I just finished the game and I really enjoyed the entire thing from beginning to end. There were some manly near tear moments like Legion declaring itself in the first person, or the death of Thane and Mordin. There were some really funny moments like the Garrus bromance moment with sniper rifles with my male shep, or finding out the Elcor fight with giant cannons on their backs, or basically anything to do about the Krogan re-population moments and Ashley+Tali getting drunk, finally laughing at James Vega for being a loco.
The Tali thing didn't bother me at all because no one was gonna be happy even if they put the time into it, there would be a group of whining people complaining about how she didn't look like they envisioned for the character and demand DLC adjustments.
Also I hate the complaining about the ending and how everything didn't matter, because yes it did. I can tell you right now I know it does Conrad is alive in my Shep's world cause I saved a dancer/undercover woman in ME1, The Krogan are alive and repopulating, and the Quarian are living hand in hand with the Geth cause I screamed into a transmitter, also I killed the Ranchi and left them to never be alive again because I liked Grunt too much to sacrifice him in the tunnels, and I thought that the Krogan would be better in numbers. That's just a few of the real changes I made on that world for whatever future game will come up.
Back on topic of the ending, there is a reason the game comes with a freedom of choice, otherwise there should just be a popup in character creation that says, do you want to be paragon or renegade? If I want to play and punch out the reporter I can do that, if I want to be a douche that also loves his girlfriend with paragon tenderness, I can. The fact is that makes your character you and as a result, you can be affected by your decisions in the game. So when I saw the three endings, it made me think about who I was becoming at that moment.
The Mass Relays were going to get destroyed regardless, but I could control the reapers, and use them to move people around the world and use their power and intelligence to rebuild them and the world, I could destroy them better safe then sorry in hopes of giving the world peace by eliminating synthetic life. Or finally, and the choice I made, transform all life into bio-synethic life, so that there were no slaves, everyone was equal[at least that's how I saw it].
But what made the "push-button" decision goes back to my probably badly created argument, people can change, and decide to change in the moments before death. At the start of the game I knew I wanted to destroy the Reapers and keep them from ever coming back for what I had seen but by the end I was questioning myself on whether or not I could. I knew that they were murderous bastards, and sure the little AI kid confused me a bit about how life would merge, or why the Reaper synthetic was perfectly acceptable to rise up and kill all life, rather than the creations of organics. But after watching and hearing about the effect the Geth were having with their creators in the Quarians, how quickly they were helping them and helping rebuild the planet for them, I thought about how could I kill or control synthetics because of actions and decisions that went farther back in time than the existence of humans.
