Van Buren said:
It's not the worst story ever, but it's the most disappointing plot I've experienced in years - Mass Effect 2. In fact, considering the emphasis the series places on narrative, and Bioware's reputation for crafting story-driven "RPGs", it's astounding that ME2 had such an atrocious main story that eviscerates the overarching plot for the entire series. I mainly took issue with a few details -
The most offensive part of the story was that Shepard and Cerberus never had, or even discussed a plan to stop the collectors. Now, think about the game. Reflect on it. Did you, at any point, discuss
how you were going to stop them? You start out with a goal - "I will stop the collectors no matter the cost". Fine, suicide mission, cool. But it wasn't a suicide mission, it wasn't even a mission at all, that was like a broad, overarching strategic goal. A goal you never at any point in the plot had any idea of how you would even come to grips with.
At the start of the game, you and all other characters believe that the Collectors are in fact a whole civilization. They are very advanced and very powerful, and we assume they have many planets, just like all the big factions. They're hidden behind a mysterious relay nobody has returned from, so you have to figure out how to get there. They have some weapon that can disable colonies (that's dumb in itself, but that's a discussion for another time). These are things you do, but beyond this, what is there? How were you going to destroy a
whole civilization with dozens of planets? How were you even going to destroy them if they had a single solitary planet? How were you going to destroy them if they had two space stations instead of one, or two space ships instead of one?
The notion that Commander Shepard and a squad of elite commandos was the right tool for the job of taking the collectors down requires future knowledge that Illusive Man didn't have. He would have first thought to build an entire army, or at least to stockpile weapons of mass destruction. Perhaps should have found a way through the relay, then leaked that information to the Alliance to send a fleet through to fight them off. What ended up happening instead was that every time you talked, he just goes "oh, I have complete faith in you Shepard, do what it takes to bring them down". Then Shepard always goes on and on and on about how it's a suicide mission, how he doesn't expect to come back alive. But in reality, that's bullshit. He never had a chance of even completing his objective (neutralize the collector threat), let alone coming back alive.
To distract you from this obvious, gaping hole in the story and characters, they give you the bullshit final act ass-pull where you HAVE TO GO RESCUE YOUR CREW OMG GO GO NOW NO TIME TO THINK. Shepard apparently thinks that jumping through the relay RIGHT NOW with no idea of what is on the other side and no plan is the smart thing to do when failing apparently means the death of humanity or something. He went full fucking retard! But by pure god-damn coincidence, they have ONE ship, ONE space station and a convenient overload button on said reactor. Not even McGuyver wings it this much.
The icing on the cake is, of course, that the Collectors were never a threat in the first place. Not only would one Reaper not have done diddly squat to help the Reapers return (would have been obliterated by the council fleets just like the last one), but they never would have been able to finish building it. There aren't enough humans in the colonies to finish the Reaper (it's nowhere close to complete circa the boss fight) and it would have had to go after Earth... except landing on Earth is a total death sentence, because the whole Arcturus fleet is between them and Earth. Plus Earth actually has military ships in the solar system already, there are guns on the planet, and so on. A single collector cruiser could never have retrieved the humans it needed, it would have died, and without that ONE ship it had, the collectors would have been back to square one.
That's even assuming they got to Earth - the colonies were having defense guns installed, defense guns that actually drove the ship off. All it would have taken is for an alliance patrol to get lucky and intercept the Collector ship (which was by no means stealthy), and it would have been game over for them. You destroy the Collector ship in the end of the game with a gun that is, according to the codex, "as powerful as a cruiser". The Alliance has hundreds of cruisers. Not only that, if you didn't upgrade to Thanix gun, you blow it up with Disruptor torps (I think? The cutscenes are notoriously inconsistent regarding weapon effects), which any old frigate can mount anyway. Whoops!
ME2 >>> ME1 in gameplay, but damnit if the story in ME2 isn't a turd. I could rant for hours about it.