Mass Effect Legendary Edition: ME2 Ep 18 – N7 Assignments

This was meant to be a slightly quieter Mass Effect Friday. I was still feeling ill, so rather than push into one of Mass Effect 2’s larger story missions, the plan was to clear out the remaining side content and leave the Normandy in a much tidier position for what comes next.

That still left eight side quests, plenty of planetary scanning, a spreadsheet to keep updated, and several opportunities for everything to become much less quiet than intended. Somewhere between feeding the fish, looking for iridium and being reminded to save the game, we actually managed to finish the lot.

🌌 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 pieces of DLC, promotional weapons, armour and packs, all remastered and optimised for 4K Ultra HD.

For this part of the playthrough we are firmly inside Mass Effect 2, following Commander Shepard around the galaxy through story missions, squad content, exploration and the many smaller assignments that are very easy to leave sitting in the journal while something more urgent gets your attention.

🧭 Where We Are in the Journey

We are now well into Mass Effect 2’s second act, with much of the major squad work already behind us and the end of the game beginning to come into view. I did not want to start Lair of the Shadow Broker or move toward Legion and the final act while there was still a collection of unfinished N7 assignments scattered around the galaxy.

So this episode became the clean-up stream. The aim was to finish every remaining side quest, pick up resources for upgrades along the way, and get the spreadsheet looking considerably greyer before moving on to the larger missions waiting ahead.

🔥 What Happens in This Episode

We began on Illium, where a couple of loose ends needed clearing before the proper N7 sweep could begin. First came the payoff from the stolen-goods investigation, with Shepard receiving a reward for passing along information about questionable shipping activity. There was also some uncertainty over whether another Illium job had already been handed in, which meant a little wandering around and checking notes before we established where things actually stood.

The more substantial stop involved a quarian trapped in a legal indentured-servitude contract after an attempt to make money on the stock market went spectacularly wrong. Losses became credit, credit became an illegal loan, and eventually she had signed away several years of her life to clear the debt. Shepard could not simply buy the contract and release her, so the solution was to convince Synthetic Insights to take it over instead. The company would gain a skilled AI specialist, free her early and recover the cost through her wages, while also being able to present the whole thing as a generous act of corporate goodwill. Very Illium.

With that resolved, it was back to the Normandy and on to the main objective for the night. Eight side quests remained, most of them N7 assignments, and the aim was to clear the lot. That turned the stream into equal parts combat operation and galactic housekeeping, with the Normandy bouncing between systems while I checked the spreadsheet, compared mission names and hunted for enough iridium and platinum to keep the upgrades moving. Planetary scanning became a regular part of the evening, as did topping up the Normandy with what had inevitably become “space petrol.”

The abandoned mine quickly demonstrated that “side-quest night” was not necessarily going to be a quiet one. Husks kept pouring into the area, and for a while it was not obvious whether the waves would ever stop. While the squad dealt with the increasingly enthusiastic welcome committee, Shepard took the opportunity to wander around examining the area, squeezing past enemies with an “excuse me, coming through,” checking boxes and even finding time to pick locks. An invisible wall briefly joined the enemy forces before it became clear that waiting for the Husks to run out was not going to work. We pushed forward, finished the assignment and came away with some useful iridium for the upgrade pile.

From there we moved on to the anomalous weather assignment, bringing Tali along for the trip. The approach already looked suspicious enough that I expected the place to be full of something unpleasant once we started moving, and it did not take long for the shooting to begin. “Shields up” became a recurring instruction while we worked toward the strange weather-control machinery, and Tali managed to go down twice during the fighting. Eventually the reason became fairly obvious: she had decided that somewhere near the front line was apparently the ideal place for her to stand. We got the machinery dealt with, the mission completed and Tali safely returned to the Normandy after her unexpectedly aggressive sightseeing tour.

There was still plenty of planetary exploration between assignments, with probes being fired into anything that looked remotely profitable. Some worlds were barely worth touching, while others produced the sort of resource spike that immediately justified another probe. It also gave chat plenty of time to wander through entirely unrelated subjects, including Gotham Knights, Supernatural, Marvel games, Hula Hoops and whether fifteen seasons of television counted as a reasonable viewing commitment.

The next major burst of pressure came with the imminent ship crash assignment. What began as another bit of N7 clean-up suddenly introduced a six-minute timer, turning a relaxed evening into a race through doors, matching symbols and power systems while enemies continued arriving. Shepard needed to connect the correct points, find power couplings and keep moving toward the escape route, all while rockets and shield warnings made everything considerably less tidy.

Naturally, Shepard also chose this exact moment to develop an occasional reluctance to face in the direction I wanted, earning the name “crazy Shepard” while the clock continued counting down. Chat immediately recognised the atmosphere, with CraigDavid comparing it to the sort of Modern Warfare moment where somebody is shouting that the soldiers are leaving whether they are ready or not. We did make it out, but it was one of the clearest moments of the stream where the evening jumped from casual completionism into genuine hurry-up chaos.

The middle of the session became a full galaxy-wide clean-up operation. I started deliberately rotating squadmates who had barely been used, partly because some of them had accumulated an impressive number of levels while apparently sitting on the Normandy doing very little. One assignment took us through a hostile environment filled with beacon towers and creatures, while another brought us into a captured mining facility where rockets, bionics and the occasional confusion over where the correct staircase had gone all competed for attention.

By the time that stretch was finished, the list had shrunk to three remaining N7 assignments: the Blood Pack base, the endangered research station and Mining the Canyon. The spreadsheet was steadily turning grey, which by that point had become almost as satisfying as the mission-complete screens themselves.

The Blood Pack base was the most straightforwardly destructive of the final three. Jack came along because she had seen remarkably little combat up to that point, and the base immediately provided enough enemies to make up for lost time. The Blood Pack’s health regeneration made some of them irritatingly determined to stay alive, so firearms gradually gave way to the increasingly effective strategy of “punchy punchy.”

Once the larger enemies were dealt with, the squad located the power source that would bring down the facility. Obviously, we did not immediately destroy it. There were still resources to steal first. Only after the area had been properly searched did we trigger the destruction and get out before the base went boom, with Frodo once again performing his increasingly important role of reminding me that saving the game before explosions is generally considered a good idea.

The endangered research station changed the pace completely. I selected a squadmate before remembering that this particular assignment was actually a solo puzzle mission, leaving Shepard to deal with a facility full of malfunctioning systems instead of another army of mercenaries. The job involved matching circuits, routing power, restoring coolant and trying to stop an overheating generator from becoming somebody else’s problem.

It rapidly became one of those situations where every repaired system seemed to reveal another thing that needed plugging into something else. “Who designed a system like this?” felt like a reasonable question, but eventually everything was connected in the correct order and the station was brought back under control. After several combat-heavy assignments, it was a welcome change, even if saving the galaxy had temporarily turned into advanced electrical maintenance.

That left Mining the Canyon as the final side quest of the night. The assignment revolved around keeping a large mining machine moving by locating power cells and feeding them into the machinery while scouting ahead and dealing with whatever was waiting along the route. The machine was helpful when it wanted to be, slightly confusing when it did not, and at one point began walking backwards in a way that made it look as though it had been taking lessons from Shepard’s occasional movement problems.

The rhythm became simple enough: move ahead, find another battery, bring it back, power the machine and see where it decided to go next. Eventually the route opened, the final objective completed and the last remaining side quest disappeared from the list. Naturally, one of the first things I did was return to the spreadsheet and colour in the final completed entry.

Chat had been running alongside all of this from the beginning, turning the whole clean-up operation into something considerably less orderly than Shepard’s mission log suggested. “Mandatory Mass Effect Friday” remained the unofficial description of the night, while Frodo’s repeated SAVE reminders developed into an essential service. He warned me before dangerous sections, before explosions and sometimes simply because previous experience had established that Mass Effect’s autosave system should not be trusted with important responsibilities.

There was also a full chat Hunger Games during one of the quieter stretches, with Gary D. Steele eventually emerging as the winner. JD gifted a subscription to Erris while I was busy scanning planets, and conversations drifted through SnowRunner, chicken-photo redeems, Star Trek singing, Willow, The Witcher and Assassin’s Creed without ever really feeling separate from the game. Planet scanning gave everyone time to talk, and combat usually arrived just in time to interrupt whichever subject we had wandered into.

AIDA_LMD contributed its own background weirdness as well. The bot appeared to be challenging people unexpectedly, which naturally led to suggestions of a “ghost in the machine” and the possibility that Skynet had arrived slightly earlier than scheduled. Its unexplained fascination with squirrels did little to make the situation more reassuring. Combined with the apparently backward-swimming Normandy fish, the constant search for space petrol and my habit of forgetting mission names almost immediately after finishing them, there was plenty happening even between the actual assignments.

Eventually, though, we were back aboard the Normandy with the job done. I checked the available upgrades, made a small change to Shepard’s outfit to avoid creating problems for future video editing, fed the fish again and — importantly — saved the game. Every Mass Effect 2 side quest on the list was finally complete.

That leaves the playthrough in a much cleaner position heading toward the end of Act 2. Lair of the Shadow Broker is still waiting, along with recruiting Legion and completing his loyalty mission, before we eventually commit to the final act in one extended run. For a stream deliberately intended to be a quieter night because I was still feeling ill, we covered a surprising amount of the galaxy.

With the Normandy parked, the spreadsheet finally cleared and the fish somehow still alive, we wrapped things up by raiding into mayhem_bedlamite and sending the crew onward for the night.

🎥 Watch the Episode

If you want to see the full run, including the endless Husks, Tali’s determination to reach the front line, the timed escape and the final assault on the spreadsheet, you can watch the complete episode on YouTube.

You can continue the playthrough through the Mass Effect Legendary Edition playlist, and you can find more videos over on Dr Ravenholm on YouTube. If you enjoy the episode, leaving a like, comment or subscription always helps.

🔴 Join the Adventure Live

Some of the best parts of these streams are the things that were never part of the plan: chat deciding we need a Hunger Games, AIDA behaving suspiciously, or Frodo appearing at exactly the right moment with another reminder to save.

You can be there for the next one live on Twitch or YouTube. Come along, settle in with the rest of us, and see whether the next plan survives contact with the game.

🛰️ Community & Links

The stream may finish, but the conversation normally carries on afterwards. If you want to stay connected, there are plenty of places to find the rest of the crew.

Live — Come along when the next stream goes live and see what happens before it reaches the edited videos:
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More — There is plenty more beyond the gaming side of things if you want to explore further:
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💾 Every Side Quest Cleared — And Yes, We Saved

For what was supposed to be a gentler stream because I was still feeling ill, we managed to cover a surprising amount. Every remaining Mass Effect 2 side quest is now finished, the fish survived another evening, and the spreadsheet finally looks the way I wanted it to.

That leaves Lair of the Shadow Broker, recruiting Legion and completing his loyalty mission before we eventually tackle the entire final act in one extended run. Fallout: New Vegas was also waiting for the following day, so there was not going to be much time away from trouble.

— Dr Ravenholm