"What's this, an unresolved issue? What are you doing you mad bastard?!? Don't you know that it is forbade by the great god of the Escapist to reopen a conversation?"
Whenever I see someone post the words "Not this thread again" I think to myself "Not this comment again". Complaints of beating a dead horse have themselves become a dead horse, and some kind of terrible cycle of pretentious dismissal has been created, lo and behold our inevitable doom.
Oh yeah, Mass Effect. Yeah the last mission was kinda shit, I still hold that the ending was worse, but the whole last battle was underwhelming, the best parts of the ending came from the little character interactions, if you ask me.
I think this problem could have been avoided if instead of having earth be the last mission, the last MISSIONS consisted of earth. The last 4-6 hours of the game would be one long, detailed, involved struggle spanning days or weeks, with the arrival of the Diablos/Deus/Confusion Ex Machina (The Crucible, which was stupid and unnecessary) as the final battle.
Ironically, I think ME3's frantic pacing is the source for most of it's problems. Say what you will about how unfocused ME2 was, every character got their due and every major plot point was closed (Except for the whole star thing(The fuck was that?)). This was because ME2 was the only game in the series without some kind of ticking clock, it was just Shepard setting up the strike on the collector base whenever the fuck he felt like it; it was for this reason everybody got their own little vignette.
The "Catch Saren before he fucks something up" and "HOLYFUCKHOLYFUCKHOLYFUCKWE'REALLGONNADIE!!!" plots of ME and ME3 respectively mean that Shepard doesn't really have time to do things like blow up a ruin or look up family just to make his buds feel better, and it also means that those friends don't get to express themselves in such personal ways, because the looming threat of annihilation demands everybody behave a certain way, and it takes a great deal of narrative back flipping and face-heel turns to make it even remotely plausible that someone would still argue against that behavior(*cough*TIM*cough*).
This is also why Saren worked better as a threat, because only the player and his immediate circle were aware of the danger, so it wasn't so jarring when nobody else wanted to help.
It was all kind of inevitable, though. This is why Bioware needs to change up their formula, because as they seek to tell more complex stories it's going to become a burden; I'm not convinced the Mass Effect series had to be about galactic destruction, but Bioware just kind of defaulted to it, and as a result we have games whose concept details and thematic undertones are often more engaging than the overarching stories that support them.