After deciding the fate of Aresh, Jack blows up the facility with a huge bomb and ostensibly closes the book on her past.Īfter the mission, Miranda and Jack end up getting into a fight: Jack wants Miranda to admit that Cerberus (which employs Miranda) was in the wrong, while Miranda claims that Jack’s erratic behavior and hatred of Cerberus is endangering your mission. Most of the mission is spent on a walking tour of the dilapidated facility, listening to Jack recount her terrible treatment at the hands of Cerberus, but the climax happens when you meet an old test subject named Aresh who’s trying to resurrect the facility and continue its work. Jack was supposed to be the culmination of the project, but escaped when she became powerful enough. The facility was run by Cerberus, which is now funding your mission to save the galaxy, and its goal was to create the ultimate biotic, a type of telekinetic that uses mass effect fields instead of psychic energy. SETTING THE STAGEįor those of you who aren’t familiar, the argument happens after you complete a special mission with Jack to help her get some closure on her traumatic past, which involves finding the abandoned science facility where she was experimented on as a kid.
But before we go deeper, let’s get some context for this argument. However, it’s important to realize that these surface traits are not the sum of their characters, they’re expressions of those characters. They describe a character’s behavior, how they present themselves to others, and the surface-level descriptors other people might use to describe them.īoth Jack and Miranda end up displaying these surface traits in a big argument around the midpoint of the game, and it’s a great demonstration of how complex characters work and play off one another. Pictured: Jack, Part-Time Rebel, Full-Time BitchĪll the things I’ve described so far are ‘surface traits,’ the immediate things you notice about a character. What I notice about complex, well-crafted characters is that you usually have a visceral reaction to them: you might think Mordin Solus, the Salarian doctor in Mass Effect 2, is a coldly logical, untrustworthy egghead who would smother a baby if it meant advancing ‘the greater good’, or you might see him as an eccentric but lovable mad scientist who just happens be an amateur opera singer/former spy.
There’s a lot writers can learn from Commander Shepard’s interstellar Scooby Gang, but this article is going to be a deep dive into what makes a complex character and what good chemistry looks like. I’ve been joking for years that I should write up an in-depth analysis of Mass Effect 2’s characters, and I think it’s finally time. Some of my favorites are HBO’s Westworld and Game of Thrones, but then there’s Mass Effect 2, BioWare’s big-time sci-fi role-playing game. As a writer, there are some shows and books I find myself going back to again and again just so I can remind myself what exciting, well-crafted characters look like.
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