Mass Effect Andromeda / Tropes A to G

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

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# - B

• 0% Approval Rating:
  • The number of people who actually like Director Tann is all but non-existent.
  • Every non-kett character hates the kett. The only time anyone says anything positive about them is the occasional scientist being impressed with their skill at bio-engineering, and they still hate them. This is noticeable because everyone hates the kett even before meeting the angara, learning of the kett's endgame or the Archon's plan ^note  and the Archon even becomes hated by many of his fellow kett given his hoarding knowledge of the Remnant technology and implied plan to stage a coup against the kett leaders But then, who really is going to like what are basically Nazis IN SPACE!?
  • Ryder runs into this a few times from some people, depending on the choices they make, and in this game Ryder gets this regardless which choice is made.
• 100% Completion: The game keeps track of your completion percentage in the savegame menu, which means it's far enough out of the way to not bother most players; many don't even seem to know the counter exists at all. Attaining 100% completion does precisely nothing aside from stroking the individual player's ego, though. There is, however, an in-game variant of this trope that does offer a reward: bringing all five main worlds to 100% viability unlocks a short but heartwarming quest after the main story has been completed.
• Abhorrent Admirer:
  • One of the engineers Gil Brodie worked with before he was assigned to the Tempest, Ignacious, developed a crush on him. Depending on whether or not Ryder is involved with Gil when they speak to him, Ignacious will send Gil a six page email either extolling his virtues before asking him out, or rambling about how good they could have been together if Gil hadn't ended up with Ryder first. Gil is not amused in either situation.
  • A sidequest on Kadara has an Outcast ask Ryder to pass along a message to an asari dancer down in the slums he knows, apologising for getting arrested. Should Ryder pass along the message, the asari makes it clear she's not remotely interested in the guy, and has told him so.
  • Ryder can encounter the sister of the original trilogy's Abhorrent Admirer, Conrad Verner; Cassandra Verner crticizes her brother's copycat obsession with Commander Shepard, but rather obviously has the same hero-worship problem with Sloane Kelly.
• Abnormal Ammo: Cryo Ammo, Disruptor Ammo and Incendiary Ammo make a return from the original trilogy, each with their own useful properties and capable of setting up powerful combo detonations. Contrary to their previous portrayal, they're now consumables with a finite number of uses (three clips per unit) instead of permanently active powers. You can, however, outfit a squad member with them via their upgrade tree.
• Absolute Xenophobe: The kett, as part and parcel of being Scary Dogmatic Aliens. Outside the kett there's the Roekaar, a faction of the angara, hate everything non-angaran with a passion. Considering what the kett have done to their people, it's not that hard to blame them, but sadly they continue to hate your guts even after you've proven the Initiative's worth and peaceful intentions dozens of times over. The Roekaar hate aliens so much they're willing to try and utterly destroy the ecosystems of entire planets just to get rid of them (which is similar to the Archon and the kett's ultimate plan to win the war). If you spare their leader at the end of a quest, a bunch of them walk away, implying they've changed their mind both about him, and the Milky Way arrivals. Not that this at all stops them from trying to kill you.
• Absurdly High Level Cap: The level cap is 135. Most players will be at or around lvl 65-70 by the time they finish the game. Only in a "New Game +" second playthrough (or by abusing experience glitches) can you reach the cap.
• Absurdly Low Level Cap:
  • The AVP bonuses max out at level 20, which you'll achieve long before reaching the end of the game. Patch 1.06 bumps this up to 29, which is still low relatively speaking.
  • A relative example, but party members max out their skills at level 53. They'll continue to level after that, pointlessly gaining more skill points that can't be spent but will make your interface claim that you should level them.
• The Ace: Each species on each Ark has one representative who is the exemplar of that race called the "Pathfinder".
• A Commander Is You: While not a strategy game, each faction wages war in their own specific way.
  • The Initiative: Elitist/Technical. All significant military actions are led either by the Pathfinders or by a few elite APEX teams. They use their superior technology (AI, Advanced ships, etc...), and great diversity of tactics and powers (Salarian espionnage, Asari commando, Spectre tactics, etc...) to overwhelm their enemies. At best however, there are only four pathfinders, and the Nexus militia is unable to fight effectively on their own.
  • The Outlaws/Collective: Balanced/Generalists. Made up of ex-security and rebels, the Outlaws have a very versatile force with some specialists and even mecha-suits. Sloane's doctrine is more about Brute strength while the Collective is more about Guerrilla.
  • The Krogan: Balanced/Brute. A special case, as each Krogan is a one man army and most of the population is willing to fight. This compensates for their relative lack of tactical finesse and versatility, as even their more technical units are tuned for direct confrontation.
  • The Angaran Resistance: Balanced/Guerrilla. A well trained militia, the Resistance uses stealth, sabotage, intelligence, and sheer audacity to compensate being vastly outnumbered.
  • The Kett: Spammer/Generalist/Gimmick. The Kett's resources in vehicle and personnel seems unlimited as they throw them en masse toward their enemy. However, they are feared for their frequent change of tactics, keeping their enemies unable to predict their next move, Guerilla one day, Brute the next. They replenish their ranks through their Gimmick, the Exaltation, transforming their enemies into more Kett.
  • The Remnant: Spammer/Generalist. Coming in all size and shapes, the Remnant basic unit is able to construct Breachers right on the field. The most dangerous ones, the Architects and the Progenitor, also produces additional units on the spot, overwhelming and outmaneuvering their enemies.
• Action Bomb: If a Remnant Breacher comes close enough to engage Ryder in melee, one of two things will happen: Button Mashing to throw it off, or it simply blows itself up then and there for considerable damage and a powerful knockback effect.
• Action Girl:
  • Sara Ryder, naturally. Of note is the fact that she exists in the game even if the player chooses to play as Scott, existing as his sister and still playing an important role in the story.
  • The asari squadmate Adventure Archaeologist Peebee (even though she often states she dislikes violence), turian Loveable Rogue squadmate Vetra and human Consummate Professional squadmate Cora.
  • Averted with navigator Suvi who tells Ryder outright that she isn't cut out for field work and prefers to stay on the ship, though some post-game e-mails suggest she's planning on taking some levels in badass.
• Actually Pretty Funny: Somewhat subdued, but still present. After Ryder first lands on Aya and encounters Jaal, Jaal demands to know what Ryder's intentions are. The "Emotional" response will elicit a somewhat playful retort and a small smile from Jaal, showing that he found Ryder's answer at least somewhat amusing.
  Ryder: I apologize, arriving the way we did - without warning, on fire, was not the plan.
  Jaal: That is good to know. Because if it was, that would be a very bad plan.
• Advancing Wall of Doom: Vault purification fields are deadly energy clouds that kill everything organic on contact and start spreading rapidly throughout their vault the moment someone tampers with its reset console. Getting caught in one spells certain death within three seconds at most, so you'd better know the way to the exit before you initiate the reset.
• Affably Evil:
  • The Outcast recruiter in Kadara Port politely answers several questions from Ryder, and fills them in on some of the details about the Outcasts. She's still a member of a protection racket enforcing, drug dealing gang of thugs, but by Outcast standards, she's one of (if not the) nicest ones Ryder meets.
  • On Elaaden, Ryder can encounter a scavenger called Twig, who politely talks with Ryder, informing them about who she works for and the nature of Elaaden with none of the usual hostility common to pretty much everyone else on the planet. She also happens to have gotten her name from snapping a salarian's neck with her biotics, and is still a scavenger who wants to fight Ryder.
• The AI Is A Cheating Bastard: There's exactly one character in the whole game that isn't immune to environmental hazards. Hint: they're not an NPC. While it does help not having to worry about squad mates freezing to death or getting zapped by Remnant juice, it often puts serious constraints on tactics and strategies that rely on patience, like sniping outposts from afar. The guys in your crosshairs can hide and wait till the end of time; you can't.
• Air Quotes: Ryder, dealing with two very stoned outcasts on Kadara, does this when talking about their "medicinal" plant, complete with the accompanying gesture.
• Alcubierre Drive: The codex states that the kett deal with long-distance FTL travel by using their element zero cores (which are designed differently from either Milky Way or angara ships) to produce an Alcubierre effect. This is noted to be inefficient compared to the mass relays back in the Milky Way.
• Alien Blood: Angara have bright-blue blood. Kett have browish-green blood. Strangely, the exiles all bleed the same red despite of being comprised of humans (red blood), turians (dark blue blood), salarians (green blood), krogan (orange blood) and asari (purple blood).
• Alien Geometries: The Remnant Vaults have a lot of this going on in their designs and architecture. From a physical point of view, a lot of these buildings shouldn't be able to support their own weight.
• Alien Landmass:
  • Habitat 7, the first level of the game, was originally supposed to be the closest analogue the Andromeda galaxy had to Earth, but 600 years later, a Negative Space Wedgie, combined with malfunctioning terraforming equipment, turned it into a spectacle with bizarre weather and floating landmasses. However, it works well to signify to the player that they've been taken very far from home, in a galaxy that plays by its own rules.
  • Kadara is a planet with both alien land and Alien Seas, since the water is full of sulfur and is thus poisonous to most forms of life. The land is littered with endless mountains that have holes, much like adder stones.
• Aliens of London: Kett all speak with a British accent once you can communicate with them, which practically makes them Evil Brits In Space. Several angara also have British accents, though they actually have a wide variety of accents due to their fractured culture, including British, African, South African, Australian, and Kiwi. This is justified in-universe as a result of angara being divided by the Scourge for centuries. Jaal is described as having a Havarl accent while Evfra is a native of Voeld. The universal translator simply turn their accents into A Form You Are Comfortable With.
• Aliens Speaking English:
  • Averted with regards to Andromeda races. The kett are unable to communicate with Ryder during their first encounter due to the language barrier, averting this trope. The angara also have their own spoken language that is initially what the player hears upon being introduced to them, until the crews's Translator Microbes adapt within a couple of scenes.
  • Lampshaded in a number of dialogue scenes where Ryder mentions that their translator didn't work on certain words and has to ask for a definition.
• The All-Seeing A.I.: When you snipe a squad of enemies and they become alerted, they'll pinpoint your precise location in an instant and hide so effectively you won't be able to spot anyone anymore.
• All There in the Manual:
  • The Codex helps explain a few things the game doesn't, like where the Hydra mechs came from (they were built by people mixing whatever tech they could get together after arriving in Andromeda).
  • The massive nature of the game (nearly every outpost world includes a Wide-Open Sandbox that can take hours to explore) pretty much requires a manual to identify all secret areas and mission/task trigger locations. For example, one side mission, "Out of Gas" will only trigger if, on a massive desert planet, Ryder is driving the Nomad around pretty much in circles within a specific, small area in a remote part of the map.
  • An in-game version: Many optional side-quests are only triggered by reading emails on terminals and datapads left around. There are also a number of missions where reading emails and datapads are necessary to proceed, and information given by them often include clues as to how to proceed.
• Always Accurate Attack: The Remnant Scattershot is a ridiculously short-ranged shotgun with homing pellets that never miss as long as the target is in range and in rough vicinity to the targeting reticule.
• Always Chaotic Evil: There are less than ten kett in the whole game that don't try to kill Ryder on sight, and those are unarmed scientists. Their combatants, however, will drop whatever they were doing and even ignore other lethal threats so they can shoot the Pathfinder the moment they spot them, no exceptions. That explicitly includes the ones that oppose the Archon when the Primus instigates a minor Enemy Civil War.
• Always Identical Twins: Thoroughly averted in two ways. First, Sara and Scott are dizygotic twins, not identical. And even left to their default appearances, the siblings look little alike. The game further allows the player to customize the appearance of both siblings (which also alter's Alec's appearance), meaning the twins can look profoundly different from each other (even different skin colours) and potentially both their parents if desired.
• Always Need What You Gave Up: The cause of the mission "Hard Luck". A Nexus scientist exploring Elaaden got a little loopy from dehydration, and bartered with some scavengers for water. Problem is, she gave up her shuttle's thrusters to do so.
• Ambiguously Trained: Liam was a cop on Earth, and then joined Crisis Response, neither of which involved heavy combat training. When questioned by most party members about his surprising skill in skirmishes, he says he learned how to fight "in movies". One party member, Drack, calls "Bullshit" and demands to know what war veteran taught him how to fight. Liam admits to him that he had a mentor in Crisis Response that taught him how to fight, but that's as far as he's willing to reveal.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: The kett view themselves not only as the Andromeda galaxy's master race, but apparently as the only sentient race at all. Everything else is referred to as "it" or "specimen", and subject to no end of Playing with Syringes, Cold-Blooded Torture and Body Horror both For Science! and For the Evulz. They round up POWs as often as they kill them on the spot, segregate them based on their genes and work everyone "unworthy" to death in labor camps. Their society is even more militarized than the Turian Hierarchy - they literally can't procreate without waging wars of extinction on all fronts. Their leader - at least the one in Heleus - is a megalomaniacal Omnicidal Maniac with a Cult of Personality full of fanatically loyal followers centered on him and him alone, and just like a certain historical figure, he surrounds himself with "perfect" specimens of his species while being nowhere near as capable in combat as them himself, judging by how he actually turns out to be The Unfought in the end, though the circumstances are somewhat different.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: When the Archon takes over Ark Hyperion, the player will take control of the other Ryder sibling to try and stop him.
• And the Adventure Continues: In the epilogue, Ryder and their crew can all voice the desire to get back to the Tempest and go out exploring.
• Animal Testing: An angaran scientist hires a group of outlaws to hunt the Voeld equivalent of whales so she can study them. Even worse, a datapad found by one of the hunting sites mentions the outcasts tried killing a calf. Once found, Jaal is very pissed at the scientist.
• Anti-Frustration Feature:
  • One of the biggest frustrations in the original trilogy was that the Skip Button was also used to pick a dialogue option, meaning it was all too easy to select something you didn't want in the process of going through a cutscene. In Andromeda, this was removed so that the skip button ONLY skips dialogue, and never selects choices on the wheel.
  • The dialogue wheel now displays icons when highlighting an option so that you know what it does, including three arrows for advancing the conversation, a question mark for "Investigate" options, and a heart for flirting and other romantic options. This solves the issue from the original trilogy where it was all too easy to accidentally advance the conversation or lock in a romance you didn't intend. As well, the icons for the four "personality responses" (Emotional, Logical, Casual and Professional) dovetail with the name of each option so that you have a far better idea of what Ryder will do or say compared to the original trilogy.
  • On the Dialogue Wheel, any question you've asked already will be darkened out. No accidentally repeating yourself this time around!
  • Falling into a Bottomless Pit for whatever reason just warps Ryder back to where they fell with a minor loss in health instead of incurring a critical mission failure.
  • Remnant Decryption Keys are special items that can be used to bypass almost any Remnant decryption puzzle (almost since there is one bonus puzzle - giving two levels if solved - where they won't work. If you are familiar with the general system of the puzzles, this one is way easier than average, if you can get past its intimidating first looks). They were extremely rare and prohibitively expensive in the game's release version but have since been patched to be a lot cheaper and more readily available from merchants. Just keep in mind that any puzzle solved by using a key doesn't count towards the achievement that requires you to solve twenty puzzles in a single game, and there's only so many of them.
  • Cobra missiles might be considered one as well. They're rare and expensive but kill every type of enemy in one shot, allowing you to bypass the majority of bosses and all those annoyingly resilient critters with the press of a button - if you dedicated one of Ryder's consumables slots to them, that is.
  • The Nomad is completely invulnerable while you aren't driving it to allow players to use it as mobile cover without having to worry about losing their ride if they take too long. Unlike the Mako, it also can't be damaged by crashing or falling into stuff, only by enemy fire and environmental hazards like the acid lakes on Kadara.
  • While driving the Nomad, there's an "Extract" button that allows for a quick return to the Tempest at any time, from anywhere on the map (as long as you're not locked in combat or on a mission, naturally). This is very helpful on Kadara where one needs to sit through two different load screens in order to return to the Tempest.
  • Everyone's powers including Ryder's can always be reset in the Tempest's med-bay for a nominal fee in credits to correct wrong skill choices or to experiment with new combinations and profiles.
  • Deconstructing crafted equipment returns all augmentations that previously went into its construction - particularly helpful in case of augments that need to be researched and can't be purchased, only found as random loot. Installed mods are also automatically returned to Ryder's inventory. Last but not least, you get 20% of the resources required to craft it back, but that's true for deconstructing any piece of gear and is usually a lot less important than the augments.
  • The game gives you audio-visual clues to fire up Ryder's scanner when you're in proximity to something worth scanning, which usually means the various factions' tech nodes that give 100+ research points apiece. The same happens in the vicinity of quest-relevant objects that require scanning. In addition, SAM or a squadmate, or sometimes even the Pathfinder may announce that there's something nearby. In some side-missions, a special icon may even appear over top of the object.
  • When a mission objective requires Ryder to search an area, an additional radar-like HUD element pops up that grows brighter and louder the closer you are to your target. It works pretty well most of the time but can get confusing on occasion when the thing you're looking for is inside a multi-story building because the system doesn't account for verticality. Once you've come across your objective, the indicator then stays on the object so that you don't have to keep looking.
  • The immediate area around Remnant monoliths is always free of environmental hazards to let you search and solve riddles in peace.
  • Want to scan a Hydra or a Remnant Destroyer, but were too busy trying to avoid being killed to take the opportunity? Fortunately, the two that fight in the hidden vault in the north of Elaaden respawn and are usually too busy fighting each other to bother with Ryder, giving the player another chance.
  • Narrative Action prompts (equivalent to Interrupts) are now much larger, always appear in the same corner of the screen, have text telling you what the action will do, and have a visible timer so that you know how long you have before you miss out. This addresses every major issue the Interrupt system had in Mass Effect 2 and 3.
• Anti-Villain: The anti-A.I. group in the Knight subquest aren't really evil, just severely misguided, and have sympathetic reasons for their dislike of A.I., like Knight's son having been used in Project: Overlord, or Valeria's sisters having been husked by the geth. When Ryder eventually uncovers their next move, they learn that Knight already discarded the "anti" altogether and prepares to bomb the Nexus' computer systems with EMPs. If Ryder takes the time to heal Knight's son, Knight actually does take out part of hydroponics, but can be convinced to stand down.
• Apocalypse How:
  • Depressingly common when going off the beaten tracks of the Heleus cluster are worlds that have been ruined beyond repair by the Scourge. The words "atmosphere" and "stripped away" recur often.
  • The destruction of H-047C. According to the Codex's description, debris was warped by the Scourge and had its mass increased dramatically, before it slammed down into the planet. Essentially, the place was Colony Dropped into oblivion. Planet scanning reveals that other gas giants gained their rings the same way, and the asteroid thickets found throughout the cluster are heavily implied to be the remains of Earth-sized or larger planets.
• Apocalyptic Log:
  • Alec Ryder's private files include transmissions from during the Reaper war, including a turian alert that gets interrupted by the iconic foghorn, a distress call from Earth's defense fleet, and a message sent by Liara T'Soni from the Normandy SR-2 during the events of Mass Effect 3.
  • As per usual in a Mass Effect game, you'll encounter several of them from unlucky colonists and explorers on planets and out in space.
  • Exploring Resilience on Eos allows Ryder to find one in the base's remains. It consists of one word: "Run". Cue the angry Fiend.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: As always, you can only have two squadmates accompany Ryder at a time, no matter how dangerous the situation. This is averted during the final battle. Like in Dragon Age II, your benched party members will show up as uncontrollable NPCs during the final fight with the Archon.
• Arbitrary Weapon Range:
  • Not in space, but even the game's infantry weapons have an unbelievably short range of less than 100 meters. You can see enemies much farther away than that if your console or rig is powerful enough to render such distances, but when you shoot at them, nothing will happen. There's also an even shorter effective range beyond which a shot will hit, but for severely reduced damage. If you want to use your guns to maximum effect, don't fight at distances beyond 50-60 meters (shotguns are an entirely different matter.) Naturally, this fact is extremely frustrating to those looking to play as snipers.
  • The Equalizer submachine gun has a much shorter effective range than other pistol or assault rifle class weapons. This is probably to balance it out, as it's relatively light but does good damage, has very little recoil, is reasonably accurate for a fully-automatic weapon, and as a Remnant weapon has an overheat mechanic instead of ammo.
  • All weapons with a Beam Emitter or Electrical Conduits augmentation pay for their pinpoint accuracy with a massive reduction in effective range, making them completely useless for anything beyond close quarters combat.
• Arc Words: For the Ryder family, a quote Alec used to say in his days as an N7; "When your back's against the wall, if you can't run from it, use it." Also doubles as a Chekhov's Gun of sorts.
• Archaeological Arms Race: Both the Archon's forces and Ryder's team are racing to find and unlock the Remnant Vaults scattered across Heleus. For the Initiative, their goal is to use the Remnant's technology to terraform worlds to settle on, and hopefully undo the damage caused by the Scourge. For the Archon, it's to force the populations of Heleus to submit to the kett, or die when their worlds are destroyed with the same technology. By the later stages of the storyline, it turns into a literal race to be the first to reach the central control hub for the Remnant network, an artificial planet called Meridian.
• Armor of Invincibility: The researchable Remnant Heritage Armor lacks any kind of offensive support but grants large amounts of damage resistance, health/shield regeneration and a huge reduction in health/shield regen delay, allowing Ryder to survive obscene amounts of damage and quickly recover what they lost if something went wrong. When crafted with augmentations like a Battlefield Assist Module, a Shield Oscillator and three Kinetic Coils, Ryder becomes next to unkillable.
• Art Evolution: Many visual aspects of the franchise were overhauled or expanded between the original trilogy and ME:A. To note:
  • Krogan females make their first real appearance, being slightly shorter than the males and with a smoother, less ridged head plate.
  • Various returning weapons underwent minor redesigns and/or size adjustments.
  • Primary omni-tools (the ones worn on the left arm) look notably different from the ones used in the Milky Way. For some reason, the one on Ryder's right arm that they use for hacking resembles the original design much more closely.
• Artificial Brilliance: The AI acts remarkably smart most of the time. To note:
  • Hostiles make good use of available cover, support each other in combined arms warfare, and will mercilessly flank you if you aren't careful and aware of your surroundings.
  • If you try to snipe a group of them and fail to kill each target in one hit, the others will immediately bolt out of sight so effectively you won't be able to hit anyone anymore.
  • Everyone's also very adept at using their jump-jets to outmaneuver you or attack from unexpected angles.
  • Squad mates are surprisingly reliable when it comes to detonating power combos. Often you actually need to hurry if you want to unleash something specific, for when you wait too long, one of your companions will seize the opportunity instead.
• Artificial Stupidity: There are, of course, still situations when the AI makes your life easier by doing something stupid:
  • For all their talent at using cover, there's always someone's head peeking out somewhere...
  • Soldiers under sniper fire will often run between various cover pieces despite having been safe where they were, offering you ample opportunity to put a bullet in their head. Alternatively, if you stay out of their detection range and drop every target with one shot, they'll just stare slack-jawed without giving a damn about their buddies' heads exploding left and right. Lessened in patch 1.05 onwards, where depending on the difficulty setting the enemies will either immediately run into cover and stay there, or pull a Leeroy Jenkins and start charging your position, which still makes them a fair bit harder to hit than if they were just standing around.
  • Many enemies (particularly the human and angaran ones for some reason) are really bad at using grenades.
  • There are times where you don't want your squad to immediately attack bad guys. For example, a side-task requires the player to conduct scans of living enemies. Which is hard to do if they're killed on sight by your squad. The only "hold fire" option available is to order squad mates to a position away from the enemy, which is risky for Ryder.
• Artistic License – Gun Safety: The sixth party member, an alien named Jaal, has two introductory scenes, one with the mayor of the planet he lives on and one with its military leader. During the second scene, Jaal keeps his sniper rifle in hand, pointed at the ceiling... but with his finger clearly and prominently on the trigger. For a trained and high-ranking member of the angaran militia, that's a little silly.
• Ascended Meme:
  • Much like how the Volus Adept and Vanguard Classes in Mass Effect 3's multiplayer made reference to Niftu Cal, the "Biotic God" from Mass Effect 2, the Annihilation skill in the Biotics tree pays tribute to his legacy with an upgrade branch listed as "Biotic Wind."
  • Ryder can occasionally loot turian calibration coils.
  • A kett datapad describes the turians' reach and flexibility.
  • At one point, Ryder can be told that a group of Outlaws are doing business near one of the outposts. One response choice is: "Outlaws? On my outpost?!"◊
• Asshole Victim:
  • Too many to list here. For starters, every single named kett character most definitely counts. Then there's Kadara, a Wretched Hive positively littered with them. If you kill someone there, chances are very good they deserved it. Further examples abound on the Nexus, at most other locations, as well as on loyalty missions, spread out across both the native and the newcomer species.
  • Basically every antagonist and antagonist faction in the original trilogy, such as the Batarian Hegemony and most vorcha, since most of them didn't get an ark to Andromeda. A possible ending is that every one of them got wiped out by the Reapers, which is a horrible fate for anyone.
• Asteroid Thicket: A shockingly large number of star systems has at least one, many of which are implied to be the remains of moons or whole planets destroyed by the Scourge. The mission to H-047c takes the Tempest right into one by making a huge asteroid your op zone for the duration of Ryder's investigation.
• As You Know: The game has lots of instances where characters explain stuff to each other that they should really know about already. Most of them involve Ryder and seem targeted at newcomers to the franchise who aren't intimately familiar with the lore. Others are much more obvious examples of Expo Speak, to the point that SAM occasionally begins conversations with "As you know..."
• A Taste of Power: Or rather, A Taste Of Versatility. At the end of the prologue mission, you fight alongside Alec Ryder, who switches between each of the various profiles while using his extremely powerful skills to wipe the floor with the kett. However, once your Ryder has mastered all of his abilities themselves, you'll quickly be forced to realize that they still have a long way to go before they can rival Alec's epic damage output.
• At Least I Admit It: On Kadara, Ryder can try to retrieve the formula for a particularly addictive drug named "Oblivion". When they confront the asari producing it in a lab, she tells Ryder a different story than the quest giver, Dr. Nakamura, told. When asked why Ryder should believe her, she says it's because she's "not hiding behind a false shield of morality". Sure... but she's still lying, anyway.
• Attack Its Weakpoint: When fighting an Architect, Ryder's squad mates will frequently call attention to its current weak points.
  Cora: Forget the armor, target the legs!
  Peebee: Time for some headshots!
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Remnant Architects are gigantic robotic constructs and by far the largest enemies in the game. Nothing else Ryder which can kill comes even close to their size, and every single one of them puts up an epic fight. Everyone including Ryder has a massive Oh, Crap! moment the first time they're jumped by one, which will include you if it's your first run through the game; even more so if your first Architect happens to be the one on Eos.
• Attack Reflector:
  • The Backlash skill creates a biotic shield in front of the user that reflects incoming fire back at its source. Certain upgrades can even make it send the bullets back with more force than they had when they hit the shield. It's an entertaining but largely irrelevant skill to give Ryder because the unidirectional barrier is extremely vulnerable to flanking, can't take much damage, and doesn't last long anyway even without being shot at, which makes it all the more annoying when Outcast Pariahs deploy it against you much more effectively.
  • The energy shields the kett use as deployable cover around their bases also reflect incoming fire. It's normally not an issue, but if you do manage to pull the trigger while standing right in front one of these things, the critical mission failure screen can quickly be the next thing you see because Ryder can't take nearly as much damage as their guns can dish out.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The Raiders from Liam's loyalty mission took a derelict kett ship for themselves. It's so damaged however that they spend more time trying to keep it running then they do raiding. Though it'd probably help if the captain stopped killing his crew every time they try to tell him what he wants can't be done.
  • Although their severe damage penalties have since been patched, all types of gun projectile augmentations are still largely useless because they either come with significant drawbacks or are highly situational. The Beam Emitter and Electrical Conduits for instance give any gun pinpoint accuracy but reduce their range by a huge margin, making it impossible to engage in anything but close quarters battles with them. Others turn the projectiles into various kinds of grenades that make it difficult to hit almost anything, even more so when the target is moving, and they rarely confer a damage bonus to give them at least some advantage. The Seeking Plasma System is advertised as an Always Accurate Attack, but the projectiles move so slowly that all but the most ponderous enemies can simply outrun or evade them while they keep shooting at you the whole time.
  • The Vintage Heat Sink is situational. You pay for unlimited ammo with a painful 60% reduction in clip size, and since the cooldown time of an overheated gun can be significantly longer than its basic reload, a sharp drop in effective DPS will often be the consequence. Clip extension mods alleviate this issue to some extent, but a Black Widow sniper rifle for instance holds a lot of spare ammo and is much more effective with up to eight shots per thermal clip than with a VHS's three. It is a good augmentation in many cases, especially when used on already single-shot weapons such as the Isharay sniper rifle (it even slightly speeds up the reload animation in that case), but is not the best choice for every weapon.
  • "Power Cell" abilities, like grenades or Trip Mines in Singleplayer, especially at higher difficulties. Enemies move fast in this game—much faster than any other game in the series except the original. Tossing grenades or leaving mines can do plausible damage if you're facing slow-moving enemies like Nullifiers or Destroyers, or see a lot of them grouped together behind cover. But those are VERY specific situations and very difficult to implement on a chaotic, open battlefield and missing enemies with power cell abilities means you've wasted ammo. An Achievement hints at the ability to use biotic powers like Pull to position enemies over Mines and explosives, but that's a lot of work and setup just to kill one enemy...and it requires you to stay out of cover (using your power) the entire time. In the same amount of time, you could have tossed a Singularity, Invasion, or other ability with homing features at the same enemy/crowd and detonated it.
  • One of the researchable upgrades for the Nomad lets it project a shield dome for some seconds every time you exit the vehicle. While that's useful on occasion to ward off incoming fire until Ryder has taken cover behind the Nomad, it blocks your own attacks just as well, giving melee-focused enemies plenty of time to advance on you with impunity. It's frustrating how often this apparently useful upgrade turns out to be an annoying liability instead.
  • On a similar note: the shield dome the Moshae projects at the climax of her mission. It's supposed to shield Ryder and their squad from the kett, and contrary to the Nomad's you can shoot through it, but it creates such heavy visual distortion that you're barely able to see the enemy, let alone aim at them accurately as long as you're inside.
  • Barricade trades the usual problems with power cell abilities for entirely new and even worse problems. Barricade uses up one cell to produce a portable waist-high cover which provides buffs for weapons or other powers for any characters behind it. However, it lasts a laughably short period of time, meaning it's not feasible for any kind of engagement—enemies can defeat your Barricade just by hiding behind cover. Granted, this can make it marginally useful as a last-resort defensive ability (especially if upgraded to stun nearby foes or instantly restore shields) but there are plenty of other powers or weapons that do the same job but better. At best, Barricade is so extremely niche that a player has to mold their entire build/combat style around it, instead of the other way around.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: Suvi, at the climax, manages to work out where Meridian could have gotten to by using a combination of all the star-charts the Initiative has.
• Ax-Crazy: Elora, an asari exile found on Kadara, who is leading a Helium-3 mining expedition, with the hopes of using it to blow up each Initiative outpost, for no readily apparent reason and with no evident goal beyond that. Most of her underlings don't really care what she wants, or figure she's too overconfident for her own good.
• Badass Crew: The game introduces a new team of adventurers exploring, and fighting, their way through an uncharted galaxy.
• Badass Family: The Ryder family. Players will choose between twins Scott and Sara as their Player Character, with the other twin still playing an important role in the story. Their dad, Alec, was one of the first humans to travel through a mass relay on Jon Grissom's exploration team, enlisted as an N7, and later became the Pathfinder (a mixture of soldier, diplomat, and explorer meant to lead the colonists once they arrive). One of the twins has to take his place after he dies saving their life. Their mom, Ellen, was one of the first scientists to research human biotics (which sadly also made her terminally sick, but doesn't make her achievements any less significant.) The "Ryder Family Secrets" sidequest reveals that Alec kept her in stasis and brought her onto Hyperion in secret, with the hope that a cure could be discovered in Andromeda.
  • Jaal's family also qualifies as several members of his family, particularly his mother and older siblings, are all distinguished members of the Resistance. His oldest sister commands a Resistance black ops squad and his older brother was a famous war hero (until he was taken by the kett.) Jaal himself is a shining example, being both famous and a high-ranking officer serving directly under Evfra himself.
• Bad Guy Bar: Two of them on Kadara, one in the port, on in the slums.
  • Kralla's Song, owned by the astoundingly bad-tempered Umi Hemon, who hates being a bartender and will draw a knife on anyone stupid enough to try and walk out without paying. Drack loves it.
  • Tartarus, down in the slums. It's dark and dingy-looking, but the owner's a lot mellower. It's a favoured drinking hole of Reyes Vidal, and has a salarian... "businessman" sitting in the corner. It's also got the obligatory dancers, like Chora's Den and Afterlife, only they dance in cages. Just not to protect the dancers, but rather protecting any clients who get grabby.
• Bar Brawl: After Drack's loyalty mission, Ryder meets him for a drink at Kralla's Song in Kadara Port. It turns into an epic bar fight with Ryder and Drack being the last ones standing amid all the bodies (unless you flub the interrupt prompt, in which case Ryder misses Drack mopping the floor with everyone by himself).
• Barrier Warrior: Asari Pariahs have shields that are immune to weaponry, and several biotic powers, sending them right back at Ryder. However, they don't last too long, and if the asari's knocked off their feet, the shield instantly disappears.
• Beam Spam: Remnant Observers attack with a continuous, blazing-red Eye Beam. Get a bunch of them together in one place and you have this trope. The kett's rapid-fire plasma weapons can also invoke this feeling in large enough numbers, particularly the Anointed's heavy weaponry. Last but not least, you can get in on the fun yourself by equipping Ryder with Remnant guns or any other automatic firearm that was augmented with a Beam Emitter during its construction.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: An audio recording on Kadara has an Outcast stating he's hoping to catch some of the Collective in the act while on patrol. Seconds later, some Collective goons show up and kill him.
• Beehive Barrier:
  • If you look closely, you'll notice that many windows are in fact kinetic barriers comprised of countless hexagons. Outpost buildings have a lot of them, as does the Tempest.
  • Ryder's Barrier power is a literal example - a short-lived holographic barrier with a High-Tech Hexagons design. Remnant Nullifiers and Destroyers also make use of these.
• Behemoth Battle:
  • You can chance upon a secondary Remnant Vault that's under... investigation by a gang of exile scavengers, and they're already engaged in a pitched battle against the Remnant bots inside when you arrive. At some point you can witness a Hydra Assault Armor squaring off against a Remnant Destroyer in a large room while dozens of scavengers around them are busy duking it out with scores of smaller bots. You can massacre them all, or you can just hunker down somewhere and enjoy the show.
  • During the fight for control of the Remnant Space Station, the kett will sic one of their Fiends on another Remnant Destroyer, while kett troops and Remnant bots go at it around them.
  • There's actually a boss with the name "Behemoth" you have to battle, though sadly it doesn't really count since neither him nor Ryder are particularly huge.
• The Berserker:
  • Anointed are the kett's heavy weapons experts, wield a plasma Gatling of sorts and should therefore specialize in mid-range combat, but disturbingly many of them prefer to charge your position instead. It's a frighteningly effective tactic because those buggers are as fast as they're huge, can take a lot of damage and dish out a world of pain when their guns' inaccuracy doesn't matter anymore all of a sudden. It's strange when a supposedly lumbering heavy gunner competes for a spot on the Lightning Bruiser team.
  • The aptly named Berserkers, heavily armored krogan warriors who fight for the Nexus Exiles.
• BFG: A lot of them, as is customary for the franchise, but one example in particular sticks out: the Widow line of sniper rifles. Most other weapons collapse into a very compact form when holstered; even the otherwise huge Revenant LMG becomes tiny on Ryder's back. Widows, however, remain a massive tube longer than Ryder's arm even in their packed-up state, jutting over their shoulder and extending down to their butt while carried on the back.
• Big Bad: The Archon, the one in charge of the kett invasion force in Heleus.
• Big Badass Battle Sequence:
  • The entire final mission, more or less, beginning with Ryder sending all their allies plus a fleet of hacked Remnant warships against the Archon's remaining armada in a pitched space battle, which then moves on to a frantic ground war in a race to Meridian's control systems.
  • On a smaller scale: every time you assault a kett stronghold, like their bases on Voeld and Eos - just you and two brothers/sisters-in-arms against an entire planetary garrison force. The individual battles usually aren't that much bigger than what you encounter elsewhere, too, but the huge enemy bases plus the entire premise make those missions feel suitably epic.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Kaerkyn, Spitbugs and co. are all over the place, ranging in size from a cat to a very large dog.
• Bigger on the Inside: The Tempest. Natch. Unlike previous Mass Effect games, the ship actually lands on the planets you visit, allowing you to walk on the roof of your own ship if you want to the annoyance of Kallo. If you do this, you'll notice how the ship you can walk on the roof of outside, is significantly smaller than the interior ship you walk on the inside. The cockpit for example, is 20 paces wide from Suvi's seat to Kallo's, but only 5 steps wide when walking along the roof of the same cockpit.
• Big "NO!": Hilariously parodied during the movie night. Twice - once by a turian actor, and once by Ryder. It Makes Sense in Context.
• Bilingual Bonus: The emails Ryder receives after the final mission contain notes of thanks in a whole bunch of languages, and since their meaning is fairly clear even to those who don't speak them, it's really just a bonus for added flair.
• Bioluminescence Is Cool: Most planets have some bioluminescent flora (usually fungi of all stripes and sizes), and the top-tier graphics make sure they really look cool. Havarl, being a fairly blatant Expy of Pandora, is covered in little else but these.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
  • While investigating a krogan murder case on Kadara, Ryder meets with Mallox, the turian owner of the flophouse next door, who's surprisingly cordial for someone on Kadara. In a different quest, he turns out to be responsible for murdering a town of angara who lived to the north, and when asked about what happened becomes hostile, telling Ryder to "fuck off". If they keep investigating, he has his goons try to murder them.
  • Also on Kadara, there's a quest wherein a doctor asks you to steal back the formula for a medicinal plant he found and was turned, against his will, into a drug. Going to his old lab will reveal his partner, an asari doctor, who claims that the doctor knew it was a drug the whole time and only wants the formula back because he wants a bigger cut. If asked, he'll claim she's not a doctor. Both of them are lying. The doctor did know it was a drug, and his former partner is indeed a doctor herself. But, the doctor had a change of heart and severely wants to get the drug off the streets. Even though he lies to you about his role in things, he is sincere about his motivations. The real Bitch in Sheep's Clothing is the asari.
• Bizarrchitecture: The other trope applying to Remnant Vaults. These buildings would be impossible to replicate in real life, both inside and outside, and make very little sense from a structural standpoint, though that's only taking architecture into account, and not the technology that's capable of, among other implausible feats, terraforming worlds.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Angara, although bipedal and roughly humanoid, have a very alien body structure that's best seen when Jaal takes to running around naked aboard the Tempest. The kett may be even worse, considering the bone-colored protrusions everywhere on their outer body actually are bones that serve as natural armor. And let's not even get into how kett are "born"...
• Black-and-Grey Morality: The kett are solid, darkest black all over, but the angara aren't exactly innocent either anymore after the endless war made some of them commit a lot of very questionable acts including Cold-Blooded Torture.
• Blatant Lies:
  • While searching for the dumped bodies of crime victims on Kadara, Ryder can come across two Outlaws working over the body of yet another dead guy. Upon spotting Ryder they have a brief Oh, Crap! moment but then quickly assure them that their "buddy" is completely fine. He's just taking a nap.
  • The Movie Night quest has Vetra telling Ryder about how she heard there's some popcorn going on Kadara. But popcorn's contraband, so Ryder will have to tragically be forced to seize and destroy it, with added salt (to hide the evidence, obviously).
  • Vetra often tells stories about the many shifty adventures and illegal dealings of "some guy she knows/knew". No-one's buying for a second that she isn't actually talking about herself.
  • Played for Laughs with all the flimsy excuses the other five squad members submit for not helping Peebee clean up her place after her loyalty mission.
• Bling of War: Among the various pre-order bonuses is a special paint job for the Nomad called Midas Touch. It gives most of the vehicle's outer armor a solid gold plating. You know, for those Pathfinders among us who aren't really into that thing called subtlety.
• Blood Knight: Although the game makes an effort to show another, more level-headed side of the krogan, a huge chunk of their population in Heleus is still way too eager to get into senseless fights just for the hell of it. Considering how few of them made the trip to Andromeda in the first place, and the losses they already suffered and continue to suffer, this is worrying indeed. What's more, one of their engineers apparently programmed New Tuchanka's automated defense turrets to "feel happy" every time they kill something, which means that the krogans' self-destructive behavior now even extends to their non-sentient gun emplacements.
• Blown Across the Room: Guns have a force effect that causes stagger proportional to their individual shot damage. This force effect is amplified if the shot kills the target. High damage guns like the Black Widow will blow their targets across the room and will even cause enemies who somehow survive being shot to be blown off their feet. This is one-upped, however, by what happens if you use the biotic power Pull followed by Throw: an unshielded enemy will be hurled a huge distance by the combo.
• Blue/Orange Contrast: On the map of the Heleus Cluster, one half is blue, the other reddish-orange. Suvi will speculate that the Scourge might be responsible.
• Body Horror: The kett are revealed to be a parasitic life form that infects other species with part of the DNA of the Archon, and mutating them with grotesque bone protrusions on their head, torso, arms and legs, until they barely resemble what they used to be prior to the mutation. And that's just the stuff on the outside. Indeed all kett troops are simply mutated forms of either angara, or native animals of the Heleus Cluster. Whether or not the Archon is the one true kett, or merely another "exalted" life form from outside the Heleus Cluster, remains to be seen.
• Bold Explorer: Everyone in the Initiative, to some degree or another. Even the most common, low-level colonist is a brave pioneer, journeying millions of light-years from the Milky Way to start a new life in the Andromeda galaxy. Special note goes to the "first wave" and "second wave" personnel, though. The first wave are Pathfinders, leaders, researchers and scientists who do the difficult work of charting the unknown and making things safe for everyone else. The second wave are the engineers, workers, and planners who use the foundation of the first wave to build sustainable living in the galaxy.
• Book Ends:
  • Ryder's first line and last line before the credits is "we made it." The first conveys Ryder's relief that the Hyperion made it to Andromeda. The second conveys Ryder's relief that the Hyperion has found a safe home for humanity in Meridian.
  • If a relationship with Peebee is pursued, it begins the same way they first met: Peebee rushing into Ryder and knocking them to the floor.
  • The tutorial mission takes place on Habitat 7. The final epilogue mission unlocked by completing the main story and bringing all five golden worlds to 100% Viability has you return there, a fact that does not go unnoticed by Ryder if s/he picks the logical dialogue option.
    Ryder: Back where we started. Fitting.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The basic weapons that automatically unlock at certain player levels are often just as good as - if not sometimes even better than - the stuff you need to research. The good ol' M-8 Avenger assault rifle for instance has more or less the same damage output as the M-76 Revenant light machine gun, but is lighter and much more accurate. Slap on a Vintage Heat Sink and you have a reliable weapon that can get you through the whole game for a minimal price in resources.
  • There's a ton of augmentations for weapons and armor, but most of their bonuses are minuscule and highly situational. The most useful ones aren't the fancy biotic boosters or tech combo enhancers. It's arguably the Double Mod Extension that gives any gun two additional mod slots; the Vintage Heat Sink that solves all your ammo worries; and the Kinetic Coil due to either increasing overall weapon damage or giving a nice boost to damage resistance, depending on where it's installed.
  • Weapons in general. Most active abilities are a lot weaker than a good gun if not used as part of a combo detonation, so it's often easier to just shoot your way through Andromeda instead of bothering with the much weaker tech or biotic abilities with their lengthy cooldowns. The gap eventually closes to some degree, but it takes a lot of levelling for an ability-heavy Ryder to even come close to the damage output of a dedicated gunslinger.
  • The "Throw" biotic power. Not very flashy, not very destructive, but it can send any non-armoured enemy flying, especially if used after "Pull" (and as a bonus deals impact damage), which can be very useful in a hectic firefight.
• Borrowing from the Sister Series: After finding general success with more open worlds in Dragon Age: Inquisition, Bioware brought them over to the Mass Effect series here. However, the results are mixed in comparison, with the large, open worlds also being rather empty and an excess of Fetch Quests among the game's side quests.
• Boss Battle: Quite a few of them, either against fairly common but very dangerous enemies like Fiends or against actual bosses which are denoted by a special skull symbol below their health bar. The latter tend to be beefed-up version of regular enemy types with a lot more health and shielding, but they behave no different from the basic counterparts and therefore (usually) require no special tactics to defeat.
• Boss in Mook Clothing:
  • Fiends are huge creatures the kett deploy as line breakers. They're very heavily armored, can move deceptively fast and hit like a truckload of bricks if they get into melee range. It usually takes about a minute of frantic fire from the entire squad to bring even one of them down, and they almost never come alone. Several missions use them for minor boss fights, but they can also be encountered in numbers everywhere on Kadara and Elaaden.
  • Remnants have the Destroyer, a huge quadrupedal weapons platform with extremely strong shielding, heavy armor and three very powerful weapons systems. It's the only enemy in the game susceptible to Sub System Damage - its two secondary cannons can be shot off to reduce its deadly firepower. Unfortunately, that's about the worst thing you can do if there's nothing else in the room to draw its attention. Their high mobility, difficult to access weak point and a tendency to constantly advance on Ryder arguably makes them even more dangerous than the immobile Architects.
  • Fighting Nexus exiles of all stripes often includes facing Hydras. They're heavily armed and armored and have a nasty tendency to show up in pairs, but are relatively harmless when compared to the other examples mentioned above because they're extremely slow and their attacks are both the weakest and easily dodged.
  • The quest on H-047c has a named krogan Berserker who's slightly stronger than the average Berserker, leading a mining venture there. It'll take a good deal of firepower to take him down.
• Bottomless Magazines: All Remnant weapons operate on an overheat mechanic similar to how the guns in Mass Effect worked, giving them unlimited ammo that's counterbalanced by a need to give the gun time to cool down every now and then. Any non-Remnant gun that usually requires ammunition can be converted to this system as well by installing a Vintage Heat Sink mod during the weapon's creation, which comes at the price of a 60% reduction in clip size.
• Bottomless Pit: Every larger location has them to keep you on your toes while you're platforming with Ryder's jump-jet. Falling into one warps you back to where you fell with a minor loss in health.
• Brainwashed and Crazy:
  • It turns out that more or less all kett one encounters are this. The exaltation process that created them somehow erased their previous personality and allegiance and turned them into obedient drones that are fanatically loyal to the very enemy they opposed before.
  • One sidequest on Kadara revolves around a bunch of Milky Way aliens that had the misfortune of crossing paths with two former Cerberus scientists who messed with their brains in an attempt to create an organic supercomputer based on an artificially induced Hive Mind.
• Break Out the Museum Piece: One of the weapon augmentations you can craft is the "Vintage Heatsink", which trades the ability to instantly reload and get back in the fight for unlimited ammo after a moment cool down after firing. Lorewise the design is a relic from the First Contact War when weapons used non-disposable heatsinks, gameplay wise it grants your weapons similar function to weapons from Mass Effect 1.
• Breast Plate: A mix of played straight and averted. Cora and Peebee wear formfitting armor or clothing in combat, while all of Sara's armor except for the N7 chest piece is gender-neutral. The same is true for Vetra's armor, but her suits are just standard turian armors, which have always looked pretty much the same^note plus turian females don't seem to have distinctive breasts in the first place.
• Breather Episode: Although many of the optional sidemissions - and even some of the loyalty questions - are light-hearted in nature, the multi-part "Movie Night" quest, which culminates in a lengthy cutscene where the Tempest crew simply enjoy each other's company as they watch a movie, qualifies as it is intended to be played prior to embarking on the endgame.
  • The visit to the turian ark is also one of these. There are no enemies to fight, so it becomes a simple case of “open doors to get to SAM node”, make a fairly easy decision and then that story arc concludes.
• Brick Joke:
  • Ryder's first conversation with Jaal aboard the Tempest ends with them trying to part with a handshake. Jaal understands the concept but prefers to show Ryder how the angara say farewell, which doesn't go what one would call smoothly. After his loyalty mission, another opportunity arises, and this time they pull it off like they never did it any other way.
    Jaal [chuckles]: You've been practicing.
    Ryder: Just a little.
  • Remember the all-elcor production of Hamlet? It's part of the Nexus' cultural database. If you visit the Nexus embassy early on, Ryder will mention it to Jaal. Come back later, and you find Jaal's watched it, and finds it "enhances" the work.
  • The reason the Tempest doesn't have any guns? It's too fragile. Recoil would blow out all their fancy windows. Structural weakness.
  • After Vetra's loyalty mission, she'll complain that Sid impersonating her blew one of Vetra's favours in order to allow someone to clone cats. If Suvi's romanced, she'll mention wanting to get a dog, then note Vetra apparently asked cats to be cloned earlier, for reasons no-one understands.
  • Back in the original trilogy, Wrex once noted krogan dances tend to involve lots of bullets, and not much dancing. An e-mail found at New Tuchanka mentions the krogan tried to throw a dance, and it went really badly. As in "people died" badly.
  • On first meeting Peebee, it's possible to have a conversation with her where she mentions a certain "grumpy old man" who keeps breaking her monitoring equipment (namely, Drack). Later on, when they're both in the party, one of their conversations is Peebee reminding Drack he owes her one trampled seismometer.
• Broken Pedestal:
  • A pedestal breaks big time during Cora's Loyalty Mission to rescue the asari ark ship. On it, Cora meets Sarissa a legendary asari commando, who literally wrote the book on how to be the ideal asari huntress. Sarissa is now the asari Pathfinder, having succeeded the original one, Matriarch Ishara. Cora had memorized that manual thoroughly, especially the portion on being a good Tiamna or bodyguard to The Captain. After restoring power to the ark's drive core, the asari pathfinder succession log is revealed, in which Cora learns that Sarissa intentionally abandoned Ishara to die at the hands of the kett in order to obtain a map of safe routes through the Scourge that the kett used to get around. Due to being in possession of that data, the ark became a priority target for kett raiding teams, endangering everyone. And on top of that, Sarissa refuses to take responsibility for contradicting a central tenet of her own treatise, claiming that the image of her being the ideal huntress must persist to give people hope. This is hard to take for Cora.
  • A minor example is the angaran astronomer you meet on Aya and sends you to find out what happened to a number of satellites. At first, he's very excited to speak with you and sees a lot of potential in the Nexus races... until your search turns up that the missing satellites were stolen and dismantled by former Nexus outlaws. If you tell him the truth, he will reverse his position on aliens, say that you're no better than the kett, and refuse to talk to anyone from the Milky Way ever again.
• Broken Record:
  • The criminals being turned into a hive mind stand around repeating such pleasant topics as the definition of warfare and genocide. If Ryder turns the ex-Cerberus scientists' experiment back on them, they'll start repeating lines from The Divine Comedy over and over.
  • SAM apparently believes it prudent to notify Ryder of almost every single change in environmental conditions. Many locations (like kett outposts on Voeld) have lots of safe and hazardous zones in close proximity to each other, which means you'll be hearing SAM's warnings over and over again as long as you're on site. He does the same almost every time you enter a mining zone, even when it's the same one you were already exploring five seconds ago and left only because their borders aren't marked anywhere. This got so many complaints that BioWare adjusted it in the game's first major patch. (Which now has him constantly notify Ryder of new emails instead while aboard the Tempest, even when there aren't any new mails to read.)
• Brought Down to Normal:
  • In a sense for the player. Near the end of the story, you briefly lose control of your chosen Ryder sibling and instead switch to the other twin who's just barely out of a prolonged coma. Unsurprisingly, they have none of their twin's fancy weapons, armor or abilities, which means you suddenly go from controlling a badass One-Man Army to a much weaker character wielding nothing but a pistol and a single grenade.
  • Throughout the game, Ryder can use their omnitool to scan objects, providing important intel and sometimes uncovering hidden items. There are several occasions, however, in which they are either not allowed to scan, or are warned that doing so will have negative consequences.
• Brutal Honesty: After the Initiative embassy is set up on Aya, a human worker can be heard talking to a curious angara asking about the Milky Way. The human admits that it wasn't actually very harmonious, which amuses the angara.
• Buffy Speak:
  • If Jaal is present on Kadara, he may complain about how much he dislikes it for being so "pointy".
  • Sara Ryder slips into a serious case of it during her awkward attempt at flirting with Suvi.
  • Two guys on Kadara ask Ryder to find a "UV lamp thingy" (or, in other words, a UV lamp) for them. They are tremendously stoned.
• Bullying a Dragon: The first time Ryder's on Kadara, they can find some Outcasts hastling the keeper of a gun shop. Who is a krogan. If Ryder comes back, she can be found having a talk with Kaetus about this, and he mentions it won't happen again (and that she's getting a pass on protection fees for the next while to boot).
• But Not Too Gay:
  • The game received a metric ton of flak for its lackluster portrayal of gay and "non-standard" romance options even before its release, and it only got worse afterwards. Unlike the straight human or asari romance scenes, which are fairly explicit by videogame standards, romancing Suvi (lesbian) or Gil (gay) ends in a Fade to Black without even a hint of intimacy. Reyes Vidal (the sole bisexual male human NPC in the game) doesn't get more than some petting and a dance scene. Also of note is that none of the human LGBT romance options are part of the squad; two are crew members of the Tempest, the third is a shady supporting character Ryder encounters halfway into the game. Due to this, they receive a lot less Character Development and depth than the rest. Gil's extremely poorly handled baby subplot only had the LGBT community further up in arms. Bioware promised to improve on the contentious topic in future updates.
  • In update 1.08 Jaal was added as a bisexual romance option, which includes the same semi-explicit sex scene from the Sara romance, and actually has separate animations and dialogue from the Sara scene.
• Butt-Dialing Mordor: Ryder and Gil accidentally activate a kett transponder that they're using to track the Archon.
• Butt-Monkey: Danny Messier is an eager colonist Ryder can talk to after things at Prodromos have settled in. He'll ask Ryder for advice on what to do with all his new-found, post-cryo freedom. No matter what you suggest (researching flora and bugs, patrolling the perimeter or studying the Remnant), he'll end up cornered by huge bugs, cornered by angry kett and cornered by Remnant bots, one after the other. After he's been saved for the third time, he's so sick of Eos that he leaves the planet for something he believes to be greener pastures: Kadara. Ryder promptly hangs a lampshade on it.
  Ryder: That is not going to end well.
• Button Mashing:
  • Remnant Breachers try to murderize you in melee if they get too close, forcing you to mash the interact button to break Ryder out of their grip.
  • The dog-like Adhi will do this too, latching on to Ryder's arm and trying to drag them to the ground.

C - E

• Call-Back:
  • The entirety of the final battle on Meridian feels like a Call-Back to the original game. It starts out with the Nomad being deployed directly from the Tempest (just like the Mako on Ilos), a giant flagship that's under assault in need of rescue and (potentially) get saved by the cavalry (just like the Destiny Ascension), waves of minions and flunkies being sent against the protagonist to kill or delay them (just like the Geth), and a villain who's attempting to access an ancient and advanced superstructure that, if not stopped quickly, will begin a galactic extinction within minutes (just like Saren). There are still differences, of course, but it's comparatively urgent and epic in scale.
  • Cora and Drack can have a humorous conversation about her not dating him because he might be too much krogan to handle. In Mass Effect 3: Citadel, Fem!Shep and Wrex had an almost verbatim exchange after the casino heist if he wasn't chosen as the third squad member.
  • Idle Remnant bots communicate in stuttering noises that sound very similar to the geth's unintelligible math language.
  • A Nomad paint job you can buy is a salarian design called Silent Step. In the first game, Captain Kirrahe mentioned an unsung hero STG operative known only as "Silent Step" during his famous Hold the Line speech. The description of this paint job states that it "holds the line" against all planetary conditions.
  • When the crew is overheard talking about the Tempest's lack of weapons, Cora points out that the recoil would destroy their fancy windows, reminding players once again that windows are a structural weakness.
• The Cameo:
  • Liara T'Soni - or at least her voice - makes repeated appearances in Alec Ryder's audio logs aboard the Hyperion. Apparently, she was aware of the Initiative and provided Alec with intel and advice on how to deal with unknown alien technology. Sara also knows her by reputation due to her previous work in protecting Prothean researchers on field trips.
  • One of Alec's audio logs contains a conversation he had with Castis Vakarian, Garrus' father. Castis is voiced by Brandon Keener, who also voiced Garrus.
• Canned Orders over Loudspeaker:
  • While on the Archon's ship, a kett can be heard blaring out instructions over the ship's loudspeakers. It lasts up until he runs into the business end of Pathfinder Raeka's guns.
  • During the side mission "Dissension in the Ranks", they find canned orders sowing discontentment and treason through the ranks of the kett. Ryder tries to track down the source of the signal, only to find that they were intentionally led to a bunker with a communications system set up by the Primus, the kett's second-in-command. The Primus wants to help Ryder take down the Archon (for her own benefit) and will attempt to strike a deal. Unless the player lets the mission sit until after killing the Archon. The mission remains available, but the messages change dramatically.
  • During Jaal's Loyalty Mission, Jaal's former fellow-student-turned-Absolute Xenophobe, Akksul, has anti-alien propaganda blaring over speakers through his base. Ryder's team lampshades how annoying the repeated message is and that, knowing the type of person Akksul is, there's probably no way of turning it off.
• Cap: Several examples.
  • Ryder's character level is capped at 132. Actually getting there requires several New Game Plus runs or some liberal abuse of experience glitches, but it comes with enough skill points to max out any and all skills Ryder can learn.
  • Squadmates max out at level 70, although their respective skills do so long before that, at level 54. Has the annoying side effect of them accumulating skill points you can't spend on anything.
  • APEX teams max out at level 20, and you can't field more than six at a time. Also, they can't be equipped with more than one upgrade simultaneously.
  • The maximum AVP level is 28, though there aren't enough AVP points available to actually reach it. Completionists will top out at 25 and change.
  • Ryder can never carry more than nine Remnant Decryption Keys on them at any given time.
  • The basic item limit is 100 units, upgradable to up to 200 via AVP perks. Consumables don't count against this limit and can be stacked to up to 999 units each.
  • There seems to be a limit to how much skills can be boosted by equipment bonuses. The exact value isn't clear but seems to hover somewhere around 100%. Since it's nearly impossible to hit this threshold without modding the game to increase the rather miniscule augmentation bonuses, most players will probably never notice.
• Car Fu: This is the only way to kill enemies with the Nomad, since unlike the Mako or Hammerhead it lacks guns. It oddly only works reliably if you hit your intended target with one of the wheels.
  Ryder [cheerfully]: Speed bump!
• Cast From Hitpoints: The Bio Converter augment automatically reloads the player's weapon instantly without using up reserve ammo, in effect giving them Bottomless Magazines. This comes at the cost of each automatic reload consuming 5% of a player's health however. Can become mildly game-breaking when combined with high-capacity guns and the health regeneration provided by Cora's Shield Boost power.
• The Cavalry:
  • Ryder and team will find themselves on the receiving end of this more often than anyone could care to count due to the kett's habit of sending in reinforcements via dropship whenever a major base of theirs is under attack. It's a safe bet that if you can spot half a dozen hostiles while scouting the place, they'll be joined by one or two dozen more as soon as you move in.
  • During the final mission, Ryder receives backup from just about every major supporting character plus their friends, and their benched squad mates will also join the fight one after the other.
  • Ryder gets to be the cavalry on some occasions, such as rescuing some scientists on Eos who got in over their heads dealing with the Remnant, and several Resistance fighters on Voeld who Ryder can come across mid-fight and back up against the kett.
• Central Theme: There are many, but one of the most-repeated themes in Andromeda is the struggle between a completely fresh start versus acknowledging history. Many people came to Andromeda looking to start over and create a better society, but either found old baggage too hard to let go or found the unknown too scary or difficult to accept. And, more negatively, some people looking for a fresh start are doing so to get away with terrible things they did in the Milky Way. Even among angara, the theme is prominent; they are torn between accepting the new aliens among them and starting over or heeding the harsh lessons learned from the kett. Other missions have angara struggling between preserving old traditions or heritage or adapting to survive. On smaller scales, this theme is also the focus of Gil and Kallo's disagreement, Lexi's change of occupation, as well as several Loyalty Missions. There's also a minor conversation in which Ryder can say that Milky Way history is irrelevant, or that it's important no matter how far they are from home.
• Chainsaw-Grip BFG: The Kett Soned assault rifle is actually a huge quad-barrelled plasma Gatling and thus comes with this almost mandatory feature. It's the only gun in the game to have one and therefore the only one that doesn't use any of Ryder's standard weapons animations. Funnily, part of the Soned's reloading procedure consists of racking its chainsaw grip.
• Character Customization:
  • You can choose to play as a male or female Ryder and customize your features, as in previous Mass Effect games, though as with those, only humans can be chosen. Unlike previous Mass Effect games both the male and female Ryders exist in the game regardless of who you choose, because they're siblings. You can also customize the Ryder twins' appearance individually and their father will resemble them to an extent. Another new addition is the ability to mix and match classes (now known as profiles) and abilities on the fly. You can also choose the type of training Ryder received back at the Milky Way at the beginning of the game. The training doesn't lock Ryder into classes like Shepard was in the original trilogy, it just gives Ryder a boost in certain skills. The types of training are Security (Soldier), Biotic (Adept), Technician (Engineer), Leader (Sentinel), Scrapper (Vanguard), and Operative (Infiltrator).
  • The appearance editor is both a downgrade and an improvement over the previous one in different aspects; The game offers you several customizable preset faces that are all unique (and offer more racial diversity), which allows a bit more unique characters than Shepard's customization. However, these presets do not allow quite as much customization, as some features (Such as ears and eye shapes) aren't customizable. The 1.08 patch made all hairstyles unisex and allows you to set a preset's skin complexion into any face you are creating, giving some additional freedom to the editor. The patch even allows to change the appearance of both Ryder twins aboard the Tempest.
• Charged Attack:
  • Certain powers can be charged before firing for more damage and/or additional effects. The Overload power for instance will only hit one target when shot from the wrist. Charging it beforehand adds a decent chunk of damage, stuns the target, primes it for combos and enables the power's ever-popular Chain Lightning effect. Pull will either lift targets in the air if you tap the button, or actually will do what its name indicates if you hold it.
  • Kett weapons have a common theme in which they can be charged up to deal more damage or produce burst fire. You can even charge while moving or in cover, making it practical for periods where you need to recover or find a lull in the battle.
  • Any Remnant Destroyer's main weapon is a powerful energy cannon in its central body that requires several seconds of charging before it unleashes two deadly shots in rapid succession. Those precious seconds are the only window you have to Attack Its Weakpoint, but make sure you're back in cover when they elapse.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • SAM's connection to Ryder, and his control over their vital functions. Useful for getting out of the Archon's trap. Not so great when the Archon severs Ryder's connection to SAM, and Ryder starts dying.
  • Additionally, the Archon injects Ryder with something while he has them captive, which isn't mentioned again afterward. That turns out to be a big mistake.
  • Alec Ryder's combat mantra - "When your back's against the wall, if you can't run from it, use it" - becomes one for his kid near the end of the game.
• Cold-Blooded Torture:
  • This is one of the kett's many asshole hobbies, showcased by scores of datapads, audio logs and cutscenes throughout the game. For instance, the first and only thing the Invictor asks a terrified captured turian just fresh out of cryo is if she knows the exact amount of force necessary to pry her dermal plates off her body. Nothing indicates he didn't find out on his own after the poor girl understandably didn't know the answer, if she even understood it in the situation she was in.
  • The Angaran Resistance explicitly forbids using torture for any reason, even on kett. Of course, though, not all angara are exempt. One sidequest on Voeld in particular shows how far one angara is willing to go if there's even the hint of a chance she might learn something important from torturing captured kett. The Roekaar, as a group, are driven by a hatred of the kett and other aliens more than the desire to be free. A quest on Kadara has a group of Roekaar who don't just kill aliens, but make sure to do so in the most painful way possible, such as peeling off a krogan's headplate.
  • The Collective are not above doing this to any Outcast they get their mitts on. Ryder can find some of their handiwork in an abandoned house on Kadara, along with a recording of it.
• Colony Ship: Four "Arks" make the journey from the Milky Way to the Andromeda Galaxy, accompanied by the Nexus hub station. Each Council species has its own Ark ship; the human Ark Hyperion, the asari Ark Leusinia, the turian Ark Natanus and the salarian ark Paarchero. There is said to be another Ark primarily helmed by quarians, which was also to have hanar, elcor and drell aboard. However, they were delayed and have not yet arrived in Andromeda. An endgame interaction with an Initiative engineer reveals that the fifth ark, the Keelah'Siyah made it to Andromeda. A garbled message was received from an unknown location, but it's not an SOS, it's a warning to stay away from them.
• Combat Tentacles: Remnant Architects have at least one tentacle on their head that mounts a powerful rapid-fire energy cannon. They have lots of other tentacles as well, though those aren't used in direct combat (might still be capable of it under specific circumstances, however). Observers also have a whole bunch of tentacles at their disposal, but like the Architects' big ones they're never used for combat, so they don't count.
• Continue Your Mission, Dammit!:
  • A non-verbal version at the end of the Moshae rescue, Ryder must hold out against a wave of incoming kett, including a Fiend. Kill it, and two more Fiends come along. By the point you've killed them, the shuttle will have arrived, meaning it's time to leave. Kill those two Fiends and yet another pair will spawn, as the kett troops keep attacking.
  • Try helping Captain Dunn and the crew of the Hyperion while playing as the other Ryder, and Dunn will keep yelling at you to leave.
• Continuity Nod:
  • You can find ex-Cerberus scientists on Kadara who are still performing strange and highly unethical experiments. Their reason for leaving was the inordinate resources and credits the Illusive Man and Miranda Lawson had thrown at a project to bring a dead person back to life - which just happened to be Project Lazarus. For added irony, they dismiss Lazarus as "pure voodoo".
  • Conrad Verner's sister Cassandra is an Exile on Kadara who happens to share his hero-worshipping fanboy ways.
  • An anti-AI terrorist group's founder is motivated by trying to prevent another Project Overlord type disaster.
  • An NPC states that he is an orphan from Mindoir. Mindoir is the colony hit by batarian raiders, where Colonist Shepard is from.
  • Nakmor Kesh mentions the krogan adaptation to the genophage. Mordin mentioned this adaptation in ME2 and had taken steps to counter it.
  • There's a sidequest to recover genophage cure research performed by one Doctor Okeer, which turns out to be Okeer's research into creating a krogan super soldier, aka Grunt.
  • The first baby born in Andromeda is named David Edward Kennedy, after an old friend of his mother's. Presumably, this old friend was David Edward Anderson.
  • On Eos, you can meet a bounty hunter killing Kett who goes by the name of Bain Massani, strongly implied to be Zaeed's son.
  • Speaking of Zaeed, Drack will mention "some crazy one-eyed mercenary" tried to pry the plate of his head with a knife. A tactic Zaeed mentioned he enjoyed using in Mass Effect 2. A roekar serial killer also uses the same method to torture and kill a Krogan.
  • Alec Ryder's last memory is him confirming information about the Reapers and Shepard's findings with Castis Vakarian, Garrus's father. Garrus mentioned telling his father everything, who in turn took action during Mass Effect 3.
  • Among the archives contained in Ryder's cabin, is a message from Liara T'Soni during the events of Mass Effect 3 that explains the Reapers have invaded, and the brave crew of the Normandy SR-2 is attempting to build a weapon to destroy them. But she has her doubts. Also included are Alliance and Turian S.O.S. recordings announcing Reaper attacks on Earth and Palaven respectively.
  • Suvi's codex entry mentions that she was headhunted by a black ops group for a certain biomedical experiment, though she turned them down. It is heavily implied that Cerberus wanted Suvi's expertise in molecular biology for Project Lazarus.
  • Drack occasionally name drops some of the historical krogan warlords that formed Grunt's genetic material, even claiming descent from one of them (Shiagur), making him and Grunt genetic relatives if he's telling the truth. That warlord's bloodline is apparently fire-resistant.
  • SAM was the product of AI research that almost got humanity kicked off the Citadel during the era of Ambassador Goyle, Udina's predecessor. This project was central to the plot of Mass Effect: Revelation, and was part of the mission that had David Anderson lose his Spectre candidacy, as mentioned in the first game.
  • The Andromeda Initiative managed to scout out Andromeda thanks to a captured intergalactic observatory taken from the geth, who were using it to map dark space for reasons no-one could figure out (read: the breakaway geth looking for the Reapers).
  • Jaal will mention to Peebee that he talked to an asari on the Nexus who worked as a dancer at Afterlife, the bar from Omega (though he mistakes her wording for the afterlife). Peebee, meanwhile, doesn't hold the place in high regard.
  • Tiran Kandros has a cousin who's a mercenary on Omega: Nyreen Kandros, from the third game's Omega DLC.
  • Ellen Ryder's codex entry mentions that she was the chief developer of the L2 and L3 biotic implants that were in use at the start of the original trilogy. A significant aspect of Kaidan Alenko's character in the trilogy was him using an L2 implant which substantially augmented his powers at the cost of the occasional migraine, with Kaidan himself, Dr. Chakwas, and a side mission making clear that he is one of the lucky ones. The majority of human biotics encountered throughout the series use the weaker but more stable L3 configuration; if Shepard is a biotic class, they are noted to be an unusually powerful L3 before the Lazarus project came with an upgrade.
  • Liam will occasionally mention some run-ins with a merc group led by a "scarred-up turian vigilante" (granted, that'd have to be before Garrus got his scars...)
  • Liara's log has her mentioning how there could be a single Prothean out there somewhere, somehow... but the odds of that happening are statistically impossible.
  • In conversation with Peebee or Cora, Drack mentions that while he's not quite old enough to remember the Rachni Wars, he is able to remember the aftermath.
  • The lead of the anti-Nakmor Morda group on Elaaden is Strux of Clan Jorgal. Shepard dealt with one of Clan Jorgal in 3, and they were a complete ass. Strux is the same. Drack will even state after learning the truth that Clan Jorgal is notoriously unreliable.
  • In the epilogue, there is a message about Ryder's ability to interface with the Remnant without SAM's involvement, and a mention that when studying that new ability they don't want to make the same mistake they did with the "Biotic Acclimation and Temperance" training, which was a major part of Kaidan's Dark and Troubled Past.
  • The Widow sniper rifle is available for purchase. Its details section notes it's been modified so organics can use it: in its codex entry in Mass Effect 2 it was noted to have so much recoil that it would break the arm of an unmodified organic who tried to fire it.
  • After visiting Khi Tasira, you get an email from Liam commenting on your discoveries, including a note that "back in the Milky Way, we were knocking on the door of stable clones". Such as the Lawson sisters and the Shepard clone in "Citadel".
  • In one of Alec Ryder's memories, he mentions a new Mako model that Scott says can be dropped from a ship, referring to the infamous model that Shepard used in the first game.
  • One of the engineers that built the Tempest was a quarian whose ship name was "vas Moreh", which was also Admiral Xen's ship name.
• Continuity Snarl: Peebee mentions liking to read Ardat-Yakshi true crime novels. Yet Shepard and Samara mention that ardat yakshi are never mentioned in asari art or literature due to the asari considering them an extremely shameful part of their society.
• Continuous Decompression:
  • Happens early in Liam's Loyalty Mission, with the wind being so strong that everyone is instantly ripped off their feet and left waving like flags in a hurricane when they finally catch a hold of something on the way out into space.
  • Averted in Cora's Loyalty Mission, where Ryder has the option to turn off a mass effect field keeping a damaged part of the hull intact. The player's party has magnetic boots to keep them attached to the floor of the ship and thus are unaffected, but any kett in the room are thrown around by the decompression. The effect only lasts a few seconds, and can only be done once.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: Applies to Ryder, the Tempest Crew and some of the NPCs.
  • Ryder to Shepard: Whereas Commander Shepard was an experienced and decorated officer at the beginning of the first game, Ryder is described as being much more inexperienced and untested.
  • Peebee to Liara: While Liara was extremely serious and often dour, Peebee has an extremely bubbly personality. Liara was the only character in the first game to lack weapons training, while Peebee is a gunslinger. Peebee is also a lone wolf, while Liara was an ardent believer in cooperation and diplomacy.
  • Cora to Kaidan: Kaidan was a normal biotic who was used as a guinea pig towards how biotics worked and has an upgraded implant that caused issues in exchange for power rivaling an asari. Cora was a naturally powerful biotic for a human who couldn't control herself and received help from asari commandos to control her abilities. Cora's optimistic admiration of the asari due to her very positive experience with them lies in stark contrast to Kaidan's more balanced view of aliens born from his very negative experience with turians.
  • Liam to Ashley: Ashley was very cynical and hotheaded towards cooperation and believes that other species will be naturally distrustful towards each other. Liam is very optimistic towards working together regarding the Andromeda Initiative and the future. Also, Ashley purely uses weapons while Liam compliments his abilities with some tech stuff.
  • Drack to Wrex and Grunt: Wrex was quiet (for a krogan) and was depressed and (initially) felt helpless about the state of his people. Drack, on the other hand, is loud, trigger happy and optimistic-ish for the krogan colonists. Drack's also very old with a living granddaughter, while Grunt was young and was becoming a full adult.
  • Vetra and Garrus: Garrus first tried working with the system until his frustration regarding regulations caused him to try and fight crime on his own in a lawless system. Vetra is an ex-smuggler who is now using her shady gifts to work with the Initiative. And while Garrus's sister thinks he doesn't take enough responsibility with their family, Vetra has raised her sister for years; in line with this, Garrus grew up with the guidance of both parents, while Vetra and Sid were abandoned by their father.
  • Jaal to Tali: Both of them are pretty much fish out of water to the rest of the group but Tali is a young and slender woman who has little experience with the outside world until her pilgrimage and has some difficulty explaining her feelings. Jaal is a big, burly guy who already has experience fighting prior to joining Ryder and is the only one of the squad who has some experience traveling around Andromeda and often speaks his mind.
  • Chakwas to Lexi: Dr. Chakwas's professionalism as a doctor is balanced out with a somewhat romanticized view of serving in the Alliance and particularly on a spaceship. Lexi hardly has any life beyond her medical expertise, and even taking time to drink at a bar has her feeling like a fish out of water, unlike Chakwas who keeps a special brandy bottle for "emergencies."
  • Tann to Udina: Both are politicians who like being in authority and feel self-important, though Tann is more reasonable and polite than Udina and unlike Udina, actually didn’t want his current position but was forced to accept it. Tann's status being a You Are in Command Now situation because everyone who outranked him is dead is also reminiscent of Primarch Victus.
  • SAM to EDI: Both are AI's installed on a ship that manifest as a blue hologram and have classified information that gets revealed as you progress through the game. However EDI doesn't interface with anyone's body directly apart from downloading herself into the Cerberus robot Eva Core and she has more emotions and free will than SAM. SAM is more subservient to Ryder and doesn't have a sense of humor that's anywhere near as developed as EDI's.
  • Kallo to Joker: Both are the helmsman of their respective ships, and are both extraordinarily talented pilots. While Joker was a Deadpan Snarker who had to fight to prove himself because of his medical condition, Kallo is much more polite and generally friendly and is already an established and respected pilot.
  • The Tempest to the Normandy: the Normandy was a military vessel with minimal comforts built to house multiple shifts of crew. The Tempest is an exploration vessel built to run with only a handful of people in quite a bit of comfort, with large windows, a very open interior, and a lack of any sort of weaponry. However, the Tempest and Normandy also share features such as the stealth drive.
  • The Nomad to the Mako: The Mako, by design, could climb very steep hills and mountains, and came equipped with machine guns and a cannon. The Nomad has to shift between four-wheel drive and six-wheel drive to traverse steep inclines, and has no weapons at all.
• Controllable Helplessness: When the Archon severs Ryder's connection to SAM, all you can do is stagger your dying Player Character towards the exit until their health bar runs out and they collapse.
• Convection, Schmonvection:
  • Peebee's loyalty mission takes place in an active volcano, yet neither her nor Ryder nor the third team member bother to wear helmets, let alone worry about the heat. Oftentimes they'll pass by lava streams close enough to touch them, or proceed across Remnant pillars they just raised from their submersion in molten rock for who knows how long without a care in the world. All of that is particularly noticeable because the game has a fully integrated environmental hazard mechanic that could have been used with little dissent.
  • Automated forward stations and the Nomad's mining drones deploy on pillars of retrorocket fire due to being dropped from orbit. Standing right next to them when they touch down doesn't affect Ryder at all.
  • While the above examples work in the player's favor, it's more than a bit frustrating that the countless burning wrecks strewn about Voeld's icy surface do nothing to restore Ryder's environmental hazard bar.
• Cool Car: The Nomad is a six-wheeled all-terrain truck similar to the Mako from Mass Effect, though unlike previous ME vehicles it lacks weapons other than Car Fu. Ryder can customize it with various paint jobs and researchable upgrades.
• Cool, but Inefficient:
  • The helmets worn by the Pathfinder teams. Unlike the helmets from previous Mass Effect games which only had clear material over the eye/face area, the Pathfinder helmets have a dome that extends from nose height all the way to the top rear of their head. Unsurprisingly, the initial mission sees Ryder get a crack in the dome while they are on a planet without a breathable atmosphere and toward the end of the mission, the dome is shattered beyond the point of repair, causing Alec to make a Heroic Sacrifice to save his child.
  • Picking weapons for Ryder's loadout is usually a choice between differently balanced but more or less equally powerful tools, but there are some guns that are downright useless because all-around better alternatives are readily available. The krogan Ruzad shotgun for example looks cool but is outperformed by the asari Disciple in every single stat, and it's made even worse by the fact that the Ruzad needs to be researched whereas the Disciple automatically unlocks new tiers every ten levels.
• Cool Starship: The Tempest, which resembles a smaller and slimmer version of the Normandy.
• Cool Sword:
  • The asari biotic sword is one option available to players for their choice of melee weapon. Using it performs a short-ranged biotic Flash Step with no cooldown, allowing it to hit enemies beyond immediate melee range.
  • The kett carfalon is another sword option that replaces the asari sword's Flash Step with a Spin Attack, combined with a Life Drain ability.
  • The kett vakarsh is a Flaming Sword that's somewhat lacking in raw damage but makes up for it by being sheathed in superheated plasma, thus setting the target on fire with every hit.
• Cool Versus Awesome: During the final battle on Meridian, the player can watch a kett Fiend battle a Remnant Destroyer. If the player clears out all the other kett and Remnant enemies in the area, they can just sit down and Pass the Popcorn until one of the two wins and then clean up whatever's left of the victor. Unless they were too close when those bad boys spawn. In that case, have fun being on the receiving end of a Gang Up on the Human situation.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: It's accused by Antandra that had Serissa chosen to save the asari Pathfinder instead of stealing the data that allows the kett to navigate through the scourge, thus causing the kett to send the Decimation Hunters after the ark, resulting in massive damage and evacuation, that that entire questline would have been avoided and the asari Ark would have arrived just fine.
• Could Say It, But...: The dock manager at Kadara Port can't tell Ryder what happened to an angara they're looking for. He also cannot let them look at the dock records on that computer right next to him to see where she went, and he cannot tell them the passcode needed to do so.
• Create Your Own Villain: Potentially. During a side-quest Ryder infiltrates an anti-AI group to get close to the leader who goes by the codename Knight. One way of getting information from the group is by giving Knight's son an implant to fix his biological impairments. After the mission is over and if Knight is killed (the conflict can be resolved peacefully), Ryder gets an e-mail from the son who swearing vengeance on Ryder and adopts the codename Paladin.
• Crew of One: Well, Crew Of Four actually, but the Tempest is run by an unrealistically small number of people - a pilot, a science officer, a medical officer and an engineer, plus Ryder as a CO who's ashore more often than they're aboard. That's it. Some of Ryder's squad mates appear to assume certain officer roles, like Cora effectively being Ryder's XO, Vetra acting as a quartermaster of sorts, and Drack becoming the ship's unofficial cook, but they're just as likely to be away on missions as Ryder is, and are very rarely seen doing anything that's explicitly related to the ship.
• Critical Staffing Shortage:
  • Common on the Nexus due to everything that's happened there, mixed with the problem that they can't wake up anyone new without draining resources they don't have yet.
  • Heleus News Network consists of reporter Davis Qar and... no-one else, besides two freelancers. There was an editor, but he got killed in the uprising.
  • The Leusinia, by the time Ryder shows up, is in seriously bad nick. Out of the bridge staff, there's only two of them left, thanks to everyone else either having evacuated or been killed by the kett.
• Cryo Sickness: The Andromeda Initiative used cryo-freezing to survive the trip across galaxies and are shown to be very careful when waking someone up, with doctors assigned to monitor all new awakenings. Background chatter explores some immediate problems like body temperature and how to feed someone whose stomach hasn't held food for six hundred years, and a later sidequest reveals that a not insignificant number of people suffered permanent damage to their brain chemistry. It is also acknowledged that some people didn't survive the trip. This trope is used to explain the aversion of Schrödinger's Player Character; the male and female versions of Pathfinder Ryder are fraternal twins. The one the player chose is the one that was woken up first while the twin not chosen spends most of the game in a coma because their stasis pod was damaged while they were in the process of waking up.
• Cruel Mercy:
  • If Ryder opts to free Vehn Terev from Kadara and return him to the Resistance for judgement, the Moshae will suggest community service in Aya's gardens. Vehn regards the sentence as this because everyone knows he betrayed the Moshae, so now he has to live with that while the Moshae looks benevolent for sparing him.
  • Ryder can cause the same situation for Nilken Rensus if they suggest community service instead of exile for only attempting murder instead of actually committing it. It ends with Nilken requesting to go back into cryo rather than face up to everyone's scorn. Interestingly enough, if you exile him instead, you can run into him on Kadara where he actually thanks Ryder for what turned out to be a net positive.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Fights with rank-and-file mooks and remnant machines - and wildlife - begin to resemble this the more powerful Ryder and their squadmates become, especially on easier difficulty levels. By the midpoint of the game, in fact, Ryder's squadmates can be powerful enough to end a fight before the player even has time to react. One easier difficulties, it actually becomes all but impossible to obtain the trophy that requires squadmates to be revived in battle because the battle is done before it ever gets to that point, even big boss battles like the Architects and the finale.
• Cut Lex Luthor a Check: The crew point out that the raider captain in Liam's loyalty mission must be quite skilled to restore a derelict kett ship to working order. Suggesting that he'd have made a good technician or engineer.
• Cutscene Power to the Max:
  • Nowhere else will you witness an asari and a human biotic team up to erect a huge barrier dome to not only deflect, but reflect the missile barrage of a freaking kett cruiser.
  • The triumphant cutscene after activating Meridian shows gorgeous plant life erupting from the ground nearly instantaneously on previously barren worlds like Eos, but those planets look just like they always did when you visit after the Playable Epilogue.
• Damage-Sponge Boss:
  • Every boss is one. Most of them are just beefed-up versions of regular enemy types with several times more health, shields and/or armor but no notable buff in damage output or tactics, so boss battles are usually little more than exercises in patience and evasion while you slowly whittle down their defenses. It gets nasty on Insanity difficulty where all enemies have at least twice as much health and deal a lot more damage than on Normal, making boss battles actually dangerous affairs where proper tactics and clever use of cover are crucial for survival.
  • The Architects, however, take the cake for being the spongiest of them all. For comparison, the Reaper larva — Mass Effect 2's Final Boss — could be killed in under a minute on any difficulty once you knew the trick to it. Every Architect, however, will require multiple phases of attacking multiple sections of its body (each with their own life bar), then defeating a swath of summoned Mooks, followed by two scripted events where you have to chase it down and do the whole thing again (with one less body part). And on Voeld, you're doing this amidst a level 2 hazard even if you've already activated the Vault.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
  • Taking cover is now triggered automatically when Ryder gets close to an eligible world object, which means players returning from ME 2 and ME 3 will usually go through an adjustment period before they no longer hit the Jump button every time they want Ryder to hunker down behind something.
  • Andromeda has fewer interrupts than ME 2 or ME 3, since it has no Paragon/Renegade measure, but players used to hitting the prompts when they appear will find that this time around, the consequences of interrupts are almost entirely negative.
• Darkest Hour:
  • The game starts with the characters at their lowest point. When Liam tries to cheer everyone up by saying it could be worse, Ryder snaps.
    Ryder: How?! Habitat 7's a bust, we might've started a war with the first aliens we met, and our Pathfinder's dead. This better be rock bottom.
  • The climax of the game has another one. The Archon has tricked the Pathfinder into leading him to Meridian, has severed the Pathfinder's connection to SAM (causing them to die slowly), and has attacked Ark Hyperion to take their sibling and SAM. The only hope left is the sibling, who can reset the Pathfinder's connection at the cost of revealing their location.
    Ryder: [The Archon]'s talking as if he's won.
    Suvi: Pathfinder... it kinda feels as if he has.
• Dead Guy on Display: Kadara Port has a kett head on a spike by the landing area, neatly telling you all you need to know about Sloane's leadership style, and her attitude towards kett.
• Deal with the Devil: Ryder can choose to make a bargain with the Primus, the Big Bad's second, to disable her ship during the final battle and thus significantly reduce the kett forces the team has to fight. Even the codex calls this arrangement a deal with the devil, but nothing negative occurs before the endgame. For added irony, the Primus is completely true to her word.
• Death from Above: Ryder can use their jump-jet to hover at a height of roughly five meters for a short time in order to attack from an elevated position. Performing a melee strike while hovering results in a Ground Pound that inflicts considerable damage and unlocks an achievement if it kills a frozen enemy. Various augmentations and skills are tailored to making this technique even more lethal. The whole mechanic is very useful for engaging entrenched enemies by shooting over their cover, but keep in mind that it exposes Ryder to enemy fire just the same.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist:
  • If that death was caused by falling into a Bottomless Pit. Doing so just warps you back to where you fell with a minor loss in health. Averted for all other types of untimely demise on Ryder's part, though.
  • Squad mates can't be killed in combat, only incapacitated. Even if a Fiend snatched them up, chewed on them and stomped on their head, they'll rise fresh as a daisy when they're revived by Ryder or once combat ends.
• Death Seeker: A sidequest on Voeld deals with the Gloryseekers, a group of angara who are throwing themselves at the kett to die in glorious combat. Not because of despair, they're just following their species' belief in reincarnation. By the time Ryder catches up to one, he's starting to have second thoughts about the whole thing.
• Death World: Every Golden World initially surveyed by the Initiative turned into this during their journey between galaxies, due to malfunctioning Remnant terraforming tech. To note:
  • Habitat 7, the first world, has random lightning strikes, floating rocks, and a toxic atmosphere. The ground is too broken up to make construction easy, and anything outside for five minutes will be hit by lightning at least three times.
  • Eos is a desert world with a highly irradiated atmosphere, which has contaminated the surface water and killed off all but the hardiest flora and fauna. Outside the shielded Initiative outpost sites, the ambient radiation ranges in strength from "will eat through your hardsuit's life support in fifteen minutes" to "will eat through your vehicle's life support in fifteen seconds."
  • Voeld was once a temperate world with a thriving angaran colony, until its Vault altered its orbit and plunged it into an ice age. Now it's a frozen wasteland where -30 degrees Celsius is considered to be "warm".
  • Havarl, the angara's ancestral homeworld, is one of the few planets in the cluster that can still sustain most forms of life and by itself isn't that bad (Ryder and their party don't need protective gear here). Unfortunately, its vault hyper-accelerated the evolution of its ecology, resulting in fast-growing, poisonous plant life and powerful, aggressive animals. According to the angara scientists studying the phenomenon, if left unchecked, the planet's whole ecosystem will eventually collapse, rendering it lifeless.
  • The vault on Kadara drastically increased its volcanic activity, poisoning most of its surface water with lethal levels of sulfur. The short supply of potable water has allowed criminal elements (primarily the exiles from the Nexus mutiny) to effectively seize control of the planet's only sizable settlement, turning it into a pirate kingdom where ordinary people either bankrupt themselves paying protection fees to live in town, or get kicked out into the badlands to die of thirst (or worse).
  • Elaaden is a desert planet where temperatures ranged from 52-99 Celsius (125-210 Fahrenheit) and there's precious little ground water. However, it proves perfect for a race like the krogan, to the point that their colony, New Tuchanka, shares with Kadara the honor of being the only Milky Way outposts that are holding their own. (Amusingly enough, neither colony is officially sanctioned by the Nexus.)
  • What takes the cake is H-047c, the planet singled out to become the new turian homeworld. When the Initiative arrives, the whole planet has been shattered by the Scourge and is now little more than a vast asteroid field. The big chunk you can land on is subject to such lethal radiation levels that you can't even exit the Nomad outside of some heavily shielded habitat domes set up by scavengers.
  • Finally, the Scourge is a Negative Space Wedgie that looks like tendrils of fiber, and it rips apart ships that are approaching their destination. Even worse, it has proven to be capable of destroying entire planets, or at the very least disrupting their orbits.
• Deceased Parents Are the Best: Early on, Alec Ryder sacrifices himself in order to save his son/daughter and makes them the new Pathfinder in his final moments. The Ryder twins's mother, Ellen, is also stated to have died from eezo poisoning. A log from SAM, however, suggests this might not be the case, as Alec put her in cryo as well under a false name.
• Defeat Equals Friendship: Defeating an Architect allows Ryder to reprogram it to help restore the planet's environment.
• Degraded Boss:
  • For most of the game, kett Ascendants are only fought at the end of story missions or kett strongholds. However, during the last couple of main quest missions, they show up as regular enemies.
  • Strangely, that happens in the Final Battle of all things. Remnant Architects are far and away the largest enemies in the game and put up an epic fight every time they make an appearance, but the one encountered here is considerably less dangerous than any of those that came before. Justified, as the game states that particular Architect was undergoing some form of maintenance.
• Department of Redundancy Department: A kett scientific report on captured krogan found on Voeld notes that krogan are "large" twice.
• Developers' Desired Date: Keri T'Vessa and Avela Karr are treated as "romances", but are more like "side women" compared to the romances Ryder can have aboard the Tempest. In addition, the same-sex relationships were underwhelming in the original patch of the game (especially for gay male romance). In particular, Reyes Vidal was upgraded from another "fling" romance into a full-fledged romance.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • On Habitat 7, if Ryder and Liam examine the entrance to the kett base before meeting up with the others, they'll note on returning that Alec has passed through (since there are more corpses than they left), and Ryder will also note they visited the rock face they meet up on. Meanwhile, if Ryder examines the cave with the tree growing in it, they'll bring it up while talking with Alec.
  • If Vetra's in the party on the first mission to Eos, when Drack is met, the scene plays out differently than if she isn't, with Drack deciding that if Ryder's with Vetra, they're alright.
  • Ryder can wear N7-brand armor despite not being an N7 themselves. Bradley will comment on this, and note that some Alliance soldiers might disapprove.
  • On Eos, audio logs can be found of the Invictor which are initially unintelligible. After SAM manages to translate the kett's language, they can be listened to again. If listened to before the Invictor's fought, Ryder and co. will comment on how horrible they are. If listened to afterward, Ryder will say how glad they are they killed him.
  • If Vetra's in the party on the first visit to Havarl, and assuming the player hasn't already found the turian survivors, when the freed scientists mention they saw some aliens while they were working, he will point out that they looked like Vetra.
  • When on Voeld, if Jaal is in the party, several scenes and moments of interaction with characters present will change, e.g. Jaal talking a sniper into joining the Resistance, conversing with the two sentries outside the base, telling a xenophobic angara to show Ryder respect, growling at a pair of turians for looting an abandoned city. If he's not part of the party, he can be found and talked to in the Resistance Base.
  • During "The Firefighters" mission, if Drack's brought along to Knight's base, and the player talks to Valeria the turian, Drack'll respond to her story. Fellow turian Vetra will too.
  • Bring Drack to New Tuchanka, and he'll vouch for Ryder with the krogan guards at the front door. Likewise, bring him along to Ark Parchero, and he and Birtak will talk to one another, since Drack's his boss. Also, during the fight with the Behemoth, Drack will try ordering it to stop attacking, to no avail.
  • If Jaal is brought to Khi Tasira, the cutscene in the Development area will play differently, what with Jaal, an angara, learning the truth of the angara's origins.
  • Complete the Knight side-quest before the Hive Mind mission on Kadara, and Ryder will tell the scientists that Knight told them about Cerberus and its unethical experiments.
  • During your first trip to Aya, Ryder can choose to turn on their scanner while being escorted through the city. The guards escorting Ryder think very little of their decision to do so.
  • Depending on who's taken to the final mission, Ryder may hear about it afterward (for example, don't take Peebee, and she'll gripe about not getting to see the "main action").
  • "Dissension in the Ranks" plays out differently if the player lets it sit until after finishing the game. Instead of finding the Primus' message, and warnings to the other kett to turn against the Archon, Ryder finds several kett executed, and messages from the Primus detailing their plans for the future. Since they have no reason to contact Ryder, there's no interaction between them.
  • Some dialogue changes depending on when the player finishes a mission. The investigation into the salarian Ark has different dialogue if Ryder waits until the Archon's dead to finish everything, with Lond's stated motivation changing to wondering what'll happen when the kett reinforcements show up.
  • Peebee's loyalty mission starts with a trip in an escape pod. She and Ryder are buckled in by the automatic restraints... but if your third party member is Drack, the bars will try, and fail, to lower around his bulk for the rest of the cutscene.
• Didn't See That Coming: The Initiative chose the Heleus Cluster to travel to in Andromeda due to the surprisingly large abundance of "Golden Worlds" there which would be hospitable to life. They were in for a rude awakening when they arrived, however, because said worlds were all the products of artificial terraforming by a powerful, unknown alien race... which had been turned off for centuries by the time they arrived there. Furthermore, the aforementioned aliens had enemies that left behind a nasty surprise called The Scourge.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • The Kett Dhan shotgun can kill standard Mooks in 1-2 hits. But it is a shotgun that happens to only fire a single rather slow energy bolt which can make it hard to line up shots on moving targets.
  • The Seeking Plasma System gives any gun it's installed in homing projectiles. It's a bit tricky to handle at first because the shots move very slowly and tend to seek out random targets in your crosshairs, making it difficult to shoot specific enemies, but once you get the hang of it, most shootouts become trivial. Just hunker down in cover, aim high and blind-fire away until nothing shoots back anymore (a Vintage Heat Sink works wonders here). That being said, if you're caught in the open with no cover nearby and no hitscan backup piece on hand, it can get you killed pretty quickly.
• Disaster Scavengers: One quest on Voeld has Ryder run into a pair of turians scavenging through an abandoned angaran city for stuff they can sell. If Jaal's present, he'll tear into them for it. Fortunately, by the time Ryder finds them, one's already has an attack of conscience, and gives what they found over.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • Pathfinder weapons and armor, by design. Available straight away with the more expensive editions of the game, Pathfinder weapons and armor are among the strongest in the early game until the player gets access to alien weapons or can craft their own. The Space Explorer armor remains one of the best armors throughout the entire game because it grants a whopping 25% increase to encounter XP, allowing a player to level up their Ryder ridiculously fast... although it lags behind in the offensive and defensive departments as it cannot be produced in upgraded versions the way everything else can.
  • You can get the N-7 Valkyrie assault rifle, M-7 Falcon grenade rifle and the Widow sniper rifle after spending some time on Eos. The Valkyrie is the best burst fire rifle with its damage exceeding most if not all rifles. The Falcon is a lightweight grenade launcher, while the Widow is still a beast of a One-Hit Kill sniper rifle.
• Disproportionate Retribution: A handful of Remnant installations have heavily encrypted containers full of high-level loot you can't open until you've tracked down the required glyphs throughout the building. Fail to solve the puzzle and not only will the chest lock down forever; it'll also sic more Remnant bots on Ryder than most primary Vaults throw at them.
• Distant Sequel: Mass Effect Andromeda takes place hundreds of years after the original Mass Effect trilogy, due to the time needed for even a mass effect ship to travel between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies.
• Ditto Aliens: Unlike in the previous games, every Asari with the sole exception of Peebee has the exact same face.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The kett exaltation facility, with its overhead conveyor belts occupied by pods filled with captive angara ready to be exalted, looks a lot like a slaughterhouse.
• Doomy Dooms of Doom: The krogan have a tabletop kid's game named Firebreathing Thresher Maws Of Doom that apparently involves functional miniature flamethrowers to burn down the opponent's pieces. Ryder promptly lampshades the name's overkill ring when Drack invites them to a game with Kesh and Vorn.
• Downer Beginning: The game starts out pretty bleak: you quickly learn that Habitat 7, the would-be New Earth, has been reduced to a stormy, toxic wasteland completely unfit for habitation, the first sapient race you find attacks without provocation, your father dies, the founder of the Initiative died and her replacement is unqualified for his job. The Nexus is a few months away from starvation and has exiled a good portion of its awake crew for participating in an armed mutiny, none of the Ark ships other than the human are accounted for, and none of the Golden Worlds are fit for colonization.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • After rescuing the Moshae and discovering the truth about kett "exaltation," many of the crew members undergo a Heroic BSoD over it, with Gil in particular wondering if it's too late to do a 180 back to the Milky Way. Anyone familiar with the original trilogy would know that as bad as the kett are, anyone who stayed in the Milky Way would have had to deal with something far worse.
  • When news of the truth about Exaltation reaches Aya, Ryder's attempts to comfort the angara over it leads one of them to ask what the Initiative would do if its people had to fight their own. If only they knew what a war with the Reapers entailed.
• Drop Ship: The kett practically spam the damn things with reckless abandon, dropping reinforcements into battles you're already engaged in or at strategic locations on every world they have a presence on. When you're driving around in the Nomad on Eos or Voeld, barely a minute goes by without seeing or hearing at least one kett dropship howl past. Lampshaded on Habitat 7 by dialogue from squadmates when a dropship is blown away by an errant lightning strike, and yet the kett commit another one to the battle. (In fairness, the first had succeeded in spawning more kett, so maybe the higher-ups didn't care.)
• Drowning My Sorrows: Danny Sarris, aforementioned Butt-Monkey, when found at the Paradise on Kadara has started drinking heavily.
• Dual Boss: Hydra mechs have a nasty habit of showing up in pairs, most often in large open areas. It's not foolproof - sometimes they do come alone - but that's an exception rather than the rule.
• Dungeon Bypass: There's a specific Remnant ruin on Voeld that, upon closer investigation, traps the Nomad in a minefield out of nowhere, forcing Ryder to proceed on foot and clear a path through the very powerful mines by tracking them down with their scanner, then shooting them. Unless you approached the location over the nearby ridge, in which case you can simply drive the Nomad back to where you came from without giving a damn about the mines at all.
• Dynamic Entry:
  • Hydra mechs are often air-dropped right into battle.
  • The Eos Architect pulls an awesome one by bursting out of the ground in a cutscene that appears to be set up as their Establishing Character Moment.
  • Sometimes you can get the jump on enemies from above and perform a hover-strike on them, if you're so inclined.
• Dyson Sphere: The true form of Meridian is one of these, albeit just the size of a moon.
• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • While exploring the galaxy map, the Tempest can chance upon a wrecked angaran space ship before Ryder, their team and the player know the angara even exist. The flavor text upon scanning it still acts like everything about the angara is common knowledge, though.
  • Repeatedly asking Drack for advice on how to fight the kett directly after he joins the team has him lecture on almost all troop types the kett can field in the game. Depending on the order in which Ryder visits the following worlds, players won't actually tangle with at least half of these enemies until much later in the story.
• Early Game Hell: Overall, Ryder starts the game comparatively weaker than an early-game Commander Shepard. Cooldowns are lengthy and damage is overall underpowered in the early game. This is because Ryder will eventually gain a lot more freedom in abilities, weapons, customization, and movement than Shepard ever did, but the player has to work for it.
• Eaten Alive: Ryder may have this happen to them if killed by a Fiend.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: What happened to H-047c - meant to become the turian homeworld in Heleus - long before the Initiative arrived, courtesy of the Scourge. All that's left now is a huge, lethally irradiated asteroid belt.
• Elite Mooks: All factions have them in one form or the other. Some even have more types of elite troops than basic goons. To note:
  • Kett Anointed are bigger than their Chosen brethren, considerably tougher due to their strong shields, and they wield the kett equivalent of Gatling guns. After them come the Destined who have powerful shotguns and can turn themselves and any kett near them invisible. Both are implied to be field commanders roughly comparable to human NCOs.
  • The Roekaar deploy shielded snipers and armored Saboteurs, the latter of which have a version of Energy Drain, sapping Ryder's shields to bolster their own.
  • Aside from shielded snipers like the Roekaar's, Milky Way hostiles field Anarchists (armored turians who spam incendiary grenades), Operatives (armored salarians who can turn invisible), Agents (salarians who can deploy clones to misdirect enemies), Pariahs (armored asari surrounded by a biotic shield who like to get up close and personal) and Berserkers (ludicrously heavily armored krogan).
  • For the Remnant, Observers and Nullifiers largely fill the role of elite troops, though Nullifiers stray pretty close to Boss in Mook Clothing territory already.
• Empty Levels:
  • Since you don't get any advantage out of gained levels except for points to allocate in your abilities, once you have your setup completed, further level raises only contribute to very miniscule passives. Not to mention that your squad mates will easily reach their effective level cap after which nothing more can be spent during the game, while the Ryders themselves will face this fate during a New Game+.
  • Pretty much every level you gain past level 80. Your stats are capped, your weapons are now capped... and enemies continue to grow in power all the way to the actual cap of 132.
• Empty Room Psych: Exploring the Vault on Eos has Ryder discover a side-room filled with inactive Assemblers, just sitting there, waiting. Ryder's teammates will even comment on how creepy it seems, waiting for something to happen. And then... one of the Assemblers falls over, startling them. Nothing else happens, and Ryder can leave the room without incident.
• Empty Room Until the Trap:
  • A mission on Voeld has Ryder tracking kett data to a remote facility, which looks abandoned until Ryder's inside, at which point a kett dropship shows up.
  • Also on Voeld is a small, completely unremarkable Remnant ruin in the middle of nowhere whose only distinguishing feature is a strange signal SAM picks up when the Nomad approaches it. Upon investigating the source of the signal, an angaran sniper radios Ryder to inform them about the huge minefield they just blundered into - a minefield that simply isn't there before that revelation. The rest of the event is either an exercise in patience while you clear a path through the mines, or a textbook example of Dungeon Bypass if you were lucky and approached the location from the right direction.
  • Played painfully straight with the Archon's research facility aboard his flagship. It even is an actual trap instead of some goons jumping out of wall panels or drop ships (that one happens earlier, on the gun deck). The kett obviously have a fondness for pulling this trick. Even worse, there's a known bug that causes several Event Flags, including this one, to fail to fire, turning the lab into an even-more-unwinnable version of this trope.
  • Played similarly straight at the very beginning of Vetra's loyalty mission.
  • Happens on Kadara while helping Reyes track down his former not-girlfriend associate.
• Enemy Civil War: Several times, it's possible to find enemy factions fighting one another: Collective versus Outcast, Elaaden Scavengers versus other Elaaden Scavengers, or outcasts of any kind fighting the local wildlife as it tries to eat them. Often, Ryder's teammates will attack them, causing them to turn on Ryder and co. as well. This also proves to be the case with the kett when it's revealed the Archon's gone rogue, but they don't get the sympathetic portrayal the others get.
• Energy Weapons:
  • Weapons from the Andromeda galaxy are usually this (either Frickin' Laser Beams or Plasma Cannons), in contrast to the eezo-driven coilguns from the Milky Way.
  • Remnant weapons are these, using an overheat mechanic instead of limited ammunition, like Javik's particle rifle from the third game and all weapons from the first game. Remnant research also provides the Beam Emitter augmentation that converts any gun's bullet type to a continuous particle beam identical to the one the Remnant P.A.W. uses. It still uses up ammo as usual (unless combined with a Vintage Heatsink) but gives the weapon pinpoint accuracy in return.
• Epic Fail:
  • One particularly unlucky krogan managed to get himself struck by lightning while courting, due to holding a boombox over his head. On Elaaden, which it should be noted didn't have thunderstorms or rainclouds, or weather of any kind beyond "unbearably hot" until Ryder showed up.
  • Let's face it: the entire Andromeda Initiative is one until the Hyperion rejoins the Nexus and Ryder has chalked up some wins.
  • Vetra's attempt to go undercover as an exotic dancer for a smuggling scheme on Omega. She tripped over her own two feet, ripped out a volus's breather trying to break her fall, and sent the volus into a group of batarian mercenaries. The resulting Bar Brawl took two days to clear up.
• Eternal Engine: The Remnant vaults contain futuristic versions of these in their hearts. The one on Eos is probably the best example, with massive underground structures stretching off for miles.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • On Vetra's loyalty mission, a datapad can be found with someone writing a letter to a friend still on the Nexus, hoping everything's going well. This would be one of the guards who in the process of said mission has either been killed or is about to be killed by Ryder and crew.
  • In the last of the H-047c domes, it's possible to find an email from Barruk, the grouchy krogan shopkeeper on New Tuchanka, addressed to the krogan running the helium-3 mining project there, telling him he'd be perfectly welcome to come home (with Vorn even saying he's saving a place for him). Of course, the player can only read this email after Ryder's had to kill him.
• Everybody Lives: In the finale, provided you take the time to befriend the other Pathfinders, not a single major character dies besides the Archon.
• Everyone Can See It: If Ryder pursues a romance with another character, or even just flirts with them a number of times - it doesn't take long for other members of the Tempest crew to notice and begin commenting on it. Lexi teases Ryder, for example, and if Cora is the one being romanced, Drack of all people may bring it up during a Nomad conversation.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: The vast majority of the map area on all planets counts, but Havarl easily takes the cake. Its jungles are absolutely crawling with Remnant bots, Roekaar fanatics and angry carnivores of all sizes, often to the point that your entire HUD compass disappears behind two dozen or more red blips because there're so many enemies nearby. Fortunately, a lot of them are busy killing each other much of the time, but make one wrong step and you can find yourself right in the middle of the carnage with everything shooting or charging at you.
• Evil Lawyer Joke: A background conversation on the Nexus has a guy locked up by APEX demanding a lawyer. He's informed by the turian guard that no lawyers have been woken up yet, after which the guard says "there's probably a joke in there somewhere".
• Evil Tower of Ominousness: All major kett bases are built around a sinister-looking one that houses their central command structure, landing/refueling platforms for their airforce and other facilities like research labs or exaltation temples.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin:
  • The whole reasoning behind the names given to the various Remnant robot models is that Peebee classified them based on what they do. Assemblers assemble other bots, Observers observe, Nullifiers have powerful self-repair protocols that nullify most incoming damage, and Destroyers, well, when SAM asks her about that one, she just rolls her eyes in exasperation.
  • Spitbugs are, well, bugs that spit stuff at you. Who'd have thought.
• Exact Words:
  • If Sloane is removed from Kadara, Jaal will say the planet's beginning to grow on him. And then immediately clarifies "like the searing pain of a festering wound".
  • If you agree with the Cardinal's request to leave her temple standing, she releases the trapped Angara within, after which you can kill her; You promised to leave the place standing, but nobody mentioned she would live to use it again.
  • During "Jaal Ama Darav: Friend or Foe", the mayor of Prodromos mentions not wanting to risk losing the Initiative's first settlement to Roekaar. The other member of Ryder's team may mention that Prodromos isn't the first settlement, what with the nearby and abandoned Sites 1 and 2.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Both Ryder and Peebee have a moment of this after Ryder reactivates the Vault on Eos.
  Peebee: Ryder? You fixed the lockdown, didn't you. The whole place is lighting up. Power readings are off the charts. Really, really off the chart...
  Ryder: But if it's back online, we should be good... too..
• Explaining Your Powers to the Enemy: The Cardinal - apparently the first kett Ascendant you're supposed to fight - spends much of the first phase of her Boss Battle bragging about her impenetrable shield, how it works, why she has it and so on, all the while she's spamming energy balls at Ryder. Her lecture could be useful if she actually is the first to meet, but you may easily have fought multiple others beforehand, depending on where your playthrough falls on the sliding scale of sidequesting versus rushing the main story.
• Explosive Instrumentation: The prologue mission starts with a power relay control panel detonating violently enough to shake the entire deck. Funnily, the panel turns out completely fine afterwards when Ryder uses it to reset the relay.
• Eye Beam: What Remnant Observers use to maintain their structures when they're undisturbed. Piss them off and they use it to make your life miserable instead. Fortunately, it's one of the less dangerous Remnant weapons.

F - G

• Face–Heel Turn: Sloane Kelly was the Nexus's chief of security and a decorated Alliance soldier. By the time Ryder catches up to her, Kelly has become an outlaw and a ruthless mob boss.
• The Faceless:
  • Ryder's father in the initial trailer, whose face is obscured behind the helmet of his N7 armor. Averted in the game proper.
  • Cora and Liam were also shown in promotional materials wearing face-concealing helmets, until the second cinematic trailer.
  • Dirk Barrett, an outcast Ryder meets on Elaaden, has his face concealed by his helmet at all times. It helps serve the idea that he might not necessarily be trustworthy, since you can't see his expression.
• Failed a Spot Check: One secondary task on the Nexus has Ryder searching for the reason behind numerous electrical systems failures. All of these system are in plain sight of scores of people. The culprit eventually turns out to be an alien creature that looks like a tick large enough to come level with Ryder's hip. How that thing managed to chew through the Nexus tech without being spotted and causing a panic is anyone's guess.
• Fake Difficulty: Minor example in the large animal species. There's no conceivable reason why those beasts utterly disintegrate upon death, aside from making one of your sidequests (scan X life-forms) more difficult by forcing you to approach the dangerous critters unarmed.
• Fake-Out Make-Out: Ryder and Reyes can pull the "let the guard catch you kissing and get uncomfortable watching, so she doesn't notice what you're really up to" variation on Kadara.
• Fall Damage: Largely absent during exploration thanks to Ryder's Jump Jet Pack. You need to free-fall a long distance (at least 30+ meters) to incur any damage at all, and doing so usually just warps you back to the point where you fell with a minor loss in health. You can also let Ryder vault over any railing in hub areas, even if it means landing one floor below, without worrying about injuries.
• Fantastic Nuke: As it turns out, the Scourge was one. Someone cooked it up and unleashed it on the Remnant's creators.
• Fantastic Racism: All over the place. There's a lot of animosity between the Initiative and the krogan (especially on the part of salarian Director Tann) because of recent events and their history back in the Milky Way. The angara are very hostile to other alien races, because of their very bad experiences with the kett. And the kett themselves see all other species as potential slaves, or as a source of new potential kett or walking gene banks.
• Fetch Quest:
  • There are several tasks requiring you to track down unmarked stuff all over the cluster. Most of them don't tell you how many samples you need, let alone give you map markers on where to find them, but fortunately the samples are usually in similar areas to one another (so if it begins in a Remnant site, search another), and most of these quests never go off the planet they're given on.
  • The Remnant data core quest is probably the most sadistic of all. Your job is to find nine data cores scattered across the cluster, some of which are in the Vaults and one of which is hidden behind the most complicated of all the sudoku puzzles in the entire game. They can easily become Permanently Missable, so you may go around looking for them an insane amount of time. Your reward for finding all nine? Nothing, except satisfaction and some exp. Yay?
• Fire, Ice, Lightning: Several Instances throughout the game:
  • Incendiary Ammo, Cryo Ammo, and Disruptor Ammo make a return as finite Consumables.
  • There are augmentations which can be added to weapons or leg armor to improve the use of the Ammo Consumables, or give aerial melees a passive attribute of one of the three
  • The kett vakarsh, Remnant cryo-gauntlet, and angaran electric firaan are modified versions of other weapons imbued with these elemental attributes
  • The Tech Powers mostly all contain at least one option from these three - Incinerate, Flamethrower, Cryo Beam, Overload, and Energy Drain are base powers, while the Assault Turret has both Cryo Ammo and Flamethrower upgrades, and the Remnant VI has an Electric Beam upgrade. Also, there are Fire, Cryo, and Tech Combos that can be dealt to enemies depending on the primer skill used before the detonator skill.
  • The squad can also be upgraded in this fashion - Drack can get passive Incendiary Ammo, Cora can get Cryo Ammo, and Vetra Disruptor Ammo.
• Firing in the Air a Lot: Unsurprisingly, this appears to be one of the krogans' favorite methods of celebrating. One terminal entry in New Tuchanka demands they at least shout a warning before they start shooting inside the colony for no apparent reason, implying that this habit of theirs has already led to certain misunderstandings in the past.
• First Contact: Zig-Zagged trope. Since the Andromeda Initiative will encounter the native inhabitants of Andromeda, the Initiative stress the importance of peaceful first contact in order to avoid any serious misunderstandings. However, it's never played straight:
  • First contact with the kett involves gunfire. Gunfire which the kett initiated.
  • When Ryder discovers Aya, it's the Nexus's first contact with the angara, but not the angara's first contact with Milky-Way species: the Exiles had been living amongst them for months. (This is why the angara immediately know how to speak English, though that fact is not revealed until later in the plot, making the Translator Microbes abuse look ridiculous in the moment.) Further zig-zagged because the angara are a loose federation of independent worlds and settlements centralized at Aya; Ryder may not have been the first person to contact an angara, but they were the first to meet their civilization as a whole, and indeed (as mentioned by Governor Shie at the time) the first non-angara ever to set foot on Aya itself.
• Flash Step: Ryder with the Explorer profile loaded can do this in place of a jet thrust. Ryder with the Infiltrator profile loaded and upgraded Jaal can give the illusion of one with cloaking. Any Ryder wielding an asari sword will perform one every time they use a melee attack before reappearing for a devastating strike. An upgraded Peebee can do one too. The kett Ascendant also dash around the battlefield like this if they are taking too much fire.
• Flock of Wolves: It's mentioned that many of the mutineers-turned-outlaws were criminals or other shady elements who joined up with the Initiative to either get away with crimes they'd done in the Milky Way or to take advantage of the relative lawlessness of Andromeda to start new illegitimate enterprises. When the mutiny happened, many of them were exiled or left with the Exiles to continue in this regard.
• Flunky Boss: All of them. Bosses never come alone, and even the one that does at first - the Behemoth - is quickly joined by waves of lesser kett soldiers as the battle progresses. Considering how all bosses are basically powerful field commanders of their respective faction, it's totally justified that they take to the field alongside their forces in order to make Ryder's life as miserable as possible.
• Foil: The Jardaan to the Reapers. The Jardaan were benevolent creators who left behind tech that looked sharp and dangerous, while the Reapers were malevolent destroyers who left behind tech that looked soft and useful. The Jardaan wanted people to understand their technology (but got wiped out before they could finish teaching the angara), while the Reapers didn't want anyone to progress at all except along pre-planned paths.
• Foreshadowing:
  • A datapad found while Ryder's heading to the shuttlebay with Cora at the very beginning mentions the sensors detecting an error that went unresolved four hundred years before. It was the Scourge going off.
  • The first time Ryder scans a kett Chosen, they'll mention the DNA readings are "all over the place". Given the kett's method of reproduction, they would be.
  • The name of the basic kett goon, the Chosen, is a big hint as to their true nature. They were chosen to be exalted into kett. The same basically applies to the Anointed and Destined as well. Also, all the names also hint at the lack of agency that those who bear the names have, as they are all titles designated by somebody else.
  • As you progress through the kett stronghold on Voeld, it's possible to find hints in side-rooms about The Reveal a few minutes early.
  • Also on Voeld, after helping an angara sniper track down a cloaked wraith during the "Cold Sniper" sidequest, he can be asked if there're lots of Remnant about. He answers in the negative but mentions that he heard about a big one he never found being out there somewhere, hinting at the possibly very first Architect players may encounter after activating the Vault.
  • After SAM is transferred to Ryder, Ryder suggests giving the Pathfinder position to Cora instead. Lexi states that Ryder is fused to SAM in a way they don't understand and trying to sever that connection could wind up killing Ryder. This foreshadows both SAM's true abilities and what the Archon tries later.
  • The Knight side-quest has the anti-A.I. group trying to sever SAM's connection to Ryder. Much later on, the Archon does the same thing, only he's more successful.
  • When Ryder and Liam first find Remnant structures on Habitat 7, Liam questions what could have built it and Ryder joking replies "alien gods". Then, later, we learn about the Jardaan and what capabilities they had.
  • In Ryder's first conversation with Avela Kjar, the angara historian, she mentions that when the Scourge first appeared, it directly targeted angaran ships and technology. We also learn that it targets Remnant technology. Turns out, they're one and the same. The Jardaan created what we now call the Remnant, as well as the angara.
  • Tons of foreshadowing about the angara's origins is mentioned on Havarl. We're told that the angara had their technology uplifted by Remnant artifacts, with one scientist stating that it was found dismantled, as if someone had left it as instructions. In addition, some angara have the ability to use Remnant technology without knowing how they know. The Havarl vault has the ability to rapidly speed up the evolution of the planet's lifeforms and ecosystem. After leaving Havarl, Ryder asks Jaal how angaran biology evolved and he says he doesn't know. Furthermore, the fact that they need the vault to be functioning for Havarl, their homeworld, to be habitable hints that the angara are related to the Remnant and didn't naturally evolve on the planet.
    • Another one during Jaal's loyalty mission: On scanning the ruins dotted about the Forge, SAM will note that the writing on them resembles Remnant writing far more than it does angaran.
    • Something similar can be found much earlier already, on Aya. Take a look at the writings and symbols on the walls. There're Remnant glyphs everywhere.
    • In a kett outpost on Voeld, the player can find datapads containing some of the kett's findings about the angara and the Milky-Way races. The entry about the angara notes that they conspicuously lack the junk DNA normally seen in evolved species, hinting at the possibility of outside manipulation.
  • A very brief version. On the first visit to Eos, at the end of conversation with the smuggler who's set up shop there, he'll mention closing shop means someone called "Crazy Blue" will have to shop elsewhere. Investigating Site 2 before going to the Remnant Pillar also finds signs someone has set up camp near there after the site was abandoned. Said "Crazy Blue" makes an appearance when Ryder goes to examine the first pillar.
    • Related to this, talking with Peebee at the first pillar has her mention she's the only one besides Ryder's team around, except for a "grumpy old guy" who keeps breaking her equipment. Said grumpy old guy turns up when Ryder investigates the monolith surrounded by a kett camp.
  • On Habitat 7, it's possible to find an Observer hiding in a cave, a good couple of hours before Ryder learns what they are.
  • Check the Codex entry on the Tempest's systems, and it notes that the ship has a version of Normandy's own stealth systems, which SAM can't figure out, because that system was a product of collaboration between the turian government and the Systems Alliance, and shouldn't be on a civilian vessel, and SAM can't find any explanation for how it's there at all. A major hint that the Initiative is nowhere near as squeaky-clean as it's presented as.
  • If the player decides to clear out the kett base on Eos, they will find a terminal belonging to the Invictor, mentioning that he has been having dreams that include "terrible visions of creatures [he] once knew." This is an early hint about the nature of exaltation if this mission is done before Ryder rescues the Moshae.
• Foreign Queasine: In conversation with Vetra, Peebee will mention the angaran fire-roasted bug. Not burnt enough to kill it, just enough to make it spitting mad. Which provides the gravy.
• Forever War: Although the war between the angara and the kett broke out "just" eighty years ago, it's been going on for so long that only a handful of angara are old enough to still remember First Contact with their nemesis. The vast majority of their people (including Jaal) have never known peace and fights the kett tooth and nail without even knowing how this war started or what the kett actually want. One sidequest has you seeking out angaran elders who are among the only remaining firsthand witnesses of the kett's arrival.
• Fragile Speedster: The Tempest doesn't have heavy armor or powerful weapons, in fact it has no weapons of any kind, but it is so fast that most enemy ships can't hit it.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • The announcement trailer contained a very brief shot that included a dog tag with the name Ryder, which was the first hint as to the protagonist's name, though apparently the dog tag does not belong to the protagonist, but a different Ryder (now confirmed to be Ryder's father).
  • Also, in the same trailer, a photograph◊ could be spotted opposite of the dog tags showing a man with two children, foreshadowing the existence of the Ryder family (with the man being the N7 father, and the two children being the two playable characters).
• Fridge Horror: In-universe, after the Archon is killed, a group of Initiative scientists start studying Meridian, and an e-mail notes they're starting to think the Jaardan were getting terrified by what they'd created.
• Fridge Logic: Invoked by Lexi in an Elaaden side-quest, when she realises there really shouldn't be so many people from the Intiative being so violently unstable, given everyone was screened heavily when they signed up. They're actually suffering an unforeseen side-effect of defrosting. In this case, literal fridge logic.
• Friendly Fireproof: Played straight for squad mates and allies, but utterly averted for Ryder when it comes to explosives. They will suffer serious harm when caught in the blast radius of grenades tossed by their squad or even themselves. Be extra aware of your surroundings if your Ryder is focused on close combat. Team members like Liam and Jaal don't give a damn about who's in the vicinity of something they want to blow up, and if that happens while Ryder's shields are down, the critical mission failure screen can quickly be the next thing you see. It's all the more dangerous because "friendly" grenades don't trigger a warning icon on the HUD and have a very short fuse. It's also easy to forget this condition is in place as shooting regular bullets at you squadmates or Ryder getting caught in a crossfire does no damage.
• Frying Pan of Doom: While investigating a murder case on Kadara, Ryder goes through a krogan's house, finding a frying pan among the evidence which was apparently used on the victim's attackers.
• Fungus Humongous: Most explorable worlds are host to species of giant fungi. Havarl's emit blue bioluminescence, grow up to twice the size of a man, and are dangerous to touch; the ones on Elaaden are about the same height but much slimmer, and they glow red instead. By far the largest examples can be found on Kadara where they serve as tree analogues of sorts and therefore dwarf most buildings.
• Funny Background Event: On Ryder's first visit to Aya, as they're being marched through the city, several angara crowd around trying to get a look at them. Some at the back can be seen jumping up and down to get a better look.
• Fun with Acronyms:
  • SAM, the most prominent example, stands for Simulated Adaptive Matrix.
  • Peebee's pet project is a salvaged Remnant Observer she tinkers on in her spare time. Its name is Poc, which may appear strange until you learn that it's just an acronym for "proof of concept". Incidentally, her self-styled nickname is her shortened take on her full name, Pelessaria B'Sayle.
  • The Initiative outpost Ryder can found on Kadara is given the name "Ditaeon". No, that's not an angaran word. It originates from an inside joke among the former mining company that runs the place and stands for "deploy in the ass-end of nowhere".
  • The Remant P.A.W. is a very powerful assault rifle with unlimited ammo and pinpoint accuracy. Its name stands for Particle Accelerator Weapon.
• Game-Breaking Bug: some of the below have been repaired with patches and updates, but not all.
  • A major one can happen early in the "Firefighters" mission when you must interact with three consoles in SAM Node aboard the Hyperion. Sometimes the mission won't proceed after you've done so or hit the consoles in the wrong order, leaving you stuck in a locked room and unable to continue the game.
  • The Vault on Eos, the first one you ever find, introduces the mechanic of having a locked chest that is only accessible during the Escape Sequence (along with, y'know, every other mechanic about Remnant Vaults). Of course, Eos's Vault is also the largest one in the game, making it easy to misunderstand, forget or simply scramble past the loot on your way out, with only your teammate's triggered dialogue — "Hey, remember that Remtech we couldn't reach? We could reach it now!" — to remind you. Afterwards, an adventurous player might think of re-entering the Vault and grabbing said chest, and the game would let you in the front door... and then attempt to trigger the Cut Scene where Peebee finds the gravity lift, trapping you in the lobby of the Vault with no way to enter or leave, except for loading a manual save file. This bug was shipped with the initial release and was never fixed.
  • The Vault on Voeld has an extremely high chance of not removing the planet's pervasive cold hazard. A handful of players have reported their Voeld being sub-zero but hazard-free (which appears to be the intended outcome since it matches up with SAM's claim about the temperatures having risen by 13°C upon the Vault's activation), but more often than not it'll never be safe to explore. Particularly annoying because it's one hell of a lot more difficult to fight an Architect when the atmosphere is also trying to kill Ryder.
  • Many of the secondary quests and tasks are severely bugged and often impossible to complete, especially on a New Game Plus.
    • The counter for the Remnant Data Cores one must collect for Peebee has a habit of getting stuck. Picking up additional cores will do nothing.
    • A quest on Eos requires the player to track kett signals to a base in the north-west corner of the map. However, on getting there, the game may refuse to advance, with SAM simply remarking "stand by" before doing nothing, stalling the quest.
    • Patch 1.05 added a new task on the Nexus. Completing it requires talking to an angara in the visitor center, but the game may not register Ryder talking to him, and label the quest unfinished. Making it worse, it won't allow the player to talk to him again. It wasn't fixed until Patch 1.08.
    • The "White Death" sidequest is triggered through ambient dialogue when Ryder enters a certain area on Voeld. If any squadmate decides to chime in with their own ambient chatter at the same time, the quest giver is abruptly cut off and the quest never starts, making 100% Completion impossible to attain.
  • Charge, one of the game's most powerful abilities, is majorly bugged. On occasion, the game code will declare a random enemy an "Invalid Target" and not allow you to Charge at them at all. This is a huge problem for a close-quarters-heavy Ryder, because Charge is their main method of closing distance and recharging their shields. Being stuck out in the open without the ability to Charge means any minor enemy can shred Ryder's health in seconds.
    • Even worse, using Charge on an Architect sometimes makes the Architect freeze entirely, much like Eiroch and Fiends. Unlike those enemies, though, Architects have scripted events which must occur to finish the battle, and they can't happen while it's frozen. This means that if a player built their Ryder entirely focused on close quarters, it will be nigh-impossible to defeat the Architects until they've gotten enough levels to fight another way.
  • Patch 1.05 introduced a random bug on PC that makes menu buttons unresponsive or freezes the entire menu with no way out except for killing the game by brute force. The galaxy map and the APEX menus are particularly vulnerable to it.
  • A minor, but still irritating one during the Three Sabers mission meant that Ryder couldn't attack some of the Three Sabers' leaders. Their attacks would just go right through them. Fortunately, there was nothing preventing Ryder's teammates from harming them. It was fixed with Patch 1.05.
  • One quest on Elaaden can cause the game to freeze up entirely just by talking to the quest giver, though if the player resets and tries again it'll work. This was fixed by Patch 1.08.
  • Patch 1.06 has increased the prevalence of a bug where a firefight on the Archon's ship never triggers, halting all progress on that op and forcing you to start it over, meaning you can lose an hour or more of progress.
  • When Ryder first arrives on the Hyperion's bridge at the beginning of the prologue mission, the bridge window tends to be completely black instead of showing Habitat 7 and the Scourge as it's supposed to do. While it doesn't prevent the mission from progressing, it sure messes up immersion and makes the cutscene a whole lot less impressive. The bug still hasn't been fixed as of patch 1.08.
  • Another immersion-breaking bug is caused by the mouse cursor getting stuck in the center of the screen, which can (and often does) happen every time the player exits any cursor-navigated menu. This one also hasn't been fixed as of version 1.08.
  • The Backup Life Support consumable was supposedly meant to refill Ryder's environmental hazard bar, but it's broken and does absolutely nothing when used. Its absence from gameplay makes one particular level - the Vault on Voeld with its pervasive Level 2 Cold Hazard - extremely difficult to complete on Insanity, to the point that more than a few players deem Insanity difficulty impossible to beat because of this one dungeon.
  • The Adrenaline fusion mod is very well-hidden but arguably the most powerful fusion mod in the game because it confers a 100% chance to reset all active cooldowns upon killing any enemy, thus allowing for near-limitless power spamming. Its drawback is a 50% increase in basic cooldown time. Take the Fusion Support AVP perk (cuts fusion mod penalties by half) and Adrenaline becomes the most useless fusion mod in the game because now it has +25% cooldown time and 0% chance of resetting active cooldowns.
  • One quest on Voeld requires Ryder to find and scan angaran tracking devices stuck on kett machinery. However, oftentimes the devices come pre-scanned, meaning Ryder is unable to scan them and continue the quest. Not necessarily game-breaking, but irritating all the same.
  • Jaal's loyalty mission has a bug where the final cutscene won't play, forcing players to reset the game.
  • With patch 1.09, any time Ryder has to give a speech on founding a colony, the Emotional and Logical speeches aren't available on the wheel, meaning the player can only go with Sarcastic or Professional.
  • A random bug, still present as of patch 1.10, can revert Ryder back to Level 1 without warning. What's worse is this bug can retroactively affect all the other autosaves of your current Ryder, so unless you created a manual save before coming across this bug, you basically have little choice but to start over, depending on how far into the game you got before this.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Strangely enough, the game as a whole is subject to this because its main story revolves more or less exclusively around defeating the kett and is thus almost completely removed from its actual premise of settling a new galaxy. It's entirely possible to see the credits roll while having established just one out of four outposts, showing pitiful single-digit viablity ratings on Havarl, Voeld and Kadara, and without ever having set foot on Elaaden and H-047c. While getting rid of the kett certainly is a major hurdle on the way to establishing a new home in Heleus, founding outposts to supply your starving settlers is both a much more immediate concern and the reason the Initiative even exists in the first place, so if you choose to play only the kett-related priority missions, you miss out on pretty much everything the game is actually about.
    • Even this is weirdly Zig-Zagged, as it's heavily implied, if not outright stated, that firing up the Meridian should make resetting the individual vaults unnecessary. Yet, it has no bearing on the viability of the various worlds, requiring Ryder to still activate the monoliths and reset the vaults in order to continue placing outposts.
  • Despite the whole point about the Scourge being that going near it is a death sentence, often times during transitions between star systems, the Tempest will apparently fly straight through it, with no harm done. The same is true for the Scourge sprouts planetside - they'll sometimes inflict minor damage when touched, but most of the time you can pass through or even stand in them without suffering any ill effects.
  • The environmental hazards don't make a lot of sense when you pay attention to the details. A zone is classified as a Level 1 Heat Hazard if the ambient temperature exceeds 40°C, which is hot but nowhere near hot enough to kill a human clad in Powered Armor in about five minutes of exposure. At 50+°C, the area is already a Level 2 hazard that gives you less than one minute out in the open before Ryder collapses. The same mechanic applies to Cold Hazards (Level 1: below -40°C; Level 2: below -50°C), which makes even less sense since it's much easier to keep a body warm than to keep it cool. A third example is the rare Radiation Hazard, a condition that is to be commended for using the correct unit of measurement, but it still screws up the potentially lethal dosage levels by a massive margin. The fact that there even are environmental hazards that can harm Ryder in the first place stands out, since in a chronologically earlier game in the series, Shepard could find and equip hostile-environment armor that gave them either significantly extended EVA time or even complete immunity. It's really odd that the Andromeda Initiative didn't bring any of that gear on a trip into the unknown.
  • After a few hours running around on Aya, Havarl and Voeld, Ryder is informed by Suvi and Kallo about how well Eos and Padromos are doing, and that they should go take a look (hint hint). All well and good... except you have the option of returning and exploring a radiation-free Eos immediately after you left the first time, and may have already gone and done most of what there is to do there anyway.
  • The allegiance of starship wrecks on the galaxy map and the items you can salvage from them often don't match up, like looting Milky Way-aligned stuff from a Remnant vessel that got wrecked by the Scourge centuries before the Initiative came anywhere near the Heleus cluster.
  • Taking out a planet's kett command center and the resident Ascendant within allegedly throws their forces into disarray and weakens the kett presence significantly. Do so and you'll notice quickly that nothing changes at all - the kett will still be all over the map everytime you return to that world, they will still occupy all of their checkpoints, and their drop ships will still buzz around like nothing ever happened.
  • Related to the above: the kett fleet that the Archon dispatches to Meridian is said to be all that's left of his forces in Heleus. Take the Nomad on a spin on Eos or Voeld after the epilogue and you'll notice the kett presence there hasn't diminished in the slightest (though given the absence of kett would render some leftover sidequests forever unable to be finished if this happened, this might be an Acceptable Break from Reality).
  • Vederia, Pathfinder Sarissa's second-in-command, carries a Sandstorm assault rifle. Since this gun is an exile invention, Vederia never left the Leusinia and the kett only use their own weapons, it's somewhat mysterious how she acquired it.
  • Coupling onto the entry above the Sandstorm seems to be the generic "non-human" rifle for NPCs. The only problem with this is that, according to the background, the Sandstorm was designed and built by exiles, a majority of which are humans. This comes into conflict with many of the groups who utilize the Sandstorm, such as the Angara, who aren't on friendly terms with the exiles, and the Roekaar, who hate anything and everything to do with the Milky Way. The Roekaar, who are pretty much just anti-Initiative terrorists, can at least be handwaved as having scavenged the rifles, but it is rather jarring to see Angaran Resistance members, who have never met another human before Ryder, waving Sandstorms around.
  • It's possible for a scripted conversation to play between Jaal and Peebee, involving her progress on her drone named Poc, while Poc is missing, having been stolen by outlaws.
  • Any Remnant Observer's Eye Beam is stated to be little more than a plain old laser resonating on "weird frequencies", according to Peebee. That doesn't stop kinetic barriers of any kind from providing protection against it despite those barriers being established as utterly ineffective against directed energy weapons. Similar to the Doctor's sonic screwdriver, the Observers can also do pretty much anything with their lasers regardless of how physically impossible much of it would be in real life.
  • The entrance to the gigantic Remnant derelict on Elaaden is blocked by a sizzling energy field that's repeatedly stated to be lethal on contact. Step into it and you'll realize that it doesn't deal any damage at all. The only thing you have to worry about is the half-dozen Remnant turrets in the area, and those are easy to pick off from cover.
  • Aya and its entire star system are said to be hidden from the kett through the Scourge, yet there's a kett satellite orbiting one of the planets there that's merrily collecting data without anyone doing something about it.
• Gang Up on the Human: Refreshingly averted most of the time. Kadara and Elaaden in particular have scores of remote outposts or Remnant ruins where kett, scavenger gangs, the planet's aggressive wildlife, Remnant bots or any combination thereof are engaged in wild shootouts when Ryder arrives. As long as you keep your distance, you can just sit back and let them whittle each other down before moving in to mop up the survivors. Sometimes it's even possible to lure some particular nasty critters like Fiends or Eiroch to a nearby hostile checkpoint, run away and watch the unfolding carnage from afar, although that doesn't always works because those beasts tend to chase the first target in sight relentlessly.
• Gatling Good: The kett Soned is a huge plasma minigun carried by Anointed. If used by Ryder or in multiplayer, it can't mount a scope (due to the way it's carried), but it projects an enormous amount of fire downrange - even Fiends and Hydras are quickly taken down by it, as will Ryder if they're caught in the open when an Anointed opens fire. It also has an enormous clip size and reloads relatively quickly, but is quite inaccurate and requires frequent resupply trips due to its low spare ammo reserves.
• Gave Up Too Soon: A pair of krogan scouts can be found in the northern wastelands of Elaaden, and if talked to will admit they're giving up on searching for water and are preparing to head back to New Tuchanka. They're sitting right on top of the entrance to Annea's secret water supply.
• Gender-Equal Ensemble: The original four Pathfinders. The human and turian Pathfinders are male, while the asari and salarian pathfinders are female. Depending on Ryder's gender and what decision is made on the Archon's flagship, the Pathfinders' gender ratio can be kept even, the turian Pathfinder can become The One Guy, or the asari Pathfinder can fall under The Smurfette Principle.
• The Ghost:
  • Considering the Andromeda galaxy is over six centuries worth of space travel from the Milky Way, and there's a "Shepard's gender" option in character customization, Commander Shepard may be this in the game. They aren't.
  • The Jaardan, who created the Remnant and the angara. We don't even get a hint to their actual appearance, save that going by the size of their tech, they were probably human-sized. Also, their only identified authority figure is a "Director".
  • Frequently mentioned Elaaden gang leader Big Taran, who is apparently one of the big names there. Whoever they are, Ryder doesn't meet them.
  • Another Elaaden gang leader, Little Mouse, is only mentioned in datapad logs. This simultaneously ties into the game's Hide Your Children policy since Little Mouse is mentioned to be barely more than a boy.
  • The "benefactor" who funded the Initiative, and who may be involved in the murder of Jien Garson, is a mystery left hanging at the end of the game.
• Giant Flyer:
  • Habitat 7 (the first world you set foot on) as well as the jungle world Havarl have Mantas - large, bizarre creatures resembling heavy Zerg flyers flapping their way across the sky. They're part of the scenery and do not interact with anyone in any way.
  • Most Remnant Architects hover harmlessly in the air until you engage them.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The Prefect, which possibly is the first kett Ascendant you'll encounter. Contrary to the Invictor and the Cardinal, there's barely any hints as to his mere existence - no datapads, no Canned Orders over Loudspeaker, just one brief mention by two angaran look-outs, an e-mail found on a side-quest, and that only consists of them giving orders to their troops. You fight your way to the top of his base, complete mission objectives while fending off an infinite Zerg Rush of Mooks, and when you finally hit the last switch and stop to catch your breath, this guy shows up out of nowhere and forces you to rapidly adopt new tactics on pain of getting your ass kicked.
• Gondor Calls for Aid: During the final mission, Ryder, looking for an edge in the final battle against the Archon, asks the Tempest crew to invite their contacts to come along. Depending on your choices, your allies can include the other Pathfinders, the Resistance, Moshae Sjefa, Kandros, Reyes, the survivors of Alec's Pathfinder team, Drack's scouts, Vorn, and Kalinda.
• Good Is Not Nice: Ryder and their crew come across as an affable, friendly bunch, all gathered together with the best of intentions for helping the colonists. However they make no bones about the fact that in order to do this, they often have to kill people. Ryder rarely shows remorse, even joking ("Speed bump!") about it on occasion. Several missions include dialogue from NPCs reacting emotionally to the fact that Ryder has just killed some of their colleagues and friends, and some of the datapad and terminal messages and overhead conversations often give personalities to the mooks who either have been or are just about to be killed.
• Gravity Screw:
  • Most biotic abilities are this by design.
  • Every larger Remnant installation has at least one so-called gravity well that facilitates access to the underground levels by floating the user up or down a deep vertical shaft. Some even work horizontally. SAM points out that this is not in line with what the physical term "gravity well" actually means.
  • What's left of H-047c when Ryder visits it has significantly lower gravity than any other world they can explore, reducing traction but allowing for long jumps with the Nomad. Suvi warns the ground team to be extra careful due to how easy it would be to accidentally hit escape velocity. Strangely, gravity inside the rad-shielded domes on the surface as well as in the Remnant Vault is the standard 1G regardless.
  • Ryder and Peebee can have lot of fun with this trope aboard the Tempest by first screwing with the artificial gravity, then screwing without it.
  • Kett Ascendants always hover some distance above ground when they're fought.
  • Liam's Loyalty Mission takes place on a salvaged kett ship that's held together by wishful thinking more than anything else. It doesn't take long until the artificial gravity goes haywire and starts turning walls or the ceiling into the new floor and every room into a cluttered chaos of countless cargo containers and other movable objects. This whole procedure repeats about half a dozen times throughout the mission. It's easily one of the most dynamic and well-designed quests in the whole game, plus one of the funniest.
  • One of the first signs something's up with Habitat 7 is that there are floating clumps of rock, despite the gravity being essentially earth-like.
  • Immediately on entering Meridian, the Tempest has a momentary problem with the place's interior gravity.
• Greater-Scope Paragon: Heh. But in all seriousness, had Shepard not learnt about the Reapers and tried warning people, the Andromeda Initiative would never have gotten off the ground.
• Greater-Scope Villain:
  • The Scourge, a dark energy storm, and the greatest threat to life in the Heleus Cluster. The true villains are the unknown race that created the Scourge as a weapon to fight the Jardaan.
  • In a sense, the Reapers from the original trilogy. This is because, while the Andromeda Initiative was going to happen anyway, Alec Ryder's logs reveal that most of the people leading the Initiative believed Shepard's warning about the Reapers. The reason the Andromeda Initiative left the Milky Way during the events of Mass Effect 2 was because the fear of the Reapers made Alec, Jien and the Mysterious Benefactor (who may or may not be the Illusive Man) move the schedule forward drastically to get them out of the Milky Way quicker. While this led to them avoiding the Reapers, it also gave them less time to prepare and left them under-equipped to deal with the loss of many of the golden worlds and any hostile aliens such as the kett and the angara's Roekaar.
  • Also from the original trilogy, Cerberus. While not physically present their actions have caused numerous problems in Heleus, including ex-scientist experimenting on other species and an extremist group looking to eradicate AI like the SAMs because they were victims of Project Overlord.
  • The government of the kett empire. They ordered the Archon to the Heleus Cluster in the first place, and they have other agents causing similar trouble elsewhere in Andromeda.
• Grenade Spam:
  • One of the Architect's many attacks is a massive grenade volley it'll often launch straight over Ryder's cover thanks to its enormous size. The explosions aren't particularly damaging but have a powerful knockback effect that tends to expose Ryder to more incoming fire.
  • Most humanoid enemies avert this trope by tossing grenades sparingly and so inaccurately they'll rarely hit anything with the blast. Kett Destined, however, play it completely straight - their energy grenades almost always hit, have a huge area of effect, deal considerable damage over time, and they make liberal use of them to flush Ryder out of cover.
  • Exalted Krogan also have a nasty habit of actually hitting with their nasty grenades, which also have quite an area of effect ruining your shields.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality:
  • What most of the conflicts between the angara, the Milky Way newcomers and the Nexus-Exiles clash boil down to. No side is innocent, everyone committed acts of questionable morality in one way or another, but the majority also had/have good reasons for why they act(ed) like the do/did. Ryder themselves must face a lot of tough decisions where neither option can honestly be called the right one and choosing the lesser evil is often the only thing they can do.
  • Averted overall in the game's main conflict, as the kett vs the Initiative and the angara is treated as Black-and-Gray Morality.
• Grid Puzzle: The nicknamed "sudoku" puzzles consist of placing glyphs on a grid until you figure out the right sequence. This requires you to think some moves ahead since certain combinations of glyphs become incompatible. The hardest one so far is found in the Elaaden vault.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: By combining the Pull and Throw biotic powers, Ryder can pull in unprotected enemies and - big surprise - throw them at other hostiles for potentially lethal results. Might not be the most efficient method of dealing with someone shooting at you, but the sheer hilarity of bowling over baddies with their buddies makes it a worthwhile pastime. There's even an achievement for doing this 20 times, plus another one for launching an enemy onto a trip mine this way.
• Groin Attack: Remnant Nullifiers are heavily armored battle robots with two stubby legs carrying a plump central body. They're the second-most dangerous non-Superboss Remnant constructs in the game, yet it's somewhat difficult to take them seriously once you realize that their big glowing weak point sits squarely in their crotch.
• Ground Punch:
  • One of the new abilities combines this with the omni-blade melee weapon and Jump Jet Pack to clear away groups of enemies at once.
  • This is the krogan hammer's special trait - it's smashed into the ground in front of Ryder, hitting everything in a considerable area.
  • The Nova biotic skill, first introduced in Mass Effect 3, still does this trope.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: Hostile entities have a fairly limited aggro range (roughly 40 meters in the open world, or the entrance door when inside a building). Stay beyond that and you can pick off mooks with a sniper rifle without their buddies giving a damn about it, as long as you kill each target in one hit and no other baddy is standing within arm's reach of the target. It's even worse than the infamous Skyrim guards - those at least went to investigate that dead fellow soldier lying next to them.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Many Fetch Quest tasks don't have map markers nor do they even reveal the planet they're taking place on. When you've finally figured out the latter, it still leaves you with the former as a big problem, and unless you have a guide handy, you'll be spending a lot of time scouring every nook and cranny for that last missing sample/bug/manifesto/etc.
  • One achievement requires you to solve twenty Remnant decryption puzzles in a single game. A total of 23 puzzles exist in the game, and the mandatory ones you need to solve during the story account for about half of them. If you want this achievement, you must search for all the optional consoles and containers in Remnant installations all over the Heleus cluster, most of which are hidden away in dark corners, very easily overlooked and often permanently missable. Again, there's no counter to tell you how many you've found, so good luck finding them all on your first run without a guide. What's more: don't even think about using the decryption keys you can find or purchase; puzzles you "solve" this way don't count towards the achievement.
  • There's a ton of upgrades you can buy for your APEX teams, but nothing in the game warns you that these upgrades are mutually exclusive and don't have a storage system. If you acquired something new and want to switch back to the previous one afterwards, you have to buy it again for the full price in mission funds, which really sucks if your first upgrade was the ludicrously expensive Exceptional Human Intelligence.
  • The Annea subplot on Elaaden has a conclusion where, if the player decides to reveal her hidden water supply, Annea can be found and talked to some time later, which inevitably results in her attacking Ryder and then dying. The game never tells the player this is possible, nor does it treat the encounter as part of a quest, meaning the only ways to know about it are to either stumble upon Annea's camp by accident, or to have known about it already.
  • There are quests, particularly on Voeld, that require the player to explore every nook and cranny, or wander well off the beaten track, with no indication that the player should search there. Elaaden has one that literally does not activate unless the Nomad circles around a specific section of desert for several minutes.
  • Every major planet except Kadara has at least one secondary Vault that can be explored for loot or various side quests. While almost all of them eventually get a quest marker as a result of advancing specific Fetch Quests, the one at the southern edge of Elaaden's op zone isn't part of any quest and so far away from any other POI that most players don't even know it exists until they learn about it from an outside source.
  • The game's most powerful fusion mod, Adrenaline, is so well-hidden many players don't even know it exists. It's on Havarl, and the search begins at a completely inconspicuous cave in the middle of nowhere whose only distinguishing feature is a lone Roekaar investigating a Remnant console. For those curious, activate the console, follow the buried wiring, do some platforming, activate another console, jump up another Remnant ruin, use the gravity well, solve a Remnant glyph puzzle, use the newly spawned gravity well behind you, and loot the hidden chest near the drop point. The reason it's so hard to find is probably because it's the only fusion mod that can be acquired without having to wreck an Architect or outrun a Vault purification field first.
  • There was a time when 100% Completion hinged solely on a 10-minute sidequest. On Kadara, a Wretched Hive filled with Grey-and-Gray Morality, two doctors argue over an addictive drug they created, both wanting sole control of it. It's very much a he-said-she-said situation, as the two are geographically separated from each other and Ryder never gets to hear them interact; first you get his side, then hers, and then the game forces you to side with one or the other of them. As originally presented, this brought the Wide-Open Sandbox to a screeching halt for half the game's players — the half that sided with the wrong doctor and found out that they could, for reasons the game never explained, no longer found a colony on Kadara. Fortunately, the stakes were patched out post-release, and now neither branch has a negative impact on the planet's viability.

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