Who are your least favorite squadmates in the ME trilogy and why? [Pick 2]

I don't really understand why so many people chose Liara... I found her character growth throughout the trilogy to be be the most significant. I like that her story is sweet and charming whether you decide to romance her or if she is just a friend.

I have to select Liara because even though I don't hate her character, I don't find much enjoyment in it either. It's a bit difficult for me to explain because to me, it is basically a bunch of minor things that end up piling up to major size. I'll try to explain some of them the best I can.

Note this is my opinionated opinion. I felt like Liara was being delegated into roles for the sake of the plot without it fitting her character or being as a result of character development. That probably requires an elaboration. I didn’t feel like her story portions were executed in a way that was enjoyable to experience. Again, it felt like she was being delegated into roles because the plot needed a character to be in the role, not because it suited her character specifically. Sometimes it wasn’t even necessary to put in her in that role: the Shadow Broker proves more or less unnecessary in the next game since her value there is as a prothean expert and honestly, she seems kind of bad at being the shadow broker since it seems everybody knows she is.

In all honesty, it feels like either the writers didn’t know what to do with her character until the Reaper Wars or it wasn’t executed as well as it could have been.

I also didn’t like how Liara’s design seemed inconsistent from game to game. It may be due to something technical like texture and Liara was just one of the characters where it was more noticeable but then there are things like her eyes. In the third game, her eyes are a very blue, well, blue whereas in the previous games her eyes were a light blue that bordered on being grey. It's not a lighting issue either: I've checked multiple shots and compared.

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Pre-LOTSB

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LOTSB

It’s minor, I know, but it creates this sort of visual dissonance for me whenever I see her that I don’t really get with other characters so she sticks out more in a negative way because of it.

There were also scenes that I disliked and with some, it is because, quite frankly, Liara could seem a bit off-putting if Shepard had barely any positive interactions with her in the first game and if she's not an love interest. I'll try to provide examples.

One is the mandatory hug which I know seems minor to many but still bothers me if Shepard and Liara has barely had any positive interactions with each other. I've heard people say that Shepard and Liara might have gotten closer during the time between the first game and the second game but there's no mandatory hug for any of the other returning squadmates, barring romances, and even if this was the case, it would still be an inconsistency for players because they have not witnessed this change in the relationship.

A second one concerns Shepard’s dog tags if Liara was not the romanced character. Why did she have Shepard’s dog tags if Shepard was a spaceborn? Spaceborn Shepard came from a military family so it seems very unlikely they wouldn’t want those dog tags. Also and I don't have military know-how about this but I don't think tags of deceased members are given to people who were not related or romantically involved with the deceased so it seems odd that Liara would have them even in the case of the other backgrounds if she was not romanced. It may be that I'm misremembering and it may have been said that Liara was given the dogtags by Hackett to specifically pass them on to Shepard.

A third one is how Liara kept Shepard’s armor in her apartment. This is the armor that Shepard died horrifically in by either suffocated or burning up in orbit, possibly both. It kind of seem like a questionable item to remember them by as oppose to a crew picture and it just rubs me the wrong way especially if Liara is a non-li. Also, how did Liara get the armor? How did she get it off Shepard’s body? Given how Shepard died, wouldn’t the armor more or less have been fused to ‘em?

There are more but this is running long as it is. Again, this is just my opinion on why I voted as I did. I know it seems like minor stuff but it adds up for me into major size and that’s why I don’t really enjoy Liara’s character as much as I want to and why I voted for her. Again, it’s my opinion. It’s not that I hate her. It’s just that at best, I’m indifferent to her and at worst, I'm deimmersed by her for the lack of a better word. That is also why I didn’t vote for Jacob because barring that moment, Jacob feels like a consistent character for the most part. Despite intially disliking her, I came to like Ashley in the first game... until the third game where most of the traits I liked her for seemed gone.

I don't really understand why so many people chose Liara... I found her character growth throughout the trilogy to be be the most significant. I like that her story is sweet and charming whether you decide to romance her or if she is just a friend.

Liara in ME1 is established as a shy, awkward, socially withdrawn person who struggles with even detecting a joke. Fine, that's who she was, I can run with that.

By the third game, she's running around in the field, risking her head and dodging bullets while running a job as THE Shadow Broker AND helping the Crucible find resources AND using her Prothean archaeology skills to decipher languages AND spying on teammates' personal backgrounds AND counteracting Cerberus AND building a time capsule.

So, i'm sorry geth fans, it's Legion.

Poor Jacob lol