YMMV / Mass Effect

• Adorkable: Liara checks almost all the boxes. She's smart, naive, somewhat prone to neurotic overexcitement, and is a romance option for both male and female Shepard.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Husk-Saren is pretty easy for a final boss. If you bring a biotic character with a maxed-out Lift, you can chip his health away while he's helplessly floating in the air. And due to the fact that there's a cutscene after you get his health, by the time it's over, Lift should be finished recharging, which means you can repeat the process again, thus winning the fight without even taking a single hit. Without biotics, which are overpowered in general, however, it is an appropriately epic final battle. The Legendary Edition adds a bit of an extra challenge by having geth reinforcements arrive every time Saren loses a quarter of his health bar.
• Awesome Music: "M4 Part II" by Faunts, which plays over the credits.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: On Eletania, Shepard is tasked with recovering a downed recon drone, but if you explore with the Mako, you can find a Prothean relic. If you helped Sha'ira, you'll find that the trinket she gave you is the key to unlocking it, and Shepard experiences the memories of a Cro-Magnon man who had once been under observation by the Protheans. The matter never comes up again, and it's even completely ignored by Shepard, when one would think that a discovery like that would be kind of a big deal.
• Breather Boss: When compared to the bosses on Therum, Noveria, and Feros, the Saren battle on Virmire is pretty straightforward. This is not the case in the Legendary Edition, which removes the Boss-Arena Idiocy and turns Saren into a fairly brutal Flunky Boss.
• Character Perception Evolution: When the game was first released, Kaidan was widely written off as a Low-Tier Letdown due to having less biotic talents than Liara and less tech talents than Tali. As the game aged and 3 gave players a reason to like him, the playerbase realized that his array of support powers was more potent than it first seemed, and he is now considered a top-tier character due to the overall power of biotics.
• Complete Monster: Dr. Saleon was a Salarian corrupt geneticist who used employees for twisted experiments, growing extra organs in them to smuggle on the black market and leaving the organs in them if they were unsuitable, with terrible effects on their health. Caught, Saleon used his employees as hostages to escape before carrying on with his horrid experiments. When caught later, Saleon has been experimenting on numerous innocents, turning them into zombie-like monstrosities without any trace of their former selves.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • You know how game-breaking biotic powers are when you use them? Well, enemy biotics in this game will gladly spam those powers at you. A few missions have you engaging entire rooms full of biotic enemies, so have fun being knocked down and thrown around as they gang up on you. They're not quite as spam-happy with these powers in the Legendary Edition, but they're still a pain in the ass to fight.
  • Geth Snipers do heavy damage from long range, and jam your radar so you can't locate the other Geth shooting at you. There are Snipers in other enemy factions that are just as damaging, but the Geth Sniper's radar jamming ability puts it at the top.
  • Geth Hoppers take the heavy-damage, long-range threat of the Geth Sniper, and adds to it by constantly jumping around from point to point between the walls, the ceiling, and the floor. Your only window to attack is when they pause to snipe at you or use tech powers to sabotage your weapons and powers.
  • Krogan enemies are true to their in-universe reputation. They hit hard, have plenty of health, and can regenerate it back if you don't use the right powers or ammo. And when their health bar hits zero and their body crumples to the ground, they're not officially dead yet. If you didn't drop them with the aforementioned powers and ammo, you'll need to continue pumping more ammo into them to keep them from regenerating and getting right back up. If their health gets too low, they'll start blood-raging and charge at you, doing heavy melee damage if they hit.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: The franchise is generally praised for its deep setting, well-written characters, and extensive lore, but the gameplay in the original version of this game was mostly panned for its mediocre combat and poorly-designed inventory system. Many players prefer to set the game to its easiest setting in order to steamroll through the combat without having to pay as much attention to inventory management so that they can enjoy the story and, incidentally, create a save to import into the sequels, which have much-improved game mechanics.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Nihlus is surprisingly well-represented in discussions and fanworks, including mentions in subsequent games, considering what a short-lived character he was.
• Evil Is Cool:
  • Saren is a well-liked villain for his badassery, intelligence, and cool voice.
  • Sovereign is widely regarded as Creepy Awesome.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Any biotic power or weapons talent can become a game breaker if maxed out. With the right build and the right specialization, Shepard can become a terrifying monster. Adept Shepard with a maxed-out Nemesis class can launch enemies across entire rooms and trap a dozen enemies in a building-sized Singularity field. Conversely, Bastion allows you to freeze enemies with Stasis and still do damage (without maxed Bastion, you can't damage them). This works on any enemy, rendering them completely helpless.
  • That's not counting some of the other powerful abilities, such as Shock Trooper dramatically reducing the recharge time on Adrenaline Burst, Medic allowing you to revive squadmates with medi-gel, and so on. This led to them becoming more balanced in Mass Effect 2.
  • A maxed Lift alone works on everything. Yes, that includes Geth Armatures and Colossi. There's something indescribably hilarious about watching a twelve-foot-tall, ten-ton robotic artillery platform drifting helplessly skyward as you riddle it with assault rifle slugs.
  • Maxed Immunity will make Shepard nearly invincible. And with the Shock Trooper specialization, Shepard will be able to reactivate it before it even deactivates. Or you can just slap a couple of Medical Exoskeleton X's on your armor and get the same effect, something Ashley and Wrex can do, too.
  • The Spectre Master Gear weapons when upgraded with good upgrades make cover and stopping firing to dissipate heat completely obsolete.
  • The Infiltrator is just as indestructible as a Soldier and with the bonus power of AI hacking (available only on a New Game Plus) can do everything an Engineer can. Their class ability allows them to avoid nearly all problems with weapons overheating and put the most powerful mods on without drawbacks. Equip a Spectre Pistol this way and turn on Marksman: you have achieved the highest possible damage-per-second ratio in the game. Alternatively, hang way back, use a Spectre Sniper Rifle with two Rail Extension VIIs and Explosive Rounds (alternatively, your choice of highest-level Tungsten or Shredder rounds) and simply artillery your enemies to death.
  • Artificial Stupidity can happen in the planets you drop on and traverse with the Mako. Enemies can be so far away from you that putting your crosshair over them doesn't cause their name and health bar to pop up, which is possible pretty much all the time on said planets outdoors. If shot at from those ranges, they will fire back, but with expectedly ineffective accuracy, and never go toward you. Use a sniper rifle, attack any snipers they have first, and then you have all the time in the world to take out everything else with no chance of getting killed aside from maybe occasional rockets fired at you that can be easily seen and dodged by moving a bit to one side at such a range. Even Geth Armatures are only a matter of time, the same counter from the rockets applying to the energy balls they fire.
  • The Sentinel class. When properly leveled up, it goes from looking like a wall-hugging joke at the start of the game to being able to destroy the final boss without taking a single hit using a spamming combo of Lift to make him a piñata, Overload to strip his shields, and Sabotage to neuter his weapons, which is not even factoring in squadmates with more exotic powers like Damping in addition to just unloading on the poor bastard.
• Gameplay Derailment: Ridiculously easy to pull off by taking advantage of a side mission that allows you to sell items for higher prices to a particular NPC. Then you can head to a different merchant and buy them back at the prices you originally would've gotten for them there, and pocket the rest. It's possible to unlock some very powerful weapons and have enough money to buy superior equipment for everyone before even leaving the Citadel. Not quite a Game-Breaker, but it does help.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Binary Helix is working on a biological weapon for Saren based on a pesticide. Making it Saren Gas.
  • Shepard's Badass Boast when facing Sovereign ("[Sovereign]'s just a machine, and machines can be broken"] is taken near word for word from Soviet general Konstantin Rokossovsky's own boast before enacting Operation Bagration, which happened near-simultaneously with Operation Overlord, a.k.a. the Battle of Normandy, the namesake of Shepard's ship, which was said following him talking about the Wehrmacht's "machine-like" organization:
    "The German army is a machine, and machines can be broken."
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Husks are among the first enemies you face on Eden Prime, alongside the geth. They're cyborg zombies appearing in the first mission of the game. Should be easy to kill, right? But then you start shooting them and discover they actually have decent damage resistance, and they can sap your shields with a heavy damage, close range Overload attack that ignores damage reduction from armor and armor mods. They'll remain a thorn in your side for the rest of the game.
  • The Thorian Creeper is a more resilient reskin of the Husk. They start in a crouched dormant state, and then activate and stand up when you get close. Until they finish standing up and start rushing at you, they can't be killed. When they get close, the Creepers spit toxic acid at you that ignores your shields and continues doing damage even after the Creeper that poisoned you is dead.
• Goddamned Boss: The Thorian is not difficult to kill; just move through the ruins shooting at the nodes keeping it anchored in place, and it will fall and die. The asari clones it spawns are also surprisingly manageable for a biotic enemy; you only fight one of her at a time, and it's not hard to predict where and when she'll appear. What makes this fight a nuisance, though, is it's designed so there's no way to speed up the fight. The nodes are positioned such that you can't get a good enough angle to snipe at them; you have actually wade through dozens of Thorian Creepers to approach each one before you can start shooting it. The Thorian Creepers all start in their unkillable dormant state, and then activate at random as you proceed through the structure and damage the Thorian nodes. You have to pace yourself so you only activate a few Creepers at a time, and then stop and kill the Creepers you've just activated before continuing. Otherwise, you'll trigger a Creeper Zerg Rush, and very likely get overwhelmed and die.
• Good Bad Bug:
  • There are a couple of occasions to completely max out your Paragon/Renegade scores in a couple of minutes; however, doing so corrupts your save files, and makes your actual decision in that scenario discounted in the sequel.
  • On Therum, you are supposed to fight through the last bastion of geth including a Wake-Up Call Boss Geth Armature on foot as the Awesome Personnel Carrier you are in isn't normally supposed to be able to make it through a bottleneck in the terrain to reach that area. However, if you aim the Mako at that bottleneck just right, the Scrappy Mechanic that causes the Mako to flip vertically into the air, launches it past that bottleneck. You can then just blast your way past these enemies and reach the mine's entrance. This glitch is even easier to pull off in the Legendary Edition, thanks to the newly-added turbo boost letting you blow right through the bottleneck.
  • If you position Shepard directly in front of someone who is talking, and then turn to face the other direction, they will go cross-eyed and start rocking their head back and forth trying to "look" at the speaker.
  • A bug on Eletania allows you to farm infinite Paragon points. Should you have taken utmost care to not shoot a single space monkey, approaching the very last one at the end of a mine grants you 6 Paragon points. However, if you do a quick save and reload immediately, it can be interacted with an infinite number of times, granting you 6 Paragon points every time.
  • A bug on Noveria allows you to farm infinite Paragon and Renegade points. After raiding the Synthetic Insights office, gathering evidence of Anoleis’s kickback scheme and agreeing to work with Gianna, you have to talk to Lorik Qui'in to convince him to testify against Anoleis. Initially, he resists, forcing you to use Charm or Intimidate. Convincing him gets you 24 Paragon or 25 Renegade points. However, as long as you don’t speak to Gianna, Qui'in can be spoken to and convinced to testify again and again.
  • Yet another bug on Noveria allows you to get two ammo mods for free instead of just one. If you agree to smuggle Opold’s package in, then inform the hanar that you’ll keep it for yourself, an ammo mod is deposited into your inventory. However, this option still allows you to turn Opold in to Anoleis for smuggling. After turning Opold in, Anoleis can be convinced to let you keep the package. Doing so, deposits one more ammo mod into your inventory.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • At one point, you're tasked by Admiral Hackett to destroy a rogue VI on Earth's moon. In Mass Effect 3, you learn that Cerberus answered the VI's distress call and rebuilt it into EDI, who still remembers Shepard shooting at her in this mission. Thankfully, she accepts Shepard's apology with no hard feelings.
  • In the elevator conversations, Wrex asks Kaiden and Ashley who would win in a fight between them and Shepard, with Wrex placing his bet on Shepard based on their answer. Whichever one survives Virmire will initiate a standoff with Shepard in Mass Effect 3. If Shepard can't convince them to stand down, they'll have that fight, and Shepard will be forced to win.
  • If the Rachni Queen has been killed, Shepard's renegade response to Sparatus' accusations of genocide is to retort with "depends on the species, Turian". Come the third game and you have the potential to render five sapient species extinct.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In a conversation with Ashley, she swears, "You ask me to kiss a turian, I'll say 'Which cheek'?", to which Shepard replies "I don't think kissing turians will be necessary, Williams." This is before Mass Effect 2 added Garrus as a romance option for Shepard, which in turn leads to quite a bit of gratuitous turian-kissing in Mass Effect 3.
  • The final act has Shepard stealing back an impounded Normandy with assistance from Anderson in order to travel to Ilos. Fast-forward about three years later to the Citadel DLC of 3, and the ship is stolen again by "Shepard", but actually their Evil Clone masquerading as them, with the real deal getting rather indignant about the whole thing.
  • The sex scene controversy became this with the release of the Legendary Edition which, due to larger computer monitors coming out since the game's initial 2007 release, showed that the women come without nipples.
• Ho Yay: Since much of the dialogue Shepard had with Kaiden was originally meant to be potentially romantic before the path was cut, there's a lot of this sentiment. It's made canon in Mass Effect 3.
• Informed Wrongness:
  • The Council are treated by characters and the story as a bunch of Obstructive Bureaucrat idiots who don't listen to Shepard about Saren being behind the attack on Eden Prime, and Sovereign being a Reaper. However, in both cases, nobody has hard proof at first; Shepard's testimony about Eden Prime relies on one clearly traumatized witness and a vision from a destroyed Prothean beacon, which Shepard themselves can note is rather flimsy evidence when they wake up after Eden Prime. Saren even points out the absurdity of a vision being used as legit evidence, and it's only after proper evidence is given that they have reason to think he is behind it. Meanwhile, only Shepard and the crew know that Sovereign is a Reaper, but have no proof, and to the rest of the galaxy's knowledge, Reapers don't even exist and are just made up. Also, most of Shepard's attempts to convince the Council boil down to "Trust me, I saw it". While they certainly are dumb in the later games for not heeding Shepard's warnings, and for making investigating Saren harder for C-Sec seemingly to avoid the backlash doing so could bring, at least in this game, the Council come across as fairly justified in their skepticism of Shepard's claims, and yet are treated as wrong by most of the story relevant cast for not blindly accepting Shepard's words.
  • Also with the Council is their choice not send the Council fleet after Saren in the finale upon learning where he is. The story treats this as them being cowards who are too afraid of the Terminus System, and like the other instances of this, end up admitting to it being a mistake if they survive. However, the Council rightfully point out that since Ilos is located in the Terminus System, launching a massive fleet against Saren would give the Terminus System justification for mobilizing a counter fleet and could potentially spark a war with them, so parking the fleet at strategic locations with the limited information they have is the best they can do. While they are wrong for grounding the Normandy crew out of fear for the Normandy being detected in the Terminus System, avoiding sparking war with the Terminus System just to get Saren makes sense even if they went overboard trying to do so.
• It Was His Sled:
  • Sovereign is The Man Behind the Man for Saren and the Reapers are the true main villains of the original trilogy, due to them being a Late-Arrival Spoiler in said trilogy.
  • Your squadmates potentially dying on Virmire are quite well-known going into the franchise, whether it's failing to calm down Wrex, or the Sadistic Choice between Kaidan and Ashley.
• Magnificent Bastard: See here.
• Memetic Badass: Ethan Jeong, Feros' resident Corrupt Corporate Executive. The speech check to resolve the situation peacefully is the hardest speech check in the entire game, requiring a level of either 10 in Intimidate or 12 in Charm. To put this into perspective : it's easier to talk Saren down, leading to fans joking that Jeong is the single most determined NPC in the entire franchise:
  YouTube comment: "It's easier to convince Saren to resist indoctrination from a powerful sentient A.I. than it is to convince Ethan Jeong to not be a corporate shill."
• Moral Event Horizon: Saren's assault on Eden Prime, in the eyes of most. To Anderson, it was his sabotage of the latter's Spectre application.
• Never Live It Down:
  • One of the most common reasons brought up by people who dislike Kaidan is that he supposedly keeps whining about his headaches. In reality, it is only brought up twice by him (and also just once by Dr. Chakwas). Furthermore, he doesn't even complain, he just mentions it.^note Ashley and Liara bring it up during separate elevator conversations with him.
  • While pretty much every squadmate in the game is some degree of racist, and an extremely popular line is Shepard calling a hanar a "big stupid jellyfish", expect anytime Ashley is mentioned to have that she's a "space racist" popping up. She's not really racist, instead she's more so just cautious about having strangers near the Normandy's important areas, and carries a lot of baggage due to her grandfather's involvement in the First Contact War. In fact, she's able she become friends with Tali, clearly shows empathy for Liara having to help kill her mother, and she does develop over the game to become accepting of the other alien races. Unfortunately, because she's the only human party member who is like this, she's often stuck with the label of a bigot by many fans.
• One-Scene Wonder: Vigil. Players actually felt sorry for the VI.
• Paranoia Fuel: In the original version of the game, there is no way to tell where a Thresher Maw is going to surface after it dives underground. This can lead to it abruptly surfacing beneath the Mako and insta-killing you. The only possible counter is to keep moving and pray. The Legendary Edition changes this by having the Thresher Maw leave a trail of dirt as it moved to signify its location.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Mako, due to its lousy controls, mediocre navigation, poor defense system, and below average aiming system. It doesn't help that in some missions you are forced to travel in the Mako, so ditching it is out of the question. It also doesn't help that while the Mako's shields increase as you level up, the rate of shield regeneration does not. At high levels, it can take upwards of five minutes for the Mako to fully recover from a firefight.
  • Long elevator rides. They got replaced with loading screens in future installments. The Legendary Edition ultimately mitigated this by adding a "Press A to skip" option and generally making the elevator rides go by a lot faster.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The way corpses frozen by your Cryo Rounds explode won't look out of place on the ZX Spectrum.
  • You can see the Ascension pass by the Citadel from the Wards. Good luck getting a good look at it, though, because for some reason, it doesn't block any light from the star in the background.
  • There's a spot on the moon Solcrum where the blue sun, Grissom, disappears in certain camera angles. It just pops out of existence, stars behind it visible and everything.
• Strangled by the Red String:
  • It is very easy to unwittingly end up in a relationship with Ashley or Kaidan for male or female Shepards, respectively. You basically have to be a complete asshole, not talk to them at all outside of missions, blow them up on Virmire, or pick a very specific and non-intuitive dialogue choice in an early conversation to avoid it.
  • There's a bug with Liara's romance where selecting a line meant to close it out ("I just want to be friends") actually locks it in.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • The song "Final Assault" is almost the exact same as the 1984 Dune theme. The music where you go to save Tali on the Citadel is also similar to the Blade Runner theme.
  • According to the composers, the galaxy map theme was nicked from Tangerine Dream's "Love on a Real Train" from the Risky Business soundtrack.
• That One Achievement: The achievements that require playing through the majority of the game with each individual squad member. This includes the assignments and such. However, this is made easier if you have the Pinnacle Station and Bring Down the Sky DLC. The Legendary Edition makes unlocking these achievements much easier by reducing the amount of missions you have to complete; it's possible to knock several of them out before even leaving the Citadel.
• That One Attack: Acid and toxic attacks completely bypass your shields, no matter how strong they are. With rachni and Thorian Creepers, this can be mitigated by putting mods on your armor to counter toxic damage. No such luck with thresher maws, though; if their spit hits you while you're on foot, it's just shy of a One-Hit Kill, even with those mods equipped. The Mako is more resistant, but still takes enough damage that you'll want to get really good at dodging the projectile. The Legendary Edition adds a Nitro Boost to the Mako, making it easier to dodge the thresher maw's spit attack. To balance it out, the thresher maw now spits several globs at once.
• That One Boss: Matriarch Benezia doesn't engage you right away. Instead, she spends the first stage of the fight protecting herself with a barrier and sending waves of geth and asari commandos at you. The geth are no harder to beat than usual. The commandos, however, are a whole squad of biotic Demonic Spiders, cheap powers and all. It's not until after a cutscene that you fight Benezia herself, at which point the fight becomes a Luck-Based Mission. You start the fight standing out in the open, where Benezia can get a free hit on you. If she lands that hit with any power that immobilizes or knocks down Shepard, your hope for survival is your chosen squadmates being able to pull her attention away before she can follow up, or you're toast. The nerfs to biotic enemies in the Legendary Edition make the fight with the commandos more fair, but do little to improve the luck-based nature of the fight with Benezia herself.
• That One Level: The Mako's clunky handling and problematic physics make exploring planets with a lot of mountainous terrain a very tedious uphill battle in every literal and metaphorical sense, even in the Legendary Edition. Nodacrux in particular stands out for most everything on the map being surrounded by mountains.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The Citadel: Scan the Keepers assignment can be done before leaving the Citadel for the first time; you just have to run around the entire station finding them. Your reward for doing this is Chorban sending you an email in Mass Effect 2 to tell you nothing you didn't already know from talking to Vigil. The XP you get from scanning each keeper does add up to a nice boost if you scan them all, though.
  • The UNC: Besieged Base assignment that unlocks only for high Paragons. It is a hostage rescue mission against biotic terrorists, and the hostages are drugged so they keep randomly walking around. Not a problem if you don't care about the hostages, but having to deal with biotic enemies while carefully checking fire can get really tough. And in the original version of the game, it doesn't even matter; due to a bug in the game save transfer to Mass Effect 2, the flag for saving all or some of the hostages doesn't set and the game subsequently assumes that all of them were killed during the firefight.
  • Some of the UNC assignments require you to go out of your way exploring every nook and cranny of every star system, planet, and asteroid belt in the game looking for valuable materials, asari writings, turian insignias, Prothean data discs, and League of One tags and corpses. There's no reward for completing these assignments until Mass Effect 3, where completing the Asari Writings assignment is one of several conditions to unlock special dialogue with Conrad Verner and receive 4 War Assets for your trouble.
  • The Volcano Hunt mission in Pinnacle Station. You get more time on the clock for each enemy you kill, but the amount of time you get back is progressively less for each one. You will want to put your keyboard/controller through the screen after coming up two kills short of the top score for the tenth time. For some reason, the Volcano map is the only one with this problem—with the others, a sufficiently skilled player can keep the mission going indefinitely and have no problem racking up enough kills.
  • The UNC: Rogue VI assignment on Luna has you clearing three bunkers full of active defense drones that can swarm you and kill you in one hit. If you make it past them, you then have to find and destroy the VI's server nodes, which will poison you and your squadmates if you're standing too close. Each time you start destroying nodes in one bunker, the VI activates defenses in the other two. The first time, the VI starts venting toxins into the bunkers. Shepard and squad counter that by leaving their helmets on. The second time, it throws up defense shields over the nodes and the doors, which you'll have to shoot through. Shooting through the first few shields to get into the third bunker will alert the drones and have them stacked up on the next door waiting for you. The third time, it will spawn in more drones in a last-ditch effort to save itself. The biggest nuisance, though, is the game doesn't mark the bunkers as you clear them or lock them to keep you from reentering if you get confused. You'll need to get inventive and find a way to keep track of that yourself.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Private Jenkins is given very little in the way of characterization despite being apparently an established member of the crew. He gets only a few lines of dialogue in two scenes, then dies to Geth scout enemies. Later games try to make his death seem like it was a major loss for the characters, yet he barely has anything to show for it.
  • Many feel that Nihlus was way underused and could've served as a cool mentor/party member. From what little is given about him, he seems to be a generally heroic Spectre, and he has some kind of past with Saren that suggests a former friendship or comradery. Instead, he is killed after about three scenes.
  • Shiala is one of The Dreaded asari commandos whom even the turians consider the finest warriors in the galaxy, she wants to make amends for what she did while she was indoctrinated, and she has the Prothean cipher. Plus she has a few centuries worth of not just life experience but combat experience too. She could have made for an interesting and compelling squadmate.
  • Matriarch Benezia is surprisingly underutilized despite being The Dragon. She only appears for one scene at the beginning of the game, is present in a voice recording, and despite Noveria revolving around her, she only appears at the tail end of it for her boss fight, which results in her death. You'd be forgiven if you forgot she even existed before visiting Noveria.
  • Doctor Droyas is the krogan doctor in charge of breeding Saren's krogan army, agreeing to do so under the belief that his work will end the genophage. Despite being a named character with unique dialogue, the player kills him as soon as they meet him instead of having any chance to interact with him in anyway.
• Too Cool to Live: Nihlus is a hardboiled Spectre built up as a badass as well a potential mentor, and he dies very quickly to establish Saren as a threat. He gets a decent backstory in Mass Effect 2 if you talk to Samara. Apparently, Nihlus was so badass that he was able to stop her from killing him simply by using her own justicar code against her and allowing him to escape.
• Vindicated by History:
  • While not a bad or critically panned game, the original Mass Effect was sort of lost in the shuffle when its two sequels were released, with 2 and 3 being more similar to each other in terms of gameplay, tone, writing, and art style than either is to this game. As a result, the original could feel antiquated and unfamiliar to play for fans who entered the franchise with one of the sequels. The upgraded graphics and the overhauled combat system in the Legendary Edition did a lot to make the game more accessible and prompted many reevaluations of the game as being underrated or even the best in the trilogy.
  • When the game launched, the elevator rides were reviled for being extremely long, poorly-hidden loading screens, to the point of being mocked by BioWare themselves in Dragon Age and Mass Effect 3. But as time went on, and computers became advanced enough to greatly shorten them, they started gaining appreciation for the entertaining conversations between party members or radio announcements that are played during them.
• Vocal Minority: Declarations of this game being a player's favorite aren't uncommon, but a rare thing to see is when someone reports that they actually like the gameplay mechanics compared to the sequels'.

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