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It's more than the character writing that's good, it's how all the little tangents in the game end up contributing to the outcome of the final battle that made it interesting / satisfying. Though I agree they dropped the ball with the main storyline, and the fact that they had to make a DLC just to connect it to part 3 is proof positive that they screwed up.
That's a good point! Mass Effect 2 was absolutely what I thought about when I said stories could create compelling gameplay if your choices impact character outcomes. It's also a good example of what you said, that your character and story choices impact the mechanics you have available to you in major challenges. At their best, story-driven games have the mechanics and the gameplay feed into each other so that broad segments of the playerbase see both elements as compelling.
I'm rarely a "take notes so I can min/max" person, but I will absolutely admit to using guides to maximize my story choices for the final battle.
My dislike of ME2 was shaped by the fact that I never played the games when they were coming out, and I played them all in Legendary Edition for the first time. So a lot of the graphical and mechanical hard edges of ME1 were shaved off, so I enjoyed it more than a lot of people did, while ME2's tangential storyline stood out more as I was playing them in sequence and felt myself dragged away from the Reapers storyline in a way players who played them years apart might not have felt.
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