I loved these games too. They were great games in a lot of ways (for example I think 3's multiplayer, which was fantastic, has been overlooked in this thread) but I think the quality of the story slipped from game to game, and I'm not just talking about the ending.
Mass Effect 1 was an amazing Star Trek like experience, with all sorts of cool new races and galactic politics to encounter, a great main story to unravel, and the leisurely pacing to drink it all in. The gameplay was janky as hell, but partially because it tried to provide a lot more options, with all the equipment, conversation areas where gunfights would suddenly break out (You'll notice that in 2 and 3 the fighting and talking areas are generally segregated) and areas that could be approached in a vehicle or on foot from multiple angles with whatever strategy you wanted. Enemies came from every species and every faction. It was open world in the best and the worst ways.
Mass Effect 2 was character focused with less extraneous world building, and a sense of time pressure that is at odds with what makes the series great. It also had way fewer locations than 1 (due to the removal of the Mako) and a boring, ill-defined, villain. The individual vignettes varied in quality, but if you wanted to get the most out of the game you had to run around after every mission and talk to everyone, which was annoying, and while attempts were made to knit the relationships together the lack of interaction between other crew members just seemed weird to me. Why did Garrus never play poker (or whatever) with Jacob and Thane? Why wasn't Mordin always bugging Grunt, trying to learn more about him? They were all just always at their posts waiting for you to come around so they could unload their stories (some of which were quite interesting.) The gunplay in ME2 was much more polished but at the cost of the open world feeling. It was like 2 games stitched together, a talky adventure game and a third person corridor shooter. I get why people liked it, but I missed the integrated world of 1. I missed fighting thresher maws and mercenaries on the same planet.
Mass Effect 3 had its moments and was still better than most games, but 90% of it was super predictable, the fact that nobody really reacted to Javik (or Eva, the unshackled AI) was SUPER distracting for me, and the whole thing was so focused on the war effort that the expansive Star Trek feel was almost totally lost. The enemies were all mercs or a few boring other types and the whole thing just felt like Intergalactic GoW, including collectibles to find and conversations tacked on. The gameplay was fine, the story was still great for a videogame, but I was bored with the game well before the stupid ending and might not have finished had I not been playing the same character for over 100 hours of gametime.
As for the DLC...it was a mixed bag. From Ashes was absolutely necessary. Bring down the sky, Shadow Broker, and Citidel were all great. Overlord, Arrival and Leviathan was good but not worth the money. Zaeed and Kasumi were...fine. Omega was exhausting and had way too much combat (when I think of ME3 these days most of what I remember is fighting through those endless red hallways full of troopers and robots) The fact that they were all integrated into the games and released well after the games' release was just stupid.
Overall the series changed over time, and in my opinion not for the better. It got more polished, less ambitious, and less interesting. Still pretty amazing overall, and there's never been anything quite like it in videogames.
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