JKoopman wrote...
@darknoon5
Show me one poll, or even one person, who says they prefer ME2's story to ME1's. ME2's story being lackluster and disjointed was something that was universally panned in virtually every review following ME2's release.
And yes, I'd say "trainwreck" adequately describes what passes for ME2's over-arching story.
The trainwreck starts right off the bat with Shepard dying and being resurrected with space-magic, then forcing Shepard into service with Cerberus with virtually no opportunity for protest despite Cerberus being set up as space-al-Qaeda in ME1 and the default Shepard's origin being that Cerberus is directly responsible for the murder of your entire squad on Akuze (something which Shepard is never even able to mention when speaking with the Illusive Man).
The trend then continues with old allies suddenly being struck blind, deaf and dumb in the form of the new Council and Alliance turning their backs on you ostensibly for no other reason than because Shepard is working with Cerberus (despite the given rationale for Shepard working with Cerberus being that the Council and Alliance have turned their backs on you, so it's kind of a circuitous "which came first" scenario) as well as Shepard finally being reunited with his/her ME1 love interest on Horizon only to have them be struck with such a case of mind-boggling irrationality that they try to blame the abductions on Cerberus (apparently forgetting all about the Collector attack that they witnessed not 5 minutes earlier) and to have Shepard be railroaded by artificial incompetency to the point where--despite being able to successfully persuade Saren to kill himself in ME1--the best response you can come up with after being called a traitor to the Alliance is to say "Well, I can see you're not going to listen to reason" before your former BFF/lover storms off (but they send you a nice email later, so it's all good, right?).
Then there's the whole "humans are more genetically diverse than all other races in the galaxy because we have a wide range of appearances and intelligence levels...even though every other race in the galaxy has idiots and geniuses and a range of different appearances as well...including the asari who can randomize their genetic code with that of other species and should then clearly be the most diverse by far...but we're different/better because...actually, just don't think about it too much and nod your head in understanding" angle that the game tries to push on us no less than three times.
But where things REALLY get bad is on the Collector Base where, in the space of 10 minutes, Mac Walters successfully takes one of the coolest sci-fi enemies of the last 15 years and turns them into a running gag; first with the most facepalming-est WTF moment that was the BabyTerminatorReaper, and then by suddenly revealing that the Reapers are in fact semi-organic and not purely mechanical and that Reapers "reproduce" by melting an organic race into a gray paste that somehow preserves that race's collective consciousness and then use that organic paste to construct a new Reaper in that race's image.
ME2's "story" was a travesty. The fact that it was also the point at which Drew Karpyshyn took a back seat and Mac Walters became the Lead Writer doesn't exactly inspire me with confidence that ME3's story will be any better; which is only reinforced by the retcons and inconsistencies present in his work on Evolution.
I've heard it said that Mac Walters is a better writer of characters than Drew Karpyshyn, but I find even that hard to be believed considering that I found most of the characters in ME2 to be either dry and/or cliched. ME1 had Tali, Garrus and Wrex; three of the most-loved characters in the franchise. What did ME2 add? It replaced Wrex with Grunt and his stereotypical teenage angst, added Jack and her directionless "I'm the queen badass ****"-ery, Jacob with his PRIIIIIZE and the most awesome backstory never to be mentioned ever, Miranda, the stereotypical hotty with daddy issues, etc. The only truely stand-out characters were Mordin and Legion, and the later got nowhere near enough "screen time" or development.
So no, I'm not particularly fond of Mac Walters or the "new and X-treme" direction he seems to be taking Mass Effect in. I wish BioWare would've just left Drew in charge...
Quoted for truth - some of the recruitment and loyalty missions in ME2 were very well done, as were most of the gameplay tweaks, but in terms of actual feel and continuity of the universe it was a huge step backwards towards the same generic stuff that every other "big" franchise is doing. In my book, that is a very bad thing, my personal peeve being how Shepard is now suddenly a robot who doesn't have any problem whatsoever walking around with the *memory of dying to vacuum exposure* in his head. Shepard in ME1 was a person who rose to the occasion, Shepard in ME2 is the same old generic Master Chief BADASS111!!!11 wish-fulfilment brick that's been done a million times before. There's a reason I keep as far away from Halo, Gears of War and the like as I can and I really don't want Mass Effect to turn into any one of those. In this case "big" means generic. I'd like some of the uniqueness of Mass Effect back, please.
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