This will no doubt be an upset, and I’d say, “Hear me out,” but I know plenty of people will not do that. To be clear: Garrus is one of the best characters in the Mass Effect series, but he is also one of the most uneven characters in the trilogy.
To get the good out of the way first, the Turian vigilante is one of the most charming, memorable, and likable characters BioWare’s ever put into a video game. By the time we reach Mass Effect 3, he is Shepard’s best bro, a reliable shoulder to rest your head on, and his romance with FemShep is full of both goofy and heartfelt scenes that are some of the best BioWare’s ever written. However, the hill I will die on is that it took Garrus a while to become that character everyone remembers. In the original Mass Effect, he’s got the least going on of any of the party members, and it’s really about nudging him to be one flavor of cop or the other.
Mass Effect 2 certainly fills him out more as a defined character and you can see glimpses of the charming hero we all know and love, though it pretty much repeats this arc by having him become a vigilante that you can Paragon or Renegade him into one conclusion. On top of this, his romance is undeniably the most shallow one in Mass Effect 2, mostly just being a bunch of innuendos and talk of “blowing off steam” when the stakes are high enough to have an emotionally vulnerable moment with your long-time squadmate.
Once we reach Mass Effect 3, there’s not a shade of either variation and he kinda funnels into one version of himself, but then this guy gets some of Mass Effect 3’s best work and a lovely romance. By the time you have the “no Shepard without Vakarian” conversation at the end, it’s a stunning, earned culmination of a trilogy-long friendship. Every Mass Effect game feels like it’s almost getting there, so by the time Mass Effect 3 really nailed the incredible character everyone remembers him to be, most people feel a brotherhood with him. But that meandering repetition of the first two games keeps him from ascending to the higher rankings for me.
Yes, yes, here are some tomatoes to throw at me.
