the best revenge haha

This should've been the mission critical failure scene

Aye, they should’ve done it as part of mission failure. Would make for one hell of a horrifying experience to see so many Reapers pouring in along with maybe some chatters of despair and oh no Shepard failed and so on

@@AimlessSavant It should have been specific to failing on the Citadel during Sovereign's attack. Seeing it every time wouldn't have been as impactful.

Thank you :)

Great animation. what if there is another citadel in dark space to act as a relay?

@@giovannibini6809 its possible

@@UsernameGeri best animation of mass effect i could use you for the roblox game ima make about mass effect

Not only where the every settlements are, but where each and every single person are! Literally no way to hide... unless you're a top-secret Prothean unit on Ilos.

dont forgett the reapers controll the mass relay sytem from the citadel. everyone just trapped in there cluster.

Lmao “numerbs”

So all it took to stop this massive flotilla of ancient killer machines is punch Udina in the face)

@@T--kq3pj In the short term, at least.

Ok but I can't remember what's so important about Ilos to begin with. I remember using the Ilos portal to access the citadel but if Shep had been stuck then wouldn't he have already been there to fight Saren? What needed to happen on Ilos that wouldn't have if Shep wasn't able to escape? I can't remember

@@vintagedot8350 No, if Shepard had not found Ilos, then the Commander would have never interacted with Vigil, Vigil informs our fearless leader that the Citadel contains a portal directly from dark space to allow the Reapers to directly access it and cut the main leadership out of the picture before the wear even started. That is what Saren was at the Citadel to do. Fight off the defenders and get to the control panel to set it back to open that mass effect relay station.

@@GothicElf68 Yeah but presumably even if Shep was stuck he would have fought off Saren all the same

Along with tripod horn

Would be perfect for a "liminal spaces" video. Imagine how the Prothean researchers felt when they got there from Ilos.

@@UsernameGeri Oh that’s terrifying. You successfully close off the Citadel, giving the people of the next cycle a fighting chance and after that, all you can do is wait to starve to death and be recycled by the keepers. A heroic action that could save countless billions, but nobody will ever remember your name or who you were

@@mochagoat1998 welp, I made this into a video

I recall the Reapers were slow and methodical, often taking one world at a time and sending indoctrinated refugees to more heavily fortified worlds to sabotage them, their biggest advantage was the shutting down of the Relays and the fact all civilizations seemed to rely on them (have yet to play 3, based on the exposition given by the Prothean computer near the end of 1).

Protheans weren't just big, they were absolutely ruthless. Warhammer 40k levels of fucked up. Must have been the most frustrating cycle for the reapers. Until Shepard showed up ofcourse.

​@@Baloo106Nah warhammer 40k folds reapers tbh

@@Baloo106 The Proteans, even after being harvested, found another way to fuck the reapers. Blocking the activation signal for the keepers.

@@AaronBiswasfunny - if humans were the first to discover citadel - we’d have surely formed an Imperium of Man. Let’s be honest, the only reason we played diplomacy is because we were the new kid on the block. Human supremacy would have meant enslavement of all other species under one banner… heck we spent 10,000 years killing each other… we have already had slavery just because other fellow humans looked different. So I don’t think so humans would’ve been diplomatic if we were the first in our cycle to find the citadel. As Legion said, “Human history is a litany of bloodshed over different ideals of rulership and afterlife”

Not weird at all, we never got to see a mass formation of reapers aside from the dark space shots that are seconds long. The visual demonstration of a thousand reapers jumping into Citadel space is the kind of cosmic horror that's easy to understand - it hammers home how desperate and truly hopeless the fight is in any conventional means. For similar feeling, look at Freespace 2 and the Shivan's having 80+ Sathanas Class Juggernauts when you just spend 3/4s of the game BARELY defeating one.

Good work is good work.

Sometimes it takes a while to notice good work.

That's the algorithm for ya. In particular its been dropping Mass Effect stuff on a friend and I lately so it's not surprising this would get caught up in that.

That's more or less exactly how I imagined it happening Very good work 🤘🏻

Not sure, the games never tell. Would've loved to find out though. I guess it just wasn't important for the sequels.

probably a second "citadel" where reaper go to stasis

@@UsernameGeri They could explore that in mass effect 4

Maybe it’s how they connect andromeda and the original trilogy? Just an theory.

I would assume that is likely, as according to the Wiki in order to transport a ship, the Relays do require a second Relay. Essentially, one Relay acts as the initiator, the other as the receiver. So, the Citadel we see is on the receiving end, then there would need to be a second in Dark Space to be the initiator.

That's the implication from vigil, but given that vigil can only really speculate on the details of the Prothean harvest I'd have to say it got that one wrong - in ME3 we see the Reapers (eventually) take the citadel and it does not enable them to shut down the relay network. If they could have, they would. If it were even a possibility, they wouldn't have wasted time harvesting the homeworlds but would have beelined straight to the citadel at the start of 3. I think we have to conclude that the relays aren't so easily shut down. (Yes, yes, obviously the ME3 writers just forgot or didn't know how to work around that, but we have to interpret the text as it's given to us).

Now we know.

My idea was that it's just a small patrol fleet. Since there were no other species capable of space travel at the time, there really wasn't anyone who can threaten them. There was the Metacon war I think, probably on some remote planet, or planets. The rest of the fleet is probably out there conquering the primitives :D

You forgot that Jarvik specifically stated that the Zha were fighting the Zha’til and that the Zha were part of the Prothean Empire. The war against the Zha’til was ongoing at the time of the Reapers’ initial appearance during the Prothean cycle. It was mentioned in Mass Effect 3.

Something that ME2 claimed with the Reapers always never sat right with me and of course made the Catalyst's claims sound like pure BS (especially since first playthrough I achieved peace between Quarians and Geth) but it supposedly only takes Millions to make a single Reaper (likely one of the smaller ones but still) the Advanced life each cycle should amount to trillions, each cycle should be adding hundreds of Reapers to their fleet, and there's no freaking failsafe to prevent the Reapers from being the very thing Catalyst is claiming to be trying to stop.

and holy shit the ear ringing sound after is chefs kiss

Under regular circumstances no, with a reaper iff maybe though it might be hit or miss also since they had to travel to bahak first it would imply that reapers during the 50,000 year grace period would be orbiting somewhere in dark space closest to bahak.

Thanks haha!

I really hope the Beyond The Relays (Mass effect mod for stellaris) team adds the reaper invasion as an end game crisis! Also - it’d be dope if the team could also take leverage of the GalCom system in Stellaris to create a Citadel council

Honestly it's just a bunch of blender nodes non-sense lol. I can probably put them in a separate blend file and send it to you if you want to use it or just check it out.

@@UsernameGeri That would be awesome man. I can dm you my email address if that's cool.

@@johnkingmob Here: blend-exchange.com/b/XDEWspvr/ This link should work. It was designed to work with Eevee, but should probably work with Cycles as well (only the render time would probably be insane) To get the best results with Eevee, set the Volumetric tile size to 2 px.

@@UsernameGeri Thanks man. Works great. I already made a quick test render with it. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/jZldgMdyrbTZj5s.html Just need to figure out how to slow down the pulses a bit.

@@johnkingmob Oh wow, it looks like it's from the actual game! Nice. And oh yeah, I should've mentioned; it was animated in 24 fps over ~1800 frames. During those 1800 odd frames, 150 of those blue ring particles are emitted, and the core pulses 45 times with that foggy detail particle. If you want to use higher frame rates, you need to adjust the particle start and end frames, or the number of particles emitted.

Thanks :D When I have some interesting or unique ideas, I'll definitely make them :)

The protheons may have tried that if there plan to outlive the reapers underground worked.

Aye, but the Reapers are careful enough to make sure they're hidden until the invasion.

Thanks. Yeah that's fine. Be sure to share it when it's done :)

Aaaaaaaannnnndddd... The video in question is finally up! I ended up using a short except in the latter half of the essay. Thanks again for making this! kzfaq.info/get/bejne/j9CVrduiu8--j3k.html

@@BartlebysCorpse Oh nice! For some reason I didn't get notified of this comment -.- Really great video, glad you could use some of my footage to illustrate your thoughts :)

If Sovereign wouldn't have been taken down, I imagine something like this would've happened, yes. As for the reaper forces, I think they were there in full force in ME3 as well, they were just all spread out throughout the galaxy coming from the Bahak system, not the Citadel.

@@UsernameGeri as well as possibly other relays like the Alpha relay that have a similar functionality.

The Citadel was a key part in previous cycles. It was the heart of previous civilizations where all the knowledge of them was keep. Demographics, military tactics and military strength, classified projects and so many other things For a tactical standpoint, attacking the Citadel is the best way to start a galactic invasion because you are destroying the political, economical and social power of those civilizations. That's what Javik explained in MA3. Once the Citadek was attacked, the rest of systems were isolated and it was far more easy for the reapers to conquer. The protheans find out about this and interfered Keepers signal so now the Citadel relay has to be manually activated The Reapers had a plan B in case of this, it was the relay in the Battarian sector that's is the one we see in Arrival. With that relay destroyed and the Citadel under the controll of the aliens species, the reapers lost the element of surprised Now i will say that even with that, there's plenty of plotholes during the invasion. The main one been basically why in the hell the reapers didn't attack the Citadel until basically the end of the game

To be fair, they never said that such didn't exist.

Is not crazy to assume that they have a big ass relay in the dark space otherwise i wouldn't be impossible for them to use the Citadel or the Alpha Relay

Thanks! Yeah those _are_ supposed to be prothean ships. But since we never actually saw any prothean dreadnoughts in the games, only 1 type of assault rifle, I went with this. I based the design on the few fan made concepts that exist about prothean ships.

Particle beam weapons ARE mass accelerators. They just accelerate particles instead of slugs.

It indeed does not make sense why the reapers didn't capture the Citadel in ME3. But, logical storytelling and world building ceased to be a priority after ME1 as far as I'm concerned, so it's not entirely unexpected.

Remember Sovereign needed Saren to open the Citadel from the inside. It’s basically impenetrable when closed and the keepers didn’t respond to their commands. They probably wanted the Galaxy is disarray before going there, possibly trying to indoctrinate a few spies and having them infiltrate the Citadel to keep it open. Otherwise if they tried to B-line for it the rest of the galactic powers could Zerg rush their fleet there. @@UsernameGeri

It's super simple. It's just a tube with a gradient texture moving across it, which is used as a transparency factor for a material from this tutorial: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/rNdddrek293cco0.html Then it fades away by increasing the transparency to 100%.

That didn’t help at all

For Every race was a simbol of Triumph When we see It for the First Time in ME 1 it's an Amazing Moment, that's probably the same reaction the Asari, the protheans, the Inusannon and Every Other race had

@@Ale-dd3ek Come on you see an alien structures in space fully functioning with random cyborgs, you don't make it your capital, you quaratine it and try to reverse engineer it

@@uncleaungzayyafromburma985 And after a thousand years or so of it doing _absolutely nothing_ and showing nothing anomalous about it, and the cyborgs doing nothing but maintaining the station, you _wouldn't_ use it?

@@VelociraptorsOfSkyrim Sure you can use it but making it the capital seems silly

Using it as capital is a pretty silly idea, but the Citadel would've eventually end up to be pretty big hub of activity regardless. It sit in a naturally very defensible place inside the serpent nebula that makes attacks very difficult without the relay(which will naturally be guarded by everyone), a crapton of mass relays all over the galaxy eventually links to the citadel so its a vital hub for relay traffic. Sooner or later the citadel is gonna be very important.

its reaper invasion too much of reapers is good not a flaw you dont understand it

It is nightmare inducing, to be sure.