or, at least, better.)

The first sequence of the game is Ryder awakes on her colony ship, the ship runs into some sort of negative space wedgie Mysterious Energy, takes severe damage, and is on the point of having to abandon ship. Ryder, her Pathfinder father, and a small select team take one of the surviving shuttles down to the very scary looking planet which is in the process of being ravaged by the Mysterious Energy in hopes of finding a way to save the ship.

Long story short, they run into an alien species who shoots at them, check out the Ancient Building of Alien Technology the other aliens were trying to get into, Ryder Senior throws a switch turning off the lighting storms and then falls to his death. Everyone else goes back to the colony ship which is mysteriously not damaged nearly so badly now and they all fly off...never to return to that planet again.

I say, fie on this! Ryder's dad is killed much, much earlier. The ship remains in danger. The planet is potentially viable. Ryder and the remains of the Pathfinder team have to survive and understand what is going on and struggle all the while to get the panicking people on the critically damaged colony ship to trust her, with the big turning point where they abandon ship and land on the planet she has staked all their chances on.

And then they have to deal with the Angara, and there are diplomatic overtures with the Kett, and a struggle of competing philosophies both of which seem to offer clues to the puzzle of what the Mysterious Energy is, what connection it has to the Ancient Aliens, how physics itself is different in the Heleus cluster and how the Milky Way immigrants can survive and adapt.

Oh yeah, and Sam, the talkative AI that was illegally placed in Sara's brain by her own father, is looked on with a lot more suspicion, including by Sara herself, and those suspicions are partly born out when Something Goes Wrong.