Garrus? Tali? Grunt? Samara? Courage Under Fire As I mentioned some of the exploits I’d had with my crew, he kept puzzling over my crewmates. It never occurred to me just how much these small changes could pile up, until I got to Mass Effect 3 and was discussing the game with my mate Dave. If I hadn’t backtracked and saved Wrex, someone else would have taken his place in that part of the game on the Krogan home world of Tuchanka. Plus I got to pick up another, equally charming Krogan, Grunt, along the way. While Wrex couldn’t rejoin my crew, we did get to catch up. Sure, plenty of people had to face similar decisions but when all those decisions were taken as a whole they lead to very different experiences. This is just one of the many experiences from my first, and only, Mass Effect play through that marked the whole experience as uniquely mine. The only save I could use was from over six in game hours ago! That’s six hours of trudging through the same conversations, gunfights, elevator loading screens, weapon inventory management, and Mako excursions I’d have to repeat! All I had to do was load up an earlier save and help Wrex retrieve his family’s armour. I eventually found out that the option to calm Wrex down was only available if you’d completed Wrex’s “loyalty mission.” One of the “errands” I had foolishly disregarded earlier. How could this be? What kind of cruel bullshit was this!? How could this be a Role Playing Game if I couldn’t play the role I wanted to! To be honest, I could see his point but the only options presented to me by the patented “conversation wheel” led to either me or one of my crew shooting Wrex dead. Wrex couldn’t just stand by and watch a possible cure be destroyed. Saren may have come up with a cure to the Genophage so he could breed his own unstoppable army of Krogan – the Genophage having been unleashed on them in the first place due to their incredible rate of reproduction. On Vermire, outside a lab that could hold the key to restoring his species fertility, cruelly stolen from them via a bioweapon known as the Genophage, Wrex and I had a… disagreement. In 2009, I assumed I knew everything there was to know about the latest video games and that my crew would be relatively safe until much later in the game. Urdnot Wrex a member of the gruff, warlike, Krogan, a very rough analog for the Klingons in the Mass Effect universe if you squint really hard, had joined my crew early on and won me over with his no nonsense attitude and refusal to back down from a fight. All screenshots are taken from the backwards compatible versions of the Xbox 260 games running on an Xbox Series X

Mass effect shepard face