ME:A seems to focus on a sequel... (SPOILERS)

at least story wise they have set themselves up well to jump off from. but i do think they focused on that to much and for a franchise that was already on shakey ground, they really should have focused on just making MEA the best it could be and make itself its own contained story.

The fact that there are open questions is one good thing about this story IMO.
I've written this in my review post already but basically, this being Mass Effect, I really like the fact that we are not solving every puzzle, finding every answer right away. And it's not like we don't achieve anything. We do achieve our objectives, set out at the beginning (and more), we do set up the Initiative and we do give the bad guys a hell of a punch in the face. This is not like Deus Ex: Mankind Devided where it feels like we didn't accomplish anything. Given that, I have absolutely no problem with loose ends, in fact I welcome them the way there were done (even if they'd never make a sequel). It adds to the mystery and to the feeling that we are just small fish in a vast universe.

In it's combination of achievement of immediate goals but open threads within the bigger picture, ME:A really did remind me of the ending of ME1, which IMO was just about the best ending of any video game I've ever played (never mind that ME2 literally blew all that potential to hell and gone in the first 5 minutes). Great balance between victory and closure and leaving threads for more as far as I am concerned.

So basically it is ME1 again, which is what a lot of people have been saying.

ME2 would have fit so well with a faction like the kett rather than the reapers. You defeat them at their home base and move on, without being saddled with the fact that you're still on the hook for a total apocalypse and accomplished little to nothing to truly stop it. 

I agree, and it shocks (not really) me as bioware said a sequel may not happen and that if there was, the prior game will not correlate to the other. However why ignore what andromeda set up? And how can one take bioware seriously because of how it's setup? I see a sequel happening.

ME1 was the same way as well. You clean up the mess with saren but you still have the question of sovereign mentioning there are more of his kind and mentioning how they clean up the galaxy. Plus you had the question of humanity being ready to be a main part of the council race and how the rest would look upon them after what they do in the fight vs sovereign himself.

ME3 really made ME2 sort of a disjointed mess of a story.  ME2 by itself is fantastic.  The characters, the atmospheres, the enhanced gameplay and dialogue choices are all great.  However when you look at it in the context of the full story... the full trilogy.. ME2 stands out as very awkward and out of place.  The only important pieces of the story are the DLC's...  Arrival and Lair of the Shadow Broker.

Before anyone hates me, I love ME2.  I love the whole original trilogy.  I've played them numerous times over and always enjoy them.  Taken alone outside of the context of a trilogy series, ME2's story is pretty good.

However, the direction they took ME3's story really put ME2 in an uncomfortable position.  

1.) The roster of characters you build for the Suicide Mission (except Tali and Garrus) are all delegated to side characters with many of their content being side missions that don't REALLY affect the main story.  Outside of Legion and Mordin and possibly Thane's sacrifice, everyone else are just side stories added to the game so the characters could appear

2.) The Collector story line is pointless.  There's never any payoff for why the Reapers sent them to abduct and process humans specifically.  In the context of ME1 and ME3, that whole plot point is kind of irrelevant.

3.) Human Reaper - what.. in.. the.. world.  It was very video gamey when it first appeared but after ME3 it's just.. all the Reapers look the same and they came to cull everyone anyway.  What a waste of resources to build this Terminator, non space worthy contraption that isn't for any purpose.  Really, what was the purpose?

4.) Collector base - This doesn't matter at all even in the slightest how you decide to handle the base.  No matter what it just ends up as a couple of barely recognized war assets.  If you gave TIM the base, he's still your enemy.  If you destroyed it, oh well... You still get assets for salvaged remains.

5.) Cerberus - no matter what, Cerberus is always your enemy in ME3 no matter how you handle them in 2.  If you sided with TIM or not, it doesn't matter

6.) Harbinger - He's nothing in ME3.  He's everything in ME2.  Arrival centers around him.  ME2 he's pulling all the strings and so fascinated by Shepard.  He's the big ominous baddie we wanted!  ME3?  He's never referenced until he flies in at the last second to stand in front of the Citadel beam on Earth and then flies off after shooting the ground in front of Shepard (not actually shooting Shepard himself so apparently he has awful aim) and then he's just.... gone.  He never speaks.  He never reveals anything.  He never expands on the character we got in ME2.


I'm sure there's plenty more but this was just off the top of my head.  I really hope that if Bioware is planning an Andromeda trilogy, if they haven't already, they spend time to sit down and plan the entire story start to finish now and then stick with it.  It's obvious that from the get go they never had a plan with the original trilogy of where they were going.  That's evident by ME3 (which I did think was great).  They didn't have a plan for why the Reapers do what they do.  They didn't have a plan for the ultimate invasion and how it would be resolved.  They had a great idea, made the first game, then had to come up with a continuation, made the second game and then were in a bind how to resolve it.

I've read Drew Karpyshyn's dark energy plot and even that makes no sense in the grand scheme of things.  First, I think the choices from that ending are far worse than what we actually got.  Second, dark energy is such a minor, teeny tiny little plot point barely even spoken about in the first two games outside of Tali's recruitment mission in ME2.  If that had ended up being the entire reason for the Reapers and the conclusion it still would have been woefully underwhelming.  I suppose it would have made ME2 more relevant because iit was the genetic diversity of mankind that the Reapers thought was the key to stopping the expansion of dark energy and that's why they went after them specifically in ME2.  Sitll though, the early planned ending choice for this story line sucked.

From a strictly story perspective, I don't want a repeat of the original trilogy, as great as it may be.  No matter if they make a new trilogy, one more game, an Andromeda saga that expands past three games... Whatever they choose to do I hope they already have the template laid and they stick to it... expanding or contracting certain aspects as necessary but having a plan on where they plan to go and how it all ends up.  The best stories are planned this way.

I was going to give you a like there, since I agree with pretty much everything you say about ME2, until I got to the dark energy bit.

I think what  alot of people misinterpret is that dark energy in the ME universe means nothing else but Mass Effect fields. That's why I find DK's idea for the ending so great. Because it would have very neatly tied the entire trilogy, the entire universe even into a bow.
The entire reasons for why the ME universe exists is because of the Mass Effect phenomenon, it's why we have space travel, the guns that we have, the relays, everything. In ME1, we find out that this is all controlled by the reapers, who gave us enough peaces to work with to control our technological evolution. In ME2, we get the first hints that there is something fishy going on with dark energy in stars. Now, DK's idea was just that, a very unfinished idea but I think tying the reaper's reason for their mass genocide and the cycles back to the foundation of the ME universe had a lot of potential.
It also could have easily made some sense within the ME premise: If eezo was creating mass effect fields in suns, causing them to go super nova, creating more eezo, which would amplify the effect, the entire galaxy would be an incredibly unstable system in the long term (as in billions of years). But that would be the kind of time scale the reapers can perceive (and we can't, it would really be something "beyond our understanding"). They would have been able to measure the problem getting worse and they are trying to find a solution through the cycles.

It would have instantly made the reapers seem way more sensible, way more capable and IMO more grand if you will, as they are not just focusing on some maybes and unprovable beliefs. And it would have tied the plot back to the premise of the universe.
It needed work in the details but it was a promising premise, IMO.

Anyway, it's all water under the bridge. I do agree that ME2 sticks out like a sore thumb but also, you make it sound like that was ME3's fault. IMO, the writers had little choice but to take the plot back on track by knitting it back more to ME1 since ME2 really didn't bring any new points forward that were usable. In fact, apart from a few exceptions, ME3 did an admirable job in towing the cart back out of the ditch ME2 rode the franchise into. Even sidelining most of the ME2 squad wasn't really something that could be avoided. I mean, I love the suicide mission as much as the next guy but setting it up so that every character could potentially be dead effectively precluded using more then 2 or 3 of them again in any substantial manner.
Those were things the devs should have thought about when making ME2. They were planning for a trilogy with save import after all but when playing ME2 (as I do right now), it becomes very clear they approached the game as a single entity with no regard for how it served the greater scheme of the trilogy. That was their main mistake with this - otherwise brilliant and very fun - game.

On its own merits, ME2 is a fun, alien abduction ripping yarn. The problem is that it completely torpedoed all your work from ME1 getting people to finally come around to accept the reality of the Reaper threat. It then proceeded to waste time on a story which was little more than fighting some B list enemies and not doing anything to advance the Reaper story.

And it doomed ME3 to be a rushed fudge of a game. Because with no unity, no preparation, no work on rooting out Reaper agents and developing tech to combat Indoctrination and tackle such huge foes, married with a surprise attack that all but wipes out a major race and we are looking at a scenario that should have been completely impossibld to win. Cue the awful mcguffin of the Crucible, the absurd improbability of its swift construction, the fact the Reapers couldn't fail to find it, given that so many people are working on it and guarding it. It would be found and destroyed, end of story.

Bioware have proved again and again and again that they are not interested in or capable of making games with narrative consistency. They are absolutely dreadful at it.

I'll give ya a like.  You make it sound more sensible than the theories surrounding the DE plot I've read online where it all ended with basically deciding, yes sacrifice just humanity because our diversity can somehow solve the Dark Energy problem or no we'll go it on our own and hope we can find a solution.

I agree though, ME2 set up a lot of plot points that just couldn't be used, that's why I'm saying ME3 and ME1 are much more connected.  If you cut the entirety of ME2 except for say LoSB (even this one is a stretch because while it IS referenced in ME3 if you played it, they also make Liara just as connected but NOT the Shadow Broker if you didn't) and Arrival DLC's you would hardly miss anything at all and just flow straight from ME1 to ME3.  Which is sad because ME2 is a good game in it's own right, and lots of people consider it the Empire Strikes Back of the trilogy and the finest game in the franchise. 

The fact that none of the characters in Andromeda can die (I know they can't but I haven't finished the game myself) gives me hope that they are planning things out slightly better.  I suppose it can be argued that having no 'Virmire decision' hurts the game, but I don't necessarily agree, especially because it would be retreading ground we've already covered.  Virmire was intense and that decision was one of the hardest in the entire franchise, however it also meant that whoever survived was delegated to what amounted to a cameo appearance in the next game.  Even when the characters reappeared in ME3, I felt like they had very little overall content.  They were injured swiftly and carted away for a good portion of the game and when they returned to the ship, no matter if they were your LI or not, they seemed to have the least amount of interaction among the companions on the Normandy.

With everyone still alive at the end of Andromeda, a sequel can be built where every single one of these companions can return and be put in play.  I think that's good!  It means everyone will still have them and the developers can focus on fleshing them all out even more.  I know deciding who lives and who dies in video games, especially with sequels where you want to see your choices matter, is something a lot of people want but it doesn't seem like there is really any good formula anyone has discovered.  Game developers are never going to spend as much resources on characters that may only be alive for one portion of fans in the next game.  It happened in ME and it's happened in Telltale's The Walking Dead.  In that game you often have a choice of who will live or die, but it never really matters because everyone ends up dead anyway no matter what you do at some point or they swiftly die a meaningless death at the beginning of the next game.

The same could be said of SW:TOR's expansions. Nothing is ever finished. Nothing is ever over. I agree that some things are that way, even ME1. But at least in ME1 you got to see Saren go down. Plus we got to see Sovereign being taken down. Here, it's all too easy for another Kett to get a wild hair in his ass, decide that he's now the Archon and for this to start all over again.

Great, won't that be fun. Playing the same game over and over and over again. Except now, this time, PeeBee's turned against you! And in the midst of turning, Cora has some foreshadowing that she's gonna be the next! For only $59.99 you can see how Cora's turned against you!

No, it's all bullshit.

Nothing is ever explained in those expansions, nothing. I do agree that the human interaction is the most critical role of the games as a series, but it currently (as of ME3) stands at about 35-40% of why people love these games. More than any other part singularly, but far less than 75-80% that BioWare thinks that it currently is.