Ok heres my two cents.
200 hours of gaming across three titles and a game that captured my imagination over a number of years through either playing through the incumbent title at the time or waiting fervently for the next Mass effect game to make an appearance.
It's mix of RPG, action and epic cinematic story telling held me in a vice like grip that only FF7 and FF8 have previously managed to thrust me into during my hormonally charged emotional teenage years.
The entire series, from the first time I played ME1 in my friends house for half an hour whilst he was getting ready for us to go out to town to the completion of ME3 in my home last weekend, has been, for me, probably the apex of what gaming has to offer, I doubt any other game will make me feel like the ME series has ever made me feel, whether this is down to me simply getting older and the influences on my life changing, I'm not sure but this feeling I'm driving at is one that I know isn't just felt by myself.
That's obvious due to the strength of feeling ME fans have shown and the reaction so many on here and forums across the world have displayed when discussing the climax of the trilogy in ME3. From simple outright indigination being displayed, to the more creative, such as the story of 60 cakes being sent to Bioware heardquarters, 20 coloured red, 20 green and 20 blue...but all flavoured vanilla to the more objective protest such as fighting funds being established over the course of a few days that ran into the thousands in aid of trying to get Bioware to somehow alter the already world wide release of ME3, in particular the endings that have divided the fan base to the core.
How I feel about the endings is unclear even to myself, I'm still trying to grasp exactly how I feel about it in a totally neutral and logical way, but currently that is beyond me.
What I'm considering in my current quest to come to a conclusion on the ME3 endings and the series is what I loved about it on the whole, and one of the major things I loved was that although it was a fantastical story created in a far flung future, the human aspect of it was so real and believable, a point illustrated in my own personal playthrough of ME2 and the loss of several characters in the final mission.
I'd done absolutley every little thing their was to do in ME2, yet still lost characters in the final mission, which at first infuriated me, thinking i'd missed something I consulted gaming guides and found that I had missed literally nothing during my play through, yet to get a 100% playthrough with all characters saved required not just x amount of quests completed and favourable outcomes achieved, but also one other thing...luck, random, generated luck, something i evidently didn't get much of as the two characters I lost, (legion and Talia who'd I'd gained 100% loyalty with and completed all of the games side quests) and later discovering that both are key components of the quarian/geth storyline, having now gone over all the walkthroughs for it after completing ME3.
After first being infuriated in the wake of completing ME2 I then realised, well if it this was a real story, in the face of those kinds of odds, would everyone survive? The answer to that is probably not and how this shaped my ME3 experience was crucial as it displayed the fact that in too much of todays gaming, social and cinematic media, everyone wants to see the 100% happy perfect smiley ending, in real life that simply doesnt happen very often, sacrifices must be made to achieve your utlimate aims, so although gutted at first it made the experience more real for me and therfore sucked me deeper into the ME world.
So to the endings, after putting in 50 plus hours into ME3 completing every little quest I can find and searching every nook of the Milky way for war assets, traversing more times than healty around the Citadel in search of additional quests between nearly every single mission I completed I came to the end game sequence.
Before writing down my feelings on this I guess the question I'd like to pose is, given the largely negative reaction to the game's endings,what type of endings where we hoping for exactly?
Just how do you end arguably the greatest gaming series ever released? Its a tough question and one I've asked a lot of ME fanatics and the answers given seem consistently vague to me.
So to begin with Bioware had a monumental task on their hands, which didn't just include creating a triple A quality game to live up to the series billing but also to end it on an astronomical high whilst balancing it with the need to satisfy its worldwide and diverse fan base with their own cultures on what is right and what is wrong.
Not easy.
So after finally besting the game at around 13:00 last Saturday, and then playing through the game another 4 times from the point of downing the reaper destroyer, I had seen all the endings that my "good" playthough could possibly give me (and caught the "bad" endings on youtube) I sat down and took in what I'd seen...and I can understand why people are angry, the endings really are very similar in the terms of the actual cinematics used, each cinematic, only really changes in terms of the colour of the lighting (red, green or blue) and only in one of the endings do you see a different piece of cinematic in relation to the fate of the reapers...so yes I can see why people are annoyed.
It does however depend on how you view it, whilst all 3 cinematics are undeniably very similar, the actual outcome and consequences for each ending is literally worlds apart, each one, completley changes the universe in a unique way for better or for worse, that also cannot be denied so putting my finger on the problem is very difficult.
Do people just feel cheated due to the lack of variation in the ending cinematics? (ie their not all completley different/recycled?) Or is it something more than that?
It's not a question I can answer myself, my only feeling now is that Mass Effect has given me probably the best gaming experience of my life and I wouldnt change any of the gameplay or cinematics up to the ending, even with the benefit of hindsight on my own personal playthroughs, its been an absolute pleasure and a testament to what real story telling aligned with quality gaming can achieve.
I just think its also undeniable that for so many people, their own ME series experience has been soured to varying degrees by the end game, and for a gaming legacy such as Mass Effect, that's a real shame.