A new piece of fan art imagines what Tali would look like without her mask in the Mass Effect games. Tali is one of three characters who appear as a companion in all installments of the original trilogy, and the image focusing on her is one of many pieces of fan art based on the Mass Effect character.
The Mass Effect Trilogy is arguably developer BioWare's magnum opus and, despite a few franchise hiccups, it continues to maintain a dedicated fanbase. A lot of that arguably has to do with Mass Effect's companion characters, which are easily some of the best in the entire video game medium. One of the series' most popular characters is the quarian Tali'Zorah nar Rayya.
Originally introduced in the first Mass Effect game, Tali was a member of a nomadic, space-fairing race known as the quarians. She was originally introduced to the series protagonist Shepard while the main character was searching for information on the game's first antagonist, Saren. She quickly went on to become one of the series' most popular characters and joined Shepard on their missions in all three games. Since she was introduced, fans have created their own art dedicated to Tali, which continues to be made to this day. In a recent post, Reddit user Onyrica shared their own version of Tali, which showed the character without her mask, and it appears to take inspiration from her look in Mass Effect: Legendary Edition.
Following her appearance in the first Mass Effect, Tali would become a romance option for Shepard, as did Garrus. Should the player opt not to romance either character and they both survive, they become a couple toward the end of Mass Effect 3. However, the character was not without her controversies in the third game due to her limited role within it and her infamous face reveal.
In the Mass Effect games, one of the race-defining rates of the quarians is that they cannot leave their suits due to shot immune systems. As a result, Tali's face is hidden throughout the game behind an airtight mask. Her actual face was revealed in Mass Effect 3 where she gives Shepard a picture of herself. It turned out, however, that the image was simply one pulled from Google that was lightly edited and run through a filter. Eventually the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition would fix this issue, but the initial reveal would go on to inspire numerous artists to create their own versions of Tali for nearly a decade, such as the one from Onyrica that is pictured above.
Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.