A big part of the thing with the ending is the suddenness with which it goes bad. It's got one rather well-written and touching scene that would be a great way to kick off a conventional denouement, and then all of a sudden [spoiler]you're being moved into another room where a hologram babbles about the villains' idiotic true purpose[/spoiler], and it manages to keep going downhill from there.
The ending has a lot of problems, and it's difficult to summarize concisely, but I'll try: [spoiler]After the climax, it introduces a really lame new character, who expositions up an unforeshadowed and thematically questionable new motive for the villains which is largely less interesting than the one implied of them over the course of the last 2.9 games, and which is based on a premise that the events of the game have already demonstrated to be false. Based on this information - which, uncharacteristically, you can't question or reject - it offers you a choice with consequences so far-reaching that they overshadow all the events leading up to it. The mechanics of the choice are unclear and appear to violate the established rules of the setting; one of the options is outright nonsense when considered at any but the most abstract level. However, the consequences of the choice don't matter, because it never depicts them; it shows one of several almost identical brief cinematics including some (not all) of your party members, which leaves them in a situation that appears to totally overshadow the directions
their lives had been going in as well (and it is possible to view a permutation of the scene which contradicts the stated effects of the choice you just made so what the fuck).[/spoiler] Then the credits roll and it shows an ambiguously distant epilogue narrated (poorly, I'm afraid) by Buzz Aldrin, and a message that if you want more adventures, DLC is available.
Notably, it does
not depict [spoiler]what happened to anybody except your crew, and in the case of your crew it doesn't explain what the fuck they were even doing there[/spoiler], and therefore [spoiler]people have every reason to assume that the ending is not so much "bittersweet" as it is "nihilistic," with billions starving including everybody you grew attached to over the course of the series, and the setting as a whole never regaining its defining element of a huge and diverse galactic community[/spoiler]. Their promises to "clarify" the ending imply that this
particular failure will be addressed, but that still leaves lots of others.
There's the kernel of a good idea in there, but the way it's presented, executed, and (not) depicted is about as unsatisfying as imaginable. When you build up players' emotional attachment to the story so well and then do...
that... then is it any surprise that all those emotions will go nuclear?
Hey stupid question.
Is the rest of the game fun up to the ending? All this talk and hype has me vaguely interested in seeing the ending and wrapping up my FemShep adventure.
It's still Bioware, and that means laden with inconsistent quality and cut corners, but it's their A-team, not the B-team behind Dragon Age 2. Apart from the ending, its biggest failings are being occasionally dumb and having too few enemy types, but when it's good, it's got a strong claim to being the best they've ever produced.
Gameplaywise it manages to bring back the RPG-like weapon and build customization of the first game and apply it to the shooter-like streamlinedness of the second.
