Our Greatest Enemy | Reapers COMPLETE Breakdown 

"Ah, yes, 'Reapers'. The immortal race of sentient starships allegedly waiting in dark space. We have dismissed this claim."

“Your words are as empty as your future. We are the vanguards of your destruction.” CHILLS, every single time!

It's wild that this series is 17 years old now. I remember getting this for Christmas in 2007, and how much fun I had discovering this crazy galaxy. Definitely peak BioWare, along with NWN, BG 1 and 2, Jade Empire, KOTOR, and DA. Just a fuckin decade+ of bangers from them.

God damn Mass effect's such an amazing series. The fact that it stays grounded to real science while still having batshit crazy technology and lore is so appealing

Imagine getting turned into soup but at least you get to be a super cool giant spaceship robot, only to get murdered again before you even leave the shipyard

“We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution you exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it. I am the vanguard of your extinction this exchange is over”Sovereign

Fun Fact: Bioware the Studio behind Mass Effect they also did the STAR WARS KOTOR when developing KOTOR 3 before cancelling the enemies The true sith were inspired by the shadow from Babylon 5 and when the game was cancelled they based The Reapers on the old game

EA are the real Reapers. They preserve nothing, while consuming & destroying all they lay their hands on. RIP Bioware, builders of wonderful universes and stories. You are missed.

Imagine how many Reapers got destroyed during the games and in the final battle in ME3. They make one Sovereign class per worthy race per cycle. So something between one to four in one Cycle. The Protheans only resulted in a single new Reaper. So even if the reapers had won that final engagement, this Cycle has caused them demage measuring in the dozens and dozens of Cycles. So even if the ME3 organics had lost that war, it would have been an absolute *disaster,* a phyrric victory, for the reapers. Likely forcing them to completely rethink and adjust the cycle in accordance. So if the ME3 organics hadnt won that war, organic intelligent life in its entirety may have never gotten another chance to get that close to them ever again. ME3 really is the final battle.

Man you could tell me the lore of a coconut and I'd listen to it. The fact that you're constantly covering subjects I enjoy is just the benefit. Great work man!

“We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it.” ~ Sovereign Such a chilling line. Baffles me that Sovereign is not Harbinger. Harbinger is a loser and doesn’t project the same level of fear as Sovereign. He also had the balls to fight us directly. Taking over Saren’s corpse to try and kill Shepard. Unlike Harbinger, who just stares at the Normandy landing directly infront of it and lets it take off without a single beam of death being fired.

Leviathans: "Oh no the lesser species keep developing ai and getting destroyed by it. How do we stop this cycle" "So we built this ai to solve the problem" "Why is the ai looking at me weird"

Mass effect 3 galaxy map theme if you're wondering. I've been listening to it for years whenever I needed to relax and get some sleep

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky...

The scariest part about the reapers is thay at no point do thay consider it a war. It's a harvest to them. The galaxy fighting back is irrelevant to them.

Interesting how when you investigate the derelict reaper you find that almost, almost all the walkways were cerberus catwalks in cavernous areas that otherwise wouldn't allow for easy foot traffic. Really gave that feeling that you were on an expedition into a place you're really not supposed to be. The interior of the ship really wasn't designed for you to be in it.

I’ll never forget speaking to Sovereign for the first time, and simply learning that all organic life developed on the path the Reapers controlled. Which at the time was bone chilling. One quote Sovereign spoke sent chills down my spine and it was… “ We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it. And you will end because we demand it.” Meaning all of human history or organic history was silently controlled by the reapers from dark space and at anytime could have been extinguished. Wrapping my head around it at that point in time was insane.

Imagine if Star Wars had something like this

They were inspired by Babylon 5's "Shadows"

I’d like to point out that it WAS a long time for the intelligence to decide on its final solution: the Reaper program. The intelligence tells you that it studied and tried to intervene in many AI uprises over an unknown period of time. It didn’t just instantly decide it would turn on its masters, and really if you think about it the Reaper program carried out its function successfully for a BILLION YEARS. It’s hard to say it was a failure of a project when it was largely correct, until Shepard and the most upgraded Crucible happened to just show up in the same cycle and prove to the Intelligence that the Reaper program had finally failed. Which is also the best argument against indoctrination theory, because no matter what ending you chose, the catalyst gives you a way to destroy the Reaper program in its current form. Even, ironically, the refusal ending leads to the defeat of the Reapers.

I love the inclusion of Mass Effect Andromeda story as well. I really wish they'd make a sequel to that game, if nothing else but to complete that story. Hopefully the upcoming Mass Effect game answers some of those questions

This game blew my mind. I couldn't stop playing, heartbroken at the end. The Sovereign blew my mind.

So much damn potential…the writers just couldn’t bring it all together in a way that satisfied all that build up.

I really need this game turned into a show. A show with ppl that KNOW the material! And make you think about big decisions of the main character throughout the seasons. Thank you for your breakdown it was truly eye-opening to me thinking of the Reapers on a different level of understanding from references in human history.

Love mass effect so glad you covered the reapers I think they are awesome and it’s a shame more people didn’t seek out their history while playing the games

I know a lot of people hated the three colors ending or how there are theories on Shepard already being indoctrinated by that point. But personally, I still subscribe to the Synthesis ending. It is the only one that really offers a long-term solution to the primary conflict of the entire Mass Effect series, racial differences. From the warlike Krogan to the alien Rachni, from the Biotics enhanced Asari to the mechanical Geth, or organics versus synthetics,... all have differences that prevents them from truly uniting. Even as the backdrop or unintended consequence of our actions, Shepard have slowly build bridges and solve those differences throughout the trilogy. Destruction would stop the immediate threat, but all it really does is resetting the cycle of violence. Someday, when the lesson of the past is long forgotten, another conflict between organics and synthetics will rise again. Control halt the threat, keeping the cycle in a stalemate. But how long will it last? What stopping the cycle to resume when control no longer function, much like the Keepers of the Citadel? Synthesis change the cycle, giving it new paths and possibilities. Much like with other races throughout the trilogy, we extend an olive branch of reconciliation to the Reapers. To break down the barrier between organics and synthetics, helping them to see eyes to eyes with each other so we can all come out stronger together. If Legion, the Geths, and EDI have a soul, then so does a Reaper. It would be hypocritical otherwise. And personally, the Shepard I know would not throw those lives away if there is another option. The Synthesis option is scary because we fear change, the unknown, and false promises. But if no one take that first step, then nothing changed, nothing get solved.

отлично, мне нравятся твои прошлые видео по Star Wars, а Mass Effect моя самая любимая трилогия - я рад что ты начал делать видео по этой вселенной)

Such a great build-up, only to fail at the climax.

Just wanted to say Thank you man for making this video. Ive always wanted somone to do a good breakdown on the Reapers and the cycle. Its such a dark and twisted, but somewhat logical pov when looking at it from their viewpoint. I want to learn more about them and pray ME 4 does something cool. I also really was interested in the Leviathans. So ill ve watching that video next. So thanks for such a comprehensive breakdown on so many things ive wanted to watch videos on from this amazing series. Did a great job. My daughter is named after Liara. Always thought it was a pretty name. Totally fits her too. Shes ten now

I have been seeing a resurgence of mass effect content and this convinced me to replay the trilogy again

Give the writers of mass effect their flowers. Good god! I loved the games but no idea how deep the lore was.

I love finding new fantasy worlds like this! Well new to me at least. I'm mainly a Warhammer guy but this world building is 💯. Cool video

FINALLY someone is doing reaper lore

I'll admit i never expected Metanerdz to cover anything in the Mass Effect series it's a surprise to be sure but a welcome one

The mass effect 3 fight with them was underwhelming

They looked like ginormous bedbugs

The Reapers remind me of the "Hunters of the Dawn" in a book series that starts with Luna Marine and continued through 9 books that gave me hope for our future... even with the Hunters as a BIG BAD. They are THE ANSWER to the Fermi Paradox.

Just got to say sir you really did justice to the Mass Effect universe... I think I played it 8 years ago? Still a top pick for one of my favorite games...Your video just reminded me how amazing the game was.... being torn and nervous when it came to making decisions...and trying to hard to get certain characters to do certain things lol... I don't try to be naive but I really think/hope that most sentient beings would cooperate with each other...GRANTED it takes a serious annihilation event to do so... kind of like Independence Day.. Props to you and your Channel...

I know glados/hal is considered to be the best ai villains but I think the reapers take the crown as number one best ai villain.

One possible inspiration for the Reapers were the Shivans from the Freespace video game franchise: a non-planetarian aquatic-like species that wiped out an entire ancient civilization eons ago, coming back to exterminate humanity and its extraterrestrial rival for unknown purposes. Their ships have black-red designs and fire destructive red beams

The video was very entertaining and informative, that's what I like about your channel and your videos. Can you do videos on the Mass Effect races?

The more I hear about the Reapers origin the more I'm starting to think I'm getting indoctrinated

I took a week off from undergrad classes during 2009 to play this game. The memories were good!

I still don't get why the Reapers didn't make a beeline to the Citadel to immediately take control of the Mass Relay system during ME3.

Thank you, ive been needing some mass effect lore.

I hope you can do halo and the covenant species and weapons and ships one day and I hope you’re doing well and take care and keep up the good work😊❤

Our real enemies are the friends we made along the way

All this advanced technology, and nobody even wants think to consider to use their Omni tool to record some thing

How fitting, my Favorit tabletop System Dropzone commander and its sister System dropfleet commander released a trailer for a New faction yesterday, and the faction is a bit like the reaper mixed with 40k's Khorne

It’s crazy that Mass Effect constantly warns of the risk of AI and humanity now in the real world is surging ahead in possibly creating a true AI. Terrifying.

Tali is best girl.

My take on The Reapers, is that while being an objectively highly advanced machine race. I think they're actually quite lacking on the high end tech and military advancement tree. It's very well known that the Reapers would not be able to fight the Covenant Fleet with some research, Reaper ships armor and Kinetic barrier type shielding isn't good enough to handle immensely powerful Plasma weaponry that the Covie fleet uses. Moreover, when it comes to the upper echelons of the tech tree that a civilization can reach, the Reapers are powerful, but average fish in the sea. The Reapers aren't capable of technologically progressing, they fall into the classic trap of essentially being a corrupted genocidal machine race. For example, I personally think the Reapers would experience a severe run for their money against the Cybrex and Contingency from Stellaris, it's actually possible the Ghost Signal would completely humble the Reapers. I DO think the Cybrex and Contingency wouldn't outright annihilate them very quickly, but they would severely cripple them to the point that the Reapers would never be capable of threatening the Galaxy ever again. If you toss in the Ghost signal? It's over. The Reapers aren't capable of innovation or engineering on a mass scale to protect themselves, they are flawed machines run by a non-adaptive Machine Consciousness. The Reapers would also be completely unable to fight against the likes of Mendicant Bias, nor it's superior, Offensive Bias. Such AI are beyond comprehension, reaching Godlike levels of processing capabilities. It's not just those entities' processing and tactical prowess, it's their technology too. It's not really worth digging into. Honestly, I'm genuinely unsure how Reapers en masse would be able to handle the Imperium of Man from 40k in space specifically, from what I've seen, Imperium navy ships come slightly short when in even numbers vs a Reaper fleet. But the thing about the Reapers, are that they're a ground invasion type of crisis. I absolutely believe the Imperium would be more than capable of destroying Reaper ground offensives. The Reapers would lose a battle of attrition to the Imperium HARD because of this. Reaper Destroyers would go down so goddamn fast, Sovereign class Reapers, while large, would lack the armor and fighting power to actually stand in a protracted fight against the Imperiums capabilities for immense firepower down on planetside. If the Reapers fought the Necrons or Eldar? Please, the Reapers are far too primitive in comparison to top level advancement such as them, they are the 0.1% of the 1% I think the Reapers are a nightmare scenario crisis for the vast majority of Civilizations in any Galaxy, but when it comes to the upper echelons of civilizations? The Reapers aren't capable of punching in the their own weight class.

Us believing AI will evolve past us is just hubris. This whole story, is about precived hubris, across different mediums, times, dementions(dark space), and so on. IMO.

I need to play these games again.. I love 'em all of them

man RIP bioware.

So glad this series was apart of my childhood

FYI don’t put a red boarder around your thumbnails I thought I’d already seen this due that the red bar running across the bottom of video

That stupid catalyst kid ruined the Reapers for me permanently.

I think the only movie showing something similar would be "Skyline" (1st one), big biomechanical ships harvesting humans (kinda like the Reapers), extracting brains to brainwash & repurpose them as control-units in other bodies (those could be the Collectors), and dead human bodies being disposed in a converter that makes protein-soup out of them, for food, I guess.

Please help me remember the name of a game… it was a trilogy I believe where the guy fights alien invasion but becomes corrupted in the end??

They've got a classy A.F. soundtrack though !

Why is everyone suddenly making Reaper videos? I’m getting worried here

You can’t really think of many sci-fi villains like the reapers the closest you get is the flood and they’re very different in many ways

God I remember the Kotor series, jade empire, and the ME series as peak gaming.

Truly the final decision of the player is based both of their experience and their morals 🤔 Comes down to how they view the world, how they interact with it, and how they perceive both it and themselves Just what would be the right choice given the gravity and weight the decision makes, we can speculate all we like but none of us would truly know the choice we will make unless we are in the scenario

"ol' harbie speaks of me? oh my, seems I'm famous in the reaper community!"

I agree with your ideas on the parallels from the Bible. Even to the point where the name Shepard is a reference to the "Good Shepherd" but I would say the reapers are false gods, pretenders and a good analogy for the Beast of Revelation and synthesis is taking the Mark of the Beast :)

Awesome video.

What's WILD is if you think of how many times the reapers harvested the galaxy in the billion or so years since the first harvest of Harbinger. Even giving them a million years to build the relays and ect, if they conducted the harvest an average of every 50k years, there have been about 20,000 "cycles"

So with the mass effect 4 trailer do you think the destroy ending is canon

Right off the bat, sovereign dising on organic life.

Reading the output of a chat gpt response as the main crux of your RU-vid video blurs the lines between organic and synthetic cohabitation. Teetering on the brink of pure ease of use while also seeming utterly sophisticated, though prompted by a pivotal moment in the history, it also posed a moral dilemma for RU-vidrs and RU-vid management alike. Aligning the organic creative process with the intense thoroughness of synthetic knowledge and bland use of sophisticated vocabulary in extraordinarily predictable patterns spelled the end of this RU-vidr and any other who would simply read from the output of an ai.

That multi colored ending that this franchise ended on will never leave the back of my mind.

Theory: if a civilization abandoned technology would they be left alone. Take huge swaths of a population and move them to an undeveloped world and go back to “hey, these two sticks get hot when rubbed together” technology would the reapers just pass over. Seeing a world cut off full of basically cave and nomad hunters but they came from a developed world?

Their reasoning: "To avoid inevitable conflict between organics and synthetics, we (synthetics) show up every 50.000 years and destroy all organics" Wait, what!? That's just outright stupid...

wouldn't joining everyone together eventually be the same option as just letting it happen at the moment?

Not sure what series this is but have a like and a comment anyway

The worst type of opponent you can imagine. Even after death you will have no peace.

Here is my take on the reapers: they were such menacing and powerful threats that every single mass effect game after them cannot compare with its enemies. Mass effect andromeda suffered from this lack, mass effect 4 will also struggle with that i fear, if the game ever sees the light of day that is

This fiction is so well thought out that it's frightening to think how terrible it would be if it was actually real.

If this harvest creates more, when does saturation occur? As they are immortal, would their numbers eventually become too massive for a single galaxy to support?

Awesome

The Sovereign speech will ALWAYS stick with me

On our planet the Leviathans mind controlled humans into writing several religious books

not entirely though yet, but at 18:00 you say that there are walkways inside of the reapers for organics to walk. do you mean the ones in the broken reaper? i always went with the assumption that cerberus build all of those to properly research it. kinda like construction scaffolding, you know?

I have always wondered... Since the Rachni Wars were going on around the time of the Roman Empire, what if they had worked and Sovereign had weakened the galaxy enough to end the cycle then... The Salarians, Turians, Asari, and Krogan wouldn't be around anymore... But humanity would then have the next 50,000 years to do their thing. Even though the Reapers would have corrected the genetic modification of the Keepers and gained full control of the Citadel, Humanity would still have a ridiculously long time to work through things and most likely come across evidence of the Reapers to some effect pretty early on. Although I guess that's what Sovereign's presence is for, to watch and make sure that no organic civilization has enough time to truly pose a threat. So maybe my hypothetical cycle wouldn't be allowed to last very long haha.

Straight away, Harbinger is a snitch.

OMG this bring me back to the game so hard! should I play it game again? I finished the second 3 times and third 3-4 times......

There is a bit of Fanon in this video that significantly hurts it, imo. It is not _Element Zero_ technology that is the trap. It is very specifically the Mass Relays and the Citadel. We know this because the natives of the Andromeda Galaxy, completely outside of the Reaper Cycle, _still_ use Element Zero as much as the Milky Way Galaxy. For example, the Kett use Element Zero to create an Alcubierre drive. Angara, Kett, and Jardaan (Remnant) weapons all use Element Zero in their construction. Saying that using Element Zero is the Trap is like saying that using Gold, or Iron, in technology is a trap.

Twisted cursed PERSONS!! 😏😉👌🏾😂😂. 🙌🏾🙌🏾🙌🏾 Source!! 🙌🏾🙌🏾 Ancestors!!

While I understand why people hated the star child so much most people I’ve asked why it upset them so much they usually say “ so bro a fucking kid is the leader of the reapers are you kidding me?” The star child isn’t ACTUALLY a child I feel like a lot of people misunderstand this. The intelligence aka the star child is just taking the form of a child that Shepard has a connection to, the “child” isn’t its true form we never see its “true” form. Don’t know why this confused so much of the fanbase lol I’m not saying that I thought the intelligence was a satisfying antagonist I would’ve preferred what BioWare writers have confirmed in interviews that a reaper queen was the original idea for the leader of the reapers but they changed it late in the games production to the star child.

I'm still traumatized from andromeda and will never recover.

May sound crazy but I actually support their "policy". Galaxy needs the Reapers. The Harvest is necessary. Of course, the Harvest is horrible thing but it's the only thing that saved entire Galaxy from dying for countless times. And everyone we know - Humans, Krogan, Turians, Asari and others - *EXIST THANKS TO THE REAPERS* Without their intervention humanity would possibly never met their dawn but even if they would... that would be a existence under foot of some superior space conquerors, like Protheans. There would be no such things as uniqueness and freedom. Reapers do nothing wrong. They "renew" the Galaxy by eradicating ones so others could evolve without being conquered, destroyed or brainwashed or enslaved or whatever. Of course, nothing fun when they appear and say "It's time". A few would want to die just because they say so. But if you look at bigger picture... besides, they actually preserve the life. Each Reaper is a civilisation.

Can you look at Matrix Sentinels

27:58 Don't think I missed you using the M-920 Cain you filthy casual. All jokes aside 2 shot-ing ending boss is never not funny.

Well good thing that the reapers are now gone right… right?

29:30 nothing important was lost that day

I really loved the Reapers as antagonists, as characters. ME3's color coded ending was very disappointing for such a fascinating fusion of angel and alien, of religion and science. I never thought of Reapers in the context of the Christian Resurrection, but it makes a lot of sense!

Good thing the Reapers don’t make the Mass relays use the IFF system during the invasion. Resistance would be completely futile if you can’t retreat

I can take them out. 😎