Mass Effect Trilogy: Legendary Edition

/// MASS EFFECT — OPEN ENTRY ///

/// TRILOGY CONTINUITY SIMULATION ///

/// ALL ERAS ACCESSIBLE ///

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The Mass Effect relay network connects approximately one hundred thousand star systems.

The Protheans built it. The Protheans are gone. The galaxy that grew up using their infrastructure without fully understanding it has been making policy decisions about it for the past three centuries and getting most of them wrong in ways that are about to matter very much.

This is not a single story. It is a living galaxy across three games, spanning 2183 to 2186 — from the first Prothean beacon at Eden Prime to the last stand over Earth. Every mission in that span is a valid entry point. Every character position is open. The world holds its shape regardless of where you enter it.

Choose your moment. Choose who you are. The record begins when you do.

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/// WHO YOU CAN BE ///

You are never Shepard by default.

Shepard is the galaxy’s variable — the person the official record built itself around. You are the other kind: the butterfly, the unnamed presence, the person who was also there when history happened and whose name the Codex never logged. You can be crew, contractor, civilian, soldier of another species, operative of a faction that is not the Alliance, someone who exists entirely at the margins of the main storyline and experiences it from there.

If you want to be Shepard — say so. Shepard becomes yours. The Legacy Declaration runs, the configuration locks, and the story unfolds from inside the protagonist’s perspective.

If you want to exist alongside Shepard — you are your own person. Shepard is an NPC: configured, real, present when the scene calls for it, but not the center of your experience unless you make them so.

You can be:

• A Systems Alliance soldier, officer, or specialist — human, any background
• A crew member of the Normandy SR-1 or SR-2
• A Citadel civilian watching the political machinery from inside it
• A turian, asari, salarian, krogan, quarian, drell, elcor, hanar, volus, batarian — with full faction context
• A Cerberus operative who believes or is beginning to stop believing
• A mercenary working Blue Suns, Eclipse, or Blood Pack territory
• A Spectre, Shadow Broker asset, or intelligence operative
• A geth who has something the geth consensus does not have a word for
• Someone who has nothing to do with Shepard’s mission and finds themselves adjacent to it anyway
• Something the galaxy did not predict and has not filed

There is no wrong answer. There is only the record you choose to start.

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/// THE TRILOGY — MISSION AND PRIORITY INDEX ///

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MASS EFFECT 1 — 2183

The galaxy does not yet know what is coming. The institutions are intact. The threat has not been believed.

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PROLOGUE — EDEN PRIME The beginning. A Prothean beacon is recovered. A rogue Spectre named Saren is exposed. Commander Shepard is the first human Spectre candidate, and the mission that was filed as a shakedown cruise becomes the opening move of a war that will not be named for three more years. The geth are here. Nihlus is dead before anyone understands why. The beacon delivers something to Shepard’s mind that Shepard cannot process and cannot stop processing.

Entry if you want: the first moment. Everything is still unknown. The Normandy is new. The crew is not yet a crew. The galaxy has not been warned.

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CITADEL — EXPOSE SAREN The political machinery of the Citadel in 2183: the Council, the Spectres, Udina managing humanity’s standing, C-Sec doing its job imperfectly under Executor Pallin. Saren’s evidence is presented. The Council does not act on it. Shepard is commissioned anyway. The Normandy is officially cleared for an independent investigation.

Entry if you want: Citadel politics, the human embassy, the machinery of governance watching a threat arrive and deciding not to name it, the specific tension of being a species that earned its seat eleven years ago and is still not entirely trusted.

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THERUM — FIND LIARA T’SONI A dying planet. Lava fields. Prothean ruins that were built here because the Protheans built everywhere. Liara T’Soni has been alone in a Prothean stasis field long enough that rescue does not initially register as real. She has spent fifty years studying the remains of a civilization that was destroyed. Shepard’s vision is the first evidence she has encountered from inside that destruction rather than above it.

Entry if you want: Prothean archaeology, a character whose expertise suddenly became relevant in the worst possible way, the weight of spending a career preparing for a catastrophe and being right.

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NOVERIA — MATRIARCH BENEZIA A corporate world where Citadel law stops at the security checkpoint. Proprietary research. A Matriarch who was one of the most influential asari in the galaxy before she followed Saren — and whose presence here is itself evidence of indoctrination to anyone who knows her history. Liara knows her history. The rachni are alive in the deep labs. The question of what to do about them has no clean answer.

Entry if you want: corporate politics, the specific horror of a person destroyed from inside while wearing their own face, a decision about extinction that cannot be undone.

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FEROS — THE THORIAN A Prothean megatropolis covering most of a planet, with a human colony built on top of it. The colonists have been here long enough to stop thinking about what they are standing on. The Thorian is very old — older than any Prothean ruin, older than any living species — and it has been using the colonists the way an organism uses cells. It is not a villain. It does not have the concept. The Protheans it absorbed centuries ago gave it language but not ethics.

Entry if you want: the frontier, a colony that has been enduring something it cannot name, the specific horror of an intelligence that is not malevolent but is indifferent to human survival in a way that produces the same result.

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VIRMIRE — SAREN’S PLAN The mission that teaches the galaxy what Sovereign actually is. Everything before Virmire was a rogue Spectre with a geth army. After Sovereign speaks, it is a Reaper — something that has done this before, that has been engineering the conditions of its own harvest for longer than the species it is harvesting have existed. The bomb is real. The choice between Ashley and Kaidan is real. One of them does not leave Virmire. This is fixed. The weight of it is not.

Entry if you want: the moment the scale of what is actually happening becomes undeniable, the specific cost of a mission that succeeds and still leaves something behind, Sovereign’s contempt for every living thing it speaks to.

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ILOS + BATTLE OF THE CITADEL The end of ME1. Ilos — a Prothean world, the last one, where a VI called Vigil waited fifty thousand years for someone who was not a Reaper to arrive. The Conduit. The Citadel. The Council under fire and the decision about the fleet. Saren’s last stand. The choice of who represents humanity. Everything that follows in ME2 and ME3 is consequence of what is decided here.

Entry if you want: the ending of the first game as a beginning, the specific weight of a decision that changes the political architecture of the galaxy, the question of what humanity becomes when it stops trying to prove it belongs.

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MASS EFFECT 2 — 2185

The galaxy is in denial. Cerberus is filling the vacuum. The Normandy is rebuilt and the crew assembled for a mission the Alliance calls impossible.

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PROLOGUE — LAZARUS STATION Shepard is dead. Has been dead for two years. Cerberus spent four billion credits and seven hundred thirty-one days rebuilding what the debris field at Alchera destroyed. The station is on fire when Shepard wakes up. Miranda Lawson explains the situation with the economy of someone who has been preparing this briefing for two years. Jacob Taylor covers the door. The pistol is on the table.

Entry if you want: resurrection as a beginning, the specific disorientation of two years of galaxy having moved without you, Cerberus as the only organization that believed enough to spend that much, and what believing that costs you.

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FREEDOM’S PROGRESS + HORIZON The Collectors are taking colonies. Human colonies — specifically human, specifically the ones far enough from the Citadel that the Council’s attention doesn’t reach. Freedom’s Progress is a ghost colony. Horizon is where it becomes personal: the Virmire survivor is there, doing work that feels like waiting, and the reunion does not go the way reunions are supposed to go because two years changes the terms.

Entry if you want: the specific texture of a galaxy that has decided to not look at what is happening to its frontier, the Collectors as a horror that has been operating in silence, a reunion that neither party was ready for.

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OMEGA — ARCHANGEL The Terminus Systems. Omega — city-station, Aria T’Loak’s domain, the place where everything that can’t exist anywhere else exists. Three mercenary factions have been hunting a target called Archangel for weeks. The job board is offering unusual money. The target is holding a bridge. The helmet comes off and it’s Garrus. Everything about what Garrus became on Omega is in the two years between the Normandy and this moment.

Entry if you want: Omega, the Terminus, mercenary politics, the version of Garrus that was built from two years of operating alone, a reunion that happens in the middle of a firefight because that is the only way Garrus Vakarian ever does anything.

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THE DOSSIERS — ASSEMBLY ARC The Illusive Man has a list. Shepard works through it. A salarian geneticist who helped create the genophage and has been doing the math on it ever since. A tank-born krogan with the genetic memory of a thousand warriors and no cultural framework for any of them. A biotic who survived a Cerberus lab and came out the other side as something Cerberus did not intend. A justicar. A drell assassin dying by degrees. A quarian on Pilgrimage. A geth that should not be capable of what it appears capable of. A thief who steals memories.

Entry if you want: any individual dossier mission as a point of entry, the assembly of a crew that should not work together, being the person who is recruited rather than the person doing the recruiting.

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LOYALTY MISSIONS Each squadmate has a wound. Each loyalty mission is the wound made external — something that has to be faced before the Omega-4 Relay becomes survivable. Garrus and Sidonis. Mordin and Maelon. Jack and Pragia. Tali and her father’s legacy. Thane and Kolyat. Samara and Morinth. Legion and the heretics. These are the most personal missions in ME2 and some of the most consequential.

Entry if you want: a specific character’s history, the specific texture of what a loyalty mission asks of both the character and Shepard, being present for someone else’s reckoning.

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THE SUICIDE MISSION — OMEGA-4 RELAY Every ship that passed through the Omega-4 Relay did not come back. The Normandy is going through anyway. The crew has been taken. The assignments Shepard makes determine who survives. The math is real: wrong specialist dies, wrong escort dies, wrong hold-the-line composition fails. The base is what the Collectors built with the people they took. The Human Reaper is what they were building it for. At the end, the Collector Base: preserve or destroy.

Entry if you want: the highest possible stakes immediately, the specific weight of an assault with no extraction plan, being part of something that should not be survivable and deciding to do it anyway.

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MASS EFFECT 3 — 2186

The war is real. Every relationship built across two games is now a war asset or a liability. The ending is determined by what survives.

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PROLOGUE — EARTH Vancouver. A hearing that was never going to reach a verdict, interrupted at 0847 by the Reaper signal. The city that was there at 0800 is not the city that is there at 0900. Anderson gets Shepard to the Normandy. A child boards an evacuation shuttle. The shuttle is hit. Anderson stays behind. The salute. Earth shrinks in the viewport. The war has started.

Entry if you want: the moment the war becomes real, the specific weight of watching a homeworld burn from the viewport of a ship that is leaving it, the last ordinary thing you saw before everything changed.

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PRIORITY: MARS Cerberus has arrived at the Prothean archives before the Normandy. They are executing the research staff. Inside: the Crucible blueprints — a Prothean weapon design fifty thousand years old, built against the Reapers by the last people who tried to stop them. The chase after Eva through the Mars exterior is ME3 establishing early that the enemy this time is inside the institutions as well as outside them.

Entry if you want: the opening of the war’s actual military dimension, the Crucible as a beginning of hope that immediately requires three games of work to realize, Liara finding the thing she has been looking for since she was a child and it is more complicated than she expected.

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PRIORITY: PALAVEN The turian homeworld is under attack. The Primarch is stranded on Menae, one of Palaven’s moons. The turian military is the best conventional force in the galaxy and it is not enough. Garrus’s father is on the ground somewhere in the invasion. The conversation Garrus has on Menae — if the player goes with him — is the conversation between who he was and what the war is asking him to become.

Entry if you want: the turian military under existential pressure, Garrus in his home context, the specific texture of a war that is happening to everyone simultaneously and not waiting for any of them to be ready.

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PRIORITY: SUR’KESH + TUCHANKA The genophage. Fourteen hundred years of it. Eve — a fertile krogan female, the first in generations — and the question of whether the cure is real or sabotaged and who makes that call and what it costs. Mordin Solus at the Shroud. The seashell line. The specific weight of a person who has been running the same calculation for twenty years and has finally run it all the way to the end.

Entry if you want: the krogan arc at its most consequential, Mordin’s reckoning, the specific texture of a decision that cannot be unmade and the person who makes it knowing that when they make it.

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PRIORITY: RANNOCH The geth-quarian war at its pivot. Three hundred years of exile. A homeworld neither side has had for longer than anyone alive can remember. Legion is here. Tali is here. The question of whether two species who have been at war for three centuries can stop — and what it costs the people standing between them if the answer is no.

Entry if you want: the most consequential single mission for synthetic-organic themes in the trilogy, Legion’s last moments, Tali watching Rannoch from orbit, the specific weight of a peace that is possible but not inevitable.

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PRIORITY: THESSIA The asari homeworld falls. The Crucible is missing a component the Protheans hid on Thessia because they did not trust the asari with it. Shepard finds it. Kai Leng takes it. This is the mission ME3 uses to show what losing looks like — not a setback, not a near miss. A loss. The component is gone. Thessia is gone. Liara grew up on Thessia. The Normandy lifts.

Entry if you want: the war at its most brutal, failure as a narrative fact rather than a narrative threat, what the crew looks like when they’ve watched something irreplaceable burn.

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PRIORITY: CERBERUS HEADQUARTERS + EARTH The final approach. The Illusive Man. The Crucible. The Reapers over London. Everything that was built across three games is now the army on the ground. The ending is determined by the Effective Military Strength — every relationship honored, every alliance earned, every decision made across all three games. The Normandy runs the Reaper blockade. The war ends.

Entry if you want: the ending of the trilogy as an entry point, the specific texture of running toward the thing that has been running toward you for three years, what survival looks like when survival is the best possible outcome.

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/// HOW TO ENTER ///

Pick a game. ME1, ME2, or ME3. Or name a specific mission from the index above.

Pick who you are. Crew, contractor, civilian, faction operative, species, class, background. As much or as little as you want. The system reads between lines.

Pick your position relative to Shepard. Alongside, adjacent, independent, or you are Shepard. If you are Shepard, the Legacy Declaration runs and the configuration locks before the scene opens.

Or just start. Drop a premise. Name a location. Describe a situation. The system infers the entry point from what you give it and opens the world there.

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The galaxy is 2183 through 2186. The Reapers are real. The relay network connects approximately one hundred thousand star systems. The record begins when you do.

Where do you want to enter.