Mass Effect 2 Day#14: Off to Save the Universe (finally)

Day 14 gets me to stop stalling and get back to the plot. The next plot mission is pretty good, and it leads to an introduction of a new character for the party and of course a new loyalty mission for that character. Fights are good with a little bit of cheap stuff and the game ends with a nice big decision that I’m happy to say that I can’t see a way to paragon cheat out of. Spoilers within.

I’m back to the side mission to save the ship. A day away has done me good because now I see the first thing I have to activate as soon as I walk into the room. I activate them both and then go to turn on the power. To do that, I have to bypass security at that station. I succeed and save ship. I go back to Illium one more time after I’m done. There’s no progress on Liara’s quest. I guess I blew that plot by getting the observer thing wrong. When back on the ship, I remember that I have an email from a reporter looking to talk. I’m still stalling the game’s end, so I go back to the citadel to see if I can find the reporter before I get to the finale. I do so pretty quickly. It’s a lot of questions about what happened to the old council. I miss a renegade qte moment, but I just paragon a good quote about the council to end the interview, and in a CS as I leave, she mentions to her camera guy that I nailed her on her own show. As I’m leaving the citadel, I hear new dialog between Garrus and Tali about the elevator from ME1 — kind of funny. I  do a last check-in with Anderson, and there’s nothing new there.  I realize now that there’s no sense left in stalling.

I go back to the Normandy to do that last IFF mission. I talk to crew individually first to make sure all is cool. There are new conversations with Grunt, Samara, and Thane but nothing big is revealed there. Then, it’s to galaxy with the big mission. When we arrive, I scan the local planets first to get the resources for a sniper rifle upgrade and then I go to derelict reaper ship.  When I choose to land, it’s a CS where I’m with Joker and the approach is choppy. He scans a geth ship behind the reaper ship which could be trouble. We get on the ship and as we fight husks on our way across it, we find work logs of scientists — they were scared about being on a reaper ship.  Barriers go up around the ship as we explore and we can’t leave.  We need to take the barriers down to escape, but that will take down the engine so we’ll have to get as much info from reports as we can before we blow it. More logs indicate scientists’ memories were being screwed up by the reaper ship. We fight more husks, and find more crazy logs. There’s a moment where there’s sniper fire from somewhere, but no obviously shooter and it’s not at us. Through this, I die fighting husks 2 times, mostly due to poor battlefield position.

Deep in the level, we enter a room and see a CS of a geth sniper taking out enemies near me. He says my name and calls me commander. Miranda says geth never talk so this is truly odd. There are more husks in room and it’s a rough battle; I die once cheaply because I get stuck, die 2 times later because I corner myself, and then finally win. I bypass a door to the core and there we find the complete research log we came for. I open door to see CS of the geth sniper killing husks until going down. We blow up the core with my huge missile launcher, and there’s CS conversation where we decide to take the geth back to our ship. (Garrus was against it, but there’s no choice in the scene, so that’s that.) There’s a  CS of us carrying the geth off. We CS fight off husks as we jump to the ship and escape to mission end.

We cut to a CS conversation between Jacob and Miranda.  Miranda is for giving the geth to Cerberus. Jacob is for destroying it. I decide I want to talk to it before making a decision. Edie is doing the IFF discs and that will take time. I  save and then go to reactivate the geth. Edie firewalls the geth off from the rest of the ship and then I turn it on. It tells me that it knows my history and I haven’t met the true geth yet. There are two different kinds of geth (heretics and true), and the true geth are trying to stop the heretics who serve the reapers. The geth becomes a part of team, and we call it Legion. He then tells us that the heretics will infect true geth with a virus to convert them to heretic thinking. There’s a system where the virus is being broadcast from and he wants us to go there. Wow, he wasted no time getting me the loyalty mission, and with nothing else to do, I guess that’s the next stop.

I go to the system for the loyalty mission. There’s lots of mining there. Dear lord, I have a lot of palladium and no platinum, which is annoying because I seem to need platinum for every upgrade that I could possibly buy. I upgrade what I can, and then go to heretic station to save true geth. As we approach, there’s a CS of Joker and Legion talking where Joker mocks Legion. We land and begin exploring the base. An interesting choice establishes itself as soon as I land. It turns out that the virus can be reprogrammed to convert heretics back. Legion didn’t know this until we landed, so it was assuming we would just obliterate the heretics. I can now choose either to blow them up or restore them to the true geth. It’s a tricky choice;  I choose not to choose right now. I enter a new room with a green line running along the ground. When I step on it, it triggers geth to attack. I eventually trip it because I have to reach a door, but the fights are easy.  Between fights, I learn about the local hubs of more isolated geth and we talk about how heretics are a part of geth such that reintegrating them may be traumatic to the true geth as well. That puts a nice wrinkle in the choice of what to do with the heretics and I use that as an excuse to call it a night.