For those not aware of the games, I'll allow
TV Tropes to explain
Quote:
Mass Effect is a Space Opera multimedia franchise, originating as an RPG/Third-Person Shooter. It was developed by BioWare, which also developed Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Baldur's Gate, Jade Empire, Dragon Age, and Neverwinter Nights.
The series takes place in the late 22nd century. A few decades ago, Mars turned out to have an outpost of the franchise's Precursors, the "Protheans," which yielded up advanced technology, including "element zero," a substance that can be used to alter the mass of anything near it. By utilizing this "mass effect," mankind was able to develop fancy new technologies like personal Deflector Shields, Faster-Than-Light Travel and Artificial Gravity. Amongst the stars, humans found themselves to be just one sentient species amongst an entire panoply of civilization: the mono-gendered asari, the amphibian-descended salarians, the militant turians, the hard-to-hurt krogan, and more.
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The series makes heavy use of a large number of science fiction tropes. Nearly every aspect of the setting has been thoroughly thought out, with hefty amounts of technical, cultural, and historical background data provided by an Encyclopedia Exposita. (Amongst other things, the names of alien races are not capitalized—the way "human" isn't.) It manages to be simultaneously a reconstruction of the Space Opera, a highly plausible setting, and a Lovecraft Lite Cosmic Horror Story in the form of the Reapers.
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