I think it's a tremendous game with serious lows that are ultimately made up for by its triumphant highs.
Its strength lies in genuinely great encounter and combat design. It comes at a cost of the structure of the game, feeling the most linear and combat heavy. But the end result is punchy, satisfying weapons and hit feedback, challenging encounter loops, enormous enemy variety, and exceptional encounter zone layout that encourage push-pull player positioning and movement. The strength of the combat is proven by the horde mode that I'm still gutted wasn't ported after the Legendary Edition as a stand-alone multiplayer.
The story is, for most part, fine. BioWare had no plan and wrote themselves into a corner, and I've long come to accept the goofiness and weaknesses of some of the narrative beats and BioWare's struggle to make amends with the ridiculous premise they'd built up to. Having the Reapers presented as omnipotent, invincible Lovecraftian space gods and having a narrative where they can be beaten was a rough idea to start with. That being said, I think the momentum of the story is excellent, the game does a fantastic job of making each location and setting tense and riddled with a sensation of war. There's fantastic attention to detail, like revisiting the Citadel after major story beats to find the impact of the war increasing the waves of refugees and flood of injured persons at the hospital.
Character writing is fine. Even Vega. I don't think enough credit is given for how most of the characters are fully formed, and even cliche dumb meatheads like Vega have substance in their backstory and personality. The game aims to wrap up three-story-arc characters like Garrus and Tali and, for most part, does so exceptionally. There are countless major payoffs that 'complete' arcs to great satisfaction and really make it feel like the three game investment was worthwhile.
The visual and audio design is fantastic. It sounds and looks incredible, and with SGSSAA on PC is still one of the cleanest, nicest looking games around. The variety of locations is astounding, particularly with the DLC, and the game never feels repetitive of phone in as to where you go and what you see.
On the downside the story's end is dogshit, and remains dogshit, and tonally off with some key facets of the series. I've long come to accept it for what it is. And I actually like the climax itself (like the Battle for Earth and push into and upwards into the hijacked Citadel). Leviathan DLC adds a lot of necessary substance to soften the blow thanks to additional context, but the "impossible scenario" presented to you at the end and options to conclude it are contrived and silly. BioWare weirdly wrote 3 games about defying the odds, triumph over conservatism and faux inevitabilities, and then pissed it away at the end.
Some of the characters are rubbish. Kai Leng is one of the worst things penned in the entire series, and isn't even fun goofy. Legion/Geth arc is a woeful Pinocchio story that does more damage to the Geth's unique qualities than enhance them. Sex bot EDI is whatever, horny writing is fine, but whoever was penning that went way overboard into cringe.
I think the DLC is fucking awesome, especially Leviathan and Omega. I don't think Citadel is very good, in retrospect. It serves a purpose as a post-experience fandom pandering tokenistic cap to the "Mass Effect Trilogy", that aims to masturbate players with cringy meme dialogue and tongue-in-cheek, wink-at-the-player references. And I think that's cool and fine because it serves a purpose. But it's laden with awful Whedonspeak dialogue and pandering that would later form some of the worst qualities of Andromeda's own script, and don't represent the best of the trilogy's sombre melancholy and black comedy.
All in all though I think it's great. Like, all of the three games have their strengths and weaknesses individually. Mass Effect 1 is still my favourite of the bunch as a sum total of parts, but is also littered with shit people forgive it for that it condemned in other games. Mass Effect 3's lowest are excruciating and I still genuinely feel, even being my most forgiving for other stuff in the game that I don't like, that the ending is trash and was badly written and conceived from the start. I think BioWare probably wanted to do a lot more with the Battle for Earth (they talked about it being more ME2 Suicide Mission-like), and the game probably could have done with another year in the cooker to reduce pressure on getting it all done. And ultimately ME2 and ME3 didn't take the series in the direction I would have preferred post ME1. But I can't undo that and it's dumb to keep complaining about it all these years later, especially since I still enjoyed what's there.
And ultimately I just don't think there's really much, or anything, else out there like the trilogy. I think the Legendary Edition is still some of the best value-for-money gaming on the market, and that despite their weakest moments, BioWare maintained an extremely impressive and consistent level of quality across all three games in what they deliver at their strongest beats. I genuinely think the Mass Effect trilogy is one of the closest series in the entire medium to capture the experience of watching several seasons of a great television show, and the depth of the worldbuilding, lore, characterisations, arcs, etc, are relatively unmatched when you consider how much content and time is offered across three games and how it all unravels. Going through the Legendary Edition reignited a lot of the love I have for these games, and how there isn't a replacement.
The saddest thing is, as said, that they never ported the fucking awesome horde mode with the Legendary Edition, or afterwards. Shit ruled hard.
