See, simple closure wouldn't be enough for me. A simple text epilogue tacked on to the end of those endings would not satisfy me. Why?
Because everything I did over the course of three games DID NOT MATTER. Because in the end, the stubborn, fiery, hope-obsessed Shepard that I played transformed into some mewling child who pathetically went off to a fate without so much as a feeble protest. What does it matter that she nearly died to stop Sovereign and save the Citadel in the first game? What does it matter that she nearly died stopping the Collectors in the second game to save humanity and ultimately the other races? What does it matter that in the third game she: Appeased the Batarians and gained access to their remaining fleet, patched up an old grudge between the Krogan and the Salarians/Turians, meanwhile curing the Krogan of the genophage, convinced the Asari that they were also part of the galaxy and should help, and (most importantly to the ending), resolved a centuries long war between the synthetic Geth and their organic creators the Quarians, in which the Geth and Quarians not only stopped killing each other, but were actually HELPING EACH OTHER rebuild their lives, TOGETHER, on Rannoch?
The fact is, those three endings ensure that absolutely nothing I did mattered. I ended the game with 6982 total assets (pretty much max, with a few points missing). I ended the game max Paragon. I had the same three choices I would have had as someone with half of my score. Destroy the Reapers (oh, and destroy all the Geth and EDI - essentially committing genocide on two complete races and murdering a member of my crew), control the Reapers (destroying all of the mass relays in the process, ensuring that this newly unified galaxy that I worked so effing hard to get together IS NO LONGER UNIFIED) a la Illusive Man - a man I spent the past three games /hating/, or synthesize all organic and synthetic life together, creating a 'perfect' species (oh, and destroying all of the mass relays, ensuring that this newly unif... blah, blah, blah) but forsaking everything that made each of the individual races, both organic and synthetic, unique and special.
Maybe I can't see the 'art' in those endings - but if I want metaphysical philosophy, I'll go to church or call up my philosophy professor from a few semesters ago. A video game whose focus has been hope, survival, and choice is not the correct platform to suddenly discuss the meaning of life and chaos theory. It's too fourth wall. I didn't play Mass Effect 3 expecting that every emotion I felt, every sacrifice I felt keenly, every choice I made - would not ultimately matter. I played Mass Effect 3 expecting to have to make hard choices, to feel overwhelming emotion, and to ultimately have to sacrifice /something/ in order to break the cycle and uplift these UNIFIED races as the new truth in the galaxy.
Did I expect a Disney ending? Yes and no. I expected that I would have to play a 100% game in order to see Shepard survive with her LI, to see the races come together as one and help to rebuild their lives together, to acknowledge that countless sacrifices have been made, but ultimately, those sacrifices MATTERED because we destroyed the Big Bad, saved the galaxy, and now can start the healing process, together. I expected there would be a very good chance I would forget something, make some choice, that resulted in Shepard dying, but the galaxy surviving and having to rebuild. And I would have accepted that, knowing that if I played through again, I could potentially see the end of my story in a different fashion. I even expected that there would be an ending where the Reapers would overpower us because I just couldn't do enough to ensure the galaxy's survival. Failure should be an option.
What I got was three endings that were essentially the same. Even though Shepard proved that order can come from chaos (the galaxy united) and that AI doesn't always have to destroy its creators (EDI and the Geth/Quarian resolution), when confronted by the child AI, she doesn't even make a token effort to hold these hard-won truths up as a shield against the dissolution of reality. She just says 'Okay' and stumbles off to selflessly sacrifice herself in order to... destroy everything she just created. (Or, yeah, she could have "survived" - at the cost of two races, one of which she just redeemed by allowing the sacrifice of one of her dearest friends and the destruction of a synthetic being she just helped learn what it meant to LIVE, and STILL destroying everything that united the galaxy together.) They took MY STORY away from me in the last 15 minutes of the game and twisted it into THEIR STORY - even though one of the selling points of Mass Effect has always been that cHOICE matters and that you aren't playing their story, you're creating your own. (See, I could have accepted this with more aplomb from a game like King's Quest, where you're essentially following in the character's footsteps. Mass Effect was billed as a game where you control the outcome, where your choices dictate the ultimate ending.)
I had been working on a 100% playthrough of ME1, and had been planning on another with a few different choices that I could take into ME2, where I planned to play through several times in order to have some more 100% saves with several different choices, because I wanted to see how they played out in ME3. Now I can't even look at my desktop background of Shepard from ME1 without feeling my stomach drop out from under me. The endings of ME3 - the lack of closure, the utter gutlessness of Shepard, the despair from knowing that the hundreds of hours I spent playing the games meant /nothing/ - have destroyed any chance I might ever want to replay the game - any of the games - again. And that in itself enough to make me want to cry, because I have never enjoyed a game series as much as I do Mass Effect, nor has a game series obsessed me so much since I was playing the Q4G games back in the day.
And now I wish I'd never played them.
That right there makes me want to break down and cry some more.
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