SPOILERS AHEAD

Keep in mind that this covers my first playthrough; that is, as the male Commander Shepard.

Although there is an over-arching plot about saving the Galaxy (of course), the true substance of the game is in building your team. Your goal is to acquire the strongest and most loyal team possible, so that you and they can survive the final quest, which could kill any of you (including you; more on this later). You can have 11 team members. Two are with you at the start; so there are 9 acquisition quests. And then, for each of the 11, there is a loyalty quest, by which you help the team member resolve some conflicted part of his past and thereby gain his loyalty.

Since I wanted a fully loyal team, I was very careful during each loyalty quest. Let me tell you about one of them. Samara is, among her kind, empowered by tradition to summarily deal justice. She asked me to track down her daughter Morinth, who had become a kind of succubus, a siren, a sexual monster who seduces and kills. I was to lead Morinth back to her apartment so that Samara could kill her. Morinth was at a bar and I had to impress her. I was, in other words, tasked with picking up a girl. And I failed. Of all the loyalty quests, this one I failed. I couldn't even pick up a succubus who intended to kill me and move on.

I'm a loser in every universe, apparently.

The makers of ME2 must have been having a giggle when they made such a quest, imagining all of us geeks playing it out. Yes, I managed the second time to figure out the proper conversation to lure Morinth to her death. (In some ways it was obvious; I had been trying too hard to be subtle.) Honestly, though!

In fairness to myself, I did manage to get the girl in the end. I don't mean Morinth. ME2 gives you the option of pursuing a shipboard romance. Of course, you can't credit my skills as a Casanova. In fact, I was only being polite, trying to solicit story information, and things got all emotional. Very surprising. At first I didn't need the distraction (I had foes to kill, after all); but then I was curious to see how it would play out. And then, a second character — an old friend and now an exile from her people — revealed her schoolgirl crush on me! That came out of left field, but fact is I liked her character and, frankly, I couldn't resist being lusted after. So I terminated the first romance (which was with a woman of worrisome loyalties anyhow) and deliberately cultivated the second. I wasn't interested in the eventual sex scene (which was coy in any event); I just wanted to take that narrative path.

The odd part is that the romance I turned down was with the hot human babe Miranda, played by and modeled after Yvonne Strahovski. Instead I ended up with the alien woman Tali (who, indeed, has a pretty nice body, too; no tentacles or the like). I guess it was Tali's Slavic accent, and that lovely hood, and her awkward enthusiasm...

I ♥ Tali

It will be interesting, in Mass Effect 3, to see what repercussions follow from my romantic choice.

Next: We Could All Die