I fucked up the poll because I hit enter too early and it doesn't seem to take my attempts to fix it. Live with it.
The intro
I figure by now everyone will already have finished ME2 twice, but I just finished my first playthrough. Let me start by saying that I loved it. Despite its overwhelming amount of little plotholes, it quickly became one of my favorite games ever. That's not something I say lightly, but ME2 just has so many wonderful little details that elevate it beyond just being a good game and earning it a solid place in my personal top-10.
Anyway, on to the whining. Yeah, I could go on and on about all the things I love about the game, but I'd rather whine about the few things that pissed me off. It's not the plotholes. Sure, there are a lot of them, but most of them don't become apparent until you stop and think about them for a while (apart from the really blatant ones like Samara's recruitment mission), so they don't really mess with my enjoyment of the game while I'm playing it.
The thing I want to talk about it how it seems that, while they took all that was good about the first game and made it better, they also took all that was bad about the first game and made it worse.
The pointless whining
1: The guns
Why did it suck in ME1?
Overheating was annoying. It was actually a decent mechanic, but because of a one issue it got to be really annoying. There was a bug in ME1 that caused overheated guns to stop cooling down, making them unusable until you switched them for another weapon or reloaded the game. This bug was made even more annoying by enemies that used the Overload ability on you, because at times you wouldn't even be able to tell if it was the bug or your enemies that were messing with your guns. I believe the cause of the bug was linked to one of the achievements, which sounds totally stupid.
Why is it worse in ME2?
It probably wasn't a direct reaction to that bug (after all, they could've just fixed it, and there's no Overload ability in ME2), they replaced the whole heat system with a bog-standard ammo system. Yeah sure there's some lame explanation about how the 'ammo' are actually replaceable heat sinks (which doesn't make the slightest bit of sense), but I know ammo packs when I see them. It's completely useless since every weapon uses the same ammo, and there's so much ammo lying around in the game that you'll never run out anyway, so the whole ammo system serves absolutely no purpose that the overheating system didn't do better.
2: The inventory
Why did it suck in ME1?
You could have a ton of guns with only slightly different stats, a ton of armors with slightly different stats, and then you had a ton of upgrades you could apply to each of them individually. Keeping track of all of that for each of your party members was a pain, in no small part due to the retarded inventory menu.
Why is it worse in ME2?
Because it's not there. In stead of using their brains while designing a menu, they decided to scrap the whole buying new equipment thing, the whole upgrading system, the whole goddamn inventory system. You just find a new weapon once in a great while, and that weapon then automatically becomes available to your entire team. Likewise, upgrades are automatically applied to your whole team once you 'invent' them. There's no individuality here, no room for trying out new combinations of upgrades, no choices to be made. Armor doesn't exist for anyone but Shepard anymore, with only one purely aesthetic alternative available per character. Lets not even get into the fact that the female characters (except Tali - another reason she's the best female character in the game) go into OUTER SPACE SHOOTOUTS wearing nothing more than a slutty leather outfit and a breather mask.
3: The skills
Why did it suck in ME1?
It depends on your point of view, but my main problem with it was that, as a new player, you didn't know which ones were the good ones. There were a lot of skills, and there were a few that you really needed if you wanted to be able to open locks and stuff. Also, it was hard to decide whether to spread out your skill points or to focus on one skill at a time. This problem was mostly solved once you figured out you only needed one or two skills at a high level in your team and could mess with the rest any way you wanted, but I imagine it would have annoyed new players.
Why is it worse in ME2?
They took the same approach here as they did with the weapons. Why make things more intuitive if we can just reduce the amount of choices to just 3 or 4, and make sure that your skills neve have any relevance to anything outside of battle? That way us idiot gamers really can't go wrong anymore. Oh, and while we're at it let's remove the conversation skills and base the conversation options off your alignment in stead, forcing the player to go full-on Paragon or Renegade for at least half the game in order to make the more difficult speech checks! Brilliant!
4: The minigames
Why did it suck in ME1?
It didn't. Or well, it actually did, but it was 100% optional. The hacking minigame in ME1 wasn't bad but got really boring really quickly. That's why, in their infinite wisdom, Bioware gave us omnigel. It didn't make the slightest bit of sense, but it was brilliant how you could avoid these dull and mood-destroying minigames at the cost of some of this magical substance. Either you play the minigame and save some onmigel, or you lose some gel and get on with the game. Whether you liked or hated hacking in ME1, it never interfered with your enjoyment.
Why is it worse in ME2?
There's no more omnigel. This alone is reason enough to fire someone at Bioware (preferably the guy who thought this was a good idea). Without omnigel, there's no longer a way to avoid these shitty minigames. To make things worse, they made these minigames a lot more annoying. Neither of the new minigames is all that hard (although trying the bypass game with a touchpad made me want to throw my laptop out of the train window more than once), and they look slightly more hacking-related than the one in ME1, but they've become boring match-the-picture games that are somehow even less interesting than the more timing-based ME1 one. And did I mention that they're no longer optional? Seriously, that was the best part of the ME1 minigame, and they just tossed it out like that.
5: The loading times
Why did it suck in ME1?
We all know the elevator jokes about ME1. The elevators that took you from one location to another were slow, dull, and broke the pace of the game in more than one location.
Why is it worse in ME2?
Those slow, dull, pace-breaking elevators were replaced by even slower, duller, and pace-breakinger loading screens. Yeah the elevators were annoying, but not half as annoying as the alternative. At least in the elevators you got funny conversations between teammates and bits and pieces of news and background information. I would've loved to hear ME2 my party member have those little mini-conversations between levels, but Bioware though it was somehow a better idea to make the player look at the same goddamn pointless animation a million times. And in stead of hearing news reports during the times when you've got nothing better to do, you now have to stand around near those news terminals to hear them, taking up valueable time you could've been spending hacking into random people's bank accounts (which is, by the way, totally the new 'walk into your house and smash your flowerpots for coins').
6: The non plot-related planets
Why did it suck in ME1?
Because the team that designed ME1's planets and the team that designed the Mako were kept in two separate cages, and were never allowed to communicate with each other. The Mako has caught a lot of flak, but I think that a very big part of that was the environment's fault. On smooth-ish open surfaces like roads and hills, the Mako was slightly awkward at worst. But when you took the Mako down to one of those pointless planets in order to find some rare metal or artifact or whatever, you often had to traverse the entire map, which was filled with steep mountains and jagged cliffs. It's in these places that the Mako really begins to suck, and you start bouncing and sliding around and the whole thing handles like Shepard is driving home after a particularly wild party involving vast amounts of Asari dancers and Krogan liquor.
Why is it worse in ME2?
Because in stead of improving the Mako's handling and not making their planets suck ass, Bioware decided to remove both the Mako and the planetary surfaces from the game. Like with most of the items on this list they had a good idea but slightly messed up the implementation in the first game. Then, in stead of learning from their mistakes and improving the things they did wrong, they decided to give up, get rid of the whole system, and put something even worse in place. The mining minigame has become one of the focus points of fan anger, and rightfully so. Like all Mass Effect minigames ever, it's dreadfully boring. Unlike the other minigames, it's also very slow. Luckily it's pretty much optional, but if you want to get all the cool upgrades you're still going to have to do a nontrivial amount of mining. It just pads the game with a whole lot of extra gameplay time during which you're being bored out of your mind. Listen, Bioware. If you make games as great as ME2 with this kind of replay value, the last thing you want to do is add things that take up a lot of time and are about as exciting as watching grass grow.
7: The exploring
Why did it suck in ME1?
Because there was no point. You could explore a huge amount of planets, but most of them were really boring. There was absolutely no point in visiting most of them unless you're an OCD completionist who absolutely had to find that those 10 Turian fingernail clippings, 12 Asari thongs, and 20 Krogan poetry books from all corners of the galaxy to complete your collection.
Why is it worse in ME2?
Because there still is no point. Most planets are still boring, and while you now have a reason to visit some of them (the mining minigame), it's an extremely bad reason because of how boring it is. The thing that makes it worse is that this time you run out of gas every so often, so in addition to being pointless it now costs money. Money you'd be better off spending on replacing your dead fish yet again.
The intro
I figure by now everyone will already have finished ME2 twice, but I just finished my first playthrough. Let me start by saying that I loved it. Despite its overwhelming amount of little plotholes, it quickly became one of my favorite games ever. That's not something I say lightly, but ME2 just has so many wonderful little details that elevate it beyond just being a good game and earning it a solid place in my personal top-10.
Anyway, on to the whining. Yeah, I could go on and on about all the things I love about the game, but I'd rather whine about the few things that pissed me off. It's not the plotholes. Sure, there are a lot of them, but most of them don't become apparent until you stop and think about them for a while (apart from the really blatant ones like Samara's recruitment mission), so they don't really mess with my enjoyment of the game while I'm playing it.
The thing I want to talk about it how it seems that, while they took all that was good about the first game and made it better, they also took all that was bad about the first game and made it worse.
The pointless whining
1: The guns
Why did it suck in ME1?
Overheating was annoying. It was actually a decent mechanic, but because of a one issue it got to be really annoying. There was a bug in ME1 that caused overheated guns to stop cooling down, making them unusable until you switched them for another weapon or reloaded the game. This bug was made even more annoying by enemies that used the Overload ability on you, because at times you wouldn't even be able to tell if it was the bug or your enemies that were messing with your guns. I believe the cause of the bug was linked to one of the achievements, which sounds totally stupid.
Why is it worse in ME2?
It probably wasn't a direct reaction to that bug (after all, they could've just fixed it, and there's no Overload ability in ME2), they replaced the whole heat system with a bog-standard ammo system. Yeah sure there's some lame explanation about how the 'ammo' are actually replaceable heat sinks (which doesn't make the slightest bit of sense), but I know ammo packs when I see them. It's completely useless since every weapon uses the same ammo, and there's so much ammo lying around in the game that you'll never run out anyway, so the whole ammo system serves absolutely no purpose that the overheating system didn't do better.
2: The inventory
Why did it suck in ME1?
You could have a ton of guns with only slightly different stats, a ton of armors with slightly different stats, and then you had a ton of upgrades you could apply to each of them individually. Keeping track of all of that for each of your party members was a pain, in no small part due to the retarded inventory menu.
Why is it worse in ME2?
Because it's not there. In stead of using their brains while designing a menu, they decided to scrap the whole buying new equipment thing, the whole upgrading system, the whole goddamn inventory system. You just find a new weapon once in a great while, and that weapon then automatically becomes available to your entire team. Likewise, upgrades are automatically applied to your whole team once you 'invent' them. There's no individuality here, no room for trying out new combinations of upgrades, no choices to be made. Armor doesn't exist for anyone but Shepard anymore, with only one purely aesthetic alternative available per character. Lets not even get into the fact that the female characters (except Tali - another reason she's the best female character in the game) go into OUTER SPACE SHOOTOUTS wearing nothing more than a slutty leather outfit and a breather mask.
3: The skills
Why did it suck in ME1?
It depends on your point of view, but my main problem with it was that, as a new player, you didn't know which ones were the good ones. There were a lot of skills, and there were a few that you really needed if you wanted to be able to open locks and stuff. Also, it was hard to decide whether to spread out your skill points or to focus on one skill at a time. This problem was mostly solved once you figured out you only needed one or two skills at a high level in your team and could mess with the rest any way you wanted, but I imagine it would have annoyed new players.
Why is it worse in ME2?
They took the same approach here as they did with the weapons. Why make things more intuitive if we can just reduce the amount of choices to just 3 or 4, and make sure that your skills neve have any relevance to anything outside of battle? That way us idiot gamers really can't go wrong anymore. Oh, and while we're at it let's remove the conversation skills and base the conversation options off your alignment in stead, forcing the player to go full-on Paragon or Renegade for at least half the game in order to make the more difficult speech checks! Brilliant!
4: The minigames
Why did it suck in ME1?
It didn't. Or well, it actually did, but it was 100% optional. The hacking minigame in ME1 wasn't bad but got really boring really quickly. That's why, in their infinite wisdom, Bioware gave us omnigel. It didn't make the slightest bit of sense, but it was brilliant how you could avoid these dull and mood-destroying minigames at the cost of some of this magical substance. Either you play the minigame and save some onmigel, or you lose some gel and get on with the game. Whether you liked or hated hacking in ME1, it never interfered with your enjoyment.
Why is it worse in ME2?
There's no more omnigel. This alone is reason enough to fire someone at Bioware (preferably the guy who thought this was a good idea). Without omnigel, there's no longer a way to avoid these shitty minigames. To make things worse, they made these minigames a lot more annoying. Neither of the new minigames is all that hard (although trying the bypass game with a touchpad made me want to throw my laptop out of the train window more than once), and they look slightly more hacking-related than the one in ME1, but they've become boring match-the-picture games that are somehow even less interesting than the more timing-based ME1 one. And did I mention that they're no longer optional? Seriously, that was the best part of the ME1 minigame, and they just tossed it out like that.
5: The loading times
Why did it suck in ME1?
We all know the elevator jokes about ME1. The elevators that took you from one location to another were slow, dull, and broke the pace of the game in more than one location.
Why is it worse in ME2?
Those slow, dull, pace-breaking elevators were replaced by even slower, duller, and pace-breakinger loading screens. Yeah the elevators were annoying, but not half as annoying as the alternative. At least in the elevators you got funny conversations between teammates and bits and pieces of news and background information. I would've loved to hear ME2 my party member have those little mini-conversations between levels, but Bioware though it was somehow a better idea to make the player look at the same goddamn pointless animation a million times. And in stead of hearing news reports during the times when you've got nothing better to do, you now have to stand around near those news terminals to hear them, taking up valueable time you could've been spending hacking into random people's bank accounts (which is, by the way, totally the new 'walk into your house and smash your flowerpots for coins').
6: The non plot-related planets
Why did it suck in ME1?
Because the team that designed ME1's planets and the team that designed the Mako were kept in two separate cages, and were never allowed to communicate with each other. The Mako has caught a lot of flak, but I think that a very big part of that was the environment's fault. On smooth-ish open surfaces like roads and hills, the Mako was slightly awkward at worst. But when you took the Mako down to one of those pointless planets in order to find some rare metal or artifact or whatever, you often had to traverse the entire map, which was filled with steep mountains and jagged cliffs. It's in these places that the Mako really begins to suck, and you start bouncing and sliding around and the whole thing handles like Shepard is driving home after a particularly wild party involving vast amounts of Asari dancers and Krogan liquor.
Why is it worse in ME2?
Because in stead of improving the Mako's handling and not making their planets suck ass, Bioware decided to remove both the Mako and the planetary surfaces from the game. Like with most of the items on this list they had a good idea but slightly messed up the implementation in the first game. Then, in stead of learning from their mistakes and improving the things they did wrong, they decided to give up, get rid of the whole system, and put something even worse in place. The mining minigame has become one of the focus points of fan anger, and rightfully so. Like all Mass Effect minigames ever, it's dreadfully boring. Unlike the other minigames, it's also very slow. Luckily it's pretty much optional, but if you want to get all the cool upgrades you're still going to have to do a nontrivial amount of mining. It just pads the game with a whole lot of extra gameplay time during which you're being bored out of your mind. Listen, Bioware. If you make games as great as ME2 with this kind of replay value, the last thing you want to do is add things that take up a lot of time and are about as exciting as watching grass grow.
7: The exploring
Why did it suck in ME1?
Because there was no point. You could explore a huge amount of planets, but most of them were really boring. There was absolutely no point in visiting most of them unless you're an OCD completionist who absolutely had to find that those 10 Turian fingernail clippings, 12 Asari thongs, and 20 Krogan poetry books from all corners of the galaxy to complete your collection.
Why is it worse in ME2?
Because there still is no point. Most planets are still boring, and while you now have a reason to visit some of them (the mining minigame), it's an extremely bad reason because of how boring it is. The thing that makes it worse is that this time you run out of gas every so often, so in addition to being pointless it now costs money. Money you'd be better off spending on replacing your dead fish yet again.
.
