I know I’m really late to this fandom, but Mordin singing Gilbert and Sullivan in Mass Effect 2 is one of the best things in any video game ever.
I just finished Priority: Tuchanka so let me say that Mordin singing Gilbert and Sullivan in Mass Effect 3 is one of the worst things in any video game ever.
– they are mutated reaper versions of not just an already incredibly powerful race in the galaxy but a subset of that race called ardat-yakshi who specialize in literally fucking their victims until their brain rots out through their skull.
– they look like a geiger alien and a crushed spider had a baby
– they have a metric fuckton of health AND a barrier shield protecting them so it can take ages to actually kill the fucking things and in that time you will be frantically running, rolling, dodging, shooting and screaming
– they fire a devastating little warp of health-depleting death that basically heat-locks on to you so its almost impossible to dodge it, and it continues to suck your health from you for a while
– they also like to occasionally harness their biotic powers and just unleash a ridiculous and unfairly devastating blast of power that fucks up absolutely everyone within a five metre radius because being a murderous asshole isn’t enough for them.
– they can teleport rapidly so if you’re fighting more than one of these fuckers (and you usually always are, dont even get me started on the final battles when you’re taking on FIVE of them at the same time) and you take your eyes off any of them for more than a second, there is a 99.9% chance you’ll turn around and ONE WILL BE CHILLING RIGHT BEHIND YOU STARING AT YOU LIKE YOU OWE IT MONEY
– you can’t get too close to them or they WILL grab you by the fucking throat and impale you through the gut with their big-ass claws and it’s an insta-kill move, you cannot escape it once they have grabbed you and you are almost definitely going to die. and what’s worse is that you have to witness your squad mates getting murdered by these bitches and there is very little you can to do stop it except stand there with mmm watcha say blasting as you see your best friend brutalized into a shish kabob like
he has the best character development in the entire trilogy in my opinion. just thinking about it makes me lose my pants because it makes me so excited asdfghjkl.
and I think one of the most powerful moments is when shepard is unfortunately reluctant to cure the genophage (my shepard would never do this. but that’s what youtube is for)
shepard: “everytime we’ve talked about this before, you’ve defended the genophage! hell, I had to talk you into saving maelon’s data! how can you change your mind now?”
mordin: “I made a MISTAKE”
this is so powerful. also props to mordin’s voice actor because that was really nicely done. and it’s just. so different to what he says when you first meet him.
It’s also notable that he actually says “I” here.
Mordin speaks largely in sentence fragments, and he tends not to reference himself as a direct object. I haven’t analyzed his entire dialogue for this, but I’m pretty sure that, outside of singing, we haven’t heard him say “I” ever before. At all.
“Made mistakes!” is far more in-line with his typical speech patterns, but instead he says “I made a mistake!” – he’s taking full responsibility here in a way he hasn’t admitted to before
His feelings about the genophage are not a clinical detachment anymore, they’re personal, and he finally can’t hold that in any longer
Mordin falls back into that fragmented syntax in the very next sentence, but for that one moment, for those four words, he lets Shepard (and us) see how much the legacy of the genophage has affected him
A Quiet Respite 