Yeah, I'm in a similar situation. I like the setting, and I love Mass Effect 2, but the first installment is a slog that sold itself on setting and the promise of multi-game CYOA experience. ME3 probably had the best gameplay, but the story was easily the least consistent of all three installments, with some pretty nice high points (Tuchanka, Rannoch), but some pretty abysmal low points. There's the new antagonistic GMPC in Kai Leng. There's the framing of everyone sequestering themselves rather than creating a united front in the final act of the trilogy (which is just plain terrible pacing), conflict for conflict's sake like the Salarians prioritizing the Genophage over surviving the Reapers, padding the story by making Cerberus the central villains of the game and thereby making the Reapers still mostly feel like a distant threat, the dream sequences (hamfisted at the best of times, but downright perplexing for a Shepard with a background in which they saw their friends and family slaughtered on Mindoir, lost their squad to a Thresher Maw, and/or were renowned as a brutally ruthless leader who literally sent 3/4s of the soldiers they served with to their deaths...but oh no, the apparent death of this one child during the initial Reaper incursion just haunts Shepard *eyeroll*). And then, of course there's the ending in which the central conflict of "not getting killed by the Reapers" got shelved in literally the last ten minutes to try and convince you that the real issue that had to be addressed was that different races synthetics and organics are just too different to get along and that the real solution was to - as the Illusive Man suggested not five minutes earlier - use the Reapers and their technology to magick up a solution.
Really, I don't think Mass Effect needed a remaster so much as it needed a remake with a more consistent gameplay design philosophy and a better roadmap for the overarching story. As much as I maintain that ME2 is the best installment for its character focus and final mission, I also happily concede that narratively it floundered about, only really existing to foreshadow the Reapers' motives by dropping a few references to Dark Energy (with Haestrom in particular implying that it was accelerating the heat death of the universe)...which Mass Effect 3 then completely dropped in favor of a half-baked 'Zeroth Law' motive, leaving ME2 as contributing virtually nothing to the overall narrative. Point being that if the devs want to recapture my interest, they need to show me that they can run a tighter ship.
