Kaidan is dead if you play as a male. If you play as a female, Ashley is dead. Wrex is dead if you don't import a save. If you don't import a save, the Council was killed in the Citadel battle.

You find Garrus, and he joins the party!!!! He was my favorite character next to Wrex. Speaking of Wrex, even if you import a save where he lived, he won't join you, he becomes the chief back on his home planet.

He is so much more badass than he was in the first one. I like how they kinda gave him Wrex's personality, though he still has a "Justice" side.

He's definitely more gritty and experienced than in the first. In ME1, he was kind of young, naive, and righteous. Since going off on his own, he's matured, and his personality colored by the realities of life in the lawless parts of the galaxy.

His physical appearance is a reflection of the changes to his character. He's been damaged, scarred, both physically and psychologically during his time away from Shepard.

The ending was a bit anticlimactic - granted, that's very common for sequels. But it felt like there wasn't a terrible lot of story progression. You learn a little bit about the reapers, but not much. What you do learn is more pseudo-science fiction than it is science fiction ("absorbing the essence of a species," what does that even mean? ). It was kind of a let down.

It felt to me as if this game is irrelevant in the terms of the trilogy. What happened in this game that really needed to happen to move the major story arcs along? Nothing. They could have just as easily skipped this one and went straight to the final game. There was no analogue to Vigil, no truly major revelations (big freakin' deal, the Protheans were turned into the collectors - was that so much of a shock given that, in the first game, you learn the same thing basically happened to the Keepers; and that the collectors, like the Keepers, are insectoids?), and you don't get to blow up any planets.

I would have liked much more dialogue and interaction with the party members. At the end, it felt kind of empty. Garrus didn't have nearly as much dialogue as I would have liked - the same for Legion, and Tali, and Samara, and..... so on.

My biggest gripe is that there were no same-gender romance options. In this day and age, they should be included by default. Actually, Id even have liked a Legion romance option. But that one may just be me.

That said, I thought the game was excellent as a whole. The gameplay was significantly improved over the first one, I'm glad they got rid of the Mako and refined the inventory system.

I'm very much looking forward to ME3 - and some tangible DLC for ME2.