The Mass Effect trilogy remains arguably the best trilogy in all of gaming. With its engrossing characters and engaging story full of different twists, it's easy to see why the series has the following it does. When Mass Effect: Andromeda - a game set after the events of the trilogy - was first released, there were bound to be a few callbacks to the Mass Effect trilogy.
While newer players may not notice these callbacks, fans that have stuck with the series since the beginning will delight in seeing these homages to the original trilogy, knowing that Mass Effect hasn't forgotten its roots or its fans.
8 Old Friends Show Up In The Codex
.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=740&dpr=1.5)
The codex provides information on the world around you that isn't directly given during gameplay. This includes different planets as well as the game's different alien species. Checking out the sections for the turians and salarians includes a neat Easter egg for trilogy fans.
The image for the turian history codex entry features none other than best comrade Garrus Vakarian while the salarian entry features the scientist salarian himself, Mordin Solus. While old characters don't show up physically, seeing them in some form was definitely a treat.
7 Tali's Voice Actress Voices A Turian
Garrus and Mordin aren't the only ones to make a small cameo. Tali's voice actress, Ash Sroka, happens to be the voice behind a turian on Eos by the name of Darket Tiervian. Darket can be met by doing the Waking up to the Future task in the game, where her family requests that she be woken early from cryo to join them.
Once she's up, she can be found in Prodromos where you can talk to her. She happens to speak just like Tali did in the Mass Effect trilogy and hearing a familiar voice was a nice and subtle callback to one of the series' best characters.
6 Liara Shows Up In Audio Logs
Liara played a major role in all three games in the Mass Effect trilogy and looks poised to do the same in the next Mass Effect. She can actually be heard in some of Alec Ryder's audio logs that he has in his office on the habitation deck of the Hyperion.
The reason Alec reached out to her was for her studies and knowledge on the Protheans who are an extinct species in the Milky Way galaxy, knowledge he might have to use in Andromeda. Though it's unknown if Alec and Liara ever met in person, Liara seems to regard him as a good friend by the way she talks.
5 Tiran Kandros Is The Cousin Of Nyreen Kandros
In Mass Effect: Andromeda, you will eventually run into Tiran Kandros who is the head of the Nexus's security as well as the commander of the APEX unit. You can talk to him on the Operations deck of the Nexus and ask a bit about his background. Here he will mention a cousin named Nyreen, as in the female turian from Mass Effect 3's Omega DLC.
Nyreen was the first female turian introduced in the series and was a gang leader on Omega. Unlike Aria T'Loak and the other gangs, she was actually honorable and seemed interested in bettering Omega by standing up to Cerberus. Both Tiran and Nyreen actually meet each other in the Mass Effect Discovery comic.
4 Knight Worked On Project Overlord From Mass Effect 2
.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=740&dpr=1.5)
Project Overlord was another Cerberus experiment gone wrong when they tried to combine the mind of a person with that of a VI as a way to control the geth and other synthetics. It backfired horribly as it nearly unleashed a dangerous A.I. on the galaxy that was thwarted by Commander Shepard.
During The Firefighters side quest in Andromeda, Pathfinder Ryder meets Knight, the leader of an anti-A.I group whose real name is Katherine Nigh. Ryder will be able to meet her on Kadara where she will tell her that she worked on the project and that her son was a candidate for it. She saw the atrocities committed during it and swore to destroy any kind of A.I, viewing it as a blight.
3 Cassandra Verner Is Conrad Verner's Brother
.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=740&dpr=1.5)
Speaking of side quests, an entertaining one from Mass Effect 1 and 2 involves a man named Conrad Verner. The guy is an utter fanboy of Commander Shepard and clearly worships the very ground they walk on.
Meanwhile, in Andromeda, Ryder can meet Cassandra Verner at the Tartarus nightclub in Kadara's slums who mentions that Conrad is her brother. Apparently obsessing over strong, military types of people runs in the family as she is a huge fangirl of Sloane Kelly.
2 A Normandy SR-2 Model And Display
.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=740&dpr=1.5)
The Normandy SR-2 is Commander Shepard's ship in Mass Effect 2 and 3 and is perhaps one of gaming's best spaceships. Many great memories were made by people on that ship so it only makes sense there is a callback to it of some kind to it. In fact, there are two callbacks to it in Andromeda.
The first is that it can be collected as a model ship that can be found in Alec Ryder's office on the Hyperion and then displayed in Ryder's room on the Tempest. The other callback is that it is one of the ships on display in the Pathfinder's HQ section of the Nexus's operation deck once that area opens up.
1 Pathfinder Ryder Discovers The Reapers
Once Ryder finds all the memory triggers and progresses through the game until their sibling wakes up, they will be able to view their father's last memory which reveals the truth behind the Andromeda Initiative. It was all a subtle mass evacuation from the Milky Way to escape the Reapers.
The Reapers were the trilogy's main over-arching villains and were essentially giant mechs that wiped out all advanced life in the galaxy in intervals of 50,000 years. The Andromeda Galaxy is safe from them which is why they tried to bring people there in the first place. Additional audio logs show some people in the Milky Way galaxy facing the Reapers, including one last message from Liara. It seemingly comes right before the final assault on Earth in Mass Effect 3, where she urges Alec to remember them should they fail at stopping the Reapers.