Mass Effect/Characters

Saren Arterius is a fictional character within the series of Mass Effect video games. He serves as the primary adversary of the first game.

According to the character biography posted by BioWare, Saren Arterius is a former turian Spectre known for 'getting results' by any means necessary. More often than not, this meant he killed everyone and everything in range -- the target, any witnesses, and innocent bystanders as well. In the novel Mass Effect: Revelation, he is seen torturing and killing his victims mercilessly, rarely having any regards for sapient life or the lives of anyone in his way from getting the job done, even deliberately killing innocent bystanders and witnesses (after he had extracted key information from them.) This seething hatred for humans is speculated by other characters in the novel to stem from the loss of his brother in the First Contact War.

After the events described in the novel, and before the start of the first Mass Effect video game, Saren takes command of an army of geth through the use of a mysterious artifact known as The Sovereign, an ancient ship that supposedly predates the Protheans. With a machine army at his command, he uses them to both do his bidding and oppose the efforts and actions of the player across the story of the Mass Effect video game. One of his main goals at first appears to be to unleash the genocidal Artificial Intelligence upon the galaxy once again to take revenge on humanity for killing his brother during the First Contact War, and on the Council for interceding on humanity's behalf in a war that the turians were winning. In reality, he is merely assisting Sovereign in bringing the rest of the Reapers into the galaxy to prove that organics are worth enslaving, rather than exterminating.

Of note is that Saren does not consider his methods harsh. In the novel, he brutally tortures a batarian until, having exhausted the information resources he provided, Saren snaps his neck while he is unconsious, considering himself to be merciful and that he isn't "a monster."

In the game it is revealed that Saren had known about the Reaper threat and had independently tried to discover a means to stop it. It is unknown how Saren found Sovereign, however, Sovereign slowly began to manipulate Saren through subtle subliminal messages into helping him into bringing back the Reaper threat. During the Geth invasion of the Citadel, Saren uses the Prothean Conduit to gain access to the Citadel to allow Sovereign to activate the Citadel Mass Relay. The player can then either attempt to kill Saren before he can activate the relay, or he shows Saren that he is being controlled by Sovereign, at which he apologizes for his actions and commits suicide. Either way, Shepard later has one of his crew members shoot Saren a final time in the head to make sure he's dead, but he is still revived and controlled by Sovereign, transforming him into a geth-like synthetic who engages Shepard and his crew in one final battle. Upon defeating the Sovereign-manipulated Saren, Sovereign itself loses its defenses, allowing the Citadel Fleet and the Alliance Navy to destroy it.