As a longtime fan of the series, it was a lot of fun going back to these games and powering through with everything I knew. It was even better as someone who never touched any of the DLC and got to experience all of it for the first time. The games had such a pull to me that I went well out of my way to 100% this game's achievements, and likely saw nearly every event I could in the game. Every one of these games had a "that one fight" on Insanity, but for the series that inspired a lot of my own gaming preferences and still stands to this day as my favorite RPG bar none, the frustrations were worth getting that 100% for once.

The Gameplay is as I remember it across all three games played on Veteran:
- Mass Effect 1 was just that little bit floaty in gunplay but snappy in power use, and so much more fun thanks to freely modifiable guns; You haven't lived til you put HE rounds on a Bolt-action style Sniper Rifle or a Heavy Shotgun and watched the bodies embed themselves in the walls and ceilings
- Mass Effect 2 tightened up gunplay and reduced the sheer volume of options you had in ME1, in exchange for making the classes more unique to each other, a detail I do appreciate; Vanguard became my favorite class pretty quickly once I had Biotic Charge. I did find myself missing the customization I had in 1's guns, and it did take away the level of customization I had in how a character could be built, but the direct gameplay was still improved.
- Mass Effect 3 has its own little bugbears with things like auto-targeting making headshots up close more frustrating than it's worth trying to do, but it did expand outward a bit more from Mass Effect 2's scaled back level-up trees. Guns on the other hand saw a very substantial upgrade in customization, with more variables to tweak across the whole system, and the simple fact that all guns are usable with all classes now means you're able to tweak your setup any way you like.

And having played on Insanity across all three games, I had a decent idea of where the game's difficulty came from in each case: 1's difficulty was mostly from the sheer tankiness of the enemies, because after a certain point in your armor upgrading, they don't usually do enough damage to matter. 2's difficulty came from the various bars of secondary protection you had to chew through, asking a player to bring the types of damage required to smash through them in any kind of timely manner, making Warp users a godsend. 3's difficulty was all about aggression, because when the whole engagement is out to get you, grenades have the power to straight up one-shot you, there's enemies capable of killing you instantly and mercy invincibility is so brief you can get two-tapped by a Nemesis and Phantom tag team, the game was less about beating tankier enemies and more about getting rid of enemy DPS.

And of course, what's an RPG without its story to role play through? Across the series, you have a ton of variables you could influence in nearly any configuration you wish, and while a significant handful don't have many direct consequences for the future, more so being in the background than directly affecting you, the big choices do indeed have long-standing consequences, and options in the future can be opened or closed to you depending on your prior decisions, ending notwithstanding.

If you enjoy RPGs, I cannot recommend this game highly enough, at least for the 1st game alone; who knows, maybe it'll open your preferences to shooter games as well. Vice Versa for Shooter fans looking at getting into RPGs; it feels like this game sits squarely in the middle of both camps, and it sure served as my gateway from shooting to RPGs

Now if only they'd reopen the Multiplayer in Legendary Edition, I would be a very happy man, but as it stands, this game is one I'm glad to have pushed through again.