[quote=Fat Boy Kyle]
But despite the few appearances you do spend the entirety of the game chasing after him and trying to stop him, seeing the results of his actions along the way. You don't need to see much of a villain for them to be captivating. The more I think about it, the more I realise that in many games you don't see much of the main bad guys/bosses.
[/quote]

While you're busy tracking him down, there's not a lot to him that makes him particularly noteworthy outside of his indoctrination, other than he's anti-human and completely ruthless even before he's indoctrinated. Throw in that one book and comic and he gets fleshed out considerably more, even so far as to show you what happened on Anderson's mission with him. Good stuff.

[quote=Blitzkrieg]
A good villain is not one who makes allot of appearances, kills tons of people, or has a fleshed out story. Those help, but a villain needs to make sense to me, they just need to fit the story the same way the protagonist does. Saren is the ultimate anti-Shepard, he is a person, Illusive is a symbol for Cerberus .I also just have a thing for fallen-paladins.
[/quote]

I wouldn't exactly call him a fallen paladin, despite his reputation as a Spectre. As I mentioned, he's an established human hater and that mission with Anderson ended up with Saren killing hundreds of innocent people to get to his target. His motivation and goals were always pretty clear, even though the specifics as to why weren't readily apparent until your encounter on Virmire. Don't get me wrong, he's a great character and he certainly set the standard going into the other two games, but I suppose I thought Harbinger was a bit more meaningful to the trilogy and his presence is undeniable. TIM is also good for other reasons, and I am pretty pleased with myself for calling him being indoctrinated right after I finished ME2. The BioWare forums didn't seem to think that theory made sense, which makes me wish I could have bumped my thread there after ME3 came out with a Nelson laugh.