More Mass Effect 2 and Some Thoughts on RPG Romance

I wanted to put up an actual sketch post between the Mass Effect 2 Choice post and this one, but that's just not going to happen before I leave for GDC. So here we are:

So I'm on my second Mass Effect 2 playthrough, this time with a male Shepard import. It's really neat to see how the game is affected by all the ME sidequests--I just about cried laughing when I ran into Conrad Verner (though I was somewhat confused by his claims that Shepard had waved a gun in his face until I found out that it's a bug), and I have been genuinely charmed by some of the messages from old NPCs. I'm also somewhat amused by the fact that the default ME2 Shepard appears to have completed none of the sidequests and chosen the neutral dialogue option every time, since in my mind that represents a complete failure to play the game properly.

I'm far enough along in this playthrough to have completed some of the Loyalty Quests, so romances are opening up. I'm a little distressed by the fact that my options tend to be between "Have Sex With Jack Now" and "Tell Jack You Want to Have Sex With Her Later," or "Enter a Relationship With Miranda" and "Utterly Crush Miranda's Tender Self-Esteem By Being a Paranoid Jerk." Sex or Renegade, basically. Which is really funny, because when romancing Garrus as Paragon female Shepard, you have to be really careful because the Paragon option tends to be "No, Let's Just Be Friends" and you have to be sure to choose the neutral one if you want to get anywhere. I think I'm just not going to talk to Miranda or Jack again until I've swept Tali off her feet, as I planned when I started this playthrough.

Mass Effect 2 and the Articulation of Choice

Despite all the excitement surrounding the option to load a save game from Mass Effect for continuation in Mass Effect 2, I made a new character (referred to as a new "Shepard," for the character's universal surname). I did this for several reasons: a) my first playthrough of games like this generally sucks, and I didn't want to "waste" a character I had already put effort into on a sub-par playthrough; b) I wasn't too thrilled with any of my Shepards as a jumping-off point; and c) I wanted to know what the designers put in as the default choice history--to have a dry run so that I'd know when I was seeing different content on subsequent playthroughs.

This has put me in an interesting position, as a player. In a sort of player amnesia situation, my Shepard remembers what she did during the events of the first game, but I don't. And I like it that way--the fact that there are things about this character that I don't know yet, that I need to find out, makes her feel more alive. I'm much more heavily invested in my Shepard2 than I was in my original Shepards. Heck, I'm more invested in my default-Shepard than I was in any character built up from scratch in any single-player RPG I've ever played, save my Jedi Exile in Knights of the Old Republic II.* And I'm dead certain that the reason those two characters stick out in my mind is tied that same player amnesia, particularly the fact that both made questionable or destructive choices of which the player must take them through the consequences.