Mass Effect Legendary Edition: ME2 Ep 05 – Loyalty Kasumi: Stealing Memory and Zaeed: The Price of Revenge
Friday night brought us back to Mass Effect 2 for another round of mandatory viewing, and this time we had two loyalty missions waiting for us. What started as a carefully planned high-society robbery eventually became an ammunition-starved firefight, followed by a burning refinery and twenty years of Zaeed wanting revenge.
It also turned out to be my Twitch affiliate anniversary, which chat appeared to remember more clearly than I did. Between that, RAF Holiday Cover spending his birthday with us and the ongoing insistence that everyone was looking forward to Sunday’s SnowRunner stream, there was plenty happening even before the missions started falling apart.
🌌 About the Game
Mass Effect Legendary Edition brings together the single-player content from Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, along with more than 40 DLC packs, promotional weapons, armour and other content, all remastered and optimised for modern systems and 4K Ultra HD.
Across the trilogy we follow Commander Shepard through a huge science-fiction story built around exploration, squadmates and choices that can continue to matter much later. That is particularly important in Mass Effect 2, where recruiting people is only part of the job. We also need to earn their loyalty and deal with the personal problems they have brought aboard the Normandy.
🚀 Where We Are in the Journey
We are still working through the first major part of Mass Effect 2, building Shepard’s team and clearing the loyalty and DLC missions available to us as part of the 100% playthrough. That means scanning planets, checking dialogue, exploring side areas and generally making sure we do not leave useful things behind.
This episode was centred on Kasumi’s Stealing Memory and Zaeed’s The Price of Revenge. Completing both moved us further toward the remaining Act 1 objectives, with Grunt’s dossier still one of the next major jobs before the story pushes toward the end of this stage of the game.
🎭 What Happens in This Episode
Things began with considerably more elegance than they ended. Kasumi’s loyalty mission took us to Donovan Hock’s mansion, where Shepard adopted the identity of Allison Gunn and arrived dressed for a high-society party rather than the usual collection of armour, weapons and questionable tactical decisions.
Kasumi’s target was the graybox belonging to her late partner Keiji, containing both his memories and information dangerous enough that Hock was determined to get his hands on it. The plan was wonderfully elaborate: our weapons had been concealed inside a statue of Saren being delivered as a gift, the mansion was packed with some of the galaxy’s less reputable wealthy residents, and all we had to do was quietly dismantle the security protecting Hock’s vault without anybody becoming suspicious.
Naturally, the plan changed almost immediately when Hock refused to let Kasumi enter openly. That left Shepard doing the talking while Kasumi remained hidden nearby and kept in contact over the radio. The vault itself was not exactly welcoming either. Between the voice lock, DNA scanner, password protection and kinetic barrier, getting inside meant peeling away several layers of security rather than simply applying the traditional Shepard solution of shooting the door.
That gave us plenty of opportunity to explore the party properly, and the 100% playthrough instincts immediately took over. Hock’s mansion was not somewhere we were going to rush through. Conversations had to be overheard, rooms inspected and anything remotely interactive investigated before we even considered moving on with the actual robbery.
Finding a usable DNA sample took us into Hock’s private quarters, where several possible sources were inspected before we finally found something reliable. There was even a moment of wondering why there might possibly be DNA on a plant, which led to exactly the sort of speculation you would expect during one of these streams. Somewhere between the quiet infiltration and rummaging through a wealthy criminal’s belongings, we also managed to acquire a few credits. We were already robbing the man’s vault, after all. It seemed rude not to be thorough.
The voice sample was considerably easier. All Shepard needed to do was encourage Hock to talk about himself, something Hock required very little encouragement to do. The whole setup reminded me of Leverage, particularly the sort of scheme where you manoeuvre somebody into saying enough carefully selected words to reconstruct a voiceprint. In this case, Hock happily provided everything we needed simply by explaining his view of the galaxy and his place within it.
The kinetic barrier meant following the mansion’s power cables back toward the security room, while the password turned out to be “Perugia,” a reference to the man who stole the Mona Lisa. Once all four parts of the security system had been dealt with, the vault finally opened and the weapons hidden inside the Saren statue became available again.
At which point, obviously, we did not immediately pick up the graybox.
Hock had filled the vault with an impressive collection, so we had to have a proper look around first. Alien artefacts, rare pieces, models, statues and even Michelangelo’s David all received their share of attention. There was something wonderfully ridiculous about carrying out a dangerous heist while stopping to examine every display in the room, but this is a 100% playthrough. We were not going to break into one of the most secure private collections in the galaxy and then leave half of it unclicked.
The stream itself was just as busy outside the game. It turned out to be my Twitch affiliate anniversary, something everybody else appeared to know before I did, and viewers kept dropping in with anniversary messages throughout the evening. RAF Holiday Cover was also spending his birthday with us, complete with birthday drinks and an injured ankle, so chat stopped for the appropriate birthday wishes before AIDA managed to get part of the birthday command wrong. The thought was there.
Then asmith501 appeared almost an hour late for mandatory viewing and attempted to defend himself by explaining that he had been watching Mad Max films all day. Naturally, this required an investigation into whether the films were a sufficiently good excuse. From there the conversation wandered through Mad Max, Peter Pan, Tinkerbell and several other films while Shepard continued casually robbing one of the most dangerous men at the party.
Eventually, though, Hock realised what was happening and the elegant part of the heist came to a fairly decisive end.
The escape quickly became a proper firefight, and ammunition became an increasingly serious problem. We burned through rounds remarkably quickly, discovered that some of the available weapons were considerably less useful than hoped, and spent a lot of time juggling shields, health regeneration, powers and whatever ammunition we could find. Mercenaries gave way to mechs, and one particularly unpleasant section forced us to abandon the original approach and move firmly into Plan B territory.
As if that were not enough, the capture card decided this was the ideal moment to start misbehaving. The picture went strange enough that we had to pause and see whether it would sort itself out. The obvious solution would have been to unplug it and reconnect everything, except doing that would also have ended the stream. So we carried on, kept an eye on it and hoped the hardware would eventually remember what it was supposed to be doing.
Chat, meanwhile, had developed another ongoing storyline: Sunday’s SnowRunner stream.
I may have suggested more than once that Sunday’s game was something viewers had made me play, which of course only made everybody increasingly enthusiastic about it. There were promises to follow me around in case I fell over or ran out of fuel, repeated declarations that everyone “can’t wait for Sunday,” and eventually a question about designing a game received the answer “driving trucks in the snow.” I pointed out that surely such a game already existed and, from what I had heard, nobody liked it.
This did not discourage them.
By the time Kasumi’s mission reached its conclusion, however, the tone changed considerably. Keiji’s message revealed that the dangerous information everyone was hunting was embedded within his memories, and that he wanted Kasumi to destroy the graybox if anything happened to him. Keeping it would preserve everything she had left of him, but it would also leave her carrying the information and, more importantly, clinging to those memories rather than moving forward.
We chose to destroy it.
It is one of those Mass Effect decisions that feels harsh in the moment, especially with Kasumi standing there knowing exactly what she is losing. My reasoning was based partly on what that choice means later in the series. Allowing her to keep the graybox leaves her constantly returning to those memories, whereas destroying it gives her a chance to move on and start looking ahead again. Kasumi accepted the decision, even if she did not pretend that it made the loss any easier.
That completed Stealing Memory, but there was still enough evening left to head straight into another loyalty mission.
This time we took Zaeed, with Miranda joining the squad, and headed into The Price of Revenge. Before landing, we had a few squad points to spend and upgraded Shepard’s armour, opting for something that suited the way we were actually fighting rather than relying on getting close enough for a more aggressive armour effect.
The mission quickly established exactly why Zaeed had wanted this job. His history with the Blue Suns went back decades, as did his hatred for Vido Santiago, the man who had betrayed him, turned his own men against him, shot him in the head and left him for dead. Twenty years later, Zaeed was still very much carrying that grudge.
Moving through the facility brought plenty of ambushes, rocket troops and the usual collection of enemies positioned exactly where video game logic said they would be. There was still time to look around at the scenery, remember some of the creatures from the first Mass Effect, and continue checking side areas for anything worth collecting. Apparently even when an industrial facility is actively becoming an inferno, there is always time for salvage.
The real turning point came when Zaeed finally got close to Vido and decided that revenge mattered more than anything else around him. His actions left the refinery burning and workers trapped inside, but he wanted to keep chasing Vido before he could escape.
Shepard refused.
We chose to save the workers instead, despite Zaeed making it very clear that if Vido escaped he considered that entirely our fault. From there the refinery became one long struggle through fire, mercenaries and heavy enemies as we worked toward the controls needed to save the people still trapped inside.
That section produced some of the messiest combat of the night. Squadmates went down, Unity had to be used to get them back into the fight, and a mech that I did not realise could climb stairs suddenly demonstrated that it very definitely could. At one stage we were retreating while waiting for powers to recharge, trying to avoid getting pinned down and repeatedly attempting to vault over cover before we became trapped in what was rapidly turning into a death loop.
Eventually we fought our way through, saved the workers and reached the end of the mission. Vido had escaped, leaving Zaeed understandably furious, but Shepard was not particularly interested in indulging the argument. Zaeed had put his own revenge ahead of the mission and the lives around him, and that was not how the Normandy crew was going to operate.
The confrontation ended with Zaeed reluctantly accepting the point. He was still not finished with Vido, but he agreed that he could put that vendetta aside long enough to do the job he had been hired to do and work as part of the team.
Between those major moments, chat continued to provide all the usual side quests. The mango song appeared, an accidental kiss emoji from Frodo became a whole conversation, and a discussion about the British use of the word “birds” required some cross-cultural clarification. A Star Wars joke somehow became Luke Skywalker throwing a Horcrux into Mount Doom, while the film conversation continued through Halo, District 9, Chappie, Elysium, Predator and Last Action Hero.
By the time we returned to the Normandy, both loyalty missions we had set out to complete were finished. Kasumi had said goodbye to Keiji’s graybox, Zaeed had been forced to put the team ahead of revenge, and there was just enough time to check around the Normandy for any new dialogue before making the final save.
Frodo was already preparing to remind me to save, but for once we got there first. Story-wise, it left us in a very good place for the next session. Grunt’s dossier remains one of the next major objectives before we push toward the conclusion of Mass Effect 2’s first act and the next stage of the journey.
Not bad for one Friday night: one heist, one burning refinery, two loyalty missions, an affiliate anniversary, a birthday, malfunctioning hardware, several extremely questionable conversations and an alarming amount of excitement about SnowRunner.
📺 Watch the Episode
If you want to see the full heist, the ammunition problems, the capture-card glitch, the refinery fight and both loyalty decisions as they happened, you can watch the complete episode here:
Watch Mass Effect Legendary Edition: ME2 Ep 05 on YouTube
You can also follow the whole playthrough through the Mass Effect Legendary Edition playlist and find the rest of my videos on the Dr Ravenholm YouTube channel.
If you enjoy the episode, please leave a like, add a comment and subscribe so you can keep up with the rest of the series.
🔴 Join the Adventure Live
The recorded episode shows the missions, but the live stream is where the birthday wishes, film conversations, technical problems and repeated attempts to convince me that SnowRunner is something to look forward to all happen around them.
You can join us live on Twitch or over on YouTube and become part of the next session while we continue working our way through the Normandy’s increasingly complicated collection of problems.
🛰️ Community & Links
There is plenty happening between streams as well, whether you want to keep up with the schedule, join the conversation or explore some of my other projects.
Live — Come aboard while the next stream is actually going wrong:
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Community — Keep the conversation going between episodes:
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Music — You can also find my music here:
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Support — If you would like to support what I do:
Fourthwall | Teespring | Streamlabs
More — For my other projects, services and writing:
Business Centre | Download the Brochure | About Me | Blog
🔥 Two Loyalty Missions and One Unavoidable Sunday
By the end of the stream we had completed both DLC loyalty missions, destroyed Kasumi’s graybox, saved the refinery workers and brought Zaeed a little closer to working as part of Shepard’s team. We also finished in a good position to move on toward Grunt’s dossier and the remaining work before the end of Act 1.
Next Friday we will continue the mandatory Mass Effect viewing. Before that, apparently, there is the small matter of SnowRunner on Sunday. Chat remains far more enthusiastic about this than I am.
— Dr Ravenholm
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