I'm just surprised that people expected a standard happy ending from this. The whole series has been setting up that these space croissants were a bit rigged in abilities. The whole 3rd game shows each race getting their asses handed to them and the only hope is a mysterious device that might do something...
Sure I'd love for an option for an ending that was less abstract... but would an everyone cheering star wars style ending work here?
Pretty much the main theme of the entire franchise is that Shepard is put into impossible situation after impossible situation, each one appearing more intractable than the last, and every single time walks out without taking more than some light battle damage.
You never
automatically get the happy ending (ie: You can lose some/most/all of your crew in the suicide mission, the peace you broker between the Turians, Krogan, and Salarians isn't always stable, you don't always get to patch things up between the Geth and the Quarians), but your inability to do so is always limited by your own choices and action/inaction. That theme was carried through all the way to the end of ME3, where your choices had a huge impact on how strong your final assembled fleet was. It would absolutely have been thematically appropriate to have at least one variant on the ending where Shepard is able to pull through, not without sigificant losses, but with few enough losses that the ending could legitimately be celebrated.
Instead, the rug is pulled out from under you at the end, a God Baby shows up out of nowhere and tells you that you can't win, and for the first time in the entire franchise, Shepard just meekly rolls over and goes "Oh, okay" without trying to fight it. Despite the fact that the villain's entire motivation is based on an idea that is diametrically opposed to one of the franchise's major themes, there's no option to even
try to talk God Baby out of it. Three games repeatedly reinforcing the notion that synthetic and organic life can peacefully coexist, and that's wiped off the table by a shitty (literal) deus ex machina without so much as a "Wait,
what?"
In every ending, the galaxy is plunged into a dark age, and this is brought up
for the very first time in literally the last five minutes of the game, and Shepard doesn't even
comment on it, let alone try to avoid dooming billions and billions of people.
Ewoks dancing in the Citadel's streets - literally Ewoks, from Star Wars - would not be any further removed from the rest of the franchise's story than the endings that were put in the game. An unqualified happy, storybook ending would have been far more appropriate than the shit they piled onto the plate.
