You think they made ME3 TOO depressing overall? ((spoilers))

I think they made a mistake of making every game tonally inconsistent with one another. You can always make one more serious than the other but if you look at Lord of The Rings which is a very general example of a great trilogy there's overall a similar tone in all three movies/books.

I think beginning the doomsday plot right as it happens in ME3 was always going to be part of the game in some way, but it's more the idea of "war" and how militaristic everything became that I take issue with. I know there was always the alliance and we've always heard about the Turian military, the Flotilla and hte morning war and etc. but it was pretty big news to me that the Protheans had so much warfare with the Reapers before being wiped out let alone that according to the writing in the Mars mission they "came close to defeating the Reapers". I'm aware that was a handwave to allow for an actual solution since we wasted ME2 not discovering anything that was valuable against the Reapers and that they suddenly aren't "trapped" in Dark Space anymore, but that was still an overall shift in tone IMO that we're actually "at war" with the Reapers.

Logistically it's sound. Why the hell wouldn't we face them head on with all our advanced military across every home world, but you really get the impression in ME1 that the Reaper invasion would be so massive in force and scope that we'd be wiped out in days or even a split-second from how strong the Reapers are in their bulk strength, and making the story about "war" implies that we're as much in a diplomatic opposition with the Reapers as we are in physical strength, and that just doesn't work when we're supposedly coming from different planes of existence.

And with that "war" tone came a lot of WW2-elements like nukes, military objectives, military chatter over radios that try to sound like CoD, and BioWare went full-on with this WW2-themed version of Mass Effect. You meet Kirrahe and he's now black-green and you meet the Quarians and they're now all black-suited or black-ish, and the Normandy is darker than ever before and gone (to some extent) is that feeling of wonder and curiosity that ME1 and ME2 had replaced with doom and gloom... and gruff military marines from all species. Mass Effect always had some "pulpyness" to it and IMO this contrasts in a bad way with the attempt to create "realness" and groundedness.

It's fine to have general themes resound each other and tie them each to their own act but to outright change the cosmetics and the narrative tone so much per installment was a mistake IMHO. I really wish the Alliance and Earth weren't so central to ME3 and that as a Spectre we'd have to work with the Council to fly across the galaxy chasing various leads akin to the mission on Thessia where we see the ongoing war on the periphery but we're not the tip of the spear in it (because we're one friggin soldier who has a stealth ship, c'mon) and we'd be chasing leads the entire game that reveal more and more about the Reapers and previous cycles, have an ambiguous relationship with Cerberus and TIM and ultimately find the key to stop the Reapers from harvesting us by somehow confronting them much like in the game, using the Citadel.

I just think the war element took up way too much of ME3 and then when you get to the finale the shift from military and heroic sacrifice to "space oddysey 2001 and sci-fi" comes pretty fucking suddenly. Overall ME3 felt like Independence Day in how jarring its juxtaposition of sci fi vs Military MURICA chest-beating it was and with that IMHO is where it got too "dark and depressing". Too much emphasis on heroic sacrifice for military honor and poetic justice instead of the core themes that Mass Effect was originally made with which was space-opera sci-fi, mysterious artifacts and alien friends embarking on adventures that reveal more about the IP.

And it's a shame because they're continuing even further into a direction that doesn't match the original tone of the series with Andromeda. It's gotten too fixated on realness and groundedness instead of vibrant and adventurous.