I recently played The Arrival and part of its storyline confused me:
It said that the Reapers would arrive through the Alpha relay, which they would use to move throughout the galaxy as it was a particularly powerful relay. OK, fine, that makes sense, destroy the thing and slow them down.
But isn't one of the central plot points of Mass Effect 1 the fact that:
the Citadel itself is one giant relay and acts as the Reapers' entrance to the galaxy?
The two plot points seem in direct contradiction. Here are my questions:
If they can get to the Citadel directly, why the fuss about the Alpha relay? If they need the Alpha relay to get to the Citadel, shouldn't we have known about this earlier?!
Unless I'm really misremembering things, it seems a little sloppy on Bioware's writers.
Best Answer
In Mass Effect, Sovereign, the Reaper that remained resident in the galaxy to montior biological life, was to have sent a signal to the Keepers on the Citadel to activate the Citadel relay and bring the rest of the Reapers back from beyond the edge of the galaxy. The Protheans modified the Keepers to ignore this signal, thus requiring Sovereign to have to assault the Citadel and dock with it in order to manually activate the relay. Shepard destroys Sovereign and buys some time for the Galaxy. My interpretation of these events was if Sovereign had been successful in activating the Citadel relay then the Reapers would have entered the galaxy at that point in time through that relay, destroying the seat of government and mopping up the galaxy from that point in space outwards.