User blog comment:Diyartifact/Shepard's adversaries/@comment-1895174-20120408234519/@comment-1895174-20120410000956

Fair point. But by lumping the Collectors, the Collector General, AND Harbinger together as one villain, you can at least where I'm coming from when I say the Collectors as a whole is the primary antagonist of Mass Effect 2. If the plot of Mass Effect (1) is to stop Saren, then you can say the plot of Mass Effect 2 is to stop the Collectors. Yes, stopping the Collectors is stopping Harbinger by proxy, but Harbinger isn't the one we recognize as the enemy until the very end.

Back to my original point of the Illusive Man and Cerberus playing a similar role to Saren and the geth while the Reaper forces are the same as the Collectors: consider the way the two enemies are fought. In Mass Effect 1, we fight Saren and the geth in very straightforward ways - offense (Virmire), defense (Feros), and espionage (Noveria). The same can be said for how we fight Cerberus in Mass Effect 3 - offense (Cerberus Base), defense (Citadel), and espionage (Horizon). The Collectors in ME2 and the Reaper forces in ME3 are fought in a much more complicated way. Combating them revolves much more around recruiting allies - squadmates in ME2, and armies in ME3.