I saw ME2 as being very much the dark middle-chapter of a suitably epic story (all the Empire Strikes Back comparisons through the boards suggest I'm far from alone here). So for ME2 the content was suitably grimier and more ambiguous; characters struggled with hard pasts and unpleasant moral choices, while Shepard constructed his Dirty Dozen and assisted them in some way or another in putting their past misdeeds or experiences behind them. Shepard as a character helps them grow out of where they are into a place where they can go into the future and step onto the next page of their lives.
As for the unpleasant elements of the story, ok, I can see how some
people would be offended or distressed by some of them. Epic stories
have though been filled with disturbing themes for centuries; in fact,
sometimes the further back you go, the worse they get - rape, murder,
torture, incest, genocide, fratracide, infantacide, and those are just
the common ones. History itself is full of it, too. I'll agree that the whole young Asari running off to
be pole-dancers, mercs, waitresses and floozys thing was a bit of a
relic of the juvenile James T Kirk school of alien cultures (as in
female aliens are there to be a funny colour, dress in skimpy nothings
and throw themselves at rugged male hero-types), but I was willing to
buy the whole 300-year teenage phase thing and it is a very old trope of sci-fi fiction now. Not a very PC one, but one that will take a while yet to abraid into something less juvenile. That is though a very minor aspect in something as large as the ME series. Sci-fi is a little phallocentric in its politics at times, as is a lot fantasy and horror fiction (though not all, admittedly). Gender politics will always be fighting a tough battle to get correct representation, but no one game/book/movie will ever please everyone.
While it was never said, I saw Shepard's quest in ME2 for the team's loyalty not so much as a means to make them survive, but as a way to make them want to survive; instead of throwing themselves suicidally at the enemy, they fight with a passion to live beyond the final battle, earning either redemption, hope or direction to become new people no longer shackled to ghosts of their pasts (Miranda's envy of normality, Jacob's relationship with his father, Jack's childhood of torture and abuse, Grunt's lack of connection to his heritage, Thane's desire to make amends, Mordin's contemplation of ethics and morality, etc.). Shepard is not so much marching them into doom, but trying to save them from their own personal dooms though facing a greater one.
Just using Jack's origin story as an example (because the character seems to be one people either love or hate with seemingly no middle ground), it could not have in my eyes worked in any other way. Without such a horrible past to have endured, Jack would have been a simple sociopathic criminal with a tendency to drop f-bombs left and right, only brought along to blow things apart and thus as disposable as a bag of demo-charges. The character's endurance of terrible wrongs was responsible for the shape she had grown into, and without seeing and experiencing the unpleasant reality of it, she would have been a character the audience could develop no serious empathy for. Instead understanding her past made me at least want to know more about her and see if there was a way to free her from the bonds of the past. It made her my favorite character of the game, hands down.
Jacob's story had a similar vein, placing him in his father's shadow and using the abhorent events on the planet's surface to demonstrate once and for all he was the better man. That one could have been a little better drawn out in my eyes, but I could see what it was aiming for. Without the moral questions, without the darkness, there would have been much less meaning, and much less to make the characters more detailed. And if you didn't care, empathise, sympathise or just plain like the characters, would you really want to see any of them survive? Or would you just fire them at the Collectors and forget them? Bad things happen to good people in the real world, things that often have no excuse. These events shape them. The game was doing just that, and I feel that the dark, seedy and horrifying aspects of this were needed to paint such a shady world correctly and realistically.
The story took the form of character studies more than part of a big, over-arcing plot in my eyes; an interlude on the way to the main event (which Empire certainly is to continue the comparison), and while I agree that the main thrust of the story outside of the new crew could have had some more depth and a couple less plot holes in it, it was certainly more engaging to me than say Dragon Age: Origins was (that's just me personally - I still played DA:O through and enjoyed it, with the exception of one of the final plot twists was just so idiotic to a person with any concept of morality or simple story foreshadowing that there could be no turning back from what seemed an entirely inevitable ending). I loved ME2, enough to play it through a few times now just to explore different plot paths, etc. which I couldn't do with DA:O. Sure, it was a darker (occasionally uneaven) ride, even marching the path of the Paragon, but I certainly don't think they went too far, at least for me. In fact, without it, I don't think it could have functioned as well as it did.
Anyway, that's my own opinion. Thanks for bearing with me. You can wake up at the back now
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