

She'd spent two years mourning Shepard and lived daily with the guilt of what she'd done because she refused to let them go. When Shepard first contacted Liara on Illium, the Asari greeted them with a kiss, but her romantic inclinations stopped there for a while. Not only did she retrieve Shepard's body after the Collectors attacked the Normandy SR-1, but she then turned it over to Cerberus in the hopes they would revive them. Liara wasn't a squadmate in the second game, but she did play an integral role in Shepard's mission to take down the Collectors. Related: How Mass Effect Changed Video Games Forever The Virgin Asari This suggests that though BioWare would never outright tell their players who they should romance, they seemed to consider Liara to be Shepard's canonical soulmate. While the first game's intimate scenes were similar between all three romanceable characters, Liara's was actually longer and featured more nudity than the others. Liara's romance with Shepard is still considered one of the most popular romances in the original trilogy, perhaps because she is the very first alien species the player character can get intimate with, regardless of their gender. Garrus and Tali'Zorah didn't become romance options until the second game, but Liara T'Soni was into Shepard right from the start.

Across the Mass Effect trilogy, Commander Shepard has plenty of opportunities to find love, but maintaining that relationship between games isn't always easy. A Shepard who romanced Kaidan Alenko or Ashley Williams in ME1 would be considered a cheater if they romantically entangled themselves with someone else in ME2, even though Kaidan and Ash aren't romance options in the second game.
