: Eh, I think M1 was a bit higher on the 'asskickingness' scale IMO.
What I mean by "asskickingness" is grandness and scope, the epic nature of it. M1 was a far more personal, character-driven story, with much emphasis on the philosophy of freedom and slavery, the nature of intelligence and personhood, witnessing the development of Durandal's personality as his rampancy progresses... and really feeling for poor Leela when she 'dies'. But it was fending off one ship from alien invaders. It wasn't even fending off Earth, just one little colony 300 light-years away.
In M2, you are personally liberating an entire alien species from a thousand years of slavery, in the process beginning the downfall of a millennia-old galactic Evil Empire, all the while searching for the secrets of a long-vanished mysterious godlike race in an attempt to escape the closure of the universe itself. The implications of the events of that plotline are HUGE. It's less personal and less philosophical than M1 was, but it's a much 'bigger' story if you get what I mean.
Infinity on the other hand, while technically dealing with much bigger scope things (the nature of time and the player's role in history, and all of that crap), got a lot more personal too... it's like how delving into the largest-scale things also leads into the smallest-scale things. You want to get into physics, you gotta talk both relativity and quantum stuff. You want to get into philosophy and you've got to deal with both metaphysics and epistemology. (Which is something I think is a big weakness in the historic trends of ethical philosophy, focusing too much on the middle-scale normative stuff and not on the big, metaethical, or the small, praxiological problems that the middle stuff is all based off of). So Infinity gets into that trippy nether-realm, the other side of the circle, where both extremes of difference from the moderate and normal stuff we're used to merge together into the strange and out-there yet at the same time most fundamental aspects of things, the land of (apparent) paradox. One of my personal mottos goes something like "embrace the paradox and see that it is not" (there actually is no paradox, and the 'normal' things can be understood by seeing that both extremes away from it arch around to a single, seemingly paradoxical point, and if you can understand the way in which it is not in fact a paradox you will have understood the deepest foundations and the furthest implications of the 'normal' things you started with). Anyway, that's why I'm so fond of Infinity, though nowadays it seems like cheap made-for-TV depth rather than real depth (ooh look at us, unanswered questions, hey maybe you're a god of some sort, or like, the universe is all one or something? who knows, it's all so trippy man, look at the trails...).
In short, for a film analogy:
M1 was a genuinely deep, touching, independent drama, with lots of dialogue and important themes.
M2 was an epic and awe-inspiring blockbuster, with an engaging plot and a vast, cohesive universe.
Infinity was a psycho head trip intentionally designed to make people think about nothing in particular.
