Susan Arendt said:
It's not like the endings are broken or anything....
Just taking this quote from the video because I just have to comment on it.
This is flat out incorrect. The canon endings of Mass Effect 3 are extremely broken on a very basic, narrative level. They fail miserably in a variety of ways, introducing plots holes and inconsistencies all over the place.
Really, it can be broken down into a few discrete points, some of which was covered in the video:
1) The logic behind the Reapers is asinine. Anyone with half a brain can understand that "In order to stop robots from kill you, I built robots to kill you first" is bad logic. Computers operate
solely on logic. It's a bit outrageous to not expect a machine older than I can comprehend to spot that flaw.
2) There's absolutely no closure. You have no idea what happened to the Quarians, Geth, Krogan, Turian, your crew or the fleet you brought with you. It just ends, with no way of telling what kind of impact you just had on the galaxy.
3) It is tonally and thematically opposed to the entire rest of the series (and even the rest of ME3). The series as a whole has proven itself to revolve around a few core ideas: Tolerance and unity despite base differences leads to greater strength (in every meaning of the word), What it means to be a person, The importance of free will, and Optimism even in the face of armageddon.
The canon endings spit in the face of all of that. They are tonally very, very dark, and Shepard just meekly accepts everything the Catalyst says, despite it going against every one (or most, depending) of his/her principles (and the themes I list above). It just comes out of nowhere and goes directly against what the games have been trying to establish.
4) Plot holes galore. The Normandy suddenly running away from the battle, the Relays exploding but not killing everything in the galaxy, Anderson and TIM magically appearing on the Citadel, the beam of death somehow not instantly killing Shepard, etc.
The canon endings are incredibly broken, at the most basic levels of narrative. It's not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of simply broken literary mechanics. They
might have been able to salvage it (or at least fix the worst of the flaws) if they had just cut out the Catalyst conversation and Joker flying away and added in a DA:O style end montage to wrap things up, but since they didn't, it came out utterly broken.