So, I never post here, but I just finished the game and figured I'd add my opinion to the growing amount of feedback. I know I'm just saying things that have already been said, but I figure one more voice couldn't hurt.
The game was, overall, pretty damn good. The writing and squad interactions throughout most of the game were outstanding. If I had one major criticism it would be the continued dumbing down of the series. No more PDA hacking or locked door bypass minigames? Eh, fine, whatever. The combat was good, and the gun and armor customization was nice. The end, on the other hand, felt... off, somehow.
You spend the entirety of the game gathering your forces for the counterattack on Earth, yet when you get there they have little to no impact on the final outcome. I was expecting a "suicide mission" format similar to ME2, whereby your preparations (or lack thereof) actually had an impact on the final outcome and the lives of your squad. It was nice to see Wrex and the Primark there before the final push, but that seems to be the extent of their addition to things. Still, I could overlook that as a small blemish on an otherwise outstanding game.
I will say I found the music to be somewhat lackluster during the fleet's arrival and the joining of the battle against the Reapers. The melancholy piano numbers were nice, but the composer doesn't seem to have the same talent for epic scores as the one from ME2. And it really should have been epic, because damn was that a beautiful cinematic.
I was into the story all the way up to the Citadel. When Shepard gets hit by the beam and wakes up, I thought "oh, it's like the shell shock effect from Saving Private Ryan, cool". Then I ran into Anderson and the Illusive Man, who for some reason seemed to be half husk now. That threw me a bit, since the last time I'd seen him he looked fine. I assumed it was supposed to indicate that he was now a blatant tool of the Reapers, and played through the sequence.
The scene with Anderson and Shepard sitting there, looking out at Earth, was great. Very emotional. Had the game ended there it would have been perfect - something goes wrong and Shepard has to fire the the Crucible manually, one last heroic sacrifice. It fires, with no explanation how it works, the Reapers are all destroyed, and the Citadel blows up with Shepard on board. Give us an epilogue or final cinematic to tie up loose ends for the squad and the fleet, and we're golden. I would have been fine with that, though perhaps a tad disappointed that I didn't get to deal with Harbinger personally.
Then I meet the glowkid, and everything falls apart at the speed of light.
I wasn't sure how the Citadel had been moved to Earth in the first place, but I figured "hey, its been established as a giant Mass Relay in the first game, why the hell couldn't it move itself?". Now this glowkid tells me he IS the Citadel? And that he made the Reapers?
Ooookay, now we're introducing new plot holes. If this thing created the Reapers and is part of the Citadel, why the frack did Sovereign need to attack it in ME1? Glowkid could have just pulled the Reapers in on his own.
Now, having thought about it for a moment I can actually see part of the logic in the glowkid's "solution to chaos" argument. At some point, organics will create a synthetic that will wipe out all organic life in it's entirety, not just intelligent life or advanced civilizations. By "reaping" the advanced civilizations and "preserving" them in Reaper shells you can save the advanced civilizations and ensure that all organic life is spared at the cost of a portion of it. It's a very alien point of view, but we're dealing with an alien entity here.
However, the Reapers seem to be consistently late to the party. They started Reaping after the Protheans were fighting the Metacon War in the last cycle, and after the Geth had kicked the Quarians off of Rannoch in this cycle. Its clear that the Reapers need to keep a closer eye on things. Since none of the enemies from the Metacon War were still around in our cycle, it's safe to assume that the Reapers wiped them out along with everything else. So why, instead of destroying advanced organic lifeforms, didn't the solution involve simply destroying only dangerous synthetics?
Part of the argument is that created will always rebel against the creator. Then why would the glowkid create the Reapers if they're destined to turn on him? And what exactly is he, anyway?
We're provided an explanation for the Reapers, but the answer raises a much larger question about who and what the glowkid is. To make this worse, we're not afforded an opportunity to ask any questions about it - we're left completely in the dark, at the very end of the series, and provided no answers to a huge new mystery.
And then we are provided a choice of three endings, none of which are good. You can control the Reapers, which Shepard has been vocally against for the entire series. This was the Illusive Man's solution, and we saw how that ended. Why on earth would be choose that? Then there's Synthesis, which allows you to do what sounds suspiciously like Huskifying every living thing in the universe. After seeing what the joining of synthetic and organic has done previously (IE, Saren), why would we choose that either? Not only that, but it does not provide a distinct reason for why it would end the Cycle of Reaping. Are you trying to tell me that synthetic/organic hybrids would never create anything purely synthetic ever again, or that what they create wouldn't turn on them regardless? There's no way you could say that with any certainty. And then there's Destroy, which is what Shepard has been after this entire time, the only solution his character has been built up to take. Only it gets the caveat of destroying everything synthetic? If the Crucible can join organic and synthetic together, it should be able to differentiate between Reapers and other synthetic life forms. But then, once again, we only have the mysterious glowkid's word on that.
No matter what we choose, the mass relays are destroyed.
Wait, really? It was established in Arrival that destroying a mass relay destroys the system it sits in. Now, it could be that however the Crucible works it somehow avoids this, but that's never explained, and it really should have been.
Next we have the ending cinematics, which are more or less the same. Beyond some colored lights and whether the Reapers fall down or fly away, we have no idea how our choices affect the game or the rest of the galaxy.
The Normandy crash makes no sense, either. Why were they in a mass relay jump at exactly the wrong moment? Why did they abandon the fight above Earth? How did your squad members, who were all on Earth with you - and in some cases right there at the beam with you - get back up to the ship? And... that's it. That's all we get to know about the fate of squad members we've come to know throughout the course of three games. We don't know how the galaxy gets on after Shepard's dead, either.
Lots of speculation from everyone!
Honestly, when I saw that line it made me facepalm so hard I have a concussion. The end of a magnificent trilogy of games is supposed to end in closure, a feeling of satisfaction. Instead we're supposed to wonder what happened? If that's an artistic choice, it's a fail. A big one.
Unless... I've read up on the Indoctrination Theory, and wow does it fit. If that's what this is, then its sheer brilliance, but we need to know. Maybe it should have been made a little more clear, maybe you guys should just come out and say one way or another. If you didn't intend it I suggest you pick up that ball and run with it, because it would make this whole thing so much better. Then again, if this is all the end you planned on, it's pretty sad that the only thing that makes it make sense is "it's all a hallucination".
Overall, the game is 95% awesome. But that ending (unless it's indoctrination), is one hell of a fail.
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