Just beat Mass Effect 3. Not the best in the series (that honor definitely goes to ME2), but still a VERY good game and easily the best STORY in the series. And having completed what is, in my opinion, the best series of this console generation, it seems only fair (okay, I'm doing it because I like ranking things) to do a ranking of the twenty squad members (full time) you can get over the course of the series. This includes the three DLC squad members, as well as two characters who I count as different even though they fill the same slot. And characters that are in your squad in multiple games do not get multiple rankings. Note that there WILL be spoilers as to who some PCs are, so if you haven't beaten any or all of the games yet, don't read the list below:
THE CHARACTERS
Kaidan Alenko Ashley Williams Urdnot Wrex Garrus Vakarian Tali'Zorah nar Rayya/vas Neema/vas Normandy Liara T'Soni Jacob Taylor Miranda Lawson Zaeed Massani Mordin Solus Kasumi Goto Jack Urdnot Grunt Thane Krios Samara Morinth Legion James Vega Javik EDI
Now, James may not be the absolute WORST character and he may be slightly less obnoxious than others, but that still doesn't mean he doesn't fully deserve a bottom spot on this list. Let's start with his personal negatives. One, his character design is obnoxious and gross. I don't want to see a Jersey Shore reject whose muscles make him look bigger than a Krogan. And two, his personality is obnoxious. He's basically just a slight Latino stereotype who acts like a frat boy sometimes, and gives "clever" nicknames to people. I hate the fact that whenever you wander around and explore, when you find James, he's always either drinking or playing poker...he NEVER takes anything seriously. We're fighting a war to the death, and he's too busy goofing off to ever show any maturity and emotional depth. The only scene I can actually remember some substance in is when he's telling Shepard that the Alliance wants to make him an officer...and even then it's like..."Why should I care? I barely know you."
This brings me to the reason why James is ranked at the very bottom of the list. He's annoying, but he's not as awful as number 19. But when it comes down to it, he's definitely hurt by the fact that he's a PC in Mass Effect 3. My way of looking at it is...in Mass Effect 1, they didn't really have their story-telling skills down just yet in terms of the characters...so you had a lot of relatively uninteresting playable characters. But these characters (except for the Virmire casualty) had three games to flesh out who they are. Mass Effect 2 had two games to do this, plus the designers gave each character their own personalized mission to give them more story. Mass Effect 3...you basically needed to be amazing, because it was your only chance to make an impression, and any personal stories were likely to be very overshadowed by the overarching narrative of the war. James did not do this, like, at all.
James' character is extremely shallow and really, aside from that N7 conversation, most of the game is spent with him doing almost nothing, character-wise. Once you have your little play-fight with him, he seems to spend his time in the shuttle bay, either working out or trading barbs with Steve...that's about it. Honestly, you can definitely tell that Vega is a filler character, and I think the best way to describe him is...what would've happened with Jenkins if he hadn't been killed on that first mission of Mass Effect 1. Seriously, the only reason I can think that Vega exists is because the game starts on Earth and they wanted to make sure you had a full party when you went to Mars for the first time, and there were no other human PCs (besides the Virmire survivor) that made sense to have show up. So they created Vega as a filler party member, but then decided to knock Kaidan (or Ashley) out for a while for the emotional response, and suddenly he becomes a full-time party member, and it's stupid, in my opinion.
He's just a pointless filler character, which is not something that should've been added to the final chapter of the series.
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Captain Tracy Mombaro and Agent Mirasuke Inhara: Two of the toughest, hottest furrs you'll ever meet.
This one should be no surprise, since I can't recall every seeing anyone say they're actually a fan of Miranda. And the reason for that is obvious; it's because she's a total b****. Hell, even the characters in ME3 seem to think so. Honestly, I've always found Miranda to be an extremely obnoxious character. It's one thing to be designed to be genetically perfect, but it's another thing entirely to act put upon because being perfect is so much of a burden on you. Seriously? THAT'S what you're gonna complain about? What a b****. I'm sorry, but when you spend most of Mass Effect 2 acting high-and-mighty, I don't really feel in the least bit sorry for you that you're "perfect" (although her buckteeth and massive forehead certainly don't seem perfect to me.) Even her personal mission is dull, because you're just going to yet ANOTHER warehouse on one of the more civilized planets to save her sister, who gets pretty much no character development herself in either Mass Effect 2 or 3.
So yeah, useless in Mass Effect 2...so they bring her back in Mass Effect 3, not as a playable character, but as an NPC who winds up getting more screentime than any other returning NPC aside from the ones that actually stay aboard your ship (Wrex/Legion/Mordin). Her entire storyline seems to be "something's going on with Oriana, we need to talk," followed by "I'm not actually going to give you any real information, but let's meet up anyway" three or four times before you finally meet her at Sanctuary. And throughout the entire thing...she's just so goddamn pointless. Why does THIS character get to be part of the main storyline? Why not Jack? Why not Jacob? Why not Samara/Morinth? Her very existence annoys me.
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Captain Tracy Mombaro and Agent Mirasuke Inhara: Two of the toughest, hottest furrs you'll ever meet.
Yeah, Kaidan is extremely extremely bland. Like, bland to the point where over the course of three games, I honestly can't say I have even the slightest form of attachment to him as a character. He's always just this consummate soldier and that's like, the entire personality that the writers gave him. I think he definitely suffers from being playable only in Mass Effect 1 and 3, because those are the two games that didn't really focus on character development as much as Mass Effect 2 did. I don't think it would've helped him though...he's just so goddamn bland. He doesn't even have any defining personality traits that I care enough about to mention here. The only reason he's not at the very bottom of the list is because Miranda is just THAT awful and James is even MORE pointless than Kaidan is.
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Captain Tracy Mombaro and Agent Mirasuke Inhara: Two of the toughest, hottest furrs you'll ever meet.
Yup, everyone's least favorite racist is out of the running now too. Honestly, I don't care much for Ashley, because she's racist and has a pig-nose. And aside from that, she's pretty under-developed and boring. But I give her some credit for not annoying me to the level that Miranda/James did, and for at least having SOME kind of defining personality traits, unlike Kaidan. Honestly, I don't LIKE the racism, but I appreciate the fact that there's a character in the cast that has a xenophobic attitude towards the aliens in the game. It just feels more realistic than the extremely unified group you get right from the very beginning. And admittedly, part of me ranking her above Kaidan is because I haven't gotten to experience her in ME3 yet, due to me killing her on Virmire on my ManShep, so I can't really judge how she is in the third game exactly. Still, bottom tier character.
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Captain Tracy Mombaro and Agent Mirasuke Inhara: Two of the toughest, hottest furrs you'll ever meet.
So yeah, my bottom five all have one thing in common: they're all lameass humans. But more than that...I noticed that EVERY character I hated was one of the starter squad members. Seriously, Mass Effect 1 had Kaidan/Ashley, Mass Effect 2 had Miranda/Jacob, and Mass Effect 3 had Vega/Virmire Survivor. It feels like the game always wants you to start off with two humans, rather than giving you an alien squad member right off the bat, and I can't quite figure out why. And to top it off, it feels like the developers assumed that players would naturally relate more to the human characters, so they made the aliens more unique and interesting, while keeping the humans more generic and boring.
Jacob is generic and boring, there's no doubt about that. But really, he makes it out of the bottom category of this ranking because he's a Mass Effect 2 character. By sheer virtue of having a personalized mission, he got more character development than ANYONE in the bottom 4 aside from Miranda, who just sucks. Him dealing with daddy issues isn't the most compelling of storylines, but hey, it's something that distinguishes him from the rest of the playable cast. And in Mass Effect 3, he's still pretty boring, but at least he doesn't play a huge role like the four characters below him on thr ranking, so I didn't get nauseated by the fact that he was deemed more important than ever bringing Wrex back as a PC.
Also, I hate his VA. I don't know why, but that voice just always rubbed me the wrong way every single time he spoke. It sounded like he'd been autotuned or something.
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Captain Tracy Mombaro and Agent Mirasuke Inhara: Two of the toughest, hottest furrs you'll ever meet.
Samara really fits in the "Eh" category because she's such a one-note character. Like, you first meet her on Illium when she's in the midst of being completely unable to disregard her moral code, to the point where fisticuffs seem inevitable. And then she basically just sits in the Normandy and meditates non-stop, intermittently giving you her loyalty mission, which is pretty much the entire reason why she doesn't fall under the b****/boring bottom rank of the list. Her conflict of being a mother who is forced to hunt and kill her own daughters is a unique story, given how young most of the cast seems (even by Asari standards, Samara seems to be old). And then ME3 comes and once again her entire story revolves around finding and killing her OTHER daughters. It's extremely one-note and doesn't really make her a character so much as a robot that fulfills a single plot point of purpose. That's all she's got going for her.
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Captain Tracy Mombaro and Agent Mirasuke Inhara: Two of the toughest, hottest furrs you'll ever meet.
I feel like I might get some flak for this one, but I just don't find Grunt all that appealing. It seems like everyone who's ever played Mass Effect loves the Krogans, and so Grunt is loved by default, but I don't feel that way. I don't particularly care for the Krogans as a race, because for the most part, they're all just war-hungry soldiers, which is fine. I get that this defines their race. But at the same time, it makes them boring, because they're all the same and they're all one-note. Wrex is great, but not because he's a Krogan, necessarily, but instead because he as a character is great. Grunt doesn't have that. Grunt is essentially designed to be a pure Krogan, and hell, he was just born by the time you meet him, so he doesn't even have an interesting past or backstory or anything like that. His entire character involves fighting, and that's dull to me. This continues in Mass Effect 3 where he only really shows up to be a warrior in one little mission against the rachni. And if I rank Samara low for being a one-note character, I have to rank Grunt low as well.
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Captain Tracy Mombaro and Agent Mirasuke Inhara: Two of the toughest, hottest furrs you'll ever meet.
I remember back when the "Save My Mass Effect Character" contest was going on, Thane was the one character I was legitimately shocked to see going so far in the game, mostly because he was like, the only character I wasn't actively trying to keep around. I mean, I didn't hate him, but I just didn't care for him all that much. I appreciate his storyline though, and he's much more multifaceted than, say, Samara or Grunt. He's basically an assassin that was trained from a young age to kill, to the point where it became his life, even moreso than his wife and son. And then he finds out he's dying and basically wants to set right the mistakes he made. Honestly, one of the saddest moments involving Thane is when you're talking with Mouse and find out that Thane was more of a father to some street rat than to his own real son.
But then he becomes a casualty of Mass Effect 3, and honestly, it was the only casualty I got that didn't really make me emotional or upset. It should've, but I think the fact that Thane wasn't my favorite, and the fact that I knew he was gonna die of his disease soon, really hurt the emotional impact of his passing. Overall, I feel like Thane just wound up in the wrong game. In Mass Effect 2, there were just so many great personalities he had to compete with, whereas if he was the same character in Mass Effect 1 or 3, he would've shone much brighter, in my opinion.
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Captain Tracy Mombaro and Agent Mirasuke Inhara: Two of the toughest, hottest furrs you'll ever meet.
I'd probably have had Samara a little higher, probably with Jack taking her spot in the Bottom 7, but I'd have to think about my own ranking first. Otherwise, I mostly agree so far.
-- xp1337: Don't you wish there was a spell-checker that told you when you a word out? GotD (219/384) Melee v FFX
Jacob isn't too high because to put him lower would mean that he'd be under characters that are worse or the same level of terrible as him. The bottom five is fine the way it is.
No forgiveness for having Thane that low. Grunt is awesome too and I'm sad you don't like him as much, but I can get over that.
I also love Samara but I know I'm like the only one.
Also I feel I should let you know that you will be dead to me if Tali isn't in your top five, top two would be ideal.
-- ~Halo You're not the brightest. http://img404.imageshack.us/img404/907/bandfinisher.jpg
Jacob is the worst squadmate in the series, hands down. Kaidan and Ashley are at least a bit more interesting in ME3, and Vega isn't so bad. The guy has some great conversations with the other squadmates.
Tali, Wrex, and Garrus top three easily. Thane and Legion would be up there too. Javik is great but he's only in ME3 so that hurts him.
Samara sucks because she's so stuck-up and stuffy and lame...and she's too boss mom in her personality. I like my mother figures to be sweet and loving. So generally, when I play ME2, I try my hardest to kill off Samara and choose Morinth for my team instead, because she's f***ing amazing by comparison. She's hilariously slutty, and I actually love the fact that the game gives you a paragon/renegade choice of killing Samara, or killing her daughter, because seriously, how often do you get that sort of choice in a game. You get the "who do you want to sacrifice?" choice in ME1, but never the "who do you physically choose to kill?" option, especially not with one of the options being someone you have no real affiliation with.
But anyway, Morinth is an evil, slutty b****, and she would absolutely rank higher if the people above her weren't just so much more involved in the storyline (again, like Ashley, I didn't get to see Morinth in my ME3 playthrough, so I don't know how good she is there.)
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Captain Tracy Mombaro and Agent Mirasuke Inhara: Two of the toughest, hottest furrs you'll ever meet.
If I were doing this ranking based solely on Mass Effect 2, Jack would be in the bottom group with the other humans. Seriously, the only humans they didn't manage to f*** up as interesting characters are the two you don't even necessarily need because they're DLC. But anyway, Jack in Mass Effect 2 is still the best of a bad bunch because she's most certainly not boring. Like, seriously, you cannot say she has less personality than Vega/Ashley/Kaidan/Jacob, and unlike Miranda, Jack is a full-on psycho-b****, which I've always found more appealing than the Mean Girls variety of b****. Still, even a psycho-b**** isn't all that great when it goes over the line into unmanageable territory. Seriously, you cannot be nice to Jack in Mass Effect 2 without her thinking you're trying to f*** her. My first game, I didn't want to romance her, but when I turned her down gently, she spent the rest of the game telling me to "F*** off". My second game, I apparently got to the point where she thought I was trying to seduce her AND Tali and got jealous and pissed, which wasn't even close to my intention. So yeah, unmanageable.
Mass Effect 3 really improved Jack though. I mean, you had her loyalty mission in Mass Effect 2, where she kinda got over the fact that she was abused as a child (well, not GOT OVER, but she put it in the past somewhat and realized she wasn't the only one who suffered). But then she comes back in Mass Effect 3 and suddenly has a "family" who she is willing to lay her life on the line to protect. And I like this, because suddenly she's the same hardass, but she's only being a hardass to protect people. And the whole inability to swear thing is f***ing hilarious, especially since Joker takes delight in teasing her the way he's apt to do. But yeah, Mass Effect 3 matured Jack and really improved on her enough to put her just outside the top ten,
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Captain Tracy Mombaro and Agent Mirasuke Inhara: Two of the toughest, hottest furrs you'll ever meet.
Zaeed places relatively high on this list because he fits into the one RPG archetype that is almost impossible to f*** up: the badass character that's badass for the sake of being badass. Now admittedly, Zaeed is easily the weakest of the three DLC characters in the series, but still, all three are pretty awesome. Zaeed is actually the easiest character to unlock, outside of the starter duo in each game, because you're pretty much forced to go to Omega, and as soon as you enter, he's pretty much just standing there. Not as badass as most recruitment missions, but still, he kneecaps a guy and proves right off the bat that he's not a man to be f***ed with. And since I always bring him on the Garrus mission (anything to get rid of Miranda/Jacob for the rest of the game), I get to see him interacting with the Blue Suns, which is pretty cool.
Now, Zaeed actually has a pretty awesome loyalty mission, where you find out he started the Blue Suns and then got betrayed, and he goes so far as to try blowing up an entire refinery in order to get revenge. That mission was goddamn amazing because Zaeed is actually pretty evil about the whole thing (and I can't wait until I'm ready to do his loyalty mission on my renegade character), and yet you STILL get to talk down to him and get his loyalty by essentially holding him hostage under a fallen pylon until he agrees to do what you want. From then on, he basically fills the role of Wrex for Mass Effect 2, telling you fun stories that no one else can really offer because they're all busy with personal bulls***.
Mass Effect 3, he shows up briefly, but still, he's not so bad overall.
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Captain Tracy Mombaro and Agent Mirasuke Inhara: Two of the toughest, hottest furrs you'll ever meet.
Can't say I'm a fan of Zaeed. Haven't played ME3 but I'd put him below Jacob. Really didn't like his character though; definitely felt thrown in and I can't say I felt he offered much, though I didn't get him in ME2 until very shortly before the point of no return.
If you asked me to rank Liara after Mass Effect 2, she'd be at the bottom of the list alongside the other two Mass Effect 1 love interests (and many of the Mass Effect 2 love interests as well). She doesn't have the strongest start in the series, because for one thing, she's the one squad member you don't meet on the Citadel. With EVERYONE else, they prove themselves in combat before you allow them to join you (or they're Wrex, who's a Krogan and thus naturally better suited for that stuff). Seriously, even Tali, who is the only other real contender (IMHO) for the weakest squad member, proves herself in combat when you first meet her. But you find Liara trapped in a barrier, and it's like...really? Liara's the token damsel in distress of the series? And then she's really not all that important besides being knowledgeable about Protheans and showing little emotion when her mother dies. She's better than Ashley/Kaidan in Mass Effect 1, but not by much.
Then Mass Effect 2 comes along and suddenly Liara's this badass, taking on the Shadow Broker for reasons that are still unclear to me, even after the Lair of the Shadow Broker. It's such a dramatic change in personality that even though it's a vast improvement over a kinda pathetic do-nothing...it's still pretty bad.
Mass Effect 3 though is when everything comes together. Liara's still the Shadow Broker, so she's still badass, but at this point, everything has kinda sunk in. Plus, she's back on the ship, so that mellows her out. Mass Effect 3 Liara is what Mass Effect 2 Liara SHOULD have acted like in order to be more realistic: a happy medium between dorky Liara and badass Liara. Her actually coming to terms with her mother dying is good for her character, and it's weird that it took her over two years to do it, but in doing so, it allowed for her character to grow. And Liara is pretty hilarious in Mass Effect 3. Her dorkiness in response to meeting a Prothean in real life is amusing to me, it really is. And overall, I just feel like she was a quality squadmate this time around.
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Captain Tracy Mombaro and Agent Mirasuke Inhara: Two of the toughest, hottest furrs you'll ever meet.
I agree with most of the list, but I'd shuffle the humans around a bit. I still don't see why people like Kasumi so much. Maybe I need to start a new game that can actually use her before I finish the main quest. Zaeed is probably my favorite of the humans and I agree with Morinth being so much more fun than Samara. I'm guessing the top five are Garrus, Tali, Mordin, Wrex, and Legion...which would be the same as mine.
While James might've sucked, the other new characters in ME3 are both pretty cool. With Javik, I love the fact that they actually integrated him into the story (although it is pretty s***ty on BioWare's (let's be honest, EA's) part that they had something that was so integrated as day one DLC. But I digress. I love the fact that Javik actually feels like a real party member. With Kasumi/Zaeed, they just don't feel like the developers cared about them beyond their loyalty missions, but with Javik, he gets multiple cutscenes and fun interactions with the other members of the crew.
What I particularly like about Javik is how unique he feels. I mean, he wakes up after fifty thousand years in cryo-stasis and he's the ONLY Prothean that isn't dead by that point. So right there, they could easily have turned him into a cliched "I'm the last of my kind" type of character. But they didn't. Instead they took it to the other extreme and made Javik a complete a******, and it was amazing. I loved how he belittled Shepard for caring about friendship or thinking that synthetics and organics could co-exist, and I also loved having someone around who could make fun of how the humans/asari/turians/salarians used to be like before they became evolved. His interactions with Liara helped to solidly boost HER character to ninth place, so he's amazing on his own. Sadly, I just can't rank a one-shot character from Mass Effect 3 that highly, because everyone else has at least two games-worth of content to make me love them.
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Captain Tracy Mombaro and Agent Mirasuke Inhara: Two of the toughest, hottest furrs you'll ever meet.
Ah, the last of the humans finishes in seventh place, but hey, seven has to be a lucky number for a master thief like Kasumi. Now, after Javik's update, it's hard to really make Kasumi seem more appealing than him, but I'll try. First off, she's easily the most attractive character design of the playable cast, what with Miranda having a huge forehead and buck teeth, Ashley having a pig nose, the Asari being essentially bald, Jack ACTUALLY being bald, EDI being an obvious robot, and Tali being covered up from head to toe. So yeah, Kasumi has hotness going from her, and in addition, she's somewhat slutty without being overly-so, which gives her more of a femme fatale feel to her character.
But yeah, she's clever and witty. Like, Zaeed tells fun stories, but Kasumi makes witty quotes and wants to bang Jacob (which is like, eh, but to each her own). And she has an awesome loyalty mission where you get to be a secret agent and everything, so that's always positive. And then she comes back for a brief little mission in Mass Effect 3 where she's extremely fun and cute once more (pretending to be dead and then being disappointed that Shepard saw through her clever ruse, so cute), and continues to be so when working on the Crucible. So yeah, strong character, but not in the upper echelon.
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Captain Tracy Mombaro and Agent Mirasuke Inhara: Two of the toughest, hottest furrs you'll ever meet.
Now THIS is one I KNOW I'm gonna take a lot of crap for eliminating before the top three, let alone outside of the top five. But it had to be done. Wrex is literally the only character to have been a PC in Mass Effect 1 and then never show up as a PC again. Which kinda sucks, because I'd much rather have Wrex back than Liara/Ashley/Kaidan. But that's not why Wrex is being docked and kept out of the top five.
Wrex was awesome in Mass Effect 1 for the same reason Zaeed is awesome. It's always good to have that one character who's just totally badass and has awesome, badass stories and makes you want to keep them in your party as often as possibly. Wrex's mannerisms of being a violent, sarcastic a****** were what made him truly amazing, and it also helped to make the Virmire stuff more appealing, because you have this guy who seems to be a one-dimensional brute, an then it turns out he's really concerned with the future of his race (and we got glimpses of that earlier, when he was discussing why the Krogans suck at colonization, because they care more about being mercs than the future). But yeah, Wrex was awesome, probably the best PC in Mass Effect 1, and he was a great bro to Shepard.
Then come Mass Effect 2 and 3. This is where Wrex gets hurt in the overall ranking. Now, I appreciate the fact that Wrex was shown as having matured and really wanted to help the Krogan race unite and return to their former glory. I can completely appreciate that. But in Mass Effect 2, I feel like he was completely pushed aside, given how unimportant Tuchanka was, aside from Mordin/Grunt's loyalty missions. Yes, he's the dominant clan leader, but he doesn't really DO anything other than have a brief reunion with Shepard. And in Mass Effect 3, he almost comes across as more of an obstacle than anything else. Like, Earth is getting f***ed up, but so is Palaven, so at least in that situation I can understand the Turians being hesitant to help. But then Wrex comes along and I GET that he wants the genophage cured, but there's better times for that s***, and it felt like a really long fetch quest in the middle of the game (there were awesome moments, but plotwise, it was arduous).
I think overall, Wrex is hurt by the fact that he's a Krogan. Like, with EVERYONE other alien character, they're basically the representative of their race in the game. But you meet others of the same race that are different. Tali is different from the other Admirals. Garrus is different from other Turians. Mordin is different from other Salarians, etc. With Wrex, he's the representative of the Krogan, but after Mass Effect 1, he no long feels like an individual anymore. He feels like the composite of the entire Krogan race, which diminishes him as a character, in my opinion.
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Captain Tracy Mombaro and Agent Mirasuke Inhara: Two of the toughest, hottest furrs you'll ever meet.