I was working at a video store at the time, and my generous boss let me have that shiny new game a full six days before it was due to appear on shelves. I then proceeded to go home and beat the hell out of it, finally completing Mass Effect one day before it came out. As I watched the events of the finale unfold, a thought crossed my mind that stopped me cold "Oh, crap. Now I have to wait for the second one."

So here we are, 3 years later. Mass Effect 2's release crept up on me partly due to the changing of the years; no matter what month of 2009 you're in, 2010 seems like a long way away. The good times I had with the Xbox 360 version of the game lead me to repurchase it for my more-powerful PC.

However, when the release date rolled around and I was able to play my shiny new copy of Mass Effect 2, I was presented with a problem.

The mechanic that I so looked forward to for the second game was the ability to import your save file from the first game and continue on your story. Your character would be preserved, as would the major choices that were made during the plot. This is a unique feature that let a little monster named OCD grow within me.

At the time of release, I was only half-way through Mass Effect. Mass Effect 2 will only allow you to import your character if that save file has completed the first game in its entirety. This, obviously, would not do.

Attempts to play the second game anyway were met with frustration: the game assumed the choices that were supposed to be made in the first game in order to ease new players into their role as protectors of the galaxy.

However, these choices were not the ones I would have made.

After these frustrations, I decided I would go back and finish Mass Effect. I would rather spend a week avoiding spoilers and powering through a game I had already beaten multiple times in order to play the game may way, on my terms.

In some ways, this can be seen as a sign the game was designed right; Mass Effect’s allure is the vastly overhauled conversation system (compared to normal RPGs, anyways) and in-depth character relationships. As you spend more time with the series, you begin to get attached to the personalities you’re interacting with. For the first time, I was actually paying attention to the conversations my main character (Matthew Shephard) was having with other people, instead of mindlessly skipping through.

That last fact is what usually keeps me away from adventure games, but that’s neither here nor there.

-Possible Spoiler Warnings to Follow-

I took a bit of tie to get used to Mass Effect 2 for a number of reasons. For the first few days of playing, I had assumed a very pessimistic view of the game, as in my mind it didn’t meet my expectations. However, this wasn’t your typical hype-machine delusion: I had powered through so much of Mass Effect in the days leading up to the second game that my brain hadn’t had the time to adjust.

My first impressions of the game as follows:

-          The environments, compared to the first game, are very dingy, dark and downright depressing. Sure, this is a different part of the universe from the first game, but that doesn’t mean they’re not happy.

-          No game which relied on a “heat overload” system of gunning should replace it with an ammo system.

-          A much-hated part of the first game was the elevators that took the same amount of time regardless how fast the game loaded. I would rather have those than be taken out of the action (to a loading screen) whenever I want to go to a different area. As long as those elevators were, you at least felt like you were going somewhere, as opposed to just whipping around a planet/your ship at breakneck speeds.

-          The continuity, even with minor missions, from the first game is amazing. You’ll get e-mails from people you’ve helped, or you’ll meet them again in your travels.

-          Props for getting all the voice actors back, including the ones for the aforementioned minor NPCs.

-          The squad-based combat and the quickslotting of skills is amazing, and the pinnacle of any game I have played. Managing your squad is no longer as big of a hassle as it was in the first game.

-          Having a dedicated cover button, making it the same as the sprint button, and not having your character automatically take cover when you sprint up to something is not a good design choice.

All in all, Mass Effect 2 deserves all the praise it’s getting, but really needs to be played after the first game to get the full effect. Really, I would rather pay for someone to get Mass Effect than go into the second one blind.

Good luck saving the galaxy!