How to recruit Legion early in Mass Effect 2

Note: I should have titled this to appear as a guide. Some of you may know this, but I know some of you don’t. If you want to add something I missed or to clarify a specific detail, go right ahead!

This is potential spoilers so if (for some reason) you’ve not beaten Mass Effect 2, be warned! Alright so for the longest time I wanted to recruit Legion early than the very end in Mass Effect 2, but didn’t see any way to do it due to his recruitment being locked behind a (supposed) late game story mission. That is not the case however!

I’m not sure how common of knowledge this is but here is how to recruit Legion early.

Also, this is primarily for console seeing as how console commands can be used to break the game and recruit him way way early on PC.

Legion is not recruitable prior the Horizon encounter, or the first linear story mission after you start recruiting your team. But after the horizon mission there are a few ways to speed up the story mission encounter without having to recruit anyone, and I’ll come back to why avoiding the recruiting is important later. You know those goofy side missions where you land on a random planet and do some random things? They are the key to this. You need to find 3-4 of these, and you need to buy the star charts from illium so you have the 3-4 available. Do some of these side missions and after a few you should get the “the illusive man wishes to speak with you, commander” announcement. Here’s the key. Go off and do the derelict collector ship mission, then go strait to the derelict reaper mission. That’s where you get the reaper IFF AND Legion as a squadmate.

This WILL trigger the abduction of your crew a few missions later, no big deal if you don’t care about loosing them.

Here’s why this is awesome. Take Legion on Tali’s recruitment mission. The unique dialogue between Legion and Reager is perfect. Take him on Tali’s loyalty mission and you’ll die laughing. He has unique dialogue for all this that normally you may not experience.

I hope people find this helpful.

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