I went into the endgame with knowledge of what was being said about the endings, but not actual details on what they were. So I tried to keep an open mind about it and see if I could catch something BioWare put in to make sense of it all.
My honest opinion? The ending comes out of left field. The sequence is completely unlike any other part of the game. You go from a fight against 5 Brutes, a Harvester, and a wave of Banshees and Marauders into- oh well, the laser beam hits you anyway, you have no idea what happened to your squad, and you're up on the Citadel alone with Anderson and the Illusive Man.
(Also, was disappointed on the final speech check- seems like you needed absolutely 100% Paragon or Renegade to get it, because I had about 90% Paragon and it was no dice. But then, I was able to make every single Renegade check in the game besides that one, despite having 10% or less Renegade. Kind of odd.)
That would be all fine if the endings were something worth it, something profound. But they're really not. Shepard dies no matter what, and the ending sequences are virtually the same, save for the color of the laser beam the Crucible shoots and maybe some robot-leaves for the merge ending. And the game doesn't save afterwards, so it's not like it makes a difference which one you pick. And it seems like the whole war effort, the whole "war readiness" questline is also for nothing, because in the end the entire game is reduced to "you pick one of three endings".
It feels almost uncannily like Deus Ex: Human Revolution - which was a good game on the whole, but kind of made weaker by the fact that you just press one of four buttons for the endgame (it goes: truth, exaggerate, lies, and "I'm just gonna blow the whole damn thing up").
Also- what's up with making the Illusive Man's Renegade ending blue and Anderson's Paragon ending red? That confused the hell out of me, especially in an already-confusing scene. Even if it was a stylistic shades-of-gray thing.
So I can see where a lot of the criticism comes in. You put in all that effort crafting a unique story for your Shepard, and then you get to just choose one of three endings and be the same as everyone else. The after-credits scene even states: well, Shepard is just a legend, anyway. We lost a lot of the details that don't really matter- such as, well, every choice you ever make. The only part that's important is that he/she stopped the Reapers.
So... I'm not gonna go demanding that BioWare change the ending. But you might say that I would welcome something a little more personalized than what they provided. Going into it, I was expecting the ending to be more of a "level of success" choice than a "pick your poison and btw all the mass relays are destroyed". Maybe a choice between destroy the reapers and control/make friends with the reapers, and depending on how many forces you put together determines how much gets destroyed in the process. Because I had well over 7000 war score and almost everyone still got killed.
Of course, if BioWare does put out a DLC ending, they will almost certainly charge me for it...
Eh. I've said my peace. I enjoyed the rest of the game immensely, and I'm still enjoying multiplayer. The only reason I'm hesitant about playing with my Renegade file is I get stuck with those endings to pick from. I might go up to Kai Leng, do all the final conversations with people on Earth, and then stop right there before doing the Brute-dance-gauntlet.
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