Mass Effect in order, and what carries over
Mass Effect is the rare series where play order is not a matter of taste. The original trilogy is one story told across three games, with a save file that carries your decisions forward — including which characters are alive to appear in the next one. Playing it out of order does not just spoil things, it removes the entire mechanism the series is built around.
So the order is settled. What is worth knowing is what actually transfers, what happens if you skip an entry, and whether the two games outside the trilogy are worth your time.
The order
Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 3, in that order, all three of them, ideally with the same imported save. The Legendary Edition packages the trilogy with its DLC and brings the first game's combat and interface close enough to the later two that the transition no longer feels like a punishment — which was, for years, the main reason people bounced off at the start.
Andromeda is a separate story in a different galaxy with a different cast. It is not a sequel in any meaningful sense and can be played whenever, or not at all. Play it after the trilogy if you play it, because a lot of what it does only reads as interesting against what came before.
What actually carries over
The save import is the point of the series, and it is more thorough than people expect. Decisions from your first playthrough surface in the second and third games as characters who appear or do not, as factions that help or refuse, and occasionally as a single line of dialogue acknowledging something you did forty hours earlier.
The most consequential piece is that squadmates can die permanently, and the game does not stop you. A character killed in the first game is simply absent from the rest of the trilogy, and their role gets filled by someone else or by nobody. Mass Effect 2's ending in particular can lose you most of the cast if you go into it unprepared, and those losses propagate straight into the third game.
Starting a later game fresh instead of importing gives you a generic default history — a set of decisions someone else made. Everything technically works, but the series stops being about your Shepard, which is the only thing it is really selling.
- Squadmate deaths are permanent and carry across every subsequent game
- Major faction and character decisions resurface, sometimes many hours later
- Your Shepard's appearance, class and background import too
- A fresh start substitutes a default history, which is the one genuinely lossy option
If you only have time for one
Mass Effect 2 is the best individual game of the three and it is the usual answer to 'which one is the good one'. It is also the one that depends most heavily on you caring about people you met in the first game, and its ending is built to punish a player who has not been paying attention to relationships built across two games.
So the honest answer is that there is no good single entry point. If you genuinely only want one game, play the second and accept you are getting perhaps sixty per cent of it. If you want the series, start at the beginning — the Legendary Edition removed most of the reason not to.
Budgeting the run
The trilogy is roughly 30, 35 and 40 hours on a main-story run, and comfortably half again as much if you do the side content — which in this series is where most of the character writing lives, so skipping it to save time is a false economy.
That puts a full trilogy run somewhere between 100 and 160 hours. It is worth knowing that number before you start rather than discovering it in the middle of game two, because the most common failure mode is stalling out partway through the third game, which is exactly the point where the previous hundred hours were supposed to pay off.