Sometimes people look through rose tinted glasses and forget the truth, like with the Mass Effect series. Mass Effect has many flaws, the overall story is better in ME1 but its still badly written in a lot of places with its lame romances and cheesy dialogue. The environments where endless copy pastes and the inventory system was beyond hopeless, and the items that went into it where hopeless. Much of the equipment was superfluous, you basically had four guns and three types of armour.
After that everything was the same it just had higher stats, compare that to the way armour and guns in the sequels has very different characteristics. Many of the side quests where garbage, more copy pasted environments with about 4 types of building or bunker and featureless hills and mountains on a huge mostly empty map. The combat was uninspiring and powers poorly balanced, the rubbish selection of firearms made it seem worse too.
Still the story and atmosphere more than saved it, the drama and character interactions where great when the didn't feel cheesy, forced or artificial.
Than you have Mass Effect 2, if ME3 ended on a retarded note ME2 began with one. Shepard coming back from the dead? Really? Come on, out of the things they could have started with like Shepard barley surviving or found by slavers and locked up for two years or any number of feasible ideas Bioware had to make Shepard into space Jesus that died for everyone sins and came back to life to save everyone.
The story started off badly but it did pick up though, ignoring the cheesy and forced dialogue thats par for the course in a Bioware game the chars where pretty good. The main quests where interesting and the expansion of the squad mate quests in ME into the loyalty quest idea was nice as well. ME2s problems mainly came from the almost total removal of the RPG elements, and while the equipment distinction was better there wasn't much choice, even with DLC. Mining was dreadful, I don't know who sat down at Bioware and thought that it would be a good replacement for exploration but I bet they wear their pants on their head.
ME3 has a lot of flaws along with its ending but it solved some of the issues in the first two games. The RPG elements where back and better than ever, being able to evolve skills into one of two paths allows you really tailor a chars skills. Not only are weapons really distinctive there are loads of them, same with the armour. Tailoring your char and load out means you can hone any number of playstyles. The cheesy, artificial and forced dialogue is still there but there are some really nice features, instead of just going to the squadmate on the ship and having a conversation the crew interact with each other and roam around the ship.
You can also have more natural feeling relationships with the crew as well, you can go for a drink on the citadel, invite a friend for a game of chess and other things like that. That makes it seem much more immersive than standing in the same place talking.
Each game had its good parts and its bad parts, but neither ME or ME2 where some kind of sacrosanct, perfect and flawless paragon of a RPG that people make them out to be.
