The Protheans were an ancient civilization that vanished more than 50,000 years prior to the events of Mass Effect, and for the longest time, they’re just a legend. Their biggest fans are scholars and the Hanar, a bizarre species of jellyfish-like creatures. They’re everything and nothing, talked about by just about everyone you meet, yet no one can really tell you who they were or what they looked like. Related: Mass Effect's New Box Art Creator Proves The Trilogy Has No Bad Squadmatesīeginning with the earliest moments in the first Mass Effect, you’re introduced to what feels like some ghostly omnipotent alien race, the Protheans.
However, a couple of extra storylines add so much depth to understanding the space opera’s rich lore that they can’t be missed - like From Ashes and Leviathan. While some of them are beloved for their own special reasons, like the Citadel DLC, they aren’t really critical to the Mass Effect universe at large. Mass Effect is loaded with plenty of additional content that can be a little hard to parse - some of which had no business being DLC to begin with, but I digress. Back in 2012, when the first Mass Effect trilogy bundle dropped, I struggled with prioritizing which DLC to buy and when to play it.
