It is true.

Spoiler

Thane is no leader, so he got Legion killed. As 2nd leader you want to take a character with leadership experience.
The same is true for your second choice of grunt as a leader.

 

Dunno what the spoiler tags are so WARNING

SPOILERS
































Legion/Tali

Mirranda/Garrus

Samara/Jack

Jacob/Grunt to lead back. Worked for me. Lost Legion as I didnt have any shields, saved the crew.

 

*Facepalm*

You just type [ spoiler ] [ / spolier ] (minus the spaces) around what you want hidden.

Learn to DLP, noob.

 

I just don't get why anyone wouldn't do the loyalty missions I made sure and I went and did all of them as well as every ship upgrade even on my first run through not knowing what would happen. I lol at people who keep raging on other sites about losing people because they were too stupid to buy the upgrades.

Also

Spoiler

I've decided on this runthrough I'm going to go with Garrus in the squad leader positions this time and keep my other choices, I went with Jacob on the first and Thane on the second with Legion in the shaft, Grunt protecting the rescued crew and Jack as my biotic.

Grunt: Lived
Jack: Lived
Jacob: Lived
Legion: Lived
Thane: KIA

 

Righto.

Tits or GTFO.

/Dlp'ed.

 

Spoiler

Tali as Tech Specialist
Garrus as Secondary leader both times
Grunt protects the crew
Samara for Biotic Field.

Everyone lived.

Also, am I the only one who sees Joker/EDI as the new Mass Effect OTP?

 

Spoiler

Yeah I'm definitely seeing a pattern here, I think I just messed up on the squad leader picks, I'm going with Garrus this time.

Also lol I agree, their interaction was just freaking hilarious, Joker was always funny but with EDI to interact with its just gold.

Oh and Joker just said one of my new favorite lines from Mass Effect ever, when you ask him his thoughts on the crew and he gets to Garrus "Its great that Garrus finally pulled the stick out of his ass but its slightly worrying what with how he seems to be using the stick to beat people to death with now."

 

Well, I'm just wrapping up my second playthrough. Next, I'll start a new game in ME1 and play that file through ME2 a third time so I have a good save ready for number 3.

My thoughts on ME2? Fantastic game. Sure, there were a couple problems (your teammate's AI getting stupider as the game got harder was one of the bigger ones) but none of them really took away from my enjoyment of the game. Let me put it this way: I got Bioshock 2 on release day. But instead of playing it, I restarted ME2.

As with all Bioware games, one of the major reasons I got this one was for the teammates. I think (not sure though) that this is the biggest teams in a Bioware game since Baldur's Gate 2 with 12 party members (counting Morinth). With double the party members from ME1, you'd expect their quality to go down. But instead, they all seemed to go up.

Here's my blow by blow of the characters.

Jack: A much more intresting character then her trailer indicated, especially if you choose to follow up her romance options. Also one of my favorite teammates, because her abilities really compliment mine as a Sentinel. I expect that to change on playthough number three though.

Grunt: I love Grunt. He combines that badassness of Wrex with the eagerness of a newborn. And as much as I liked Wrex, he never shot someone's face off for insulting me. Big fan of that.

Garrus: I don't know how, but they actually made my least favorite ME1 character intresting. He gives off that old army buddy vibe, and his loyalty quest is one of my favorites.

Tali: On the other hand, they made one of my favorite ME1 characters less intresting. I think she was introduced late, and she's way too easy to romance. I say that I trust her, and all of a sudden she wants me to drop Miranda for her.

Thane: Also introduced late. Never got too attached to him, but if there were more time to play with him I might have.

Samara: Same as Thane, but I liked her more. I also liked how her loyalty quest was the only one that could be completed without any violence. I'm always a fan of roleplaying and not just shooting everything.

Miranda: I actually liked her. Her background was different, and her voicework was very different from everyone elses. My chosen romance for ME3, mainly because I want to see her and Ashley square off.

Jacob: My next to least favorite character. I think more could have been done with him, and he only gets one real moment to shine (his loyalty mission).

Mordin: Mordin is fucking awesome. He sings, he makes sex jokes, and he burns things. Only complaint is that there should have been a cutscene in the game for him to bust out his much-lauded Jackie Chan karate.

Legion: Legion was introduced far too late for my taste. There should have been more involving him.

Zaeed: My least favorite character. I left him in his cargo hold except for his loyalty mission.

Oh, and my favorite moments of the game:

Spoiler

Headbutting the krogan who insults you on Tuchanka
The 'I got better line' from Thane's recruitment mission
Getting to punch that annoying stalker fan again

Oh, and last thing. I thought what they did for Wrex and Liara was intresting and good, but Ashley turned into a complete bitch. Can't wait for Miranda to smack her around.

 

I was weighing the options between romancing Miranda and Tali.

Am I the only one who picked Miranda in hopes that in the 2 or 3 years they have to work on ME3 they'll fix her goddamned face?

 

I liked Miranda's face and the woman who was the template for it is so fucking hot..

 

Maybe but she has no animations whatsoever; not to mention her boohooing about the horrors of genetic perfection are getting old really fast.

 

So you're saying we need a third option in conversations where you can slap or force something into someone's mouth to shut them up? I like it!

 

So something slightly interesting I didn't know about Miranda, her appearance is designed to look like the actress Yvonne Strahovski who does her voice. Yvonne is the girl who plays Sarah on the NBC show "Chuck." The only reason that they gave her black hair instead of blonde was because they decided that it went better with her black Cerberus outfit. Now that I know this, I think they actually did an amazing job of making her look like Yvonne.

 

Yeah, that was a pretty big deal.

I mean, this looks like shit to me.

However, this compared to this? Not that bad.


AH.
Found what I was originally looking for. Here ya go, and do not be scared of the deviantart tag:
http://aidanzon.devianta******/art/Mass-effect-miranda-lawson-151707111

 

Miranda doesn't look bad, it's just... she always wears the same expression. Her lips move a little, but I would have liked to see the rest of her face be more animated.

Tali is way too easy to romance, but I think it's understandable. This is a Bioware game, and it's alluded by Kelly that she's had a crush on you since ME1.

Also, you need to take Legion on Tali's loyalty mission. Changes the whole nature of the trial and adds tons of cool dialogue. Just be careful when you enter the Omega 4 relay since you won't have time to do Legion's loyalty mission.

 

That explains why Miranda's nose is so odd looking for a computer chick. It's just copied from YS. That was bugging me.

Anyway, I fucking love this game. I can't entirely put my finger on why. I never even finished more than half of ME1, but I blew through ME2 in 4 days. It was much more like an interactive movie than any other game I've played. Also they did an awesome job of removing the shitty parts of games (like inventory management) while leaving the cool stuff. It's the sort of game where when you finish a mission and need to talk to somebody they'll put the person near the mission instead of making you pointlessly walk five minutes. Just a much less grind-y experience.

My biggest problem is that the plot is way too short and the main storyline is weak. Allegedly that's just because this is the prelude to ME3, but meh.

 

Loved the game. Originally my biggest problem was how little time the game actually spends on plot development. Now I believe the plot is really recruitment and building the back-stories of these characters for the third game, the collectors were just filler in my opinion.

 

So many spoilers it's not even funny coming up.

Spoiler

The Reapers' plan was simple - wait until life gets tasty enough, then fire up the Citadel and pop the entire Reaper fleet onto the center of galactic power.

Then Sovereign woke up, stretched, yawned, and hit the remote control to send the signal to the Keepers for them to fire up the fuck-over-everyone relay - and nothing happened. The Prothean holdouts on Ilos had warped over and tinkered with the Keepers so they ignored Sovereign and only responded to what the Citadel itself needed. Well, fuck. Sovereign spent ages trying to figure out what the fuck happened, using indoctrinated agents (starting with some scientists that stumbled across him while he was asleep), got in contact with and allied with (a rogue splinter of) the Geth, and eventually worked out that the motherfucking Protheans had done something.

So what to do? Grab your favourite indoctrinee and your new Geth buddies and head over to where someone had dug up one of the Prothean psychic bulletin boards.

Except by complete coincidence motherfucking Shepard, the only asshole stubborn enough to not go batshit from these psychic bulletin boards, and the brand new stealth ship SSV Normandy were on shakedown when the call went out that this thing had been dug up.

Cue Mass Effect.

Reaper Plan B was for Sovereign to make his way to the Citadel to fire things up manually, but they had to sneak someone in or the damn Asari would just slam the Citadel shut in front of him, and then every organic that valued it's non-liquified organs would unite against it. So, gotta find the way those sneaky Prothean bastards snuck their way onto the Citadel, which lead to the whole race to the Conduit.

You know the rest of the story - yadda yadda, humans kill Sovereign, much rejoicing.

Cue Reaper Plan C.

The Reapers didn't put all their faith in Sovereign. Either Sovvy got a message out to the main Reaper fleet or they woke up hungry and cranky and wondering where the hell dinner was, and therefore dialed up Sovereign's backup - the repurposed Protheans, know going by their stage name, the Collectors. Harbringer, apparently just a random Reaper chilling in the deep dark of space, beamed in to the head of the Collector boss and started whipping up a replacement for Sovereign from the safety of a base that is, theoretically, utterly impregnable.

Consider how ridiculously lucky a fully-upgraded complete-survival end run is - Shepard and Normandy Jr and co got through the Omega 4 Relay because they managed to snag a bit of hardware off a Reaper that got topped by a harvestee that fought back seven hundred and forty extinctions ago, and even then it was booby-trapped enough that the only reason things didn't get fucked up then and there was because a cripple managed to dodge his way through the ship and hook up an illegal AI with anti-Reaper tech incorporating a piece of Sovereign to the ships controls and got them the Hell out of dodge, and Shepard and all the characters with full backstories were off gallivanting in their little pod-thing at the time. And the only reason they even knew they needed it was because the Collectors laid a failed trap for Shepard, which gave EDI enough time to ransack their cruiser's systems for info.

Then once they actually pop through, there's the gauntlet before they even hit the damn station. The ship at the start of ME2 is the best of the best - the pinnacle of Turian and human warship technology redesigned by Cerberus at massive expense to all involved. Even that wouldn't have gotten through the gauntlet unscathed, except thanks to the fact that, by coincidence, there's a bloke called Jacob in the crew whose black-ops contacts in the Corsairs, a plausibly deniable splinter of the Alliance military, can get the ship some crazy high-tech Asari-made armour, which is basically carbon nanotubes and motherfucking diamonds crushed superthin by mass effect fields and then piled on thick. Also by pure coincidence, there's this crazy-smart prodigy Quarian tooling around in the engine room with enough expertise to whip up this bleeding-edge overlapping shield thingo that wouldn't work on anything larger and most ships wouldn't bother with because of the crazy levels of maintenance it would require.

Then the collector ship is only easily killed because there's also this crazy turian fucker that can, through his contacts in the turian military and various mercenary groups, fit the ship with these crazy fuck-off bleeding-edge guns that shoots molten uranium alloy at a sizeable fraction of the speed of light that would be ridiculously beyond the current tech-level if they hadn't shamelessly (and secretly) gathered enough chunks of Sovereign to figure out how the fuck it did it.

And all this tech only managed to interweave because of the crazy hyperactive all-singing all-dancing salarian supergenius that by all rights should have been dead of old age a decade ago.

Then they actually get to the station, and the only reason that actually works is because Shepard, who's freaky good at gaining the loyalty of the best of the best (that's why they killed Shepard dead at the start) has got the most ridiculously overpowered team this side of Dragonball Z.

The ideal tech experts? Either thousands of the best Geth programs condensed into a single ideal form that they only ever built one of, or a Quarian supergenius with unmatchable insight into Reaper lackey tech.

The ideal fireteam leaders? Archangel, who lead a team of a dozen mercs with enough precision that the top three mercenary groups found their positions threatened enough that they dropped their incredible hatred of each other to just KILL that asshole. Miranda, who's basically an utterly incredible amount of wealth distilled into one 'perfect' supersoldier, sort of like Leeloo with bigger tits. And Jacob, who was a top agent of those Mission: Impossible dudes IN SPACE before chucking it to be the top security dude of Cerberus' most important and expensive project.

The ideal biotic? Either Jack, the condensed results of hundreds of experiments on biotic children and some utterly insane programming tricks followed by years of being used and abused by the scum of space to turn her into a ball of rage contained only by utter fuck-you stubbornness. Or a thousand-year-old Asari knight templar that's spent centuries walking into bad places full of bad people and being the only one that walked out again.

Then the Hold The Line is made possible by Grunt, the utterly condensed ideal of Krogan (the race that wiped out the Rachni, remember, and brought the galaxy to it's knees before they got castrated), and Archangel, who held off three seperate PMCs working in concert for days on end, and Zaeed (if you got the DLC) who co-founded the baddest motherfucking PMC in known space, all held that motherfucking line. And there was Thane, too, I suppose.

And then Shepard killed the embyonic but awake and very pissed off Reaper on foot.

The only reason Mass Effect 2 didn't end with a (or several) brand new Reaper(s) made of humans fucking up everybody's shit is because Shepard got insanely, incredibly, unbelievably lucky, with allies and resources and leadership coming together into a perfect storm of fuck-you-Reapers. Harbringer would have been well within it's rights to yell OMGWTFHAX constantly during the final fight. By any logical way of looking at things, the Collector Base should have been utterly impregnable.

Destroying the Collector Base wiped out the latest and greatest method of Reaper creation - the Collectors were freshly-made out of Protheans from the last extinction, remember, and the Cruiser had enough room in it's hull to hold the population of entire worlds comfortably.

And all this is not including the peripheral bits of favourmongering Shepard could've carried out while tooling around - the heretic Geth being wiped out or reprogrammed during Legion's loyalty mission leaps to mind, and Shepard's ol' buddy Wrex uniting all the Krogan and Mordin potentially getting his hands on an almost-completed Genophage cure, and the Migrant Fleet being potentially very impressed with both Tali and Shepard and possibly closer to lending their strength to the Final Fight. And the Rachni sent word that they'll rock up for the endgame, too. Not to mention Samara to rally the Asari, Mordin with all his old friends in the STG, and Garrus the ubercop and once Spectre consideree, Thane the Hanar-trained assassin and spiritual figure, Jacob the ex-Corsair... And you can convince the council to reinstate your Spectre credentials. Then there's Liara becoming a newer and bluer Shadow Broker and Kaidan/Ashley climbing the ranks, DLC Zaeed who's one usurper's death away from reclaiming leadership of arguably the scariest mercs out there.

All the now-reunited Geth, the Migrant Fleet, the newly-reborn Rachni, the close-to-a-cure and more-united-than-ever Krogan, Very Important Personages of the Asari, Turians, Salarians and Hanar in Shepard's rolodex, and friends old and new in all levels of the Alliance power structure... Shepard's building up a lot of forces that'll be called upon before all this is over, just you wait. I wouldn't be surprised if ME3 is ME2, only with entire races having recruitment and loyalty missions.

tl;dr - ME2 was as big a blow against the Reapers as ME1, even if the finale didn't have a stirring musical score as hundreds of spaceships did battle and thousands of lives were lost.

 

You forget that

Spoiler

Every single one of those people can die. Meaning that there's going to be *very* little plot and dialogue based around the characters you met in ME2, or anything that affects the game besides its overall end.