Favorite Mission: Virmire (Mass Effect)
So you've flown across the galaxy and have exhausted every lead hunting down the rogue Spectre Saren. All you can do now is investigate this gargled transmission from an infiltration team out in the middle of nowhere...
And right off the bat it tells you that this mission ain't gonna be like nothin' you've done before. Unless you've done one of two very specific things beforehand, one of your squadmates is going to be a corpse before the mission even gets underway.
Then you get inside Saren's base and the music turns into an ominous remix of his theme, and you find some members of the infiltration team whose minds have been destroyed. You fight your way past krogan and Geth Destroyers, two of the toughest enemies you have to fight on foot, and then...
"You exist because we allow it. And you will end because we demand it."
Yes, yes, at this point we all know that Sovereign is not just Saren's ship, but was additionally his childhood sled. But damn, that reveal!
And then to top it all off, you have to sacrifice one of your two human squadmates to get off the planet. This is literally the only time in the entire trilogy where there isn't a secret third option. Someone dies.
My only complaint about Virmire is that this track doesn't play in its entirety (you hear it immediately after you decide which of your squadmates to save, but it cuts to something else the moment you get in an elevator to actually do the saving).
Seriously, everything about the mission is awesome. Except possibly for Liara's sand joke. And some really bizarre sound mixing, so that at one point (if you sneak in through the sewage pipe and kill the indoctrinated salarians, rather than charge through the front door and fight through a room full of geth) you can't hear what your squad is saying. Okay, I have a few complaints about it. But it's still the part of the entire trilogy I look forward to replaying the most.
Favorite Weapons: Mattock (Mass Effect 2), Geth Pulse Rifle, Eviscerator (Mass Effect 3)
In Mass Effect 2 (it's nerfed slightly in ME3), the Mattock is essentially a semiautomatic sniper rifle masquerading as an assault rifle. It is lethally accurate, does fairly high base damage, and can fire basically as fast as you can click. (With Heightened Adrenaline Rush and Incendiary Ammo, you can shoot down all four injection tubes on the Reaper-Larva in one go.)
With a decent Thermal Clip upgrade, the Geth Pulse Rifle can fire 160 rounds before needing to reload. That is plenty of time to let Adrenaline Rush cool down... and in ME3, Adrenaline Rush automatically reloads your weapon without you needing to go through the animation.
And finally, the Eviscerator is the go-to weapon for Vanguards everywhere. Yes, the Disciple is lighter, but the Eviscerator has a slightly faster re-load time, which is going to be far more important in the long run. And really, it's a difference between -184% cooldown and -200% cooldown. If that actually makes a difference, I'd love to hear about it.
Favorite Squadmate (abilities): Zaeed Massani (Mass Effect 2), Tali'Zorah (Mass Effect 2 and 3)
ME2 introduces a lot of gameplay changes, the most important of which is the retirement of the ammo mods from the first game. Now, specific ammo types do more damage against specific enemies... but only specific squadmates have access to those ammo types. Being the only character (other than a Soldier or an Infiltrator Shepard) with Squad Disruptor Ammo goes a long way to making Zaeed an essential part of your team on higher difficulty levels or against the geth. His Inferno Grenades only make him more dangerous, and his passive can boost his damage output as high as fifty percent. Damn.
(All of Zaeed's abilities are given to Ashley in ME3, but powers are a lot more viable in that game because of the weight capacity system, and also Ashley seems to be glitched so that whenever she tries to activate one of her abilities, she just stays in cover until manually directed to attack an enemy. Also, y'know, she might be dead. See Virmire, above.)
(Oh, and Zaeed, being a sniper, has access to the Incisor, which is glitched to do full damage in the hands of your squadmates regardless of the difficulty setting. So there's that.)
Then there's Tali'Zorah vas Neema nar Rayya/vas Normandy/von Hauptkof of Ulm, who gains the "r*t*rd magnet" ability... I mean "Explosive Drone" in ME2. And her unlockable, Energy Drain, is the perfect bonus power for Vanguards, who have no shield-blaster naturally.
Favorite Squadmate (character): Garrus Vakarian
Come on, is this even close? (Okay, Wrex...) There's a reason I have a lot of trouble deciding who to romance as BroShep, and that reason is: there's not a female version of Garrus.
Joking aside, I'd like to point out that Garrus is the only squadmate you can confess to sabotaging the Genophage cure in in ME3. He's the only squadmate who'd understand, anyway. I have killed Wrex in two different playthroughs just to unlock that scene.
Least Favorite Mission: Sins of the Father (Mass Effect 2), Rannoch: Geth Server (Mass Effect 3)
Thane Krios is a lizard assassin with inoperable lung cancer. But rather than go all Walter White on us, he's determined to make the universe a better place before he dies. While he's fairly fragile, he has access to Warp (incredibly useful if you can set up biotic combos), a sniper rifle (and thus the game-breakingly powerful Incisor; it's glitched so that your squadmates don't do reduced damage with it), and his unlockable, Shredder Ammo, may be useless on higher difficulties, but it's still pretty amazing to watch an unprotected Collector go down in a handful of hits.
And his loyalty mission sucks.
You would think it would be a stealth-based mission akin to the first section of Arrival, and the fact that I just compared Arrival favorably to something tells you what I think of "Sins of the Father." No, what this mission actually entails is you having two conversations, following an NPC around for a little while, and then having another conversation.
The only reason "Sins" isn't tied with "The Ardat-Yakshi," Samara's loyalty mission, is because that mission ends with the hardest Reputation check in the entire game, so at least there's some suspense, regardless of whether you want to recruit Morinth or not.
(Oh, and there's glitch at the end of "Sins" - if you kill the hostage yourself, Thane might turn invisible for the rest of the conversation. There are some odd things that QA just flat-out missed. Favorite blooper? Probably Nihilus winking in and out of existence during the prologue cutscene/conversation; he should be right next to Shepard while Joker's saying "Thrusters, check, navigation, check," etc. Anderson in 2 and Chackwas in 3 sometimes getting glitched so they face away from Shepard and try turning their necks around 180 degrees is also pretty funny.)
Now, I didn't think it was possible for Mass Effect 3 to have a worse mission than "Sins of the Father." Mainly because, whatever its storytelling flaws (and there are oh so many), 3 has hands-down the best gameplay of the franchise (with one exception, see the next entry) and anyone who says otherwise is in denial.
And yet, they pulled it off. In the middle of BioWare's Battlestar Galactica homage/ripoff, they suddenly decide to start going all TRON on us instead. Shepard is told to venture inside a geth server, Matrix-style, and solve the simplest puzzles since Test Chamber 1 in the original Portal. I get that this was hastily thrown in at the last minute* to make the geth more sympathetic for the Big Choice at the End of Act II, but it was hastily thrown in at the last minute to make the geth more sympathetic at the end of Act II. I honestly break out my iPad while I do this mission so I can do something entertaining while I advance the plot.
*I'm speculating. And judging.
Stupidest Innovation: The turret mini-games (Mass Effect 3)
Come on. These were thrown in there to pad out the missions. I don't want to spend any more time on Thessia than is strictly necessary (see the next entry). Don't make me hold the line for two minutes in a glorified cutscene.
Most Annoying Squadmate: Liara T'soni (Mass Effect 3)
One word: Banshees.
Explanation: Liara is three times as old as Shepard is (her species lives ten times as long as humans do). Shepard has been dealing with Husks (undead human zombies) since the first game. Nobody comments on how creepy it is fighting undead humans. Nobody makes a big deal about undead turians, krogan or rachni in the third game. But undead asari? Oh, that's special.
And let's talk about her little bout of mood whiplash after you finish the Thessia mission. First Liara comforts Shepard as the latter fires futilely, Princess-Leia-at-the-end-of-Empire-style, at Kai Leng's retreating gunship. Then you get back to the Normandy, and suddenly she's the basket case. ...uh, okay then.
As a sidebar, her line in Mass Effect 2 about flaying people alive with her mind reminded me of Buffy Season Six. This is unforgivable.
Most Useless Squadmate: Kasumi Goto (Mass Effect 2)
Most Frustrating Mission: Stealing Memory (Mass Effect 2)
I'm explaining both of these at once because they overlap. Stealing Memory is the name of a DLC that gives you squadmate Kasmumi Goto and her Loyalty mission, um, "Stealing Memory." It starts out like the aforementioned "Sins of the Father," but thankfully there is a shooting part later on.
Unfortunately, you're blessed with only the presence of Kasumi, who as squadmates go is
...the mission gets marginally better at the end, with a halfway decent boss fight. But that's too little too late.
Weirdest graphical translation: Jack
Yeah, Bailey and Udina suddenly have different hair colors. And yes, Anderson's skin is suddenly darker. And yes, no matter what, you will have to touch up your Shepard in the character creation screen to make him/her look like (s)he did in ME2. But seriously, look at Jack's model in ME2 and her model in ME3 and tell me that girl didn't grow at least half a foot between games.
Hardest Mission: Dossier: Tali (Mass Effect 2)
I mean this in a good way. See, you need to do this on one of the highest difficulty settings if you want the Geth Pulse Rifle in ME2 (and it's not as OP as its ME3 counterpart... but the priiiiiiiize). Anyway, this mission re-introduces the geth, and they're back and meaner than they were in the first game. See, shields regenerate (eventually,) but enemy health doesn't. And geth have huge shields and low health (so basically, in Starcraft II, they're Archons). And, even if you're not gunning for the bonus weapon, there's another gimmick: the planet's sun has gone hypernova and basically turns you into a vampire for this mission (especially if you've already beaten the game once and have Energy Drain as your bonus power); you have to stay out of the sunlight because it drains your shields.
And the boss fight at the end is surely the hardest in the entire franchise. The Colossus hits with the force of Harbinger and has much better defenses.
Biggest Misdirection: EDI
So your ship's AI is voiced by Tricia "Number Six," "Kerrigan" Helfer and has a name that reminds you of the ED-209 from RoboCop? In a 'verse where every AI you've encountered so far has gone batfrak insane? Raise your hand if you expected her to be evil.
Especially if you got your hands on the soundtrack to Mass Effect 3 before playing the game and noted that one of the tracks at the end was called "Betrayal." And then there's this huge setup about taking EDI to the Cerberus base at the end of that game? (Actually, the "Betrayal" track comes from much earlier in the game - namely, if you shoot Mordin at the end of Act 1.)
Best Story: Mass Effect
Like this was difficult. ME3's story is godawful, and ME2 is extremely padded out with sidequests (most of which, I hasten to add, were fun, but they felt like standalone episodes on a TV show, whereas ME1 and ME3 felt more like coherent novels). ME1? Here's this extremely well-constructed world, here's the plot... holy f*cking sh*t here's the twist, YOUR WORDS ARE AS EMPTY AS YOUR FUTURE.
Also, ME1 gives you the most control over the story. ME2 Shep has to work with Cerberus, and has to give the Illusive Man the verbal finger at the end. ME3 has Shep going around uniting the galaxy (and the screwed-up Reputation system in that game doesn't help the role-playing at all). But ME1 puts you in the driver's seat for one of the galaxy-altering decisions Shepard can make. And I mean beyond the dialogue wheel thing; you wanna burn the Feros colony to the ground, you have to do it yourself. Where else in the series can you actively gun innocent people down (on two different missions: Feros and the Paragon-exclusive "secret" mission)* just because it's easier that way?
*By the way, aside from one teensy part of Zaeed's loyalty mission in 2 (where you decide which path to take on the spot), the Paragon- and Renegade-exclusive missions in 1 are the only times that Shepard's morality actually has an effect on the gameplay. Just saying.
Finally, in my opinion, taking the Nemesis (not the class/enemy class; the character type) away from the game was a huge mistake. In ME1, Shepard and Saren are both Spectres, neither of whom (after the prologue) are exactly trusted by the Council. On an extremely Renegade playthrough where I got the Renegade-exclusive Lord Darius mission, I decided there's this extra parallel between Saren and (that) Shepard: both are being used by their superiors (Sovereign and Hackett), and both will be discarded when they're no longer useful (yes, this Shepard was bummed that she couldn't permanently join Cerberus at the end of 2). That's not to say that Saren doesn't work as well in a Paragon playthrough; Saren is still what Shepard could be if (s)he just had one bad day.
In contrast, there isn't really a Nemesis character in ME2. Shepard could never be Harbinger (aside from the fact that it doesn't matter how many times they kill you) or the Illusive Man. And ME3 doesn't allow Shepard to be a hyperdick like Kai Leng.
(Unrelated to Mass Effect, but yes, this Nemesis thing is what inspired my Faith-centric Buffy reviews. I started writing this post a loooooooooong time before that "published" date you see.)
Best Renegade Interrupt
Best Paragon Interrupt
The fact that these are both in ME2 is not surprising, because ME2 wins my final category, which is Best Characterization.
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