Even though Mass Effect 3 is easily the weakest game in the trilogy, it's still really damn good. And I'm not the sort of person to let unskippable cutscenes/plot developments that make no sense/recycled music/flattened characters/an ending that pissed off the fanbase detract (too much) from the parts of the game that were really, really good.
So without futher ado, here are not the "I didn't hate this" moments. These are the things that Mass Effect 3 did that showed me BioWare was still capable of making awesome video games, no matter what they were surrounded by (the things, not BioWare).
Kai Leng.
Ask George Lucas what a smart idea it is to import a villain from the Expanded Universe.* This could have been a terrible, terrible mistake. But by giving Kai Leng a wicked entrance (no matter how much Thane makes light of it afterwards, this is still the first time you're utterly helpless to prevent the death of an ME2 squadmate), and then unleashing the Phantoms to show you just how deadly that sword and obnoxious that little flipping maneuver can be... and then by making Leng get away with everything in every encounter with him until the final battle... assuming that BioWare were trying to create a villain even Paragons would want to stab in the gut, they succeeded.
*Blah blah books that preceded the first game blah blah Saren blah blah.
That's right: I hate Kai Leng, but I hate him for the right reasons. So score one for them.
This scene.
It took a while for me to see this scene, because my first two playthroughs were with Shepards who both cured the Genophage. (Despite the YouTube description, this scene plays out this way whether you're romancing Garrus or not. The important part starts about one minute in.)
I'm inclined to put "All of Act One" in here, because the Genophage stuff is the best part of the game. But this one scene is probably the best part of the Genophage story. Shame that it's an out-of-the-way conversation down a very dark morality path.
By the way, I'm really glad they gave this convo to Garrus and not, say, Liara. Despite the fact that Liara's far more ruthless in this game than she was in the previous titles (yay character development), it's still hard to imagine her being able to see both sides of the issue. Seems like Garrus knows what to do with grey after all.
And as the first half of the scene demonstrates, it's just more personal for Garrus. Krogan support for the war effort won't have nearly as big an impact on the fate of Liara's home as Garrus's.
The funny stuff.
Liara meeting her "dad," Ashley and Tali getting smashed, "I don't need luck; I have ammo," Ken and Gabby finally doing it, "I am Garrus Vakarian, and this is now my favorite spot on the citadel," the dinosaur joke in From Ashes, Legion being amazed at Garrus's calibrations, "Infiltrator Tits," Blasto 6, "they used to eat flies," everything to do with EDI/Joker, Joker and Garrus swapping speciesist jokes, "And I gave you the moral strength you needed to dodge them," EDI flooding Cerberus's computers with fourteen times the entire volume of the internet worth of porn, Teacher!Jack, "might run tests on the seashells," Garrus and Tali hooking up...
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