I knew Shepard wasn't going to make it quite a ways out from the end. The whole trilogy seemed to be steering towards fatalism and self-sacrifice. I had played the 3rd game first and decided I really needed to play the first two. So I traded 3 in for the new (at the time) trilogy box set for the PS3. The first game was fun, but got pretty tedious towards the end. Once the plot picked up, I rushed through and missed out on some of the side quests in the latter half of the game. The second game was awesome. I loved that it cut down on the tedium and emphasized the story. There were still parts that I didn't care for, but I wanted the "suicide mission" to go as well as possible, so I did absolutely everything. I also wanted to save the Krogan female in 3, so thy dictated some of my choices. The third game is still very well done and often had a cinematic vibe. I missed some of the exploration from the earlier games, but the more linear path helped keep the pace of the story going. As for the end... Like I said, I saw it coming, but there didn't really seem to be a [i]good[/i] ending. The gray morals and bleak endings are an epidemic in gaming as well as cinema these days. I'm sure it doesn't help that everyone (developers) is depressed that the '90s are over and we just spent 15 years fighting a pointless war (I was there too, so I get it). I'm not saying that we should have a sparklie-rainbow Disney ending, where everyone lives happily ever after, but 3 versions of screwed aren't really my idea of choices. All in all, the games were great and one of the best science fiction stories I've seen in a game. So despite any faults it had, I loved them and they will be lodged in my nostalgia-banks as a yardstick for future games of its type. I doubt we will see anything like Mass Effect again for a while with all the emphasis on medieval settings lately. That's not to say we aren't getting Mass Effect 4 (and Fallout 4 for that matter). And I'm rambling...