So, I (finally) finished MEA...

Even if they had gave the scene the correct emotional connotations, there is no build up or time to get attached to the character.  They killed him off way too early for it to work, the same holds true for the sibling in cryo.  If it were me I would have set the prologue in the MW with those two as your squad... lets see were going to need some action, drama and epic set pieces.  Lets change it up so the AI is a response to the Reapers and the prologue is a mad dash to get the Ark ships underway as the Reapers attack the system.  Lets have you save your sibling from some crisis, only to find you both in peril, then have you father save you, some action, some emotional scenes and the Arks are underway.   You sleep for 600 years, as far as you know everything you left behind is destroyed, then the real kick in the tits happens, after a cryo accident your sibling is left unresponsive, in a critical condition and may not survive and your father dies on your first mission.  Done. 

I suspect the reason for this has nothing to do with Beta Testing. I think a lot of the animation scenes like taking off and landing double as loading screens. When you go to the Tempest the game has to replace all the planet environment and maps etc. with the Tempest environment and maps. That's going to take time to load so they cover it up by showing the scene of the Tempest taking off to cover the load time.

If it didn't take off you'd still be waiting the same amount of time, except that you'd be waiting staring at the Tempest hatch the whole time instead of an animation!

I have never understood why people hitched on the "my face is tired", because I actually liked that dialogue. It conveyed very well the exhaustion that sets in after months of trying and trying to keep the shit together at work, and it's going nowhere because of politics or inertia. It resonates with me. When my Ryder stood there in front of Addison, I really felt for that character. And I liked her edgy response when Ryder was trying to insinuate that maybe dad and her were an item. I had not problems with my Ryder being told she is a pup, and nothing much to look at for now, and go hop to it. My life experience support the truth of this scene more than the Shepard hanging up on the powerful political figures like a drunk teen and going on.

With genophage, I was mostly shaking my head at the complete weirdness of trying to render females infertile when it is so much easier to sterilize the males. I've never liked Wrex and his dialogues, and the only really remarkable piece of writing was Mordin's final monologue. Yet Mordin's monologue is an exceptional find. No, I cannot compare anything specifically to Mordin's last monologue, but that's one instance of writting in three games, and it is unmatched for me anywhere.

Another exceptional dialogue was with Anderson in the end of the third game. To me the scene with Alec death after following the Ryder family saga was as impartial.

Geth vs Quarian is the same quality to me as the writing in the Angaran conflict vs Kett, and I actually like the cast of the Angara a lot more than "good Borg" Legion. I preferred writing for Gree and Scorpio in terms of creativity. I much prefer writing for SAM over the maudlin theme with ED in ME3 for AI expressions. Tali's overacting the scene where Legion dies. The whole "does this unit have a soul" sequence was not my favorite, as it was too long, and reminded me too much of the Animatrix cartoon.

But MET also suffer from writting that made me roll my eyes, like Jack's romance, Liara's fainting spells and then a sudden conversion into something she could not have possibly developed into, Samara's daughter gods' knows what it was and what for writting

I do prefer Archon and Primus to Leng, Illusive Man and the Starchild of the Reapers.

The Gray Dreams in ME3 are terrible waste of development resources imo.

To give you examples of the memorable moments in Andromeda, Alec's death scene replayed, Liam's soccer match, Vetra' climbing moment, on the Roofs of Kadara with Reyes, and the moment of choice between Reyes and Sloane, when we found a wheelchair embedded in the Tempest from an engineer back on Earth, Gil's workaholic poetry, Cora's garden...

See, I understand that people did not like it, but I quite enjoyed the character writting in Andromeda and actually found it far more real and alive and interesting than in the preceeeding games. There were a fair bit more observations of real humans in those dialogues and emails for me rather than typical video game characters who'd had to get through some improbably angsty stuff. It is not to say that the over-the-top drama is not fun. Hell bells, I adore Anders, but, well, Andromeda also hit the sweet spot for me.

Again, I expressed this sentiment before, but I almost feel that the charge that Andromeda's writing is "too juvenile" is misplaced. The problem is that it is not juvenile enough.

And that is why there is no accounting and no arguing for tastes. Look, I also can't comprehend how anyone can possibly like Inquisition. But peeps do, and they attach to the chars there, quote things and want to replay it. Me, I stay cold and bored. But Andromeda really makes me feel and recognize a lot of my own experiences and sentiments, so, yes, those are memorable moment for me.

EDIT: And, yes, I will correct my error in judgment and will not respond again. Nobody really wants others to share, what they need is to air their grievances. Who cares if some old lady got feels because Cora who tried futilely to prove to the stuck-up Asari for years that she is worthy,finally got to put it behind her and start a rose garden in a desert.

"My face is tired" is no more nonsensical than "his face fell". IMO in this dialogue Addison describes spot-on the pervasive fatigue when you have pushed yourself past a point of hope at work. Her face is tired of keeping the brave face, from smiling when nothing is working out. Because the process was set up with pathfinder being an important part of it, and they have faced the unforeseen and significant difficulties, the bureaucracy started to stall and grind gears. Obviously, they did not have an autocratic leader, someone who for good or bad stepped up and took charge, and wasted too much resources on quelling dissent in the ranks with the Exiles. I don't know what's so nonsensical about it. It's a perfectly believable commentary on the workings of any government that tries to stick to moral values, accountability etc when facing too much torubles.

That's not an established idiom, rather a poetic licence. Addison tries to convey her feeling of deep-sited fatigue that way, and I have no problems with it not being Queen's English. Emotionally, I really get what she is saying, particularly when you listen to the whole sequence, where she talks about being tired. Just like people who complain that everything is hurting.

Yes, that's their problem, and they failed to resolve it. Alex was supposed to be there sooner, as well as other arcs, those were supposed to be the Golden worlds, and they were expecting to have the magic of SAM on their side. The rest of the game is a demo of what Ryder can do what others could not. Save for a MMO, every game has the protagonist that is the guy for the job others can't shoulder. If you can't suspend disbelief in regards to Ryder, Shepard has him beat thousandfold in that department.

Lucky for me, my PC blew up before I saw that, and by the time I got a new rig it was patched out.

Yeah, Pathfinders are AI-enhanced supermen who are supposed to be able to do anything. It's a weirdly mystical concept as expressed in NPC reactions,  and I don't think the writers did a very good job of establishing it. SPECTREs, meanwhile, are just 007 agents; they have legal sanction and are good at murder.

Did you ever go to school? Did they use a grading curve?

75% = solid C. Good enough to pass, but far from Valedictorian.

5/10 is a shit game that barely works. This shit game apparently works well enough to finish, but varies in quality a great deal along the way.

I think it rates a 6/10, myself, but that's just, like, my opinion, man.

Actually, in my country, the grading was never related to percentages. In grade school it was just a grade teacher gave you (I still remember my 3rd grade teacher telling me that if my test came from a low-achieving Student B, he'd have gotten an A, but for me it was a B-), and in the uni, the preference was given to the oral examinations so the professor would talk to you for as long as it took him to establish the grade. It's not till I moved to the western style system that I saw multiple choice tests and percentages as the way to actually calculate the grade. And even then, the more serious courses were graded on the curve, depending on how the entire group of the students did.

I just wanted to illustrate that you truly cannot assume other person's experience and expectations.