The... hell? That's a pretty huge jump in appearance, isn't it? If you hadn't told me it was Ashley I wouldn't have known. You know, being that she has a different hair color, different facial structure, different... everything. This is like all those cartoons where they change voice actors mid-show and hope you don't notice. Except they did it with physical actors.
I'm a little torn. On one hand Ashley was a great big pile of bland in the first game, just about out-blanding every Bioware-bland human character that ever blanded up the screen. I had a debate with a friend once over whether she or Tali was the bland "nice girl" Aeris-equivalent of the game, and we ended up agreeing that Ashley was too bland to be classified under even that. As such, part of me feels that ANYTHING they do to her character design could only be an improvement if only to leave some kind of an impression.
The other part clearly recognizes that this is definitely not the same person. The nose is off, her hair's obviously the wrong color, hell, she doesn't look like the same nationality. :\ Obviously they're trying to fill in Miranda's spot on the team from ME2, the trouble being that they're so not the same character and this Ashley looks like anything but a Gunnery Chief. At least I could believe that much about the original character design, what with the red-and-white color scheme and the no-nonsense lack of lip gloss and all.
I don't know. This all seems a little bit pandering and condescending to me. It seems like Bioware's started to slip up ever since they started thinking about every character from the perspective of who the player might want to shag.
