Though I was several hours into Mass Effect 3, I decided to restart with an imported character from Mass Effect 2. I read some things on IGN’s excellent ME3 Wiki and Guide that made me realize I had messed up by not importing my character. Without importing, some known characters didn’t even show up in ME3. Some of my choices in ME2 may come back to haunt me in ME3, but so far, it has been OK. The other thing that made me want to restart is that I had been getting a little too far in the main plot, so some of the early side missions were about to be cut off so I couldn’t finish them.
The biggest change so far is that I met up with the crazy tattoo chick, Jack, while rescuing the students from Grissom Station. The end of that mission goes way better when Jack is present, because one of the students died in a scripted scene in my first play through, but with Jack present, the student didn’t die (though he did have a lesser role). A few of the dialogue choices throughout the game are different too, based on the choices I made in ME2, and that may come to haunt me when I’m dealing with the Krogan and the genophage cure. We’ll see.
The only odd thing is that I didn’t import my ME1 character in to ME2, so ME2 didn’t know that I had chosen Ashley to be killed rather than Kaidan, so Kaidan was alive in my first attempt at ME3, while Ashley is alive in my new one.
So, yes, I did waste a few hours, but I was able to re-do the missions more quickly with the imported character than before. Besides, imported characters are high-level and have way more abilities than freshly rolled ones. So I don’t regret restarting at all, other than the cognitive dissonance of Ashley being alive.