The Mass Effect Trilogy Squadmates, Ranked From Worst To Best

The Mass Effect Trilogy Squadmates, Ranked From Worst To Best

Last week marked N7 Day, which means Mass Effect fans broke out the fan art and BioWare vaguely gestured at the upcoming fifth game. The studio said this year would be a quiet one, as the team just released Dragon Age: The Veilguard earlier in the week. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still discuss the series and reflect on its history while BioWare forges its future. Somehow, we’ve never done a ranking of the Mass Effect squadmates. While I would love to throw the Mass Effect: Andromeda characters into the mix, those intergalactic explorers have only gotten one game that was clearly building up to a continuation we haven’t gotten. So, rather than pit characters with unfinished stories against people with complete, messy, trilogy-long arcs, we’ll just rank the original squad from the first three games. Grab your omni-tool and let’s dive in.

2 / 21

Jacob Taylor is a tragic example of a character being mishandled at nearly every turn. On the surface, a man who has been disenfranchised by the usual channels resorting to joining an extremist group because no one else will listen can be a compelling basis for a character. It sure sounds buck wild to look back on, but it’s pretty in line with the 24-esque, Bush-era politics of the franchise. But from then on, Jacob becomes an inconsistently written, often carelessly handled party member.

He goes back and forth between whether or not he trusts protagonist Commander Shepard, stops being so personable, and then his personal story with his father ends up falling into some weird Black stereotypes that are hard to swallow. It only gets worse in Mass Effect 3 as BioWare decided to use some untoward methods to make Jacob the only love interest who leaves Shepard in the final game, and it’s just a big ol’ bummer to look back on.

3 / 21

James Vega exists as Mass Effect 3’s new player insert. He’s a younger soldier who gets dragged into Shepard’s crew more or less by accident and seems pretty ignorant of the ways of the extended galactic society. So, he asks a lot of questions that a newbie might ask about why the Krogans and Turians hate each other and is pretty much a fish out of water for most of the game.

He can be endearing and heartfelt when he wants to be, and his friendship with shuttle pilot Steve Cortez is delightful. But he also flirts with female Shepard and the relationship systems in Mass Effect 3 never really let you put out that fire and also maintain a decent friendship with him. He feels like one final relic of a moment in Mass Effect that probably wouldn’t fly these days, and as the only character on this list who is only around for one game, he has the least amount of time to make a bigger impression.

4 / 21

Both Zaeed and Kasumi suffer as Mass Effect 2’s DLC squadmates who get demonstrably less material to work with across their appearances in the last two games. But damn, bounty hunter Zaeed Masaani is truly elevated by the late Robin Sachs’ portrayal of the gruff, no-nonsense but also kinda sassy old man. Zaeed is an absolutely unhinged gun for hire who is more than willing to put people in the line of fire for his own goals, while also putting his own life on the line for a big enough paycheck. He’s a series of enjoyable contradictions, as he’s one of the most terrifying people on the ship who’s frequently in some of the funniest scenes in the trilogy. It’s just a shame that he feels so underutilized, but that’s what happens when only a fraction of the player base is going to ever see him.

5 / 21

Speaking of underutilized characters, I have a soft spot for the original Mass Effect’s human squadmates, but I think only one gets their due (we’ll get to him later). Ashley Williams, meanwhile, starts off as a really strong concept for a party member that could truly grow across the span of a trilogy. She begins as a military brat turned proper soldier herself, though her family’s history is a bit spotty. Because of her family’s relationship with other alien races, she comes in with a skepticism that she’s only comfortable voicing to Shepard because they’re also human, and, in theory, seeing a human character reckon with their past prejudiced beliefs makes for a compelling trilogy-long arc.

The trouble is, Mass Effect 3 never truly gets there. You have a game with party members who are giving their lives as they subvert past prejudiced beliefs, but Ashley can’t so much as muster a sentence about how she used to be racist but has come to love and care for aliens she once judged. Sorry, girl. You’re another example of the Mass Effect trilogy not quite delivering on its promises.

6 / 21

As previously mentioned, Kasumi Goto suffers quite a bit as a DLC character like Zaeed. But she’s also a big personality that makes the most of her limited screen time. The thief sometimes feels a little out of place in Mass Effect 2’s squad of soldiers, biotics, and tech wizards, but she also facilitates one of the game’s coolest missions in the form of an elaborate heist. She’s one of the most unabashedly fun characters on the roster and manages to be consistently funny and charming without devolving into something quippy and groan-worthy. But again, she’s just not utilized as much because people had to pay to have her around.

7 / 21

The Asari Justicar Samara is one of the most tragic figures in Mass Effect. She spends hundreds of years searching the galaxy for her daughter Morinth, who was born with a genetic condition that would kill anyone she mated with. As she hunts down her daughter, believing her to be an irredeemable killer drawn to the ecstasy she gets from manipulating and then discarding her prey, she also finds respect and pride for how her daughter fought for her freedom. It’s a multifaceted issue, of course, but Samara is bound by a Justicar code that demands she go to the ends of the galaxy to find and kill her own daughter.

It’s only natural that she would still feel all the nuance in between her code. There’s something compelling about a character who is more or less “trapped” within the boundaries of a code they’ve sworn an oath to, but what was most compelling to me was how, in Mass Effect 3, she decided she would choose death over following it if it meant she must kill the last of her daughters afflicted by the same condition. Though there are ways to stop it, I am still enamored by how even after two games of expressing her devotion to the Justicar code, the woman underneath it still shines through.

8 / 21

I love my reptilian son. Urdnot Grunt can sometimes feel like the “Wrex replacement,” as the first Krogan squadmate of the trilogy could die in the original Mass Effect and was thus banished from being a party member again until Mass Effect 3’s Citadel DLC. But despite them both being hulking tanks in battle, Grunt and Wrex are still demonstrably different characters with separate places in Krogan culture. Grunt is a tank-bred Krogan, which is a loaded position to be in when your people have a 1/1000 birth rate due to a manufactured sterility plague. Grunt’s whole deal is trying to find a place in a world that he was made to be part of, rather than something he was naturally able to integrate into.

There are Krogan who hope to deny him a place among their people, and others who advocate for him as he stumbles his way through understanding. He sometimes feels like a bull in a china shop, so having people who create the space for him to find himself is a heartwarming thing in a galaxy full of unfriendliness. By the time he makes a great sacrifice in Mass Effect 3, I was sobbing at the loss of my giant alien child, but then I was fist-bumping when he emerged from the wreckage covered and blood and looking for something to eat. His scene in Citadel is also one of the best ones in the game. Grunt rules.

9 / 21

The Enhanced Defense Intelligence that runs Commander Shepard’s ship becomes a full-fledged squadmate in Mass Effect 3, and to this day I’m conflicted on how BioWare chose to approach this. In Mass Effect 2, she’s portrayed as a spherical hologram that can show up in different places on the ship. She’s deadpan but witty, and it’s clear that despite being an artificial intelligence, she has inclinations toward humanity that shine through her code. However, at the tail end of Mass Effect 2, she is unshackled from her programming and is able to eventually inhabit a robotic body in the third game.

EDI is still one of the most sharply written, funny, and introspective characters in the franchise, and in a vacuum, her attempting to learn what it means to be a person without any previous framework in this universe to look to is fascinating. But it’s hard to feel like all of this introspection is happening for her when so much of her story ends up feeling tied to a possible human/robot relationship with Joker, the Normandy’s pilot.

The relationship feels uneven, as it wildly swings from Joker being excited about a sexy robot on the ship to trying to get at the heart of how much these two people care about one another. I get what they were going for, and it can help feed into some late-game decisions you can make, but overall, it just feels like swaths of EDI’s existence as a squadmate were reverse-engineered for that relationship. I still love her, though. When she stands on her own, she’s an incredible character.

10 / 21

While Zaeed and Kasumi felt underserved as DLC, Mass Effect 3 pulled out all the stops for Javik, the Prothean soldier awoken from cryo sleep. To be honest, it’s still baffling that he was a DLC character considering how instrumental Javik is to the world of Mass Effect. The Protheans are one of the last-known living species to have fought the invading Reapers that Shepard is fighting in the trilogy, and what happened to them is one of the biggest mysteries that unravels through each game.

Having Javik be an optional character you had to pay extra money for is baffling, but he’s noetheless one of the most compelling, meaningfully disappointing squadmates the series has to offer. Asari squadmate Liara has spent her life studying the Protheans her entire life, and to find the last living member of an entire race just to learn he’s kind of an asshole who views everyone around him as primitive cavemen hurts.

But Javik also has some of the most interesting writing in the trilogy. He’s an echo of a civilization long gone, but even if he dares to hope he can help stop a galaxy-wide invasion, what would his life even look like after? He has no contemporaries, the galaxy is looking to him as a source of wisdom, and all he has to give them are war stories and fearmongering. Even as the Milky Way falls around him, Javik is somehow, even if he doesn’t intend to be, a symbol of hope for the war effort. If one person still survives, the war is not lost.

11 / 21

Ashley Williams’ biggest problem is it doesn’t feel like she has an arc. Meanwhile, Kaidan Alenko feels like he’s one of the most underappreciated characters probably in all of BioWare’s portfolio. In a ship of mostly aliens, having a human character dealing with human problems seems unremarkable to some. But Kaidan’s story offers a clear window into the struggles humanity has been dealing with since it joined the galactic community.

Kaidan is a victim of humans’ insatiable need to be at the forefront of everything, having been subjected to abusive biotic boot camps as he was forced to undergo rigorous training to hone his telekinetic powers. By the time he reaches adulthood, he fears his powers, has frequent headaches, and has become a bit of a wallflower. He goes on to become a biotics teacher in the human military, controls his power, and becomes the second human Spectre. It’s an understated story of not letting your past define your future. But what about when that future seems tenuous? What if you’ve finally gotten your life together and then the world is ending around you? Kaidan’s story isn’t the most theatrical or dramatic, but it is one of the most grounded in a series defined by galactic-scale wars and life-changing choices.

Kaidan is the lead of a rom-com, running to Shepard as the Reapers rain hellfire down on everything they’ve known and loved. When the two meet one last time on Earth at the end of Mass Effect 3, he recounts his life and the things he’s done and thanks Shepard for the life he’s lived, hoping that there will still be more of it when the dust settles.

12 / 21

Jack and Kaidan are two interesting mirror images of one another. Both are victims of the abuses put on biotics to achieve some imagined version of human superiority, but at the hands of two different institutions. Jack’s mistreatment at the hands of Cerberus led her down a much different path. She had a lot of lives before she joined the Normandy. She was a pirate, a mercenary, and had even joined a cult. Her tattoos all tell the stories of the lives she’s lived, and that elaborate tapestry paints a picture of who she is.

Jack starts out as a foul-mouthed punk who puts up walls, but as Shepard and the crew chip away at her armor, she learns to trust a team of close-knit people once more. When she shows up in Mass Effect 3, she’s a changed woman, mostly. No longer a loner, she’s dedicating her time to building a better future for biotic kids so no one has to go through what she has. Some might take issue with the hokey way she has a swear jar, but I think it’s sweet to see how she is having to adapt to polite society after spending most of her life throwing middle fingers at it. It’s funny!

13 / 21

Miranda Lawson is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. Unlike universally beloved characters like Garrus or Tali, The Illusive Man’s right-hand woman starts off cold, dismissive of the player, and generally mad that you’re even there. As her icy heart defrosts, you come to learn that Miranda’s cold exterior is a wall built up after a lifetime of everyone who’s ever cared about her always having ulterior motives. It’s not easy to put your trust in anyone when every connection you’ve made has come with a catch. That’s why she initially had only invested emotional energy into her distant relationship with her sister, largely facilitated anonymously as she saved her from her manipulative father’s clutches as a baby.

Miranda, much like Jack, is a concise summation of Mass Effect 2’s team-building focus, starting off operating on her own interests, then slowly but surely learning to trust the team she works with after believing for so long she could only rely on herself. What puts her a notch above Jack in my eyes is her role in Mass Effect 3. Miranda is a bit enigmatic in the third game, mostly working in the shadows as Shepard handles the Reapers. Having shed her Cerberus ties, Miranda seeks to atone for helping the extremist group reach the status it has in disrupting the war effort, but as she looks into her father’s plans and how they tie to Cerberus, she does so alone. Part of this is because Miranda still feels like she has to handle things on her own, but there’s something potent about someone who was once a radical unlearning their views, realizing that they can’t just integrate back into society and still doing the right thing anyway.

Miranda’s story can end tragically, as most characters in the Mass Effect trilogy can, and there’s a gutting sadness to that ending if that’s where your choices take you, but if she makes it to the ending, there’s something kind of beautiful about someone having gone to the dark side and reaching the opposite end.

14 / 21

In all my years of having deep talks with folks about the Mass Effect series, I don’t think I’ve found a character more surprisingly divisive than Thane Krios. The Drell assassin is introduced in Mass Effect 2 as a religious, terminally ill, absentee father, who could have easily been an edgelord stereotype. He can often be frustrating to talk to, as he uses his being a tool for someone else as a justification for his actions as an assassin, which feels like a sorry attempt at renouncing all personal responsibility. But Shepard has killed plenty of people without monetary incentive, so who are they to judge?

Thane’s conversations center around the morality of killing, but while he can be a bit immovable on the subject, the guy isn’t immune to the introspection that a suicide mission prompts. As he attempts to reconcile his relationship with his son Kolyat, Thane finds meaning in his last days.

His final day is one of the most memorable in the trilogy, as he saves a prominent politician from the worst BioWare villain ever, Lieutenant Bastard Kai Leng, but is mortally wounded in the process. Thane’s final moments, in which he, having repaired his relationship with his son, dies in a Citadel hospital, still has me in a chokehold 12 years later. He, Kolyat, and Shepard (if you choose) recite a prayer. Initially, you do this under the impression that it is for Thane’s comfort in his moments of passing, but when Shepard asks about the contents of the prayer, Kolyat clarifies that the prayer wasn’t for Thane, it was for the commander. That shit still hits, get the fuck out of here.

15 / 21

This will no doubt be an upset, and I’d say, “Hear me out,” but I know plenty of people will not do that. To be clear: Garrus is one of the best characters in the Mass Effect series, but he is also one of the most uneven characters in the trilogy.

To get the good out of the way first, the Turian vigilante is one of the most charming, memorable, and likable characters BioWare’s ever put into a video game. By the time we reach Mass Effect 3, he is Shepard’s best bro, a reliable shoulder to rest your head on, and his romance with FemShep is full of both goofy and heartfelt scenes that are some of the best BioWare’s ever written. However, the hill I will die on is that it took Garrus a while to become that character everyone remembers. In the original Mass Effect, he’s got the least going on of any of the party members, and it’s really about nudging him to be one flavor of cop or the other.

Mass Effect 2 certainly fills him out more as a defined character and you can see glimpses of the charming hero we all know and love, though it pretty much repeats this arc by having him become a vigilante that you can Paragon or Renegade him into one conclusion. On top of this, his romance is undeniably the most shallow one in Mass Effect 2, mostly just being a bunch of innuendos and talk of “blowing off steam” when the stakes are high enough to have an emotionally vulnerable moment with your long-time squadmate.

Once we reach Mass Effect 3, there’s not a shade of either variation and he kinda funnels into one version of himself, but then this guy gets some of Mass Effect 3’s best work and a lovely romance. By the time you have the “no Shepard without Vakarian” conversation at the end, it’s a stunning, earned culmination of a trilogy-long friendship. Every Mass Effect game feels like it’s almost getting there, so by the time Mass Effect 3 really nailed the incredible character everyone remembers him to be, most people feel a brotherhood with him. But that meandering repetition of the first two games keeps him from ascending to the higher rankings for me.

Yes, yes, here are some tomatoes to throw at me.

16 / 21

The Geth are initially presented to you as a hive mind of murderous machines hellbent on the destruction of organics. After spending nearly two full games with everyone and their mother telling you to fear these synthetics, by the time Legion, a geth with Shepard’s N7 armor welded onto its chest, shows up, you’re right to be skeptical of its supposed good intentions.

But Legion is a window into one of the people affected by one of the greatest crimes committed in the Mass Effect universe. He is the first person to tell you the Geth’s side of the story in their uprising on Rannoch, the home planet of their Quarian creators. They were once curious gardeners and laborers who just wanted to know more about the world they were created to live in, and that was terrifying enough for their creators to try to wipe them out. After the Geth successfully drove their oppressors from their homeworld, Legion is an avatar of what’s left: an entire synthetic race of people just as complicated and divided as the rest of us.

But he also believes in a brighter future for his people, so much so that he sacrifices himself in Mass Effect 3 to elevate the entire race to a new state of intelligence. Legion dies as he lived: hoping that the Geth could find their place in the galaxy alongside not only their creators but the rest of the galactic community.

17 / 21

Liara T’Soni is borderline the Mass Effect series’ mascot at this point, being the only throughline of every game in the series, including the upcoming fifth one. Part of this is because she is the only character other than James who is guaranteed to survive the events of the trilogy as long as you get a good ending in Mass Effect 3. Because of this, the asari researcher turned galaxy’s most powerful information broker can be a divisive figure for some fans who might consider her to be a “writer’s pet” who’s been given preferential treatment over the years. That’s all valid, but also, Liara’s constant presence in the Mass Effect universe makes her one of the most well-rounded heroes on the Normandy.

She starts off as an awkward introvert who has her world rocked twice over in the course of the first game. By the time you meet her again in Mass Effect 2, she’s notably hardened and angry at the world, and there’s almost no trace of the naive girl you once knew. Unpacking the various traumas she’s endured to become this person takes its own DLC, and Lair of the Shadow Broker puts her transformation into perspective while bringing the woman we knew back to the surface.

In Mass Effect 3, she is Shepard’s rock while being hit with as many life-altering blows and revelations as ever. But she remains vigilant, strong-willed, and unyielding, even after facing hardship that would break a weaker person. Liara wanted to discover worlds that had been lost to history and ended up being at the center of history herself. By the time we see her in the next game, she’ll likely be hundreds of years older and wiser. I’m eager to hear the stories she’ll have to tell.

18 / 21

Tali is one of the two constants in your party throughout the Mass Effect trilogy, and she absolutely makes the most of all that time. Tali starts out as a nomad who just happens to stumble into the beginnings of a galactic invasion, bringing evidence of the incoming Reaper invasion to Shepard. Throughout the rest of the first game, she’s mostly a representative of the Quarian people, as she’s the only person of the suit-wearing alien race to appear through Shepard’s first adventure. You get a sense that she’s a very important person to her people, but it’s not until Mass Effect 2 that it becomes clear that she’s in the thick of some of the Quarian’s vitriolic, divided politics.

Tali finds herself caught between everything she’s ever been taught about her people’s history, all her conflicted feelings of resentment and admiration for her father, and the pressures of being a notable figure within her community that gives her a sense of responsibility to her people. She’s the girl who feels pressure from every angle while she’s struggling to even find out who she is and what she wants in the process.

In Mass Effect 3, Tali has reached the other side of a suicide mission and knows who she is, knows the truth of what happened between the Quarians and the Geth, and is ready to try and usher her people into a new era, should you be able to facilitate that through your choices, at least. In a series where characters like Ashley start out with prejudiced beliefs and more or less just drop them like an old toy they got bored of playing with, Tali is one of Mass Effect’s most effective characters in terms of watching someone slowly but surely suck out the poison of everything they’ve been taught. She’s a changed woman by the end of Mass Effect 3, and the ending in which she’s able to see Quarians and Geth living side by side in Rannoch is one of the most rewarding conclusions in the trilogy.

19 / 21

It still haunts me that there are large swaths of Mass Effect players who never saw Urdnot Wrex fighting Reaper forces on his home planet of Tuchanka and proudly proclaiming “I am Urdnot Wrex, and this is my planet!” Wrex is the first possible casualty of Shepard’s war against the Reapers (RIP to Jenkins, who dies no matter what), and whether he lives or dies depends on whether you’re able to talk him down from a standoff.

When you first meet him, Wrex is a jaded bounty hunter who has lost all hope for the Krogan race. But when it becomes clear that there’s a possible cure for his people’s sterility on the planet Virmire, a sudden jolt of inspiration strikes. Is there a future for the Krogan that doesn’t end in wasting your life as a mercenary sent out to die, or in thousands of stillbirths? But this cure is being made at a facility that is a threat to the galaxy’s continued existence, so it’s gotta get blown up along with the rest of it.

Convincing a man who lost all hope for his people that you must destroy a key to their survival is no easy task, and if you can’t get him to stand down, he will meet the wrong end of a bullet. But if you can convince him, he appears throughout the rest of the trilogy as a radical clan leader seeking to usher the Krogan into a new era. Wrex becomes an advocate for the Krogan people where he was once expecting them to burn themselves out to extinction. Without him to help guide his people, the Krogan could have gone down a very different, destructive path.

Luckily, I never see that future because I am a good friend who he will listen to. The rest of y’all stay safe, though.

20 / 21

The phrase “going out in the blaze of glory” is cliche, but Mordin Solus should get that shit trademarked. The Salarian scientist is exuberant, prone to singing, and also a brilliant doctor with an immense knowledge of different alien biology. But all that whimsical charm is in direct contrast with his actions and beliefs. Mordin is one of the people responsible for modifying the Krogan sterility plague when it seemed the people were adapting to it, and as horrific as that sounds, he’s pretty steadfast in believing that it was the right call no matter how much you poke and prod at his calculus. He mourns dead Krogan who gave their lives trying to help scientists find a cure for the sickness that has haunted their people, all while knowing his work pushed them to this point. It’s not until Mass Effect 3 that the cracks start to show. Mordin becomes a double agent for the Salarian government and Krogan clans, leaking intel about a potential cure his people have been working on, and helping to create and distribute the cure to the Krogan people.

But what sells Mordin beyond his charismatic nature and satisfying about-face is how well BioWare executes the end of his story. The cure must be sent through the Krogan homeworld’s atmosphere at the top of a facility that is crumbling down. Mordin’s fate here is determined by key choices you made over the course of the trilogy. Mordin is ready to die for the cause, and if he heads up to the top of the building, he will sing a Mass Effectified version of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” to calm himself as he dispenses the cure and a new hope to the Krogan race. BioWare mercilessly smothers the final moments of the song under an explosion, and it’s a devastating yet hopeful moment that the trilogy had been building toward.

Conversely, if you choose to sabotage the cure for more Salarian support in the war, Mordin’s story can end with a much more sinister conclusion. Mordin’s guilt for his crimes can be too great to persuade him, as he sees a future for the Krogan race that he helped delay. If he’s unwilling to back down, Shepard can shoot him in the back, and he won’t make it to the console in time. If your choices throughout the trilogy have undermined the growth of the Krogan race, Mordin can be convinced to help you sabotage the cure and disappear to keep the lie consistent, leaving with hope that maybe there might be a way for the Krogans to not repeat their past violence. All of these conclusions are in keeping with the multifaceted character that is Mordin Solus. He’s a calculated person who can see people as statistics, but he also wants to believe that there is a better way than the path he once chose.

Had to be him. Someone else might’ve gotten it wrong.

21 / 21

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