ME2 is a bunch of tangentially connected stories all in service of recruiting people for a vague suicide mission that only occurs in the endgame, and people consider it a narrative masterpiece.
I don't. And in fact, I think few people consider it a good game because of its storytelling. When ME2 came out in 2010, about the first thing I noticed about it was how our sense of location was lost, compared to ME1, because we were now teleported from the ship to "where we needed to be", as a developer post put it, rather than being able to land on a planet and find where we needed to go on our own. I summarized it with "ME1 had locations, ME2 has game levels". It was not the only signficant thing that was lost between ME1 and ME2. The roots of the ending debacle are here.
As a standalone game with focus on action gameplay and character stories, and no ambition to tell an overarching story and be more lore-consistent than absolutely necessary, ME2 would've been great. As a sequel to a more serious-minded SF RPG, set in a world with consistent lore that drove a story larger than one game could tell, it was a disaster.
