Personally I think Mass Effect Andromeda has the best gameplay of the series but everything else ranges from just okay to bad
That it was such a success and led to an incredibly successful franchise despite that, shows the power of its writing and strong characters and world-building.
A similar thing goes for another legendary series: Assassin's Creed. The first game is borderline unplayable, but it was still enough of a success to spawn AC2 which was a masterpiece of storytelling, although the fundamental mechanics weren't really smooth yet even at that point, and improvements were made all the way through brotherhood to AC3 and then black flag.
Over time, the story-telling and characters weakened, although there were some gems along the way such as odyssey.
Anyone who says this isn't the case needs to go back and play it. It's TOUGH gameplay wise.
Specifically, I didn’t find the gameplay of ME2 to be much better (and in some places, e.g. the Probing Uranus minigame, it was worse).
Sadly, though, the story left a lot wanting. It felt like multiple writers had inserted their own incomplete story lines, so by the end of the game, you're left with unresolved plot threads regarding the Remnant, the Scourge, and the Kett, among other things. The only somewhat resolved plot thread is colonization via ending up inside the Remnant dyson sphere, but that basically renders all the effort you just spent terraforming planets throughout the game moot.
At least with the original trilogy, you're defeating Sovereign in the first game and the collectors in the second game, giving you some form of resolution, even if it was always clear the trilogy was going to lead to a full reaper invasion in the third game. And across all of them, your singular focus was on the reapers and not spread across multiple threats.
Some of the people that worked on that Bioware are working on Exodus which was a very interesting story.
Like imagine I work at Nintendo and I pitch to leadership: “OK I’ve got an amazing idea for the next Mario game. The way it’s going to work is you have a stamina mechanic so if you jump too much you run out of breath so then you can’t jump until you sit still for a while and recover. And it’s going to be an RPG so you can play for 100 hours and specialize your Mario into various classes and have different kinds of weapons …”
They’re going to put a hand on my shoulder and say 1)That stamina thing sounds like it wouldn’t be fun. 2) The RPG thing sounds like the sort of thing that people aren’t really looking for in a Mario game. There are good games that have a stamina mechanic. There are great games that have RPG mechanics and class specialization, but none of them have anything to do with what makes Mario great.
Nintendo leadership have a really strong conception of what makes a fun game and what makes their particular games distinctive. That’s how they come up with innovative concepts (like super mario wonder or the last DK game) that still feel 100% rooted in what makes those series good.
Getting a story-driven studio to build a looter-shooter was just a terrible idea and the also executed it badly in anthem. Whatever it was that they were trying to do with Veilguard, (I heard that started as a live service and then pivoted), someone senior should have had the courage of their convictions and asked the question of whether someone who loved dragon age inquisition would love this game or whether indeed it was fun at all.
I feel that everyone is throwing so much money at games these days but they have in many cases lost sight of why people play games in the first place.