My hot take is that Mass Effect sucked... at release. If you get the Legendary Edition, all my issues with it go away.

The biggest problems were with Mass Effect and Mass Effect 3. The latter had loot boxes/gambling, and that was removed and you'd never know it was there. Meanwhile, Mass Effect 4 had its servers shut down, but they still sell online junk for it. The stuff simply does not work. There's an interface for it, but it won't work. Fortunately the base game goes on sale dirt cheap, and even the deluxe edition is worth it for what you get, which is kind of a "less good Mass Effect 2" in a sense.

The issue with the first one is, it doesn't respect difficulty choice when you're on a planet, it just jumps to the highest difficulty. Also, you don't get experience when you're in the Mako (the planetary vehicle), which is the hardest part of the game. Any victories you gain in your toughest trials, and I'm not even exaggerating here, have exactly zero reward. That's not good game design. That sounds like a bug and BioWare never fixed it for the OG. The Legendary Edition both respects your difficulty choice throughout the entire thing, and you get XP for stuff done in the Mako. The OG also had far fewer repair kits for the Mako, and a longer cooldown to use them.

Unfortunately, they didn't fix the trinary choice at the end of Mass Effect 3. Martin Sheen just prattles on for about 20 minutes about the end and what the choices are, and then you're given 3 paths and just enough time to reach one of them. They never tell you what each one does. Sure, you could pause the game and look it up, but at that point you kinda just want it to end. It's three deus ex machinas, they're all explained ad nauseum, but they aren't identified. Then they play a short cinematic, and then it's over. A lot of people complained about this upon release, and I'm annoyed they did not fix it.

Then there was Mass Effect 4, the one that took place in Andromeda. Such a fun game as far as the terraforming stuff. But then you get done with that and it's a bunch of fetch quests and side quests. And I've seen some softcore stuff of Peebee online that I do not believe is faked (e.g. it's in tribute videos), but I never got any romance options in mine. Not sure if that was because I was on Xbox or what. Still, I got a censored experience and that seems like a valid mark against the game. Not to mention straight up lazy, almost slop-like code where an NPC wants to talk to you on the ship, won't speak to you on the planet, so you take off (unskippable cutscene), and talk to them on the ship, and they want you to do something for them on the very planet you were literally just on, so you land again (another unskippable cutscene) and then you have to drive however far to the destination. It's a silly game. But, despite what people said, it's just as good as the others. Better than the first. About on par with the third. Not quite as good as the second.

Still, I wish we'd got that ME4 DLC, and I wish they'd finished ME5, especially after dropping that epic teaser.