
Originally Posted by
Nevex
Played the trilogy in the last month. Here's my thoughts (spoilers incoming):
The whole "choices" mechanic is stupid. Not only does it slow the game down considerably, but 90% of the time the "canon" outcome is incredibly obvious. The genophage is cured. The quarians make peace with the geth. Everyone survives the suicide mission in ME2. Garrus and Tali hook up, which means neither of them is the canon love interest. Speaking of that, Liara is obviously the deuteragonist of the series and I'm pretty sure she was intended to be the main love interest. Destroy ending with high EMS is the canon ending. The Rachni queen survives. I could go on and on but everyone with common sense can easily see what's canon and what isn't.
It's not like your choices matter in the end anyway, due to the whole space magic BS the ending of the third game pulled from its ass.
The gameplay is pretty boring. Generic FPS with RPG mechanics here and there. ME1 had depth but horrible controls and inventory management, which needed to be fixed in the sequels, not outright axed. I tried Soldier and Sentinel and couldn't stomach them, then switched to Vanguard and luckily it was actually decent and stuck with it for the entire trilogy. Sadly the third game reduced it to Charge+Nova spam, which was fun during the first 2 hours, not so much afterwards.
They should have focused more on the gameplay instead of all that redundant dialogue 90% of the players are never going to experience.
On the good side, the characters were excellent, the main plot was solid (until the second half of ME3), VA was top quality (except for Chobot--I mean Diana Allers) and the lore was interesting.
I'd give the series as a whole a 6.5/10, with ME1>ME2>ME3 in terms of gameplay and ME2>ME1>ME3 in terms of story.
Not going to compete with Final Fantasy anytime soon, though.