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Spoiler!

I like the idea of things going on at a high level and the people having little idea of what it is, but having to deal with the consequences (the movie Signs for example). I always enjoy sci-fi like that, where at the end nothing was what it appeared to be and stuff was going on that no one expected.

I don't think it was inconsistent with the whole series; I thought they hinted at it enough during the whole game that I wasn't completely surprised by it. I thought the whole deus ex machina nature of the Crucible (we're building this but we don't know what it does) through the whole game foreshadowed it. Conversations with the Reaper and the Prothean VI made it more clear.

Was it perfect? Maybe they could have ramped up to that end more slowly I guess, at some point shift Shep's focus from the war effort to the cycle maybe (maybe at the detriment to the war effort and everyone gets mad), but I'm not sure if that would have been better, just different.

I think it partly boils down to what kind of fiction and sci-fi people like, and it might boil down to the kind of character people see Shepard as.