Mass Effect/Tropes U-Z


 * Main Page

The rest of the list to be found here:


 * Tropes A-D
 * Tropes E-H
 * Tropes I-L
 * Tropes M-P
 * Tropes Q-T

"Nassana Dantius: Commander Shepard? But... you're dead!
 * Undying Loyalty: The true geth. No matter how badly they were treated by the quarians, even to the point of genocide, they still value them as parents. Given the chance, the geth repay the quarians  There's a certain amount of pain from Legion when he ponders what the geth could do when their own beloved creators wanted to destroy them.
 * Unexplained Recovery: Invoked by the Commander in the second game.

Shepard: I got better."

"Commander Shepard: You deserved better, Tali.
 * Taken in a different direction by Tali in the second game.

Tali'Zora nar Rayya vas Normandy: I got better. I got you."

"...the turian term "barefaced" refers to one who is beguiling or not to be trusted. It is also a slang term for politicians."
 * Unholy Nuke: When possessing a puppet, the Reaper Harbinger has a special version of of the "Warp" ability that qualifies.
 * An ability also possessed by banshees
 * Unobtanium: Element zero is stated in the Codex to be generated only when stars go boom. The primary sources of eezo are, thus, the debris fields surrounding neutron stars and black holes, requiring extensive set-up costs for the telerobotic systems and radiation shielding necessary to mine it. It is also the only means of manipulating mass known. It is thus the rarest and most valuable substance in the galaxy. However, every FTL craft, every Flying Car, every omni-tool and every firearm (not to mention every biotic) has a few grams somewhere inside of it. Not mention, two words: eezo toothbrushes.
 * Luckily, not all that delicious Unobtanium stays in such harsh places. Good-sized chunks are often caught in the orbits of younger stars, where it can be mined much more easily; Omega Station was the result of one such mine. And the galaxy seems to be filled with Ghost Planets which gathered the material for their own use, meaning Adventurer Archaeologists can make a cute credit or so doing a little Grave Robbing. One could assume that this is the case for all Mass Effect technology; why would a centuries-old galaxy-spanning civilization that uses the stuff extensively ever throw any of it away?
 * Unreliable Expositor: The Codex.
 * Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Not only doesn't a trio of heavily armored and armed to the teeth soldiers turn any heads, you can discharge an automatic weapon right in the middle of the seat of the galactic government and onlookers won't even interrupt their conversation.
 * You can also take with you to the Citadel, or a turian or salarian to Tuchanka, without even a pause from the locals.
 * Averted however if you take with you to the Quarian Flotilla. They will have something to say about it.
 * Unwinnable By Mistake: In all three games there are dangerous spots where your character can cross some invisible boundary and become unable to go back, forever hanging in mid-air. In 2 there is such a spot on Alchera, in 3 there is a particularly nasty spot on the Normandy's bridge.
 * Vicious Cycle: The Reapers
 * Victory by Endurance: According to the Codex, this is humanity's main method of fighting. Humanity attacks the enemy's supplies, headquarters and resources foremost, leaving enemy forces leaderless with less logistical support until the human fleets can curb stomp them. Humanity's approach to warfare is based on rapid reaction forces which seek to decapitate command and control and avoid attrition while remaining highly manoeuvrable. Mass Effect's codices basically have humanity fighting Third and Fourth generation warfare ...in SPACE! The rest of the galaxy has barely managed to catch up to human innovations in strategic thought from about the time of the biplanes. Turians still fight massive wars of attrition. Humanity is always shown as being simply more tactically proficient than everyone else to the point of actually subtly paralleling earth history. As the Turians and everyone else builds Dreadnoughts, humans realize carriers are the future and make many of them. Humans have the first ship able to use "stealth." It bears a striking resemblance to a submarine. Sound familiar? The Turians may as well call their military groups Legions for how "groman" they are. Salarians don't have the endurance that human forces have and the Asari are still fielding armies of light infantry from city-states. Krogan are shown to be poor strategists for a race of proud warrior race guys, and their culture resembles tribes of Maori or African warriors from pre-nation state times.
 * Video Game Caring Potential: AND HOW!
 * Video Game Cruelty Potential: Disturbingly but hilariously summed up well here.
 * Viewer-Friendly Interface: The profile creation screen at the start of the game.
 * Also the Virtual Intelligences, humanoid computer programs. Bioware most likely added them so the player could interact with electronics without a bunch of reading involved.
 * Villain Override: First seen in the original game when . Extremely prominent in the second game, to the point of giving the trope's page quote, with Harbinger and the Collectors.
 * Inverted when.
 * Virtual Ghost: The quarians used to do this, although it was to preserve the knowledge of their ancestors and not to become immortal. They stopped once the geth conquered their homeworld and destroyed the databanks containing them.
 * are particularly fond of this trope.
 * According to Cerberus News, a ship containing a one-billion-strong race of virtual aliens has made contact with Council space after travelling the galaxy for 8000 years after uploading their minds to a virtual world to save their civilisation from destruction.
 * The Virus: Again, two to four varieties, depending on your personal criteria.
 * We Are as Mayflies: Both the krogan and the asari live for about a thousand years, whereas humans in the 22nd century are lucky to live to one hundred and fifty. Inverted with the salarians who live to be about 40. The vorcha, introduced in Mass Effect 2, have a lifespan of only 20 years.
 * Wearing a Flag on Your Head: More subtle than most instances. This is what most turians do; that's actually what their face-paint is.
 * The Virus: Again, two to four varieties, depending on your personal criteria.
 * We Are as Mayflies: Both the krogan and the asari live for about a thousand years, whereas humans in the 22nd century are lucky to live to one hundred and fifty. Inverted with the salarians who live to be about 40. The vorcha, introduced in Mass Effect 2, have a lifespan of only 20 years.
 * Wearing a Flag on Your Head: More subtle than most instances. This is what most turians do; that's actually what their face-paint is.

- Codex entry on turians


 * We Cannot Go on Without You: If Shepard is KO'd during a battle, you get the Game Over screen (unlike Shepard's teammates, who automatically recover after the fight ends if they were KO'd, even if the Unity ability isn't used).
 * This trope is acknowledged if you get the worst ending of the second game. Joker also mentions it early on as the reason the team broke up after Shepard was killed - they were Shepard's team. Without him/her, there was no reason for them to stay together.
 * We Do the Impossible: The crews of either Normandy.
 * Welcome to Corneria: Typical BioWare approach. NPCs usually answer the same thing whenever you ask (for convenience). Subverted by/averted by some random NPCs.
 * Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Cerberus organization, at least if you're human. Except if you're a biotic, or any particular individual, as the survival of the species overrides anything else (ethics, human decency, etc).
 * At the end of ME3 we learn this of
 * We Will Have Perfect Health in the Future: Medical science advancements have extended the human life expectancy to around 150 years. Some people still get diseases though. Such as your pilot, Joker, who has a rare medical condition that makes his bones really brittle. Though even that technology is advanced, since Joker said if he was born during our time, he would've died as an infant.
 * What Beautiful Eyes!: The second game really ratchets the visual quality of all the character eyes. Miranda and Doctor Chakwas are two of the prettier examples.
 * Default male Shepard has striking blue eyes while on the flip side, the default female Shepard has bright green eyes...unless you go renegade.
 * What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic: In ME2. Shepard dies and is resurrected by the Lazarus Project. Shepard has to head to Omega, enter a nightclub called Afterlife in order to recruit someone named Archangel. With all the squadmates available from DLC, Shepard will have 12. Ringing any bells?
 * And when you get to the heaven-like planet Illium, there is a bar called Eternity.
 * Not to mention having to go to a prison named Purgatory.
 * Which is also a bar!
 * Whole-Plot Reference: Let's see... the human race discovers ancient alien technology on Mars, gets into a first contact war with another alien race, eventually joins a UN-styled space station run by representatives from three major alien races and several minor representatives from others, and eventually the main character (whose initials are JS who dies and comes back to life) steals a massive prototype space ship and breaks away from the government to fight an ancient alien race that resembles a large organic spaceship. Sound familiar?
 * Don't forget, said organizations sanction a collection of Badasses that are above the law, and only accountable to a couple people at the top.
 * And the third game is one protracted quest to enlist help from multiple factions who all distrust each other to some degree in order to prevent the fall of civilization at the hands of Eldritch Abominations, all while . And the hero  I do believe BioWare has been down this road before.
 * A Wizard Did It: Or rather a mass effect field. Why your squadmates can survive in hard vacuum without a helmet. Probably.
 * Given that the squadmates who don't have helmets are nominally biotics, such as Miranda and Jack, its possible that they're simply using a biotic field to protect them.
 * With Kasumi on the other hand, this could easily be an justified as being an extension of her shields. We see something similar in the prologue when the Normandy has an emergency shield erected around the cockpit to maintain atmosphere, while Joker's helmet has a visor uses a shield instead of glass.
 * World Galaxy of Badass: Humanity discovers the Charon Relay and zips out to meet a galaxy crawling with raptor-like Space Romans with a fleet whose capital ships can shoot off Hiroshima-level railguns, ninja amphibians who make the deadliest viruses known to the galaxy, Blue-skinned space babes who can kill you... with their MINDS, immune-deprived mechanics who can wipe out a ship with a couple key presses, landshark master warriors who are merely the decayed remnants of the most powerful horde in galactic history, thresher maws, and oh yes, Mecha-Cthulhu. They promptly show themselves to be perhaps the most badass thing to hit the galactic scene yet. Yeah, the Mass Effect galaxy is a constant, ongoing Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny.
 * Not to mention EVERY MAIN CHARACTER IN THE SERIES, especially Commander Shepard.
 * Galaxy of Woobie: Dear lord, everyone in the series, from the ultimate Badass that is Commander Shepard, to the squadmembers, all the way down to the minor bit-characters.
 * You No Take Candle: How Vorcha speak. They talk no definitive article. Growl lots, too. RaaaAAAAAAAAAAAgh!
 * Averted/Subverted/something in 3, where some vorcha are shown using correct grammar.
 * Your Princess Is in Another Castle: You didn't think and the  would go down without a fight, right?