Mass Effect

1. The Absolute Minimum

- Get Rich quick. The "Rich" achievement unlocks Spectre weapons, you want them ASAP. You need 1 million credits in your bank. If you're having trouble, don't grind too hard. Gear is level-dependent, so a few levels mean exponentially better drops. This is the only gear you need to worry about. After BIG PROMOTION go into the little room beside the elevator on the Citadel and talk to the C-Sec officer at the desk to unlock the special weapons, or talk to the weapons officer on your ship.

- Dialog and loot boxes can be gated with omnigel. Combined with the point about money, regularly sweep your inventory to make a reserve of omnigel, then sell anything that's not bolted down.

- You can play any class, but they aren't balanced. The dual magic/tech is by far the weakest / hardest to play, especially your first time through. Pretty much anything else is usable. Full fighty is easiest, and full biotic gets a hilariously overpowered nuke in the mid/late game.

- Until you know how to exploit the system, balance your party so that you have at least one full or dual-class character who can do each of: magic, fighty, and tech.

- The unlock skills in this game are Electronics and Decryption. Your party has to have both, on any combination of characters. Either max these skills on one tech character in your party, or don't double up until the late game when you can afford to spread your points.

- Talk to all your squadmates after every single mission. Especially after every big mission. Especially if you think they're cool characters and you want to unlock more character development. Especially if you want to romance them, and they're either human or blue.

- Party members Wrex and Garrus are generally thought to have the best shore party dialogue lines. The game scripts its best dialog for obvious combinations of companions, so if you bring along a particular character for a story mission it's smart to choose your other party member as someone you want to see them talk to. Even the boring vanilla humans have nice story bits written for them, almost making up for the fact that they're boring gameplay-wise.

- You get way better boosts from maxing out either side of the morality system. Pick a side early, and use it anytime you're in doubt. There are gated dialog options starting early in the game that add your Charm/Paragon or Intimidate/Renegade. Generally, put your skill points here first to make sure you're covered, and only on one side. As you progress you'll get 4 “free” points by maxing out the morality wheel on that side, so you'll only have to spend 8 skills to get all 12 slots. (If you intend to 100% the game, see below.)

- Yes you need to know the order of the big story missions they messed this up. When you first set off in your ship to tackle some planets, do them in this order. Dig Site, Feros and Noveria. The reason is Noveria is ridiculously difficult if you leap into it right away, especially the final boss who will massacre you if you didn't grind beforehand. Completing Dig Site and Feros first will level you up enough to tackle Noveria easy. Keep in mind once you play a planet to a certain point, you cannot leave until you complete the planet.

- The game can be a tiny bit buggy and stick you in floors/walls if you get hit by a lot of physics magic. I suggest armoring against this as highest priority. Rarely, an enemy will become stuck under the floor and won't die, forcing you to reload. Before that, try to use physics like grenades or magic to dislodge them.

- The Mako gets stronger based on the Electronics skill of your tech person. Max that asap. Like unlocking, this does not stack.

1. Miscellaneous but Good to Know

- The Biotic power Singularity will kill a whole room in hilariously short order. If you want to breeze through the mid/late game, make sure at least one party member (you or the blue one) can cast this. Also use Lift/Throw to paralyze strong fighters. If you throw them off the map, you win.

- If you accidentally or intentionally tie the romance counter, and you don't pick one side in the dialog that happens, the game defaults you to the blue one.

- To get ally achievements, you have to have them with you for pretty much the entire game- that INCLUDES the sidequests before you get your ship, so you have to skip those and come back later. Pick your partners and keep them with you throughout the entire game. Its best to hold off on any quests at all until you have the members you want.

- Especially Liara, don't do any side quests before you pick her up. And never let her leave the party.

- 99% of the things you can buy in stores are useless. You get so many items just by exploring that you will never need to buy normal things. The exceptions are (1) the permanent upgrades to your healing item and grenade capacity; and (2) "Spectre" class weapons, which you can begin buying once you've amassed one million credits.

- Complete Wrex's armor quest before going to Virmire. You will not regret it.

- If you plan on playing a non-combat character, you'll benefit strongly from some Achievement synergy. First create a soldier, get some weapon achievements to unlock weapon abilities with the Assault Rifle and Pistol, and restart.

- If you're worried about the morality wheel and missing important choices, there is an infinite-repeating dialog that you can use to 100% both sides of the wheel. Those options are also gated, so you can miss them if you're not expecting it. Guide it if you care. The end of the game requires your persuasion skill be maxed with like 80% morality to pass the final gates, which is pretty steep for your first time playing. You have been warned.

- There is a New Game +, which you might not use if you're playing through the trilogy, but you can use NG+ to max out both sides of the morality wheel to see all the "best" dialog in the game, without resorting to fancy tricks.

- If you plan on playing through your game multiple times, say three or more times, then don't invest any points in either Persuade or Intimidate. You can gain up to 4 points in each skill per playthrough, reaching the max 12 on your third time through.

- Your party members don't all work with the same class structure as PCs either. Wrex is a "Krogan Battlemaster" and Liara is an "Asari Scientist" (or something like that) which allows them different bonuses / skill combinations.

- Grind some sidequests in between those planets, by the way. Even if you do some medium-level grinding, that's enough XP for you to plow over the rest of the game. I completed a handful of side-quests on my play-through and I really just steamrolled over the rest of the bosses in the game. Mass Effect is kinda easy like that.

- All achievements like "use skill X 75 times" or "kill 150 enemies with X weapon" have to be done by Shepard.

- Have targets in mind when you allocate skill points. Your targets should always be ranks that unlock new skills or improve the skill's active ability.

- When you're on an uncharted planet, there are always more things to be found than your map lets on. Explore areas of the map that are far away from the marked locations--you'll find hidden stuff. This is critical for completing a few annoying item collection sidequests.

- Let your allies do whatever they want, they're either generally smart enough to do what you want them to do anyway, or too dumb to not immediately die no matter what you tell them. Use your cooldowns basically whenever they're up, there's no downside to using them other than that you won't be able to use that one for the next 45 seconds or whatever and they make things much easier.

- The options menu lets you choose how you want your squad to use their powers. You can tell them to not use anything unless you say so, or to go nuts and use everything they've got. It's usually better to just let them use their powers on their own unless you like crazy micromanagement.

- There's one power, stasis, that squad members won't use unless you tell them to. It's theoretically really useful but since I either forget about it or don't care to micromanage that much it doesn't give me any value.