Eletania Is Mass Effect's Most Underrated Planet

thegamer.com:

Exploring planets across Mass Effect is a strange business. Only the first game in the trilogy lets you actively explore the planets, putting you in the Mako and letting you drive across the terrain to your heart's content. The only issue with that, of course, is that the Mako sucks. Meanwhile Mass Effect 2 and 3 have you landing at specific stations, cities, and hubs, meaning you cannot roam as freely nor do you have a spirit of discovery to you. That means, for all its great locations, it's hard to truly know anywhere - and as a result, Eletania is left out in the cold.

Eletania is a planet in the very first game, and not a particularly important one. No main mission occurs there, and even doing a playthrough where you don't just race ahead to cross off the major plot points in order to get to Mass Effect 2, it's pretty easy to miss. That's only part of the reason it's so underrated though. It also has to cope with the Mako, a vehicle with the manoeuvrability of an elephant with a bin bag on its face, and the subpar graphics of the original game. Even in the Legendary Edition, the first game is well off the pace of the rest of the trilogy from a visual perspective. Not only did the art style take away some of the personality of the original game, it just polished the flaws rather than rebuilding them to be more in-line with the improvements that came later.

Eletania would have been a great planet for Andromeda, when driving was finally back and when the planets looked good enough for you to drink in the sights. Andromeda is a better game than it's given credit for, and mixes the roving of the first Mass Effect with the on-foot exploration of the next two, but just lacks a little bit of spark to tie it all together. For