That's Mass Effect 1 down, on to the next

 I recently finished the Mass Effect 1 portion of the Legendary Edition trilogy remake.  While I'm glad I was able to go through the whole game once, thanks to the gunplay and companion AI improvements, the game itself was okay at best.  Some of that comes down to what they were able to attempt with the hardware available at the time, no doubt.  However, there were enough plot holes and failures of common sense scattered throughout, generally of the flavor of "we want to do this cool thing at this point, so let's ignore the problems with the setup needed for that cool thing to happen", that my suspension of disbelief was regularly broken.  Basically, if this was a sci-fi movie instead of a game, I would put this closer to Battle Beyond the Stars than Star Wars.

That said, I still have hopes for Mass Effect 2, now that I've started in on that volume of the trilogy.  Where the first game starts you off tied to both Earth's military and the ruling galactic council, with "I am the law" levels of personal power, the second makes a clean break with that by having a mysterious ship track down and destroy your stealth-enabled ship.  You manage to get some of the crew off safely, but you end up jettisoned into space with a suit leak.  Fast forward to you waking up, two years later, after a shadowy humanity-first organization named Cerberus (who you took out some unsavory projects from as side-quests in the last game) has given you the Six-Million Dollar Man treatment via their Project Lazarus - and even that is an early wake-up call, because someone decided to sabotage the facility's security bots, likely in a bid to kill you properly this time.  Surviving that, you find out about an ongoing issue that might be linked to the big-bad Reapers that you managed to stop last game, something the powers-that-be seem to treat as settled, while Cerberus is willing to give you an updated ship, some of your old crew, and contacts to gather more crew to investigate and deal with things as you see fit.  For now, your goals and those of Cerberus align... will that hold true throughout?

Simply put, the story of Mass Effect 2 looks to be more interesting than the story of Mass Effect 1, and there are mechanical changes between the two games as well, so the only reason to play the first game would be the story... and the second game includes an "interactive comic" that you can use to get yourself up-to-speed with the story from the first game.  All in all, I would say to give the first game a skip, and just start with ME2 at this point, if you haven't played either.

Now, it's just about time to show my face to the galactic Council.  It'll be fun to see how that turns out.