Last week, I was looking for something to listen to and stumbled across a YouTube video called "A Thorough Look at Mass Effect". This inspired me to play Mass Effect 3 for the second time, and I poured close to ten hours into it this weekend. In my opinion, while the game starts off a little slow, the two main "galaxy unity quests" are pretty much perfect. The way the first geth mission starts, where you're walking in a broken spaceship in space while a battle rages on around you, is pretty genius.
After finishing Uncharted 1 and 4 a few weeks ago, I decided to resume the Mass Effect 3 playthrough I mentioned back in April, and officially finished the game this evening. I have some thoughts that I feel I have to share, even though probably no one cares and I'm the only person who still thinks Mass Effect 3 is relevant in 2016.
As most of you know, the game's ending was poorly received by fans, and the outcry was so loud that BioWare released an extended version of it to try and placate the angry masses. I think that, before today, I had only beaten the game with the extended ending(s) once, and it was a few years ago, so I totally forgot about them and expected to hate them...
It came as a big surprise to me then that I was actually deeply moved by the final couple of minutes of the game. The music, the cutscenes, the epilogue... I thought it was all pretty great. This was most likely a combination of: a) People complaining about the ending(s) so much that my expectations became astronomically low, and b) Acceptance that I wasn't going to get a perfect ending.
At the end of the day, I guess I'd say this: If I were a member of the BioWare team during development, I would have gone about the endings differently. I think that the synthesis ending doesn't make any sense and, much more importantly, I think that a perfect Destroy ending (Shepard lives, non-Reaper synthetics live) and a perfect Control ending (Shepard lives) should have been possible. However, the endings as they are don't take anything away from the game in my opinion, and I already feel like starting another playthrough.
TL;DR - The ME3 endings aren't that bad and have genuinely powerful aspects with the Extended Cut DLC. Mad props to anyone who read my entire rant.