All right, time for me to join in.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
The ending sucks. There shouldn't really be any Stoney-esque "I thought it was fine" bs. You can say that the ending "didn't bother you", but you can't argue that, in and of itself, it was a good, coherent, ending.
I'm not quite in the GR and Green Man camp of raging about it, though.
Also, I never read any of the spoilers in this thread in advance, but holy crap, I made the Deus Ex comparison on my own right away, so it's funny to see I'm far from the only one.
But, the comparison to the end of Deus Ex does not do any favours to ME3.
For one thing, the three endings of Deus Ex aren't simply levers that you pull. You actually have to work towards the ending you choose in Deus Ex, so the final level plays out differently according to what you are trying to accomplish.
Whereas ME3 has a DX:HR-esque "okay, you've reached the end, now push one of these three buttons for the different endings."
That alone is bullshit.
But in addition to that, the Deus Ex choices logically followed the game. The three choices pretty much represented the competing forces you had been torn between throughout the whole game. None of them were black and white, but you chose the one that you best fit with.
ME3? One of the options was to control the Reapers, which comes right after you spent a five-minute dialog/cutscene arguing with and ridiculing The Illusive Man for wanting to do exactly that. What. The. Fuck.
Synthesis was generic new-agey crap that made no sense. And blowing up the Reapers was exactly what the game was supposed to be about, so of course that was my first choice. But it still doesn't make sense that you shoot at some tubes to destroy the Conduit, which kills the Reapers, when the game has you believe that, umm, the whole purpose of the Conduit was to destroy the Reapers. So, to kill the Reapers, you have to shoot and sabotage the weapon that was designed to kill the Reapers? Riiiiight.
And none of that even touches on the Catalyst/kid/God himself.
It doesn't necessarily bother me that there was some "Force/being" behind the Reapers. But if you're going to have a reveal like that, at least explain it and have it make a lick of gawdamned sense, please. Every conversation you have with a Reaper in the series has a real sense of gravitas and awe to it. So if you're going to have some-*thing* beyond the Reapers, you have to be able to outdo even that. And they failed miserably. So they shouldn't have even tried.
I think a sappy "here's what everyone is doing now" or Ewok-campfire-party-on-Endor is not necessarily the right fit, but anything's better than what they did. End it with the convo between Shepard and Anderson sitting down, then the clips of the red energy wave killing the Reapers with the soldiers celebrating as they fall. The end.
More than anything else, it's disappointing that they clearly completely winged the ending. They pitched this series as a fully-conceptualized trilogy, and if that were actually the case, you would have thought they would have contemplated the ending before, oh, fall 2011. You don't have to JMS-levels of arc-planning, but having a rough idea where the story is fucking going would have been nice.
end rant.
That being said, the ending shouldn't be changed. The horses have left the barn on that one. You can't make people forget what they originally came up with on their own.
