No, I totally 100% agree. The ending was meh but it hardly ruined a fantastic game. If it did for someone, well, that's unfortunate. There is much more that goes into a game than the ending to its plot. ME3 was chock full of incredible moments and the gameplay was typical great Mass Effect.
I think people would bitch about the ending regardless of what they did. Hard to end such a hailed story/series. Just like how when ASOIAF ends (I know Jack can relate to this example) legions of fans will bitch about how it ended, regardless of how GRRM decides to end it.
Eh...I have to disagree. Mass Effect was a very story-based franchise, and the two most important parts of a story are the beginning and the ending. The beginning is important, obviously, because it's what draws people in. The Last of Us is a perfect example of this. I was totally on board with that game right from the start because the intro was fucking fantastic and memorable. If you open with a bang, people will stick with your story.
The ending is more important, though. If you fail with the ending, especially to the degree that Mass Effect 3 failed (which was a Lost level of incompetence), that becomes the main thing people remember about your story. Lost, as I just mentioned, is a great example of this. I really enjoyed most of Lost, but the ending left such a bad taste in my mouth and was so horribly envisioned that I will never rewatch the series. Contrast that with The Shield, a series that got a little bumpy toward the end but hit the finale so far out of the park that I'm always willing to go back and keep watching.
Now, if Mass Effect 3 had just had a mediocre ending, it probably wouldn't have been that bad. The problem was that the ending was just fucking awful. There was no epic final boss fight, no incredible space battle (at least that we saw enough of to matter), just a dumb fucking space kid who was running a deus ex machina machine. All those choices you made throughout the series? Didn't matter. Here are three different colored endings. Enjoy!
@AustinCarr - I wasn't saying the entire game was rushed, but the ending was pretty clearly rushed. It felt like they ran out of time to make a proper ending so they just slapped some high school level philosophy bullshit together and called it a day. And as far as the great reviews went, well, I'm guessing most reviewers didn't even finish the game before reviewing it, which is a common practice, especially for games that are as long as Mass Effect 3 was. It's also no secret that AAA games are basically guaranteed a good score because they pay for all the advertising on the sites that review them. A major release from EA or Activision has to really, really suck to get anything less than an 8.5. That's just the state of video game journalism, and I think it says it all that most sites actively derided fans that were unhappy with Mass Effect's ending. Rather than engage in an actual debate about the merits of it they attacked their readers and protected the advertiser.
