@xist Like I said, ME2 was more of a throwaway comment. It’s a game I personally hated, but at the same time I feel like I could play it again if I really had to for the sake of going through the whole series. Also, you can’t skip mineral mining-- if you do, you’re guaranteeing that you’ll fail some of the arbitrary skill checks at the end. Telling everyone you love their Citadel store only goes so far. On that note, ME2 fits well into this category-- games that looked fun, even legendary, on the store page, but turned out to be a complete regression from the first game. I felt like ME3 was just “2, but refined to be actually fun,” but part of that may be the fact that I never actually played the Xbox 360 versions. I have them all, but never even touched them when they were relevant, having just played the entire series back to back over the course of last year.
ME:A is, as I would elegantly put it, “the mega poop.” There’s no enjoyment to be had, other than ironically. It was a game so tragic, so messy, so poorly written that they couldn’t even trust BioWare Montreal to make DLCs for it. They pocketed the missing story arcs so as not to waste their potential on ham-fisted and over-opinionated “writers.” I really did try to see the good in that game, and I even did-- I love its gameplay refinement, the return of Mass Effect 1 style RPG mechanics, the proper use of open world environments to scavenge in a way that doesn’t bore me to tears like in ME2 (sorry, I’ll move on), and even many of the awesome concepts. It would be like trying to tolerate Mass Effect 1 if it had the writing of Ride to Hell: Retribution behind it, a story bad enough to actually ruin a game.