| abstract
| - The rest of this list can be found at:
* Tropes A-F
* Tropes G-M
* Tropes N-S
* Tagline: Fight For The Lost showed up on quite a bit of advertising for the game.
* To a lesser extent, They call it a Suicide Mission. Prove them wrong.
* Take a Third Option: Tali's loyalty mission can be concluded by either letting her take all the blame to prevent her father's good name from being ruined, or to lay out all that her father was doing, ruining his name, balkanizing the quarian fleet, and alienating her. Should you have enough Paragon or Renegade points, or ensured the well-being of Veetor and Kal'Reegar, you have a trio of third options. You can extoll Tali's virtue with a Paragon option, dosing it with a helping of Paragonic righteous indignation at their political machinations, you can call out the sham of a trial and hope that the crowd backs you up (and they will if both Kal'Reegar and Veetor'Nara are alive and well), or you can call out the sham on your own, replacing Kal's and Veetor's backup with a heapin' helpin' of Renegade vitriol that takes the admirals aback.** Also, this is an option during confrontations between party members such as Jack and Miranda or Tali and Legion. Don't want to favor one companion's loyalty over another? There are alignment-dialogue options for that.
* If Zaeed Massani's loyalty mission is done after the final battle at the Collector Base, and if Shepard chooses to save the workers instead of going after Vido Santiago, Shepard has the option at the end of the mission to just walk away, and let Zaeed burn to death.
* Take My Hand: Near the end, there is a scene where one of your party members slides off a falling Collector platform, leading to Shepard saving him/her in this manner. Shepard him/herself is rescued this way about 45 seconds later.
* Take That, Critics!: In response to the sequel being "dumbed down"...
* The video game salesman has a lot of Take Thats, including what may be a dig at EA for their DRM when he informs the player of a special warranty that lets you re-download a game if its copy protection corrupts it. With EA's current DRM problems with Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins, it takes on a Harsher in Hindsight quality.
* Quite a few salesmen have those. The Saronis Applications clerk has this jab at audiophiles and their expensive cables:
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* There's also a few Take Thats leveled at fans. For instance, on Illium you can find a quarian girl in a bar complaining to her (friend-zoned) turian co-worker about how it's always the same thing when she's dating a human: "Oh, she's vulnerable! She could get sick! I wonder what she looks like under the mask!" Bring Tali with you for maximum awkwardness!
* The same with Conrad Verner, who basically acts like the player character, but in a Noob-like manner.
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* An asari is quick to point out that she doesn't trust humans with anything, after all- "You can't even figure out your own religion!". Ouch.
* If you ran into a few cars in the Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC, you'll comment about the bad controls. Liara will comment about how it's still better than the Mako.
* Take Your Time: Subverted. If you don't immediately go through the Omega-4 relay after the Collectors abduct your crew, you'll find a lot less of them alive, and one of the survivors chews you out for dragging your feet. Played agonizingly straight at every other point in time, except at a few points where the next story mission is literally forced on you. Which might be why the subversion is so devastating.
* The point where Take Your Time stops being a factor coincides with when Shepard goes from being reactive to proactive. It's also implied that the preparations for the Suicide Mission actually take several months.
* Talking Is a Free Action: Played straight in most cases, but averted in some. QTE cutscenes interrupt talking on a regular basis. Ditto any time Harbinger possesses a Collector--a good weapon and a fast shot can nail him before he's finished his speech.
* Talk to the Fist: A game mechanic. You can shut up a villain's Hannibal Lecture by shooting him in the face, making the subsequent fight easier.
* Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: There were certainly awkward moments between squadmates in the first game, but the second features people actively trying to kill each other. Not one person in the whole group completely trusts everyone else. Except (possibly) Shepard. Not until the end, at least.
* That Came Out Wrong: Garrus, if you're a female Shepard romancing him.
* That Was the Last Entry: A few times, but the most heartbreaking example is probably Nef's last journal entry before she goes to meet with Morinth.
* Theme Naming: Most weapons inside of their families. The most prominent example are shotguns, which are named after swords.
* Several planetary systems have theme names. Whether they're all given names in alien races, or they're all named after afterlives in Earth religions (go to the Exodus Cluster in the first game to see) or they're all named after characters from the Old Testament.
* Also, all the Prothean V Is have names beginning with "V."
* There Is No Kill Like Overkill:
* The Widow, full stop. A few seconds reading the description of the Widow will reveal that it's an ANTI-TANK rifle. Since you're using a rifle designed to destroy armored vehicles and krogan, on people with regular armor, it's not hard to see how this trope applies.
* The Cain isn't a nuke launcher, but it may as well be. On lower difficulties, it can take out the Final Boss in one hit.
* This Is Sparta:
* WE. ARE. HARBINGER.
* I! AM! KROGAN!!
* Timed Mission: In the Suicide Mission, disabling the Collector's vents before your tech specialist is roasted alive. Also, technically the Final Boss, as the longer you take to defeat it, the more likely at least one of your squadmates will be picked off.
* The final part of both the Overlord and Arrival DLCs are timed missions.
* The Arrival has several timers, starting at two days, then decreasing to an hour and a half, then five minutes. And if you wait around long enough, they do run out.
* Also the sidequests dealing with the launched Javelin missiles and saving the falling ship by re-activating its engines.
* To Absent Friends: A possible conclusion to the Serrice Ice Brandy side quest.
* Tomato in the Mirror: Seems to be subverted and played with, as people expect Shepard to be one of these, considering the game picks up two years after his/her death on the Normandy and subsequent rebuilding by Cerberus. One dialog path has him/her think of this as soon as s/he finds out.
* Tonight Someone Dies: Used as a warning as well as for marketing purposes.
* Too Awesome to Use: Higher-end heavy weapons. As heavy ammo doesn't, normally, fill between missions and cannot be purchased at any in-game store, a player usually has a limited amount of ammuntition availible throughout the game.
* Too Dumb to Live: Special mention should go to the warden of the Purgatory, who thought that trying to take Shepard prisoner to ransom them, both angering the Commander and betraying the Illusive Man, was a good idea. Not only that, but he lets your party keep your guns when you board.
* "There's only three of 'em"
* Go ahead. Sleep with Morinth. Dumbass.
* Dr Amanda Kenson in Arrival. As Shepard him/herself mentions, leaving Reaper technology in an open space, uncontained and surrounded by security guards, is a very, very stupid idea.
* Also, Zaeed can relate a story about how smoking can kill you... apparently, a kid he knew decided to toss a butt near an explosives cache.
* Took a Level In Badass: The Colossus. Remember hunting those tanks down for experience in the first game? In the sequel there is only one. You fight it on foot, and, thanks to its fire support, it can wipe the floor with you if you choose a wrong path.
* Similarly, the thresher maws in the first game weren't a tenth the fight as the one in the second.
* Total Party Kill: The absolute worst ending. You do kinda have to work to get it.
* Tragic Villain: The Collectors are completely controlled by Harbinger and the Reapers, even built by them - out of the Protheans.
* Trailers Always Spoil: The "Fight for the Lost" campaign.
* Trash the Set: The game opens with the Normandy being destroyed. One part of the day-one free-to-new-copies DLC is a visit to the wreck of the ship, and it really exemplifies this trope, going as far as giving flashbacks to what each part looked like undamaged.
* Tron Lines: The kinetic barriers of several bosses and Elite Mooks look like these.
* Most armors in the Mass Effect 'verse have a few blue glowing lines on them, signifying the use of Mass Effect Fields, thus Justifying how guns Stick to the Back. The Kestrel Armor from the Aegis Pack DLC, on the other hand, has these all over.
* Troperiffic/Trope Overdosed: This had to be split off from the main Mass Effect page, because there were so many entries on it that new edits weren't showing up. Then it had to be split again into four pages, as the page originally had over 400,000 characters, and pages over 500,000 make the wiki crash.
* True Companions: Shepard's goal is to take his/her team and turn them into this. In addition, numerous responses from Paragon Shepard essentially boil down to "you're part of my crew." EDI even uses it to calm fears that she'll go 2001: A Space Odyssey on everyone after she's unshackled and merges with the Normandy. Also the only reason Joker doesn't get abducted by the Collectors, as the Normandy's crew buy him time to escape by fighting energy-gun-bearing Scions with small arms.
* Turtle Power: The Krogan have beaks, shells, short stubby tails, and the longest natural lifespan among the spacefaring races--Urdnot Wrex is over 1400 years old, well beyond the thousand-year lifespan of the Asari. They are mentioned as being reptilian, and resemble nothing so much as anthropomorphic tortoises.
* Tutorial Failure: The Firewalker DLC features on-screen tool tips that give the wrong keys for a number of necessary tasks to use with the Hover Tank (jumping and mining, specifically). This is presumably the result of a minor case of Porting Disaster.
* Twin Threesome Fantasy: An old human man at Donovan Hock's party has two matching asari on either arm.
* Two Plus Two Makes Five: Basically, this is how the "heretic" virus works, by altering the geth's logic system to come to a different conclusion. In other words, an indoctrination virus. You are given the opportunity to turn their virus on them.
* Notably, this subverts the usual Black and White Morality of the Paragon/Renegade dichotomy, as the renegade "kill them all" option can be justified as being more morally correct than brainwashing them.
* The Unfought: Harbinger, sort of. While he takes over plenty of Collector drones to fight you, he never gets a proper boss fight in his true form or anything. Of course, that may be because he's hiding beyond the galaxy's horizon. And because he is a fully grown Reaper. The Collector General is probably a better example.
* Unexpected Gameplay Change: The car chase over Ilium in the Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC.
* Unexplained Recovery: What happens with the Unity power, which allows Shepard to revive his/her squadmates if they fall in battle (and only then). Lampshaded by one of Garrus' responses to being revived:
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* If you import a Shepard who did Nassana Dantius' quest on the Citadel, she will be unbelieving that you're somehow alive again when you meet her again. Shepard will respond with "I got better".
* Shepard can also quote this word for word to Liara in the Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC.
* Universal Ammunition: Justified, as the "thermal clips" are not actually ammunition, but heat sinks that are made to fit into all small arms. While it would make sense for the guns to have the option to wait for the thermal clips to cool down as opposed to being forced to eject the clip and insert a new one, the game doesn't give the option and make it impossible in-game. There's also the power cells, which any heavy weapon, from a flamethrower to an explosive lobber, can make use of.
* Unperson: Tali states that if her father were found guilty of bringing live geth to the fleet, he'd be written off all Flotilla records and become a bogeyman used to scare children.
* Unreliable Expositor: The Codex.
* The Un-Reveal: By romancing Tali, Shepard can find out what's under her helmet, but camera angles conspire to make sure that the player never does.
* Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Should you choose to recruit Legion, a geth, you can take him/her/it/them anywhere with few reactions. Notably, you can take Legion to the Citadel of all places and get no comment from any one. Lampshaded by Anderson if you ask him about the war with the geth with Legion in your party.
* Cerberus is considered a known terrorist group throughout Citadel and Alliance space. Not many people one seem to have any real problem with (dead) Shepard walking around with two people literally wearing Cerberus logos on their chests, in Cerberus clothing, in a ship in Cerberus colors.
* Unwinnable By Mistake: Technically you can put the game in an Unwinnable state if you really try for it. If you go around blowing money on probes and fuel, use them up, and carry on doing this until you've exhausted all the money that it's possible to earn in the game before the Reaper IFF mission, then there's no way you can get to the star system where that mission takes place, making it impossible to proceed in the game. Since there are several million credits in the game though (even without any DLC packs), it's pretty dang hard to actually do this.
* Even harder than you think. If you've got no fuel, you burn the minerals you've been farming. So you've got to use up all the minerals you've gathered and haven't put into upgrades, too.
* This would probably be a case of Unwinnable by Insanity, if not for the fact that some players have admitted making the game Unwinnable in precisely this way during their first playthrough. For their part, BioWare have said that they don't consider it a serious enough problem to actually do anything about it, but will make sure it can't happen in the third game.
* Several story missions unexpectedly take you to a star system without a mass relay without any warning, so if you're a first time player who is just doing story missions and hadn't farmed any minerals or bought any fuel when this happens, congratulations you're suddenly stuck.
* Uranus Is Showing: "Really, Commander?"
* Used Future: Typically averted through the entire series, but played straight on Omega and Pragia. Omega is the series charging headfirst into Darker and Edgier territory, while Pragia has been derelict for several years.
* Useless Useful Spell: Biotics tend to turn into this on higher difficulties, since enemies are immune until you destroy their protection first... which is generally much harder to do with biotics than with a big gun. This renders the biotic-only Adept much less useful on Insanity mode, where all enemies have protection.
* Biotics are highly overpowered on targets that are not immune. Most biotic abilities disable the enemies, extract them from cover, dangle them in front of your team to be turned into bullet cheese, and any random combination of two physics based abilities tends to result in the target sailing into hard things at the speed of sound. So the developers decided to balance this by turning all of it into a basic finishing move to be used when you've broken through the protections.
* Given many of the biotics have area effect options, it's possible, even advisable, to simply whittle down the big threat's shields, then sending it and its mook squad flying off their platforms or into hazards.
* You can also use them on explosives and destructible items, turning those fuel canisters into high speed grenades. Harder to use Pull on them and still have them useful, becomes Awesome but Impractical when they fly over your enemies and suddenly drop on their heads.
* Values Dissonance: An in-universe example. On Illium, indentured servitude is legal. The player can meet an asari contract broker and a quarian who sold herself into slavery indentured servitude in order to cover a large debt she incurred playing the stock market. While the quarian is not happy about her situation, she is less upset about her status than with the financial troubles which led to this solution. The broker claims humans are prejudiced against slavery because of their poor experiences with batarian slavers, explaining the legal protections provided to indentured servants by their contracts, including strict limits on its length, the duties involved, and how they're treated. The asari representative that the slave was to be sold to, meanwhile, is initially unwilling to buy the quarian's contract because they're anti-slavery one of the few licensed AI-research companies, who have been suffering bad press following the geth attacks in the first game. (You can convince them to pay the fine to break the contract and hire her as an ordinary employee, resulting in a PR boost.)
* Vendor Trash: Completely averted. Unlike the first game, there is no inventory whatsoever, so there's nothing to sell. Most equipment is upgraded rather than replaced, and when a new weapon is obtained, it (usually) becomes immediately available to all characters who are capable of equipping it.
* Verb This: Blasto the Hanar Spectre pulls one of these.
* The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The other side of the Omega-4 relay--the Collector base. Not only is it located in the galactic core, but you have to travel through a relay that's glowing red instead of glowing blue. Oh, and when you get there you can see the supermassive black hole that's in the very center of the galaxy in the distance.
* Don't forget the sky full of wreckage from your predecessors.
* In the Shadow Broker DLC, The Shadow Broker's lair counts as one, as it's the final location of the DLC and fits the criteria visually as well. It's a highly elaborate ship that floats in the clouds of the planet Hagalaz, complete with large amounts of lightning in the sky. Liara notes that the planet's conditions keep anyone from knowing the ship is there without previous knowledge, and must have taken decades to build without anyone noticing.
* In the same way, Atlas Station in the Overlord DLC.
* Video Game Caring Potential: Considering you can potentially finish the game just fine without doing all the primary quests, but need to do so to ensure everyone survives the end, this game is pretty much entirely based around this trope.
* If you romance a party member, you can invite him/her up for a night of cuddling just for the heck of it in a scene right out of a WAFF fanfic.
* Should we even get into minor quest characters and random overheard conversations on top of all of that?
* Video Game Cruelty Potential: It is possible to exact petty, satisfying revenge on those "monkeys" (known as pyjaks) that led you on a tedious chase all over the planet Eletania in the first game. On the planet Tuchanka, pyjaks are infesting a settlement's food supplies, and you get to take down as many of them as you want. With a missile turret. For a shop discount and the gratitude of the local populace. Oh, and this time, you don't get Renegade points. So all you good guys of the galaxy, you go and have some fun, too.
* There's also an achievement for watching ten enemies die screaming as they burn. The screams, it must be noted, are quite disturbingly realistic. It makes for a very good strategy, though, because while they're running around screaming, they're not shooting at you.
* In more psychological terms, you can break off a relationship with a party member at any point - including moments before the two of you would otherwise do the deed. Their reactions vary; Garrus mumbles something about how you're right and that you two shouldn't risk damaging your friendship, while Tali just says "Oh" before rushing out of the room. Kelly tells you that having a one-night stand with Jack is a bad idea, but you can still go ahead and do it, and thus use her like everyone else.
* Oddly enough, even letting Jack down easy seemed cruel - she'd put up the defensive wall of "Why the hell do you keep snooping around here anyway? It's not like you love me or anything!" Confirming that suspicion leads to her crestfallen reply of "Oh... good", which is a minor Tear Jerker.
* Most players try to get everyone through the suicide mission alive. Others... don't.
* And some intentionally proceed to doom not just their team, but every character and faction they can to the best of their ability just to see how will this affect their playthrough of Mass Effect 3.
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* If you take your time with opening the heat exchange valves in the ventilation tubes while your tech specialist is crawling through them in the last mission, their pleas for you to hurry up will get increasingly... desperate. This leads to a Nonstandard Game Over if the player runs out of time.
* In a very subtle example, Kasumi comments on how it's nice that she doesn't have to travel in a cargo hold and has an actual window to look out of for a change. You can close the blast shield over said window with a conveniently placed button, which has no function or purpose other than to enable you to make her room a whole lot more gloomy and bleak.
* In the Overload DLC, if you kill a few of the local deer-like fauna, the Hammerhead computer says, "Analysis: defenseless herbivores are no match for guided missiles." Kill a few more and the computer says "The Galactic Humane Society would like to remind you that animals are people too."
* Fail to get the loyalty of a squadmate like Thane or Tali (by allowing his son to finish the job, or revealing the truth about her father) and see them becoming absolutely crushed. Thane becomes an even darker Death Seeker and Tali feels completely betrayed by someone she considered a close friend and mentor.
* Villainous Breakdown: Harbinger, who is normally unflappable, really stats to make it clear how much trouble Shepard is during Arrival.
* Violation of Common Sense: The SR-2 is boarded by the Collectors, who abduct the Cerberus crew. The only reason they succeed is because of the lack of any credible opposition as Shepard has taken every single one of their handpicked badass specialists and crammed them into the Kodiak (sardines, anyone?). Nor are you allowed to simply wait for however long it would take EDI to synch up the Reaper IFF. This is done to ratchet up the tension for the endgame, and give a sense of raised stakes, but getting to that point is pretty blatant railroading in a series that is normally much subtler about it.
* In fairness, the reasoning is sound. EDI's testing theoretical technology, and it despite how bad it was that the rest of the crew was nearly harvested, the worst case scenario was the destruction of the ship and all aboard. It's possible, if expensive and undesirable, to replace Normandy and Shepard again, but it's unlikely he could afford the time to replace all those dead specialists you spent the entire game recruiting.
* Justified in that the squad is always deployed in the shuttle - that's why exiting a level allows you to either return to the Normandy or simply swap out your teammates.
* Visual Pun: The M-300 Claymore is the most powerful per-shell shotgun in the game. Although its model number is M-300, the shotgun model has it printed as 300M. Because of the font, from a distance it can be easily read as BOOM.
* Voice Changeling: It turns out that Morinth, by way of considerable practice, is able to do a perfect imitation of her mother, Samara.
* Wake Up Call Boss: Wakeup call minibosses. The heavy mechs tend to be difficult, but the Collector Praetorians have heavy shielding, fly, and have to be taken down at least three times before they're permanently destroyed.
* Horizon is one big series of Wakeup Call Bosses. First, you have Harbinger, which is doable. Then you meet your first Scion, an enemy which can pierce cover and requires you to do more than duck-into-cover-and-shoot. Then you fight two Scions at the same time. Then... the Praetorian, who can kill you in the blink of an eye.
* Walk It Off: You now auto-regenerate health, to help take the game in a more shooting-oriented direction. This was possible in the first game, provided you met certain conditions, but it wasn't a viable mid-combat strategy.
* You can also walk off your tipsy drunken-ness after a couple of seconds.
* This may be explained by Shepard's cybernetics filtering out toxins more efficiently than a "standard-issue" endocrine system, as evidenced by a dose of poison in a minor sidequest that should kill a normal person, but merely knocks Shepard out for a bit.
* The War Sequence: Tali's recruitment mission finishes with Shepard and co. fighting through an endless onslaught of geth, including a Colossus, in order to reach her. And it's literally an army; Kal'Reegar mentions that it's at "platoon strength".
* Wave Motion Gun: The Thanix Hydronamic Cannon. It's a mass accelerator that fires jets of molten metal at near relativistic speed, reverse-engineered from Reaper technology. You see Sovereign wielding the originals and skewering many Citadel ships with it during the Battle of the Citadel.
* Weakened by the Light: You, during Tali's recruitment mission, which takes place on an old abandoned colony orbiting a star that is, for unknown reasons, aging rapidly and putting out too much radiation. Sunlight on this level burns out the shields of you and your party members, so you need to duck into cover and shade to allow your shields to recharge. It doesn't do any damage to your health, but without shields, you die from gunfire very quickly.
* Averted by the Geth, in said mission. Grunt also Averts it, because thanks to his Bizarre Alien Biology, he never uses shields anyway.
* We Are Everywhere: Cerberus.
* The geth pull this off, too, with implications that messing with them on any level is a bad idea, even after their defeat. Explained by Legion, who points out that the geth do not consider themselves robots, but programs. Any access to their data is likely to free them to corrupt or subvert other systems.
* Harbinger.
* Wham! Episode: The realization during a sidequest that the Collectors are genetically altered Protheans after getting a clearer look at the Cipher from the first game.
* The moment when the Normandy is boarded by the Collectors, who get away with everyone except for Joker and the away team.
* "Arrival". Not only are the Reapers incredibly close to the galaxy, but Shepard is forced to kill 300,000 batarian colonists to destroy the Reapers' shortcut throughout the galaxy. There is no big moral choice. There is no choice, period. And it's only a delaying tactic.
* Harbinger's manifestations. Especially when realizing how similar it is to the Rachni's possession techniques in the previous game.
* Kaidan/Ashley gets one when Shepard shows up on Horizon.
* Wham! Line: Shepard-Commander.
* Only one other species is known to have this genetic structure: the Protheans.
* Legion's recording of some of the first self-aware Geth
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* The line that kicks off the Wham! Episode at the start of the final act.
* What Could Have Been:
* Let me save you the trouble.
* Legion was supposed to be recruitable earlier in the game. Legion's mission dialog still exists, though unreachable without hacks.
* Unimplemented content, pre-release posts on Weekes' dev blog, and other leaks indicate that Tali and Thane could be romanced by Shepards of either gender in earlier development. In the final product, the most visible remainder of this is that most of Tali's lines are the same for both Shepards, which are clearly intended to nudge the player to a romance with her. Female Shepard can even attempt to initiate a romance with Tali, but she will dodge the issue.
* Similarly, Kenneth and Gabriella were meant to be romanceable like Kelly.
* Character recruitment was originally intended to be much more open-ended, and modding your save file to add party members before you should be able to recruit them will let you hear their dialog for earlier circumstances, such as taking Legion to Purgatory. This likely changed because of the late decision to split the Xbox 360 version of the game into two discs; the forced recruitment progression funnels the player along a path that's not entirely linear, but predictable enough to split the game with.
* A few leftover voice recordings in the released game indicated that Liara was initially intended to have a much deeper and longer storyline -- which was later made a reality with the DLC Lair of the Shadow Broker.
* Early video previews showed more involved gun mechanics; weapons would cool down on their own ala the first game, with ejectable thermal clips as a "need More Dakka right this second" option. Specialized ammunition was shown to be a consumable resource instead of a passive ability and as such could be turned on or off at will.
* Going through the dialogue and screen text files reveals that several of the loyalty missions originally had very different plots:
* What the Hell, Hero?: Pretty much everyone calls Shepard out on working with Cerberus.
* Player's can give one to Liara when you find out she gave your body to Cerberus.
* And before that Shepard can say (for some weird reason the line gives you renegade points):
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* In Arrival, you get a huge one from Admiral Hackett after blowing up an entire system to delay the Reaper's invasion...and killing 300,000 batarians in the process. Toned-down slightly in that he says he knows you had good reason to do so and he'll offer to do everything he can to hold off the Alliance pressing charges, but warns you that your actions may lead to all-out war between the humans and batarians, and that Shepard will eventually have to face the Alliance in a court of law.
* If the player speaks to him after the Collectors abduct the crew, Joker will give Shepard an absolutely blistering one (and rightfully so) for taking every specialist along in the shuttle, leaving the Normandy essentially completely defenceless.
* All of this can be subverted or played straight like mad, depending upon whether Shepard destroys the Collector base or hands it to Cerberus.
* Tali will give Shepard a heartbreaking one if s/he chooses to reveal the evidence discovered on board the Alarei to the quarian Admiralty Board and Migrant Fleet at the end of her loyalty mission.
* What the Hell, Player?: EDI, if Shepard enters the wrong-sex bathroom.
* EDI doesn't find launching a probe into Uranus as humorous as the player likely does.
* Doctor Chakwas briefly chews you out for not arriving sooner and not being able to save Kelly and the others if you take too long to go through the Omega-4 Relay.
* What You Are in the Dark: Ronald Taylor. Turns out he's a Complete Monster.
* And accidentally Tali's father, suddenly exile was a preferable option
* Heavy implications of this surround the Illusive Man, who only breaks character in the epilogue of the paragon ending. Previous to that, he claims that he respects Shepard's goals and motivations regardless of disagreements, but destroying the Collector Base shows Shepard or Joker his true colors.
* The point of Legion's loyalty mission. You can either brainwash the Geth heretics or destroy the handful before you. Only the immediate squad and the Illusive Man will ever know whether you decided to mind control the Geth -- you know, like the Reapers do to their victims -- or willfully risked further genocide.
* When You Coming Home, Dad?: The relationship between Thane and his son. The achievement for his loyalty mission is called "Cat's in the Cradle."
* As for less sympathetic fathers, see the trope above this one.
* Wicked Cultured: Donovan Hock, the antagonist of the Kasumi - Stolen Memory DLC. He even has (what's left of) Michelangelo's David and the Statue of Liberty in his vault.
* With a Renegade action, you can destroy one of his prized pieces, forcing him into a less tactical approach.
* With This Herring: Averted in every way possible--by Cerberus. The Complete Monsters from the first game, who were always Playing with Syringes while bleating about humanity's right to conquer the galaxy. They not only rescue Shepard, they replace his Cool Starship, and practically drown him in money and information, while the Council has decided to suppress and/or discredit the Reapers. They do all this while still Playing with Syringes and bleating about humanity's right to conquer the galaxy, but tone it down a bit while you're around; they know quite well that Shepard is useful to them as a symbol. Turning Shepard to their cause by giving him/her money, information, and all the goodies would be a good place to start.
* Wretched Hive: Omega. Illium, too, they're just subtler about it.
* Bekenstein, from the Kasumi DLC. It's described as a human exclusive Illium.
* Garrus even describes it by saying "Illium is just like Omega, only with more expensive shoes."
* WTH? Casting Agency: In-Universe: Depending on how you customized Shepard, the actor/actress in that role in "Citadel" (the film based on the events of the first game) may look nothing like him/her.
* Xanatos Gambit: Cerberus is practically built on them.
* You No Take Candle: The vorcha species speaks like this.
* You Require More Vespene Gas: Want to construct that new upgrade? Can't. You require more element zero, iridium, platinum, and/or palladium. Especially the platinum.
* Throw the Dog a Bone: You get start-of-game bonuses if you import a high-level character from Mass Effect 1 or if you've beaten Mass Effect 2 already (with the same character or a different one, doesn't matter).
* Fridge Logic: If you start a new Mass Effect 2 game by importing your save file from Mass Effect 1, you get a big credits/minerals bonus if you've beaten Mass Effect 2 with any character, plus a smaller bonus on top of that, depending on what your character earned (credits/experience levels) in Mass Effect 1. If you start a new game built off a completed Mass Effect 2 playthrough, you only get the big bonus, and the little one disappears. (That being stated, you do get to keep any experience and heavy weapons you earned during your previous playthrough with that character.)
* Bioware furthered this with an update that made mining a little faster, then the Lair of the Shadow Broker gave you the ability to earn materials by sending agents on missions, as well being able to buy info on/mine planets with an abundance of a certain material.
* You Shall Not Pass: Done in the Suicide Mission when all but two squadmates and Shepard stay behind to keep the Collectors at bay and give Shepard a chance to destroy the base. Depending on your choices, any or all of them might not make it. Before that, when the Collectors board the Normandy, the crew engages in a valiant holding action, with nothing but pistols and assault rifles, to buy Joker the time he needs to run quickly limp to the AI core.
* Your Makeup Is Running The rest of this list can be found at:
* Tropes A-F
* Tropes G-M
* Tropes N-S
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![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)