Achievements of the Week – The Blood Oath for a Paramour Brawler Edition

Achievements, Achievements, Achievements. They came in droves this week from one game, and I just happened to ping another during my lunchbreak. Go me.

All right, let’s just do this.

From Mass Effect 2…

If you’re a daily reader of Grinding Down, then you know this week was my “falling back into Mass Effect 2 hard and now need to beat it like woah” week. And, uh, in the last week, I’ve unlocked 26 Achievements for the game. You can see others by clicking the links in the previous sentence. Here are a few more that I liked, too.

Paramour (50G): Successfully pursue a relationship with a teammate

Shepard totally got some grinding action from Miranda before the suicide mission went forward, and it was awkward and silly, as these sequences often are, but whatever. Good for them. My biggest gripe was that Miranda was in her white outfit instead of her darker one I earned from gaining her loyalty. At least she wasn’t wearing it for too long…

Brawler (10G): Shoot and kill 20 enemies while they’re knocked back by a punch

Weapon Specialist (15G): Fully upgrade a weapon

From The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim…

Blood Oath (10G): Become a member of the Circle

Just working my way down the questline for The Companions. Ah-woooo!

—

That’s it. I have a friend visiting this weekend and a family dinner to go to so I don’t expect too much gaming time to happen. And then I’ll be drawing comics all week to finish up my 31 Lovingly Bad Love Comics challenge. I do, however, have an itch to go back to Dragon Age: Origins or L.A. Noire, but we’ll see. Still have a ton of games to play on Steam and such.

For now, my Shepard has saved humanity throughout the galaxy from certain annihilation

With not much left to do in terms of side missions for Mass Effect 2, I decided it was high time Commander Shepard and his crew ate their last meal of space turkey and jumped deep into unfriendly territories, to go on what everyone kept calling “a suicide mission.” The Collectors were just past the Omega 4 Relay, and it seemed like we were ready; all members on my crew were labeled loyal, and all upgrades for The Normandy were purchased. We only had to move our feet. And so we did, grim and quiet, kickstarting the end of all things.

And it was…an okay final fight. Kind of underwhelming, really. I went in as virgin-like as possible, not knowing much of the specifics, just that any or all team members could die during these explosive events. My goal, despite how uninterested I was in many of my squadmates, was to keep everybody alive, including my simian Commander Shepard. Just had to watch out for those husk swarms, as melee takedowns was not a strong point.

But first, here’s all the end-game Achievements that popped in a nice succession:

Suicide Mission (50G): Use the Omega 4 Relay

Against All Odds (15G): Survive suicide mission

Long Service Medal (75G): Complete Mass Effect 2 twice, or complete it once with a character imported from Mass Effect 1

Mission Accomplished (125G): Save humanity throughout the galaxy from certain annihilation

No One Left Behind (75G): Keep your team alive through the suicide mission

Um…whew. That’s a lot of Gamerscore all at once, more or less. But as you can see, I was very successful on this final mission, kept myself alive, and kept everyone on my team alive. Honestly, after looking up exactly all the number of things that could go wrong on the suicide mission and everything that is taken into consideration, I am surprised I did so well. I mean, I just played the same way I played for the whole game (around 23 hours or so), using my supped-up assault rifle and a ton of Unity and Incinerate and Heavy Overload. When it came time to picking specific squad members to do certain tasks, I went with the obvious choices: Tali for crawling through tubes, Garrus for leading the side-team, Jacob for escorting the miscellaneous crew back to the ship, and Samara for creating a strong biotic barrier. And they all survived. As did my personal two squadmates–Mordin and Miranda–though my brain almost burst during that last boss fight, which is pretty ridiculous.

But yeah, the team and Shepard is alive–and is also done. Other than some story elements and all of the world’s lore, I did not enjoy a ton of Mass Effect 2, and if memory serves me right…I did not have a fantastic time with Mass Effect. There’s a lot to like, but ultimately, it’s not my kind of RPG-in-space. I really dislike the repetitive nature of starting a mission, running down a hallway, encountering enemies, and rinse/repeating until you reach the end, where you have to then make a Big Choice™. Chances are very high that I won’t be moving on to Mass Effect 3, certainly not any time soon, though I am curious to learn how the story plays out. Might just have to spoil myself down the line.