Mass Effect/Tropes Q-Z

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Tropes A-D | Tropes E-L | Tropes M-P | Tropes Q-Z

  • Racial Remnant:
    • 288 years before the main events, the quarian race lost their home planet to the geth, forcing the survivors of the war to flee. At the heart of their culture is a strong sense of loyalty and a deep attachment to their home world, beliefs passed down by their ancestors. For this reason, almost every quarian you encounter is devoted to finding a way to take back their home world from the geth, despite the fact that no current living quarian has ever stepped foot on the home world. However, according to Tali in Mass Effect 2, it would take 60 years for them just to acclimate to Rannoch, and ten times that for any other planet.
    • In Mass Effect 3, the loss of Khar'Shan turns the batarians into remnants. You can coerce them into rallying around what's left of the Hegemony's navy, providing a boost to your War Assets.
    • Andromeda has the Remnant, so-called by Peebee because it was easier to say than "remnant of an extremely advanced civilization." They're the last things left behind by the Heleus Cluster's previous occupants.
  • Ragnarok Proofing:
    • Prothean technology is remarkably durable, most of it still working fifty thousand years later. Granted though, there is a fair amount of it that's gone offline, and what's left tends to be glitchy or breaking down. The mass relays were designed to go at least fifty thousand years without maintenance, though. Not that they're Prothean, anyway...
    • Krogan architecture was designed with this in mind, with Tuchanka having already suffered one world-wide nuclear apocalypse. Krogan hospitals are actually built more like bunkers because critically injured Krogan in the midst of blood rage tend to attack anything.
  • Ragtag Bunch of Misfits:
    • Played absolutely straight in the first game and taken screamingly Beyond the Impossible in the second.
    • Archangel also built up one of his own during the two years Shepard was out of commission.
  • Railing Kill: Possible with biotic powers or with weapons that can cause knockback like shotguns.
    • The Mass Effect 3 multiplayer mode used to suffer from major abuse of this. It has since been changed, with knocked-off Cerberus troops using their boot rockets, normally used to slow descent when falling, to boost back up.
  • Ramming Always Works: Played straight in the first game: Sovereign makes a direct run at the Citadel and plows through anything in its way. Subverted in the third game: when it becomes clear that the Reapers can't be defeated conventionally, a Codex entry notes that kamikaze attacks could be an effective alternative... except the FTL system used by every Council species (including humans) has a built-in safety feature that prevents high-speed collisions. Given that FTL technology was devised by the Reapers, this "flaw" is likely intentional.
  • Rape, Pillage and Burn: What happens to a number of colonies throughout the games. Including Shepard's hometown, if you went that route.
  • Raygun Gothic: It's subtle, and certainly a more modern take than is usually traditional, but the game is as much a tribute to the aesthetics of early Space Opera as it is to the plots. Almost every ship is shiny like new, and even the clothing captures the same 'space age' feel of early sci-fi without being too corny.
  • Real Is Brown: Mass Effect 1 seems to have places where this trope is averted and played straight in equal amounts, the most notable aversions being the Citadel and Virmire. In Mass Effect 2, however, the aversions are much fewer in number, and even tropical locations tend to be painted in brownish shades, and, judging by the demo, Mass Effect 3 seems to follow Mass Effect 2's example. Justified in many cases: Tuchanka, Krogan homeworld and major location in both Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, is a Death World that has been rendered further uninhabitable by nuclear war. Many other locations take place on atmosphere-less cold rocks with enclosures fit for habitation. And in Mass Effect 3, the Reapers destroying everything equals lots of dust.
  • Really Seven Hundred Years Old:
    • The asari and krogan often have lifespans over 1000 years.
    • In the case of your squadmates, Liara states she's 106 and barely considered more than a child.
    • While we don't know how long the Krogan Rebellions lasted, Wrex hints that he fought in them during his youth. When one considers they started in 700 AD, this puts Wrex's possible age at nearly 1500.
    • Which says something when you realise that Warlord Okeer was stated to be even older, with the implication that as a veteran of the Krogan Rebellions, he was roughly the same age as Wrex's father.
    • Krogan may actually be immortal as far as natural causes are concerned; ironically, their deadly homeworld fauna and violent way of life result in the average krogan living a shorter life than a human. Exceptional individuals like Wrex, however, end up notoriously hard to kill due to millennia of accumulated combat experience.
    • And then there's Javik in Mass Effect 3.
  • Real Time with Pause: Practically essential. It lets you figure out where the enemy is, not to mention distribute orders to your squad members. For what should be obvious reasons, Mass Effect 3's multiplayer mode disables pausing, making adjusting to multiplayer in the third game more of a challenge than usual.
  • Reconstruction: Specifically of many science-fiction tropes popular in The Eighties.
  • Recursive Precursors: The Mass Effect universe is the Trope Codifier for this trope; there is an extremely long line of civilizations that came before our own, starting with the protheans 50,000 prior to the games, and ending with the reapers at least a billion years ago.
  • Recycled in Space: A lot of tropes present in cop dramas show up in Mass Effect, such as:
    • Cowboy Cop: As mentioned, you can play Shepard this way, and Garrus himself is like this.
      • You also encounter a couple of these among the background chatter on the Citadel in the third game.
    • Turn in Your Badge: The Council grounding the Normandy is effectively this.
  • The Red Mage: Meet the Sentinel class, a biotic engineer. Got a combat upgrade in the sequel, making them Jack of All Stats instead.
  • Red Oni, Blue Oni: Series-wide, Blue has represented Charm/Paragon and Red has represented Intimidate/Renegade.
  • Religion of Evil: The geth's worship of the Reapers basically boils down to this; after all, how benevolent can a religion be when one of its core tenets is 'exterminate all organic life'? Only the 'heretic' geth follow that particular path though; the other 95% of the geth practice more benevolent, or at least less destructive religions.
  • Remember When You Blew Up a Sun?: Word certainly gets around in the Mass Effect universe. Between systems. And between games.
  • Replacement Mooks: Reapers are fond of this trope. Their first Slave Mooks were the rachni, who were hunted to near-extinction. Their second were the geth Heretics, who were utterly crushed in the first game. In Mass Effect 2, the Collectors (arguably their "first" mooks all along) have their shot, and are promptly discarded when they lose. Wonder who's next to check out their Wanted Ads? Indoctrinated humans, batarians, turians, asari, krogan...
  • Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Oddly played with. While the krogan actually encountered throughout the series are generally villains or mercs working for villains, you run into more than a few halfway decent ones, and a couple in particular are the fan's favorite heroic Badasses. Also, the species as a whole may become staunch allies in the finale of the series. As for the other races, nobody really seems to mind the salarians, and the drell are even seen as a race of woobies. And a potential romantic interest.
    • Well, the Krogan sure seem to mind the Salarians, and the fact that many Drell serve as elite assassins for the Hanar (who adopted them wholesale after the loss of the Drell homeworld) tends to make many people view them with caution at the very least.
  • Restricted Expanded Universe: Bioware has stated that the official continuity is what happens for the player. Because of this, the novels and comics have to avoid mentioning any of the decisions players can make in the games. The exceptions are thus, appropriately vague: The second and third novels reference the Council, but do not specify if it is the original, human-led, or human-only. Retribution and Inquisition state that Anderson leaves the Citadel in disgust at the Council's refusal to acknowledge the Reapers, but do not specify whether he's the Councilor or Udina's aide.
    • Word of God has since said that Udina is the councillor and Anderson was his aide, he is even stated to be an admiral in Retribution, this has more to do with plot reasons for future novels and games, however.
  • Retcon:
    • The physical appearance of the batarians.
    • The "it's-not-ammo" ammo system in the second game counts. It's handwaved as a new universal "upgrade", but mentions of heat sinks in periods well before that are made too.
  • Retraux: The games come replete with a faux film grain filter to complete the seventies and eighties throwback feel.
  • Retro Universe: The entire Mass Effect universe is built from tropes present in the seventies, with some from the eighties thrown in. Even the art styles are reminiscent of that era. Most people don't even notice though, until it's pointed out to them.
  • Revolvers Are Just Better: The M-358 Talon pistol.... with added awesome for being a revolver-shotgun hybrid. No seriously, it shoots multiple projectiles, has the highest base damage of all pistols and higher than some real shotguns and requires six revolving blocks of ammo to offset the ridiculous heat it generates. Yeah.....
  • Ridiculously-Human Robots: The geth, from having a blood-like fluid spatter when they're wounded, to doing some serious soul-searching constantly to the point of adopting religions, to screaming in pain when they die. Can be taken Up to Eleven in the third game, depending on player choices.
  • Ring Menu: Pretty much every menu in the game, from the main to the power selection to the weapon selection, even the dialogue system.
  • Ringworld: The Citadel. Okay, maybe not strictly a ring, but it does fold up into tube-like shape when under attack, and besides, Lotus World isn't exactly a trope.
    • The Presidium, the rich folks neighborhood on the Citadel and location of many of the high offices of Citadel government, fits the trope to a T, however.
  • Ripped from the Headlines: Cerberus Daily News sometimes bear a striking resemblance to topics currently hot in the real world..
  • Rite of Passage: Several species have them in the games. Constantly mentioned is the quarians' Pilgrimage: when a quarian reaches adult age, they leave the Flotilla and go out into the galaxy, not allowed to return until they have found some kind of gift, some item, resource, or information that will help the Flotilla. Then there's the krogan rite of passage, which, true to their origin and general nature, involves killing lots and lots of things. Followed by five minutes of frantic running from a Sand Worm.
    • Or killing said sandworm, if your name is Urdnot Wrex, or Commander Shepard and serving as part of a Krannt.
    • Or, in the case of shamans, spending seven days trapped in a cave with barely enough food to last.
    • The turians also have a rite of passage, one which is a little more mundane... conscription and military service from age 15, for another 15 years.
  • Robot Religion: The heretic geth form a religion based around worship of the Reapers and the extermination of all ascendant organic life in the galaxy. The rest of the geth, that is to say, most of them, practice a more benign religion that involves every race determining their own destiny.
  • Robot War: A few. First, there was the war between the geth and the quarians, which turned out to be a mistake; the geth really want to live in peace, and the whole thing never would have happened if the quarians hadn't shot first, which ended badly for the quarians. Then there was the more recent invasion by the heretic geth, led by Saren, which ended less badly for the galaxy. And then there's the ongoing war against the Reapers, which hasn't ended well for any organic civilization in the last forty million years.
    • Apparently, the cycle of synthetics turning against organics has gone on for so long that someone came up with the Reapers as a solution to the problem.
  • Roma: The quarians are an odd mix of Roma and Space Jews: their lifestyles are reminiscent of Roma, but their beliefs and some behavior is similar to Jewish traditions. Some Quarian accents are also similar to that of Roma, such as Tali's, but in the sequel its revealed accents differ widely between ships.
  • Rousing Speech: Both Commander Shepard and Captain Kirrahe.
    • Speaking of Shepard, in the first game, the player gets to craft his speech themselves by choosing dialogue options. It can make for a great Establishing Character Moment, and it's a nice touch for role-playing.
    • And Wrex in the third installment. Hackett also gives a very inspiring one.
    • The Ryder siblings aren't slouches in this department. Unless they're being snarky and/or irritable.
  • RPG Elements: After all, you are playing a third-person shooter. With character customization. And experience points. And amazing plot, character development and dialogue.
  • RPGs Equal Combat: Yes and no. You certainly do get exp for killing things in the first game; however, a good chunk of your early levels will come from talking to various people and scrutinizing various computers and viewpoints. The second game discards with combat rewards entirely; you get exp for completing missions, and nothing else.
  • Rubber Forehead Aliens:
    • The asari.
    • The quarians are stated to be very human-like, being convergent species and all.
      • Confirmed in the third game provided you romanced Tali.
  • Rule 34: Inevitably. Primarily focused on the asari (as you might expect), but also includes Naughty Tentacles from the hanar. Somehow also applied to Tali, even though she's always in that suit.
    • Hilariously lampshaded by BioWare itself in Mass Effect 2 with the alien porn magazine Fornax.

Game Salesman: Those asari/hanar porn games they sell down in Shin Akiba are really nasty.

      • Sure enough, fans made this magazine a reality, that can be downloaded for free.
  • Rule of Cool: Mass Effect started out as a fairly solid piece of sci-fi, but then got softer in order to make way for some of the "cooler" stuff, like small scale FTL travel fueled by human metabolism (the Vanguard's Charge in Mass Effect 2) and blades of solid light (Omni-Blade in Mass Effect 3). Both, however, were foreshadowed, Biotic Charge by the fact that the Conduit, like all mass relays, was powered by Eezo, just like any biotic ability, and the Omni-Blade by the simple expedient that anything strong enough to make into a shield can be made sharper and shaped differently to serve as an equally strong sword.
  • Running Gag:
    • The human trying to get a refund from a merchant in the Citadel. He returns in the sequel having finally gotten permission to get a refund... only to end up in a similar situation on the specifics of the refund itself. The player knows it's the same guy because he states it's taken him 2 years to get a refund.
    • Mexican Standoff is done so often that it's not even funny anymore.
    • There's also Shepard decking the tabloid reporter, complete with Meme:

"I've had enough of your disingenuous assertions!" SHEPARD PAWNCH!!!

  • Sand Worm: Thresher Maws.
  • Sapient Ship: At first, the Reapers appear to be an entire species of these, identified as synthetic constructs rather than natural creatures. Then the end of the second game reveals their construction methods and it ricochets rather squickily back into Living Ship. EDI is a straight example at the end of the second game.
  • Saving the World: You get to save multiple worlds throughout the game, or at least the only parts of the world that are colonized. And of course, the entire point of the series as a whole is to save the galaxy. May be averted, though, in that they acknowledge that if they fail, there will be others who come after them. Just a looooooooooooooong time after, and those people won't have any idea what they're up against either.
  • Scars Are Forever: Pretty much every 'seasoned warrior' type character in the game has some form of scarring:
    • Shepard has at least one in default mode (for both genders), and Wrex, Zaeed, Mordin, James Vega and Garrus after his rescue in the second game have very impressive scars on their faces.
    • Played with in the case of Shepard's scars after s/he's been revived. They go away if you play Paragon, but get worse if you are Renegade. However, plastic surgery is an (expensive) third option.
      • Interestingly, any scars that Shepard had gained from character creation from the first game are gone in the second for plot reasons as Cerberus pretty much had to regrow your skin from scratch. Scars being the result of external stimuli, not genetics, would logically not reform.
    • Like Shepard, both Ryder siblings can have scars by default. Of their teammates, only Jaal has visible scars: one he has by the time he appears, and another depending on the player's choices.
  • Scary Dogmatic Aliens: Both averted and played straight. The batarian government is fascist-like and runs primarily off of slavery, not to mention the government doesn't entirely condemn the predation of pirates and outlaws on defenseless human colonies. The quarians, on the other hand, are very much communistic: any resources beyond personal effects are available to the community at large (by necessity), and they are most definitely not enemies. If anything, the fanbase woobifies them to the extreme.
  • Scenery Gorn: Pretty much the entirety of Mass Effect 3.
  • Scenery Porn: Frequently. And for people who played the first game, the second arguably opens with Scenery Gorn, as Shepard walks through the destroyed Normandy.
    • Mass Effect 2... Illium. ILLIUM.
    • The Normandy Crash Site is just beautiful.
    • The Overlord DLC has some particularly jaw-dropping vistas. The designers were apparently so proud of it, the onboard computer of your vehicle draws your attention to it.
    • The third game tends more towards the above trope, but Rannoch is beautiful. It's no wonder that within seconds, Tali's already dreaming up her house there.
    • Pretty much everywhere in Andromeda.
  • Science Is Bad: Although not played anviliciously straight, you still hear a whole lot more about science gone wrong than any other kind. Then again, you tend not to notice science at all until it does go wrong.
    • It should be noted, however, that the vast majority of the "Science gone wrong" stuff is conducted by Cerberus, which seems to have few ethical guidelines, if any.
    • This trope is averted (or even inverted) for universe at large. The biggest problem in the setting, is that all the races are content to rely on technology that they found, instead of making their own FTL methods, to the point were they shoot at anyone who tries exploring a dormant relay. Meanwhile, new technologies have saved Earth from environmental catastrophe, also curing most human diseases and dramatically increasing human lifespans.
  • Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Averted in that the game acknowledges the fact that the galaxy is quite large and that interstellar travel would be impossible without the mass relays, even with Faster-Than-Light Travel. The fact that just 35 years after the discovery of alien technology on Mars, mankind has settled a bunch of planets and is poised to take their place alongside the three most prominent species in the galaxy who have already been space-faring for over a thousand years looks like a case of this at first glance, but that's exactly the point.
    • A more excusable one comes up in the descriptions of how space combat works. Lasers are effective close range weapons because they go at light speed, but are hard to focus at longer ranges, making mass accelerators more effective at longer ranges. In reality, lasers could be focused well enough that they would miss due to light-speed lag before they would cease to be damaging, and mass accelerators would be even harder to hit with.
    • The Codex also mentions the trope. It gets down to knife fight ranges... which are measured in tens of kilometers. As well, it mentions things like heat, projectiles traveling until stopped, and so forth as reasons why fights don't get any closer than this. Shooting the equivalent of a tactical nuke in space is bad if you miss... and there is something you don't want destroyed right behind your target. Which makes the Citadel fight stand out, if you think about it. One, the attack is coming in within visual range, meaning they're unprepared for something that close. Second, they have to worry about missed shots hitting friendlies and/or the Citadel itself.
    • Averted in regards to time and space when you learn about the end of the Protheans. Even with their massive power, a Reaper galactic culling still requires decades to centuries to complete, just because of the size of the galaxy and how much of it they have to cover.
  • Sealed Evil in a Can: The Reapers are a rare case of self-sealed evil: every time they finish harvesting the current crop of civilizations, they go back into deep space and reset the mass relay system. Granted though, they designed a can opener to let them back in anytime they wanted. Until the Protheans messed with it. There are also more than a few stories of how a certain peril was mostly dormant until someone came along and stirred it up; the most common is caches of dragon's teeth (husk-making devices) and other bits of Reaper technology scattered throughout the galaxy.
  • Sealed Good in a Can: Subverted with the Crucible, because in addition to being a weapon powerful enough to destroy the Reapers, it also destroys the mass relays, and thus all trans-galactic society and commerce.
    • In the first game, one of the many random planetary descriptions involves a wealthy (and somewhat crazy) volus businessman buying an ancient crypt planet and digging it up with mercenaries, claiming to have received visions of "beings of light" designed to protect the galaxy from "mechanical demons". Considering that "demons" is a very good description of Reapers and Shepard has been on the receiving end of multiple visions courtesy of the Protheans, not to mention the fact that more than one side description turned out to be important later on, fan theory holds that this will be important later on... it proves to be a Red Herring in the third game though.
  • Semper Fi: The Marines and the Navy are pretty much inextricable in space these days, so they are encountered everywhere throughout the series.
  • Send in the Search Team: There's a very Heart of Darkness-esque mission in the second game involving Jacob's father. However, in a more literal application of the trope, quite a few side missions (and a few main ones) involve some person/people going missing and Shepard being tasked to go find them. And then fight his/her way out of whatever mess those people got themselves into/made.
    • In the third game, you repeat this trope, looking for missing krogan scouts on Utukku, this time in a Shout-Out to another 70s classic Alien.
  • Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: In the first game: "I've had enough of your snide insinuations!" In the second: "I've had enough of your disingenuous assertions!" Also qualifies as Sophisticated As Hell, since your character says that right before punching a reporter on live TV.
  • Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: The AI Hacking ability present in both games allows you to temporarily turn mechanical opponents against each other. Obviously, the stronger the better, but some of the largest ones have immunity to abilities. In the first game, only Tali has the ability for sure; Shepard can only do it if s/he is an Engineer, or plays through a second time with a specialty. The second game has the ability more spread out, and even adds a new one: Dominate, which lets Morinth take control of organic enemies as well. In the third game, AI Hacking is tied in with Sabotage, a skill from the first game, and Shepard can learn Dominate after finishing the Leviathan DLC.
  • Shaggy Dog Story: The main story is fine. However, in the first game (they seem to have fixed this in the sequel), all the search and rescue side missions have you go out and search for a guy. Almost every time, the guy was already dead long before you got there.
    • Played with in the third game when you have to find the turian Primarch.
    • The third game's endings, once Fridge Horror sets in. It's a galaxy-wide dark age, and everyone is trapped in whatever solar system they ended up in. Especially bad for Sol, where potentially thousands of asari, turians, salarians, krogan, quarians, geth, batarians, hanar, drell, volus, elcor, and vorcha are suddenly trapped. Even if enough quarian liveships survived and can feed the quarian and turian populations and Earth can be recultivated quickly enough to feed the other populations, the volus contingent is completely hosed... they can't even breathe the atmosphere of any planet in the system.
      • It's not quite that bleak if you think about it some more. Faster than light travel still exists, and the building of the Crucible, because of the purpose for which it's created, probably lent scientists some level of understanding of how the mass relays operated [which might have been its secondary purpose all along]. Plus, the Protheans managed to create a working prototype of a mass relay in the form of The Conduit from the first game. So extrapolating from that, it makes sense to deduce that any future installments in this universe will focus on the rebuilding of the mass relays, as well as galactic society/economy, and then perhaps being faced with a new threat as a result of exploring heretofore unknown technology. Sequel Hook, anyone?
  • Shocking Defeat Legacy: Both general and personal. Shanxi is the big one, and it even applies to both sides. Short story: humans try to open a random mass relay. This is illegal in Citadel space, because opening inactive relays is forbidden after past unpleasantness. Turians find them and shoot instead of talking, follow them to a colony with a good-sized fleet, and attack. The colony surrenders and the turians let their guard down, thinking they wiped out the human military. Real human military shows up and wipes out them. Turians gear up for all-out war, but the Council stops them before things go too far. The humans are sore at being attacked unprovoked, and the turians are sore that the conflict ended on a high note for the humans. Both sides are really upset though because it gave them a good look at how freaking strong they all are.
  • Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Rana Thanoptis, the Asari scientist you find researching indoctrination on Virmire in the first game, also shows up in the second game helping Okeer with his research. In the third game, if you spared her both times, a news bulletin reveals she was indoctrinated the whole time, and she was killed offscreen after murdering a bunch of politicians.
  • Short-Range Long-Range Weapon: In terms of gameplay, largely averted. The cover system encourages you to stay away - far away - from your enemies. It still gets played straight occasionally, but only because your melee attack are laughably ineffective when it comes to dealing with enemies who like to get up close and personal. Also, largely averted in space combat, or so we're told. The ones we get to see happen at extreme close range, but each time they are explained and justified.
  • Short-Range Shotgun: Averted in the first (more so if you specialize), played straight in the second. There's even a specific "long-range shotgun" in the second game. *facepalm*
  • Shoulder Cannon: Hasn't been seen (so far!) but it's mentioned that the elcor's primary armaments essentially turn them into mobile heavy weapons platforms.
  • Shout-Out: See Mass Effect/Shout Out.
  • Shown Their Work: The development team at BioWare went out of their way to keep the internal universe consistent, with in-depth analysis of how the titular mass effect influences society and physics, along with in-depth geological information on each planet that can be visited in-game and extensive information about each species' biology.
  • Sidequest: Numerous, all of them optional, though not taking many of them will make you feel like a big jerk.
    • The lamentable number of "Go to planet X, find bunker Y and kill everyone in it for reason Z" sidequests is arguably the only flaw in an otherwise overwhelmingly well-made game.
  • The Singularity: The whole purpose of the Reapers is to prevent a version of this from occurring.
  • Slave Mooks: Quite a few throughout the series: Husks, Collectors, Keepers, the Thorian-controlled colonists, anyone subjected to indoctrination...
    • Even the Reapers themselves.
  • Slave Race: The Collectors of the second game. Some speculation is also attached to the Keepers; the Protheans, at least, believed that they were another, earlier race that the Reapers enslaved to act as ambulatory Black Boxes. A particularly shocking one is the Reapers themselves, although to be fair they've been alluding to it for a while.
  • Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Entirely up to you. However, even at its darkest, the series never slides quite to the end of the cynicism side.
    • Takes a hard turn towards cynicism in the third game. The unofficial tagline being "you can't save them all."
    • However, Vanilla Shepard (a.k.a. Blank Slate with no imported saves) takes it so that Shepard is semi-Renegade. Not complete Renegade but when faced with the major outcome of the mission always takes the Renegade option for better or worse. This, however, is due to change with the Mass Effect: Genesis DLC, which condenses Mass Effect 1 into an interactive comic, presenting players with 6 necessary questions.
  • Sliding Scale of Linearity vs. Openness: Level 5. Definitely has a direction in mind, but a lot of the missions in a given chapter can happen in any order, and almost all of the side missions are available whenever.
  • Sliding Scale of Robot Intelligence: All of it.
  • Sliding Scale of Villain Threat: Everything up to Galactic level shows up at one point or another. The Galactic threat is the Reapers, by the way.
  • The Smurfette Principle: Averted with respect to your squadmates in both games, but applied to entire species. Asari (who are technically a One-Gender Race) are the only female aliens you see most of the time, and the only other female aliens you encounter are quarians and the rachni queen - and note that the main asari and quarian characters were both designed to be love interests for male Shepards. You'll never run into a single female turian, salarian, krogan, batarian, vorcha, elcor or volus (well, it's hard to tell with the last few, but all the ones we meet have masculine voices).
    • Averted to an extent in the third game, where a female krogan and a female salarian put in appearances. The Omega DLC finally gives us a female turian.
  • Some Call Me... Tim: Shows up alllll over the place. Especially with certain races (hanar, salarians) who tend to have fairly complicated names. There's even one character whose Fan Nickname really is TIM.
  • Something Only They Would Say: Part of quarian standard procedure is to give a code phrase upon returning to the Flotilla.
    • Something They Would Never Say: Along with another one used to indicate duress should they ever be held hostage in a Trojan Horse situation.
    • Also incorporated (optionally) into Samara/Morinth's loyalty mission in the second game.
  • Space Battle: Only a few are actually seen in the games, though they are discussed in-depth in the Codex. Space combat does largely avert most Did Not Do the Research tropes about space that come up; the devs just go to a lot of effort to make sure the battles that happen in-game justifiably involve ships flitting around at extreme close range as opposed to hammering each other from thousands of kilometers away.
  • Space Clothes: For a Space Opera, the clothing isn't actually that bizarre, for the most part, though standard reporter and diplomat attire has apparently changed somewhat.
  • Space Fighter: Mentioned, never seen. Their role is to harass and weaken larger ships to let their backup get the real hits in, though they can be loaded with very potent mass effect torpedoes that can apparently do nasty things to bulkheads. They can be seen just behind the Normandy in the final space battle in the first game, albeit very small.
      • ...and are equippable with the Thanix Cannon, according to the codex. Think about that for a second. Note that the aforementioned weapon was reverse-engineered from none other than Sovereign.
    • Featured more prominently in the third game.
  • Space Is an Ocean: As demonstrated by the Alliance Navy and the terminology used by same. The quarian fleet is also known as the Flotilla, another naval term.
    • Averted in other ways though. The finale space battle though has Alliance ships coming at the Big Bad from all angles and notably, it's the only space borne battle depicted. In general, the game makes it a point to demonstrate that while ships are basically impossible to stop from going anywhere outside of mass relays and docking bays, it's more the political and other ramifications that are the real tricky part.
    • Subverted and combined with Fridge Brilliance in the way the Normandy itself maneuvers in the final battle against Sovereign. The fact that it flies up, inverts, then dives looks like a classic mistake of using a spaceship like an atmospheric fighter. Then you realise how the drives work. The element zero core modifies the mass of the ship, allowing the drives to produce greater thrust/force on the vessel. So when the Normandy does this flip, it is simply using the full potential of its element zero core to reduce mass to apply massive thrust as it 'dives'.
    • The nature of space is gloriously spelled out for some cadets in the Citadel in Mass Effect 2.

Sergeant: I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that SPACE IS EMPTY! Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going until it HITS SOMETHING! That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship! It might go off into deep space and hit someone else in 10,000 years! If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime!

  • Space Is Cold: Averted. Though it only really comes up in the in-game codex, the inherent temperature of the near-vacuum, the lack of convection, and the problem of heat radiation (both in acquiring and disposing of heat) are treated correctly.
  • Space Is Noisy: Simultaneously played straight, averted, and even slightly justified. For the most part, the cutscenes play this almost painfully straight, although Rule of Cool is in full effect. On the other hand, it gets played with quite a bit. There are Codex entries that mention the silence of space, and several of the noisy space scenes take place in particularly thick nebulae or a planet's upper atmosphere, where at least some noise could be possible (though, admittedly, nowhere near the amount used). It's also messed with in gameplay. For example, at the beginning of the second game, during the destruction of the original Normandy, the only sound used during the spacewalk is the sound of Shepard's breathing inside his/her helmet. Also, during the battle on the docking bay in the Arrival DLC, the sounds are muffled, giving the feel of silent space while simultaneously allowing the player to hear audio clues as to what's happening.
    • Steve Cortez in the third game mentions turning off the sound emulators so he can watch spacecraft take off silently: implying that this trope is actually enforced in-universe, probably because hundreds of years of Space Opera movies have created the expectation in most races, as well as allowing for more awareness of your surroundings without overloading your visual cortex with data (a loud "whoosh" noise could alert you to a fast moving nearby object outside of your field of view, and is easier to quickly interpret than, say, a 360 degree panoramic display).
  • Space Jews: The volus.
    • To a certain extent, the elcor are a Space Jew variant. Their culture and government has some noticeable parallels to rabbinic law.
    • The quarian trial board in Mass Effect 2 bears some striking resemblances to the Beth Din (an ancient rabbinical court during the age of the First Temple). Additionally, the prayer they recite at the beginning of the trial is almost a word-for-word translation of the Shehecheyanu.
  • Space Marine: In the most literal sense, the entirety of ground-based human military seems to be made up of Marines, including the Player Character and a few squad members. They play most of the tropes straight, being equipped with Powered Armor, Deflector Shields, and loaded up with Bio Augmentation. Justified since what was the Army is now part of the fleet (aka Marines) because it is pointless to fight on the ground if you don't control the space above it.
  • Space Navy: Natch.
  • Space Opera: An essential, played absolutely straight example.
  • Space Pirates: They're called 'mercenaries' more often than not, but what with all the independent hits they make, they're really this most of the time.
  • Space Police: C-Sec for the Citadel, and Spectres for Council space in general. The human Systems Alliance Navy also has a policy of aggressively dealing with criminals they come across, typically from orbit.
  • Space Romans: The turians. This is so prevalent it makes them the most powerful military force in the galaxy; the only reason the krogan and humans can't measure up is because the former is too disorganized and the latter doesn't have the same recruitment levels.
  • Spanner in the Works: Shepard obviously serves as one for the Reapers. It is also discussed that the Geth as a race are this as well, as they are both unique among sentient species and are developing technology outside of the Reapers' usual technological plans.
  • Spare Body Parts: The krogan. In spades. Spare hearts, spare lungs, spare nervous systems, spare testicles...
    • To a less extreme degree, the batarians, who only have four eyes.
    • The vorcha can spontaneously grow them!
  • Spider Tank: Armatures and Colossi.
    • And Destroyer-class Reapers.
    • Rachni get turned into these by Reaper tech, as well.
  • Spiritual Successor: Since BioWare never got around to (personally) making a Knights of the Old Republic sequel, most of the community sees this as the next best thing.
  • Spoony Bard:
    • Gameplay-wise, the Sentinel class in the first game. The main issue with it was that it was an Adept, just slightly worse. The tech skills they received were actually far less potent than the extra biotic powers an Adept would have and Adepts have an actual weapon skill and a better class passive (where as the Sentinel one is much weaker because it functions as a limited combat tree as well). Sentinel still had Game Breakers, but less than Adept. They Took a Level in Badass and became the most durable class in the sequel.
    • Character-wise, Kaidan (the party's Sentinel representative in Mass Effect 1).
  • Sprint Meter: Shepard usually moves at a slow jog, but when in combat (actually, only in combat) s/he can run at high speed. The brevity of the meter makes this impractical as an escape strategy, and the patheticness of the melee system limits its use as an attack. Its best use is in diving for cover.
    • Averted in the third game, where it's possible to sprint without fatigue during combat, and the improved melee makes it practical.
  • Standard FPS Guns: Though not a FPS, the games still manage to make most of the checklist. In terms of what you can personally use, you have standard pistols, shotguns, automatic weapons, and sniper rifles. The second game adds in a different flavor of automatic weapon, along with every brand of heavier equipment on the list (grenade launcher, missile launcher, flamethrower, BFG, etc).
  • Standard Sci-Fi Fleet: Escape pods, fighters, frigates, cruisers, carriers, dreadnoughts.
  • Standard Sci-Fi Setting
  • Starfish Aliens: Rachni, the Thorian, elcor and hanar. Also, the Reapers.
  • Starfish Language: Quite a few.
    • The geth's extremely high-speed "data pulsing" language.
    • The hanar communicate through bio-luminescent pulses as opposed to speech: they have to have specialized translators to vocalize to other species.
    • The elcor primarily communicate through speech, but convey meaning through pheromones and extremely subtle shifts in body language as opposed to tone or inflection. They have to learn to clarify what they mean with every sentence they speak.
    • The rachni communicate by "singing," which other species are incapable of hearing. This is never fully explained.
    • And though no proof is given, it is theorized that the Prothean language is this, considering how squad members react to hearing it spoken. And how Shepard reacts to having his/her head crammed full of it.
    • The Jardaan of Andromeda used glyphs, which have multiple different meanings. They're not unintelligible, but it does take a highly sophisticated AI a good while to translate enough of their language to get anything more than fragments out of their writing.
  • Starfish Robots: The Geth have some pretty strange designs, ranging from the Armature to the larger Geth platforms.
  • Stat-O-Vision: Used to explain why enemies are clearly labeled and marked in-game, as well as why their current shield, armor, and health status is displayed, along with your squadmates.
  • Stealth Pun: Several pop up in the series. Such as the Mass Effect 2 "Collectors' Edition".
  • Stealth in Space: The Normandy is the first ship to be able to do this. The ship is still visible, it just has all its emissions contained and is able to move without thrusters due to its drive core. The visibility is not much of a problem unless it gets very close to another ship and they actually look out of the window. Also notable that going to FTL speeds makes it easily detectable.
    • Joker even comments on this during Legion's loyalty mission:

Joker: You know that it's just our heat emissions that are hidden, right? They can look out a window and see us coming.

    • It's also mentioned repeatately that with the dimensions of space, most people don't pay much attention to visual signs. The geth don't even have windows.
  • Steel Ear Drums: Played straight for the most part: explosions don't seem to hamper the team's ability to hear or communicate in any way. Somewhat averted in the second game, with Shepard temporarily experiencing Shell-Shock Silence whenever an explosive goes off near him/her. It only lasts a few seconds though.
  • Stereotype Flip: Overlaps with My Species Doth Protest Too Much on occasion; the Codex spends all of its time describing the stereotypical behavior of most species. Then you actually go out and run into lots of people who don't conform to those standards.
  • Sticks to the Back: Pistols and submachine guns have holsters, but everything else folds up and packs onto the back. Justified as mass effect field emitters can be seen on the back of armor and cloth uniforms exactly where the weapons "rest".
  • Storming the Castle: Present in the first two games. The attack on Fist's bar and the Virmire assault from the first game, and the entire point of the second game is recruiting soldiers to attack the Collectors on their side of the Omega-4 relay.
    • And then comes the third game, which features both you and the main antagonist factions engaging in this.
    • Happens several times through Andromeda, usually with kett facilities, though one planet has Ryder storm a scavenger base instead.
  • Story-Boarding the Apocalypse: In a way. The first game gives the general details of what happens every time the Reapers roll around, including timing and general behavior. But not everything was revealed, making the discovery that the Reapers took time to enslave the Collectors and apparently harvest said beings for making baby Reapers, as opposed to simply killing them all.
  • Story to Gameplay Ratio: Definitely more to the Story than Gameplay side, but there's still an equitable amount of both. It starts to tip more towards gameplay if you skip the dialogue.
    • And more towards story if you take the time to read every codex entry and log.
    • The third game lets you pick which side of the ratio you want to be on. You can play normal, in which the game is presented as the developers intended. You can play gameplay, in which the cutscenes/dialog are shortened and a lot of the choices made automatically while the combat is made tougher. Or you can play story, in which the combat is what's cut down and made easier.
  • Strange Syntax Speaker: Hanar, elcor, the Rachni Queen.
  • Streaming Stars: Averted. Plenty of light going by, blueshifted by the speed of travel, but the stars stay right where they are.
  • Stripperiffic: Three of Shepard's companions have impractical high heels and skin tight outfits. The law enforcer (Asari Justicar) looks like this. Lampshaded in Miranda's case by several NPCs including two of Normandy's engineers and an asari mercenary who tells her she's waiting for Miranda to get dressed before the shooting starts. And then there's EDI.
  • Stronger with Age: Asari age like this.
  • Subspace Ansible: The primary form of communication is using photons ferried through the mass relays, which results in limitation of bandwidth. Quantum Entanglement Communicators are another form of communication, with its own bandwidth limits plus it only ever connects two places... so if you do not want to talk to somebody special they are of no use whatsoever. They are more prevalent in the third game though.
  • Sufficiently Advanced Alien: The Reapers. We still don't know everything they're capable of.
    • Even more so, The Catalyst.
  • Suicidal Overconfidence: For the most part, played straight: a massively large number of mercenaries, pirates, and private security teams seem to think they can take on the Normandy's crew. There are a few places where Shepard can point out that this didn't go too well for the last few hundred or so people to think like this and urge them to reconsider. Most of the time, it works. Sometimes it doesn't.
    • Lampshaded during the Mordin loyalty mission:

Weyrloc krogan: Run away now while you still can!
Shepard: I don't know, I might trip on the dozen or so krogan I had to kill to get here.

    • Hilariously lampshaded in the encounter with Niftu Cal.
    • In the third game, if Shepard acts very confident about defeating the Reapers, many characters will think this trope applies to Shepard. Which it might.
  • Superior Species: Though they have all the hallmarks, the asari rarely actively play this trope straight. Which is good because it's averted more often than not, and even deconstructed in the second game. The Reapers, on the other hand, play it straight all the way.
  • Superpowered Mooks: Enemy biotics, and any Collector controlled by Harbinger.
  • Superpower Russian Roulette: The only way to get a biotic is through pre-natal exposure to eezo. However, this has a higher chance of causing brain cancer than granting people gravity-controlling powers.
  • Super Reflexes: The Soldier class' Adrenaline Rush ability.
    • The Infiltrator class has its own version; when looking down the scope of a sniper rifle, time slows down for a few seconds, giving ample opportunity for headshots. In the third game, this ability is still present, but other classes can have them via a sniper rifle mod.
    • In the second game, a properly upgraded Biotic Charge gives the Vanguard a few seconds of time dilation after use. In the third game, this applies regardless of how the power is evolved.
  • Super Soldiers: Every Alliance marine fits the definition of this trope in the Mass Effect universe, having received numerous genetic tweaks as part of standard training, though specialists get more fancy enhancements. There are more fantastic examples though mostly in the second game, notably Shepard, Miranda and Grunt. It is unknown what the tweaking policy is for other species.
    • And in the third game, we learn that Cerberus has its own ways of doing this.
  • Surprisingly Elite Cannon Fodder: Mass Effect 2 could be seen this way as a serious example: a Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits sent away on an admitted suicide mission, the leader of whom the Council has tried to wash their hands of.
  • Surprisingly Similar Stories
  • Surveillance Drone: Often seen floating at the shoulders of reporters, intrepid or otherwise.
  • Survivor Guilt: Not as rampant as some other issues common amongst Shepard's team, but each one still has members who feels this. Like Shepard him/herself. Or Ashley. Or Kaidan. Or Jack.
    • Han Olar could be the most profound example of this in any game ever.
    • Garrus, too. In Mass Effect 2, Liara shows signs of this in regard to Feron, before it's revealed that Feron is alive.
    • Starts to weigh heavily on Shepard in the third game, and Admiral Zal'Koris.
    • In the third game, Liara's Survivor Guilt over the fall of Thessia pushes her into nigh Heroic BSOD territory. Player choice determines whether Shephard pulls her out of it or joins her in it.
  • Tactical Shooter: Though the line between TS and FPS has become somewhat blurry of late, Mass Effect hits three of the criteria.
  • Take Cover: The game's combat system utilizes extensive cover, like most Third Person Shooters.
  • Take Your Time: For the most part, this is played absolutely straight. Anytime you receive a distress call, are informed of a 'desperate' situation, or have been sent an urgent communique about something that needs to be dealt with right now (like tactical missile launches, falling asteroids, or falling ships), go ahead and ignore it. It'll still be there in five hours. Memorably subverted in one instance in the second game, however: the longer you wait after the Collectors abduct the crew of the Normandy, fewer of them will be alive when you rescue them.
    • Averted twice in Mass Effect 3: if you don't complete the evacuation of Grissom Academy within a certain amount of time, Cerberus will kill most of the students, and you'll have to face an indoctrinated Jack at Cerberus Headquarters. Also, failure to disable the Tuchanka bomb will cost you heavily when it comes to Krogan war assets.
  • Talking Lightbulb: Both quarians and volus have this built into the "mouth" area of their suits. Why has not been explained, nor does it entirely sync up with their speech.
    • The reason the light blinks is because if more than one quarian, volus, etc, is present, its helpful to know which one is speaking. Sure, you can also do that off of voice recognition, but that's only if you know them.
  • Talking Is a Free Action: As in all BioWare RPGs, though not quite as bad as in others. Most of the time, if something urgent is going on, the conversations will be short, and you can't start a conversation in the middle of a gunfight. However, certain sequences, like confronting Saren on Virmire, occur while nuclear weapons are ticking.
    • Lampshaded in the sequel a couple times. Shepard can bring up inane topics a few times in the middle of critical situations, and the character s/he's talking to will call him out on it.
    • ...or be zapped with electricity, in one particularly uncomfortable interrogation in the Shadow Broker DLC.
  • Tank Goodness: One in each of the first two games.
    • To elaborate, it was used in the first game for exploration, and many people liked exploring enough to forgive the bad controls. Also, the PC version had much better controls for it.
  • Taxonomic Term Confusion: Mostly averted; except for the Protheans, Reapers and Collectors, all of the species names are uncapitalized, like "bottlenose dolphin", "human" or "saber-toothed tiger". The latter two are titles rather than the species' actual name, and the first might also be so it's sort of justified in those cases. However, this hasn't stopped the fandom from capitalizing the species names, sometimes on this very wiki.
  • Technology Levels: Played straight... sort of. Only because someone is keeping a very tight leash on technological development beyond the space age.
    • We find out in Mass Effect 2 that it didn't take very long to reverse-engineer Sovereign's Wave Motion Gun, and use it against the Reapers.
  • Technology Porn: The Codex probably doesn't need to go that in-depth on details of mass effect technology. But then, most of us don't care, one way or another.
  • Terminally Dependent Society: The quarians. Most of their food comes from a few agricultural superships. These ships are kept at the center of the fleet, and are so fragile they're most of the reason for why quarian military forces will only transmit one warning before blowing your ass out of the sky. Also, galactic travel is impossible without the mass relays, all of which are under the control of the Reapers.
  • Terraforming:
    • Mentioned but rarely, if ever, seen, mostly because it's hideously expensive.
    • Andromeda has six (formerly seven) planets where a previous race has left theirs behind. Tech which can change a planet's global temperature within minutes of being turned on. It's hinted, and later confirmed in a datapad, that the Heleus Cluster wasn't the only place this race had been renovating.
  • Terrified of Germs: The quarians, courtesy of having immune systems that are slow to adapt.
    • It's subverted, in that, most of the time they don't have to worry about getting sick, just allergic reactions. Also, the quarian immune system has always been very different from a human one. On their home world, viruses were partially beneficial, and formed a symbiotic relationship with their bodies, so they even had trouble with this before their exile.
  • Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: Quarians have several suit differences between male and female: females generally have a "girly" color scheme, males have hook-like things that extend off their masks, and so on.
  • Thanatos Gambit: The sole survivors of the Prothean race sabotaged a Reaper trap in the hopes that it would give future species the chance they never had. It was a one-way trip and they all died of starvation, but their sacrifice paid off thousands of years later.
  • That Came Out Wrong: Almost everyone has at least one of these, but the most common (and popular) come from Garrus, Tali, and Liara.

Garrus: You know me. I always like to savor the last shot before popping the heat sink. ((Beat)) ...Wait. That metaphor just went somewhere horrible.

  • That Makes Me Feel Angry:
    • Elcor have extremely monotone voices because they communicate their emotions through pheromones and other means too subtle for other species. To get around this they state their emotions while speaking, such as "Delighted: welcome". This is later used to humorous effect in a random Citadel radio announcement when a human patron of the arts says he's organizing an all-elcor run of Hamlet, the entire point of which (as far as human audiences go) is to filter out all the emotional overtones to the Danish Prince's behavior.

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    • The elcor bouncer at afterlife when a customer threatens to force his way past him "With barely constrained menace, I would like to see you try."
    • An elcor on the Citadel in Mass Effect 2 is accused by his companion of hacking his translator to lie about his speech conditionals. His response: "With a sincerity such that doubt would be considered deeply offensive: No".
    • Averted in one instance by the elcor ambassador in Mass Effect 3: he doesn't use a prefix, stares downwards, and sounds like he is about to cry.
  • That's No Moon: The Solar System's mass relay was Charon. The rock and ice seen in the 21st century were just a concealing shell.
  • Theme Naming: As of the second game, Shepard has met two Reapers, Sovereign and Harbinger. While those are not their real names, they are both adjectives you would most likely see used to refer to a hero or some other position of greatness.
    • Curiously, they seem to have been mixed up. Sovereign is the one heralding the return of the Reapers, which is basically what "harbinger" means. Harbinger, meanwhile, is the one best known for assuming direct control.
  • There Are No Therapists: Averted. Repeatedly. The most messed up people in the game, should you so choose, are quite explicitly shipped off for therapy. And the second game even has its own therapist on your ship. Perhaps inevitably, said therapist is the only one to visibly have problems adjusting after nearly being turned into Reaper Goo in the suicide mission, assuming she lives.
  • Third Person Person: The hanar speak like this, since their culture believes that using first person in public is rude.
  • Time Abyss:
    • Most notable in the first game with the Thorian, Vigil and the Reapers. The page-quote from the trope page in fact originates from Sovereign, the first encountered Reaper.
    • The Catalyst, the intelligence that built the Reapers, in the third game.
  • Timed Mission: Contains a few, but they're really not too difficult, and for most of the missions you can take as long as you need. They also make for some of the more memorable missions in both games.
    • Some of the notable ones include: in the first game, rescue Tali (or she dies); in the second game, the Thresher Maw, which you only need to survive for five minutes... Bonus Points for actually killing it. In the endgame, you have to prevent your tech specialist from being killed in the vents: you have a timer for each switch that must be thrown.
    • And then there are the challenges in the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer mode.
    • Averted with many other missions: whenever you hear that "we need to hold this position until X", chances are that X happens exactly when all enemies are dead.
  • Title Drop: As seen in the page quote, "mass effect" is an ability of element zero to increase or decrease objects' masses depending on the polarity of an electrical charge via dark energy. It is the basis for the technology of interstellar civilization, and is mentioned to be such.
  • Token Romance: The romances in both games. What happens on the Normandy, stays on the Normandy.
    • May ultimately be averted in the third game.
    • Of course you can avert this as the romance is entirely optional.
  • Too Dumb to Live: Why thank you, Wrex.

"Anyone who fights us is either stupid or on Saren's payroll. Killing the latter is business. Killing the former is a favor to the universe."

  • To Win Without Fighting: The Charm and Intimidate conversation options. The earliest example occurs during a Mexican Standoff in the first game. Either Paragon Shepard points out that this would be a good time to leave, or Renegade Shepard points out that he/she's killed about fifteen well-trained guards to get there.
  • Translation Convention: We hear a Prothean recording on Ilos speaking in English, but Shepard is the only character who understands it because of the Cipher. When the party meets Vigil shortly afterward, however, he addresses them in English Galactic, having monitored and analyzed their radio communications. Note that the Translator Microbes present in the setting means that the entire party would thus understand him even if you take alien allies to Ilos.
    • In the Redemption comic, Translation Convention is both referred to (it starts by talking about Omega station and how it also means something final in alien languages, and a mention of how a phrase may not have translated properly) and played straight when Liara mistakes the Illusive Man for an "Elusive" man.
  • Translator Microbes: As explained in the codex, alien languages are translated real-time by portable computers or sub-dermal chips, without which intergalactic culture would be a far more difficult affair to sustain.
  • Trial and Error Gameplay: Since dialogue options do not reflect exactly what Shepard will say or do, picking any option is often a leap of faith that leads to an undesired result. Such unwanted responses tend to result in many players jumping to the Pause menu to reload their last save.
    • For example, one option for a male Shepard to resolve the Ashley/Liara love triangle is to suggest a threesome. Ashley dumps you and leaves in a huff, and the game treats it as if you'd chosen Liara. There's no real way to predict this outcome.
  • Tribal Face Paint: The turians all have facial markings defining the wearer as a member from one of the colonies where they were born. Which all stems from some sort of civil war.
  • Trope Overdosed:
  • Troper Critical Mass: How many times have the various pages had to be split, again?
  • True Companions: The crew of the Normandy in all three games is a Band of Brothers, brought together principally by Shepard and hir mission. More than half your crew in the third game were with you in the first and their conversations reflect this. The Krogan species generally forms these and call them 'krants'.
  • Undying Loyalty: The true geth. No matter how badly they were treated by the quarians, even to the point of genocide, they still value them as parents. Given the chance, the geth repay the quarians in a big way, even restoring their immune systems and caretaking their world. There's a certain amount of pain from Legion when he ponders what the geth could do when their own beloved creators wanted to destroy them.
  • Unexplained Recovery: Invoked by the Commander in the second game.

Nassana Dantius: Commander Shepard? But... you're dead!
Shepard: I got better.

    • Taken in a different direction by Tali in the second game.

Commander Shepard: You deserved better, Tali.
Tali'Zora nar Rayya vas Normandy: I got better. I got you.

  • Unholy Nuke: When possessing a puppet, the Reaper Harbinger has a special version of of the "Warp" ability that qualifies.
    • An ability also possessed by banshees in the third game.
  • Unobtanium: Element zero is stated in the Codex to be generated only when stars go boom. The primary sources of eezo are, thus, the debris fields surrounding neutron stars and black holes, requiring extensive set-up costs for the telerobotic systems and radiation shielding necessary to mine it. It is also the only means of manipulating mass known. It is thus the rarest and most valuable substance in the galaxy. However, every FTL craft, every Flying Car, every omni-tool and every firearm (not to mention every biotic) has a few grams somewhere inside of it. Not mention, two words: eezo toothbrushes.
    • Luckily, not all that delicious Unobtanium stays in such harsh places. Good-sized chunks are often caught in the orbits of younger stars, where it can be mined much more easily; Omega Station was the result of one such mine. And the galaxy seems to be filled with Ghost Planets which gathered the material for their own use, meaning Adventurer Archaeologists can make a cute credit or so doing a little Grave Robbing. This probably destroyed most remaining evidence of The Reapers in the process. One could assume that this is the case for all Mass Effect technology; why would a centuries-old galaxy-spanning civilization that uses the stuff extensively ever throw any of it away?
  • Unreliable Expositor: The Codex.
  • Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Not only doesn't a trio of heavily armored and armed to the teeth soldiers turn any heads, you can discharge an automatic weapon right in the middle of the seat of the galactic government and onlookers won't even interrupt their conversation.
    • You can also take a geth with you to the Citadel, or a turian or salarian to Tuchanka, without even a pause from the locals.
      • Averted however if you take Legion the Geth Infiltrator with you to the Quarian Flotilla. They will have something to say about it.
  • Unwinnable By Mistake: In all three games there are dangerous spots where your character can cross some invisible boundary and become unable to go back, forever hanging in mid-air. In Mass Effect 2 there is such a spot on Alchera; in Mass Effect 3 there is a particularly nasty spot on the Normandy's bridge.
  • Vicious Cycle: The Reapers wipe out all sapient organic life in the galaxy at least every fifty thousand years or so. They state that this cycle has repeated itself more times than humans can possibly imagine. So, let's just give you a brief picture: there is hard evidence that a Reaper invasion occurred thirty-seven million years ago. Not simple enough for you? Then here's the lowdown: this means that the Reapers have invaded at least SEVEN HUNDRED AND FORTY TIMES. And it's not even the first time that someone tried to fight the Reapers, only to be defeated.
    • And their purpose is to prevent yet another vicious cycle (i.e. technological singularity) from wiping out organic life full-stop.
  • Victory by Endurance: According to the Codex, this is humanity's main method of fighting. Humanity attacks the enemy's supplies, headquarters and resources foremost, leaving enemy forces leaderless with less logistical support until the human fleets can curb stomp them. Humanity's approach to warfare is based on rapid reaction forces which seek to decapitate command and control and avoid attrition while remaining highly manoeuvrable. Mass Effect's codices basically have humanity fighting Third and Fourth generation warfare ...in SPACE! The rest of the galaxy has barely managed to catch up to human innovations in strategic thought from about the time of the biplanes. Turians still fight massive wars of attrition. Humanity is always shown as being simply more tactically proficient than everyone else to the point of actually subtly paralleling earth history. As the Turians and everyone else builds Dreadnoughts, humans realize carriers are the future and make many of them. Humans have the first ship able to use "stealth". It bears a striking resemblance to a submarine. Sound familiar? The Turians may as well call their military groups Legions for how "groman" they are. Salarians don't have the endurance that human forces have and the Asari are still fielding armies of light infantry from city-states. Krogan are shown to be poor strategists for a race of proud warrior race guys, and their culture resembles tribes of Maori or African warriors from pre-nation state times.
  • Video Game Caring Potential: AND HOW!
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential: Disturbingly but hilariously summed up well here.
  • Viewer-Friendly Interface:
    • All computer screens featured in the series, as well as the loading screens from the second game, generally play this trope very straight. Most of the things listed at the trope's page - DNA helix animations on medical computers, random numbers, large fonts, and a Hacking Minigame featuring illegible bits of code - are there.
    • Also the Virtual Intelligences, humanoid computer programs. Bioware most likely added them so the player could interact with electronics without a bunch of reading involved.
  • Villain Decay: Husks, just compare them in Mass Effect 1 to Mass Effect 3, and note especially how Shepard deals with them. In one, it took a lot of backing away from them and spamming bullets and avoiding melee like the plague. In the other, Shepard actually quite literally stomps its head to the curb.
    • The second game mixes it up. They're really easily dispatched with any kinetic attack (be it Concussion Shot or Push or Shockwave) unless you're playing on Insanity, which gives them a thick layer of armor. Instant Demonic Spiders.
  • Villain Override: First seen in the original game when Sovereign turned Saren's corpse into a super-Husk. Extremely prominent in the second game, to the point of giving the trope's page quote, with Harbinger and the Collectors.
    • Inverted when after failing its appointed task, the Reaper Harbinger releases control of the Collector General, leaving it to its fate.
  • Virtual Ghost: The quarians used to do this, although it was to preserve the knowledge of their ancestors and not to become immortal. They stopped once the geth conquered their homeworld and destroyed the databanks containing them.
    • The Protheans are particularly fond of this trope.
    • According to Cerberus News, a ship containing a one-billion-strong race of virtual aliens has made contact with Council space after travelling the galaxy for 8000 years after uploading their minds to a virtual world to save their civilisation from destruction.
  • The Virus: Again, two to four varieties, depending on your personal criteria.
  • We Are as Mayflies: Both the krogan and the asari live for about a thousand years, whereas humans in the 22nd century are lucky to live to one hundred and fifty. Inverted with the salarians who live to be about 40. The vorcha, introduced in Mass Effect 2, have a lifespan of only 20 years.
  • Wearing a Flag on Your Head: More subtle than most instances. This is what most turians do; that's actually what their face-paint is.
...the turian term "barefaced" refers to one who is beguiling or not to be trusted. It is also a slang term for politicians.
—Codex entry on turians
  • We Cannot Go on Without You: If Shepard is KO'd during a battle, you get the Game Over screen (unlike Shepard's teammates, who automatically recover after the fight ends if they were KO'd, even if the Unity ability isn't used).
    • This trope is acknowledged if you get the worst ending of the second game. Joker also mentions it early on as the reason the team broke up after Shepard was killed: they were Shepard's team. Without him/her, there was no reason for them to stay together.
  • We Do the Impossible: The crews of either Normandy.
  • Welcome to Corneria: Typical BioWare approach. NPCs usually answer the same thing whenever you ask (for convenience). Subverted by/averted by some random NPCs.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Cerberus organization, at least if you're human. Except if you're a biotic, or any particular individual, as the survival of the species overrides anything else (ethics, human decency, etc).
    • At the end of Mass Effect 3, we learn this of the Reapers. They were created long, long, long ago by someone to prevent chaos. Not the chaos of organic evolution as implied earlier, but the chaotic destruction of organic life by synthetic life. So when organic civilizations become advanced enough to create synthetics, the Reapers come in, immortalize the advanced civilizations as new Reapers, and destroy all civilization, then retreat to deep space to wait for it to happen again.
  • We Will Have Perfect Health in the Future: Medical science advancements have extended the human life expectancy to around 150 years. Some people still get diseases though. Such as your pilot, Joker, who has a rare medical condition that makes his bones really brittle. Though even that technology is advanced, since Joker said if he was born during our time, he would've died as an infant.
  • What Beautiful Eyes!: The second game really ratchets the visual quality of all the character eyes. Miranda and Doctor Chakwas are two of the prettier examples.
    • Default male Shepard has striking blue eyes while on the flip side, the default female Shepard has bright green eyes... unless you go renegade.
  • Whole-Plot Reference: The third game is one protracted quest to enlist help from multiple factions who all distrust each other to some degree in order to prevent the fall of civilization at the hands of Eldritch Abominations that can only be defeated through the use of a superweapon of ancient design, all while a secondary villain stands in your way because he thinks he can defeat the Big Bad by his own means. And the hero might end up having to sacrifice him/herself in the end to finish the task I do believe BioWare has been down this road before.
  • A Wizard Did It: Or rather a mass effect field. Why your squadmates can survive in hard vacuum without a helmet. Probably.
    • Given that the squadmates who don't have helmets are nominally biotics, such as Miranda and Jack, its possible that they're simply using a biotic field to protect them.
  • Galaxy of Woobie: Dear lord, everyone in the series, from the ultimate Badass that is Commander Shepard, to the squadmembers, all the way down to the minor bit-characters.
  • You No Take Candle: How Vorcha speak. They talk no definitive article. Growl lots, too. RaaaAAAAAAAAAAAgh!
    • Averted/Subverted/something in Mass Effect 3, where some vorcha are shown using correct grammar.
  • Your Princess Is in Another Castle: You didn't think Saren and the Human Reaper Larva would go down without a fight, right?
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