The first Mass Effect. It feels like a story that can stand on its own and more of an RPG.

Mass Effect 2 > Mass Effect 1 > Mass Effect 3 > Mass Effect: Andromeda for me.

Mass Effect 2 took everything that was great about Mass Effect 1 and rolled it in with a ton of quality-of-life improvements.

ME:2.

Shout out out to Andromeda though. I ended up paying it approx. 2 years after it launched and found it to be quite a good game. Still bottom of the pack though.

Currently playing through ME:1 now for the second time on legendary edition as FemShep. Kind of agree with @hinch that John Shepard is the only Shepard thus far but I'll push through.

ME2 is the best, but I feel ME3 is excellent as well and I never understood the hate for it; it's easily better than ME1 thanks to the quality of life improvements from 2 alone.

Come on people let's get Andromeda up and over ME3 I've done my bit to close the gap.
As an incentive I will promise to not comment on any of your posts for at least a week if you vote for Andromeda

Mass Effect 2 wins this one overall, however, Mass Effect 3 has the best gameplay.

Not played a single one but I watched some LPs. 1 has seemingly not aged well. 3 literally stole plot points from Gurren Lagen. 2 took from X-Files but still seemed well done. Andromeda is the funniest one to watch. The horrid writing. The really bad voice acting & dialogue. Bioware sound mixing for voices always been awful. The glitches and bad animations were hilarious to watch!

What I did find kinda lame is the first is pretty much an RPG. Each game becomes more of a TPS and less of an RPG. By 3 it was just a TPS.

3 for me. I agree that the ending is terrible, but everything leading up to and including Shepard's last conversation with Anderson is just so good. The last 20 minutes couldn't take away how great the previous 30 hours were.

I thought you were talking about Resident Evil for a minute there and I got triggered. 

For a minute there, I lost my head. 

Speaking of I bought ME Legendary Edition yesterday, so I'll play through the three games and give my answer later.