12. EDI

The Enhanced Defense Intelligence that runs Commander Shepard’s ship becomes a full-fledged squadmate in Mass Effect 3, and to this day I’m conflicted on how BioWare chose to approach this. In Mass Effect 2, she’s portrayed as a spherical hologram that can show up in different places on the ship. She’s deadpan but witty, and it’s clear that despite being an artificial intelligence, she has inclinations toward humanity that shine through her code. However, at the tail end of Mass Effect 2, she is unshackled from her programming and is able to eventually inhabit a robotic body in the third game.

EDI is still one of the most sharply written, funny, and introspective characters in the franchise, and in a vacuum, her attempting to learn what it means to be a person without any previous framework in this universe to look to is fascinating. But it’s hard to feel like all of this introspection is happening for her when so much of her story ends up feeling tied to a possible human/robot relationship with Joker, the Normandy’s pilot.

The relationship feels uneven, as it wildly swings from Joker being excited about a sexy robot on the ship to trying to get at the heart of how much these two people care about one another. I get what they were going for, and it can help feed into some late-game decisions you can make, but overall, it just feels like swaths of EDI’s existence as a squadmate were reverse-engineered for that relationship. I still love her, though. When she stands on her own, she’s an incredible character.