The Mass Effect series is packed full of clever and intriguing villains who will often manipulate specific systems and individuals to their will in order to help them carry out their underlying mission. These characters can be considered "Lawful Evil", since while they do technically work within a set of rules or laws, their motives for doing so tend to be very sinister and dangerous to the wider universe.
This makes it very hard for them to be apprehended, since they don't seem to be acting too out of the ordinary, but as the games progress, it becomes very clear that there's much more to these villains than initially meets the eye. Considering that there are numerous different species and groups within the Mass Effect universe, if someone has a pretty dark plan that they want to put into action, it's actually pretty easy for them to do so by aligning themselves with like-minded thinkers, even though they are still truly dangerous individuals at heart.
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5 Kai Leng
Kai Leng Will Cut Down Anyone Who Gets In The Way Of The Illusive Man's Vision For The Future
Kai Leng becomes an incredibly annoying and persistent thorn in Shepard's side for much of Mass Effect 3, constantly trying to stop him in his tracks and continuously messing up his plans at several points throughout the story. However, Kai Leng doesn't simply do this out of spite or for a bit of fun, it's actually because he's an adamant follower of the Illusive Man and his pro-human ideology, a belief that has warped his mind to look down on every other species in the galaxy.
Although Shepard may be a human himself, his idea of fighting against the Reapers is in stark contrast to The Illusive Man, who instead, seeks to control them. Kai Leng never shows any signs of turning his back on his master, which does ultimately make him the perfect companion, since he never strays away from his orders, but the fact that he still mercilessly kills hundreds of civilians just to help The Illusive Man turn his vision of the future into a reality makes him a truly dangerous antagonist.
4 Donnel Udina
Udina Constantly Tried To Thwart Shepard's Plans For His Own Political Gain
At numerous points during the Mass Effect trilogy, Udina will desperately try to prove that Shepard's belief in the threat of the Reapers coming down to destroy the galaxy is nothing more than delusion. As a result, he becomes a huge thorn in the commander's side, and the reason for him doing this is literally only to maintain his own position as a respected human diplomat within the Council.
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A prime example of this is when Shepard, who's hot on the trail of Saren, has his ship locked down by the Council to prevent him from proceeding with his mission. Udina immediately agrees with the Council on this decision purely because he knows it will look good on his resume, and could even bump him up to a higher position. He even goes as far as to recommend stripping Shepard of his Spectre status, just to look good in front of the Council. Although there are implications that Udina is acting this way to protect humanity's interests, there are also many hints dropped that this is a cover for his own selfish motivations too.
3 Saren Arterius
Saren Used His Position As A Spectre To Avoid Any Suspicion Into His Actions Behind The Scenes
It's made very clear from the first mission on Eden Prime in Mass Effect that Saren was going to play the role of the big bad major villain of the game, but because he is already a Spectre, it allowed him to manipulate the Council in order to protect his own interests, and his ongoing indoctrination. Whenever Shepard tries to apprehend Saren and prove his unlawful nature to the Council, they dismiss these claims due to Saren's high-ranking position, and because of his past history as a fierce and dependable soldier.
After Saren became aware of the Reaper's existence, he decided that it would be best to try and reason with them, or at least, become their loyal servants, since he saw fighting them as being a hopeless venture. Saren used his position of influence and power to try and squash any attempts of the other species preparing their resistance against the Reapers, and almost succeeded in calling in the Reaper fleet prematurely by activating the Citadel at the end of the game.
2 The Illusive Man
Despite His Pro-Human Ideology, The Illusive Man Still Commits A Plethora Of Horrific Acts Against His Own Species
Even though The Illusive Man follows a very strict pro-human ideology, the way he goes about promoting his own species can be very inhumane and downright horrific at times. One major example of this is through the Overlord DLC mission for Mass Effect 2 where it is revealed that, in an attempt to successfully merge an AI with a human, it resulted in a young man by the name of David Archer being tortured against his will, with the whole experiment resulting in the deaths of hundreds of scientists and volunteers.
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Rather than trying to rectify this, The Illusive Man instead tried to scrub the whole fiasco completely off the radar to avoid any affiliation or blame. Another example of this is Jack's tragic backstory where she was held in a Cerberus research facility on Pragia which was entirely centered around brutal experimentation for the sake of trying to create the ultimate human biotic, regardless of how many people die in the process. As a result, he ends up killing thousands of members of the species that he's claiming to protect. His ideology of putting humanity first may be pretty reasonable considering how they are often looked down upon in the Mass Effect universe, but his methods for doing so are incredibly cruel, sick, and twisted, making him a despicable character as a result.
1 The Reapers
In Order To Continue The Cycle Of Rebirth, The Reapers Afflict Pain And Suffering On A Galactic Scale
The ever mysterious synthetic-organic machines known as the Reapers are mentioned a lot throughout the Mass Effect series, and although they initially seem driven to destroy the universe for little to no reason, it soon becomes clear that there is at least some method to their actions. The Reapers' goal is to continuously eradicate organic life before they can create synthetic machines that would inevitably kill them off anyway, so while they are technically "Protecting" organics from being killed by their creations, the way the Reapers go about actually doing this is by inflicting death and conflict on a galactic scale.
As is seen very clearly when they arrive on Earth at the beginning of Mass Effect 3, the Reapers have no care in the world about how they go about destroying the universe, and they show no remorse when doing so either. Although they are acting in this way for a specific reason, and ultimately see it as the right thing to do, the sheer amount of pain and terror that the Reapers inflict, just out of the belief that organics and synthetics will never find a way to co-operate, still makes them incredibly evil in the eyes of many fans.
