I'm voting mediocre but it's actually just highly inconsistent with specific very bad things that drag down the overall product.
Combat is good, some levels are good, some individual questline writing and character moments are good. I do praise it for finally striking a good balance in terms of rpg build complexity and action gameplay (although it's sad we didn't ever get decrypting type stuff to a good place).
The story doesn't just have a bad ending. Although the ending is especially poor, they built up to it by making a series of bad decisions first, some narrative, some structural.
- Cerberus just being controlled by the reapers robs them of anything interesting, narratively.
- Kai Leng as an anti-shepard doesn't work. It's embaressing.
- Throwing in a totally non essential live Prothean who just kind of riffs on things sometimes instead of him being a central character to the narrative is disappointing.
- Having only one way to approach a solution to the reaper threat throughout the game is disappointing, as is having it pop up conveniently in the opening act of ME3 with no foreshadowing or buildup.
- Having effectively no unique missions based on trilogy choices is very disappointing. Just some minor variations within existing missions. The Rachni mission always occuring is especially insulting.
- All of your collected allies and hard work being compressed down to just meat shields for you to do the final mission is a really sad way for the series to go out, even in a world where the ending wasn't as bad.
- Everything after you reach the final mission is of course famously bad and people have spent much time talking about this.
WRT to Cerberus - the trilogy feel totally incoherent. In the 1st game they were just a group of very evil rogue cia types. In the 2nd game they are presented with a lot more detail, they are given an ideology, but you are railroaded into working with them for the greater good regardless. In the 3rd game they degenerate into mindless faceless robots who somehow are no longer a rogue faction and now have a huge army capable of threatening the citadel forces.
I think what's the most disappointing part of the overall game to me is that based on the first two games, I was fooled into thinking they had a grand plan where they were introducing all of these different groups and factions and that they would present potenitally alternative ways to approach the reaper threat. That your choices in the trilogy would open up new final paths - yes from a game perspective you'd still need maybe 75-85% of the overall game to have the same or only slightly tweaked missions, but that at least for the finale and a few places here or there you could expect some cool reactivity, since there were no more sequels to constrain things for. This was the final stop!
The solutions we get are:
- Control
- Destroy
- Synthesis
The control ending has an obvious faction alignment - it's what Cerberus was trying to do in ME2 and it's DLC. The Destroy ending is a vanilla option, like the Alliance/Council aligned one. The synthsis ending doesn't make any goddamn sense, but IMO should have been replaced with a looser one of "peace" - and that would be based on solving the Quarian-Geth conflict and using this as a demonstration that coexistence is possible. There could also have been a final, bittersweet possibility where you fail, and instead try to plant the seeds for the next cycle that comes after you.
Instead of working towards an ending and taking anything you did into account, we got what we got, which I consider just a bad idea from the start, then executed poorly on top.
