User blog comment:HELO/How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Catalyst/@comment-5124348-20120710224726/@comment-3581090-20120711172908

I’m glad you were able to take something from it.

I know I sort of make a strong statement against ME3 as a whole at the start of my post and then greatly summarize the reasons for that opinion, but that’s only because I wanted to focus on the Catalyst stuff. But since you asked (and so politely, too):

Now, to clarify, I did say it was “not a good game,” which is not the same thing as saying it was a “bad game.” That hair-splitting aside…very generally, my problem with ME3 is that the production was clearly rushed and felt haphazardly put together, with everything from the script to the gameplay to the design suffering for it. It was as though they took the fundamental concepts of all the noteworthy bits from the first two games, threw them in a pile, then tried to paint-by-numbers a game with as many as they could before time ran out.

A little more specifically, I thought the story was uneven, poorly executed, and (too often) very difficult to believe; I was not a fan of the frenetic firefights and constant defend-the-objective side/semi-main story missions that didn’t do much besides advertize the multiplayer function; many of the cameos felt forced and unnecessary; even allowing for the just-escaped-from-dry-dock shabbiness, the new Normandy looked lazily rendered; I cannot even begin to justify why I had to spend so much “shore leave” on the Citadel in the middle of a cataclysmic, galaxy-spanning war; the lack of gameplay-specific purpose to gathering a galactic army really, really bothered me; and everything from the war asset collecting to the romance subplot to the “weighty moral choices” (like the genophage cure or the geth upgrade whatnot) felt perfunctory and passionless, like it was all just there to meet some managerial prerequisites and make the game appropriately lengthy.

Even more specifically (and focused): The plot of the game doesn’t make sense to me if the Reapers are attacking everyone all at once. ME3 could either have asked me to ignore the frustrating silliness of having to do absurd, time-wasting political favors to gain allies as millions of people on Earth (and only Earth) died every day --OR-- it could have asked me to ignore the sudden, ridiculous introduction of a magical anti-Reaper doomsday device as justification for everyone to abandon their besieged homeworlds and help the Alliance after Shepard goes in and manages to help their armies escape. But I couldn’t let it get away with asking me to do both. I’ve only got so much disbelief I can suspend at one time.

But, again, this is just where I stand.