I've been replaying the series (Originally in anticipation of Andromeda, but IRL derailed that handily) and I'm now a fair way into 3, and I've been thinking about how the games are regarded. Mass Effect 1 is much beloved by many, but 2 and 3 are far closer to each other in style than either are to 1, so let's leave that one aside for now. What I'm curious about is, essentially, why 2 is beloved more than 3. Now, okay, elephant in the room; the ending to Mass Effect 3 soured a hell of a lot of people on it, and understandably so. Still, until that last little segment of purestrain bulltrout, I thought at release, and am only convinced more now, that 3 is a substantially better game. 2 was fun at first but, both at release and when I just finished it last month, I got really bored by the last third and wanted it to be over. Back then I just stopped doing everything but the main quest because I wanted to reach the end of the damn thing. This time I stuck with it more so I could see the DLCs (universally underwhelming) and loyalty missions (Heavily mixed bag. Legion's and Tali's were incredible, Mordin's and Thane's was pretty great, didn't care about any of the others.) and I ended up putting the difficulty down to the lowest setting so I could blast through the content more quickly.

3 is tremendously better. I have more fun going down to some utterly inconsequential side mission in 3 than I did with all but a couple of main or companion quests in 2. More than that; the game does a far better job of selling the sense of overwhelming doom that the Reapers represent. The Collectors were assholes, sure, but I didn't get much of an impression they were an actual danger except because the Alliance said "Eh, idgaf."; when Williams/Alenko set up just a couple of regular defensive guns on Horizon the Collector ship has to get out of dodge. Meanwhile, 3 has a sense of near-constant danger. There are reapers all over the galaxy. Worlds are burning. You find wreckage and debris in more systems than you find intact infrastructure. Hell, the game starts with the entire Batarian Hegemony reduced to small groups of desperate refugees.

So why does 2 rate higher in just about every critic's eyes than 3? 2 is several points higher on Metacritic, almost always comes higher in rankings of the series or RPGs or games in general, and is lauded as perhaps Bioware's finest hour in their entire 3D output. Is it entirely down to the ending? I'm very curious to know what everyone else thinks!