User blog comment:Diyartifact/Shepard's adversaries/@comment-3038049-20120405161425/@comment-3325589-20120408233056

With Harbinger, you have to look at what it does in addition to what it says. Take the beginning of the game: no taunting, no ultimata, just swoops in, destroys the Normandy, and kills Shepard. For all that Harbinger talks like a total ham (and I, too, love ham from Harby's), it's actually a really smart and genre savvy villain; the events in Redemption and on the Collector cruiser only confirm this.

As for Kai Leng's puerile outburst: it definitely made him less intimidating, but it was also realistic, and more character development than a lot of the more straight-up menacing villains in stories get. Not every badass fighter is mature or emotionally stable. It did make him less effective as a foil to Shepard, but it was always pretty clear to me that TIM was more Shepard's foil than Kai Leng was. Kai Leng was Shepard's counterpart in combat prowess and nothing else.