User blog comment:Yanxa/Lack of Character Development/@comment-3581090-20120501184520

You're not the only one. Most of ME3 is underdone, in my opinion, and the characters were given the same glossed-over treatment that the plot was.

So I agree with you--but I'm also going to be really semantics-y for a moment and say I don't know that I'd call it a lack of character development, exactly. At least, not in every case.

The characters we've met before don't really need to grow very much (as Mr. Mittens, below, points out), because they've more or less "grown up" already. Their personal issues are resolved. The new characters, though, introduce what would be their personal issues, and then (as you point out) just sort of tell you they've worked it out (James, for example, tells you he's joining N7--therefore, ghosts of his past dealt with!). Which makes their growth seem...well, actually, it makes their growth not seem, because the resolution happens entirely within the character, off-screen. Shepard doesn't have any direct involvement, as he did with his ME2 crew, so we don't have any kind of connection to their "development."

Which is where my semantics-y whatnot comes in: our ME3 squad members, with or without any kind of personal issues to overcome, lack the emotional connection--both to the events around them AND to us, the audience/Shepard stand-in--they had in the previous games. They didn't need to grow over the course of the story of ME3 so much as become part of it, drawing us in with their personal attachment to the story, forcing us to care and feel about it because we care and feel about them. And, too often, this connection was glossed over, marginalized, or even ignored.