Exploring planets across Mass Effect is a strange business. Only the first game in the trilogy lets you actively explore the planets, putting you in the Mako and letting you drive across the terrain to your heart's content. The only issue with that, of course, is that the Mako sucks. Meanwhile Mass Effect 2 and 3 have you landing at specific stations, cities, and hubs, meaning you cannot roam as freely nor do you have a spirit of discovery to you. That means, for all its great locations, it's hard to truly know anywhere – and as a result, Eletania is left out in the cold.
Eletania is a planet in the very first game, and not a particularly important one. No main mission occurs there, and even doing a playthrough where you don't just race ahead to cross off the major plot points in order to get to Mass Effect 2, it's pretty easy to miss. That's only part of the reason it's so underrated though. It also has to cope with the Mako, a vehicle with the manoeuvrability of an elephant with a bin bag on its face, and the subpar graphics of the original game. Even in the Legendary Edition, the first game is well off the pace of the rest of the trilogy from a visual perspective. Not only did the art style take away some of the personality of the original game, it just polished the flaws rather than rebuilding them to be more in-line with the improvements that came later.
Eletania would have been a great planet for Andromeda, when driving was finally back and when the planets looked good enough for you to drink in the sights. Andromeda is a better game than it's given credit for, and mixes the roving of the first Mass Effect with the on-foot exploration of the next two, but just lacks a little bit of spark to tie it all together. For a game all about exploring the galaxy, the entire series is restricted in one way or another. Mass Effect's driving is garbage and overly relied upon, while the indoor locations are recycled ad nauseum. Mass Effect 2 meanwhile pins you into a few specific indoor locations, Mass Effect 3 lights everything on fire, and Andromeda spreads itself too thin trying to balance everything out.
You'll struggle to find anyone whose favourite Mass Effect planet comes in the first game. It's not just the Mako, it's the lack of storytelling too. Even now as I defend Eletania, I can't place it above Thessia or Tuchanka, which are both better realised in Mass Effect 3 and have a narrative woven through them that touches on key elements of Mass Effect's greatest themes. Eletania is just a pretty planet, but it's completely different to everything else the series has on offer, and it should get a little more attention.
The planet is covered in a smattering of moss, making for an unsettlingly beautiful landscape. The green algae clings to the harsh stone valleys and mountains of the planet, and the atmosphere as a light toxicity. There's a story here, but the first Mass Effect was not equipped for detailed enough environmental storytelling to fully realise it. This is a world both beautiful and eerie. The green freshness of nature everywhere should be a delight, but it spreads too wide, and covers the dark, sharp rocks that call this planet home. The air will slowly poison you. It's gorgeous, but you can't stay too long. The planet, safe and habitable as a rocky terrain with running water and roaming wildlife, is being killed by its own loveliness.
It's one of the home planets of the pyjaks, Mass Effect's space monkeys. These creatures wander freely, much like the cows of Ontarom, and it's rare that Mass Effect presents wildlife to us in this way. Every living thing we encounter in Mass Effect is usually a friend to converse with or a foe to slay. The pyjaks are just… pyjaks. Eletania has a weirdness to it that gets sanded down in Mass Effect 2 as action sequences and more bombastic, narratively consequential storytelling overtakes the innate silliness that comes with the full-blown RPG territory that the first Mass Effect game takes from BioWare's legacy.
Eletania is an awkward planet for Mass Effect to reckon with because nothing of serious note happens there, and most of the inconsequential planets in the first game were just made to make the most of the Mako driving, offer more resources, and stretch out the playtime a little more. It's a planet made to be forgotten, and so it has been. But when I look back at all of the planets in Mass Effect, there's not a single one as unique as Eletania, and maybe that makes it worth remembering after all.
Source: Read Full Article