User blog comment:Legionwrex/Comparing the Mass Effect Trilogy!/@comment-1786741-20120921051833

ME1 will always be my favorite in the series and not just because of Nostalgia. Sure, the actual combat of ME2 and ME3 was a lot more fun to play but everything else was lacking. I'll just list the reasons why I didn't like ME2 or ME3 as much to save time:

ME2 Look, I liked ME2 but there's no denying that it streamlined the hell out of the series, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. One thing that still doesn't make sense to me is why they chose to kill Shepard in the beginning other than to retcon a bunch of things. Sure, it was written pretty well but I always thought afterwards "Why do they have to kill him? Couldn't they think of something else that would serve the same purpose without being overly complicated?" Overall, I just felt the game improved in many areas, though it cut far too much from the formula that was needed.

ME3 Man, where do I start. Look, I'm not going to start ranting on the ending here because there was a lot of other issues I had with ME3. First off, the story was linear as hell. I understand that the war with the Reapers has a sense of urgency and you don't exactly have the time to dilly-dally like you could in the previous games, it's just that I was hoping for different routes to do it. The missions were all pretty well written, sure, I was just hoping for a bit more discretion on who you would try to recruit first. Speaking of linearity, I absolutely DESPISED the fetch missions of ME3. Look, I'm ok with the occasional fetch quest with a bit of story mixed in but having ALL the side missions start with randomly listening in on conversations like Stalky McCreeper Shepard and making a short trip to grab random item #56 is completely lazy and bland. Another thing I hated was the removal of the neutral voice option/action. It limits replayabilty and gets rid of a pretty good chunk of choice. Last but not least there was a few problems I had with how they accounted your choices from older games. They did a GREAT job with most of your major choices but some of the slightly less important ones were a bit shafted. Most were either lumped into the dreadfully nebulous EMS system or things like not saving the Rachni Queen were made inconsequential (save for a small amount of EMS) by replacing them. One that really irked me was the death of Kal'Reegar. Who was a pretty cool character that had a good amount of screen time in ME2. When I found out he randomly died offscreen in one of the news posts I was pretty disappointed. What was even worse is that they didn't even attempt to contact Adam Baldwin who was pretty bummed himself when he found out. There's also a myriad of nit-picky criticisms I have but I don't really feel like getting into them.