Mass Effect Legendary Edition: ME2 Ep 09 – DLC: Arrival
Mandatory Mass Effect Friday returned with what looked like a simple enough plan: tackle the Arrival DLC, then use whatever time remained to clear a few of the N7 assignments waiting around the galaxy.
Arrival had other ideas. I remembered surprisingly little about the DLC, so the evening went from relaxed planetary scanning to a failed attempt at stealth, an indoctrinated research team, a Reaper countdown and a decision involving an asteroid, a mass relay and more than 300,000 Batarians.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, we also gave away an imaginary air guitar.
🌌 About the Game
Mass Effect Legendary Edition brings together the single-player content from Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, along with more than 40 pieces of DLC, including additional missions, weapons, armour and packs, remastered and optimised for modern hardware and 4K Ultra HD.
In Mass Effect 2, we are back aboard the Normandy as Commander Shepard, building a team while a much larger threat gathers in the background. Arrival pushes that threat firmly back into focus, because the Reapers are no longer simply something waiting somewhere beyond the galaxy.
🛰️ Where We Are in the Journey
The previous stream had accidentally pushed us farther through the main story than I had intended, opening up new dossiers and leaving loyalty missions, side content and N7 assignments waiting for us.
This is still a 100% playthrough, so the plan was to finish Arrival and then start clearing some of that backlog. Instead, the DLC took roughly two hours and occupied almost the entire stream. By the end, we had also picked up important loyalty missions for Mordin and Jack, while recruiting Tali and plenty of side content remained on the list.
⚠️ What Happens in This Episode
Things started calmly enough with a tour of the galaxy map, scanning planets and firing probes into anything that looked remotely profitable. Iridium was apparently breeding when nobody was looking, while element zero remained considerably more exciting. Naturally, I also managed to waste a probe almost immediately, which set the tone nicely for a mission where small mistakes would continue to have surprisingly large consequences.
The original plan was straightforward: get Arrival dealt with, then use whatever remained of the evening to clear some of the growing pile of N7 assignments. We had accidentally pushed farther through Mass Effect 2’s main story than intended during the previous stream, so there were already new dossiers, loyalty missions and other jobs waiting for attention. Arrival was supposed to be one item on that list. It very quickly became the entire list.
Chat was already busy providing distractions before Shepard even reached the mission. its_the_matty mentioned that Tell Me Why was free to keep on Steam, which sent us through a conversation about Life Is Strange, Telltale-style episodic games and the terrifying size of everyone’s gaming backlog. The Crew Motorfest, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Rogue Trader all found their way into the discussion as well, turning the galaxy-map housekeeping into the usual mixture of Mass Effect, recommendations and completely unrelated things somebody had just remembered.
There was also some retro-gaming talk after grzajabarkus arrived and mentioned being more at home with the SNES, with Super Metroid becoming the obvious point of discussion. That naturally wandered into original hardware, emulation, old consoles sitting around waiting to be used again and the backlog becoming somehow even larger than it had been five minutes earlier.
Eventually Shepard reached the Batarian facility where Dr. Amanda Kenson was being held prisoner. Arrival sends Shepard in alone, which immediately changes the feel of the mission. There is no Garrus providing covering fire, no Miranda handing out biotic assistance and nobody else available to blame when things start going wrong.
I vaguely remembered that stealth was involved.
Unfortunately, there was a slight problem.
At the end of the previous stream, I had pressed the wrong button while sorting Shepard out and effectively reset the character’s powers. It took a little while inside the prison before the growing suspicion that something was very wrong finally turned into certainty. Abilities were missing or mapped incorrectly, combat felt completely off and I eventually had to stop in the middle of the infiltration and spend the skill points again.
Responsibility was allocated through the entirely fair and impartial system known as #blame Chrissy.
Once Shepard was functioning properly again, the stealth operation still did not exactly improve. There were patrols to avoid, pipes and vents to work around, doors that were not immediately obvious and at least one section where I spent far too long trying to understand a movable block before discovering that Shepard could simply climb down.
Typical.
The mission does allow for a quieter approach, and for a while there was genuine effort being made to avoid turning the entire Batarian prison hostile. Eventually, however, the careful infiltration collapsed into gunfire and the night’s tactical doctrine was established: it’s still stealth if there’s nobody left to talk about it.
From that point on, Arrival became considerably louder.
Shields went up, Batarians went flying and flamethrower units became exactly as irritating as flamethrower units generally are when they are standing several feet away in a confined corridor. The newly restored powers helped, although I was still getting used to the controls again after the accidental reset. Weapon swapping, shield management and the occasional moment of wondering where the objective actually wanted me to go became part of the escape.
None of this stopped the 100% playthrough instincts from taking over. If there was a side room, we were checking it. If something looked lootable, we were taking it. If the galaxy was ending but there was a container sitting twenty feet in the wrong direction, the galaxy could wait for a moment.
Shepard eventually reached Kenson and got her out of captivity, but the rescue only opened the door to the real problem. Kenson’s team had been investigating evidence of the Reapers and had discovered Object Rho, a Reaper artefact hidden among the asteroids near the Alpha Relay.
According to Kenson, the artefact was counting down to the Reapers’ arrival.
The Alpha Relay was the real danger. From that relay, the Reapers could spread rapidly into the rest of the galaxy, so Kenson’s team had come up with a solution that was simple in the way only extremely dangerous plans are simple: attach massive engines to an asteroid, accelerate it towards the relay and smash the thing apart before the invasion began.
There was one rather substantial complication.
Destroying the relay would release enough energy to wipe out the entire system, including a Batarian colony containing more than 300,000 people. Kenson’s estimate put the likely death toll at around 305,000. Suddenly this was no longer just a rescue mission; Shepard was standing in the middle of a decision with consequences on a completely different scale.
Kenson’s confidence that her team had safely avoided indoctrination while working beside an active Reaper artefact did not exactly fill me with confidence either. The whole conversation had the distinct feeling of somebody explaining that everything was completely under control while standing next to an enormous machine labelled definitely not Reaper mind control.
When we finally reached Project Base, those suspicions proved fairly reasonable.
Kenson introduced Shepard to Object Rho, and the mission promptly changed direction again. The project team had been indoctrinated. Instead of trying to prevent the Reapers from arriving, they now wanted the invasion to happen. Shepard was surrounded, overwhelmed and knocked unconscious.
Nearly two days disappeared.
When Shepard finally woke up, the comfortable-looking countdown to the Reaper invasion had become something much more immediate. There was barely more than an hour remaining, and the asteroid project that had originally been sitting ready to launch had been stopped.
Now the objective was no longer deciding whether the project should happen.
It was making absolutely certain that it did.
The escape from Project Base became one of the more frantic stretches of the stream. Indoctrinated personnel filled the corridors, shields disappeared considerably faster than I would have liked and enemies kept appearing from exactly the directions game developers know you are least interested in watching. Flamethrowers punished staying exposed for too long, while a heavily armed mech later turned one fight into repeated cycles of getting shields back, losing them again, reloading and trying to create enough distance to stay alive.
Chat, meanwhile, was conducting a crisis of a completely different kind.
We were testing AIDA 2.0’s giveaway system ahead of the planned Sunday Starship Troopers: Extermination giveaway, so everyone was invited to enter an imaginary test competition. The prize was an air guitar, because apparently even fake giveaways need something worth fighting for.
garydsteel wanted the air guitar. Gary entered the giveaway. Gary won the air guitar.
This immediately resulted in completely unfounded accusations that the system was rigged.
Gary then delivered the appropriate winner’s speech, thanking his family and “all the madness” in chat for helping him reach this important moment in his career. AIDA confirmed his victory, Gary declared his love for AIDA, and the test at least proved that the system basically worked—even if there were still a few things I wanted to adjust before using it for the real giveaway.
AIDA became a conversation in her own right after kb2764, who was studying computer science, asked how she had been put together. We talked about AIDA being named after the character from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the development from the earlier version and the fact that she was running on a Raspberry Pi. That expanded into Raspberry Pi servers, network tools and other projects, because apparently discussing small computers while trying to stop an imminent Reaper invasion is simply part of the Normandy operating procedure.
Chat also kept AIDA’s Bouncy, Marry & Kill command busy. The bot produced increasingly questionable relationship arrangements between regulars, with frodolotr33 somehow becoming particularly endangered. At one point Frodo was selected for death often enough that samwisegamgeelotr concluded that Frodo was simply destined to die. This soon developed into an insurance-related plot involving Gary that probably should not be examined too closely by anyone in authority.
Back inside Project Base, Shepard managed to reactivate the asteroid project, which should have solved the immediate problem.
Kenson had other ideas.
Still completely under Reaper influence, she attempted to destroy the project through a reactor meltdown, forcing Shepard into another race through the facility to restore the cooling system. Cooling rods had to be activated while hostile personnel continued trying to stop us, and the entire sequence carried the slightly inconvenient knowledge that failure meant leaving the Alpha Relay intact for the Reapers.
The asteroid’s engines eventually came back online and the collision course was restored.
By this point Kenson was beyond reasoning with. Once Shepard interfered with the project, she could no longer hear the Reapers’ whispers and refused to leave with us. Communications were failing, warnings were repeating and the asteroid was continuing towards the relay, so there was nothing left to do except get to the shuttle and get out.
This was also the stage of the mission where, despite the impending destruction of an entire star system, I still found time to stop and rob a safe.
There was no visible countdown on screen at that particular moment, so clearly there was plenty of time.
Probably.
The final escape delivered the payoff Arrival had been building towards all evening. Shepard reached the shuttle, the asteroid struck the Alpha Relay and the resulting blast tore through the system. The relay was destroyed, the Reapers lost their immediate route into the galaxy and Shepard escaped just ahead of the destruction.
The relief did not last long.
A Reaper confrontation followed, making it very clear that destroying one route had only delayed what was coming. Shepard refused to accept the argument that resistance was pointless, but the message itself was difficult to ignore: the invasion had not been stopped permanently. Time had simply been bought.
Then Admiral Hackett appeared aboard the Normandy.
Hackett wanted to know why Commander Shepard had just destroyed an entire Batarian system and killed hundreds of thousands of people. Shepard explained that the Reapers had been only minutes from arriving and that there had been no realistic opportunity to evacuate the colony before the asteroid hit the relay.
Hackett understood why the decision had been made, but he also made it clear that understanding the decision and escaping its consequences were two very different things. Eventually Shepard would have to answer for what happened.
Arrival had taken roughly two hours and completely consumed the part of the evening originally reserved for N7 missions, so we returned to the Normandy for some final housekeeping instead. Research was checked, crew conversations were visited and two important loyalty missions moved onto the growing list for future streams.
Mordin wants Shepard to head to Tuchanka after learning that his former assistant from the genophage modification project has been captured. Jack, meanwhile, wants to return to the abandoned Cerberus facility where she was experimented on as a child and finally confront what happened there.
There is also still Tali to recruit, plenty of N7 assignments scattered around the galaxy and no shortage of side content waiting to derail whatever plan I make next Friday.
The stream also included a very generous donation from TictaqJim towards the planned Sunday Starship Troopers: Extermination giveaway, which gave the earlier AIDA test a rather more practical purpose than merely proving Gary could successfully win an invisible guitar.
So the evening that began with some peaceful planetary scanning ended with a destroyed mass relay, more than 300,000 casualties, a delayed Reaper invasion, two new loyalty missions waiting on the Normandy and an increasingly crowded mission list.
We then sent the community onward with a raid into thecozybeastie, leaving the galaxy’s remaining problems for another night.
🎬 Watch the Episode
You can see the full Arrival run, including the stealth problems, AIDA giveaway testing and the Alpha Relay decision, here:
Watch Mass Effect Legendary Edition: ME2 Ep 09 – DLC: Arrival
You can follow the whole playthrough through the Mass Effect Legendary Edition playlist and find more videos on the Dr Ravenholm YouTube channel.
If you enjoy the episode, leave a like, let me know what you thought in the comments and subscribe so you do not miss the next part of the playthrough.
🔴 Join the Adventure Live
The videos capture the gameplay, but the live streams are where things like accidental power resets, imaginary giveaways and completely unrelated Raspberry Pi conversations happen alongside it.
You can join us live on Twitch or YouTube and become part of chat while we continue working through the Mass Effect galaxy.
📡 Community & Links
There is plenty happening away from the Normandy as well. If you want to stay connected between streams, these are the places to find me and the rest of the community.
Live — Catch the next stream and see what goes wrong in real time:
Twitch | YouTube
Community — Keep the conversation going between streams:
Discord
Socials — Follow the latest updates across the wider network:
TikTok | Bluesky | Instagram | Facebook | Threads | X
Music — You can also find my music here:
Spotify | Apple Music
Support — If you would like to support the channel and what we create:
Fourthwall | Teespring | Streamlabs
More — For the other projects and work beyond the streams:
Business Centre | Download the Brochure | About Me | Blog
🎸 One Relay Down, One Air Guitar Delivered
Arrival took over the entire evening, but we ended with the Alpha Relay destroyed, the Reapers delayed and several new jobs waiting for Shepard aboard the Normandy.
Next Friday, the plan is to spend some time clearing N7 and side missions rather than immediately disappearing into another enormous story section. Whether that plan survives contact with Mass Effect remains to be seen.
— Dr Ravenholm
Discover more from Transparent-Aluminium.net
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
