The remastered Mass Effect is looking real good in these side-by-side shots

We're one month away from Mass Effect Legendary Edition. That's one month away from the best space opera of all time—one month away from BioWare's best original IP (I said original IP, Knights of the Old Republic fans, you'll be aight).

Getting here wasn't easy. If you want the particulars, BioWare breaks it down in this comprehensive blog entry. It covers the three-phased approach the team used to remastering the trilogy: Building the Foundation, Modernization Efforts, and Rebuilding Worlds.

Some companies make remasters look easy.  But they're never easy. 2018's masterful Shadow of the Colossus, remade by Bluepoint Games, is one impossibly good example. The Halo: The Master Chief Collection is the opposite. When that collection came out in 2014, we called out its myriad problems, and we also received a ton of hate mail from Halo fans that hadn't actually gotten their hands on the game yet, but it took years for that collection to be fixed.

So, jury is still going to be out on Mass Effect Legendary Edition until we get our filthy hands on it. This 4K comparison trailer goes a long ways to compare the original with the official remaster. Right off the bat the lighting is brighter in the remaster, although I've been playing the original recently and it sure doesn't look as dark as they're making it look in this video. But I can never fully tell because my monitor burns with the brightness of a million suns. They standardized FemShep across all three games now. The Mako has been changed up, but they're not showing the random bouncy worlds here, they're only showing some sedate non-bouncy sections. Biggest visual change I noticed was in blown-up Garrus. His armor looks even more jacked up than before.

Mass Effect Legendary Edition—the remastered trilogy—hits May 14 on PC, Xbox One, and PS4.