I’ve started replaying the Mass Effect trilogy, and I’m partway into the second game.  Since game three is still fresh in my mind (and not for a good reason) I am now even more convinced that the first game is the best game of the three.  That led me to try and analyze why, and I realized it was a change made in The Hobbit that answered the question.  I have some problems with The Hobbit, the endless CGI battles became a bore, but the writers, and Jackson made one very smart choice.  They personalized the antagonist in the person of the White Orc that killed Thorin’s father, and that Thorin maimed.  It gave us a pole star, if you will, someone to focus on.

They did that in Mass Effect 1 with Sarin.  Yes, you ultimately discover that Sovereign is behind it all, but you have personal interactions with Sarin.  He mocks you in front of the Council, and makes Shepard seem foolish and delusional.  You know that he and his ship have indoctrinated and ruined Liara’s mother, you confront him again on Virmire, and finally you try to help him find redemption in the end.  It’s powerful and it’s personal.

In my first play through of Mass Effect 2 I found the Collectors mysterious and terrifying, but on this second play through it’s less engaging.  Mostly the game consists of your recruiting the Dirty Dozen for the suicide mission, and then confronting the Collectors when they steal your crew.  That’s a powerful moment, but ultimately they are just faceless.  The designers tried to address that with Harbinger constantly “assuming direct control”, and talking smack to Shepard, but it all seems very arms length.  In fact a friend of mine actually didn’t realize that Harbinger was a Reaper and not just the commander of the Collectors until I pointed that out to him.  That intensified his reaction, but the fact he didn’t see that shows the failure to personalize the villain.

Game three is a scavenger hunt to find shit, and Harbinger is startlingly absent.  I had assumed after game 2 that Harbinger would be that personalized enemy, but you actually never interact with him in any meaningful way.  They tried to make Kai Leng and The Illusive Man be the personalized villains, but that was doomed to failure because from the beginning of the first the designers promised us that the Reapers were the ultimate problem.  They created Harbinger as the stand in for all the Reapers, and then they never developed it as a character or gave players the satisfaction of that be the final confrontation.

Contrast that with Dragon Age: Origins where you know within 30 minutes that you are going to face the Archdemon, and let me tell you, getting up the courage to go out on the roof of the tower for that final battle is an emotional moment in that game.

There are other reasons I think Mass Effect 1 is the superior game of the three.  Some of that is personal to me.  I like to manage my own inventory.  I liked finding, buying and upgrading my team’s armor.  I liked personalizing their weapons and ammo depending up on the situation.  Where I would fault game 1 is in the character interactions.  They became a good deal deeper in the later games.  Your conversations with Garrus in game 2 where you see Shepard’s doubt and vulnerability were great, and the male Shepard/Kaidan romance was one of the best things in game 3.

But back to the main point.  This need for a personified, personalized villain has me looking and evaluating the projects I’m currently writing.  Is Grenier enough of an antagonist in THE EDGE OF DARKNESS?  How about the Wild Card movie?  Do I have a worthy opponent for my young hero?  What about the urban fantasy I have to write in my personae as Phillipa Bornikova?  Who is the ultimate villain of PUBLISH AND PERISH?

I may be doing a bit of tinkering with my outlines, and taking a hard look at how to build to those ending climaxes.