Mass Effect (video game)/YMMV

• Awesome Music: "M4 Part II" by Faunts, which plays over the credits.
• Big Lipped Alligator Moment: On Eletania, Shepard is tasked with recovering a downed recon drone, but if you explore with the Mako you can find a Prothean relic. If you helped Sha'ira, you'll find that the trinket she gave you is the key to unlocking it, and Shepard experiences the memories of a Cro-Magnon man who had once been under observation by the Protheans. There's no payoff in future games, and it's even completely ignored by Shepard, when one would think that Prothean tech like that would be kind of a big deal.
• Breather Boss: When compared to the bosses on Therum, Noveria and Feros, the Saren battle on Virmire is pretty straightforward.
• Complete Monster: The salarian geneticist Dr. Saeleon, who grew organs inside random test subjects in order to sell on the black market.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Thresher Maws.
  • Rachni warriors.
  • Geth snipers can kill Shepard in one hit on most difficulties, and, if you don't take them out quick, they will. Geth ghosts can be even worse, as they hop around and never stay still and use the exact same weapon.
  • Krogan enemies in general.
• Ear Worm:
  • The Normandy's theme music.
  • If you are planning to do side quests, this.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Nihlus is surprisingly well-represented in discussions and fanworks, including mentions in subsequent games (in contrast, Jenkins is only brought up once) considering what a short-lived character he was.
• Gameplay Derailment: Ridiculously easy to pull off by taking advantage of a side mission that allows you to sell items for higher prices to a particular NPC. Then you can head to a different merchant and buy them back at the prices you originally would've gotten for them there, and pocket the rest. It's possible to unlock some very powerful weapons and have enough money to buy superior equipment for everyone before even leaving the Citadel. Not quite a Game-Breaker, but it does help.
• Genius Bonus: Binary Helix is working on a biological weapon for Saren based on a pesticide. Making it Saren Gas. Oy.
• Goddamned Bats: Husks and Thorian Creepers.
• Good Bad Bug: There are also a couple of occasions to completely max out your Paragon/Renegade scores in a couple of minutes; however, doing so corrupts your save files, and makes your actual decision in that scenario discounted in the sequel.
• Ho Yay: Since much of the dialogue Shepard had was originally meant to be potentially romantic before it was cut, there's a lot of this with Kaidan. It is made canon in Mass Effect 3.
• Hypocritical Fandom: Ashley is reduced by her detractors as a "space racist", but fan-favorite Garrus is also racist. For example, while Ashley makes friends with Tali and says she hopes that Tali's participation in the mission will improve her peoples' reputation, Garrus imposes collective racial guilt on her and says that she should feel bad for her ancestors creating the geth 300 years ago. He also tells Wrex that his species deserved to get hit with a sterility plague and that removing it would be a mistake.
• It Was His Sled: The Sadistic Choice on Virmire and the Reapers.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • The entire attack on Asteroid X57 for Balak.
  • Saren, even long before discovering Sovereign to Anderson, but for the rest of the galaxy, the attack on Eden Prime.
• Most Annoying Sound:

"Decontamination in progress. Decontamination in progress. Decontamination in progress. Decontamination in progress."

• • ENEMIES EVERYWHERE!
    • Hold the line!
    • GO GO GO!
    • "I will destroy you!" - this last one was picked up by Jack in Mass Effect 2 and her biotic students in Mass Effect 3.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The level-up sound is awesome enough to make the arduous task of killing enemies like Geth Colossi or Thresher Maws worth it, especially trying to kill them on foot instead of aboard the Mako.
• One-Scene Wonder: Peter Jessop voices Sovereign for a single scene, but he's both awesome and terrifying at once, managing to fully convey the utter horror of the Reapers in those short few moments.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Mako, due to its lousy controls, mediocre navigation, poor defense system, and below average aiming system. Doesn't help that in some missions you are forced to travel in one of those so ditching the Mako is out of the question. It doesn't help that while the Mako's shields increase as you level up, the rate of shield regeneration does not. At high levels, it can take upwards of five minutes for the Mako to fully recover from a firefight. Bring a book.
  • Long elevator rides. They got replaced with loading screens in future installments.
• Special Effect Failure: The way corpses frozen by your Cryo Rounds explode won't look out of place on ZX Spectrum.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The song "Final Assault" is almost the EXACT same as the 1984 Dune theme from 1:50 in. The music where you go to save Tali on the Citadel is also similar to the Blade Runner theme.
• That One Achievement: The achievements that require playing through the majority of the game with each individual squad member. This includes the sidequests and such. However, this is made easier if you have the Pinnacle Station and Bring Down the Sky DLC.
• That One Attack:
  • Acid attacks from the thresher maws and rachni completely bypass your shields, no matter how strong they are.
  • Also, in this game only, melee attacks do the same thing, which means Mass Effect 1 is the one and only game in the trilogy where ordinary Husks pose any threat.
  • Any biotics attack but the most annoying is throw since it displays a long animation of Shepard fallaing to the ground, staying there for five or six seconds, before standing up. Meanwhile ennemies can, and will still shoot you.
• That One Boss:
  • The krogan battlemaster on Therum, at least if you go there early. Some classes may find the fight easier, however, such as the Soldier. To elaborate, you fight him in a big circular room and he's accompanied by a group of geth typically consisting of shock troopers or rocket troopers with hard-hitting weapons. And since he's a krogan, he doesn't go down the first time you empty his health bar (save for certain means) and there's steam jets that sap your shields and health and barely any cover to make use of.
  • Matriarch Benezia, mostly because of the asari commandos and geth snipers that help her... and because this is often not only one of the hardest fights in the game, but also the most prone to glitches, making it a Luck-Based Mission for many (if Benezia decides to start throwing magically cover-ignoring Warps at you, you're done). Try not to get hit with a neural shock when Benezia switches out her flunkies either, or you'll end up warping out of the map.
  • Therum has a Geth Armature you must fight on foot before you can even enter the building Liara is trapped in. To make it more fun, there are Sapper drones jumping all around you and sniping at you in case you decide to find a cover spot and stay there to avoid the Armature's One-Hit Kill siege pulse, not to mention the other geth foot soldiers that rush you as well. If you haven't taken the time to level up your Spectre Training stat, aren't a tech-based class or neglected to bring Tali or Garrus with you, it's a pain in the cloaca.
  • Feros has the Thorian, its Creeper spawn and the asari clone it keeps spawning as well. The creepers start in a crouched state up until they "activate" and rush at you, but they're invincible in the crouched state, so you can't just cheese them, and they easily inflict poison status on you. Oh, and the asari clone enemy is of course a biotic. If she doesn't keep knocking you down, she may glitch you into an immovable state.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The Collection Sidequests. Even players who have played multiple times lose track of them all, and it is kind of a pain running around and collecting them (hint: you can find scannable objects containing some of them in the asteroid fields). Included are:
    • Finding all the keepers on the Citadel.
    • Finding all the Resources.
    • Finding all the Matriarch's writings.
    • Finding all the turian symbols.
    • Finding all the salarian League of One members.
  • The Volcano Hunt mission in Pinnacle Station. You get more time on the clock for each enemy you kill, but the amount of time you get back is progressively less for each one. You will want to put your keyboard/controller through the screen after coming up 2 kills short of the top score for the 10th time. For some reason, the Volcano map is the only one with this problem... with the others, a sufficiently skilled player can keep the mission going indefinitely and have no problem racking up enough kills.
  • The rogue VI assignment on Luna. You have to clear three bases full of hovering drones that can kill you in one hit. And the shields it throws up over the consoles and doorways. It's meant to be a disturbing, desperate last means of defending itself, but just becomes tedious. The class specialization choice you get as a reward almost makes up for it though.
• Too Cool to Live: Nihlus is a hardboiled Spectre built up as a badass as well a potential mentor, and he dies very quickly to establish what kind of guy Saren is. He gets a decent back-story in Mass Effect 2, if you talk to Samara. Apparently, Nihlus was so badass that he was able to stop her from killing him simply by using her own justicar code against her and allowing him to escape.
• Vocal Minority: Declarations of the first Mass Effect being a player's favorite aren't uncommon, but a rare thing to see is when someone reports that they actually like the gameplay mechanics of the game. Amusingly, they'll still pick the gameplay's flaws apart as quickly as anyone else.