Thinking back over my emotional involvement with the story, another thing that interests me is my apathy toward Shepard. Other characters were emotionally interesting, but Shepard felt like a robot to me despite all aspects of a meaningful character arc being present. Shepard has life-changing events and big threats, makes decisions in response, and experiences victory or tragedy based on moral choices.
Shepard's Call to Action

Another quibble is in using a wall of text to recap the events of the previous game. The time between games is too long, and this seemed too limited a way to get me reinvested in goings on.

In the second act of the game, choices come into play. Though making decisions that affected the lives of other characters was interesting, they seemed to have little impact on my personal progress. I think this is partly a mechanical problem with how dialogue choices are presented but I will cover this later and want to stay focused on plot. Nothing about the plot discouraged me from caring about how my decisions affected Shepard, but there was also very little that encouraged me to pay attention.
This may be because all dialogue drives you towards a player success in the completion of the game. This strikes me as a good thing because you don't want players to feel herded towards one moral choice over another, but two articles recently reminded me of how achievement-driven human beings are, and I wondered if this could be used to increase the attention I pay to dialogue.

Stay tuned for comments about my particular brand of ending.
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