D.A. fan is back for an ME1 Text Only 'Let's Play' (page 51)

The issue is (again) that the ME writers do not care a whit about consistency in their lore, unfortunately. At the time of ME3 (in 2012) the catalyst's disregard for other galaxies was not really a problem since the lore at that point implied that there was no technology to cross the dark space between galaxies. Not sure how much you guys read the codex but just in case, there it tells you that Mass Effect drives build up charge in the engine's core over time. If that EM charge is not discharged regularly, static discharges into the hull fo the ship would cook the crew alive and eventually destroy the ship itself. Therefore, all ships in the ME universe (reapers included) need to discharge their drives regularly within large magnetic fields (ideally a gas giant but smaller planets with a magnetic field work in a pinch as well). In ME1, this made long distance FTL travel dangerous or even impossible, especially in uncharted territory, where you might no necessarily know if you'll find a discharge point in time. This is why for example Ilos and the Conduit were not discovered earlier, because the Mu Relay was lost and no one could find a conventional FTL route there. It's also why the galaxy is colonized in clusters around the mass relays and 99% of it remain unexplored. So in ME1, Mass Relays were pretty much mandatory for long distance travel. In ME2/3, this was already weakened somewhat, as it is implied a couple of times that mass relays are now more of a convenience (albeit a big one) where travel times take mere hours instead of weeks but FTL travel would in principle be possible within the milky way. For example, people were surprised when in the Arrival DLC, the reapers could just fly into the milky way from dark space. This kinda rendered Sovereign's mission in ME1 much less important. During ME1, it is assumed that the reapers were really stuck in dark space and could only get out via the Citadel relay (as they would be too far within dark space to get to the MW without drive discharge). In ME2 one prominent fan theory was that they built the Human Reaper, to take up Sovereign's mission. It was only in Arrival when we found out they could just fly in conventionally  anyway. But ok, maybe they just were not hibernating as far out in dark space as we first thought (which kinda makes sense from the reaper's perspective, just relying on the Citadel relay would have been a huge risk).

So even in ME3, travel between galaxies was impossible, due to the the vastness of dark space and the impossibility to discharge one's FTL drive. Without relays, you culd only venture into dark space for half the distance of your maximum charge. However, now, with the new lore for Andromeda,we have the ODSY drive system, which basically allows unlimited FTL travel and thus, we can traverse between galaxies. Even worse, this technology already exists in 2185, so Shepard should have known about it by the time s/he confronts the catalyst. This makes the question of what happens in other galaxies that don't have the reapers immediately he most relevant question to ask the catalyst ever. Obviously we cannot fault the ME3 writers for not including something that wasn't part of the lore at the time but this example goes to show very well the problem I have with this series. It's that the writers do not seem to see their universe as a whole interconnected space-time-continuum but rather as a bunch of cool stories, that get added techno babble whenever they need it. This issue happened over and over again in multiple aspects of the Mass Effect lore and it is IMO the one biggest flaw in an otherwise superb peace of interactive storytelling.