Under a cut for spoilers.
I wasn’t really as excited as I used to be for Omega, so it took me a few days to watch a playthrough of it. Carrie-Anne Moss sounded like she’d rather have been anywhere else, as usual, so I guess at least her performance was consistent. I eventually came to terms with Nyreen’s appearance (mostly I was mollified by the existence of metal plating on the back of her neck—the implication that female turians were protected against Palaven’s sun’s radiation was the biggest requirement from me), mysterious cloak boobs aside, though I found her death underwhelming and unnecessary.
The adjutants likewise were a letdown; I watched two playthroughs, one with an engineer Femshep and another with (I’m guessing) a soldier Manshep with the former being the more skilled player, and they both just mowed right through the adjutants. Considering they were built up as these terrifying creatures that in their original incarnation broke the game’s physics, having them go down more easily than brutes was quite a letdown. It also makes Nyreen’s fear of them seem ridiculous. Even when they attacked the last holdouts in front of Afterlife, we didn’t see them transform their victims like Nyreen described—all they did was nom a batarian and then lumber around menacingly. Banshees are way scarier than these guys.
Petrovsky was a pretty unimpressive villain, too. I guess he might have made a bigger impression had I read the comics/novels, but considering I’m not that much of a masochist, I was left with what we got in the DLC, which wasn’t much. It’s equally meh whether or not you let Aria kill him, since he didn’t give me any reason to feel one way or another about him. He was a cipher, and that’s pretty much all he could be since he was only the personification of Cerberus’s presence in Omega. This was also the last piece in convincing me Cerberus’s existence in the ME universe as introduced in ME2 was completely pointless as far as both plot and gameplay purposes are concerned. They’re shoehorned into a plot that doesn’t need them and are only good for differently-textured cannon fodder. Yeah, I should’ve seen that sooner, but I guess I was holding out hope that there was some reason for their existence as they were presented in ME2 instead of being a rogue black ops Alliance outfit.
As far as Nyreen and Aria’s shared past, I’m not really sure how I feel about it. I’m really skeptical of Aria maintaining a meaningful relationship during her rule of Omega. Before she took over, I could see, but that would have been before Nyreen’s grandparents were even born. After, I could see her using Nyreen as a fuckbuddy and being amused/touched by her reverence for Aria, but not someone Aria would trust enough to share secrets of Omega’s ins and outs. It just seems sloppy and out of character for someone who’s supposed to be cunning enough to rule an asteroid full of outlaws for centuries without getting backstabbed.
Also, dat auto-dialogue.