[This post is about the Mass Effect 3 ending. A hearty rant supporting a minority opinion that will delve into many spoilers. Disclaimer: I'm right and everybody who disagrees is wrong. I take no responsibility for your opinions being completely rewritten... actually, that's a lie; I'd love to be responsible for changing your mind]
In regards to every person who has a problem with the ending of the series, lord explain to me why they continued playing after Feros in Mass Effect 1. Seriously, you're frustrated with a holographic AI in the form of something Shepard can relate to... but you can dig the whole "Let's take a plant who shares the "memories" of an entire civilization, make it eat an asari commando, clone her a bunch of times, and have her command legions of zombies! On top of that, let's turn her green, because, I don't know, PLANTS. Oh, yeah, and did we forget to mention that the plant controls the minds of an entire human colony."
There is no point in arguing about plot holes, because the biggest damn ones were not in the ending. Seriously, the only possible impetus for making an ending that closed all of the stories would be utter destruction of the galaxy - but even this can't happen, because that's not the goal of the reapers, and the only options for the future are the cycle and a new life.
What Casey Hudson meant (or at least what is true) when he said 'it's not just endings A, B, and C,' is that your experience in coming away from the Mass Effect series is not defined by the final pre-rendered scene you get after making your catalyst choice. After it's all over, you know how the universe turns out, whether they tell you or not. Unless you spontaneously forget everything you've done, you can put the pieces of your own post-crucible galaxy together and use your imagination.
Most of the inconsequential plot holes are filled up by e-mails to your terminal. The consequential plot lines are all completely fleshed out, and although they may not end concretely, the overall experience was complete.
When I beat the game before EC, on both of my 2 playthroughs (1 was synth, 2 was destroy) I felt upset that I was sacrificing way too much to win this battle on top of everything I gave up on the way, and I didn't feel like I was really making an informed decision. If you've successfully engaged yourself to the story (and the other way around), then you should feel the burden of the decision as pretty hefty. Before EC, I had no problem with the endings - I had a problem with my interaction with the decision. I felt like it was hasty (first time, I literally didn't know how to decide and walked forward into synth, expecting to get a wheel of choices) and I didn't know what to base my decision on. I hadn't enough time to think about the consequences. Consequently, it didn't really sink in like it should have.
Post-EC, that issue was fixed. I understood that the fighting really was worth it when I realized the greatest dilemma facing me was not necessarily what to sacrifice, but what kind of galaxy I wanted to exist in the future. +, instead of being a pithy gesture of grandeur, the dialogue felt more real. It felt like I was an agent; once I had the ability to ask questions that I needed to, I felt like I was really weighing all of the factors adequately. Then I could act on the beliefs of the Shepard I crafted through three games.
Aside from that, the romance lines were drastically improved by the simple gestures added. With my femshep/Garrus, I broke in half in the scene before the beam. Later, I cried when he held up my plaque, because regardless of the fact that I was going to get the breathing scene and he could hypothetically come find me or vice versa, I could really connect to the moment. The pre-EC goodbye you say before the final battle was great, but he wasn't the last person I spoke to - which is dumb, considering that's what most would do if they were actually going into a final battle. The structure was much better for the romance, and the scene they added with Joker was also very poignantly placed.
And in the end, the differences in people's endings WAS and IS, irrespective of EC, quite large: in the sense that you're role playing, making decisions along the way that define your Shepard, you internally develop a mentality--a system of beliefs and a paradigm of thought with which you have likely been consciously consistent as you played the series. I think that once people get that, they'll understand how profound the games really were. They required you to understand the saga from a perspective that may or may not have been your own, but nonetheless a good player would have been cognizant of that perspective throughout the series, and experienced many profound feelings and concepts from that synthesized mentality. If the point of art is to communicate an experience beneath the story, then Mass Effect does so like no other game has done, and probably will do for a while--because everybody's moaning about how they didn't like it. Good art requires you to see things from a new perspective, which was absolutely done in this game. More so than people wanted, probably because this is a grey area that makes some people instinctively lean towards what they're familiar with in video games, or they clamor for the developers to read their mind and allow them the option that they would choose if they were photoshopped up onto the Crucible after eating a Hotpocket.
Here's my angle: Stop crying for fan service, because if you do it long enough, that's what you'll get. BioWare games will go down the drain instead of culminating in the most profound artistic medium ever to exist. Other companies will follow suit, and nobody will be happy. And civilization will be hopeless. And crap games will ruin our brains. And we'll all die. The end.
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