User blog comment:Diyartifact/Shepard's adversaries/@comment-3325589-20120405002501

I'm mostly in agreement with the above points. I hated Kai Leng, but more in a "why are you still breathing, let alone talking at me?" way than as a worthy and frightening adversary. TIM was better, but he was almost entirely absent between Priority: Mars (5-10% of the way through the game) and Priority: Thessia (~75% of the way). In general, one of my main beefs with ME3 (since I'm one of those weirdos who thought the ending was solid and satisfying, though admittedly not perfect) was that the writers were way too enamored of 'less is more' as a design philosophy for their villains. TIM only made it to the foreground in the last quarter of the game, and the Reapers got even less face time than that. I get that the Reapers are supposed to be distant, menacing, and a bit above it all, but the way they appeared in ME3 just made them seem fuzzy and out of focus. Victory over them felt a bit out of focus as well, which is a real shame since the war against the Reapers is the game's raison d'etre.

The latter is especially unfortunate because I really liked the way they handled Harbinger in ME2. It had a personal involvement in fighting Shepard, and felt like a personal enemy, yet at the same time the game emphasized the vast disparity in power and scope between the two characters. Harbinger can kill Shepard, and keep tabs on him/her any time s/he is around Collectors. Meanwhile, the player only even sees Harbinger twice over the course of the game, and one of those times is an ending cutscene that Shepard knows nothing about.