"The Mass Effect" is a video game that follows the story of John Mass Effect, captain of the USS Normandy. The universe is being invaded by evil robot aliens from outside the solar system, and it's up to John to stop them. To do this, he must ride 31 elevators, sit through 45 loading screens, and watch 63 unskippable cutscenes.

My initial goal for this run was getting a time under 2:30, which would be comparable to existing segmented runs on youtube, which I used as a basis for this run. I've beaten that goal by a large margin thanks to a large number of small timesaving tricks and glitches that I've discovered since starting the run.

The main things I do throughout the run are:
1. Dialogue skipping. By binding the skip dialogue button to the mousewheel, I skip dialogue pretty much as fast as possible.
2. Grenades. By hitting yourself with a grenade, you can initiate combat, which allows you to sprint for a short time.
3. Paragon points. You need to get 81 points in order to be able to persuade the final boss into killing himself. I pick these up wherever it doesn't cost time to do so.

notes:

Eden Prime: I didn't get a nade drop, but my time was pretty good, so I kept going. You don't need to kill the husks at the end if you kill the geth fast enough.

Citadel: I missed the throw on the assassins in Chora's Den, costing me a bit of time. The other fights went well. Got the Normandy speech skip.

Feros: Tower fight went pretty much perfectly. Relying on your squadmates is very random, and if the timing is off, you can lock the game. On the Mako, I tripped up a few times. It's very prone to flipping over. This section was definitely the worst for it. The cutscene skip at the beginning/end of the Mako section causes your party to glitch out in an amusing way, but you can't throw grenades, which are pretty necessary. I equipped an armor mod to disable the glitch on myself. The Zhu's hope and Thorian fights went very well.

Noveria: For some reason you can get combat by shooting the box at the end of the docks. This only works once per map load, so it's basically 2 free nades. I messed up a couple times on the level up before Benezia. Pressing esc is the fastest way to dismiss popups, and I screwed up the timing of it, causing me to exit the menu. That didn't really cost much time. The Benezia fight went okay.

Virmire: Parking the Mako where I did at the gates saves time walking back down the stairs on the way down. The security console upon entering the compound usually gives me a lot of trouble, but I was able to interact with it right away this time. The Krogan after the beacon were kept alive for as long as possible, so that I could keep combat long enough to not lose any sprinting time before the next group of enemies. The Krogan after the bomb were really well behaved this time. Usually, one or two get stuck in the elevator with me, and I have to throw them out. The Saren fight went really well. Hitting the persuasion on Saren drops the requirement for the one at the end of the game from 12 to 9.

Therum: I missed the gate jump, costing a small chunk of time. I also got stuck a couple times after the rock skip, but that's to be expected. That area wasn't built to have the Mako in it. I was still feeling pretty good at this point as I had more grenades than I knew what to do with.

Ilos: Went pretty smooth. I didn't move the Mako at the start because that will usually cause a run ending glitch that messes up the physics on the Mako. I also quicksaved before the mission because of another run ending glitch that resets your level at the start of the planet. Luckily, I didn't get either of those glitches and I was able to proceed.

Citadel: It went quite well. There's not much to say. The final boss killed himself, and I let the credits roll.