Mass Effect has two leads, Mark Meer and Jennifer Hale, but you’ll only hear one of them as Commander Shepard per playthrough. According to player stats, most people play as a guy, meaning Mark Meer is their Shepard throughout the trilogy.
However, Meer encourages players to give FemShep a go - purely so they can enjoy the performance of his co-star, Hale. Speaking with PC Gamer, Meer says that he’s a huge fan of her work, and doesn’t have any problem with players choosing to only play as FemShep because of her performance.
I have, conservatively, two dozen playthroughs under my belt at this point, including the original trilogy and remastered versions. If I had to guess, I’d say im about an 85/15 split FemShep over MaleShep. Apparently I’m in the minority, but I much prefer Hale’s performance.
I’m curious as to the paragon vs renegade percentages for each character type. As in, do more people play FemShep as paragon or renegade? Same for MaleShep.
FemShep is the best way imo.
I’ve heard the weirdest excuses for why not though, worst ones were “why would I want to play as a woman, I’m a man”. Now, on your first playthrough absolutely but after that?
Not a bad reason to want to play as yourself at all, but after the first playthrough or so then it’s time to start experimenting. One of the great things about RPGs is that you can be someone else entirely, and I think it opens us up to other ways of thinking. Playing as female shepard is at times a completely different experience, and you just want to explore it. It’s the guys who are afraid of playing as a woman, who think it’s not masculine or something weird like that. That’s not okay, drop the masculinity, be the awesome femshep bitch you were born to be. Plus to them, I like to say, “Why would I want to stare at a guy’s ass for 100+ hours?” Usually fucks with their masculinity a bit
