5) The Reapers
BioWare cottoned on to a very simple, but often ignored, fact when it went to work on manufacturing the Reapers. That being, it had no need of contracting wildly imaginative character designers in order to create a visually distinct, not-of-this-world villain. A short dive under the surface of Earth’s own oceans more than sufficed.
God, as we’re so often reminded, may work in mysterious ways, but I have a hard time believing that any deity would willingly give life to the squid and be content with labeling it a perfect creation. It’s for good reason that the species – and all cephalopods, for that matter – reside where the human eye rarely wanders, as they’re abominations of evolution that deserve to lurk in the abyssal depths of the seven seas. It’s those eyes, they’re horrifying.
Fortunately, the sight-giving organs were occluded for Mass Effect‘s Reapers, but their form retains all the other hallmarks of our planet’s own tentacle-limbed organism, made to look infinitely more menacing by ballooning their size up by several thousand dimensions and making them synthetic, species-devouring spaceships.
On several occasions, Shepard has the gall to converse with the Milky Way’s would-be destroyers face to face. They’re a much stronger person than I, as I’d have served them the galaxy on a silver platter and awaited an afterlife devoid of their existence with anticipation.
Mass Effect 3‘s haphazard ending may have somewhat sullied the air of mystery surrounding the robotic space squid, but even so, the Reapers remain a memorable foe indeed.