My favorite part of Mass Effect wasn't the Reaper story but the universe and characters that my Shepard took a significant part in helping to tweak and mold. The endings basically undo all of that and fundamentally alter that universe (then they don't show us anything of those universes except for that Joker crash land scene, which is pasted across all three alternatives with very slight differences).
It's like guiding our hand in painting something really detailed, heartfelt, and personal over the course of five years, then giving us 3 buckets of paint (a red bucket, a green bucket, or a blue bucket) to throw and splash over the painting.
Exactly. ME was mostly a character driven game, not theme-driven like DXHR, which I thought for DXHR was a fitting ending. People can bitch about it, but throughout DXHR, at least you are almost always exposed to different POVs on transhumanism even through sidequests; at the end you basically say "this is my opinion on the matter after playing through the 30 odd hours of the game, I have come to this conclusion on the themes".
For ME3, it was straight out of left field. Sure you have the Quarian/Geth debate but that is so far in the periphery compared to how they just explained the True Intent of the Reapers in the last 10 minutes while most of the game was basically "gather everyone, we're gonna fucking duke it out; the superweapon is our last hope". Kinda wish they just played it straight with employing a long-lost superweapon instead of delving into philosophy at the end.
Yes, a DA:O epilogue would've been much more fulfilling. It's possible we might get something like that with Mass Effect Datapad for iOS with mail sent "to Joker" after the player's end sequence.
Either a DA:O-style ending where you just chat with everyone then peace out, roll credits (or slides) or a Fallout style ending (where all the consequences play out all narrated) would've done better. What you truly care about is if Shepard (if he lived) and your LI did whatever, or what all the other crewmates did after The Final Showdown. Nope, the NeoGAF OT just spelled it out clearly, you were Space Jesus and you (likely) died to save us all (and screw everyone over at the same time). To think, we were all hoping for people finishing the game to be "oh man, after all these years, Shepard finally got to X and A and B hooked up, C joined the Ys, etc." but all we have is red/green/blue.
Well, isn't the point that the Reapers are machines? Not like EDI or the Geth either, but just brainlessly completing their task. They'd been told - programmed, whatever - to return and purge every 50,000 years - and so they do. They don't really consider the ins and outs - they sow the seeds to do the job they were programmed to do at any cost, surely?
They either shouldn't have explained what the Reapers were or made them less like literal janitorial god machines that show up on a regular schedule to clean house. Not that I would say I have a better origin story or any other fan fic idea would, but with the ending, who knows. If the Reapers were once an organic race gone full transhuman and their only method of reproduction was harvesting races (basically what you discover in ME2) then they could've just stopped it there or just tacked on "and they come from another galaxy everyone 50 000 years to do so" and no one would be too critical about it.
I romanced Miranda though.