Mass Effect 2 is celebrating its 15-year anniversary today, January 26, 2025.

Most RPGs are like fantasy or science-fiction novels.

Mass Effect 2 is a serious contrast, instead modeling itself after a season of television.

The format helped catapult ME2 to upper echelons of many greatest-games lists.

It is still the most beloved entry of the franchise, beating out its incomplete and controversial siblings.

ME2’s main plot is ultimately inconsequential to the trilogy’s broader machinations.

But each mission in ME2 is essentially an episode of TV.

Most are entirely self-contained, and few relate back to the main plot in any meaningful way.

They act the way individual episodes in a television show might act.

Sometimes it even succeeds.

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The problems are in the ensemble.

To be fair, this is a problem that many RPGs have.

Intra-companion interactions are limited to banter or brief reactions.

Mass Effect 2 instantiated this problem in some novel ways.

Each of the game’s 12 party members are only guaranteed to be present for two missions.

DLC characters like Kasumi Goto and Zaeed Massani only get one.

This means that party members have to go broad, charismatic, and identifiable.

But Tali’s and Garrus’s quests offer variations on their arcs from the first game.

What is Tali’s relationship to her culture and family?

Should Garrus indulge his instincts of vengeance?

Neither mission pushes either character beyond where they already were.

To give credit where it is due, ME2 does make a run at center character conflict.

However, these are isolated scenes that are easily defused with a persuasion check.

While individual characters can experience growth and change, the character of the ensemble itself must remain consistent.

Even the suicide mission, in which all 12 party members participate, focuses on choices about individual characters.

ME2 can only manage a few gestures at it.

Despite all my grousing, ME2 does sometimes capitalize on its format.

Despite these strengths, no game has really taken Mass Effect 2’s mantle.

RPGs like Pentiment, Disco Elysium, and Citizen Sleeper have innovated on the format in entirely different ways.

While Mass Effect 2 is beloved, it is not exactly influential.

Fifteen years later, what Mass Effect 2 best showcases is promise.

Its potential is still unrealized.

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