Mass Effect 2 is celebrating its 14-year anniversary today, January 26, 2024. Below, we look back at one of its strangest aspects, and how it set up a broader subplot that went almost entirely unexplored.

The Suicide Mission of Mass Effect 2 is one of the all-time great climaxes of a video game. After tens of hours building relationships with a crew of characters you've recruited from all over the galaxy, you take them into a final battle where you have to make use of their specific skills and any missteps can result in the deaths of any one of them (or potentially even all of them, and you). But less remarked upon is the climax of the climax--a boss battle with a giant robot called a Reaper.

Mass Effect introduced a Reaper at the end of the first game, cementing what a massive threat these things were. What the characters first thought was a colossal, incredibly powerful spaceship turned out to be a colossal, artificially intelligent creature, bent on the destruction of all sentient life in the galaxy--and it was only one of a whole species. It was so big that it took an entire fleet of spacecraft to defeat it. And now we were facing one head-on, just Commander Shepard and the two crewmembers you brought with you and whatever guns you had on hand.