That's a very nice write up and I agree with a lot of the things you say. Even the ones that I don't I can understand where they are coming from. A few notes:
- I think places looking different from game to game is not really a problem. It's more about Bioware having mroe knowledge of the engine and being abel to bring their vision more fully into reality. Places in ME1 suffer from a lack of detail.
- I think the work ME1 does in stablishing the universe is indeed incredible and I somewhat took it for granted for quite a long time. I knew it was great, I knew I loved the series after the very first playthrough, but it was only after playing many other games that fail to achieve such a great result that I realized it wasn't as easy as I might have thought. I do think it could do with less text. I'm sure a lot of people love the reading the codex and I'm one of them, 30% of the time. I feel a lot of entires (not only in ME1, but the other games as well) don't really make the universe better. Take two examples: space travel and space combat. In the first we have quite a few entries talking about it, and I feel most are necessary, yet when we actually see shipping going into lightspeed it looks just like any other Sci-Fi, while if we go by the lore ships in the Mass Effect universe travels like the one in The Expanse, only that mass effect fields make it FTL. The second example is worse because many codex entries exist only for the sake of existing. Everything we see about ships, about how space battles are fought and the weapons that are used are never shown in the cutscenes. Or are 98% ignored. So you have one universe of the codex and the other of the cutscenes, that can be improved. I think the codex works best when they give you a small and loose idea of what this or that concept is, but the nuance and richness comes from other places, like dialogue.
- Squadmates in ME1 can feel like walking codex, espcially Liara and Tali. The others one I found much more natural. And about characters chaning too much from one game to the other. Liara yes, she is one character in ME1 and a completely another one in ME2 and ME3, but the others? I found their evolution very reasonable.
- One thing about ME3 that I wanted to say is that I think the problem with Cerberus is less that we fight it too much and more that we fight the reaper too little. I suppose you could say it's the same, but I think most missions that you fight Cerberus it made sense to fight them (as much as sense as Cerberus could have considering how much they changed, at least). They were small raids or precision strikes. The problem comes not only from the Reapers having few missions, but from those missions being just small segments as well, not different from Cerberus' raids. Take the mission in Palaven's moon. It was supposed to be a major battle against reapers force, but it feels no different than any other level. Missions like that should have been bigger and more interactive.
- Final point, I don't think the Reapers were a "millstone around the neck". Their concept is awesome, and everytime I play the trilogy I feel they were an incredible foe that had a pathetic use in ME3. This negative view about the Reapers is common though and I've seen many fans saying that if they ever reboot the franchise, they should do without them. I can see the appeal of that but I can't say I fully agree. The Mass Effect universe might have been just as rich without the Repaers, but the story wouldn't be. The Reapers give a reason for the things to change, for status quo long stablished to be dismantled. They could have been handled much better, but my whole poing in this thread was that ME3 didn't have the time to even try to handle them better.
Anyway, I only wanted to say a few words. I'm gonna stop now.
The thing about the Reapers is that they work best the less you know about them, which is a problem because a direct conflict with them kinda necessitates that you learn more about them, which inevitably removes all other interesting possibilities for their existence. They're also so unbelievably powerful that any sort of confrontation with them necessitates the kind of deus ex machina handwave we get with the Crucible in order to defeat them. It's only in retrospect that so much of Mass Effect was dragged down by the Reapers, but that having been said I wouldn't want them completely excised, just treated more like the Borg from Star Trek or the White Walkers in the early seasons of GoT; we know they're there, they're coming for us, and we'll have to deal with them eventually, but for now we have to deal with these more immediate, more manageable threats right now. ME2 did this and honestly if things didn't need to end in a trilogy we could have had so many other games before a Reaper invasion we could have mined so many other stories to tell. Again though, it's a matter of hindsight.
As for fighting Cerberus, having just completed ME3 I can tell you that Cerberus is crazy overpowered in this game. Here is a non-comprehensive list of what they are able to accomplish in ME3:
-Infiltrate the Citadel and nearly overthrow it in a coup attempt, outgunning C-Sec and any Spectres on hand
-Operate in multiple theaters of war all across the galaxy in missions that involve at least several battalions of soldiers in the various story and N7 missions
-Operate a fleet of ships, including at least one cruiser-class ship and several advanced, cutting edge fighters, sufficient in size to commit the Alliance's entire Fifth Fleet in the assault on Cronos Station
-Run the experiments and facilities conducted at Sanctuary on Horizon that housed, according to the planet's population estimates and assuming that not everyone living on Horizon was at Sanctuary, at minimum hundreds of thousands of people
-Inflitrate an STG base on the Salarian Homeworld undetected, or basically outmaneuver the smartest and sneakiest of the Citadel races
This is despite only having around 150 operatives total in ME2 and spending most of their resources on rebuilding you, rebuilding the Normandy, and Project Overlord. See, EDI says after you've removed her AI shackles that Cerberus is divided into three cells of 50 members (we can assume that Overlord is the third cell's focus given that she confirms Lazarus and rebuilding the Normandy were the other two, at least if I recall correctly) that each are given their own project and funding to work on independent of the other cells, and although she says that Cerberus has funding in the "billions" it is a little incredulous to believe that they can resurrect Shepard at the confirmed cost of 2 billion credits, rebuild and upgrade the Normandy at assuredly several times that cost given that Rear Admiral Mikhailovich says the first one cost as much as a heavy cruiser in the first game, run the four separate installations working on Overlord, finance the scientists and soldiers and engineers working at the miscellaneous sites like the Dead Reaper and Project Hammerhead, operate Cronos Station and whatever they've got going on there, and then less than a year later be able to train, equip, and field an entire army and navy on top of all that.
So yeah, long story short, could have done with a lot less Cerberus and a lot more Reaper fighting. And DON'T get me STARTED on Kai Leng lol
This is the biggest BioWare-ism that really should be stopped, just for their own sake. BioWare always has this trope between games of "rewarding" continuity with unbelievable character "upgrades". This is an example of that. I recall in the Trespasser DLC of Dragon Age Inquisition there's a two year gap since the main story ended and when you meet just about anyone from the squad it's like "This guy became king of the city, this person became leader of the stuff" and they do that in ME2 and ME3 as well. It's kind of a slap in the face to the player's investment or belief in the storytelling imo, because this is such a lazy "we wanted the character to go here" but without showing that development.
That's one of the good things about Liara's information-broker arc at least. They made it a DLC to show her becoming the shadow broker. A really ballsy move to be honest, and it sure did obliterate a lot of the fan myths and theories surrounding the truth of the Shadow Broker back in 2010 because a lot of players speculated about it because of ME1, but for the most part that DLC really did it justice because the progression is shown, not told, and the Broker's deals as well as Liara's involvement with it ties thematically back into what's important to Shepard's arc which is his friendships and the fact that he died and was recovered thanks to Liara.
But all in all I really wish BioWare would stop taking character-leaps between games. Ashley/Kaidan jump about 6 ranks from what they were in Mass Effect 2 to Mass Effect 3, and I know, it was to foreshadow how meddlesome Udina became as the councilor (even if you totally chose Anderson........) and how he was "secretly EVIL and working with Cerberus". Man...
I do believe large parts of the storyline is well told. The macro-level storytelling is really solid in regards to the conflict of Us vs Them; Our civilization and the previous extinct species versus the Reaper "gods", and the big-level threads like the Krogan vs Turians vs Salarians or Geth vs Quarian are given so much respect over the course of the trilogy -- it's just that between all the great stuff there's some really egrigous inconsistencies and that is, as you said, pervasive.
There's also Wrex becoming the de facto leader of Tuchanka after being a mercenary less than 2 years earlier in ME1, Garrus going from beatcop to Batman (although I think this one works the best considering it had been established Garrus was good enough to be considered for Spectre status earlier) to adviser to Palaven's leadership in ME3, Tali going from teenage girl to participating in Quarian Special Ops missions (again this is somewhat explained as her just being there for technical expertise and besides she was with Shepard) to potentially becoming an Admiral in ME3, and so on. It's not that any of these are bad per se, in fact some of them like Space Batman are genuinely cool character progressions, I just found it a little off-putting at times, like the game was trying to make me feel like such a powerful hero that having people around me just made them the best of the best.
That's something that wore on me the further I got in this series, the constant hero worship of Shepard got to be too much for me by ME3. Granted, given the stuff they've accomplished it makes sense people would be in awe of Shepard, but I wasn't interested in these games to become Space Jesus, just see the world and hang out with cool characters, and I think games already indulge a bit too much in power fantasies as it is so it would be nice if the Cult of Shepard (ironic that Citadel deliberately played into that) was toned down a bit.
I'm not familiar with Mordin or Legion's replacements, but Wrex's brother standing in for him severely changed the tone of all the Tuchanka scenes.
I think the Tuchanka plot is solid enough that it works either way (although I haven't seen it with Not-Mordin so maybe that could contribute) but I consider it a step down simply due to the fact that Wreav is not as interesting a character as Wrex is. That doesn't mean he isn't interesting at all, the fact that he's a hardcore traditionalist works dramatically given the choices in front of you, but there's just going to be more going on with Wrex due to your background with him that makes it work better. All the "replacement" characters are just that, replacements so that you can still move through the plot even if you couldn't figure out how to save Wrex in ME1 or get everyone throught the Suicide Mission alive in ME2. No one looks at those scenes on Tuchanka or Rannoch and says "Yeah these work just as well without the main characters."
