Poor Jacob Taylor.
It boggles my mind when game critics whose opinions I otherwise find to be deep and insightful write off a character like Jacob as “boring.” It’s not that I don’t understand where they’re coming from. I’ve heard it explained to me: he is average, he is unremarkable, his backstory and his problems are all mundane in contrast to a crew filled with scaly raptor men, genetically perfect smarmy assholes, chatty AI, and creepy unblinking blue paladin ladies out to kill their vampire daughters. Compared to all that, yeah, Jacob is practically a blank slate. Kind of like… Shepard.
Here is the thing I don’t think anyone keeps in mind when they write off Jacob Taylor. Of the entire cast of the Mass Effect franchise, he is the only character besides Shepard to bear the distinction of full on player character. Not temporary PC, ala Joker. He has an entire game to himself, Mass Effect Galaxy. I haven’t played it (and I don’t know anyone who has) but I was personally thrilled to come face to face with the only character who might qualify as Shepard’s counterpart. Because that’s exactly who he is, and I’m sure that’s what the developers intended him to symbolize, whether or not that significance got across to the average player.
Granted, depending on your tailoring of Shepard’s backstory, it’s true she can have more interesting origins than most. But over the normal progression of gameplay, she is pretty much flat as a board when it comes to her own personal depth. You barely hear mention of her past exploits, nor do the details ever matter because whichever path you choose never influences the proceedings. That’s precisely why the game surrounds Shepard with the most colorful characters with the most outrageous daddy issues in the galaxy. She’s a freaking Jacob. The only significant difference are the number of opportunities she’s offered to do big and exciting things. Without three epics under her belt, she and Jacob are exactly the same kind of vanilla, utterly malleable stock character.
It’s not that I have no issues with Jacob. Making his loyalty mission yet another tale of black paternal abandonment is lazy in the least and excruciatingly problematic the deeper down into the issue you go. But I refuse to dismiss the entire character out of hand for that. To me, he’s an image of what Shepard would be if the narrative abandoned her before Eden Prime. Mishandled, tertiary, and as an unfortunate consequence: boring.
