What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age

[Errorname]

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Not to mention the whole opening ME2 with straight up killing Shepard, and then resurrecting him 5 mins later as a reason for why he's now beholden to Cerberus.

Change the opening to pretty much anything else, and Cerberus can be in the background/less of a focus. The opening also killed the stakes on the expected one way mission for me as well. When your game opens with resurrecting your MC, a suicide mission climax is rather meaningless when its already shown MC can be brought back from the dead.

Spoiler: ME2

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I actually kind of like the opening, it's pretty normalized for RPG sequels to start with big dramatic resets that explain why all your cool stuff from the first game is gone and why you have to start over from scratch. In that tradition I think the Normandy blowing up is one of my favourites, actually. It's a little bit nonsense but it's dramatic nonsense, and if Shepard was resurrected by a faction that was more compelling than Cerberus I'd probably have no issues with it.

I maintain that Mass Effect works a whole heck of a lot better if you go with ME2, ME1, and ME3. For clarity, I'm going to call the originals ME1, ME2 and ME3; the reordered versions are MEC (Cerberus), MES (Specter), and MER (Reaper)

Some details have to be moved around; I think I'd keep Wrex in MEC, with Grunt's story happening in the new MES, but I think you can keep Tali in MEC more or less the same. Introducing Legion in MEC gives you background on the Geth. You might move Mordin to MES, so you can keep the Wrex/Grunt/Mordin story more or less together. But you have, IMO, a clearer narrative, no weird left turn for Cerberus, that then turns right back around for the next entry.

I can see the logic, but I think you'd break a lot of character arcs just to have a cleaner progression for Cerberus, and the narrative bends itself into twists to accommodate those guys way too much as it is.

But I also hate Monday morning quarterbacking, he says after going over the offensive failures in detail.

Mass Effect gives you so many opportunities to Monday Morning Quarterback it. I think basically everyone who played MEA could write at least a few paragraphs about how they'd have improved the story.