(Now I can't find the link to the other review. Will post when I find it.)
Before I start, I think I'd better reiterate my position on the "original" dark energy ending:
I think it's phenomenally stupid/even worse than the one we got (delete according to your opinion of the ending we got).
Understand that the dark energy ending would have gone like this: the Reapers roll through the galaxy and harvest every species that uses Mass Effect technology. They do this in order to safeguard the galaxy because Mass Effect technology is slowly destroying it. Then they leave behind Mass Effect technology for the next cycle to use, thus prompting the Reapers to roll through again. "Your technology develops along the paths we desire," as Sovereign says, so if the goal of the Reapers is to prevent the use of Mass Effect technology... why leave it lying around for other races to use?
And note that this argument does NOT necessarily confound the ending we actually got. There's nothing that suggests that AI technology is inherently tied to Mass Effect technology. So while it does mean that the title of the franchise is now a relic of an abandoned plotline, it also means that the ending isn't fantastically stupid/even more fantastically stupid (delete according to personal preference).
Okay, now that that's out of the way, let's debunk the argument that Mass Effect 3 takes the story in a completely different direction. Here we go.
Organic/synthetic conflict. The author claims that this was never a theme of the franchise until the third game. This is laughably incorrect. The quarian/geth conflict existed in the first game, the geth were the principle villains of the first game, and unless I'm very much mistaken, Sovereign and the other Reapers were described as machines and synthetics throughout the first game.
Saren explicitly says that he's trying to prove that organics can be useful to the Reapers, as if this is merely an organic/synthetic conflict, and indeed there is NOTHING to hint that the geth aren't all in line with the Reapers at this point.
Now the second game introduces the geth civil war and demonstrates that the Reapers were controlling them. It is also, crucially, the point where we learn that the Reapers are partly organic.
I need to repeat that. There was NO evidence - none, nada, zip - in the original Mass Effect that the Reapers were anything other than fully synthetic. The fact that Reapers are created from the species they conquer was the Big Twist (more on that in just a second) in Mass Effect 2. In other words, the claim that an organic/synthetic conflict was invented out of whole cloth for Mass Effect 3 is complete and utter bunk.
As for why Shepard only mentions organic life when (s)he knows better at the beginning of 3? Right,
because the bureaucrats on the committee really care about the geth, don't they?
Now let's move on and talk about plot twists.
While it is true that the best-written plot twists are the ones that unfold right under your nose ("Sovereign isn't just some Reaper ship. It's an actual Reaper"), that's hardly true of, say, the most famous plot twist in science-fiction history ("No. I am your father.")
This is actually a really good comparison to make, because, as in Mass Effect, Lucas changed the story of Star Wars halfway through. He had no idea, just to pick the two most obvious examples, that Darth Vader was Anakin's father until Empire rolled around, and he had no idea whether or not Harrison Ford would be back for Jedi (hence Han being possibly written out and Lando being created in Empire to basically fill his spot). It's certainly more rewarding to figure out this sort of thing for ourselves, before the storyteller lets you in on his big secret. (Christopher Nolan is probably the master at this, with both The Prestige and Inception cluing you in to their twists long before they're actually revealed. Steven Moffat tries to do it in Doctor Who, but his examples really tend to fall into the category of "making it too obvious.") But not every story can do that.
Now, as I've already outlined above, the organic/synthetic conflict exists in all three games. The twist here - and it comes in the middle of the most tedious mission of the most tedious arc of the entire franchise, so I don't blame you one iota for missing it - is that organics (in this case the quarians) always start it. For anyone coming to this straight from, say, Battlestar Galactica - which Sage Queen takes a potshot at in passing - this is a major twist.
"The geth drove my people into exile," Tali says at one point in 1. The heretics (under Reaper control) are spying on the good geth (if they ever got a name I forgot what it was) in 2. So actually, from the perspective of anyone who's not peering crazy deep at a dark energy buildup that's mentioned twice, the big shift from 1 and 2 to 3 is that it's organics, not synthetics, that always start trouble.
Now you're free to argue whether or not the notion that organics are always the agressors is a load of horse crap. And I'm certainly not going to argue that any of the twists in 2 or 3 are anywhere near as good as the twist in 1. (Going back to Star Wars, the revelation that Luke and Leia are siblings pales in comparison to the earlier revelation that... well, you know.) But if you want to claim that the story suddenly shifts out from under you, well, I'm sorry but you're wrong.
And finally I want to touch on the Deus Ex Machina of the Crucible itself. (Incidentally, why is the engine called the Crucible and the focusing prism called the Catalyst? Shouldn't that be the other way around?) There's plenty of dialogue with Liara in the prologue to neatly lampshade the fact that yeah, this is a Deus Ex Machina... but until Shepard gets to Multicolored Death, nobody actually knows what the thing does.
I would go so far as to argue that it's an imperfect deconstruction of a Deus Ex Machina, given that none of the endings are as simple as "Bang, you're dead, I win," although they all come close in various ways. It still feels somewhat forced and annoying, and the choices all suck - but that's the point of good writing, to make your character choose between options that all suck.
(Am I saying the ending was good because we hated it? Hell no. Assuming you liked both of them and weren't trying to get into either of their space pants, the Ash/Kaidan choice on Virmire was a lot better. Hell, choosing to kill Wrex in 1 or watch Mordin die in 3 is one of the harder choices for me now on repeat playthroughs. When I get to the spacekid at the end, I'm all "plug me into the Reaper brain" because 1) my Shepard is a power-hungry maniac, 2) I can't bring myself to kill EDI or re-write everyone's DNA, and 3) I don't for one minute believe that Shepard can come across so many Reaper artifacts over the course of the games without getting indoctrinated, so if the Indoctrination Theory is your thing, my Shep has succumbed.)
One of the things that frustrated me about the first (and in my opinion, best) game was that it was essentially telling you that you - as a species, as a civilization - got very, very lucky. Your predecessors just happened to have sabotaged the trap at the center of the Reapers' plans, and all you have to do to win the first game is prevent the bad guy from undoing that sabotage. How is that any different from your predecessors having dumped the plans for an anti-Reaper superweapon in your lap? "Oh, one's to stop and invasion, the other's to kill all the Reapers." Academic. In both cases the Protheans do most of the prep, and all you have to do is the legwork. Like it or not, I don't see how you can like the first game and still rag on the third game's Deus Ex Machina parts.
Near the end of both 1 and 3, you get a conversation with a Prothean VI who says "the C__________ wasn't built by us." Near the end of both games you have a conversation with a hologram who says "here's how to stop the Reapers." And so this question baffles me: how come 3 is such a blatant, offensive Deus Ex Machina and 1 is not?
I'm basically done here. I disagree with almost everything Sage Queen said, basically because Sage Queen and I had very different experiences of the first two games. Hey wait, wasn't that the point of having a fully customizable character and tons of options along the way?
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