THE CITADEL: The Majestic Reaper Trap

[@christopherhall5361]

Space explorers: "Wow, it's like this was left for us." Harbinger: "YES!"

[@Defender117]

I need more from the Mass Effect universe.

[@UncleMikeDrop]

This is how the Borg should've operated in the Trek universe.

[@zico739]

No.

[@andreproudian7032]

Well that's a scary thought. But the borg rely on harvesting a diverse range of cultures. Leaving a trap like the citadel means it influences them to only evolve around certain paths instead of that diverse range. Just my two cents anyway.

[@cjvaye99]

my favorite scifi or even video game setting. its absolutely majestic. the fact that even with the limitations of the 360 and ps3 it still managed to keep a certain mystique show how amazing it is. Because looking back at it now it's not really that special and for being the capital and heart of the milky way seemed comparatively empty. and still even with minimalistic design it got the job done. they certainly fixed the problems in the first 2 games in ME3 especially with the citadel DLC but we still barely got to see any of the citadel in it's full glory. I feel like if they wanted to they could easily have a game set solely on the citadel and nobody would complain.

[@gotellbossc4t-vb9hz]

I loved the first Mass Effect game. History files, back story and the design of the whole game really impressed me.

[@puppetmasterey]

I love how, through out the entire game, the council don't wanna belive the Reapers exist. Even going as far as classifying the sovereign attack.

[@johnvelez3005]

What can you expect from a government????

[@puppetmasterey]

@@johnvelez3005 allot of things actually

[@AndrewJamesWilliams]

The Citadel like the Mass Relays themselves really is the perfect honey trap for organic races. Though even knowing that you have to admit that they are truly beautiful constructions to look at and some of the most incredible things to come out of Mass Effect's well thought out, rich universe. One I hope that Bioware eventually returns to.

[@laggrenade863]

I hope not. Better to let sleeping dogs lie.

[@carlossabogal2970]

@MinecraftPro15 Yes, but from what I understand the bases of its technology are the same as in the rest of the galaxy and its technology is based on quarian technology

[@permeus2nd]

It’s pretty much a giant Venus flytrap. The mass effect arc is probably the one to get the farthest in defeating the reapers even if they fail, and would probably have the best chance of setting up the next cycle to flat out beat the reapers because of the Andromeda initiative.

[@WinonaSioux]

I've watched this video several times over the past few months, and I still chuckle every time at "a mild case of the explosions." 😅😂

[@ahcokris]

you mean every civilised life form in this universe that stumbled upon the citadel said: hey, here's a free base of unknown origin that we can totally use as power base. so let's move our entire government here. it can't possibly be a trap, right? what could possibly go wrong???

[@adamstringer7092]

Its central location and all of the available amenities make it too good to pass up.

[@cjvaye99]

yeah it looks like the concept of "too good to be true " is universal and transcends not only all races but generations of races too.

[@vizthex]

never played Mass Effect, but this sounds cool af except for the whole "dying every 50 millennia" part.

[@maxrander0101]

oh god you had to end with the mass effect 1 elevator music and scene please no the nightmares they alone gave me will never end

[@kawaiku]

I would love to have a game based solely on the Asari discovering the citadel and exploring it for the first time, establishing themselves there and trying to unravel the mystery behind its existence until the Salarians show up.

[@jannegrey]

Will you cover Special Tactics and Reconnaissance branch of the Citadel? C-sec is also great.

[@CertifiablyIngame]

Yup, current plan is C-Sec then Spectres.

[@quwykxz]

Thank you for this video; the ME Citadel is amazing! In my opinion, it's probably the single most interesting construction in all of sci-fi, both very familiar and extremely mysterious at the same time.

[@gallendugall8913]

I miss the elevator rides.

[@cjvaye99]

that music. Which you can also hear on the radio stations during the BDTS dlc where it is completely out of place.

[@markfergerson2145]

The most sensible thing to do is to destroy the Citadel but since it's indestructible, the next best thing is to use it against the Reapers- they necessarily made it the biggest bottleneck to their invasion fleets. Equip it with all of the most effective weapons every race knows about (NOT connected to the Citadel itself in any way, see the reboot of BSG) and when the Reapers start their next invasion, whack them as they come through. Either that or figure out how to build a gate within the Citadel, again not connected, that links straight to a black hole.

[@TheMhalpern]

best part is the layout in the council room of the tower

[@John.S92]

Well, the "catalyst"/AI referred to in video, was not within the Citadel itself, but was the amassed sentience from every Reaper structure in existance, from the very first one (the capital and smaller one's, basically the one's seen in-game to be talking to Shepard), though the Reapers could be light-years apart, they could have maintained the AI's full capacity by means of quantum entanglement (no I know it's not a real capability, but within the game universe it is), it's even hinted within the game that the reapers is one mind, and slightly less hinted to that every reaper works to make up one full AI known as "the catalyst", each Capital-sized reaper is "a nation of it's own", a sovereign. Lastly, as for the catalyst, that seems basically just to be a key of sorts, one that works to allow for direct communication with the reaper mind, one that the AI itself must have created to allow for a solution to the problem it was made to deal with, as the ME-trilogy story ends with the player chosen solution, the citadel arms extending to full width and the choice(logically being a message) being sent from the citadel using what I assume the catalyst being a massive transceiver or battery, message, sent out though every Mass Relay in the entire network throughout all of the galaxy, leaving the citadel as well as all the mass relays damaged as a result of the massive amount of energy passed though it/them. A hole in that assumption is though that the relays could handle gigatons of ships jumping from and to relays just fine, maybe the relays were meant to inflict damage upon itself when that solution message went through it, or the relays worked of sorts to widening the width of "beam", as every relay beamed out the message in the 3 dimensions of space.

[@Buddy74656]

Nicely done Rick. I love the Mass Effect world.

[@isaacthelastn7687]

Imagine this thing flying through our earth's sky? Would be freaky but astonishing at the same time

[@brianfuller5868]

Thanks for the Mass Effect .

[@barrybend7189]

Please do a video on the Zentradi from SDF Macross.

[@feralprocessor9853]

Straight away, Corrupt Spectre Saren's Large red Hologram.

[@feralprocessor9853]

Right off the bat, three of the Coucilors.

[@jasonleslie203]

I would have loved to see the citidels relays activate

[@spartansmsu93noob54]

I love the mass effect trilogy lore too bad that a story this thoroughly fleshed out isn't done by triple AAA companies anymore...mostly indie devs now.

[@TheHarmfulOrb]

4:27 Doesn't sound so bad!

[@karlsmith2570]

Great video Perhaps maybe you do some biography videos on the specific characters that appeared in the Mass Effect games??

[@smickleburgh]

Great video! Very interesting.

[@jamesalexander1441]

Played this series countless times, I never knew how fucking *dark* the Serpent Nebula was until now...... Jesus...

[@haku8135]

The Leviathans were wiped out roughly a BILLION years prior to ME1. With that as our upper limit, assuming 50 thousand years is a good average, we can get a rough estimate on the ballpark numbers for how many cycles had been completed up to ME1. The number comes out to 20 THOUSAND. So the reapers have created probably tens of thousands of Reapers of varying sizes by the time they arrive in the games. Yeah, you can understand why they'd need a fucking super weapon. And i say tens of thousands because they don't just make ONE reaper per cycle, they seem to make one Sovereign sized reaper out of the most prominent species like humans or protheans, but smaller reapers are made from the other races. So just from this cycle alone they'd have at LEAST one huge reaper from harvesting humans, that assumes they ONLY target humans for this because Humanity killed Sovereign btw they could very well decide to use the council races as all Sovereign class reapers, which would be FOUR massive reapers. Then they get another smaller reaper from the Batarians, the quarians, the krogan, the hanar, probably the drell too, the volus, you get the picture they'd get a LOT of reapers out of just one cycle. So it's at LEAST 20 thousand Sovereign class reapers the galactic community had to deal with, and potentially TENS OF THOUSANDS more smaller ones.

[@cjvaye99]

It makes me think of something. How in all that time did a race not discover the citadel just as the reapers were done wrapping up their cycle of genocide. Like they would just be sweeping up all the bodies and destruction to hide all yrace of that cycle and a new species travels through the relay and catches the reapers doing it lol. What would happen? Would the reapers just take them or do they get a pass? Lmao

[@haku8135]

@@cjvaye99 that wouldn't happen. They would still control all the relays through the citadel. They wouldn't let any other races explore until they were done.

[@cjvaye99]

@@haku8135 of course you're right. when sovereign send out the signal to the keepers to bring the reapers through to the citadel from dark space they also take complete control of the relay network and shut then down. my mistake. The protheans really helped this cycle by messing up that signal.

[@feralprocessor9853]

Very Impervious Shell 🐚

[@kamenwaticlients]

Such a great science fiction

[@michealdodson6482]

this is when biowere was cool

[@Gripoltanate3981]

Will you do a video covering the mass effect story ending?

[@frabe81118]

i always wondered that if the citadel is reaper tech why wasn't everyone on it indoctrinated?

[@lutenantsweedpertasa]

I can think of a few reasons, they didn’t put in indoctrination tech so the species that discover the Citadel continue to develop the right tech level, they didn’t put indoctrination tech in because people notice the feeling of indoctrination even if they don’t know they’re being indoctrinated, the Protheans disabled the indoctrination signal when they disabled the Keeper signal.

[@cjvaye99]

Calling it reaper tech is kind of misleading. Yes the reapers built it just like they build the mass relays. But they didn't build them to be reapers or for indoctrination. They built them as tools to be used and nothing more.

[@linguisticallyoversight8685]

it's actually said in the games that children that are small enough can get into the vents and find their way into keeper tunnels wouldn't the volus be able to do the same thing as their small but they would also have the advantage of being intelligent cunning and some of them could even have biotics why did the citadel council never send in a group of volus to investigate the inner workings of the citadel it doesn't make sense

[@christopherfleetwood5252]

Nah, too round

[@jasonleslie203]

Its also said that its very dangerous. Some get sucked into space, protein vats,etc.

[@cjvaye99]

that's one of my only complaints about this trilogy. You NEVER see children. The closest we get is Grunt and I guess Tali in ME1. I don't count that the slideshow baby krogan or that annoying little punk that went and got himself blown up as that could of totally been a figment of Shepard's imagination.

[@nygreenguy]

What race did he say discovered the citadel before the protheans? I couldn't understand/spell what he said.

[@CertifiablyIngame]

Inusannon

[@LordProteus]

I hope you do more setting lore videos on other series', like Star Trek, Star Wars, etc...

[@CertifiablyIngame]

Done some already for Trek, but yeah. It's a slow project though.

[@dragonofdragons1720]

*IT'S A TRAP!*

[@cosmogoblin]

In my first playthrough, I didn't like the Citadel. The obviously-not-a-statue mass relay in the Presidium, the nobody-knows-anything-about Keepers ... it stank of a trap. But what did we get? Silence from Shepard, a couple of vague comments on the relay from Alenko and Vakarian, and Chorban the wild-eyed salarian running surface scans on the keepers. Thousands of years with millions of residents, and nobody curious - except me, the player. Conclusion? The Citadel is, itself, a Reaper. It exudes a low-level indoctrination field, discouraging curiosity about the origin of the Citadel. This conclusion is further supported by the Catalyst in ME3. And I propose the mass relays are also Reapers; nobody (except a few Protheans) managed to reverse-engineer them either. And in the pre-Extended Cut ending, the signal that destroyed the Reapers also destroyed the mass relays.

[@maxrander0101]

too bad we broke the cycle and made the reapers join us in a new synth life and are forcing them to rebuild all the damage they did

[@maxrander0101]

the station explodes in any ending due to the massive amount of power that is sent through it

[@nerowulfee9210]

Citadel is only trap that isn`t gay.