Was Mass Effect 2 really that Much Better than MEA?

While ME 2 is a fun game, I will always remember it as the 1.5 episode of the previous trilogy. The loyalty and recruitement mission were well done, the problem is that they were pretty much all of the freaking game. You spend more time fighting mercenaries or bandits, rather than fighting the collector and reapers, you know the main ennemy you are supposed to fight. Actually you fight them in only 3 mission, horizon colony, collector ship and suicide mission. the rest is all blue sun, eclipse and blood pack, and sometime geth.

And the suicide mission while well made, when you really think about it, the result is pointless. We destroy the collector base, ok but that was merely an infantry base for the reaper and a laboratory to create one more. Killing a reaper is pretty much useless beacause dozens of thousand are coming. So in the end all the suicide mission did was killing a group of their infantry (which is not that helpful, because they have tons of reserves and it would have been stupid if they had no reserves at all except the collector base) and we kill one among the legion of reaper that are coming to invade.

We pretty much spend a hole game doing a sabotage mission, while it was fun to play, once I finished ME 2 I was asking myself "ok that was good but what was the point?". That is why even when ME 3 had a dissapointing ending at release, at least it was the sequel to ME 1 that I was waiting for. After ME 2, I had a good experience but the more I played, the more I asked myself "3 years of waiting for just side story, yeah..."

MEA is far from perfect and have its flaws and not all of them are technical issues (like navigation, inventory system, a tone that is too light). But I had more fun when I played it that when I played ME 2, I felt as a game that has to build a fondation for future game, that has build a setting in the andromeda galaxy and establish characters before having character development with each one of them.

And actually the end results feels like something has been accomplished, When you start MEA, the initiative is in deep shit, the colonisation does not seem possible, the war against the ketts is threatening your people and the others, and there is no diplomatic relation with the andromeda natives. All of those point change at the end where the ketts are pushed back or at least severely weakened, the angara start to trust the initiative, the settlers have began to colonize the andromeda galaxy.

ME 2 we advance but only with side characters, not with the galaxy itself, we barely fought our main ennemy. It was a very enjoyable ride, but it was not the sequel that advanced the main plot by much, I had to wait 2 more years for that.