Admiral Steven Hackett gives a speech to the species of the galaxy, before the coming battle with the reapers. This is obviously a spoiler for anyone who's never played Mass Effect.
Yeah, I definitely feel you on that one. A counterbalancing idea I've always held as head-canon is that the Rachni are the only reason the Crucible could be completed, especially when so many cycles and civilizations failed to construct it in time in eons past. There is this powerful mental picture that is evoked in my mind of a Tyranid-like swarm, only bent to the sole purpose of collaborative construction, working in ways only comprehensible to a hive mind species. They were capable of taking the figurative blueprint wisps of the other races' engineering minds and were the hand that finally 'touched the face of God', if you will, in being able to just absolutely shred construction, evaluation, and improvement schedule expectations of any other race. I love the idea, not just because of its aesthetic power, but because the legitimate rationale to get these two traditionally hostile camps - individualistic vs. hive mind races - into pregame perspectives that would legitimately give them a reason to work together, and in so doing, learn to genuinely respect one another through simply letting the proving qualities each possesses to speak for themselves. That sub-current is, to me, the stuff that makes fantasy so unbelievably powerful as a genre. Not only can alternatives and unexpected outcomes be explored freely, but often what comes out of genuinely good creative fantasy processes can't simply be termed a recombination of its constituent parts. Sure, Lord of the Rings can just sit unread as another book on the self - but any mind that reads it WILL KNOW they've just stumbled across something a crucial step above and apart. The idea of a Rachni empire with a legitimate place in the galaxy, a clear basis for respect and cooperation - it almost demands those who encounter the thought to explore further and delve into the worldbuilding of all the new experiences and possibilities that almost seem to leap into life of their own accord with such a uniquely matured blending. Just realized I went on a massive tangent/rant - so apologies for that. Your comment rekindled a kindred feeling in me as well; I had to shape words to pour that inspiration into, haha.
@@HailThanagor It's a pretty cool idea, but I wasn't really surprised when they didn't show up. There's a fair 'in universe' reason to keep them out of the final fight, and that's their method of communication. They seem to communicate on the same frequencies that reaper indoctirination signals operate. Twice now we've seen the reapers utilize this against the galaxy by sining what the rachni call a 'sour note' that drives the rachni crazy; (i) the rachni war and (ii) the events of the third game. Using their incredible ship making skills to finish the crucible made sense since it was built in a hidden location where they were out of reach of the reaper signal, but brining a large number of them up close to a massive reaper fleet seems like it would be tempting disaster and the allied forces of the galaxy likely thoght it wasn't worth the risk.
@@sovietonion3937 It's mentioned in dialogue with the rachni queen on Noveria in ME 1. It gets repeated in ME 2 if you spare her. An Asari will meet you on Illium with a message from the queen in which she will state she knows you're hunting the ones who 'soured her mothers' song', i.e. the Reapers.
The way it ends with 5:50 still puts a tear in my eye. If nothing else but the fact Joker salutes Shepard showing rank but Shepard just reaches out their hand having their goodbye be as equals showing true friendship.
I shook his hand because hes the one person in the galaxy i trust to keep my daughter safe. everyone else in the galaxy gets a gun, he looks after my EDI.
Why the hell did I just cheer on the Destiny Ascension as it arrived through the relay? I've watched this scene a thousand times, I'm not even playing the game this time... still... goosebumps. Oh, how I adore Mass Effect.
Arrival of the Destiny ascension is the best! Saving the council is paying off :-) I was so proud when I´d first play it, still I have goosebumps till today
Still miffed that some fleets just have Joker say they're reporting in, I think each fleet should've had a small voice line signaling that you truly brought the galaxy together.
Best Trilogy ever made, i still have it in my heart after all these years, the Normandy Crew was, is and will always be like a Second family to return to.
I clapped so hard when the fleets arrived. Probably the only time I have clapped at a cutscene. Shepard has the whole galaxy at his command. They aren't there for Hackett, they are there because a legend called them for help.
isnt Hacket a legend himself? He lead the Arcturus fleet in the destruction of sovereign. From the invasion of the reapers to this moment probably took months, he managed to keep hit and run warfare against an enemy who completly eclipses his forces both technologicaly and in numbers, without major losses acording to your war assets, and managed to both build and keep safe the superweapon that could finish the war.
@@AnonimatosTM absolutely. I totally agree with you. He's the Admiral of the Admirals. And always he has the back of the shepherd. He is honest and not corrupted. He's a perfect military man.
Watching all those ships come through the relay still makes my eyes sting! It actually occurs to me now that nobody had ever seen that many ships together before in either a game or even a movie.
@@warbacca1017 There’s a good chance that if you compiled a list of fleets from sci-fi this one wouldn’t come close to being the biggest (despite referenced numbers such as 50,000 Quarian ships) but to have so many force their way onto your tv screen at the same time is so rare, and so fucking amazing! 🤣
@@lucaspintospintos423 the daleks in doctor who sent the largest dalek fleet ever assembled at 10 million dalek saucer ships including the dalek emperor's flagship however the war doctor said there was a billion billion daleks attacking(could be n exaggeration) and there's at least 2000 per ship Which means there could have been 500,000,000,000,000 dalek saucerships instead however perhaps the daleks sent more when they realised the doctor was on galifrey which explains the difference
@@lucaspintospintos423 I think he was refering to being SEEN yeah the Flood have 4.3 million ships....in what cutscene? Tyranid hive fleets are huge....in what scene? Every available warship in the Milky Way surged through the Relays and we saw them....on screen. more ships than the Rebels attack on the Death Star 2. more ships than Vader's Fleet at said Death Star. Might be more ships than Lando's Arrival at Exegol. not theorised on paper numbers.....ON SCREEN.
One of the greatest moments in Science Fiction history. It is the true culmination of everything we have fought for. Regardless of our choice with how to use the Crucible, all the species united as one is far more meaningful than any other achievement in history.
sweetheart, if you need someone shot, call a turian, if you need someone talk to death call an asari, if you need another problem call a salarian, if you need a problem fix call a human...
I never understood why Admiral Hackett would board a friendly ship with two guards with sidearms in hand. I get that its a time of war and he might have armed guards, but not waving their guns around a friendly ship's CIC.
Same. Those guards just casually waving their sidearms around instead of having them stowed at their hips was what bothered me during the original ME3 and it's unfortunate to see that even in the Legendary edition the devs didn't bother to change that. Then again, the Legendary edition was not much more than a visual overhaul with some modifications so that it would run better on Win10 and stuff I guess. I didn't even read the title of the video and thought I was just seeing the original fleet battle with some graphic enhancement mods as Joker's face still looked rather low-res to me. 😜
Never know if it could be a trap. After the collectors board it and reapers indoctrinating people you never know. There is even a crazy Krogan on board. The president of the US always has bodyguards watching him.
I mean. If my enemy had the power of indoctrination I would take my body guards everywhere too plus cerberus and all their sleeper agents. Cant be too careful when your the leader of the Remnants of the Human military
The ME equivalent of; Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden! spear shall be shaken, shield shall be splintered, a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises! Ride now, ride now, ride! Ride for ruin and the world's ending! Death! Death! Death! Forth Eorlingas!
Reminds me more of Independence Day. "In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be joining the largest aerial battle in history... We can't be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests... ...and you will once again be fighting for our freedom, not from tyranny, or oppression, or persecution, but from annihilation. We're fighting for our right to live, to exist"
"My Soldiers, Rage! My Soldiers, Scream! My Soldiers, Fight!" “The courageous fallen! The anguished fallen! Their lives have meaning because we the living refuse to forget them! And as we ride to certain death, we trust our successors to do the same for us!”
I am such a sucker for thing like this. Like in Avengers Endgame and in Lord of the Rings. Theres nothing like the cavalry arriving to reduce me to tears.
There are many different scenes depending on which factions you bring/ don't bring. There are some videos which have edited all of those scenes together for an extended battle.
Harbinger "We moved Citadel to Earth, organics are doomed. They will run like vermin they are until they all eventually go extinct. They have no hope to win. It is over!" Combined galactic fleet after entering Sol system "Challenge accepted!"
Canonically even if Shepard brings all the fleet power available in the galaxy the combined fleet loses to the Reapers during the battle of Earth without the crucible. So Harbinger is right. And the Reaper fleet at Earth is supposedly still smaller than the fleet at Palaven so the very best the fleet could hope for in a conventional battle would be a pyrrhic victory as they'd be sacrificing all other frontlines and planets and just hasten the Reaper's overall victory in war.
It was a single reaper battle group earth was holding out against prior to the attack on Cerberus. After Cerberus’s destruction nearly every reaper went to earth to stop the crucible because the illusive man compromised it by telling them.
That's just what reapers could be spared from the galactic fronts. But remember. The first barrage was their attempt at gaining an early advantage. In a battle of attrition. The longer the fight goes, the more likely it becomes that the United fleets will begin to wain or weaken. Harbinger and several soverign class reapers were heading back into the fray by the time the casualties became equal on both sides. They needed the crucible to work. In the rejection ending, the fact it didn't meant harbinger and his earthbound reinforcements could obliterate the surviving fleets.
@@josephmort4039 but isn't shepard canonically male? I mean they used an actual male model for mshep while they only used generic faces for femshep, i think it's obvious which one is canon and which one is not?
I know that it isn't a part of the space battle, but I still liked hearing that the Sixth Street Reds were opening up their caches of weapons to the remaining humans on Earth. Like I've never once seen it mentioned anywhere, not even on the wiki. But I know for certain I heard about it over the news in game (I've always played Earthborn Shep).
As I rewatch this I wish there was some secret ending if you completely filled the War Asset bar and you could defeat all of the reapers with the galaxy standing together as one
@@jimmycombs8159 But we still used the crucible and that's only if we grab the destroy ending, I'm talking about a way where we had so much firepower there was no need for the crucible and we would just focus on one reaper at a time to decimate them
@@FrozenChampion32 that would defeat the purpose of the entire story though. The reapers are meant to be unbeatable, United galaxy or no. The reaper ships are ten times as strong as any other, and they outnumber you a thousand to one. If the galaxy was capable of beating them in a conventional war, it wouldn't be a desperate struggle against annihilation.
@@BorderLanderr maybe.. but if more fleets had the Thanix cannon it would’ve turned the tide.. enough to get the crucible set and enough to get Shepard and his or her squad through the beam.
Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon in front of them Volley'd and thunder'd; Storm'd at with shot and shell, Boldly they rode and well, Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of Hell Rode the six hundred.
5:00 big roller-coaster ride there. the fact that a dreadnought got in that tight with a reaper, and the main gun was able to dismember it. imagine the terror, and also elation every soul aboard that ship felt firing those MA rounds. there IS a weapon that CAN physically destroy a reaper. tragically, just after the peak of their glory, the reaper recovers and extinguishes everyone on board in an instant. great scene. it displays the might of both sides, and also how close yet so far the possibility of killing these things are.
"sir isaac newton was the deadliest son of a in space" - so check your targetting solution before you pull the trigger yada yada bad day yada. It still bugs me that the reapers were between the fleet and earth. And they missed. A lot.
I was always baffled by the fact that the whole fleet started shooting with mass accelerator weapons when there was a planet behind the enemy. I remember the small dialoge on the Citadel when the sarge scolded the cadets about Sir Isac Newton. And yet, here we are , ruining someones day.
If they win, there's still an Earth to rebuild and the people to do so. If they lose, everyone dies anyways so why does it matter? Plus, Earth in its entirety was a warzone at that point, so there wasn't much left to accidentally get hit aside from the ruins of cities that would have needed to be rebuilt anyways.
For a planet like earth the projectiles would just burn up in the atmosphere. The real risk is when there's a colony on a planet that hasn't been terraformed or a space station in orbit
@@emelyn7145 well rannoch as far as I'm aware had an atmosphere similar to earth and the quarian fleet bombarded the fuck out of the reaper base with mass driver weapons. Honestly the whole game is full of weird plot holes when it comes to consistency. Like this whole fleet coming through the relay all at once (like within seconds) isnt consistent with the games codex, which says that fleets over a certain size need to be broken up otherwise ships can drift off even lightyears from their intended mass relay target. Also because the reapers have been shown being able to manipulate relays with IFF tech (like the omega 4) theirs no reason why they wouldnt just shut down access to the sol relay (ignoring the rest of the galaxy)
@@commandershepard2490 ready to go down the rabbit hole? Why is Cerberus called Cerberus? They don't really guard anything, and other than Shepard, and the Husks, they aren't really associated with the limens of life and death. My theory is that Cerberus has three "heads". Jack Harper is one of course, Miranda's father or someone like him is another. But who is the third? My prime suspect is Admiral Hackett ;)
@@ArcaneAnouki I always thought that, since their mission is to “guard” humanity and the sol relay is actually Pluto’s satellite Charon, it made sense for them to name themselves Cerberus. But that three head theory of yours is NICE! Wish it was in the game!
Imagine how well this would be in a live action series. The beginning of the grand finale as the fleets Shepard gathered for the whole season finally comes together. And not like in that other movie where one episode before they said nobody cares, and nobody comes, then suddenly a gigantic armada just appears for the rescue.
@@ErelasInglor It is hard to adapt a video game, because the combat, and dialogues are in a very different balance. Seeing Shepard moving around, and shooting for 10 hours would be boring. But in case of ME they have no real reason to change stuff for "diversity" as in most other stuff. There is a lot of diversity by default. Though considering the amount of CGI it would be i think animated movie would be better for it.
@@akuladoctor7355 You’d be surprised then, some of the most diverse stories have suffered at the hands of producers of late. I’m sure this too would suffer terribly. If this was done with the technology of today 20 or even 30 years ago it would stand a chance.
*Earth's atmosphere We take hits from tiny asteroids constantly and nothing happens cause they just burn up. They'd have to fire something pretty substantial for it to reach the ground and I'd assume they check their targets for those kind of shots
Let's face it, their attack vector was way off. They could have easily avoided the planet being behind their target. Space is vast AND 3-dimensional. The same applies to the fleet - all ships are well aligned (meaning all are similarly "up"). Makes little sense as there is no up and down in space... but I get it. It looks more orderly and having the earth behind the enemy and not just black space drives the threat home just so much more intensely.
@@thegreatxcelerator4224 Yeah thats something I considered, the Sol relay is in orbit of Charon, the moon of Pluto. They had the entire distance from Pluto to Earth to change their vector to come at the Reapers from above, below, to the left or the right keeping Earth out of their line of fire. In fact they could have split their force to come at them from multiple angles and get them in a cross fire. Though it's debatable how effective flanking Reapers is given their awesome kinetic barriers.
Gunnery Chief: I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty. Once you fire a husk of metal, it keeps going until it hits something. That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you're ruining someone's day somewhere and sometime. That is why you check your damn targets! That is why you wait for the computer to give you a damn firing solution! That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not "eyeball it!" This is a weapon of mass destruction. You are not a cowboy shooting from the hip.
while playing me3 and for a week after it i kept thinking to myself if the god damn council heeded my warnings and the galaxy was united and spent the next 2 years building fleets fortifying planets and colonies as well as abandoning the pointless ones and when the reapers finally did arrive we’d have have a fleet with 11 ships to their one (200 minimum) (18,000 reaper capital ships) if only they listened the refuse scene at the end of the game wouldn’t be a future civilisation thanking the previous cycle for the warning but instead the galaxy rejoicing have defeated the reapers once and for all. also the leviathans not hiding and instead fighting like the apex species they claimed to be
What would've been amazing. *in the middle of the fight, Shepard is on earth already* Joker: Shepard, there's something else coming through the relay. *dozens of leviathans come through*
there are some scenes of mass effect trilogy that make me cry no matter how many times I've watched. That is one of them. He'll yeah that a fucking great masterpiece. I wonder how didn't anyone turns that into a TV series or movie
Am i the only one who gets annoyed by the two marines who escort Hackett onto the Normandy? They just walk in with their pistols in their hands swinging them about casually. I don't think a stern and professional figure like Hackett would tolerate that. I feel the scene would have looked better if either their pistols were holstered on their hips, or if they were carrying assault rifles in a proper two haned grip.
Especially since they were boarding the Normandy of all ships. Who the fuck do they think they are lol? I guess the lore-friendly reason si because incase ANYONE on the Normandy was indoctrinated.
Could be worried that close contact with the reapers in the past may have indoctrinated a sleep agent in the crew. Can't be too careful with your king piece.
Admiral Hackett is the spiritual heir to Admiral Petrarch of the GTD Aquaitane from Freespace 2. Same charisma, leadership, tactical mind. Simply chilling!
That game was 10 years before its time. I still play it now - 20 years later. I was fortunate enough to have the rather rare DVD version of the game rather than the 3 CD version :-D I don't think any other game can come anywhere close to how truly awesome FS2 was in terms of story and play. I Wish they made a 3rd - showing how GTVA eventually developed advanced tech and went on the offensive against the Shivans - finding out some grand, cosmic truth about them.....
@@novemberzed9163 I agree. Some of the community based stuff is good if you use the FS2 Open source stuff. One of the mods I really enjoyed was the shivans fighting the Ancients where you got to see some of the Ancients ships although it wouldn't be canon. A proper FS3 would be AMAZING - if anyone would do something like then in crowd funding, I'd be more than happy to donate to that
Gunnery Chief in ME2: “Each of these shells impacts with the force of a Hiroshima bomb. That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space” Earth in background, looking at all of the hits missing the reapers: “Heh. I’m in danger”
What synthetic Reapers failed to realise is that organics, with their backs against a wall and facing imminent destruction, will fight even if it's futile because alternative is death and organics have a strong aversion to it and that's something AI doesn't understand
"What had been our strength, our empire, became a liability. All races comforted to one doctrine, one strategy. The Reapers exploited this. Once they found our weaknesses, we could not adapt. The subservient races became divided and confused. Then, it was only a matter of time." "I'm happy to say our cycle is different. Most races cooperate but they still remain unique." "Then it may be your only hope."
Watching Alien vs Predator and the man in charge started talking and I knew his voice sounded familiar. Turns out it was the voice actor for Hacket, had to come here and watch him once again
The only complaint I have is the change in the camera as the fleet arrives. I wish they'd brought Destiny Ascension in closer to the camera but not changed its location so your seeing the fleet arrive and all the sudden the massive warship just takes up most of the screen.
Anyone else weirded out by the guards accompanying the admiral with their guns out in the beginning? Every time I see it, it gives the impression that they're there to arrest Shepherd.
Shepherd should have been given a field promotion to Colonel or Brigadier General in ME3. A chunk of the Alliance brass was killed in the first 5 minutes so I know they had room to promote Shepherd and he/she for damn sure deserved a higher rank.
It's never not going to be crazy that at the time of this game humanity had only been a part of the Council civilization for 38 years. Talk about kicking in the galaxy's front door, and making yourself at home lol.
Hmm, in my playthrough Joker said "Be careful down there" and there was no handshake, just salutes from both. I think the handshake is a lot a better. What do you need to do to make them handshake? 6:02 Those puppy eyes thou
i feel like when the fighters and captial ships mixed in with the reaper fleet there shouldve been some radio chatter as it devolved into the big fight.
