Take Earth Back! Or just take the game back because taking earth back had nothing to do with it. A brilliant game fail.

User Rating: 1 | Mass Effect 3 PS3
Mass Effect 3 manages to do what it set out to do for the first 97% of the game. There were some cuts made to dialog choices. Neutral choice was eliminated and less investigate options were available, but that actually did not take away from the depth much.

Auto dialog and out of character actions from imported Shepards were more of an issue, however, as the majority of Imported Shepard getting attached to a random boy playing with a toy would not happen regardless of their alignment. The dreams were also OOC and the player should be able to skip them. Dreams related to background, past game elements, or the Virmire death would have made more sense here. The kid was an unnecessary device, and lazy. Even for new users, Kaidin or Ashly could have been used for this roll.

Save for some glitches and the above issues the game did well at grabbing you and taking you on a ride around the galaxy to secure alliances, broker treaties, pile up resources, and ready a multilateral fleet to pit against the encroaching darkness that are the Reapers.

After all the work in ME1 and ME2, all the choices and consequences, then the new choices and efforts brought about in ME3, it all boils down to... The Matrix. Choice is an illusion, provided as a means of control. Nothing you did matters. Regardless of ME1, 2, or 3, your War Assets, Readiness, Paragon or Renegade scores... they mean nothing because it is you, Shepard! You are the Vanguard of your own destruction.

An AI, in the form of that kid, that supposidly controls the reapers, created them to prevent organic life from creating AI life that would eventually kill organic life; eg the Geth (Which Shepard can actually fix earlier in the game). So it created the Reapers (AI) to kill organic life before organics could create AI life that would kill organic life.... this is really the reason given. No lie... Circular logic, and a cop out. You can't even argue if you helped the Geth gain individual intelligence and brokered peace with the Quarians, who by this point are working together on rebuilding Rannoch and working together in fire teams on the war front.

So this dumb AI gives you the choice to solve the problem... or the illusion of choice. What you get is dead, dead, or mostly dead and the galaxy is destroyed, Indoctrinated into a borg hive, but the relays are destroyed, or all tech is destroyed, thus most races die out, stuck in space on ships in sol that no longer work, by relays that no longer work, or are on their devastated home worlds. No epilogue, no explanation, no closure, no hope

ME3 manages to retroactively destroy the entire trilogy, resulting in Zero replayability. Maybe that was why they tried to push Multi-Player, but even that won't help them. There is no hope, no reason to bother, as it changes nothing.

Perhaps BioWare has also become the Vanguards of their own destruction.