Mass Effect 3

If you have played the first two games of this series, expectations for Mass Effect 3 should be incredibly high. The Reapers have arrived and its upto Commander Shepard to assemble a group and fight for the survival of not only our Earth, but our galaxy too.
ME3 knows itself and knows how to tackle a big situation like this. It sets up the mood of the game perfectly well - dire, desperate and needy of a hero to save it. It also knows the player and what he wants. So it assembles the best lineup of NPCs you can hope for. Almost all the characters from the previous games return, even if not in your party, then atleast in the conversation enough to make you remember them well, at the same time adding new faces you can count on.
The gameplay remains quite similar to ME2, a streamlined progress with skill points to distribute to a limited array of skill sets of both your character and your team mates. The guns are plenty, grenades explode and the cover-to-cover system is finally perfected here giving you the fastest and most enjoyable shooting experience in the series. There can be no complains with the gameplay, nor the cast, whose developments continue far into the game when you would expect things to stagnate. There are moments which will make you teary, angry or happy if you have spent the hours with these characters like I had.
As the game reaches its final part you have this feeling of impending battle which has been seething behind your ears since the last part and you are forced by your love for the characters, the universe, its people and its races to become a completionist to try and save as many lives as possible. Yet it is the very final part which led me to give it a 9, instead of a 10. I can have no complaints with this series, it is the perfect alternative to Star Wars or Star Trek - a fast paced, deep immersive space opera with enough lore to invest in for hours on end. The story is interconnected through the games and playing through the 3 one after the other is extremely rewarding. Yet the ending leaves behind a feeling of loss. A staple of the series, making decisions in crunch time, you are left with a devastating decision to make at the very endm yet none of the options are what you would have expected them to be, 120+ hours into the trilogy. I do not know what an alternative ending could have been because what this game is to me, will be different from what this game is to you, and hence our demands for a satisfactory conclusion will be different.
Yet, no other trilogy from BioWare is capable of extracting a score of 29 out of a possible 30 from me, and long after this generation of games are done, the memories of the game will remain.