Bioware, are you f'ing serious with these minigames? I don't know whether I'm going to get carpal tunnel or just keel over from how mind numbingly boring scanning these planets is. The whole galaxy map rigmarole has become this depressing gateway to the actual fun in the game... Did people really feel they needed to drag a little ship icon around the map screen and refuel instead of just clicking on a destination?
Also, if I just pick the blue Paragon option every time, I'm just going to get more Paragon points, thus ensuring the blue dialogue option is always available to me. What's the point of removing the speech skills if they are just a guaranteed, linear thing now? The only way you wouldn't get the blue or red option now is if you didn't choose them often enough or you were doing some kind of half Paragon and half Renegade thing.
The combat feels great though and I'm glad they spent a lot of time on that, but most of the design decisions that went into improving the game outside of that are bandaid solutions at best. I'd rather they had actually made improvements to the inventory and skills systems rather than throwing most of it out and calling it a day.
Sacrificing damage output and weapon skills for better decryption or speech allowed for an interesting dynamic to the customization in the first game. While it obviously wasn't as fleshed out in the first game as it could have been, I don't think it warranted replacing them with minigames or cutting them out of the game completely. In ME2, I feel the only choice in the customization of my character is what flashy effect do I want to use to deal damage.