So as anyone can see from my recent Favs, I'm a Mass Effect fan.

Want to thank my brother for getting me into the series. Its a great space opera with lots of interesting and fleshed out races. Their is a growing sense of dread in the series, starting with ME leading into ME2 and fully felt with ME3. Your main enemy the Reapers truly feel threatening and you wonder how you can possibly beat them. A player gets to explore a lot of the futures of who they met during the course of the series. Choosing to help, harm, or even destroy allies you've made. As for the game itself, nearly all of it is excellent. Combat is fast paced and exciting. There are some gut wrenching moments when you lose close characters or spectacular ones when you help out a whole species. As a result maybe you can understand why so many fans (the majority of them BTW) are upset with the ending.

The problem with the ending has nothing to do with it being 'happy' or 'sad'. Would I have liked my Commander Shepard to have survived and see the fruits of all her hard paragon labor, of course. However if the story felt that she needed to make the ultimate sacrifice to save the Galaxy and wipe out the Reapers, I would understand. That's not what the ending of Mass Effect 3 goes for though. Without spoilers I can tell you that the ending betrays the very themes of the series. If you've played the games than you know that Shepard, no matter what version you play, good/evil, male/female, would reject the ending. Even worse about it is there is no closure for a storyline that had so many characters we came to enjoy or dislike. Do I need four hours of cut scene to tell me what happens to everyone, no. I'm not a professional writer but I considered the ending we got to be weak, and seemingly not connected to the rest of the storyline. I wasn't in Bioware's writing rooms, so I don't know what creative choices were made or if EA interfered. Whatever happened, the game's ending is a failure on what is otherwise an excellent game.

Bioware has criticized people attacking its ending. Of course there are extremes, people threatening 'death' too Bioware employees are clearly overreacting. As much as I didn't like the ending, it is just a game. However I do take offense to Bioware's statements which make it sound like all the criticism they've received is un-constructive or 'attacks'. Many arguments made against the ending have been well thought out and point out logical plot holes and problems with the conflicting themes. Personally I think Bioware if it thinks so highly of its ending, should defend it with more than talking about the art of it. Also if they have statements such as they wanted to generate discussion, don't be offended if that discussion turns against them. Poll after poll has shown that most (and by most I mean over 70%) feel the ending was wrong in one way or the other. In the end I think Bioware could be a little big and admit they made a mistake.

All in all I do recommend ME3 as game and nearly all of it as a great addition to the tale of Commander Shepard, although if you feel the need to rewrite your own ending feel free!