Jonata wrote...
I started a personal BSN journey to understand Liara, a character that I started hating with the ME3 release but that I want to look at with the eyes I've had back in ME2 and LotSB. (I really liked the character back then)
Can one of you Liara Fans kindly summarize for me, with as few words as possible, why Liara should be considered a valuable and outstanding character in ME3?
Thank you for your time.
Looking at your profile, you obviously played the ME series on the PS3. As others have already guessed, this means you missed out on ME1, probably permanently affecting your perception of the characters.
I think this is most obvious in the difference between your and our views on Liara - where you see her as a supporting character based on ME2 (even with LotSB), we here view her as an absolutely crucial character, both to our Shepards and in the context of the trilogy. Your experience with her started with some little dialogue in ME2 which only hinted that she's supposed to be important to Shepard; we on the other hand played through a whole game that fleshed out her character and her relationship with Shepard.
So when it came to ME3 you felt that she took over a place on the squad that could otherwise have been filled by a ME2 character, preferably one of your favourites or even your LI. I think that's understandable, you would obviously have felt more connected to characters that were with you through the whole of ME2, through their recruitment and loyalty missions, their inter- and intra-mission dialogues, the suicide mission, etc. As good as LotSB was, it just can't compare to the whole of ME2 in terms of emotional engagement (well, for us Liara fans it does, but certainly not for someone who never properly knew Liara before).
But for us, after falling in love with her character way back in ME1, dealing with her estrangement in vanilla ME2, rejoicing at eventual reconciliation in LotSB... we were obviously thrilled to have her back in ME3 as a full-time squadmate. She wasn't dislodging our favourite ME2 character, she
was our favourite character, finally taking back her place at Shepard's side.
So, tl;dr, the main issue is you didn't play ME1 and so got a completely different impression on characters, felt more attached to ME2 squadmates than to the old ME1 ones.
Other than going back and playing at least ME1 (and preferably the whole trilogy with the same imported Shepard) I don't really see what else to suggest to you. And even that might not do, as your impressions would still be influenced by your previous experience with ME2/3.