I feel like the story is a lot of shock and emotionally moments without a lot of logic. The first time I played it was so very tiring to play, not because the battles were difficult, but just because the game just unloads so much emotional crap on you. Playing the second time around, every time that solo piano music starts playing when something "deep" is happening, my eyes roll to the back of my head and I feel like seizing. I can't help feeling half the time, why did I think that this moment was so well done before, it's so incredibly stupid. This game is one massive chunk of PMS.
Then of course, Thane was my favorite character romance or not. I had the expectation that he will die, but the expectation included that I would see him a lot more before that happened. One conversation almost entirely around his miserable sickness and then he dies the next time I see him. He is such a minor character now, he's easily replaced by a minor character from ME1 and the game guide doesn't list him as anything important. It's made worse by the romance because there is no paramour, no I loves, not even friggen tears from female Shepard, no difference from the non-romanced Thane plot, and no one ever talks about him again. There is a conversation with Garrus immediately after about Kaidan/Ashley who died 2 years ago. Somehow that was far more important to Shepard and Garrus than Thane, the guy that went on the much more recent suicide mission and died about an hour ago.
Well no, someone does bring him up frequently. That poor excuse for a villain, the 12-year-old internet douche named Kai Leng likes to trash talk Thane since he is no longer around to kick Leng's weak ass. I really wish Thane was healthier enough to have just killed Leng off so I would have one less thing to hate the game for.
No back to crappy romance, even if I wanted to move my Shepard on from Thane, Kaidan friend-zoned my Shepard because I didn't buy him booze and all that was left were lesbian relationships. I'm happy Bioware finally embraced homosexual relationships in the game, but that was ridiculous for female Shepard. Vega's a vagina tease, Joker has "standards" and would rather do a robot, Garrus is only available if you imported his romance and goes after Tali, and Javik while completely unprovoked for romance turns Shepard down. Then Jacob, I can not believe they did that. Despite all the flack that guy got, there were a minority of fans that loved that character and passed up all the other romances for him only to find out near the end of the game he couldn't wait and had moved on. The nice guy, the down to earth, none angsty romancable guy gets turned into an cheating ass reminiscent of his own father that he spoke out so strongly against.
The auto-dialogue really kills the game for me. There was too much of it in ME3 and replaying makes it so much more painfully apparent as it doesn't seem like the conversations change at all. Even though I'm picking different options Shepard says the same stuff. When you actually get to pick something Shepard's tone just goes from one extreme to another, but then after that Shepard's saying the same stuff no matter what. You can even see it in the first ten minutes of the game. One of the conversations that really irked me was when you get to first talk to Vega on the Normandy, and Shepard's (in my case female) only options are to flirt or be a *****. There's no middle option for Shepard to just be interested in making a friend. There's no middle option for the entire game except I think for when Liara brings up her time capsule.
Why the hell did they take out the middle option. RPG's basically all have the same three personality types going on, super good/selfless hero, unsure/down to earth hero, evil/rebellious hero. What the crap happened to the unsure/down to earth hero type?
ME1 was too far the other extreme, Shepard couldn't say a word without the player picking an option and that led the character to being too flat and boring. Shepard would stand and watch everyone else carry on entire conversations without saying anything.
ME2 had this perfect balance, were you had your choices that actually influenced the auto dialogue then would go back to another choice that could take the conversation in another direction and influence the dialogue more. Up until ME3 came out, I was still discovering conversations I completely missed because I didn't explore everything yet.
With ME3, I feel like there is no point in replaying. Besides the endings pretty much making all Shepard's efforts feel pointless, the story is emotional crap, there's no appealing romance options to me, and Shepard as a playable character is sorely limited. They might as well have saved themselves time and money, said to hell with it and made Shepard male, default appearance, have him romanced with Liara, no dialogue options period, only one personality and only one ending.
It just seems like they became as attached to Shepard as the players have and formed a strong opinion on how Shepard should look, behave, and who he is with.
I have a feeling if there are future Mass Effect games it will have nothing to do with player choice anymore and the games will be more like the rest of the action adventure games out there like Assassins Creed.
Or perhaps they'll just retcon stuff, place it 300+ years later, and make a RPGMMO with shallow characters and story that will bore me to tears.
Otherwise, the combat in ME3 is great and I love multiplayer for allowing me to only play that and avoid the tragic headache of a single player story.
