Andromeda breathlessly intimates its predecessors, even while running from their legacy.

Mass Effect Andromeda is celebrating its 5-year anniversary today, March 21, 2023.

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The result is not sprawling but busy.

A franchise’s worth of ideas flavor-blasted into one package that makes the whole thing bland and over-powering.

In their best moments, each Mass Effect game evokes specific roles and ideas.

In theory, this is not a bad thing.

Forming a community on a new planet requires endless labor.

Andromeda does an impressive job of mapping out the practical, political, and emotional needs of a community.

Andromeda slices each of these ideas up into endless map icons.

Thematically, it attempts to model the mundane faith and work required to make new communities and friendships.

In practice, it feels more like faint echoes of past glories.

This chopped-up approach extends to the narrative.

This partial recreation of the original bad guys is driven out of both reverence and fear.

In some sense, the Reapers' power was the problem that created Mass Effect 3’s ending.

By lowering the stakes, Andromeda gets out of the way of those kinds of storytelling considerations.

However, those massive stakes gave the original games a sometimes striking existential quality.

It’s a massive galaxy that you only explore through the narrow lens of smaller conflicts.

Weirdly, this does have some positive side effects.

In previous Mass Effect games, your relationship with any particular planet and its environment is fleeting.

You are there to achieve a single task.

It also forces players to contend with the natural world, facing atmospheric radiation or incredible cold.

Instead, it’s a sliver of a system in a game made up of such slivers.

As Iandmany othershave written about, Mass Effect is a franchise about being a cop.

Shepard is an arm of the law, a peacekeeper who solves problems that are not their own.

This is distinctly unemotive, without the messy conflict of cultures.

Instead, it is the cold, imperial logic of video games.

You are the good colonizer who kills the bad ones.

Your power will expand and theirs will fade.

In some sense, the exploration of a new galaxy is an opportunity to make something new.

But Andromeda’s very premise is bound up in the same power fantasy as the original games.

You are the axis on which the whole galaxy turns.

In the heart of that fantasy lies a hollow truth.

Mass Effect: Andromeda simultaneously reveres and dreads its past.

It runs from the events of past games, even as it pain-stakingly recreates their territory.

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