Machine Man 1992 said:
I just wanted to know what people thought. You know, one last look before the new year and we can forget this fucking game forever. One last hurrah for the biggest cock-up in video-game history since the Crash.
But no, it seems some people need to re-argue the same points over again. Ironically, it seems they haven't gotten over it either.
I'm going to respectfully disagree with you here. I cut my teeth on the RPG genre and it has to this day been my go-to genre for escapism. Be it JRPG or Western Style RPG, there's never been anything I enjoy more than losing myself in an epic story. This has colored my psyche somewhat, I imagine.
For me, these games are less about the destination and more about the journey. I've heard a lot of people rag on Final Fantasy 13 but I, for one, loved the hell out of it. Not "I thought it was a good way to kill time when I didn't have anything else to do" loved but rather "I earned my friggin' platinum trophy in FFXIII" loved. The ending, so far as I was concerned, was crap. Hell, the mechanics were crap. The fact you could only control a single character was crap. That there were no towns or respites or anything aside from story progression and combat was crap.
Thing is, I didn't enter into the experience for the mechanics, or the pacing, or the graphics, or the design aesthetics. I was there because I wanted to hear a story. And between the beginning and the end, I thought there was a story WORTH hearing. Something that moved me. Something that made me think. Something that compelled me. It was less about the hour the story took to start and the hour it took for the story to end and more about the 45+ hours that happened in between.
Much the same is true for me for Mass Effect. I went into the experience not terribly concerned about the destination. I was there for the journey. And, for me, the journey was spectacular. That the end point of that story was not the Garden of Eden but instead Hoboken, New Jersey, was never really a consideration. For me, the payoff was in the way the story unfolded, not in how the story ended.
Now, I can absolutely understand how people could be disappointed in the ending. When you invest 100+ hours into another world - its characters, its setting, its history, its evolution, its culmination - then you haven't simply invested your time into the experience. You've invested yourself into the experience. So when the culmination of that investment is less than perfect, which the ending for ME3 most assuredly was, the experience hasn't simply wasted your time. It has taken the portion of your soul that you invested, crumpled it up like so much waste-paper, and thrown it into the trash.
I suppose that maybe I didn't have that kind of investment in Mass Effect. I was there not for the beginning or the end but for everything that was inbetween. And for me, everything that was inbetween was exemplary. Just my two cents.