ME3? Failure from start to finish. The opening scene just basically says “the last two games were completely irrelevant”. The ending is not only unsatisfying, it relies on stuff that was barely established even in the first game and not even mentioned in the others. It’s a textbook case of failing to stick the landing.
(And the less said about “choose your favourite primary colour” as an ending the better. Should have just had one ending and made it a good one.)
There are some sequences that felt tedious but the story is definitely the best part overall.
ME2 is definitely the apex of the series by modern standards.
Also you forgot to mention ME:A. Maybe your face was tired? ;)
Funny, that difference is exactly what I most disliked about ME2.
It is optimized for two things, Battlefield and FIFA, and it is even cumbersome for that (see: BFV's lifecycle and the numerous long-standing bugs that plagued it). It was never designed for an RPG and things like inventory systems and facial animation did not exist and had to be invented (badly). But EA is all-in on the "everything has to run frostbite company-wide".
Having worked on multiple Frostbite and multiple Unreal games, both engines are capable of building a wide variety of games. The discrepancies in my experience aren’t technical but organizational. It is hard to compete with the scale of Epic’s developer support organization and the wider industry inertia around their technology.
The second one though, didn't really click with me, and I stopped playing the series there.
Maybe with EA games being on Steam now, I could give the third one a try.