I loved it, I thought it was brilliant, and I don't regret the $40 I spent on the series in total. It's a literary ending, and I can see why a lot of people would be upset about it, even with the extended cut; it doesn't make sense unless you've paid a lot of attention to the previous themes and played pretty consistently, so that everything gets set up right. There you are! Establishing a new pattern of synthesis, or control, or destruction, which were pretty much the options. There were a lot of callbacks to ME1, so that we have a classical structure of Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis. For me, I felt it was basically perfect. I wish more of the game had been as intense as the last parts, or hinted at that intensity. Some of the major events seemed a bit too easy, but on the other hand I did do a lot of legwork in previous games working towards them, so...
I liked as well that we got to visit so many home planets. Look, it had some design flaws, but I thought that it was really quite good overall. The only thing I really, really disliked was that directly after the ending we're spat back to being on the Normandy, basically going "okay, now replay the end
." No. The suggestion was a suggestion to replay
everything, to my opinion, and the right thing to do was to go back to the loading screen. Bouncing us back to just before the Cerberus home base was a terrible narrative idea.
Priority:Earth was one of the few times in the game when I was actually really scared; Shepard was basically a pincushion, it was pretty dreadful, and everything was so gray. I also wish they'd gotten Shepard's voice actress to make more OH SHIT THEY'RE SHOOTING ME LET'S GURGLE AND DIE noises like she did in ME2, and that friendly fire was on, because I intentionally shot my boyfriend in the head a lot of times, I have to say. But on the other hand you can chalk a lot of that up to more experience on her part.
... In case anyone was wondering I got the very very very worst ending because I couldn't control myself and then I got the very best ending because I'm a cool cat like that.