Earth is under attack by an ancient race of enormous, sentient machines. Hulking brutes of blood and brains dubbed cannibals appear in hordes - legions, even - to decimate humanity at its last bastion, stamping out hope with bullets and belligerence. Captain David Anderson, once a Spectre candidate and the first ever human Councillor, quickly becomes the unlikely and unofficial leader of the resistance, unequivocally proving his status as one of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mass Effect’s best, brightest, and boldest characters.
When we talk about Mass Effect characters, we almost always lean heavily on the squadmates who appear in each game. Everyone loves Garrus, Tali, and Wrex - who is my own personal favorite alongside Grunt and Kasumi - although there are dozens of other characters in the series who are no less brilliant because of their absence from the Normandy. Anderson is probably the strongest example of this fact, play𓂃ing an essential role in the trilogy without ever truly coming to centre stage. At least until Mass Effect 3, at which poiꦜnt Shepard and Anderson team up for the first time in earnest, paving a way to the Normandy and, by extension, the Citadel. It’s a fairly ephemeral alliance (eh?) but contextually it’s one of the strongest sequences in the entire series. This is coming from someone who isn’t so hot on Mass Effect 3, mind, so the fact I’m praising its intro this highly comes without any kind of overarching bias. It’s just that good.
Anderson is consistently great throughout the entire trilogy, particularly thanks to the enduring excellence of Keith David’s performance. Who can forget the time you’re grounded in the first Mass Effect and Anderson says he’ll get you sorted? You reckon he’s going to go have it out with the bureaucrats, right, but instead of going to the Council chamber and mincing words he just bulldozes into Udina’s office and clocks him straight in the jaw. I mean, he literally gives you his ship - we all associate the Normandy with Shepard, but it was Anderson they were serving under at 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Eden Prime. He’s almost the hero of the story by proxy because of the fact he 🐬is, in most cases, your direct report.
That’s why it’s so important that he becomes a temporary squadmate at the beginning of Mass Effect 3 - not to mention the significance of his role towards the end of it. Sure, the mission on Earth is short-lived and mostly designed as a tutorial for Mass Effect 3’s new systems and improved gunplay, but it’s one of the most memorable sections in the entire trilogy. I revisited Mass Effect for the first time in almost a decade when Legendary Edition launched last month - 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the Normandy crash site is good, the politics an▨d id🔴eology of the trilogy are outdated, Mass Effect 2’s suicide mission ♚is a Dragon Age quest in space, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网🎉:Mass Effect 3 is environmentally confused. On top of all of those opinions, though, is this here fact: Captain David Anderson deserves far more respect than he’s ever given in conversations about 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:BioWare’s iconic space opera.
It’s just so perfectly framed. You’ve basically been court-martialed, confined to your homeworld as a means of both punishing and protecting you after blowing up a planet at the end of the previous game. The batarians want you dead, the Alliance wants you silenced, and just about everyone in the galaxy knows who you are and what you’ve done. Anderson, a firm friend as well as your superi⛄or officer, is the only person around who truly has your best interest at heart. He gives you a gun as soon as the station shakes, risks his life to get you to the SR-2 shuttle, and officially reinstates you in the same breath as saying he’s going to stay on Earth to face the Reapers head on. There’s a lot of narrative mirroring here, hearkening back to him previously handing you the keys to the Normandy - do spaceships have keys? - and being the only person of authority to believe your claims that massive machine squids are on the way from dark space. I mean, even people like Kaidan, supposedly your best bud at the start of the first game, give you shit in Mass Effect 2 for literally saving the galaxy. Yes, you were resurrected from the dead by a sleazy terrorist organization with more money than sense, but it’s not as if you whispered to them from beyond the veil and asked for a revive. You were dead - ꧟how can you be blamed for anything you do while you are literally not alive?
Anderson hates Cerberus too, mind, as he should - they’re terrorist shitbags. He knows that you aren’t a terrorist shitbag, though, which is why there’s so much gravitas attached to his actions in Mass Effect 3. He’s just grateful that even after all of the rubbish the Alliance has put you through, you’re there and willing to step up to the plate one more time. It sounds weird to phrase it like this given the impending doom of all post-spaceflight organic life, but it꧙’s almost as if he’s ecstatic to reinstate you - he wants nothing more than for you to work for him again, doing what you do best, while he keeps the final beacon burning bright in the maelstrom of the apocalypse.
I love the Mass Effect series, so naturally I love discussing it with like minded people. I never hear anyone mention Anderson though, which has always bugged me a little bit. Aye, he’s not on the Normandy - you can’t bring him to Tuchanka, or Omega, or Thessia. The thing about Anderson is that this doesn’t actually matter in his case. Loads of previous squadmates have little more than cameo roles in Mass Effect 3 anyway, which diminishes the measurement of how valid or valuable a character is based on whether or not you can assign them skill points or change their outfit. There’s more to Mass Effect than 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:dialogue wheels and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:shooting galleries - the best thing about this series has always been the story, and of all the stories within it, Captai🥀n David Anderson’s is by far one of the best.
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