>looking for a new ARPG
>ask store guy if the game is Diablo 2 or PoE
>he doesn't understand
>i pull out illustrated diagram explaining what is Diablo 2 and what is PoE
>he laughs and says "it's a good game sir"
>buy game
>it's PoE

The scoring system being so simple squanders most of the fun out of the game, and the challenges being just as basic (with them usually being stuff you'll have already done getting the REP necessary to get the right of doing the challenge in the first place!) almost buries a game that controls great and looks and sounds amazing, amazing enough to make the game a pleasuring experience all the way through.
Sadly the feeling of wasted potential is what I'll remember most about BRC.

LET ME SKIP THE FUCKING SPRAY PAINT ANIMATION

some thoughts after back-to-back pro and pro no merchant runs:

pro is a true goldilocks difficulty on a second playthrough: not really overwhelming but at the same time it holds you accountable for more shit than standard is willing to. even with a maxed-out health bar leon is down for the count after just a few hits. no merchant (NM) was more grueling - 99 deaths for the former, 180 for the latter. it's a little awkward that to some extent NM is the more "pure" experience because it's also not necessarily an experience that plays up the game's strengths.

in my remake review, I harped upon the oft-repeated herd->stagger->melee routine that forms the backbone of re4's combat design to make a distinction between its systemic aims versus those of its remake. it's sometimes easy when writing critique to approach a method like this from the perspective that this is the "proper" way to play the game or that I always played the game this way. it's not really true; the other crux of re4 is its wonderful weapon balance (between the primary weapon classes anyway, within each class the balance is meh lol), and that involves shredding through ganados with the striker or scoring headful gibs on bolt shooters from afar with the rifle. going on a rampage as a one-man army as the troops against you get bigger and bigger defines re4. these concepts are essential to understanding why the original still stands apart from its legions of descendents, especially in a world where gears introduced CoD-esque spray-and-pray into the genre.

so in NM where you get a petite little attache case, the starting handgun, and the starting shotgun, suddenly you actually are playing herd->stagger->melee 24/7(with the shotty as a panic button, but still). is that good? maybe? given that actually shooting enemies to death is incredibly wasteful given your limited reserves, you really get to experience the full range of enemy AI dynamics and states without the allure of headsplatting virtually everyone you come across. this is especially the case with the modern balance, where the game cannot help but load you up with less-than-useful pesetas as drops at every opportunity. killing anyone who isn't directly in your way is honestly a liability.

here are my observed states for enemies:
- normal. they're chasing after you and using whatever their canned weapon-specific animation is.
- full head stagger. you've shot them cleanly in the face, and they clutch their face and reel backwards, giving you the opportunity to do the KICK melee action.
- half head stagger. you've shot them nearish to the face, and they grab their arm and then stare at you incredulously.
- soft stagger. you've shot them in the torso or otherwise enough times that they take a second for an "oof" before getting back to dealing with you.
- full knee stagger. you've shot them cleanly in the knee, and they drop to a stunned kneel, giving you the opportunity to do the SUPLEX melee action (in castle and island anyway, but village should be a relative blip in comparison length-wise).
- half knee stagger. you've shot them in the thigh or upper calf, and they bend over to cradle their knee.
- topple. you've shot them in the feet and they crumple. especially funny when they're running and their momentum sends them sliding across the ground.

herding enemies is nice, but more often than not you're on your back foot and need to just get rid of shit on the screen ASAP to take a breather and reload (especially with only 10 rounds for the handgun and a paltry six shotty shells). obviously the shotgun is the true "clear everything" tool thanks to the game generously making all enemy types completely fly away after taking a round to the chest, but ammo is not a guarantee, and reckless use results in uncomfortable situations for when you really need those shells. the enemies mostly naturally herd for you, but getting that AoE KICK isn't necessarily a freebie. an important note on that full head stagger is "reel backwards," where an enemy at the head of an approaching group will fall to their back lines upon a stagger. this creates an interesting question: how do you ensure you can actually get the melee without getting opportunity attacked along the way?

overly eager enemies with some distance in front of their comrades are an obvious easy target, but groups of enemies are rarely this fortuitously designed. toppling the second line is clean, but then those on the ground don't get the effects of the melee, meaning that their timer for standing up ends uncomfortably close to when you get out of your KICK animation. soft staggers are too short to get any real effect out of other than "get the fuck away from me," and half staggers of either variety are somewhat inconsistent given that you sorta have to fuck up a full stagger to get them. this makes the most effective option popping one to the dome of your target and then the domes of anyone in the way rather quickly in a game with no aim sens option and some heavily caffinated aim sway on 60 FPS versions (tho you can fix this on PC). none of these are necessarily the "right" option, and often making a decision between how to deal with a group comes down to numbers, what weapons they're carrying, your health, and the size of the room you're in. very few games can claim to have these actually distinct ranges of options that herd wrangling in this game does, and that's all with just handgun bullets and a context-sensitive I-frame-laden sweep. tho probably about 60% of the time I just staggered one guy and then charged in like a dumbass; success rate for that is decent but not amazing LOL.

later in the game the prevalence of long-range bolt snipers makes toppling them from afar a safe option given that you have no rifle, and for most enemies getting a SUPLEX and squishing their brain against the tarmac is essential to actually killing them; your cool-looking roundhouse doesn't actually deal that much damage after all. knife play also is vital no matter where in the game you're at but especially during low ammo sections, and while it's incredibly useful to knife-loop sequestered enemies thanks to its ability to create full staggers, it's also relatively inconsistent thanks to its wonky hitboxes and the seeming invulnerability of certain enemies to its effects. very occasionally I would slash an enemy multiple times in the face to no effect... I think some enemies might have a bit of super armor against it? not sure.

in my remake review, I made the hypothetical assertion (as in I don't believe it but I posited it rhetorically to set up some other points) that re4 linearizes its gameplay via the above method, and I think if anything the above is conclusive proof that that's not true. my justification in that review against it being linear was in applying it to different situations thanks to the game's amazing scenario construction. oddly enough, pro and NM felt like inverses on why it wasn't linear. for pro it was my original justification, where the herd->stagger->melee loop was much simpler thanks to significantly more powerful tools and the ability to take out enemies who didn't fit into that paradigm very easily. through that, each scenario can twist the way that you approach your herding differently thanks to the extraneous variables and physical level design. for NM, I ended up just recreating the door problem as often as possible, flattening each scenario. however, the above stagger chart became ever important, as actually killing enemies with the herd->stagger->melee loop often took two or three full cycles to actually subdue anything.

that door issue is the first reason I felt like NM wasn't always the best way to experience the game. the water room and its lovely flank-encouraging crosswalk layout was quickly dispatched by just booking it to the downstairs switch room and then luring every single enemy inside in a single-file line. anywhere with a ladder turned into a game of slicing ascending ganados, and the triple turret sequence left me to get inside one of the huts as soon as possible to avoid the line of fire. this is not to say the game doesn't have plenty of clever ways to circumvent your efforts to linearize it, such as dropping enemies from above in the water room or having the helicopter destroy your cover in the triple turret room, but in a challenge where damage output is unfortunately low overall, these strategies are a lot more consistent than any others that rely on the occasionally inconsistent enemy spawns and behavior.

the bigger issue, however, is all the fucking setpieces that obviously weren't designed around your lack of firepower or long-range options. the hive... oh my god what a wretched area. literally an RNG check to make sure you don't get grabbed and turned around and full combo'd by a pack of the bugs. that section was in the middle of a long stretch where I had next to no ammo thanks to babysitting the rocket launcher to salazar; doing knife-only minecarts up until the chainsaw men hop in was surreal (though admittedly badass). regenerators and iron maidens can actually be knife looped as well by shooting their legs out and slicing their back after baiting out their downed attack, which totally removes their agency and makes these sections a slog. perhaps not as boring as knifing U3 to death though, and I still think the remake was right to chop him out entirely. a lot of other sections turned into routed running, such as the first warzone room before the triple turret area, the invisible bugs in the prison, the clock tower descent, and the second area of 5-1 with the flammable barrel cart at the back. this is not to say you couldn't theoretically do an all-kill run of this game with minimal equipment, but the feasibility of this seems like just way too much trial-and-error for me at the moment; my methods here (with 519 enemies killed, not a pacifist run by any means but only about half the enemies total) still warranted me so many deaths and more than a couple checkpoint retries on top of that. besides, as mentioned earlier, the carnage is the fun of this game. running around, eh, not so much.

I think in terms of challenge runs a small attache case run is probably the nicest step up from professional. you're still limited in terms of weapons, but you at least can respond to herds more aggressively with less of a need to utilize chokepoints. you also get access to striker, which would clean up some really annoying shit (aka the hive) while still making crowd control with it costly thanks to limited ammo. you'd also get access to rocket launchers to take care of otherwise-tedious bosses like U3 and verdugo with the added penalty of carrying one requiring you to throw away half of your inventory in the process. full-size attache case has the cool square-based space system, but it's more of a novelty than something actually pressing in terms of mechanics; most of the time I just let it fill on its own and make minor adjustments when I need to make room for things. keeping it small forces actual interesting decisions about what resources are important, while giving access to the merchant smooths out all of the shit that makes NM a pain or boring.

also now that we don't have to band together in support of this game's clunkiness against "tank controls suck" people, I can finally voice some complaints... for starters, re5's tank control layout clears this by a long shot, no question. great inventory and quick swap system, smooth item pickups (and they give you i-frames?!?), and delicious analog tank control. re4's tank controls absolutely purr on gcn thanks to the octagonal gate on the analog stick making it clear where each of the inputs lies, but using a modern stick just feels weird. especially since the HD version of this game puts quick quarter turn on the left stick? what the fuck? I switched to d-pad where this isn't an issue + where digital controls feel a lot more comfy anyway. quick quarter turn is so genius tho, takes this game's controls from "no bro, I swear it creates corridors of play like a light gun game! and it disincentivizes running away!" to something legitimately better than dual analog in terms of extreme control over the angle you're facing and the ability to quick aim in multiple directions. feels like driving stick shift. camera tends to squeeze in on leon too tightly when close to a wall tho, and I really wish there was shoulder-switching for a couple specific situations (the room where the rocket guys shoot from the painting in the wall comes to mind). also fuck putting all the contextual shit on square/A/whatever? and as mentioned earlier, would love an aim sens option.