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http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/MassEffectAndromeda/TropesHToZ

Site in the Announcements subforum and is where all of the information below was obtained. Blog post/download links here. Alpha Release (April 29, 2011.

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• Fifty years after Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report “The Negro Family” tragically helped create this system. The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.

This page contains tropes for Mass Effect: Andromeda alphabetized from H to Z. For other tropes, visit:

• Halfway Plot Switch: The game's marketing focuses on the business of exploring the Andromeda galaxy and helping the Initiative colonize several worlds, with the added Call to Adventure of the Ryder twin of your choice being forced to take the mantle of Pathfinder from their father. You succeed with one planet... and immediately are introduced to the angara and the kett. They preoccupy the entire rest of the story; defeating the kett leader is the game's final mission, and all colonization activities are now optional sidequests found in the game's Wide Open Sandbox.
• Hand Cannon: Many of the Mass Effect franchise's heavy pistols like the Predator, the Carnifex and the Talon make a return, but ME:A also introduces new models of alien manufacture. The angaran Ushior easily takes the cake here - a sleek single-shot handgun with tremendous accuracy that packs such a massive punch it puts most sniper rifles to shame. It's basically Andromeda's answer to the krogan Executioner pistol. If that's still not enough cannon for you, installing a Plasma Charge System turns it into a powerful grenade launcher masquerading as a pistol that has very respectable range, shoots multiple projectiles that cover a decent area, and can be charged for even more damage.
• Hand Wave:
  • The reason information on the region was current as of the time the Initiative left instead of millions of years out of date is data stolen from a geth observatory that used jury rigged Mass Relays as a gigantic mass effect telescope.
  • When the Nomad gets stuck in the desert in the north of Elaaden, courtesy of an EMP, Ryder will call the Tempest for pick up, only they can't, because Gil may have sort of been tinkering with the ship again, and they're grounded. Doesn't explain why they can't call in a favour from the nearby Initiative outpost or the krogan, though...
  • The fact that the Heleus cluster's fauna appears to comprise only about a dozen species living on nearly every habitable world in the region is handwaved by the Jaardan having created them just as they did the angara and, more or less, all of Heleus as it is today.
  • Whenever something happens that makes no sense or defies the laws of physics, even the extended ones of the Mass Effect 'verse, it's a safe bet the enigmatic Scourge is responsible.
  • The Collective is relatively friendly towards Ryder whenever they talk, (at least until 'High Noon', if you save Sloane), but this doesn't stop the rank'n'file in Kadara trying to murder you every time you drive past. 'The Collective Base' can have Ryder mention this, with the response that while the order's been given to leave Ryder alone, not everyone's gotten it yet.
• Hanging Judge: Director Tann has ruled that any outlaw who returns to the Nexus, regardless of whether they're trying to reform or not, is to be executed. Judging by a few NPCs scattered around the game, everyone else in the Initiative has decided to ignore this rule.
• Happily Adopted: In the epilogue, one of the 'Second Wave' of awakened sleepers (the specialists) is a human woman who mentions that she has quarian godparents. She uses the quarian naming convention to honor them.
• Harder Than Hard: Insanity difficulty makes all enemies ridiculously tough while simultaneously multiplying their damage output. Even basic mooks tend to survive entire clips to the face from tier X weapons with full mod support, making the Vintage Heat Sink augment or Remnant weapons borderline mandatory for everything beyond skirmishes against two to three hostiles. Direct-damage powers - already underwhelming at best on Normal - become downright useless aside from setting up the occasional combo detonation, and even those won't get you very far. What really makes Insanity torturous aren't the larger shootouts, though. It's the Remnant Vault on Voeld with its pervasive Level 2 Cold Hazard. Ryder's environmental hazard bar drops even faster, the probably very helpful Backup Life Support consumable simply doesn't work, and since any hostile encounter tends to force you into cover for prolonged periods of time, resetting this particular Vault has caused many a player to Rage Quit their Insanity run.
• Head-in-the-Sand Management: The Resistance isn't doing anything about the Roekaar. It's shown Evfra isn't wild about them, but he's reluctant to piss them off, probably because the Roekaar are Villains with Good Publicity, and the Resistance doesn't want to fracture the angara even more than they already are.
• Hellbent For Leather: Several NPCs - Foster Addison being the most prominent example - wear full-body uniforms made of leather or a similar-looking material. Some of them look like they actually planned on going on a motorbike cruise instead of travelling to another galaxy. A leather riding jacket is also available as an outfit for Ryder.
• Hell Is That Noise:
  • Most everything related to the kett - their base alarms, the sounds their drop ships make, the animalistic roar that announces a Fiend's entry into the fight...
  • Base alarms in general. As long as they're howling, you know the next shuttle with hostile reinforcements is mere seconds away from dropping them right onto your head.
  • The sounds of a Vault purification field will make you sweat, especially when it's only a few steps behind you and closing in fast.
• He Who Fights Monsters:
  • A scavenger on Elaaden asks for Ryder's help securing a compound so he can eke out a better living. As it turns out, the compound has a small stash of weapons, which they can get a hold of. If talked to afterwards, he still maintains his cheerful attitude, but he's also decided to bring peace to the wastelands by force. Ryder can point out he's therefore becoming no better than the scavengers, to which the scavenger responds by politely but firmly asking Ryder to go.
  • The Roekaar, despite being motivated by their suffering at the hands of the kett, over time take on more and more traits of the kett. During their story arc the Roekaar become increasingly violent, clannish, single-minded and racist (apart from many making a Heel–Face Turn if you spare the Roekaar leader). The Roekaar leader's idea to render planets lifeless to kill off all non-angara calls to mind the Archon's master plan for Exaltation and his intentions after his villainous breakdown. Unfortunately, Ryder can't point out this comparison to the kett.
• Hidden Elf Village:
  • Aya, which is kept hidden from the kett by the Scourge. The angara panic when the Tempest stumbles upon them by accident.
  • The Sages of Havarl, who live on top of a Remnant structure and don't tend to come down for anything. They're not exactly hidden, everyone knows where they are, but unless someone can use Remnant tech and get past the drones in the way, they're not exactly easy to reach on foot. The attitude of the Sages to Ryder varies. Some want to change their ways, some are curious, one is just irritated by Ryder bugging them when they're trying to teach, and some are indifferent.
  • Throughout the game, several characters speculate that there are more angara worlds out there, either hidden by the Scourge or the angara themselves.
• Hide Your Children: The asari ark is noted to have had several children, even toddlers, awake on-board by the time Ryder finds it, a kid called 'Little Mouse' runs a gang on Elaaden, and the krogan there have been trying out family bonding in their own unique way but no children are ever seen in game. Generally justified in the narrative by statements that only necessary individuals have been unfrozen at this point.
• High-Tech Hexagons: Those things are everywhere - prefab windows, holo-screens and kinetic barriers of all stripes consist of nothing but these, so there's a good chance you can spot at least one example no matter where you are. The very high-tech Remnant pillars are also hexagonal in shape, as are the segments their flash-forged bridges are assembled from. Finally, there's a reason why Ryder's Barrier power is listed under the Beehive Barrier entry.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard:
  • You can kill kett with kett weapons, angara with angaran weapons, Remnant bots with weapons reverse-engineered from their own technology, and your fellow Milky Way travellers with mass drivers.
  • Be careful where you toss your grenades; they can and will damage Ryder just like any other target, and they hurt. Similar caution is recommended for cooking them - overdo it and the grenade will literally blow up in your face. The grenade power's menu description explicitly warns about this.
  • Players might want to avoid Biotic Charging into Fiends or Ascendants. Both have instant-death moves that can kill them at close range, and can use it before Ryder recovers from their own Charge. Charging them essentially hands them the means to kill you for free.
  • Fiends are kett-allied Eiroch and usually fight alongside their creators, but when encountered in the wilds, they're just as likely to aggro on kett troops as they are to attack Ryder.
• Hold the Line: Several missions require Ryder to defend a certain area against waves of hostiles until something running in the background is finished (usually SAM hacking stuff). Moving out of the defined area either slows or entirely disrupts the progress bar - something any Mass Effect 3 multiplayer enthusiast will be familiar with.
• Hollow World: Meridian is this in conjunction with a Dyson Sphere.
• Hollywood Darkness: Averted. If a location is dark but you can see something even so, there's either some weak background illumination present or Ryder switched on their armor flashlight. Outside of the light cone (or if they didn't activate it for whatever reason) there's only impenetrable darkness.
• Hopeless War: With most of their worlds lost to the Scourge and the kett's endless numbers slowly but surely grinding them down, this was what we're told the angara's situation was until Evfra took command. Apparently, the angara have been slowly driving the kett back due to his effective leadership, but this is also because the Archon got tired of waiting for a conventional victory and started devoting more and more resources to capturing and studying Remnant technology, so that he can use it as an Instant-Win Condition. Also, despite major victories which defend or reclaim their territory, the Resistance has completely failed to take any kett stronghold.
• Hope Spot:
  • In-universe, the first two Eos colonies - Promise and Resilience - were ones for the Nexus. After their disastrous arrival in Andromeda, they had at least managed to set up a small foothold on one of their Golden Worlds... and then the kett massacred them For the Evulz. This proved the last straw for a lot of folks, and that kickstarted the Uprising.
  • The return to Khi Tasara has Ryder discover the location of Meridian. And then the Archon severs their connection to SAM and absconds with the Hyperion.
• Hotter and Sexier: All Mass Effect games include the option for a sex scene late in the narrative with your Romance Sidequest. In general, prior games were pretty tame with implied nudity (at most) and simply embracing each other. In this game, while not excessive there is some overt nudity and sexual movement. The number of potential romantic options is also much higher, though the actual sex scenes are no more than normal, and a couple potential love interests are options for casual sex before a romance is locked in (Sara can have a round of impulse sex with Liam a third of the way through his character arc, while Peebee has the the option to have either Ryder hit the Zero-G Spot in her Escape Pod multiple times, whether they romance her or not).
• Hufflepuff House: Ryder can talk to all the mayors of the colonies... except for New Tuchanka's asari mayor, who can only be talked to about the Remnant Architect nearby. Possibly something to do with the fact that New Tuchanka can be an entirely optional colony, depending on how the player handles the Remnant Drive Core quest.
• Human Popsicle: About 20,000 cryo-frozen specimen aboard the Hyperion during the voyage to Heleus, plus a couple more on the Nexus. If you extend the definition to humanoid alien species, the number goes up to more than 100,000.
• Humans Are Special: Zig Zagged Trope.
  • Like the original trilogy, The Hero is always human. Said human eventually turns the cluster's messed-up worlds into paradises once again and ends a century-long genocidal war in the process. This is Justified in-universe in two ways. One, humanity got extremely lucky by being the last council race Ark to arrive in Heleus—with them and their Pathfinder avoiding some of the terrible fates that befell the other Arks. And two, the SAMs that Pathfinders use were invented by the human Pathfinder, and he took advantage of that fact to customize it, which means humanity's SAM is the most powerful.
  • Eventually, humanity settles down on Meridian as their new homeworld, which just happens to be a Remnant-forged Dyson Sphere (the only one in the whole cluster) instead of a normal planet and the control hub for the Vault network, giving humans an unimaginable advantage over the other races. Again, Justified in-universe because the Archon specifically chose human's more advanced SAM to exploit and brought the entire human Ark to Meridian with him to hold as hostages. He later attempts to destroy the Ark, forcing it to crash land on Meridian, which locks Meridian as the human homeworld.
  • The most powerful upgrade you can purchase for your APEX teams is Exceptional Human Intelligence, even when the team you buy it for consists of battle-hardened krogan warriors or asari commandos with presumably centuries of combat experience.
• Humongous Mecha:
  • The Architect is a really ginormous worm shaped mech. It is encountered on Eos, Voeld, Kadara and Elaaden. The devs have stated that only a high level Ryder has any chance of surviving against it. In-game, however, they're not nearly as dangerous as that, so anyone with a basic grasp of tactics and using cover can take them on without too much problems with the help of their squadmates. Once defeated, each Architect heads into orbit around the planet and is big enough to be spotted by the Tempest.
  • Elaaden has the Remnant Abyssal, a robotic construct many, many times larger than the Architects mentioned above. Fortunately, it doesn't actively harm anyone on the planet and simply plows through the desert like a gigantic metal Sand Worm, only killing those dumb/unlucky enough to get close to it. The krogan of New Tuchanka are busy trying to figure out how to make use of it for their Rites of Passage, like they did with the thresher maws back on their homeworld.
• Hyperspace Arsenal:
  • With the return of an inventory system, this trope was bound to come into effect once more. To note:
    • Weapons, armor pieces, and mods count against Ryder's carrying capacity. Each piece weighs in at one unit (base capacity: 100 units as of the 1.05 patch) regardless of size or weight, so you can potentially lug around a platoon's worth of gear that's stored... somewhere.
    • Of particular note are melee weapons, the only weapon class to occupy a dedicated equipment slot without being shown on Ryder's body. While that's fine for omni-blades whose flash-forged nature is well-established in the lore, swords and hammers are pulled out of nowhere every time you use a melee attack. Why Bioware didn't just stick them to, say, Ryder's back in between the guns where there's lots of space available is anyone's guess.
    • On top of the above, Ryder tends to pick up tons of mined metals, minerals and animal parts for crafting purposes and always seems to carry that stuff with them wherever they go.
  • A couple of sidequests on Eos have Ryder set up various devices throughout the op zone. Some are recovery beacons the size of a street lamp, others are seismic hammers or survey beacons larger than even Drack. They all appear out of thin air when Ryder sets them down at their destination.
• Hyperspace Mallet: Comedic effect aside, you can play this trope surprisingly straight by equipping Ryder with a krogan hammer. As stated above, melee weapons don't show on Ryder's body, so every time you use a melee attack, they produce a huge hammer out of thin air, smash something unfortunate to paste with a cathartic scream, and put the hammer back into whatever hidden dimension they pulled it out of in the first place.
• Hypocrite:
  • In a recording, the Archon dismisses the asari calling melding 'embracing eternity' as 'poetry'. This is one of the kett speaking, who refer to violently turning members of other species into their own in religious terms.
  • Many angara will make excuses for their species' criminals even while they're asking Ryder for help dealing with them, but will fly completely off the handle in response to criminal behavior from members of the Milky Way species and judge the entire Andromeda Initiative over it.
  • The Roekaar's criticisms of the kett, as bad as the kett are, become increasingly hollow as we learn more about them. One Roekaar scolds Ryder for killing all his associates... who'd just tried to kill Ryder and their teammates without any provocation.
• Hypocritical Humour:
  • It's possible to briefly meet Conrad Verner's sister Cassandra in Kadara's slums. She claims her brother's hero-worship was so irritating she had to leave the galaxy... and then reveals she's every bit as obsessed with Sloane Kelly as her brother was with Shepard.
  • During a run in with some looters working over a dead body in the Kadara slums, Ryder can give them a 'respect the dead' speech. In spite of the fact that, by that point in the game, the player has probably looted hundreds of dead bodies.
  • A recording of Liara's found in Alec Ryder's quarters has her talking about the Protheans, and how a researcher cannot let their own conceptions colour the research. What follows is entirely coloured by Liara's own preconceptions of the Protheans.
• I Am A Humanitarian: Some of the exiles on Kadara have taken to cannibalism, either in a desperate attempt to sustain themselves on a world that's sorely lacking in edible food, or because they like it.
• I Call It 'Vera':
  • The game's crafting system allows players to rename their newly made weapon into anything they want.
  • A post-epilogue mail from Vetra reveals that an unspecified group of people wants to name a gun after her, and that they might do the same for everyone on the Pathfinder crew, which means folks may be running around announcing 'I call it Ryder' one day.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Vehn Terev says as much about handing the Moshae over to the Archon. It rings a little hollow, since he also makes it clear he did partially out of hatred for Evfra.
• I Have to Go Iron My Dog: At the roundup of Peebee's loyalty mission, she asks the rest of the crew to help her clean out her quarters. They all have other things to do.
  Liam: I was just making ice.
  Cora: Reports don't file themselves.
  Peebee: But... but...
• Ill Girl: The Ryder you didn't opt to play as, becomes this. The energy cloud that left Ark Hyperion adrift, also caused a cryopod malfunction that left NPC Ryder unable to thaw and wake up. The doctors had to medically induce a coma to keep them alive. They wake up later, and you can speak to them. And just before the climax, they're briefly playable.
• I'm Standing Right Here:
  • That NPCs talk about the Player Character and/or their squad while they're within earshot is standard fare for video games, but ME:A has a surprising amount of instances where Ryder and their team members invoke this trope one way or another. Many of the offenders have appropriate responses ready. Some even have several lines that change over the course of the game, like one angara on Aya who apologizes to Ryder for having called them 'it' upon their first meeting, something Ryder called him out on when it happened.
  • One NPC encountered whispers to Ryder, asking them to undertake a minor mission for a surprise party for a character who is within earshot. Ryder points this out.
  • Ignored with Lexi, who willingly discusses confidential opinions about fellow crewmembers to Ryder even if said crewmember is standing right next to them. The crewmembers being discussed give no reaction.
• Incompatible Orientation: Ryder can flirt with people who aren't attracted to Ryder's gender, which can lead to some minor awkwardness.
• Incredibly Obvious Bug: A sidequest on Voeld has Ryder finding angaran listening devices bigger than a person's fist stuck to kett devices. Turns out at the end of the quest that the kett had noticed them, then tracked down the Resistance member who'd been placing them.
• Informed Ability: The Nexus' Pathfinder HQ is said to display trophies and mementos of Ryder's exploits and thus gradually change its appearance over the course of the game. Nothing like that actually happens - it always looks the same from beginning to end. The only exceptions are the other species' pathfinders that can hang out there after they've been rescued, and a memorial which gains a picture for each confirmed pathfinder death.
• Insane Troll Logic: An angara who tries to kill Ryder on Elaaden if she's pissed off will claim the Initiative ruins worlds, despite Ryder having made Elaaden more liveable than it was before they got there.
• In Space, Everyone Can See Your Face: Zigzagged. Many of the human armors play this trope completely straight. Angaran, kett, and Remnant helmets on the other hand either have small, opague eye lenses, or not even that.
• Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!:
  • Averted with SAM. It took Alec Ryder years of research and difficulty to get SAM up and running.
  • Given a nod with Peebee, if she acquires the right Remnant tech. She figures eventually she'll be able to bring her modified drones to 'life', as it were.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • The different 'layers' one can access on the world map have a habit of spoiling story elements long before they become relevant, like the fact there's a big-ass kett base to assault on Eos for instance.
  • The kett on the 'Dissension in the Ranks' quest image isn't just any kett put there for show. It's the Primus, the Archon's second-in-command and the one the whole quest is about.
  • Turning subtitles on will introduce you to almost the whole cast much faster than the actual spoken dialogue.
• Invisibility Cloak: Aside from the Tactical Cloak power available to Ryder and Jaal's Avenger Strike power, several enemies make use of optical camouflage as well. The kett in particular have a fondness for it, with one war beast, one mid-tier infantry unit and one end-game boss trying to sneak up on you while invisible.
• Irony:
  • The kett commander on Eos calls himself Invictor, which translates to something like 'the undefeated' or 'the undefeatable'. Wanna guess how his meeting with Ryder turns out for him?
  • As pointed out by several characters, the Krogan are the only Milky Way race not considered important enough to get an ark and Pathfinder of their own. Guess which race is the only one shown to have thrived and established their own colony to the point of considering themselves emancipated from the Nexus without (a few bad actors notwithstanding) resorting to crime or requiring Ryder's help?
• Is This Thing Still On?:
  • A recurring joke with Eos' drop pods. The specialist recording messages on the planet repeatedly gets into debates with coworkers, only to realise she's being recorded.
  • At the flophouse on Elaaden, two scavengers are having a conversation over the comms about Annea's supposed secret water supply. Only once Ryder finds a terminal detailing the salient details, do they realise they've been broadcasting their conversation across the entire area. They continue to broadcast, nonetheless.
• Item Crafting: You can use a Research Station on the Nexus, the Tempest, outposts and world hubs to research and craft upgrades and augmentations to your armor, weapons, Nomad, settlement outposts etc, from minerals you have obtained. Some missions require this to be done.
• 'It' Is Dehumanizing:
  • The kett don't view 'lesser species' like the angara or the Milky Way descendants as sentient creatures; only as a source of genetic material for their Assimilation Plot. The only words they use to describe humans, turians and anything else are 'it' and 'specimen' (unless they're speaking to an individual).
  • Some of the Roekkar do the same. The ones who kidnap a severely ill woman to weaponize her disease against the Milky Way species just refer to her as 'the weapon' or 'it', not even treating her like a living being.
  • A non-Roekaar angara on Voeld refers to Ryder as 'it', while Ryder's passing by, saying the Aya authorities should have 'dealt with' them. Depending on who's in the party, they either get snarked at by Ryder, or scolded by Jaal (and then snarked at by Ryder).
• It's All Upstairs from Here: Part of the world arc on Havarl involves climbing a massive Remnant tower to speak with the angara hermit sages living on its peak.
• It's a Small World After All: The Nexus' docking bay connects to a residential wing with six apartments. Six peoples' homes on the Nexus can be visited or must be investigated as the game progresses. No points for guessing where Ryder needs to go when one of these tasks pops up. Made even more glaring by the various residents' vast differences in background, social standing and importance to the Initiative's first wave (though possibly justified by the fact that, until Ryder showed up, most of the Nexus was in bad shape).
• It's Up to You: Even though Ryder is but one Pathfinder amongst four (five, if/when the quarian ark arrives), the game still plays this deadly straight. Ryder is the Pathfinder first to arrive at the Nexus (despite the game implying that Ark Hyperion was the last to enter Heleus proper), and must immediately Set Right What Once Went Wrong. Once the other Pathfinders are found, they are still left with limited mobility, as only Ryder has access to the Tempest (itself the Last Of Its Kind — other scout ships were created and stowed on the Nexus, but were destroyed when the station collided with the Scourge). Finally, the other Pathfinders can't contribute to the Vault-hunting: SAM is what allows Ryder to fix the planets, and each other Pathfinder explicitly states that their SAM was destroyed, disabled or otherwise severed from them. Ryder — or rather Ryder's working SAM implant — is The Only One who can fix Heleus. (Well, them and their twin, which becomes a Plot Point...)
• It Tastes Like Feet: An exile on Kadara notes that even filtered so it isn't instantly deadly, the water still tastes like 'a krogan's undersuit'.
• I Want Grandkids: If a female Ryder romances Jaal, his true mother Sahuna will send an email requesting a description of the human birth process, which she claims she's interested in 'for many obvious reasons.' Scott gets the same letter if he romances Jaal; since Sahuna has not met any humans before, she apparently didn't realize that Scott is male.
• Jack-of-All-Stats:
  • Six of Ryder's SAM profiles correspond to the original trilogy's character classes and are either specialized on one fighting style (combat, tech or biotic) or a hybrid of two. However, the new Explorer profile is explicitly stated to be a jack-of-all-trades setup that requires points invested in all three categories. It confers escalating bonuses to weapon damage, damage resistance, tech recharge speed and biotic power damage, enabling Ryder to buff any combination of powers and weapons simultaneously while not excelling anywhere in particular.
  • Virtually all of the game's armor sets are specced to maximize the effectiveness of one of the six basic profiles mentioned above, except for the researchable Heleus Icon Armor that gives bonuses to damage resistance, weapon damage and the damage inflicted by all powers regardless of class affiliation.
• Jerkass: Sorvis Lehn, a salarian scientist assigned to Aya. He's pushy, rude and massively egotistical, assuming the Initiative would actually send a Pathfinder to help him when confronted by a pushy drunk and assuming he 'deserves no less'. Ryder can even admit to aforementioned drunk that Lehn is a jerk.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Some of the more snarky Andromeda aliens encountered make a valid point when they say they aren't necessarily happy about 100,000 aliens suddenly deciding to set up camp in their part of the galaxy (especially as some of the bad actors among the Milky Way refugees make themselves known).
  • The Krogan have every right to be angry, given they weren't even considered worthy of having their own ark. Good thing for them the revelation of one optional side-quest ( that the Andromeda Initiative may have the only survivors of the Milky Way Galaxy races) is something Ryder keeps to themselves.
• Jump Jet Pack: You can use one to traverse vertical distances and do a quick horizontal dash in any direction. Biotic characters put away the jet packs and just use their biotics.
• Jump Scare:
  • The Remnant Vault on Eos has a fairly dark side room full of inactive robots lining the walls, spooky enough to give even the hardened Cora the creeps. When you've looted the chest there and are on your way out, one of the bots drops to the floor with a resounding clang, scaring the living shit out of both your squad mates. Ryder isn't fazed at all and pokes fun at them for being so jumpy.
  • Kett Wraiths have very effective optical camouflage and are quite adept at setting up ambushes. You can be forgiven for needing a change of pants when one of those things appears out of thin air in a dark hallway right in front of Ryder and tries to gnaw their face off. The wildlife equivalent Challyrions also do the same thing.
• Karma Houdini:
  • Whichever salarians sold out the salarian Ark to the kett, assuming the kett didn't take them too.
  • Whoever it was that murdered Jien Garson gets away with it, assuming they weren't killed in the uprising.
  • On Kadara, Ryder can encounter two Outlaws in the process of looting and dumping the body of yet another murder victim. They're the only openly criminal exiles in the badlands that can't be killed because the game doesn't consider them valid targets. You can't do anything to make them stop or bring them to justice.
  • Half the Nexus leadership is guilty of this:
    • After the uprising, Foster Addison hired and equipped a gang of exile mercenaries to protect Nexus teams on field trips, but the mercs soon went rogue, killed everyone and turned pirate. The ones responsible swept it under the rug, but even if Ryder convinces them to come clean to the public, they never get their comeuppance.
    • Director Tann's prejudiced racism against the krogan and his gross mismanagement of the uprising in general was responsible for many of the troubles the Initiative is in when the Hyperion arrives, yet he, too, is never impeached or held accountable in any other way.
  • The 'The Little Things That Matter' quest revolves around an acquaintance of Foster Addison's who left the Nexus in the wake of the uprising for reasons unknown. Turns out she did it because she utterly failed (and still fails) to see that continuing to enforce a pregnancy ban in the middle of a stationwide famine is a prudent course of action. She wanted to have a babynow, so she absconded with lots of the Nexus' scarce resources and disappeared. Some months later she deploys several hacker satellites throughout the cluster to steal even more of the Nexus' still-scarce resources, attracts the Roekaar's and the kett's attention and ultimately must be rescued by Ryder from both of them, all the while she's acting like none of this is her fault. Her comeuppance? She's welcomed back with open arms.
• Karma Meter: Averted. The Paragon and Renegade system do not make a return, instead being replaced with a tone-based dialogue system similar to the one present in Dragon Age: Inquisition.
• Kick the Son of a Bitch:
  • Ryder can shoot the Cardinal dead. With the right timing, it can even be done right after they finish speaking, for added effect.
  • Ryder has a choice between allowing Sloane Kelly to be shot by Reyes, or saving her.
  • At one point offscreen, Kesh decided that Spender's interference with Engineering went too far and gave him a Literal Ass-Kicking, to the delight of everyone who witnessed it.
  • Exploring the valleys of Kadara will occasionally find Outcast outposts where the occupants have been paid a visit by the Collective. Given the Outcasts' activities, it's hard to feel too sorry for them.
• Killed Mid-Sentence:
  • Ryder can shut up the Cardinal with a bullet mid-speech if the interrupt prompt is taken.
  • This can potentially happen to Ryder under specific circumstances because the game doesn't fully pause the exterior action during certain cutscenes. A good example is the Roekaar hunt on Eos where at one point you need to interact with a comm console in their FOB, triggering a prolonged dialogue scene during which you can't do anything but choose how to answer. Problem is, there's a Remnant ruin with constantly respawning Creepers only a few steps away, and there's a good chance one or more of them will wander near enough to aggro on Ryder and start attacking them while you can't defend yourself. Your squad mates won't intervene either, so this segment can become a tad frustrating if you're really unlucky.
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: The weapons brought from the Milky Way are these. They lack the unlimited ammunition of the Remnants and the gimmicks of the Heleus weaponry, but make up for it by being deadly against unshielded targets. Install a Vintage Heat Sink and even your ammo worries are solved, although that slightly reduces the gun's clip size.
• Knockback: The Throw biotic power will do this to any regular sized enemy, provided their shields are down. This includes some of the creatures too. Detonating any type of combo will also reliably stagger or even knock back even the largest of enemies.
• Know When To Fold Them:
  • When Ryder finally catches up to the Moshae during her rescue mission, the Cardinal levels her hand at them and prepares one of her energy ball attacks in an attempt to stop them from escaping. She quickly reconsiders when one of Ryder's squad members promptly points a big gun at her face at nearly point-blank range.
  • A scavenger out in the north of Elaaden has set up an EMP generator which he uses to fry any vehicle he likes the look of, before attacking and killing the owners so he can grab their stuff. He tries it on Ryder, and then promptly realises there's no way in Hell he'd actually win that fight, and kindly offers to fix the damage and let Ryder and co. go on their merry way. Of course, Ryder might not be feeling so benevolent...

• Lampshade Hanging:
  • If the Moshae is made ambassador to Meridian, Ryder will ask her how the angara will react to this. She'll point out that they're naturally going to have widely varied opinions, and she can't possibly guess them all. Not all species share the exact same thoughts and opinions on things.
  • Poking around the emails at Prodromos, one can be found with an afterword from Vetra telling Ryder she knows they're reading it, and to stop poking through other people's e-mail already.
  • The Movie Night is basically all about the Tempest's Genre Savvy crew having a blast poking fun at various movie tropes, from Fanservice over Large Ham overacting to the mandatory use of Red Shirts in action movies and beyond.
  • Find enough Remnant Data Cores, and teammates like Jaal and Peebee will start pointing out the Remnant sure seemed to leave a lot of them lying about.
  • Bring Peebee along to the Remnant Vault on Elaaden, and she'll point out the makers sure seemed to love growing plants underground.
  • During the mission on Meridian. Liam points out that the Remnant are very similar to the Protheans from the Milky Way (long lost yet advanced alien civilization, with tech that has glowing lines and fire energy).
  • During one vault excursion, Ryder will enter into a humorous dialogue with themselves, poking fun at their tendency to talk to themselves during missions.
  • Scan Poc, Peebee's pet Remnant, and you find a message from Peebee telling Ryder to top being nosy (similar to Vetra's comment about emails, above).
• La Résistance: The Resistance, which Jaal belongs to, is a group of angara resisting kett occupation.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • A side-quest on Kadara has Ryder tracking down a bunch of criminals who've been raiding a windfarm, only to find they've all been killed by an Eiroch.
  • One of the options for dealing with the ex-Cerberus scientists experimenting on outlaws is to turn their technology back on them (with Ryder telling SAM to 'make it hurt').
• Laser Sight: Lots of enemies use them - snipers have the basic red one, Hydra mechs have three in their head, Remnant Nullifiers have large bluish ones, and so on. They all serve as clear warning to get to cover ASAP - with the exception of Nullifiers, which can shoot through cover.
• Last Episode, New Character: Four human characters only appear after the credits have rolled as part of the second-wave colonists being brought out of cryo-freeze on Meridian to help manage the colony.
• Last Lousy Point:
  • 'Tasks' are sidequests which usually don't advance the plot in a significant way and often send players on Fetch Quests across the cluster. Losing track of which objectives they've already found will require that Ryder land on a planet, check the map to see if it's there, then go back to the Tempest, sort through the Galaxy Map, disembark to that world, and do the same thing over and over again until they find which planet has the objective they missed. And each change in setting is compounded by Loads and Loads of Loading.
  • And that's just the tasks whose targets are actually marked on the map. Many others give you no clue whatsoever as to where to go, which usually means you're forced to investigate every single enemy presence you come across, and even that's not a sure-fire way to find everything you need. If you end up with something around 98% completion, those tasks are most likely the ones you haven't finished.
• Last of Their Kind:
  • Thanks to the Multiple Endings of Mass Effect 3, this is possibly true for the Milky Way species. If Shepard failed to stop the Reapers or accidentally killed everyone with low EMS, everyone in the Initiative are the last of their species. In fact, Alec Ryder learned of the Reapers' threat before leaving and deliberately hastened the project to escape before the invasion occurred. They got out just in time. The Ryder protagonist is made aware of this but, due to not being aware of the final outcome of the Reaper invasion, is left with the assumption that they're all that's left.
  • The Tempest is the only ship of its class to survive the trip to Andromeda intact; the other scout ships were damaged or destroyed on arrival.
• Late to the Tragedy:
  • The Hyperion, humanity's Ark, is revealed to have arrived in Andromeda 14 months after the Nexus. In the meantime, things have gone extremely poorly for the Initiative: a massive accident with the Scourge upon arrival resulted in the deaths of numerous people including founder Jien Garson, the other Arks are missing, and the lack of resources and hostility of the planets they were supposed to colonize resulted in a mutiny that was only stopped by assistance from the krogan, who were promptly double-crossed and went off on their own as a result.
  • Minor examples abound throughout the whole game, usually in the form of an Apocalyptic Log and the corresponding body nearby, dead since long before Ryder came across it. Unfortunately for Ryder, sometimes whatever caused the death is nearby and still a problem.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: As per usual for these sorts of games, there are many occasions where Ryder will speak to themself to call the players attention to objects and locations (i.e. 'Maybe if I climb that ledge over there I'll find something.'). At one point Ryder lampshades this by pointing out that they realize they're talking to themselves.
• Le Parkour: Using the Jump Jet Pack, Ryder and crew frequently engage in this. This is especially common in Remnant structures. In many other locations, this is the only way to access equipment drops and mission-related triggers.
• Level Scaling: As the game is a Wide Open Sandbox, this is implemented for your enemies all the way to the level cap. Unfortunately, as detailed under Absurdly High Level Cap and Power Up Let Down, you stop scaling after level 80, and your teammates stop after level 54. Every level you gain after that just makes the game harder.
• Lighter and Softer: The developers have indicated that they want Andromeda to have a lighter tone so that the player doesn't feel like they're leaving the galaxy to burn when they engage in exploration and sidequests. The game is rated 16 on PEGI as opposed to 18 like previous entries. And it's the first Mass Effect title where no party members can suffer Plotline Death.
• Like a Duck Takes to Water: The krogan, of all the Milky Way races, are not only surviving the best in the Heleus Cluster, they're practically thriving. At the beginning of the game, they're the only ones who've set up anything approaching a functional colony. This is especially ironic given they're the only Milky Way race that wasn't granted their own ark or Pathfinder. (Making the trip in cryo in the Nexus storage, instead.)
• Literal Metaphor: The human Golden World turns out to be... a Golden World.
• Literally Shattered Lives: Cryo attacks once again freeze unprotected enemies solid, and once that is accomplished, they can be killed instantly by shattering them into pieces by any means convenient. There's even an achievement for shattering a frozen enemy with a jump melee attack.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Averted and, in some ways, inverted. Powers are extremely underwhelming in this game, starting out barely worth it in the early game and getting moderately better in the late game. Powers are more useful for utility (such as floating enemies, weakening defenses, restoring shields or causing stun/freezing/burning) than damage. Weapons, on the other hand, become obscenely powerful late in the game and the player can obtain consumables, mods or passives to give them comparable utility to powers while being able to remove major threats with big damage.
• Loads and Loads of Loading:
  • Longest when first entering the game, no matter where you left off; likely due to pre-caching of assets the game keeps loaded for the rest of the play session. The first load is long enough to hear almost all of John Paesano's A Better Beginning, which is four minutes and twenty-five seconds long.
  • Many quests force you into the following sequence: Take off with the Tempest. Loading Video. Fly to another system. Loading Video. Land on the planet you want to go to. Loading Video. If you've landed on Kadara, you have another Loading Video to get out of the town and on to the planet proper.
  • Adding to the irritation, there is no option to merely reboard the Tempest on a planet without taking off. (Something the original trilogy did allow for.) Certain missions and tasks require that you do something on a planet, return to and depart on the Tempest, load a video of the Tempest taking off, talk to a Tempest crew member, return to the planet you just left, load a video of the Tempest landing, and only then you can continue.
  • In the unpatched game, there is a loading animation while going between planets in a system, which makes exploring far more time consuming and tedious. (The original trilogy handled this far better on inferior hardware, no less.) A patch was eventually introduced which allows you to skip these animations.
• Long Runner: In-Universe. In one of the crew messages, Gil mentions a drama that ran for seventy years. He also implies that this was a salarian show, which makes it extra impressive since salarians only live for about forty years.
• Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair!: Aside from the Remnant, there's the angara themselves. It's frequently mentioned they had a civilisation all over the Heleus Cluster, but by the time Ryder shows up they're reduced to a mere handful of worlds. Especially notable doing 'Forgotten History' for Annea, and seeing the item on Elaaden, where there's no longer a hint the angara once had anything there, besides one tiny isolated ruin in the dunes.
• Loved I Not Honor More:
  • Avela Kjar, the angaran historian that a male Ryder can romance on Aya, can fall in love with him but refuses to distract him from his important work saving the galaxy. Her only request is that, no matter how far he ventures or for how long, he always comes back for her when he can.
  • Keri T'Vessa, the asari reporter on the Nexus, can be romanced by a Ryder of any sex. Even if Ryder is dating or flirting someone else, Keri says she doesn't mind sharing them, and knows that what Ryder is up to in space (both professionally and personally) is important to them. She promises Ryder, though, that whenever they come back to the Nexus, they can always belong with her.
• Loyalty Mission: As per the franchise tradition, every squad mate has one. Some like Liam's or Vetra's are fairly short and straightforward while others like Cora's or Peebee's are extensive multi-stage quest chains that take Ryder across the entire cluster and can't be finished until fairly late into the story. Finishing them to the respective companion's satisfaction unlocks the option to complete their romance arc and gives access to their tier 6 power evolutions.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Insectoid critters detonate in a huge burst of shell shards and innards upon death no matter how they died. Even stranger are the large (armored) animal species, all of which completely disintegrate in moments a few seconds after they're killed.
• Machine Worship: For some undisclosed reason, a cult worshiping a 'massive machine' sprung up on Kadara virtually the moment Outpost Ditaeon was founded. By that point in the story it's obvious this machine can't be anything but an Architect, and the cult's leader was just on his way to pay tribute to it when the outpost lost communication with him. When Ryder finally catches up to him, his audiolog reveals that his attempt at placating the mechanical monster went about as well as expected.
• Macross Missile Massacre: Kett warships are fond of deploying these, usually as an Alpha Strike before they switch to their ginormous direct-fire artillery. Hydra mechs can also launch one consisting of a dozen or so unfailingly accurate homing missiles, so better take cover when you see those three red laser sights lock on to Ryder.
• Made of Iron: Just about everyone and everything is a lot more durable than their counterparts in the original trilogy. Even a comparatively fragile Ryder build can soak up much more damage than Shepard ever could, and their squad mates are stupidly resilient. In fact, all of them have about 50% more health and shields than their boss at the very least, making them very hard to kill. Unfortunately, this also extends to their enemies. Even the most basic Mook can tank half an assault rifle clip to the face without going down on Normal difficulty, shielded infantry usually takes a full (upgraded) clip to kill, and neutralizing the higher-level enemies requires enough firepower to wipe out a platoon. Insanity difficulty turns everything hostile in the game into Incredibly Durable Enemies - prepare for desperate sprints to nearby supply caches several times per battle even with the very best weapons at your disposal because you will run out of ammo long before all the bad guys are dead. Well, and then there's the bosses...
  • A few examples deserve special mention:
    • Kett Wraiths, reptilian war beasts that keep on fighting even after you've blown their goddamn brains out. Also crosses into Body Horror due to how squicky it looks and sounds.
    • The kett troops one has to fight while controlling the other Ryder twin. They're Chosen, the kett's most basic mooks, yet each of them takes two dozen headshots to kill, something that can't be chalked up to the Phalanx pistol one is restricted to because that gun isn't nearly as weak in regular gameplay.
    • Remnant Destroyers, for sticking out even among the other Bosses in Mook Clothing. Their armor and especially their shields are so strong that everything that doesn't hit their sole weak point is reduced to Scratch Damage. Made worse by the fact that this weak point is their main cannon, which can only be targetted for a few seconds while it prepares to fire at Ryder.
• Mad Scientist:
  • A pair of ex-Cerberus scientists can be found on Kadara, experimenting with creating a Hive Mind on unwilling and unwitting test subjects, not noticing or caring that their experiment is destroying their subjects' minds. Tragically, by Cerberus standards, this probably makes them an unqualified success, since the experiment doesn't get them killed.
  • Dutch, the operator of the Vortex, though he mercifully restricts himself to running experiments involving contained doses of poison on anyone foolish enough to enter his lab (i.e. serving them drinks.)
• Manual Leader, A.I. Party: Ryder is always accompanied by two squadmates on planetary excursions. The player can command these characters to move to assigned spots on the screen. Otherwise, they take care of themselves in battle and can be relied upon to clear out a number of enemies on their own.
• Marathon Boss: The four Remnant Architects that are optional bosses. You have to damage all three legs and its head (which have a lot of HP) to the point where it can't stand anymore, allowing SAM to interface with it through the omni-tool. Problem is, it shoots back with three different possible attacks, including a grenade salvo and an energy ball that can penetrate cover, and has another attack cycle where it creates smaller Remnant bots to fight you. And the one on Voeld also has to be fought while keeping an eye on your life-support meter: you're dealing with a level 2 cold hazard the whole time (giving you roughly 5 minutes before you freeze to death), instead of the level 1 on the rest of the map.
• Mass 'Oh, Crap!': When the Archon's fleet forces the Tempest out of FTL on the way to Aya.
• Mauve Shirt: Lani Reed, one of the crewmembers of the Hyperion, can be met and talked to early on in the game, and lasts all the way through to the climax, even if she isn't plot-relevant. She just narrowly avoids being killed by the Archon and the Primus when they seize Hyperion.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The angara believe that they reincarnate in later generations of their own family, and that artifacts from a previous life can jog their memories. One side quest involves a Roekkar turning over a new leaf after your give him an artifact and he remembers a past life. But the thing is, the artifact in question was highly advanced and of unknown use, designed to interact with the angara natural ability to manipulate bioelectricity. So did it remind him of his past life, as the angara believe, or did it simply download memories from a past user into a compatible mind? The reveal that the angara were created by the Jardaan blurs this more. With all the power they've demonstrated, neither possibility seems out of the question.
• Meaningful Name:
  • The developers have confirmed that the name Ryder has plenty of meaning behind it, not the least of which is Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, as a successor to Commander Shepard's surname which comes from Alan Shepard, the first American man in space. More so for the female Ryder, whose default name Sara is a derivative of 'Sarah' just like 'Sally' is.
  • Also meaningful in another aspect, as Ryder spends a majority of the game 'riding' around on the Nomad and exploring. Nomad is also a suitably meaningful name for the buggy.
  • 'Jaardan' sounds like 'garden' and the Jaardan are responsible for creating the vaults and the terraforming network that can turn uninhabitable planets into garden worlds suitable for life.
  • Peebee decides to name her first modified Observer 'Poc', for Proof Of Concept.
  • The designations of the Exiles' various Elite Mooks are pretty spot-on: Anarchists, Pariahs, Operatives and Berserkers.
  • The club on the Nexus that was was originally supposed to be (and still officially is) a lab is called Vortex. A vortex is a very common piece of lab equipment.
• Mecha-Mooks: The Remnant are a vast army of non-sentient robots left behind by their creators to guard and maintain their technological legacy. They're mostly docile unless you get too close, attack them or do something else they don't like, which usually includes messing with their Vaults.
• Mercy Kill: Ryder can give one to a kett who's been violently tortured by an insane angara, and is asking for release. Or they can leave them to the angara's ministrations.
• Mighty Whitey: The sci-fi version of the trope, not tied to a specific ethnicity (although the default appearances of the two Ryders is caucasian). The protagonist arrives to a strange land inhabited by technologically less advanced natives who are struggling against an overwhelming foe. He or she then immediately masters the local technology that the natives have been unable to utilise properly for centuries, gives them their first meaningful victories over their enemy, and makes staggering discoveries that they had never been able to put together on their own. An angaran lampshades this, citing their proverb 'In an ocean of fish, ONE will have gems in its mouth.'
  • Deconstructed with Cora, a human Vanguard who served in an asari commando unit. Though a valuable asset to the unit, she never really moved beyond Token Human, and her commmander eventually suggested the Andromeda Initiative as a better fit. Peebee, an actual asari with a decidedly 'been there, done that' attitude toward most of her people's traditions, effectively accuses Cora of having a Foreign Culture Fetish.
• Mile-Long Ship:
  • Remnant spaceships are the size of small cities. The one on Elaaden is more than halfway buried under sand, and it still looms over just about damn near everything.
  • The Nexus is also huge, comparable in size to the city ships (like the Citadel) seen in previous Mass Effect games.
• The Milky Way Is the Only Way: Averted; as the title indicates, the game takes place in the Andromeda galaxy, which Ryder and the other characters reach via Sleeper Starship.
• Minimalist Run: Your mission, should you choose to accept it: don't mine for minerals, don't scan anything not mission-related, and consequently, don't craft anything. Don't purchase anything that's not part of a mission. Don't bother with Remnant puzzles other than the story-relevant ones. Use only equipment you found in containers or looted off of enemies (for an added challenge, don't loot containers). Don't do any APEX missions. AVP perks may be taken (if only to shut up SAM), but don't accept any of the regular resources deliveries. Don't waste time with romance.
• Mini-Mecha: Hydra Assault Armors, high level enemies which start showing up halfway into the game and take a lot of firepower to put down, are towering war machines piloted by a single individual inside. It's heavily implied that they were precursors to ME3's more advanced Atlas mechs.
• Military Moonshiner: On arrival at the Nexus for the first time, Liam can be found talking with one of the security officers, who implies they've been managing to make their own stuff, much to Liam's surprise.
• Money for Nothing:
  • There's a lot of ways to make money, but precious little to spend it on. Weapons and armor can be bought but are way better when crafted by Ryder, and all types of consumables can be obtained en masse by other means. Only a handful of (useful) items are exclusive to merchants, and those will usually be the only thing you'll ever fork over cash for. To top it off, they aren't even particularly expensive, so you'll quickly end up with five to six digit values of credits on your account.
  • Augmentations and modifications are the two best things to spend money on. You use the augmentations while crafting your equipment, and while mods will eventually drop, it's much quicker to just buy them when they become available.
  • Another useful item, the copied from multiplayer Cobra Missile, which devastates nearly anything with one shot (at a cost of 2400 credits) was prevented by Bioware from appearing regularly because it trivialized combat.
• Mood Dissonance: Avina the VI retains her chipper speech when first met on the Nexus, even though the lights are off and it looks like nobody's home. She also retains it after she's hacked by Knight and starts spouting anti-A.I. rhetoric.
• Mood Whiplash: Despite the Lighter and Softer tone, the game occasionally reminds the player that many, if not most, of the Andromeda Initiative personnel left family and friends to live out their lives and die back in the Milky Way, while they slept in cryo for 600 years. One character, August Bradley, will discuss this if prompted, explaining the meaning of a motto used in the Initiative: 'We stay out of people's grief.' Some of Liam's backstory relates to this and is quite touching (and also serves to explain his often-snarky attitude).
• Mook Maker: The Remnant really like this trope. For starters, almost every structure of theirs is one and can spawn waves of angry robots literally out of thin air. Their most basic unit - aptly called Assemblers - can throw a grenade-like something that rapidly morphs a Breacher bot in your face. Somewhere in between lies the Architect, a recurring Bonus Boss with the ability to spawn half a dozen lesser bots as one of its attack cycles (although 'lesser' is relative in this context; the later Architect encounters include generous amounts of Nullifiers in every wave, plus some less dangerous backup).
• Mooks but No Bosses: The final battle in a nutshell, which is somewhat jarring after all the frantic boss battles you've fought to get to this point. All you have to do is annihilate waves of Remnant bots (the worst of them being Nullifiers) while simultaneously dodging occasional fire from the Architect in the middle of the arena, interrupted by some running to hit a switch every now and then.
• Moral Dilemma: A quest in the later half ends with one. Do you arrest a salarian for helping to sell out their Ark to learn what they could about the kett, or let them go free to gain that information, which could give the Initiative an advantage in the future?
• Moral Dissonance: The game is mostly good about keeping consistent morality, but there are a few odd ones:
  • The choice at the end of 'First Murderer' is either to release Nilken, as he didn't kill the man he is accused of killing, or to exile him to keep the political situation stable. The latter choice is treated like condemning an innocent man for political expediency, ignoring the fact that attempted murder is still a very serious crime. There is no way to bring this up with anyone.
  • The Gil/Kallo story is about Gil making tweaks and upgrades to the Tempest, which Kallo is against because he feels that it is an insult to the original designers. While that question is an interesting one, it ignores the fact that Gil is making these tweaks without permission, sometimes even in the middle of a mission. One side mission even has Ryder stranded briefly because one of Gil's tweaks went sideways and the Tempest is temporarily grounded. No one ever mentions this blatant violation of safety and protocol.
• Moral Myopia: On Elaaden, an angaran called Annea is hoarding a massive reservoir of water. If Ryder decides to reveal its existence to everyone so it can be shared, she'll send a group of raiders to kill Ryder, claiming they ruined her life if confronted.
• More Dakka: Most kett troops use fast-firing automatic plasma weapons, but their Anointed take it Up to Eleven by deploying some sort of plasma Gatling gun. If you see one of those things rise from cover and brace themselves, you better haul ass to the nearest cover yourself if you're at medium to close range.
• Morton's Fork:
  • Ryder's very first on-screen conversation with their father has one right when the game begins. No matter whom Ryder supports during their dad's argument with the Hyperion's captain, he'll immediately chew them out for it. The only difference is whether they or Cora take the brunt of it.
  • Occurs in a conversation Ryder can have with an angry woman on the Hyperion after settling Eos, who blames Alec Ryder for everything that's gone wrong. Ryder can respond in two ways - point out their dad just died, or declare their attempts to fix it. Both have the woman brush them off and tell them to 'go to hell'.
  • Also happens during the 'Path of a Hero' questline. Paint Ryder's exploits in bright colors and Tann will reward you for spouting the party line, but Keri T'Vessa will be forced to hide in her apartment after she's attacked by enraged colonists who learned the hard way that Heleus isn't quite as sunshine and rainbows as Ryder made it out to be. Give her the honest truth instead and Keri ends up in jail on Tann's orders because her reports incited riots on the Nexus and spread further unrest about the Initiative's perceived failings. Try to straddle the line between both options and she'll go to jail anyway. She'll come out fine eventually regardless of the path taken, but there's no way to spare her from suffering if you continue to let her interview Ryder.
  • Eos' resident Butt-Monkey Danny Harris gets it much worse than all of the above combined. No matter what Ryder advises him to do with his new life in Heleus, not only will it immediately bite him in the ass - it'll be the prelude to him getting into trouble two more times when he tries the other options you had in your initial conversation with him. Once he's been saved for the third time, he relocates to Kadara and becomes a miserable alcoholic. There's only one way to save him from this fate: never talk to him in the first place.
  • Ryder's first meeting with Nakmor Morda. No matter how Ryder tries to play it, Morda tells them to get lost.
• Mugging the Monster: By the time Ryder arrives on Kadara and Elaaden, they've developed a reputation as the Pathfinder. However, there are still those who think it's a good idea to shoot at the heavily armed and armored badass and their companions. Taken even further by one particular example found during an Elaaden sidequest, a turian outcast who sees Ryder and declares his intentions to take their armour. By the point Ryder has reached Elaaden, they'll be powerful enough they can kill said turian without even working up a sweat. (Indeed, by that point in the game, Ryder's squadmates are powerful enough to do the job without Ryder/the player lifting a finger.)
• Multi-Mook Melee: The kett base on Voeld ends with one. Ryder and their teammates versus a never-ending stream of Chosen, Exalted and Anointed, until all the consoles are turned off, at which point the Prefect shows up (without announcing themselves). Once the Prefect dies, the mooks stop coming.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Happens to Jaal's sister during his loyalty mission. When their brother tells Jaal of the extremists' plans she shoots him in the back for betraying their cause. Luckily he lives and they make up.
• Named After Someone Famous: Zoe Kennedy, one of the first Initiative women to give birth, names her son after David Anderson from the original trilogy.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast:
  • The Scourge. At the very least, pray you can fly away really fast.
  • Remnant Nullifiers and Destroyers are nothing to mess with if you value your health. Peebee sure chose those names well.
  • Elaaden's Remnant Abyssal doesn't sound particularly cuddly, either. It's a humongous robotic Sand Worm hundreds of meters in length.
  • Kett Fiends. And later, the kett Behemoth.
  • After Drack's loyalty mission, Vorn can be heard wanting to name a new plant 'the murder potato'.
  • Invoked by Liam in a conversation with Vetra, who points out this is common with turians. The way he phrases it offends an already irritated Vetra.
  • Draulir, a series on caves on Kadara, translated to 'death caves' in Shelesh. Apt, since it's where Reyes Vidal tries to assassinate Sloane Kelly.
• Narrating the Obvious: Like many RPGs, character dialogue is often meant to prompt the player to perform an action. (i.e. someone saying 'Pushing the big red button in front of you will open the exit.') The game lampshades this (while also Leaning on the Fourth Wall) by having Ryder themself at one point do this and then start joking about talking to themself.
• Necessary Evil: Sloane Kelly is harsh and lethally ruthless, but she's also extremely aware of the Wretched Hive she has to lead. She's willing to listen to ideas from all sources and decide if it's for the good of the Kadara Port and its stability, though she's not exactly fond of angara.
• Negative Space Wedgie: The Scourge. It messes up ships that come into contact with it, it disrupts the orbits and weather of planets it comes near ('near' in this case being within a few AUs), it kills anything that touches it, it reacts to any Remnant tech that comes near it. Worst of all, it completely destroyed what was to become the new turian homeworld, leaving our favorite dextro species with no place to settle. It's spread across the entire Heleus cluster with no obvious spawn point and no means of getting rid of it (not that anyone seems to be trying), screws up basic physics, and is just generally bad news. It's a weapon released and aimed at the Jaardan for some reason.
• Nerf: Patch 1.05 nerfed the Cobra RPG consumable by removing it from merchant inventories, leaving exceedingly rare random drops as the only means to acquire it. While the thing hadn't been exactly cheap before, it could still be stockpiled easily enough to steamroll almost every boss battle there is, so this move was likely an attempt at curbing another Complacent Gaming Syndrome. This decision has since been reversed, and the Cobra is now available for purchase again.
• Never Heard That One Before:
  • The Outcasts have gotten pretty used to people protesting that they paid their protection fees as they're being kicked out into the wastelands.
  • The bartender at New Tuchanka tells Ryder straight away they're not getting any ryncol, and no, they don't care if Ryder thinks they can 'handle it'.
• Never Live It Down:
  • Invoked, In-Universe, by one of the turians found on Havarl, who says that while they do want to be rescued, they just don't want their rescuers to be human, because 'those arrogant bastards would never let us forget it'.
  • Invoked another time when Ryder talks to their twin after the latter awakes from their coma. One of the main reasons the Ryders left the Milky Way was that they never would've been able to live down the stigma brought on by Alec's insanely illegal AI research that turned even his completely uninvolved kids into blacklisted pariahs virtually over night.
• New Game+: Players can carry over their level, unlocked abilities (including your squadmates' loyalty-locked variants, and Ryder's Remnant VI), and any items, armor and weapons in their inventory into a new campaign. All the maps you explored stay explored as well (minus stuff like forward stations), and both your squad mates' and your APEX teams' level, abilities and upgrades carry over, too. As a bonus, you can even change Ryder's gender, appearance, and training while retaining all of the above.
• N.G.O. Superpower: The Andromeda Initiative is a civilian, privately-funded project founded by the mysterious Jien Garson, with no ties to the Alliance or the Council, making their monumental journey to Andromeda all the more impressive. It later turns out some of their funding was from less than upright personas with massive bank accounts, once Garson's own supplies had run out.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!:
  • The salarian fire-team manage to disable the massive battery of guns on the Archon's ship, thereby saving their Ark... but the EMP covers the whole ship, including the systems keeping the Behemoth contained. It promptly gets out and goes straight for Ryder.
  • All grenades in this game can hurt Ryder, which includes their own and those used by squad mates. Melee-focused builds are at particular risk of accidentally being blown to pieces by their own friends' explosives, with Liam being by far the worst offender.
• No Cutscene Inventory Inertia: If the script calls for Ryder to draw a weapon in a cutscene, they will pull out an M-8 Avenger assault rifle, X-5 Ghost, or M-6 Carnifex pistol regardless of whether they actually carry one, although that only happens if Ryder holstered their weapon before the cutscene started. If they had an appropriate gun in hands at that moment, chances are good they'll be wielding that one during the following scenes. Squad mates get in on the fun by randomly using either an Avenger, their own weapon or the X-5 Ghost assault rifle.
• No Flow in CGI: Zig-Zagged. For the first time in the series, the hair moves... but there's no Jiggle Physics, even when there ought to be, such as the love scene between a female Ryder and Jaal. While both characters are naked, the partner kisses their way down between Sara's breasts, which don't move whatsoever.
• No Kill Like Overkill: Ever since APEX first ran into a Behemoth^note , their recommended tactic for taking one down revolves around the application of multiple rocket-propelled grenades. This actually has some basis in gameplay - Behemoths are one of the very few enemy types that can survive being hit with a Cobra RPG, which is most likely the weapon APEX is resorting to as well.
• Noodle Implements: One of Vetra's party quips is mentioning that Sid had asked for 'a timer, medigel, and 15 pairs of socks'.
• Noodle Incident:
  • Drack once killed a Thresher Maw with his bare hands. No details are given because when he recites the story, Gil and Peebee make him skip to the 'good part', in this case meaning 'the bit where he says he killed it'.
  • In the Eos Vault, Vetra recommends Ryder watch their fingers, in case of traps, noting she 'made that mistake before'.
  • On Kadara, Cora may mention an incident during her huntress days when a target in the Terminus system tried hiding out with a gun smuggler. Problem was, the smuggler was the baby sister of one of Cora's team. Things apparently didn't work out well for the target after that.
  • While exploring Voeld, Drack comments that it reminds him of a frozen moon where he once nearly lost his 'lucky toe'. He doesn't elaborate further.
• No OSHA Compliance:
  • Most locations and buildings in Heleus are admirably safe to explore, but the Remnant's creators apparently were so advanced they didn't really do railings anymore. Some of their main consoles are barely one step away from a Bottomless Pit, and the path to them isn't any safer, either. Fighting running battles in Remnant installations is as much an exercise in dodging hostile bots as it is in not accidentally falling to your death or stepping into a pool of electrically charged liquid.
  • The Tempest is a strange case. Every place one could fall off of has handrails installed, except for the long transparent walkway that runs half the length of the ship. You still can't jump down from it for some reason, but it's still a curious contrast to the rest of the vessel.
• No-Sell: Kett Ascendants are surrounded by an energy shield that makes them completely invincible as long as it is active. You need to destroy the drone projecting it before you can attack the Ascendant himself, which is much easier said than done due to the thing's small size and the fact that it's constantly orbiting its master, thus hiding behind his damn shield itself half of the time. It does stay still when he's charging up for a damaging attack, giving you around 5 seconds to drain its health before you need to dodge the incoming wall of damage.
• Notice This:
  • Lootable containers and objects are surrounded by an aura of bluish scan lines that is easily visible at medium to short range without being obtrusive. You also get audio-visual clues to deploy Ryder's scanner in the vicinity of objects worth scanning, which is particularly helpful because - although the three types of tech nodes are large and easy to spot - only a few of them can actually be scanned for research points.
  • Important systems and planets give off a pulse, just in case their name isn't visible. This also applies to ones quest related, helping if the player isn't tracking the quest in question at the moment.
• Not Quite the Right Thing: Some questlines or side missions have a morally ambiguous or complicated situation that seems like a classic Morton's Fork, where every decision can have equally-devastating consequences. But, more often than not, these choices end up with one solution clearly better than the other. To note:
  • Not giving krogan overlord Morda the Remnant Drive Core will result in no outpost being founded on Elaaden, removing the opportunity to fight the local Architect, pissing off Drack and Kesh, and making certain achievements impossible. The alternative reward (credits and Remnant research data) is lackluster in comparison.
  • Solving the 'First Murderer' quest by exiling Nilken will satisfy both the Nexus leadership and, later, you'll learn that he and his wife are living a harsh but happy life on Kadara. On the other hand, sparing him results in him becoming very unhappy and hated on the Nexus, to the point that his wife divorces him and he goes back into cryo. It's a Sudden Downer Ending to a player trying to help Nilken and not remotely an obvious choice for one that wants to punish him.
  • A side mission on Aya involves Ryder convincing a trio of angarans to stay on the Nexus. The dialogue options are usually similar but subtly different, and the wrong choice means they won't go. For example, with one, if Ryder chooses the casual option the angara they're talking to thinks Ryder is being flippant. With another, who wonders about seeing his family, Ryder can suggest they'll work something out, which annoys him, or state he can talk to his family, which convinces him to go.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat:
  • Director Tann and Colonial Supervisor Addison are prime examples, blocking efforts and signing off on things which inevitably cause more probelms (especially Addison). The entire Nexus leadership group qualifies when Ryder seeks their permission to go after Meridian. Despite bringing up everything Ryder has done for them, they still block him from going on his mission, requiring help from the other Pathfinders instead.
  • William Spender, one of Foster Addison's subordinates who has a knack for making things even more difficult aboard the station than they need to be. Investigating him for Drack reveals that he deliberately engineered the mutiny, the betrayal of the krogan, and has been covertly aiding the exiles as part of a power play to gain more influence on the Nexus.
• Obvious Beta: Wonky character animations, glitchy gameplay (E.I. characters rocketing through the roof of the Tempest), constant freezes/crashes/framerate drops, and characters carrying placeholder weapons during cutscenes. Even after patching, the game still feels VERY unfinished. Most of the blame laid at trying to make the game on the Frostbite engine, which does not handle this type of game well, then with refusing to give the developers time to properly get the game working on the engine.
• Offscreen Teleportation:
  • Ryder's squad does this every time Ryder uses a gravity well. Once Ryder arrives at their designation, their squad mates magically appear behind them out of thin air.
  • Jaal pulls a particularly strange one on Havarl on the way to his loyalty mission. He's scripted to wait next to another angara on the shuttle pad when Ryder enters the area, and he does so even if he's part of the current squad and was trailing a hundred meters behind the others a second ago.
  • A few quest NPCs will tell Ryder to go ahead to a common destination while they take care of something else. Except for one instance on Kadara, all of them will be waiting when Ryder arrives no matter how much you hurry, even if you immediately took the most direct route, never saw a shuttle pass overhead or the NPC doesn't even have access to a vehicle of any kind.
• One-Hit Kill:
  • The purpose of the Cobra RPG consumable. Exceedingly rare, but kills just about anything in one shot. Yes, that includes Demonic Spiders like Fiends and kett Ascendants (once their shield is down of course).
  • All the game's boss-level enemy types have an 'Instant Death' Radius. Keep your distance.
    • Kett Ascendants will pick up anyone who touches their No-Sell shield and deliver a rapid series of blows, killing the victim instantly.
    • If a Fiend gets too close, they'll pick up Ryder, chomp and shake them around, then throw them to the floor. It's probably the most graphic death sequence in the game.
    • Hydra mechs can and will seize any opportunity to pummel Ryder to death with the large claw on their right arm, no matter how much shield strength and health Ryder has at that moment.
    • Remnant Destroyers, although the most powerful of the bunch overall, avert this issue and are slightly more feasible to attack in melee because their close range attack doesn't kill instantly. It merely deals a crapton of damage, but if you don't retreat immediately after every attack, you're toast anyway.
• One Hit Poly Kill: At long distances, squads of humanoid enemies often spawn in the exact same spot, clipped into each other. Landing a sufficiently powerful headshot with a sniper rifle modded for penetration can therefore result in half a dozen headless corpses suddenly hurtling off in all directions. With a bit of luck one can take out a dozen or more hostiles with two bullets this way.
• One Steve Limit:
  • Enforced with the submachine gun known as the Tempest in Mass Effect 2 and 3. The same gun is renamed the 'Charger' in Andromeda due to the player's scout ship taking on the name.
  • Narrowly played straight with the Remnant Abyss and the Remnant Abyssal - the former is a location on Havarl, the latter a robotic construct on Elaaden.
  • There are two characters called Reynolds - the (now dead) mayor of the second Eos colony, and the aide to the Aya ambassador. No indication is given that they're related.
• Only One Female Mold: Averted in both single and multiplayer- female characters have a much greater variation in height and build, from tall Amazonian Beauty to short and androgynous.
• Only Six Faces: With the exception of Peebee, all asari have the same face with different colors and markings. Similarly, the salarians are mostly just recolors of Tann with the exception of Raeka, and all turians except for Vetra are palette-swapped variations on a single male or female template. Krogan at least appear to display a few varying details in their faces and head plates. Humans have the largest choice in faces, but even they are subject to this trope. For instance, Meriweather (the Arc Villain of Vetra's loyalty mission) and Gil's friend Jil are identical save for their hair color, and you'll notice a lot of recurring faces when you pay attention to the human NPCs in hub areas. Jarringly, this includes the likenesses of fairly important characters like Captain Dunn, Doc Carlyle and even Reyes Vidal. During the epilogue party aboard the Hyperion you can encounter at least two women that look exactly like Dunn while Dunn herself is standing only a few steps away.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • Everyone goes out of character when Ryder drives the Nomad over a cliff at high speed - Cora yells a panicked warning, Drack roars a pants-soilingly terrified 'SHIIIIIIT!', Vetra starts laughing in excitement like a child at Christmas... Just try it out by yourself. It's utterly hilarious.
  • On a less humorous note, everyone's terrified by driving about H-047c. Expect many startled calls, Big Nos, and alarmed 'shit's whenever Ryder goes too close to a bottomless crevice.
• Opening the Sandbox: Though most storyline missions open more of the Heleus Cluster, rescuing the Moshae is the point where the game really kicks into full swing. In addition to more worlds to colonize, the player can complete most loyalty missions and rescue the other Arks.
• Organic Technology: The kett, the main antagonists, have a rock-like body that melds into a similarly rock-like armor/carapace. it turns out the kett's bone-like armor is part of their body and not any sort of clothing, as the Kett are 'born' naked and already fully armored.
• Outrun the Fireball: Resetting any Remnant vault has two consequences: the planet it's on becomes much more viable for colonisation, and a deadly energy cloud spawns at the center that kills every organic thing it touches and quickly expands throughout the vault. It's therefore not a bad idea to make yourself familiar with the vault layout before you hit that button and are forced to make a mad dash for the exit. For everyone looking for an additional challenge, most vaults have treasure rooms that are inaccessible until the vault is reset, so if you're really greedy, you can even try to nick some more goodies while there's a killer cloud hot on your heels.
• Pardon My Klingon: The angara have quite a few slurs and cuss words in Shelesh, their trade language. Most get a translation at one point or another, but one never does because its meaning is abundantly clear anyway: 'skutt', as in 'Skutt!'^note , 'the skutter', 'skutting stars', and similar variations.
• Passing the Torch:
  • In game, this happens when Alec passes the title of Pathfinder on to you as he dies.
  • The second teaser of the game is a symbolic torch passing - a voiceover from Commander Shepard telling (presumably) Ryder that it's time to become The Hero and find new worlds for humanity.
  Shepard: Know that wherever you go, we will be with you. This is Commander Shepard, signing off.
• The Password Is Always 'Swordfish': During the hunt for the Remnant drive core on Elaaden, Ryder and team come across a datapad with the password to the door it's hidden behind. It's 'password123'. Ryder's companions have appropriately sarcastic comments ready.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • Remnant installations occasionally contain puzzle-locked containers or consoles with high-level loot or additional skill points, respectively. Save your game before you attempt to open any of them - you sometimes only get one shot at solving the puzzle, and if you fail, well...
  • On a related note, finding and solving these puzzle-locked objects is mandatory for anyone intent on unlocking the Mastermind achievement, but many of them are located in primary Vaults and become inaccessible as soon as the Vault is reset, making the achievement unobtainable if more than three are missed.
  • One task requires Ryder to collect nine Remnant Data Cores for Peebee. A total of eleven cores can be found, and just like the puzzles mentioned above, many of them are hidden in Vaults and therefore lost if they aren't picked up during Ryder's first visit.
  • The majority of the game's missions are optional, with many easy to miss if one doesn't talk to the right people to go to the right place. Although many of these missions can still be completed even after the main game ends, an entire strand of missions related to one location ( The Hyperion) becomes inaccessible once the endgame is launched.
  • Ryder has the ability to romance multiple characters during one playthrough; once a 'commitment point' is reached, however, Ryder must choose whether to cement a relationship. Once a choice is made, romance-based interactions and unique events involving other characters are locked out permanently.
• The Place: Unsurprisingly, Mass Effect: Andromeda takes place in the neighboring (read: 2 million light-years away) Andromeda galaxy.
• Place of Protection: Aya is a paradise compared to the rest of the cluster, especially for the angara—anywhere else, they can't say goodbye to friends and family leaving for work or school without wondering if they'll ever see them again. The place is so heavenly that they hold regular lotteries determining who next will have the luxury of living there for a limited time. When the Nexus opens an embassy on Aya, several angara recognize the hope this brings to their species and willingly give up their spots so that Milky Way guests can stay. We're told that at least one angaran died from a kett attack after giving up their spot, and the Nexus ambassador is horrified to hear about it. Ryder can recommend a number of methods of dealing with the problem (including nothing), but the most benevolent option is to grant any lottery winners who give up their spot on Aya a chance to live on the Nexus instead.
• Planet Spaceship: Done on different scales:
  • The various Arks are about a mile long and have enough space for 20,000 inhabitants in cryo sleep each.
  • The Nexus is a downscaled version of the Citadel, but is still about 18 kilometers in length. It was in a more compact form to make the trip from the Milky Way, and then expanded upon to serve as a central command station. The Arks dock in the center ring for added power and living space.
  • Khi Tasira is a city-sized Remnant structure floating in space. Originally believed to be the Remnant Capital known as Meridian, it turns out to be just a piece of Meridian.
  • The actual Meridian is a Hollow World/Dyson Sphere combo the size of a small planet, with the living space inside of the outer wall, creating a Gravity Screw. Ark Hyperion ends up crashing on Meridian, making it humanity's and the Andromeda Initiative's first major colony.
• Planetville: Zigzagged, but usually averted. Havarl is probably the closest to being played straight. In this instance, though, there are other cities on the planet, it's just the one Ryder visits happens to be the one where the Vault is (because the angara built the city around the monoliths). Jaal's loyalty mission does take Ryder to another part of the planet. The same occurs on Voeld, where the kett's exaltation facility is on another part of the planet from where the Resistance is holed up in.
• Plasma Cannon:
  • Kett weapons are an interesting case. The projectiles they fire move comparatively slowly, but can usually home in on targets, be charged for more powerful blasts, or offer other similar advantages. Technically speaking, they are still physical projectile weapons. However, the projectiles, rather than simply being launched at high speeds by a mass accelerator, are sheathed in plasma, which gives them their unique properties.
  • At least some Remnant weapons are also plasma-based. Their stationary turrets are explicitly stated to shoot plasma, and since their infantry weaponry shoots particle beams and plasma is basically just a cloud of super-heated particles, they might count as well.
• Playable Epilogue: Unlike the original trilogy, ME:A doesn't end after the Final Battle. In fact, a couple of sidequests don't unlock until after the main story is finished, and some of them do a good job at concluding certain secondary story arcs. Ryder and team can also set out once more aboard the Tempest to continue exploring the Heleus cluster, and to wrap up any leftover quests or tasks.
• Player Tic: Jump Jettingeverywhere. It doesn't actually get you to your destination any faster (at least on a level surface) than simply sprinting, and it can even be detrimental if there are environmental hazards around, but players still do it constantly. Once you get the timing down, it is possible to jet forward, jet up, jet forward again, and then repeat as soon as you hit the ground.
• Plot Armor:
  • NPCs occasionally meet up with Ryder in the wilds to get something done there, which means they may accidentally cross paths with the planet's vicious wildlife if some critter strays too close. No need to worry, though - no matter what beast they run into, they can't be wounded, let alone killed by it.
  • The Nomad has this as long as you're not in it, so don't worry about it being destroyed by enemy fire if you take cover behind it.
• Point of No Return:
  • The second visit to Khi Tasira, which comes with a warning that if the player goes, they're locked in until the end of the game.
  • Most romances have a 'threshold' point where the player has the option of locking-in a relationship or letting it go. In some cases, doing so shuts down any options for flirting or romancing other characters.
• Politically Correct History: The main gag of the Cultural Exchange section of the Nexus. Every race presents themselves in the most flattering possible light and one display has the quad to call the Milky Way in general a harmonious collective of peace-loving races.
• Polyamory: Played With. While Ryder can have sex with a multitude of potential partners, the game basically divides relationships into Official Couple and Friends with Benefits. Characters like Suvi or Cora will lock out any other full romance option, while characters like Keri or Avela are closer to temporary flings and Peebee can be either. However, there's no option to set up a Menage A Trois (or greater) situation, or an open relationship with two or more committed partners, who are all on the same page. To drive the point home, the usual 'complete a romance' Achievement in most Bioware games is instead complete three romances—which can be done in a single game if the player chooses.
• Posthumous Character:
  • Jien Garson, the Initiative's founder and leader died when the Nexus collided with the Scourge on arrival in Andromeda. You 'encounter' her on the Nexus via recordings and holograms she recorded before the expedition's departure. You also discover that her death actually occurred shortly after the Nexus' arrival under suspicious circumstances.
  • References are made to several characters from previous Mass Effect games (including actual audio logs by the character Liara and discussion of characters such as the Illusive Man). With the possible exception of members of long-lived races such as asari or krogan, it is assumed that all these familiar individuals are long dead by the time the Initiative arrives and the game begins.
• Power Floats:
  • The Remnant Architects can usually be found hovering over an area of the map (except the one on Eos, which bursts out of the ground).
  • Kett Ascendants are recurring boss-level enemies that never touch the ground as long as they're alive.
• Power Up Let Down:
  • A great many of the AVP cryo-pod perks are rather... underwhelming, if not downright useless. At best, a player may get something useful every once in a while, but far more often they'll receive a better quantity and/or quality of rewards by adventuring normally.
  • The overwhelming majority of Ryder's powers definitely fall under this category, with the exception of a specific, Charge-centered Vanguard setup. Max out every offensive tech and biotic power there is, equip as many power damage booster mods as you can and spam combo detonations like there's no tomorrow - you still won't come even remotely close to the sheer damage output a tier 6 Soldier or Infiltrator with one or two good guns can unleash on the battlefield.
  • Any of power evolutions that give a single-target power (like Incinerate or Concussive Shot) a blast radius. Due to enemies not clustering together the way they did in previous games, the upgrade will rarely prove useful.
  • Disturbingly, the entire character level system falls victim to this. Enemies level with the player and receive a continuous bonus to their resilience while Ryder's health and shields barely improve. This has several nasty consequences:
    • Researching and deploying higher weapons tiers doesn't mean you need fewer shots to kill something - it's borderline mandatory if you want to avoid falling behind. For instance, a Black Widow I needs two headshots to kill a Kett Destined on Normal. A Black Widow X also needs two headshots to kill a Destined on Normal because by the point you can unlock the BW X (level 80), the Destined has so much more health that it cancels the rifle's additional damage out. Another one: don't expect to breathe through the prologue mission on an NG+ just because you now have a level X gun instead of level I - your damage output is identical to your first run's. A similar mechanic applies to armor and especially shields, which means that unlike in the original trilogy where Shepard grew noticeably more powerful with every level and every upgrade, you'll never gain an actual edge over your enemies in Andromeda no matter what you do.
    • Damage-dealing powers have a very narrow range in which they can be improved. Once their maximum potential is reached (which can be done very early on since there are almost no restrictions on how to evolve powers), they become less and less effective the more Ryder levels up.
    • Worst of all, once you hit level 80 and max out your favorite weapons including mods, there's absolutely no way to get any stronger. This means that you actually grow weaker with every level you gain from this point onwards because the enemies continue to gain in strength and toughness while you do not.
    • For another example on how strange this mechanic is: your squad mates reach their peak performance at level 54. By that point they'll have up to three times more health and shields than Ryder has at their level cap of 132 with all skills maxed out.
• Precision F-Strike: A lot of characters will throw in the occasional swear word when the situation is fittingly grim or they're sufficiently pissed. Ryder is no slouch in that department either; a primarily sarcastic protagonist will even drift into Sir Swears-a-Lot territory.
• Precursors: The Jaardan, the creators of what is now known as the Remnant and the huge, impossibly advanced structures associated with them. Gets even more impressive when Ryder uncovers that the Jaardan created the angara. Like, from scratch. Everyone except Jaal and his people is suitably impressed. Or terrified. Or both. No-one really knows what happened to them or if they're still out there somewhere, but the Scourge is eventually revealed to be a weapon someone deployed against the Jaardan in a devastating war that forced them to flee the Heleus Cluster. One NPC also mentions that a handful of the Remnant warships Ryder sent against the Archon's fleet briefly linked up to Meridian after the battle and then left for parts unknown, implying the Jaardan's present-day location might yet be uncovered in a sequel.
• Product Placement:
  • Oddly enough to SpaceX, the private aerospace company currently working on creating reusable space launch systems. According to the codex, SpaceX was vital to the efforts that eventually led humanity to discovering the Mars Prothean Archives that gave them mass effect technology.
  • A model of the SpaceX rocket is one of the first model ships the player may collect. The only one ahead of SpaceX? The Normandy SR 2 of Mass Effect 2 and 3, of course.
• Pronoun Trouble: Discussed between an angaran diplomat and the asari working at the Nexus Cultural Exchange, with the former asking the latter about which pronouns to use for the asari. The asari explains that it depends on the asari in question.
• Properly Paranoid: Played With. During the task 'Messages to the Nexus', Ryder is required to go to message terminals on Aya to collect personal messages from the angaras to the Nexus. One angara asked them what drove them to cross darkspace and that angara believes they fled from something terrible and it might follow them here. He's definitely right about the first part, considering the Initiative leaders knew about the Reapers at that point.
• Pun:
  • Some of the mission names are pretty punny, like the one on Kadara that revolves around identifying the source of illegal weapons caches. Its title? 'Cold Hard Cache'.
  • One comes close to being an Interface Spoiler: The mission 'Out of the Frying Pan' seems innocuous enough, until the person you are trying to locate turns out to be imprisoned by a group of cannibals. There's even an actual frying pan.
• Punch-Clock Villain: At least one Outcast met on Kadara is just doing the job to provide for his little brother.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!:
  • Kallo is not happy to witness Sara Ryder's awkward attempt at flirting with Suvi. Even the subtitles get in on it.
  • Choosing the casual response to the Cardinal's speech on Voeld has Ryder drop this line.
  Ryder: Except I'm gonna fuck. Your. Shit. Up. How's that for great?
• The Purge:
  • If the Charlatan takes control of Kadara Port, near all the non-angara inhabitants vanish from the place. If Sloane Kelly remains in charge, it's the other way around, Reyes' attempt on her life prompting her to beef up security.
  • The Primus' first order of business after the Archon dies is killing every kett still loyal to him.
• Purple Is Powerful:
  • There're two indicators that let you know you're fighting a boss: skull symbols below their health bar, and their name written fat in purple instead of the usual white.
  • A bunch of Ryder's squad mates also have a marked preference for wearing purple.
  • The asari are widely considered the Milky Way's most powerful species, and their ark has a lot of purple in its design, most notably the exterior hull.
  • The biotic Barrier power improves Ryder's shield strength and grows stronger the more skill points are invested in the biotic skill tree. Putting even one point in it changes Ryder's blue shield bar to purple, the color that's generally associated with biotics.

• Ragnarök Proofing: Remnant structures and constructs appear extremely resistant to wear and tear, showing little signs of damage even after centuries of exposure to the harshest of environmental conditions. Scanning defeated Architects reveals various minor damages related to their former habitat, but none of that prevented them from putting up one hell of a fight against Ryder's team, and they're still very active after the beating they just suffered at Ryder's hands. Most impressively, even the asteroid belt that used to be H-047c (the planned turian homeworld in Heleus) harbors fully functional Remnant Vaults despite not even being on a planet anymore.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Ryder's team, as per Mass Effect franchise norm. Let's see - we have a rather unassuming hero who inherited their position from their father under the worst possible circumstances, a slightly anti-social rogue asari academic who's the leading expert on Remnant technology, a failed cop turned crisis response officer, an insanely powerful human biotic who's somewhat detached from her own species after she was trained by asari because nobody else could handle her, a truly ancient krogan warrior and ex-pirate who's fought in just about every war and conflict that went down in the past fourteen centuries, a shady turian smuggler and mercenary with a heart of gold, and a native alien resistance fighter with a stated interest in those curious newcomers to the neighborhood. While they're off fighting, their ship is maintained by a homeless kid turned starship mechanic, a brilliant but absent-minded scientist, an asari doctor who grew up in the Milky Way's most notorious Wretched Hive, and a salarian pilot with an unusually strong memory even by the standards of his species. Together they save the day on countless occasions, and - to quote Cora - they do it in style.
• Random Drop: A system present in many ways:
  • Hostiles have loot lists for consumables as well as for faction-specific items - a kett for instance will never drop a human weapon, but has a chance to drop random kett equipment, salvage, and/or crafting components, plus all types of weapon mods and consumables scaled by their rarity. The more powerful the enemy was, the higher the number, amount, and quality of the items they may drop.
  • Containers come in several tiers that determine the quality of their contents. Basic ones rarely contain more than some cheap salvage or a single consumable while boss-level chests are guaranteed to contain at least one high-level weapon or armor piece, a bunch of valuable salvage items, and ultra-rare augmentations and/or resources.
  • Any augmentation that has been unlocked by spending research points is added to the levelled loot tables, and since you get only a single guaranteed sample upon researching it, it's recommended to unlock the good ones early to maximize your chances of finding more.
• Readings Are Off the Scale: Crops up every now and then, most often in connection to the Scourge or Remnant technology. Peebee is among the first characters to use this phrase almost verbatim to let us know that yes, reactivating a Remnant Vault is indeed Serious Business.
  Peebee: Readings are off the charts! (glances about nervously) Really, really off the charts...
• Really 700 Years Old:
  • In chronological terms at least, Scott and Sara's father Alec Ryder counts as this. Being among the oldest of the twenty thousand humans - barring noncombatants such as scientists who could plausibly be older - on the Hyperion Ark when they set off (56 years old, born in 2129), Alec is revived upon arrival in the Andromeda galaxy at the 'age' of 690. Of course, that doesn't even take into consideration any of the asari and krogan who made the trip; both species with life expectancies at, around or exceeding a millennium.
  • Drack is the oldest krogan shown in the series at around 1400 years old at the start of the Andromeda project. Counting time spent in stasis he's now over 2000 years old, making him one of the oldest beings encountered in the games.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Most of the Initiative, despite most of them not appearing to be at first.
  • Kandros and Kesh are the most level-headed Initiative leaders, always being polite, friendly, and reasonable towards Ryder. However, Kandros does try to stop a protest by force, and will grumble if Ryder resolves it peacefully.
  • Director Addison downplays it. She is the most hostile member of Initiative leadership at the start. She tells you that she never even cared for pleasantries with Ryder Sr., and she now she cares for them even less. As she says, the work of the Initiative is never finished, and they're always one major disaster away from total collapse. She also signed off on several projects with harmful consequences to the Initiative (such as the Three Sabres). Despite this, she helps Ryder as much as she can, and genuinely congratulates Ryder for his/her successes.
  • Director Tann zig-zags it. After the mission to the Remnant space station, he admits that his ordering you to stay away from it was wrong, and pledges the Initiative's full support. Tann largely has two failings: aggressively enforcing his own propaganda, such as having Keri T'Vessa arrested if her documentary series doesn't fit the narrative, and demonstrating Fantastic Racism on multiple occasions toward the krogan and, despite his efforts to hide it, towards the angara as well.
  • All of the ark captains are shown to be extremely reasonable individuals. The captain of the salarian ark will throw all of his weight behind Ryder if he ends up as the Pathfinder. The captain of the asari ark is quick to throw her support behind Ryder and despite intensely disliking Sarisa only strips Sarisa of Pathfinder status after learning of something truly egregious. The turian ark captain is never seen but is implied to have had a good working relationship with her Pathfinder and sacrificed her life to save as many of her passengers as possible. Most notable is Nomi Dunn, the captain of the human ark. She is the only person with the authority to strip Ryder of Pathfinder status and arguably would have been justified in doing so after Alec ignored the chain of succession. Despite this, Dunn decides to give Ryder a chance and remains one of their strongest allies, essentially making the game's story post-Habitat 7 possible.
• Re-Cut: Somewhere between this and George Lucas Altered Version. Some of the earliest updates and patches were to clean up the notoriously bad character and facial animation. The 'My face is tired' scene was completely reanimated, where instead of Addison having static body language and a blank expression she was instead much more emotive (she actually looked stressed, making the famous line seem more like Buffy Speak instead of something to take literally).
• Red Shirt: No prologue mission would be complete without a minor character biting the dust to show off how serious the situation is. Here it's Kirkland, one of the guys on your squad who got shot dead by kett soldiers before you even find him after the crash.
• Regenerating Shield, Static Health: While the game's shield regeneration mechanic is identical to those of its predecessors, Andromeda hits a middle ground between ME 2 and ME 3 as far as health regeneration is concerned. It shares ME 2's one-piece health bar instead of ME 3's segmented one, but Ryder's health only regenerates to a maximum of 50% on its own. How long that takes depends on various skills and equipment bonuses. Full healing can only be achieved by picking up medkits, visiting a forward station, or evolving Cora's Shield Boost power for health regen.
• Reincarnation: The angaran religion, which is never described in detail, is heavily influenced by reincarnation. One mission on the angaran homeworld requires Ryder to track down and use the reincarnation of a particular angara. The amazing thing is, it works. However, since angara can only reincarnate as their own direct descendants, some Milky Way scientists hypothesize that some form of genetic memory, as seen in the rachni queens, may be involved. The relvelation that the angara were created by the Jaardan further muddies these waters.
• Relationship Values: Unlike in previous Mass Effect games, the game tracks Ryder's relationship with the crew members and there's a menu tab where you can review Ryder's relationship statuses.
• Renegade Splinter Faction:
  • The Exiles, for the Initiative. Having been banished from the Nexus for various crimes (mainly involvement in the mutiny that happened before Hyperion arrived), they turn Space Pirate to survive and encounter the angara before the Initiative does, blackening its name and forcing Ryder to fight even harder in an already uphill battle to gain the angaras' trust.
  • The Roekaar, for the Angara Resistance. Their leader Akksul was a charismatic Resistance leader who was traumatized by experiences in kett captivity. When the Nexus arrived in Heleus, he came to the conclusion that the angara should drive out or destroy all aliens, not just the kett. The Roekaar attack any aliens on sight and will murder other angara for 'collaborating' with them. Jaal's loyalty mission involves discrediting or killing Akksul; Jaal prefers the former, which leads to the Roekaar mostly disbanding.
• Required Party Member: As in previous games, each teammate has their own loyalty mission where they cannot be swapped out. Jaal is also mandatory for the mission where you rescue the Moshae.
• Replay Value:
  • Players are asked to choose between playing a male or female Ryder. Unlike the previous Mass Effect games in which the male and female Shepard are explicitly the same character, albeit with a Gender Swap (and different romance options), Sara and Scott Ryder are both characters within the narrative, and though the one you aren't playing is explicitly sidelined early in the game, they remain present and relevant. They also have different backgrounds and personalities, and many of their dialogue options and responses and interactions with squadmates (romance notwithstanding) differ, creating a different gameplay experience.
  • Engaging in different romance options opens up some side-quests and events that are unique to that relationship.
  • The Wide Open Sandbox nature of the game means that, without the aid of a walkthrough guide, many optional side-quests can be missed on an initial playthrough. Given that a few quests (specifically the collection quests that turn up on virtually every planet) are triggered at random, even with a guide one may not do everything. Also, even outside of the gameplay itself, some of the world maps are huge and offer lots of nooks and crannies to explore.
• Retcon:
  • Obviously, the Andromeda Initiative was never mentioned in the original trilogy, despite getting launched a little after the second game. Especially noteworthy in the third game, where after Thessia the asari councilwoman states that they will have to make plans for the continuation of their civilization, which is exactly what the Initiative is all about.
  • The N7 Piranha shotgun got retconned in order to appear in this game. In Mass Effect 3 it was stated to have been designed after the initial Reaper invasion due to the sudden need for a powerful weapon for species who had trouble handling heavier guns. In Andromeda, it's stated that it had already reached the functioning prototype stage early enough to be included in the Initiative's equipment stores.
  • After Patch 1.09, the Elite Destroyer in the H-047c was renamed to the slightly less alarming 'Progenitor'.
• The Reveal:
  • On Voeld, it turns out the kett turn prisoners into more kett.
  • Examining Alec Ryder's memories reveals Jien Garson was murdered after the Nexus reached Andromeda. Also, the Initiative believed Commander Shepard's story about the Reapers when the Council didn't and accelerated their timetable, making it out of the Milky Way barely in time. Alec has recordings of distress signals from Palaven and Earth.
  • Nakmor Morda isn't a bad krogan. Bad-tempered, sure, but not bad.
  • A side-quest that begins after finding the salarian Ark has an STG operative wonder whether someone on-board that ship deliberately let the kett take it, though at first his claims have little proof. It turns out that yes, several salarians did surrender their people to the kett.
  • The angara were created by the Jaardan, the race also responsible for the Remnant.
  • Meridian isn't a Vault. It's also not the city-ship. It's an entire Dyson Sphere.
• Revisiting the Roots: The game in general bears more resemblance to the story and gameplay of the original Mass Effect. Specifically:
  • The emphasis is on exploring planets and actually dropping down to find resources. Vehicular gameplay returns in the form of the Nomad ATV, with MASSIVE maps to drive around.
  • The soundtrack regains the synthesized '80s techno' roots.
  • Environments are much larger, combat has a lot more vertical aspect and the Take Cover! element is a passive feature like in the first game rather than a necessity as in 2 and 3.
  • Inventory and resource management is a major feature, with a limit cap forcing you to dismantle and reassess different items.
• Revolvers Are Just Better:
  • T he Sidewinder, which is a precision weapon that is as close as you can get to a proper revolver in the game.
  • The Talon (basically a shotgun in pistol form) returns from Mass Effect 3 and still relies on rotating internal ammo blocks to prevent shaver jam and misfires, making it fall under this trope once again.
• Rewatch Bonus:
  • The early part of the game is chock full of Foreshadowing, Brick Jokes, Meaningful Background Events, and other things which are Hilarious or Harsher in Hindsight that part of the fun of a replay is seeing how much of it you can find.
  • Many cutscenes play out differently depending upon decisions and outcomes of various missions.
  • Playing as one gender and then going back and playing as another gives the game a whole new feeling, not just in terms of romances, etc., but also because the performances of the male and female Ryders are so different they change atmosphere of the game.
  • As the entries under Guide Dang It! and All There in the Manual show, there are many random and out-of-the-way mission triggers that may be missed on the first playthrough.
• Riddle for the Ages: Absolutely nothing is ever revealed about the jaardan. Who were they? What did they look like? Where did they go? Where are they now? Why haven't they returned, and what will happen if they do? Do they even still exist? What the hell happened centuries ago that someone/something saw fit to deploy the Scourge against them? What were their reasons for terraforming the whole cluster and creating the angara to populate it? None of these mysteries gets resolved in the game, only hinted at.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter:
  • Once again, The Hero can acquire a Space Hamster as a pet. It's even an in-universe example - Sara Ryder all but starts squeeing over how cute the little guy is when she sees it the first time.
  • Players of the deluxe edition also can obtain a 'space monkey'-style 'pyjak' creature.
• Ridiculously Fast Construction:
  • When Ryder founds an outpost, they activate a homing beacon, the screen briefly fades to black and voilà: instant buildings everywhere! It's compounded further by the game's utter lack of day-night-cycles which gives the impression of no time having passed at all. Justified, as all the buildings are obviously prefabricated, so they only have to be set down on solid, flat ground and you're almost done.
  • Larger Remnant structures often have nifty bridges that are assembled from hexagonal segments out of nowhere. No matter how fast you make Ryder run or drive, construction always stays one step ahead of them.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge:
  • When Ryder and their team find out the Archon has been horrifically experimenting on hundreds, if not thousands of salarians after capturing the salarian ark, they stare at the pile of disposed and rotting bodies in utter horror. In the very next room over, they're attacked by a group of kett, and are overcome with a blinding urge to make every single one of them pay for what they've done.
  • This is how Ryder calls for aid against the Archon during the Final Battle. They tell the Tempest to call every single person they've met in the game and ask them if they're ready to get 'Fucking Payback' against the kett. Every pissed-off angarian, turian, asari, krogan, outlaw, and other factions Ryder has met show up in waves and blow up all the kett they see.
• Romance Sidequest: Ryder can romance several members of their squad and the Tempest crew, including Peebee, Vetra, and Jaal^note as bisexual options; Cora and Liam exclusively heterosexual options; and Gil and Suvi as exclusively homosexual options. There are additional light romances outside of the crew on the various worlds the player visits that Ryder can engage in. Patch 1.05 upgraded one of the latter - Reyes Vidal on Kadara - to a full-fledged bisexual romance partner that cuts off all Tempest romances, and patch 1.08 updates Jaal's romance to be available for male and female Ryders alike.
• Rule of Three:
  • Three Remnant monoliths seal the entrance to each planet's Vault and need to be reactivated before the Vault itself can be entered. A lot of these monoliths require three Remnant glyphs to be tracked down before the activation can commence.
  • Architects have three conduits - one on each leg - that must be destroyed one after the other, and they cycle through three combat phases while you're attempting to do that.
  • One sidequest in New Tuchanka on Elaaden pits Ryder and two bickering krogan warriors against a pack of three Fiends at once. Thankfully, the arena is large enough to have some room to manoeuvre.
  • Another sidequest on the Nexus sends Ryder to Voeld to do the exact same thing, only this time it's three boss-level Fiends simultaneously, and with a Level 1 Cold Hazard thrown in for good measure.
  • During the final battle, Ryder must interact with three consoles to sever the Archon's connection to Meridian's control systems.
• Running Gag:
  • Lexi is constantly reminding the Tempest crew of outstanding medical exams she's scheduled for them, which the crew is constantly trying to skip in return.
  • Jaal awkwardly asking his traveling companions what they do for 'fun' as an icebreaker.
  • Suvi trying to find a way to safely eat Heleus flora, to Kallo and Lexi's increasing exasperation.
• Sadistic Choice: Par for the course in a Bioware game:
  • During the mission to rescue Moshae Sjefa, the Cardinal offers to free the imprisoned angara in the exaltation center in exchange for your leaving the base intact. You have a weapon that can destroy the base, but there won't be enough time to get the imprisoned angara out of the base before it blows. Your are forced to choose between sacrificing innocent angara or leaving the base intact so the kett can exalt more innocents.
  • Dealing with the ancient angaran A.I. has one. Kill the A.I. and save the angaran it's zapping, the angaran you just freed from captivity, and who has a family, or let it live.
  • The quest 'Contagion' ends with the woman that carries a fatal, incurable, rapidly-communicable, and worst of all, cross-species virus being held at gunpoint by the Roekaar—a xenophobic Angaran faction that happens to be immune and carrying a sample of said virus as a bioweapon. She will beg you to kill her so that you can kill him and stop a future genocide, but SAM will tell you that the virus is decayed, possibly beyond use. Do you allow the innocent woman to die to save other innocents, or do you save her^note and risk letting the genocidal bigot go with one of the deadliest pathogens in the universe?
  • During 'Hunting the Archon,' you have to choose between saving Drack's scouts and helping Pathfinder Raeka save the last imprisoned salarians. Save the scouts, and Raeka dies, leaving the less experienced Captain Hayjer as salarian Pathfinder. Save the salarians, and Drack takes it as a personal betrayal. Either way, after the mission, you are treated to footage of the aliens you didn't save being herded into an exaltation center.^note
• Saharan Shipwreck: It probably isn't a coincidence that Elaaden, the desert moon, has a crashed Remnant ship dominating the skyline.
• Samus Is a Girl: As part of the main quest on Havarl, Ryder and co. have to find the remains of a deceased angaran hero. On finding their body with the help of a Roekaar, they realise said warrior was a woman.
• Sand Worm: Elaaden is home to a physics-defying robotic version called the Remnant Abyssal that moves around by constantly disassembling its tail and reassembling the matter at its tip while it plows through the dunes. It's completely harmless as long as you don't happen to stand anywhere near the point of impact when it hits the ground, though it looks intimidating enough that even Drack is unnerved by its presence. It can be seen (and heard) from the in-game equivalent of miles away.
• Sanity Slippage:
  • As Lexi realises on Elaaden, an unfortunate side-effect of the defrosting can result in a bad case of this, which can't be cured, just alleviated.
  • A quest on Voeld requires Ryder to find an angaran Resistance fighter, who went missing. They're found torturing a kett trooper for information on their family. While calm and relatively rational, the angara is too out of her mind with grief to realize she's wasting her time.
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens:
  • The kett are a quasi-religious Knight Templar race replete with many parallels to the Nazis that are heavily implied to control a vast empire outside of the Heleus Cluster. The reason they sent the Archon to Heleus is simple: to 'exalt' the entire cluster, which basically means 'turn everyone with desirable biological traits there into more kett, kill the rest'. To lay it on further, it's their method of reproduction. They neither make nor accept any offer of peaceful coexistence; the best you can manage is defeat the current invasion force, never knowing when the next one will roll into town.
  • The angara, while reasonable and peaceful overall, have the Roekaar, an alien-hating fraction that hates your guts just for being human, asari or anything else not angaran, no matter how much you do to help the species in their struggle against the kett (not to mention the Roekaar's racism and idea to render planets lifeless to kill off all non-angara calls to mind the kett Archon's master plan for Exaltation). They usually shoot first and forget the questions, and you'll never fully get rid of them.
• Scavenger World:
  • Kadara. Most of the resources are up in the port. Out in the wastelands, people have to get by on whatever the exiles took when they left the Nexus that were left down there after Sloane learned about the toxic water (which, after several months, is not very much). Problem is, most of the people living down there have come to the realization that it's easier to take someone's stuff when they're dead.
  • Elaaden manages to be worse, thanks to having all the cast-offs too violent and crazy for Kadara, and having no real civilization outside of the krogan colony (and the krogan aren't sharing).
• Scenery Gorn:
  • Some of the systems that can be visited have been utterly destroyed by the Scourge. One in particular has the damn thing hogging up half the screen, and only a few planets still around.
  • In a conversation with Cora, Drack will describe what he remembers of seeing the aftermath of the Rachni Wars. It falls squarely into this trope, even though Drack was born centuries after it ended.
    Cities collapsing into rubble from the tunnels they dug, nests still burning centuries after my people burnt them out, and the bleached skulls of Rachni queens in the dust.
• Scenery Porn:
  • The 2016 trailer has plenty of gorgeous alien vistas, often with other planets visible in the sky.
  • A Remnant vault looks breathtaking, especially in 4k.
  • Players can now see any planets or anomalies in the place they're in outside the Tempest's windows, and they look amazing.
  • Voeld, once the blizzards let up. Mile after mile of snowy mountains, with a gorgeous aurora in the sky. The ice caverns and frozen bodies of water are just as captivating.
  • Ryder will even admit this is the only thing H-047c has going for it. It's utterly dead and destroyed, but the views are spectacular.
  • Meridian is absolutely gorgeous. Tragically, you can't take the Nomad out for a spin on it after everything's over.
  • Frankly, every location in the game looks awesome in some way thanks to the extremely improved graphics over the original trilogy. If your console or gaming rig is powerful enough to play ME:A on 4k and ultra-high settings, chances are you'll find yourself distracted by the gorgeous vistas all around you as often as you'll be shooting at something.
  • The Forge on Havarl features a moment where the player is instructed to look over the gorgeous mountain vista their path offers. Jaal even notes it's gorgeous.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • A great many of the interrupt prompts you sometimes get during cutscenes are detrimental, with consequences like getting chewed out by someone or losing support for the final battle all the way up to forfeiting the ability to romance certain team members. Read very carefully what exactly the prompt says before you hit that button. General rule of thumb: Don't use them. Especially not during loyalty missions. They almost always do the opposite of what the squad mate in question wants Ryder to do. (Conversely, not clicking the prompt fast enough in certain situations may also result in a potential romance going straight into the friendzone.)
  • The Remnant Destroyer is a massive robotic enemy susceptible to Sub System Damage - its two rapid-fire energy cannons are separate entities that can be shot off to reduce its withering firepower. While that may seem like a good tactic, it actually makes the thing even more dangerous because for every weapon it looses, it channels the surplus energy into its motive systems. With both cannons down, Destroyers can cross even the largest rooms frighteningly fast to close in on their target, and once they're there, they proceed to spam a short-ranged but very damaging energy field that can knock Ryder out of commission in seconds. It's much easier and safer to just shoot their large central cannon when it opens for charging.
  • In-universe, the kett have a tendency to just leave their vehicles and technology just lying around, unclaimed, in the open, where any angara could stumble across them... at which point it turns out the kett have booby-trapped it, and it explodes. The angara who tells Ryder this mentions they only started doing it after the angara did it to them first.
  • In the Remnant City's research sector there's a so-called shield console connected to two inactive shield pylons that, if activated, would cover the area's most easily defensible position on the way back. Interfacing with the console does indeed power up the shields, but they're the damaging red ones instead of the helpful blue ones, which makes the following battle one hell of a lot more difficult, and there's no way to turn them off again.
  • In one corner of Elaaden, there's a small group of Scavengers standing around a crate. They're not hostile to Ryder, unless of course you decide you just have to open the crate. At which point they attack you.
  • There's a lone kett building on Eos in the middle of nowhere near the western edge of the op zone, with a big juicy generator just begging to be switched off. Do so and the rather unassuming cage behind you sics an Ancient Eiroch on you, a boss-level Smash Mook that you really don't want to fight inside of a building with almost no room to manoeuvre.
• Secret Test of Character: One of the first quests attainable on Aya, a trader asking Ryder to help with some missing supplies, turns out to be one of these from Evfra at the end.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Cora and SAM can have a discussion on AI in which SAM argues that true AI are so rare that there can't exist a sufficient sample size to determine if AI is always a crapshoot. Cora counters by saying that while that may be true, any rogue AI is automatically a serious threat to organics. SAM counters that by saying that if an entire society believes AI are automatically hostile, then the AI will inevitably become hostile.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Although not a direct sequel to the original trilogy, ME:A is both the next title in the Mass Effect franchise and significantly easier than any of its predecessors - at least once you're past the sadistically tough major battles against the kett in the prologue mission. The Player Character quickly becomes exceedingly versatile and very difficult to kill, all squad mates are powerful assets made of tank-grade composite armor, and there are a lot of hard-hitting guns with potentially unlimited ammo available. Weapons handling in general is notably smoother, too, since even the most powerful guns have little to no climb or sway. If you play on Normal difficulty and actually manage to get Ryder killed in combat, you either did it on purpose or something went horribly wrong.
• Sequel Hook:
  • The Arks that have arrived in Andromeda were for humanity, turians, salarians, and asari, and the krogan were explicitly denied one. However, Director Tann explains that a quarian ark was also in the works, but they have had to postpone transit due to a desire to include accommodations for the drell, hanar, and other races, and their ark should not be expected for some time. During the epilogue party, a worker alerts Ryder that the Initiative has picked up a distress call from the quarian ark, but they haven't been able to pinpoint the ark's location. More alarmingly, the message isn't a call for help. It tells anyone receiving it to stay away.
  • Prior to leaving for Andromeda, the Initiative received massive amounts of funding from a Mysterious Backer, who is subject to tons of fan-theorizing, and who were also responsible for sending an agent along on the expedition who murdered Jien Garson. The identity of the backer and the agent, as well as their motives for murdering Garson, remain unknown.
  • Ellen Ryder is also Not Quite Dead thanks to being put in cryo by Alec and being smuggled aboard the Initiative under a false name. She remains in cryo until a cure for her condition is found. It's possible to miss it completely if a certain optional side mission is not completed prior to the end game.
  • The Archon is the agent of a larger kett empire that is causing trouble in many places throughout the Andromeda galaxy. Preparations for their expected future attacks on the Initiative and its angaran allies are already underway. In addition The Stinger shows the Primus, the Archon's former second-in-command, looking over Meridian from the shadows whether or not Ryder accepted her offer. Further, if the player leaves 'Dissention in the Ranks' until after defeating the Archon, it reveals the Primus has contacted the Kett Empire for back-up.
  • The fate of the Jardaan race is unknown, as is their reason for creating the angara and the Remnant network. Ryder and SAM speculate that they are likely to return to finish what they started.
  • The identity and fate of the race that created the Scourge to fight the Jardaan are complete unknowns.
  • After the credits, talking with one of the Hyperion's newly defrosted crew reveals seven of the Remnant ships survived the final battle, linked up with Meridian, and then left for parts unknown. Meanwhile, another tells Ryder that there's apparently another Vault out there, not one of the ones Ryder previously explored, in need of fixing.
  • If Knight is killed at the end of the Firefighters sidequest, her son vows to continue her anti-AI terrorism as vengeance.
  • One optional side-quest reveals that the arks were launched during the events of Mass Effect 3 when the survival of the Milky Way was uncertain, and Ryder is left with the impression that they are the last survivors of their home galaxy. Whether this ends up being true, or of the revelation becomes public knowledge, is left unrevealed.
• Sequence Breaking:
  • A minor case in the Architects. When the one on Eos makes its Dynamic Entry, everyone freaks out and starts wondering what the hell that thing is, as the player is meant to encounter this one first. But in reality you can fight them in any order, and if you do, nobody's reactions are changed to accommodate.
  • A very minor but quite prevalent example can happen aboard the Tempest when certain squad mate quests advance to the next step. The questlog usually demands reading the latest emails first, which in turn tasks Ryder with talking to the respective comrades next. Talking to them without reading the mail advances the quest just the same but marks that first mission objective as failed. In some cases, this will also fail a condition for advancing romance.
  • Players are clearly meant to face the Cardinal as their first Ascendant. She is the first mandatory one in the story, and she boasts about her shields (drawing the player's attention to them) and explains why she has these powers above other kett. That said, the player can fight two others on Voeld and Eos before her with no clue about who or what they are.
  • A quest on Elaaden has Ryder looking for a guy's sister, who's run off to become a weapons dealer. It's possible, if the player doesn't talk to him, to stumble upon her base of operations anyway, completing the quest before it's ever begun. Of course, doing this doesn't earn the player any experience. Even if Ryder did talk to the guy beforehand, the quest can still be sequence-broken by accidentally finding clues as to her location in the wrong order, skipping several steps in the process (and some games also just skip the 'multiple steps' option and tell the player exactly where to go from the start).
  • Another randomized Fetch Quest on Elaaden concerns datapads left behind by a scavenger who ran afoul of a creepy cult. He's supposed to be found dead at the end of the quest, but you can stumble upon his body at any time, and the game will register it. In practice, that means the quest completes automatically upon finding the last datapad instead of marking the respective location on the map, which can be quite jarring if you found the scav and thought nothing about it; his corpse doesn't have any obvious connection to the quest, and the task itself suddenly fizzles out without a proper ending.
  • There are numerous other examples of missions that can be accomplished out of order. On Eos, the final notes belonging to an Alliance researcher can be discovered if one stumbles upon an unmarked vault, completing a task that is supposed to begin by finding several randomly placed datapads in another part of the planet.
• Serial Escalation: 'Guys, guys! Remember how Shepard came Back from the Dead once? Well, what if we have Ryder do it thrice? Once in the prologue, a second time during the science-lab trap on the Archon's flagship, and then again during the finale?'
  Ryder:Can't say the experience is improving.
• Serious Business:
  • To Alec Ryder, his 'good luck rock', apparently. Keep in mind that everyone aboard the arks was only allowed to bring a very limited amount of baggage with them, with several sources implying that only a single item of personal value was permitted. That didn't stop Alec from hauling a big-ass hunk of granite^note across dark space just because it saved his life once when he fell during a climbing tour.
  • An initial suggestion of Liam's to have a movie night quickly mutates into a massive string of quests forcing Ryder to travel all over the Heleus Cluster, just to get everything needed for it. Liam will even point out eventually he had just meant for it to be a bit of harmless fun.
  • Popcorn. People want it so much it's actually contraband on the Nexus. As Vetra points out to Ryder, it's a tasty snack. Of course people are going to get serious about it.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: Monster infighting is not only available for players to use to their advantage, the concept is actively discussed in-game, with several scenarios in which Ryder and his team are encouraged not to engage groups of mooks as they battle it out. Often happens between Remnant and humanoid enemies, as well as between humanoids and animals, and different humanoid factions (especially the Outcasts and Collective on Kadara). A several points in the game, Ryder gains the ability to spawn and control Remnant, sending them up against other Remnant.
• Sexy Discretion Shot: Some of the romance scenes end with a discreet fade to black before the characters have sex. Others... do not.
• Ship Tease:
  • Peebee and Jaal seem to have a lot of chemistry, and she flirts with him more than any other cast member to the point that Jaal directly propositions her to mate (although it's revealed that he and Ryder set it up to tease her back).
  • Peebee at one point makes the suggestion that she and Liam's disagreements are built on Belligerent Sexual Tension, wonders if they'd have a relationship that'd be 'slapstick funny'. Liam, however, doesn't seem interested in her.
  • Lexi has an obvious crush on Drack, but he doesn't return any affections. One dialogue thread also suggests something between Lexi and Harry, the doctor on board the Hyperion.
  • Vetra at one point admits to being aroused by Suvi's voice.
  • Drack questions a romanced Cora about her relationship with Ryder, and she asks if he's jealous. When he teases her back and says she couldn't handle this much krogan, she says she'd rather kiss a thresher maw—to which he says he knows some that are single.
  • Jaal at one point notes that Cora is in perfect physical condition and an embarrassed Cora expresses surprise that he was looking. Jaal states, 'The mind wants what it...wants'. At another point, Cora asks Jaal to scoot over in the Nomad because it's too hot. He asks if she means 'hot' or 'hot'.
  • Depending on the playing style, shipteasing is also possible by way of Ryder's flirting with assorted characters, with the option of full-out romancing some of them.
• Shipper on Deck:
  • Vetra's sister, Sid, wholeheartedly approves if Ryder and Vetra are in a relationship and gushes over how cute they are together. She goes on to make an Incredibly Lame Pun about how Ryder 'found the path to Vetra's heart' and squees over how adorable they look together because Ryder is 'soooo tiny'.
  • Sahuna, Jaal's mother, is very supportive if Ryder and Jaal get together. She's quick to accept Ryder into the family and later asks about the human birth process 'for obvious reasons'.
  • Lexi is all for the idea of Ryder entering into a romantic relationship with a squad mate and supports whoever their choice may be.
• Shock and Awe:
  • ME:A sees the return of a wide variety of electric attacks available to Ryder, from Disruptor Ammo to Overload to a Beehive Barrier power that electrocutes anything close to it.
  • The game also introduces a new environmental hazard: streams and ponds of a mysterious, electrically charged liquid that's prevalent in most Remnant installations; touching it deals massive amounts of damage.
  • Speaking of Remnant - one of the Architects' most dangerous attacks is a massive, cover-piercing electric shockwave that deals high initial damage and even more over time if you don't move Ryder out of the area of effect.
  • Kett grenades don't go boom like Ryder's do. They instead unleash what you might call a localized thunderstorm trapped under an orange shield dome that deals considerable damage over time and lingers for quite a while.
  • One ultra-rare gun augmentation changes the projectile type to a tightly focused stream of lightning discharges.
• Short-Range Shotgun: In full effect, mostly due to their ridiculously wide spread. If they (like the N7 Crusader or the kett Dhan shotgun) happen to shoot slugs or plasma balls instead of pellets, they're either so inaccurate you won't hit anything beyond point-blank range, or the projectile simply disappears after a couple of steps.
  • Averted in patch 1.06 as The N7 crusader actually is pin point accurate after aforementioned patch, causes more damage than most sniper rifles and has more range than most assault rifles AND takes advantage of headshot multipliers. Ammo has also been increased.
• Shown Their Work:
  • The writers record radiation dose in the unit mSv, or millisieverts, which is a commonly used unit. The level encountered at Hazard Level 3 is about the maximum dose allowed annually for working in a nuclear plant, every second.
  • On the other hand: Hazard Level 1 is listed as around 0.04 mSv/hr. In the game, this won't kill you very quickly, but it will will eventually prove fatal. In real life this exposure rate is too low to cause even the mildest symptoms of radiation sickness.
  • The turian scientist in the Nexus' research lab correctly uses the term 'meteoroid' to describe small stellar objects on an orbit around a star. Most people tend to call these things 'meteors' or 'meteorites' instead, but those terms don't become valid until the object in question has entered a planet's atmosphere. 'Asteroid' would be another matter since the only thing that sets them apart from meteoroids is their size (and there isn't a clearly defined line where the meteoroid ends and the asteroid begins), but that matter notwithstanding, it's a refreshing case of someone at Bioware having done their homework.
• Sickly Green Glow: The game's creators took some liberties with the design of uranium nodes. On the highest graphics settings, these things resemble tiberium growths a lot more than the silvery metal that uranium actually is in Real Life, glowing intense enough to be visible in bright daylight from quite some distance away.
• Sigil Spam: You can't go ten steps on the Nexus, the Tempest, or any other Initiative installation without spotting at least one AI sigil, Andromeda Initiative banner, or location designation somewhere.
• Single-Biome Planet: Played straight in gameplay, but it also seems to be that way in the lore. Some are even explicitly described as such on the galaxy map. Of note is that their current status appears to be grounded in the malfunctioning Vaults and that they will eventually become the diverse 'Golden Worlds' they used to be once again. To note:
  • Eos and Elaaden are two slightly differing shades of desert worlds. (Eos is more like an irradiated American southwest world while Elaaden is more like a Sahara Desert moon.)
  • Voeld is an ice world locked in a planet-wide ice age.
  • Havarl is a jungle world suffering from uncontrolled hyper-evolution.
  • Aya is a rabidly volcanic world with a single paradisiac oasis where the resident angara live.
  • Kadara is somewhat more difficult to categorize, but between its rocky landscape and acid lakes caused by Vault-induced volcanism, it's closest to being another Volcano World.
  • Habitat 7 is a solid Death World.
  • There are dozens of other planets that can be scanned for information, many of which are described as single-biome.
  • Actually gets a Lampshade Hanging on Eos, with a email found where one of Prodromos' scientists is weirded out by it, and wonders if it was deliberately turned into one by the Remnant builders.
• Sinister Geometry:
  • Kett technology has a very H. R. Giger-esque design, which always feel uncomfortable to look at. Their architecture always has a lot of ribbed surfaces, exposed tubes, bulbous orbs, and sickly green color. Everything about it seems ominous and sinister. Part of this is because the kett use biomimetic technology; while not actually 'grown' or organic, a lot of their ship and vehicle systems take inspiration from biological functions, which explains why they seem vaguely organic in appearance.
  • Remnant structures look sinister in the opposite direction, being universally spiky, angular and either dark or lit by a sharp, sterile blue glow. The overall impression is artificial, inhospitable and passsively menacing.
• Sleeper Starship:
  • The Initiative arrive in the Andromeda galaxy by going into stasis on board such starships known as 'Arks'. There are four main Arks, one for each of the Citadel Council species (humans, asari, turians, and salarians). A fifth, helmed by the Quarians but also containing other non-Council Milky Way races (hanar, elcor, drell, and volus) experienced technical difficulties and was launched after the others. All personnel aboard the Arks made the 600+ year trip between the galaxies in cryo stasis.
  • The Nexus, while not a true Ark, also qualifies. The Nexus unfolds into a massive space station similar to the Citadel and made the trip carrying the initial wave of Initiative leadership, security, scientists, and the krogan, who did not receive an Ark of their own.
  • During Liam's loyalty mission, it is revealed that the kett use sleeper ships of their own to travel the vast distances of Andromeda. Once the kett arrived in Heleus, they stripped the ship and set the hulk adrift, where it was claimed and repurposed by raiders.
• Slept Through the Apocalypse: A double example. The arks leave Citadel space in 2185, the year before the Reaper War and all it entailed, then arrive in Andromeda 634 years later to discover that the star cluster they intended to settle has suffered both an apocalyptic Negative Space Wedgie (the Scourge) and a major Alien Invasion (the kett) since they surveyed it from afar. In an optional sidequest, Ryder can also listen to transmissions from the Milky Way that have caught up to the Initiative that imply the Reapers may have indeed destroyed all life in their home galaxy.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: Voeld is a frozen world. Its icy surface makes controlling the Nomad somewhat more difficult than normal.
• So Much for Stealth: On the Archon's ship, Ryder and team plan to sneak in. This manages to last right up until the first door they walk through, right into a squad of kett. The second room they get into sets off every alarm on the ship.
• Space Mines: The Scourge, Heleus' resident Negative Space Wedgie, is eventually revealed to be little more than a very esoteric take on this trope - a gigantic, incredibly devastating area denial weapon made of unstable dark energy that destroys ships, makes worlds uninhabitable, and gives physics as we know it the finger across an entire star cluster. Liam even explicitly compares it to a minefield once he learns of its origin and purpose. It actively seeks out and hunts down its enemy's technology, can't be cleared or fought, and might eventually smother the whole Heleus cluster if no solution is found in time.
• Space Cossacks: Has the premise of you fleeing the galaxy just a year before the arrival of the Reapers without knowing you are, except at the leadership level. You then find most of the worlds you were going to settle are hellholes and you have to make a deal with the local species, the angara, to fight an invading one in the Kett.
• Space Is Noisy:
  • Zigzagged in combat. All sounds in level segments without air are severely muffled but still louder than they should be. Since this isn't a horror game like Dead Space, it's probably for gameplay purposes to allow players to stay aware of flanking attacks and enemy movements in general.
  • Played totally straight in cutscenes. The Tempest makes a lot of noise outside of a planet's exosphere, and space battles are loud spectacles as well.
  • Lambpshaded during movie night. When the movie is fast-forwarded to a ship loudly exploding, Kallo objects.
    Kallo: But, it's vacuum. The ship explosion should be silent.
    Gil: I hope that's not the voice of experience talking.
• Space Pirates: Specifically encountered in Liam's loyalty mission. Plenty of other outlaw groups and even some activities of the Roekaar also qualify.
• Speed Run: Since ME:A's main story is almost completely detached from the game's official premise of exploring and settling a new galaxy, one can see the credits roll about 7 hours after seeing the title screen, possibly even less. Very useful for anyone intent on unlocking the Unwavering achievement because such a run circumvents almost every difficult battle the game has.
• Spider-Sense: On Cora's loyalty mission, a mass effect field has been rigged up on one of the Leusinia's observation decks. Going near it gives any biotic squadmate a massive headache. Jaal, meanwhile, just gets a sudden itchy feeling.
• Spin Attack: Equipping a kett carfalon sword will have Ryder perform one every time they use a melee attack.
• The Stinger: After the end credits roll there is a brief Sequel Hook cutscene - and then there are not one but two priority op missions (albeit non-combat-related) unlocked, along with one optional side mission that provides resolution to a plot point dating back to the original trilogy, and the final step in a game-long task is also unlocked. Not to mention literally dozens of conversation options with NPCs including more romance-based dialogue if Ryder is involved with someone. The game also allows the player to continue working on any side missions and tasks left unfinished at the end of the storyline, with some exceptions.
• Start My Own:
  • An asari on Kadara decides she doesn't care about the Outcasts or the Collective, and decides to try and start her own group. On H-047c, she turns out to have nearly come into enough Helium-3 to be a serious problem to the Nexus, but Ryder sabotages that without even being aware of her connection. If the Charlatan is in charge of Kadara, he finds out and sends her 'on vacation' to Elaaden.
  • On Eos, one encounters a second small group that left the Nexus and chose to establish a sovereign state of their own. Fortunately, this group takes the peaceful approach.
• Stoners Are Funny: A pair of NPCs found at the north-western edge of Kadara, who send out a distress signal because their UV lamp has broken, and they are incredibly high on their own product.
• Stop Being Stereotypical:
  • Due to the angara's distrust for aliens, several characters (especially an Emotional Ryder) state that all of the Milky Way species need to be on their best behavior to convince them that they're different from the kett. When Ryder and crew come across various criminals or Exiles that paint them in a negative light, they are audibly frustrated and recognize how far back this is going to set them.
  • A number of salarians mention the part their species had to play in the Rachni Wars, the Krogan Rebellions, and the genophage. They comment that they have a lot of mistakes to atone for. Former members of the Special Task Groups also mention how old habits die hard.
  • A few krogan NPCs can be heard complaining about New Tuchanka (and specifically Morda's) power and command structure, saying that it's way too similar to the original Tuchanka. Some point out that they tried to change but if the Nexus is going to treat them like brutes, then they may as well own it.
• Stopped Numbering Sequels: The given reason for this game not being called 'Mass Effect 4' is that the developers consider the numbered installments to comprise the 'Shepard trilogy', while Andromeda is an entirely new story, unrelated (or at most very loosely connected) to the Commander and the Reaper wars.
• Storming the Castle:
  • Or more precisely, Storming The Kett Stronghold. A number of worlds boast huge, heavily fortified kett garrisons that can be cleared out during certain missions or simply because it's a real blast to do. Pulling it off increases the respective planet's viability by an impressive 10%, more than any other secondary objective save for defeating the resident Architect (also 10%) and activating the local Vault (a whopping 40%).
  • Attacking the Flophouse on Elaaden has a similar feel to it, probably due to how it reuses many of the mechanics that also play an important part in assaulting kett bases.
• Stuff Blowing Up: ME:A provides ample opportunities to blow up shit in creative ways, from Ryder's omni-grenade power over explosive canisters to all flavors of power combo detonations and more. Certain enemies are even worse thanks to their fondness for Grenade Spam. Last but not least, a lot of missions include lovingly rendered cutscenes in which big things explode spectacularly.
• Sub System Damage: The Remnant Destroyer is a massive robotic enemy susceptible to this - its two rapid-fire energy cannons are separate entities that can be shot off to reduce its withering firepower. While that may seem like a good tactic, it actually makes the thing even more dangerous because with every weapon it looses, it channels the surplus energy into its motive systems. With both cannons down, Destroyers can cross even the largest rooms frighteningly fast to close in on Ryder, and once they're there, they proceed to spam a short-ranged but very damaging energy field that can knock Ryder out of commission in seconds. It's much easier and safer to just shoot their large central cannon when it opens for charging.
• Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: The Jardaan race was so advanced that they created an entire sapient species. Suvi briefly questions where the line between advancement and divinity is once a race reaches that level.
• Super Drowning Skills: Neither Ryder nor the Nomad can swim, so they can't cross any body of water that's deep enough to fully submerge them. Trying to do so will simply have them respawn at the shoreline. The acid lakes on Kadara are an exception - they can be slightly deeper than Ryder is tall, and once the Vault has been reset and the water is safe again, (s)he can walk through the lakes like they aren't even there.
• Super Spit: Everything in Heleus has a ranged attack. If any species of animal can't get into melee range with its prey for whatever reason, it'll instead spit huge globs of a greenish liquid over considerable distances with pinpoint accuracy. While these attacks are pretty powerful as well, they're easily dodged and therefore a lot less dangerous than risking close combat.
• Suspicious Video Game Generosity: The Archon's private quarters has spare ammo boxes lying around. They are needed for dealing with the Behemoth. However, it's subverted as often as it's played straight - a lot of locations are stocked with tons of supplies, yet no fight ever happens there (the Resistance HQ on Voeld is a good example).
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: A disturbingly long list of them:
  • In universe, the Nexus is meant to be to Andromeda what the Citadel is to the Milky Way. The Nexus has a similar design to the Citadel and is meant to be the capital of the worlds settled by the Andromeda Initiative. It also uses the same Avina VI guide as the Citadel.
  • The Remnant, and by extension their creators, are to Andromeda what the Protheans were to the Milky Way - mysterious, extremely advanced Precursors that left behind tons of mind-blowing, still functional technology. They serve as a veritable MacGuffin wellspring to all sides of the conflict and eventually provide both the story background and the arena for the game's Final Battle that could spell either doom or salvation for the protagonists. They have Tron Lines all over, just like most of the Protheans' stuff back in the day. Their weapons utilize Beam Spam instead of more down-to-earth alternatives. Also, The Hero just happens to be the only person in the galaxy/cluster who is able to reliably interact with all that cool tech. Possibly justified as the game gives hints that the Protheans and the creators of the Remnant are connected.
  • Hydras are the ME:A equivalent of Atlas mechs - heavily armored Mini-Mecha that steadily advance on their target while pummelling it with barrages of heavy weapons fire. Their Arm Cannon even looks almost identical to the Atlas'.
  • Kett Ascendants behave a lot like Banshees - they move around the battlefield via Flash Step spam, have a No-Sell shield that's even worse than the Banshees', hurl slow but powerful energy projectiles that can knock you out of cover, and to put icing on the cake, they have an insta-kill attack at melee range. Even their general body shape (tall, thin, creepy face) is similar. The only difference is that Banshees didn't hover around, for which we're all thankful.
  • On a similar note, Fiends are essentially Brutes in all but name, what with their massive bulk, their heavy armor, their habit of charging targets and then grabbing them for a One-Hit Kill, and the fact that they're a purposely mutated form of another species. Most of the kett's remaining troop types share similarities with other Reaper ground forces as well.
  • Although their methods and motivation are different, the kett's one and only plan for Heleus is basically the same as the Reapers': destroy all local resistance and transform every living being that's left into a supposedly superior species - themselves.
  • A mouthy, disrespectful ship engineer with a penchant for poker - are we talking about Gil or Ken Donnelly?
  • A battle hardened krogan, old even for his Long-Lived species, with hundreds of years of combat experience to his belt and highly respected in krogan society, joining the player character for a common goal (and because there's going to be lots of stuff blowing up), and is a stoic with dry comments. Are we talking about Drack or Wrex?
  • Liam Kosta and Jacob Taylor have an awful lot in common. Both are their respective team's sole Token Minority black guy. Both have by far the least complicated backgrounds among their comrades. Both tried their hands at state jobs that didn't really suit them (police work/Alliance black-ops) before they joined an exceedingly powerful private organisation (Andromeda Initiative/Cerberus). Both are introduced in tandem with a human woman adept at military-grade biotics and tech skills (Cora/Miranda) at the very start of the game. Both are romance options for the female Player Character. Both prefer close quarters combat (omni-blades/shotgun). Both... well, the point should be made by now.
  • A slightly socially awkward redhead who happens to be LGBTQ and a potential romance partner; Suvi bears more than a few similarities to Kelly Chambers, the only major difference being Kelly could be romanced by the male or female Shepherd while Suvi is just into women.
  • A human female soldier who starts out cold and apparently unfeeling but who warms up - and warms to the protagonist - over time, to the point of becoming a romance option (but only for the male version of the protagonist). Lots of comparisons are possible between Cora and Miranda.
  • Akksul, the leader of Roekaar, is more or less the angaran equivalent of Balak. Both are xenophobic military officers with a credible grudge who eventually jump off the slippery slope and mastermind large scale acts of terrorism intended to kill countless civilians and render entire worlds uninhabitable. A few followers think this too extreme and decide they want out. The Protagonist has the opportunity to shoot them, making them a martyr, or sparing them, raising concern of them still being a threat, but also making the prospect of a partial Heel–Face Turn, under certain conditions, a possibility.
  • A lot of the non-Initiative guns are fairly obvious copies of weapons from the trilogy, like the angaran Ushior pistol that works identically to the krogan Executioner, or the kett Rozerad submachine gun that's basically the Geth Plasma SMG in all but name and optics.
• Sword and Gun: The game allows you to carry several guns at a time (which can be plasma weapons from the Heleus Cluster, kinetic weapons from the Milky Way, or Remnant energy weapons) as well as a melee weapon of your choice.
• Take a Third Option: Metagaming example. Players stuck on Remnant 'sudoku' puzzles can brute-force it, look up the solution online, use a consumable in-game item to bypass the puzzle... or simply draw it out on a piece of (real-life) paper, substituting numbers for the Remnant glyphs. A lot of the difficulty goes away when you're not manipulating a controller and inputting made-up graphemes.
• Take Cover!: Andromeda uses a similar system to the first game: get close to a suitable object, and Ryder will automatically crouch behind it. Also, blind-firing is now possible.
• Take Your Time: There are exactly three missions in the game with segments that run on an actual on-screen timer. Everything else, no matter how urgent it's made out to be, will patiently wait for Ryder to finish giving interviews, exploring unimportant star systems, mining for minerals, or combing the cluster for every last inconsequential Fetch Quest object.
• Taught by Television: The krogan of Andromeda, now able to have children of their own, have started learning about this whole 'courting' mess they keep hearing about, taking inspiration from things like Blasto 6, and even an asari adult movie. Results seem to be mixed.
• Technology Porn: The Tempest unfolding or retracting her landing gear is a beautiful thing to behold every time she makes planetfall or takes to the stars.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork:
  • Liam and Vetra - though the hostility comes more from Liam than Vetra, who is more indifferent to him. Until Liam, frustrated by there being children on the Arks, decides to criticize Vetra's relationship with Sid, which culminates in a vicious argument. Eventually, they come to somewhat of an agreement and even managed to patch things up a little but they both agree that they're far too different remain friends when off the battlefield.
  • Peebee and Cora aren't exactly fond of the other, either. They grow to accept each other eventually, but never really become friends.
  • On a larger scale: Ryder allying the Initiative with whoever ends up running Kadara Port. The Charlatan appears a lot more open to the idea than Sloane, but the Nexus leadership will never feel comfortable about it regardless of who's in charge.
  • A lot of angara feel this way about cooperating with the Initiative. Most eventually get over their issues, though.
  • Surprisingly averted if Ryder allies with New Tuchanka - the Nexus and the krogan colony get along pretty well if the right choices are made. Also, Jaal and Drack hit it off right away and get on like a house on fire.
• Tell Me Again: The Ryder twins seem to have had a pretty sheltered upbringing, as they're totally in the dark about some basic facts of life of the Mass Effect universe that the average Alliance citizen really should already know (but which many video game players in Real Life would also be unaware of). For example, when speaking to the Nexus V.I., Ryder is completely clueless as to the fact true A.I. is incredibly illegal and that most people have massive prejudices against true A.I.s. They also seem to not remember the geth attack against the Citadel. The latter can be handwaved in various ways, but the former is inexplicable because it's part of why they joined the Initiative.
• Tempting Fate: Lighthearted version. When the bartender at New Tuchanka tells Ryder not to bother saying they probably can drink ryncol, Ryder does just that.
• The Dead Have Names: A quest on Eos, 'Naming the Dead', requires Ryder to find and identify the few bodies left scattered around Sites 1 and 2.
• There Are No Therapists: Zigzagged. Ryder actually does have a therapist on their ship, Lexi. Fortunately for all concerned, neither Ryder or any of their team are sufficiently screwed up to need her services. Most of the time. Meanwhile, Avitus Rix is mentioned as having a shrink, if he becomes Pathfinder, but he's apparently ducking his appointments. That's about it, despite there being some indications some of the other folk in the Initiative could use a therapy session or five.
• The Thing That Would Not Leave: Once upon a time, there was a chemist named Dutch on the Nexus who just wanted to work in peace in his lab. Then someone found out Dutch had the equipment and the skills to make good drinks. Word got around, more and more people began to show up, furniture and decorations got installed, and before poor Dutch knew, his peaceful sanctuary had been converted into what's now the Vortex club, the Nexus' most popular bar full of things/people that just won't leave, much to his chagrin. Ryder can add to his plight by bringing his asari assistant exotic ingredients from all over Heleus, which ends up making the Vortex's drinks even more popular.
• Tie-In Novel: Nexus Uprising, Annihilation, and Initiation bridge the gap between the original trilogy and Andromeda, as well as provide additional information about the events that led to the state of the Andromeda Initiative at the start of the game.
• Tidally Locked Planet: Elaaden, designated Habitat 2, is a large moon tidally locked to both the gas giant it orbits and another nearby moon. The sun never sets on the playable area, reducing it to a desert that can kill you through the Nomad. Everyone stays on the sunny side because it's the only place they've found water.
• Time Skip: The Milky Way-to-Andromeda trip took the Hyperion, the Ark housing humanity, 634 years. As the trip started in 2185, following the events of Mass Effect 2, Andromeda is set in the year 2819.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • An outcast on Kadara comes to the conclusion that Sloane's lying about the water being toxic if not filtered, partly due to desperation, and decides to drink it. Unfiltered. He's found next to a datapad recording this genius move, along with the following sounds of him choking to death.
  • The scavenger from Elaaden who rigs up an EMP will attack Ryder if they say he can't be allowed to keep on going, despite the whole reason they're talking at all was him pointing out attacking Ryder was stupid. Even worse, he's no more powerful than any other mook, so it's possible to take him out in one hit. That's how outmatched he is.
  • A large portion of New Tuchanka's population seem to consider dying in a hopeless and unnecessary fight against the Remnant Abyssal a commendable act worth repeating.
  • When Ryder arrives at Kralla's Song in Kadara Port to meet up with Drack, there's an unconscious human lying on the floor next to Drack whom he casually kicks aside to make room for Ryder. Turns out the guy got himself talked into a headbutting contest with that huge krogan warrior who's obviously decorated his armor with the bones of his enemies. What happens next shows that just about everyone in the bar except for Drack, Ryder and Umi qualifies for this trope as well.
  • Some of the salarian Ark command wanted to figure out exaltation, which in itself wouldn't be too horrible. Their method of figuring it out was to sell out their own Ark to the kett, who would have killed or exalted all of them if Ryder hadn't stumbled upon them. Ryder can even call one of them out on this stupidity later on.
    Ryder: 'Hey, I know how not to get us all exalted; get us all exalted!' You idiot!
• Tripod Terror: The Remnant Architects, when they drop down onto the ground and attack you.
• Tron Lines: The ultra-rare Heleus Icon Armor Ryder can research has these along the torso and arms. They even cycle smoothly through two colors (magenta and ice-blue) in regular intervals. Remnant weapons and most of their tech in general have them all over.
• True Companions: The crew of the Tempest becomes this, naturally. But there's also Mining Company 07 who make up the bulk of the staff of Outpost Ditaeon. They were a multispecies crew of Eezo miners working on Mars. When the mine closed they signed onto the Andromeda Initiative together rather than go their separate ways looking for other work in the Milky Way.
• Turns Red: Remnant bots and even their Vaults do this in the most literal way. Their lights, beams and Tron Lines are blue when they're idle, but everything glowing on them turns red when things get messy.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: If you visited Voeld and perhaps even Kadara after founding Prodromos on Eos, you're in for one when you reach Havarl. Eos, Voeld and Kadara have huge maps you explore in the Nomad, encountering hostiles only sparingly in small camps scattered throughout the op zone. Havarl not only denies you the Nomad and has you explore entirely on foot; it also saturates your radar with red blips the moment you step out of the Tempest. H-047c on the other hand does almost the exact opposite by restricting exploration to the Nomad and combat to a handful of tiny, environmentally sealed shield domes.
• The Unfought: A surprisingly large number of major supporting characters that appear to be set up as eventual boss fights are never actually fought. To note:
  • The Remnant Abyssal, a giant mechanical Sand Worm on Elaaden, exists only as an environmental hazard that the player has to evade while exploring the desert. It's explicitly mentioned to be invulnerable to weapons fire, so don't even try unless you have a death wish or too much ammo.
  • Both contenders for Kadara Port's throne. Ryder's influence on their lives is restricted to deciding which of them survives their duel.
  • Kalinda T'Reve, the Arc Villain of Peebee's loyalty mission. She can be killed, but the trope remains in effect even so since it happens with a single shot administered via a cutscene interrupt.
  • Aroane, Spender'sdragon and leader of the pirates that oppose the team on Drack's loyalty mission - who also may die if you let Drack have his way during another cutscene.
  • The Archon. You do fight him in a way, but not directly - he has hooked himself up to some Remnant machinery that kills him when Ryder overloads it by messing with some consoles.
  • The Primus, the Archon's dragon]], counts as well. She at least is implied to reappear in a DLC or sequel.
• Ungrateful Bastard: While exploring Voeld, Ryder can come across a bunch of angaran Resistance fighters who're engaged in a shootout with kett forces. A sidequest pops up to help them and talk to their leader afterwards, who promptly proceeds to chew Ryder out for interfering in matters that don't concern them. Actually serves as a nice Take That Player against the game's massive display of Mighty Whitey since the angara really do hold their own pretty well and will eventually defeat the kett without Ryder's help.
• Unique Enemy:
  • A minor Nexus sidequest has Ryder compete in a set of three combat trials set up by angaran elite commandos. One of these trials consists of defeating an 'ancient creature' which turns out to be a boss-level Fiend of unique design. Well, almost unique - It brings two identical buddies as backup.
  • The Archon's ship has kett scientists, who don't attack and tend to run off as soon as Ryder comes near. They have health and armour equivalent to an Anointed, meaning actually killing one of them before they get away is pretty difficult. Later on in the level, there's the Behemoth (an exalted krogan), of which there is mercifully only one... unless you don't save the krogan scouts.
  • The Remnant tiller on H-047c fields a boss-level Elite Destroyer that's even deadlier than the normal ones and has a unique self-repair protocol for its secondary turrets.
• Unnecessary Combat Roll: Humanoid combatants have some very fancy moves to vault over low cover, one of which is an impressive over-the-shoulder roll that would be next to impossible to pull off in Real Life.
• Unrealistic Black Hole: Subverted with the black hole at the center of the Heleus cluster. The Black Hole is realistically portrayed to how black holes would look in real life. However, the problem is that it is far, far too huge for it's mass, looking like a supermassive black hole that you would find at galactic cores.
• The Un Reveal: In conversation with Jaal, Drack says the krogan refer to the Milky Way by a different name, but when asked what he calls it, Drack just says 'gone'.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Zigzagged. To note:
  • Enemies do occasionally drop weapons or armor pieces of their respective faction, but it's randomized and therefore rarely the stuff they were actually using before their painful demise. These drops also don't appear to kick in before you've reached a certain point in the story.
  • Outcasts and Collective agents on Kadara often wear a unique set of Maverick Deadeye armor with Vertical Mecha Fins that's unobtainable for Ryder. The playable version lacks the fins.
  • Strangely, this trope extends to your squad mates and even to Ryder themselves. Cora's shotgun in particular is a completely unique model exclusive to her that can't be seen or obtained anywhere else in the game. On top of that, both her, Ryder and any other squad mate can often be seen wielding the fancy-looking X-5 Ghost assault rifle, a weapon that wasn't available to the player in the release version and was only included in a later patch.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Ryder can routinely vault over railings in hub areas, jump down to the floor below and even land on other peoples' heads without anyone batting an eyelash. Quite the feat for folks who always stand at the same spot and keep repeating the same three lines over and over for months on end.
• Unwinnable by Mistake:
  • There's an APEX task that can be acquired virtually the moment Ryder first boards the Nexus; it involves collecting intel on (read: scanning) twenty enemy types. Eighteen of them aren't a big deal because they respawn indefinitely when you know where to look, but there's only a finite number of Hydras and Destroyers to be encountered during the story. Forgot to scan those big dangerous things trying to kill Ryder before facing the Archon? Well, tough luck.
  • The 'Hang Time' achievement requires keeping the Nomad airborne for 35 seconds. This can only be done by tilting the vehicle's nose upwards in mid-flight so the boost can be used to gain height, but this function is completely missing on PC, thus making this achievement unobtainable even with cheats and trainer support.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Nilken Rensus, the 'first murderer in Andromeda'. His motive was only trying to save himself and the rest of Promise's inhabitants dying on Eos, but the act was one of the absolute last straws for the disgruntled of the Initiative, and kicked off the Uprising, along with everything that followed (though emails in Promise suggest the Uprising had already been brewing, Nilken just gave them casus belli).
• Useless Useful Spell: Most of Ryder's abilities fall short of guns when it comes to killing enemies in comparison to just shooting them. The most useful powers have decent (but often very situational) utility such as making enemies helpless for a limited time, flushing them out of cover, distracting them, enhancing party mobility, or restoring health and shields. One of the most useful abilities in the game, Charge, is so buggy that it will get a player who relies on it unnecessarily killed from time-to-time. Further, if Ryder learns that a particular power or loadout isn't working, switching to another will require them to sit through the entirecooldown for all abilities, whereas they can swap guns or ammo more or less instantaneously. The common advantage powers have is that most don't require ammo — a 'pure Soldier' Ryder with non-rechargeable guns and only grenade/power cell abilities is absolutely screwed if they're pinned down by enemy fire without a single consumable resource.

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• Vendor Trash: Called 'salvage' in this game - items of varying value that don't take up inventory space and exist solely to be sold off for credits. There's a dedicated button in every merchant interface to sell them all in one go.
• Verbal Backspace:
  • The krogan geneticist mentions he knew Doctor Okeer. Okay, he talked to him once. (And a recorded transcript of Okeer's research shows Okeer wasn't too taken with the guy.)
  • An email chain at New Tuchanka has someone offering real varren jerky ('just like your battlemaster made!'), followed by many more emails going back on all the outrageous claims the guy made.
• Vestigial Empire: The angara once ruled over much of Heleus before the Scourge appeared, drove them off of scores of their worlds and reduced them to isolated colonies that struggle to survive, losing most of their history and culture in the process. Then the kett subjugated most of what was left. You can help them recover parts of their ancient legacy, as well as forge an alliance to improve their lot in life.
• Video Game Caring Potential:
  • Ryder doesn't necessarily have to help the angara on Voeld. They can just do the storyline mission, set up the outpost and then leave them to freeze. Likewise, they don't need to give the krogan the drive core on Elaaden.
  • During the Knight quest, Ryder has the option to help Knight's disabled son as an optional objective. Of course, if they don't, he'll assume Ryder's been corrupted by SAM and swear vengeance on them.
  • Ryder can talk to a lot of otherwise unimportant NPCs on the Nexus or at outposts. Many of them ask for advice, reassurance or some candid words on the current situation, all of which you're free to give without getting anything in return.
  • Dialogue with Ryder's crew members can have wildly differing tones depending on which answers you choose. Consistently choosing emotional responses will always have Ryder express sympathy and moral support to whatever problem is currently bothering the crew, again without gaining anything from it aside from feeling like a decent person. Couple this with the game intentionally depicting the Tempest crew as a family (albeit a dysfunctional one), and the potential for Ryder to romance one (or more) of their crewmates.
  • A literal example in the space hamster Ryder can catch aboard the Tempest. You can set it free next time the ship makes planetfall (which probably won't do wonders to the hamster's life expectancy), or you can take care of it as Ryder's beloved pet.
  • The fact Ryder can romance one or more characters in the game leads to the trope kicking in when the romanced character is in trouble or is troubled, even though once they reach a certain level, squad mates are virtually indestructible, and other romanceable characters are never really put in harm's way.
  • The finale quest ramps up the urgency by having Ryder fighting the Archon primarily in order to rescue their sibling.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • One sidequest on Voeld tasks Ryder with searching for an angaran demolition specialist whose friend refuses to believe she's dead. When you eventually find her, she's torturing a wounded kett soldier to learn the location of her missing family, and obviously has been for quite some time already. You can make her stop, or turn around and let her continue without a care in the world. Ryder's squad will call them out if you do the latter.
  • A quest on Eos to discover who's been raiding supplies ends with Ryder finding the culprits: A group of exiles who did so out of desperation, not wanting to stay on Kadara. Ryder can either allow them to join Prodromos, or just tell them to get lost.
  • Assuming the player finds and does 'The Collective Base' before 'High Noon', they can have Ryder assist the Collective with a minor problem, then expose their leader, turn them in fugitives, and storm aforementioned base, killing several people they'd talked to.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: In some vaults, it's possible to spawn Observers that are on your side. Taking a pot-shot at them makes them turn on you.
• Violation of Common Sense:
  • What else to call taking a massive detour just to rob yet another Remnant chest while there's a lethal energy cloud hot on your heels? That's what many vaults are set up for; SAM even points the locations out and marks them on your map when you get near them during your initial exploration. The Kadara Vault actually has two of those, and looting both will almost invariably require running into the purification field on purpose, leaving you about three seconds before the critical mission failure screen pops up. Anyone tempted to do so should know that those chest are nothing special and contain no better loot than the average containers scattered throughout the vault, which only adds insult to injury.
  • One Nexus task requires scanning twenty different enemy types. Most of them aren't a big deal - scanning their bullet-riddled corpses is more than sufficient. However, things like Fiends, Hydras, and Destroyers explode upon death without leaving anything to scan behind, and walking up to something hell-bent on killing Ryder with nothing but the scanner active isn't exactly something that springs to mind in the heat of battle; especially since those scans don't even provide any in-game advantage.
• Wagon Train to the Stars: The Andromeda Initiative is a massive, multi-species project to explore and colonize another galaxy.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: It appears the Cardinal on Voeld is meant to serve in this role, judging by the amount of build-up, dialogue and cutscenes she gets, plus her lengthy explanation of how her powers work. Being a kett Ascendant with their customary No-SellDeflector Shields, Flash Step spam and One-Hit Kill melee attack, she suddenly requires tactics and strategies beyond camping in a convenient spot and blasting away until nothing hostile so much as twitches anymore. Unfortunately, her example is particularly vulnerable to Sequence Breaking due to how easy it is to unknowningly encounter other Ascendants before you meet her, thus defeating her entire purpose beyond acting as another, slightly more annoying speed bump for Ryder on their way to their mission objective.
• War Is Hell: Many angara grow up never knowing if they, their parents or their friends will come home at the end of the day. Most have lost family members to the kett, often by the dozen, and only a handful of very old angara have ever known peace. Those who don't die in battle are dragged off to labor camps if they're lucky, or to somewhere else for otherpurposes if they're not. The newbies from the Milky Way have it just as bad in a slightly different way, particularly the ones that got jumped while still on their arks. There's no imagining the terror most people aboard the asari, turian, and salarian arks must've gone through when the kett attacked and did their thing, and for them the war was just beginning at that moment. The kett, however, have a different perspective on the matter, naturally. They're just procreating.
• Warp Whistle: Almost all maps have fixed drop zones for automated forward stations that activate when you come near them. Once deployed, they serve as fast-travel locations, healing stations, resupply depots and a lot of other useful things, making their activation a priority on any newly discovered world. Established outposts as well as the Tempest have their own fast-travel markers, as do important locations on hubs like Aya.
• Was Once a Man: It turns out the kett are, mostly, actually genetically altered angarans, and have been growing their army by kidnapping and converting angarans. They've all been injected with the Archon's DNA, and he may very well be the only 'true' kett in Heleus.
• We ARE Struggling Together: The Andromeda Initiative has become highly fractured since their arrival in Heleus. First there was an armed mutiny on the Nexus, creating a rift between the loyalists and the mutineers who were exiled from the station and became the Outcasts. Those exiles then settled on Kadara and Elaaden, and fractured even further into multiple gangs and factions of outlaws and scavengers. The krogan quit the Initiative and left the Nexus shortly after being double-crossed by the station leaders after putting down the mutiny, founding their own separate colony on Elaaden.
• We Have Reserves: This seems to be Kalinda's attitude towards her forces during Peebee's loyalty mission. When Ryder remarks that she's running out of minions, she doesn't really care aside from calmly pondering that she'll need to go on a recruiting spree when this is over. Shortly before that exchange, Peebee is put off by how many goons Kalinda continues to throw at them at every turn just to keep Peebee from reaching the artifact both of them are after.
• Welcome to Corneria: The ambient chatter you can overhear in hub areas has a... limited number of lines available. A very limited number.
• We Will Spend Credits in the Future: Gets a Lampshade Hanging when Ryder meets an angaran trader, on their first visit to Aya, who tries to figure out the exchange rate of credits.
• Wham Episode:
  • Voeld, when it turns out just what the kett do to their angaran prisoners.
  • The Remnant City, where Ryder learns the origins of the Remnant and the Scourge. The Remnant were created by an incredibly advanced race called the Jardaan. The Jardaan were so advanced that they didn't just create the Remnant, they created the angara race, as well as many other organisms found in the Heleus Cluster for an as yet unknown reason. The Scourge is a weapon created by an unknown race that was at war with the Jardaan.
• What a Senseless Waste of Human Life: At the end of 'Out of Gas', if Ryder choses to kill the scavenger responsible, Liam will remark killing him was 'a waste'.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • The status of the Milky Way civilizations 600 years after the Reaper Invasion is left ambiguous. Word of God says this was an intentional choice by the creators, so that the new Andromeda trilogy can exist apart from the previous games. It also reflects the fact there were multiple possible endings for Mass Effect 3.
  • One of the earliest sidequests has someone committing sabotage on the Nexus, and if confronted will walk off. Unless the player pays a visit to Kesh's office and listens to her background chatter, they'll miss what became of the guy. He was arrested.
  • After the endgame, Ryder's twin disappears from the narrative. They can speak to the sibling in the epilogue, but when they return to that location later, the sibling is gone.
  • An in-universe version, while going through the crashed Remnant ship, Ryder wonders what happened to the crew (if any), of whom there is absolutely no sign. They never get an answer.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • A Roekaar on Havarl gives Ryder a brief one when they try asking him for help, because in order to reach him they have had to kill several of his friends (albeit in self-defence).
  • Ryder can spark this reaction in squadmates and others depending on decisions they make.
  • Sid is greatly disturbed by the amount of killing her sister Vetra and Ryder do, partly in her name, during Vetra's loyalty mission, asking if it's necessary. She stops complaining once she realizes she's killing bad guys too through her own actions.
• What You Are in the Dark:
  • A lighthearted version while Ryder is investigating Spender. They find he stole a model ship that's been labelled missing, and have the option of taking it for themselves.
  • A nowhere near light-hearted version on Kadara. Ryder can intervene to save Sloane Kelly's life from Reyes' assassin, or they can let her die, with no-one the wiser.
  • Similarly, with the ex-Cerberus scientists, Ryder has the option of turning off their hive-mind machine, or turning it back on the scientists, or... leaving it alone and walking away.
  • Kadara in general is a massive example on the bad side. Most of those who participated in the Nexus uprising were decent people who just wanted answers and some action from their leaders, but after barely a year on Kadara, the vast majority of them have turned into vicious scavengers, pirates, killers and even cannibals. Unsurprisingly, the image it paints of the Milky Way species in the eyes of the angara is... less than flattering.
• Whole Plot Reference: In his ...One Year Later retrospective, Raycevick drew parallels between this game and Mass Effect, complete with side-by-side video clips to drive home the comparison.
  'For all that this game boasts that Andromeda is a new start, it's not. You're a relative Fish Out OF Water facing an enemy with galactic-scale plans that you meet after fighting on a once-peaceful world that holds artifacts with great effects. You proceed to the galaxy's hub to meet its leaders, who task you with a dangerous mission that'll save thousands of lives; as an asset to the Council, there you establish a ship and its crew. After starting with a human biotic and [a] soldier, you recruit a street-smart turian, an introverted asari and a thousand-year-old krogan. You and the antagonist are in a race to the MacGuffin. You attack one of their bases that are greatly expanding their army, and destroy it. You obtain information that will lead you to the MacGuffin first, but the Council doesn't grant you access to leave, so you disobey orders and escape through a brief time window given to you by friends on the galactic station. You travel to the secret world, discovering that there's more to the established backstory of this galaxy's aliens, and that the city's promise was a ruse where the villain gets ahead and takes over a vital section of the galactic station. Our pilot drops us off in an all-terrain vehicle to catch up with the antagonist, and the final battle is initiated where he uses Precursor technology and is defeated. Oh, and you select a representative rather than the Council.
• Wide Open Sandbox:
  • Most of the various outpost worlds are huge areas that can be explored at length even without getting involved in missions and tasks, with many places to explore - and even people to meet - that have nothing to do with any assigned tasks.
  • Taken to a literal extreme with the planet Elaaden, which features a huge area to explore that is virtually all sandy desert.
• World of Badass: This is a game where everyone is either a Bold Explorer who crossed the void between galaxies in search of a new home, or a resistance fighter who continues to survive in a decades-long genocidal war against Scary Dogmatic Aliens. And that's not even getting into the One-Man Army called Ryder and their Badass Crew.
• World of Snark: In between a naturally snarky hero and a crew that can't go ten seconds without dropping a witty one-liner, be ready for an extended snark fest whenever someone opens their mouth.
• Would Hit a Girl: Female combatants, human and otherwise, are legitimate targets if they attack Ryder and company. There are a couple of missions in which seemingly or genuinely sympathetic female NPCs appear but, depending on game choices (or sometimes no option is provided) Ryder or an ally still ends up having to kill them.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • An unborn one even. When the Roekaar find out about the first pregnant human woman in Heleus, they immediately try to track down and kill the 'breeder' as a symbol and a statement. To make it worse, the kett are right behind them and don't give a shit about any of their victims being pregnant or not.
  • It is revealed that during the kett attack on the asari ark, at least a few asari children (some as young as toddlers) were out of cryo. Their fate is unknown, but one can safely assume that the kett would not have shown them mercy.
• Wretched Hive:
  • Kadara Port is ruled by Sloane Kelly and her gang, the Outlaws, who extort protection money from the citizens. People who don't pay up get beaten, or just kicked out into the Badlands to starve. Underneath the topmost city is a shanty-town slum, where murder and petty crime thrive. The Badlands outside are worse.
    Jaal: Kadara Port is growing on me. Growing like the searing pain of an infected flesh wound.
  • Even Kadara is tame compared to Elaaden, comprised of the crazy, the desperate, and those too extreme for Kadara; save for the krogan colony, the customary lifestyle on the planet consists of murdering other scavengers for scraps. Pretty much every scavenger met at the Paradise is psychotic or violent, or some combination thereof. Gangs, cults, and even slavery are said to be commonplace.
• Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Every solar system in the Heleus cluster has planets that are within visual range of each other enough to see each planet in detail, which is highly improbable in real life. Typically, planets are far enough away that they appear only as large as stars in the sky. An exception can be made for Elaaden, which is a moon that orbits a gas giant and thus would make the parent planet hugely visible in the sky as shown in game.
• You ALL Look Familiar:
  • With the exception of the Squad-mate Pee Bee, every single asari character in the game has the exact same face with only minor differences in tattoos as well as eye color and skin tone. It is especially jarring in the Asari Ark Quest where several characters such as Pathfinder Sarissa Theris, Captain Atandra, and Commando Vederia Damali along with two other asari crew members are together on the bridge but it is very difficult to tell any of them apart because they have the same face as each other.
  • Most other non-humans in the game look identical, too. Sometimes the only way to tell Jaal apart from his brethren is his clothes, the fancy monocle he wears and the scar he acquires later in the game.
• You Are in Command Now:
  • Happens to Ryder during the prologue mission. They aren't even second-in-line for the position of Pathfinder (Cora is) and hasn't had Pathfinder training. However, Alec's decision to pass the title onto his son/daughter is done for plot related reasons that become apparent much later.
  • Depending on your choices, this can become the case for every single Pathfinder. The original human, asari, and turian Pathfinders will always die no matter what. The next-in-line Pathfinders for the asari and turians may also be passed over or not accept the position (respectively) depending on the player's choices. Finally, the salarian pathfinder may be killed as part of a main quest mission, again depending on the player's choices.
  • By the time the Hyperion arrives at the Nexus, this is the case for several of the Nexus leadership positions. To note:
    • Director Tann was an accountant and something like eighth in line for the position of Director. Everyone above him was killed during the Nexus' run in with the Scourge or was assassinated shortly after. To say that Tann is ill-suited for the position is...a fairly serious understatement. The amount of characters who actually like Tann can be counted on one hand, although, following Ryder's successes as Pathfinder, Tann does become more reasonable over the course of the game.
    • Kandros was a bodyguard for a prospecting team captured by the kett. After leading their escape efforts, he returned to the Nexus and found 'all the Nexus personnel looking at him like he was in charge'. He officially became leader of the Nexus Militia and took on many of the responsibilities of the Director of Security (a position abandoned by Sloan Kelly after the uprising).
• You Bastard!: Ryder's job often requires killing people. There are several points in the game where they find themselves forced to justify their actions, or encounter people who are upset that someone they know has just been killed by the person they're talking to. Possibly lampshaded by the fact there's a trophy awarded once Ryder kills 2,000 creatures (human or otherwise) and it's possible to reach this milestone well before the end of the first playthrough.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Justified, since you arrive in a new galaxy on a starship that has been on a six-plus century long journey. It's a one-way trip and everybody you used to know from your past life (except for the asari and krogan maybe) are long dead. Taken up a notch since the expedition launched a year before the Reaper Invasion. So it's possible the entire Milky Way galaxy is dead. Of course, one of the stated goals of the Initiative is to eventually, work out a way to get between each galaxy.
• You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Human NPCs in this game have a huge variety of hair colors, many of them noticeably loud.
• You Have Researched Breathing:
  • It takes an expensive upgrade to enable the Nomad's Agility Mode, which is just a fancy 'Disable ESP' button, something any half-decent Real Life car has installed by default.
  • This was one of the criticism leveled against the research and crafting system. It makes sense having to research equipment based on angaran, kett and Remnant tech, but Milky Way gear all the way down to the humble Predator pistol, a weapon so simple and ubiquitous that anyone could buy one for a couple hundred credits at most? Not so much. The half-hearted attempt to Hand Wave this with all the blueprints having been lost to the Scourge disaster when the Nexus arrived in Heleus didn't exactly help to calm these criticism, and mods that reduce the research costs or just unlock all blueprint right away are quite popular among players.
• Your Head Asplode: Killing humanoid targets with a high-powered shot or a barrage of automatic gunfire to the head will make that body part pop in a satisfying welter of bodily fluids. Your squad will also heap tons of praise on you for your awesome aim.

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