zombies
black crows
big snakes
crack toads
puzzles
statues
ambush
trap doors
push that
push this
shoot that
shoot this
reload
next clip
cock back
shoot quick

Famed doctor of medicine, psychoanalyst, student of freud, and eventually, imprisoned fraudster wilhelm reich described a four beat pleasure process. this pleasure process consists of physical tension -> energetic charge -> energetic discharge -> physical relaxation. the obvious example that we're all thinking of is the orgasm the scatter-shot featured here in bangai-o. upon launching into a level your whole body yearns for the 400 missile eruption... bio electricity springs forth from its own inner source, flooding your entire system, causing it to pulsate - expanding and contracting with the flow of your potent energy. this charge builds and builds until it demands relief: the inner production of energy grows too great. a wave of missiles fires at you. at the moment before annihilation you fire off the scatter-shot, finally discharging this mass of built up energy toward the outside. pleasure washes over you - this discharge liberates you from the dammed-up tension. the system pauses in preparation and anticipation for the awesome task of rendering 68000 sprites at once, each with their own accompanying screams of ecstasy. the tv screen begins radiating a healing cosmic orgone energy, relieving you of injuries both physical and psychic. a pure light replaces your consciousness and you are finally Awake. relaxation felt as a bodily state. 'enoughness'. the missiles serve as the fertilizing agent, swimming instinctively towards the numerous receptive eggs enemies. then another wave of missiles is fired at you...

bangai-o is this pleasure process looped continuously and in novel ways. it comes with all these new weird membranes that stimulate the player in new weird ways. it's instinctive and animalistic - just look out for the closest pink projectiles(!) and achieve the big (bangai) O. it's addicting. if I waited too long between levels I'd get irritable and I'd have a hard time sleeping on days that I didn't play it. speaking of - the narrative elements are rather dreamlike as well, characters come back from the dead, dialogue is often nonsensical, and we even get the jungian archetypes of the father and mother. the bangai-o itself represents the unity between the anima (mami - or maybe even mommy... hmmm much to consider...) and the animus (riki). fighting your progenitor over and over again in battles of nuclear fertility - that's robert anton wilson's anal emotional territorial circuit too. what a psychosexual experience this game is. more psychology and sex than pretty much any game I'd say.

not-as-famed thinker of the counter-cultural movement, occultist, and psychologist christopher s. hyatt re-labelled reich's pleasure process as THE UNIVERSAL CYCLE OF JOY. he said that each thing capable of completing the cycle can be considered a success. this process orients us towards life and away from the drive towards destruction, away from the need to return to the womb. it moves us forward (he states that most people are stuck in one of the three stages preceding relaxation, not you or me though, we made it). stanislav grof may have even argued that it releases us from the trauma of birth. if completion of this process does in fact equate to success then bangai-o is the most successful game of all time.

Roxy conjures images of decay and desolation in her sophomore work, which explores our symbiosis with the pests that inhabit our homes. our fear of pests lies within seeing those that we do not accept trespassing on our property; a desperate clinging to impose a totalizing will in our domain. to that end, Roxy heightens the terror by marking her own body as the point of infestation, where unknown alien entities lurk under the surface and bubble up at times of strife and anger. with everything physical in the world dominated by insects and parasites, the game paints the descent of the psyche into the world of the roach.

definitely appealed to me based on my current living situation renting a townhouse littered with mouse droppings and roaches. insects I can mostly handle, other than a little incident last week where I bit into a 7-11 cookie that had been sitting on the shelf in a folded-over bag, noticed it tasted off, and then looked at its wrapper that had been crawling with ants. promptly screamed and hurled up into the trash can. also have had to both kill multiple living mice caught in traps or dispose of corpses of ones that have died in our cabinets. no matter how many openings I plug with steel wool (which ends up getting into your clothes and scratching you while you're out and about) there always seems to be new ways for them to get in. I'm definitely getting a cat when I move out.

also great work by conecvltist on the music. enjoyed Concrete Hive the most thanks to its animating, hollow rhythm and the multiple layers of grimy buzzsaw pads littered on top.

maybe I'm just sour at the moment, but what was the point of this? why did we need to replace the puzzle solving and multitasking of the original with rote lock-and-key style challenges? all I did for hours on end was color matching: blue is water, yellow is electricity, red is fire, white is poison, etc. etc. etc. slowly moving around and disarming traps and then picking off enemies one by one until I could clear a path from the treasure to the ship. totally draining for me past the 10 hour mark especially when it came to the caves.

the real issue here is that pikmin 2 sidesteps many issues with the original instead of attempting legitimate improvements. combat, for example, was originally clunky and imprecise, especially on gamecube (I'm assuming the wii version is better). pikmin 2's solution is to attempt to trivialize it both by supplying the player with purples and adding the ultra-spicy and ultra-bitter sprays. for the latter there's the added annoying process of grinding berries for the sprays, which generally means keeping a leader near the berries waiting around for the pikmin to deal with cobwebs/knock off worms/harvest the fruit; a constant distraction while your other leader is doing the more interesting work. the purples as well add unintended annoyances by being both sluggish and rare, meaning that they die often and you rarely have as many as you would like. these are well-deserved drawbacks, as purples can butcher nearly any standard enemy in the game with no fuss, but losing too many and needing to fall back on your regular troops makes the return to clumsy combat all the more bitter, and it's not like mindlessly massacring hallways of enemies in caves with purples is exactly stimulating either. the day system as well is sidestepped by having the caves exist outside time. these areas totally remove time management for the player and in the process throw a lot of pikmin's natural strategizing out the window in favor of the aforementioned methodical dispersal of all noteworthy obstacles on each floor. some of these elements still exist in the main areas to the game's credit, but given that the levels have been scaled back in complexity from the original and that the day limit has been excised, it feels overly simplified. there were ways to fix this: perhaps make certain key items or enemies only show up periodically for a set of days, pushing savvy players to carefully lay out their day-to-day schedule to catch each event as it comes. that's an approach that has problems of its own, but could still attempt to realize the time management aspects inherent to the original while addressing common complaints.

the aforementioned level design changes are really indicative of the whole package here. the original game's levels felt explorable and flexible in the sense that the tools the player chose to use could vary while also having clear bounds. for example, it's not feasible on a first playthrough to tear down every breakable or bombable wall, so choices must be made via prioritization of objectives; no right answers, and it forces the player to follow their gut instincts and live with potential mistakes. the need for this planning in pikmin 2 is entirely absent. treasures in the overworld tend to be in much more obvious places, and enemy layouts are such that you're expected to clear pathways proactively rather than encouraging risky treasure-carry-paths around sleeping or slow enemies as in the first. as for gates, they all boil down to "match the element to the type of pikmin and then let them rip," and any gate that exists absolutely must be taken down if you're interested in the all treasure ending. presumably the debt repayment is meant to allow some level of player choice in how they pursue objectives, but the 10k coin threshold is so low that there's no impetus to do anything other than wander around and grab whatever is close. the caves just exacerbate the above issues, as the cramped spaces restrict freedom of movement and they are littered with cookie-cutter traps that will send you running back and forth to the starting area with different colored groups of pikmin in your wake. I could go on and on... I got tired of the caves very quickly.

controversial opinion, I know, but this one really seemed mechanically dead to me compared to the first, which already had plenty of issues on its own. perhaps improvements to the pikmin AI or controls could've smoothed things out, but adjustments are so subtle in these areas it's hard for me to give out points. that's not to say there aren't parts I like of course: the world is much more fleshed out in terms of both the denizens of hocotate and olimar's personal journal entries. his mixture of empirically-minded curiosity and existential boredom makes him much richer than he has any right to be, and the letters from home accentuate this, especially with their corner-cutting boss and the just desserts he gets while destitute and on the run from debt collectors. there are also still puzzles here and there I did legitimately enjoy, such as the block-weighing ones that required careful allocation of pikmin to each platform in order to elevate olimar to a higher platform. it's on a strong core, but I think it really misses the mark in trying to improve on the weaknesses of the original. I couldn't even push myself to get all treasures, as I'm writing this after finishing dream den and have no intention of doing much clean-up past that. that final boss was excrutiatingly boring... they really need to put HP indicators on each of his weapons, and killing pikmin with the water cannon off-screen is such a low blow. the fight music was terribly repetitive as well... I could continue on this tangent but I think it's basically clear this game didn't align with me like I was hoping it would after the much more unapproachable first game.

“The reunion at hand may bring joy. It may bring fear. But let us embrace whatever it brings.”

As early as that original E3 2015 trailer, Final Fantasy VII Remake labored to clarify its mission statement: “We’re about to take some artistic liberties, please bear with us.” If you listen past the fluffy prose, it becomes clear that this narrator isn’t actually part of the game’s fiction: when they speak of “us” and “them,” they’re literally describing our perspective on the original game, the “silence” following in its wake, every “remembrance” since (Advent Children, Crisis Core, etc.) and the natural fervor resulting from that very announcement. As we all know by now, the final game would go on to completely defy traditional understandings of that “Remake” moniker, literalizing its meta context in the form of the “Whispers” (the plot ghosts) — it’s a “remake” in the sense that the events of the original FF7 are literally set in motion again (supposedly in some alternate timeline,) only for Cloud’s party to eventually destroy the Whispers, defying the boundaries set by that game and leaving the door open for Remakes Part 2 and 3 to go off in a completely new direction.

I, too, gave that aspect of FF7R a reluctant nod of acknowledgement in my original review for the title, which was a more traditional and comprehensive look at its failings as a game first-and-foremost. If you’re reading this, it should be clear by now that that was not enough to exorcise my demon; if FF7R wants to be a cheeky little meta prank this badly, it seems only appropriate to look at it again primarily in this larger meta-context for its third anniversary. And the statement I want to lead in with is that leaving that proverbial door open for any upcoming games to realize the potential of its message was giving it way too much fucking credit.

FF7R wants to have its cake and eat it, too. Three years on, I’m still floored at the amount of hypocrisy and hubris in literally constructing an entire plot around the message “please have faith in our original ideas uwu” while leaning this obsessively on your past and succumbing to the shallowest trends. Think about the premise of redoing Midgar with current technology — a 3D camera with polygonal environments means seeing the world from the kinds of angles and at an intimate scale unthinkable on the PS1. It could mean more granular interactions with your surroundings, NPCs that genuinely inhabit the space instead of being mere exposition delivery bots. It could mean a more seamless flow to the experience, letting the player dictate more autonomously how they transition between locations or conveying story while maintaining player control.

Instead, FF7R copies the original’s design scope almost verbatim, placing a giant magnifying glass over its limitations when coupled with these jarring new production values. You have bartenders verbally offering you a seat, yet all you can actually do is stand around and watch them cycle through their idle animation as they repeat that one line of dialogue. You can transition between rooms without the game cutting to black now, but that’s accomplished via squeeze-through loading tunnels that will not benefit from any future hardware improvements. Environment traversal is now expressed via bespoke gameplay for those sections, but the way that works in practice is that you hold up on the analog stick for five minutes at a time as you watch Tifa robotically climb across an entire room of monkey bars — and do you really want me to talk about the part with the robot hand?

Some environments now invite you to hang out in them for longer stretches, but the new activities on offer here include highlights such as “have quest giver tell you to kill some rats, go to dead-end circular combat arena, kill rats, return to quest giver, be told you ‘didn’t kill the right rats,’ literally go back the exact same way, kill the new set of rats that just spawned there, return to quest giver again and receive your reward.” Combat now takes place within the game world in real-time, but the only way for you to decipher the properties of any given attack still is to read the big dumb name popping up over the enemy’s head, with no consistent indication for how these attacks conform to any of your defensive options, be it your three different parry moves or the non-functional dodge roll. This is a game that puts you up against flying opponents, but is somehow reluctant to give its characters anything in the way of aerial mobility, so what you’re left with is either linearly throwing out some kind of ranged option or watching your one robotic alibi air combo play out. This is a game that goes to the length of eliminating the original’s instanced combat transitions, yet it also makes you watch its characters slowly throw out potions one-by-one to heal outside of combat, with no way to have these kinds of items take effect immediately on pressing the button the way it literally worked in Final Fantasy 1 on the NES. (https://twitter.com/wondermagenta/status/1286438919916093444)

Instead of focusing on how hard I’m nitpicking, I really want you to think about just how absurd all this shit is. Consider FF7R’s approach to loading specifically: consider that it literally re-released on the PS5, a console whose entire premise is “we know what an SSD is,” only a year later, yet the game’s flaws are so deeply embedded in shortsighted design that a whole generational leap can’t salvage them. This remake was dreamt about for a solid decade before its eventual announcement, and yet somehow it manifested into a game that feels so much more outdated than its source material. It’s “upscaled PS2 JRPG (derogatory.)”

Consider further how much more intimate you could get with these characters now that you’re spending so much more time in this setting. They could’ve gone for a Mass Effect-esque structure, where you inhabit Midgar a day at a time, watching your crew progress and go through various personal struggles — the game is even hinting at this by giving Cloud his own apartment! Instead, you’re still bound to a rigid progression of events and set pieces, now padded by vapid exposition. You now regularly spend PS1-FF7-Midgar-level stretches of time simply running through linear tunnels, and somehow the only type of dialogue that void is filled with is “damn I hope we don’t get lost in this linear tunnel.” You have locked doors that are opened by flipping a single switch within the same room, characters regularly making observations that don’t actually match their surroundings in a way that makes them sound like complete himbos and a general disregard for the player’s intelligence.

In a sense, this game does actually cater to our current-day sensibilities in its Marvel-fication: more, more, more of “thing you already love,” thematic focus be damned. How ironic that this game desperately contorts itself around some vague message about the value of artistic freedom in its final act, meanwhile the way there is paved by shoving tear-jerk origin stories into the framework of every random background character the original presented that contribute absolutely nothing to any kind of overarching message. We literally will not be “free” until we realize that stories like this or Kingdom Hearts can be spun ad infinitum — Square have effectively proven you can reuse the same iconography for 20 years in slightly different scenarios, and people will show up. This game wants to be all meta, yet it never actually analyzes or challenges its source material, it’s all empty reverence.

What this means is that almost every “original idea” in FF7R either directly undermines the original’s pacing, drama and charm, or fails to be compelling on its own terms. This is why any charitability toward future entries in this series feels misplaced: so many resources at their disposal, so much talent eager to put their mark on a monumental game, so much distance to analyze its legacy from… and this is what you come up with? You may be inclined to call this game brave for being so explicit in its intentions and willing to subvert expectations with its finale, but there’s nothing “brave” about grafting these hollow-ass platitudes onto a shallow, rigid, predictable 40-hour fan service vehicle. The creative team here may have attempted to kill the burden of fan expectation alongside those plot ghosts, but the only thing they truly eviscerated is my interest in their games.

If you reached the end of this post and feel disappointed at how many points I remade from my original review, you may have some understanding of how I felt when I rolled credits on FF7R. Damn this meta shit is easy. 🤪

EDIT: had to bump up the score by half a star because I couldn't justify having this at the same level as TLOU2.

my interest in any truly structured long-form exercise here is more or less sapped so we'll hurriedly push past the brush and thistle to attempt to address the main points after one and a half playthroughs on hardcore. nota bene - i would have understandably played more if not for my analog stick succumbing to drift, and i would have also liked to squeeze in both a playthrough on standard as well as a professional playthrough in the interests of some nebulous due diligence i inexplicably feel i owe, but honestly the changes to professional seem mostly dull & the idea of learning the perfect parry timing in the game's second half on a ps4 with wobbly frame rate has less and less appeal the more i zero in on the idea. the ps4 version also has a significant problem with whatever technique they decided to use to render scope magnification, with a net result of halving the frame rate which is simply unacceptable for the kind of game this is - you're not zooming over swathes of land in search of a singular lonely target, you're scoping to try and land a bullseye that's five meters away! needless to say this made the regenerator sections tedious as all hell.

alterations to the core mechanical skeleton in RE4R are 'well-considered' but i hesitate to describe them as necessarily meaningful since an uncharitable interpretation would view this as a particularly hasty process of reverse engineering and applying tried-and-true bandaids to stem the hemorrhaging. free movement necessitates expanded enemy aggression, which inadvertently dilutes enemy behaviour, which means the designers had to inject elements of inconsistency to prevent easily optimized patterns of play, which calls for emergency defensive measures to keep encounters fair and level. this shifts the scope of its mechanics from thoughtful aggression to somewhat reactionary kiting. stack up enough of this over the course of a 12-20 hour playthrough and encounters start to blend together, something which becomes a rather serious issue once you get to this game’s fatigued rendition of the island. a shift in combat methodology towards reactionary gameplay wouldn’t be a problem in and of itself since you could argue it’s capturing some of re4’s more experiential qualities, but 1.) lol and 2.) brazenly inviting so many explicit grounds for comparison only serves to crystallize the qualities that made the original so special.

while many practical adages and tenets can be ascribed to and extracted from the original, it's difficult to say it doesn't subscribe to this overriding idea that 'less is more'. stop to consider the implications of this for one second and you might even recognize that the original doesn't have an overwhelming bestiary; there’s only a sparse handful of enemy types in spite of the notoriety of so many of its encounters. it’s commendable that a game built on minute alterations of one enemy unit can be described as constantly escalating and endlessly varied. one ganado on its own is never a threat, easily incapacitated with the swift slash of a knife, but as an enemy unit they are allowed to take on greater meaning through level design, decisions centered around resource management, and their method of deployment. in this sense, the original game has something of a beat ‘em up philosophy in its encounter design. there’s a comforting sense of rigidity set in place by its core mechanics which is then expounded on by the implementation of RNG which can alter the output of actions in ways both dramatic and subtle. a plagas eruption might force you on the retreat; a critical headshot might have robbed you of the roundhouse kick you were looking for; the enemy might have launched from your kick in a way that opens you up to risk if you tried to strike them on the ground. RE4R’s RNG, meanwhile, is most apparent in the way it approaches enemy staggers, and while it’s not something i’ll address too much since you’ve read about it everywhere else, it’s clearly a thorny inclusion which appears to be influenced by, at a minimum, the focus of your aiming reticule, the damage value of your weapon, the enemy’s health pool, and dynamic difficulty considerations which are holdovers from the previous two remakes in this new chronology. we might never know exactly how it’s calculated, but its effect on the game at a macro and micro level is easily observable and will make or break the game for some.

the point is no challenge in the original comes across as repetitious the way it so often does in RE4R and what’s frustrating is that there are moments which offer compelling grounds for expansion but which are rarely capitalized on. red cultists in the original are simply hardier and more physically resistant enemies, which is a misfire, but the remake reinterprets these enemies as summoners who can outright conjure plagas eruptions. it’s a frankly brilliant idea, so it’s shocking that it’s only leaned into a handful of times, two of which are seemingly explicitly designed to be skipped for speedrunning purposes. it’s the kind of change that could really serve to flesh out this game’s identity much further, and it feels wasteful to not consider the ways in which this type of enemy can add a layer of decision-making to its combat design.

there’s no discussion of RE4R without a discussion of the knife (which i mostly think is appropriately satisfying if entirely boring), but rather than exhaustively assess RE4R’s knife or semantically compare knife usage between games, let’s change gears for a second here and just consider the knife in the original. the knife can deflect projectiles, interrupt enemy advances, set up contextual attacks, strike grounded enemies, crumple them – anything that a handgun can do, a knife can do at close range and without wasting ammunition. it’s the ol’ reliable, a fundamentally ‘safe’ option with an appropriately attached high degree of risk. given its newfound metered dependency in the remake, your safe option isn’t the knife anymore – it’s actually the bolt thrower. with its negation of aiming reticule focus requirements, ranged approach which shields you from close-quarters damage, silent nature (a veritable rarity in this title), semi-consistent staggers at the cost of slow firing speed and loading speed, and nigh endlessly retrievable ammo, the bolt thrower is, if anything, a safer option than the knife ever was in the original. deploy it carefully and meticulously, and the most risk you’ll ever be at is if you’re intentionally firing bolts into the ether; they’ve even programmed it in such a way that you’ll often be able to retrieve it from difficult to reach places should you miss.

in addition, you might consider the game’s bolt thrower to be evidence of RE4R’s interrogation and consideration of the lineage of titles which the original inspired – and i do sincerely hope it’s a cheeky homage to the agony crossbow – but it’s also a lesson in poor adaptation. a signature weapon from the evil within 1 & 2, the lynchpin the agony crossbow rests on in the original game is a crafting system dedicated entirely to its output, giving its litany of options distinct value and decision-making potential while reserving its use for player discretion. the second game dilutes this by more broadly allowing you to craft other types of ammunition in addition to bolts, which is the trap upon which RE4R is similarly founded with its crafting system. the system in and of itself is already mostly a needless addition without much interesting balancing relevance, but there's a smaller problem specifically in relation to the bolt thrower - on replays with a more comprehensive view towards where and when your knife could break in relation to its usage and the positioning of merchants, it’s all but certain you’ll be reserving kitchen and boot knifes almost exclusively for the crafting of bolts. it’s a question which at every turn mostly answers itself. the mines which attach to the bolts are interesting since they can be positioned in fun ways with foreknowledge and they also explicitly signal you’ll lose a bolt, but for the most part it’s a safe resource you can be sure you’ll never lose sight of, which is notable if only because it seems to be the opposite of what this game intends to go for. with an eye for long-term planning in relation to bolt usage and knife usage, it’s almost unbelievable how sections of the game i had really struggled with on my first playthrough of hardcore (largely spent surviving minute to minute with shells and rifle ammunition being luxuries) became almost trivial on a second go of it. despite reaching a high level of proficiency in the original, it’s telling that i still never approach things the same conservative way that i often would in RE4R.

in some ways, metered knife dependency the way RE4R approaches it might be the wrong question to be asking. after all there’s nothing stopping players from running away from engagements to seek repairs most of the time if they were so inclined, and there’s precious few chokepoints that make errant knife usage legitimately hazardous. there’s another version of RE4 out there that’s a bit different – it’s called dmc1 – and what’s notable about it is that it remains one of the strongest instances of meter dependency you could reasonably conceptualize in a game. devil trigger is an important resource that you need to tap into – you can build it only by engaging with the combat system, and it allows for a lot of freedom in battles while being tightly designed to prevent abuse, making resource management an ever-present consideration. it was also seemingly designed with a view for a long-term playthrough, perhaps with the intention of allowing players to turn to macro strategy. it’s tempting to ascribe the same quality to RE4R as well, but with every workaround that’s currently in place – whether it’s foreknowledge of merchants, the ability to return to them quickly in certain cases, or kitchen knives/boot knives which will conspicuously be more present in enemy drops thanks to extremely gracious dynamic difficulty if your knife is close to breaking – it seems more clear that it’s intended to act as a measure to get people panicking as a result of the jams they’d enter in their first playthrough while introducing a very slight layer of decision-making. it’s questionable how true this is – after all, every prompt where you could use a knife is very explicitly signaled, which is a distinct contrast from the purpose of something like fuel in REmake or matches in the evil within 1 – but i suppose it’d get people into the groove nonetheless. but if only there was some way to introduce meter dependency to discourage certain actions and reinforce careful thought in a way that was truly interlinked with the game’s mechanics without handing out this many get-out-of-jail-free cards…

ahem, comparisons to resident evil 6 have run amok since the release of the demo and to be sure, this is the only resident evil game since to squarely address action game mechanics, but ironically (and perhaps controversially) most of the comparisons reflect on RE4R poorly. despite its disorganized presentation and severely unsystematic approach, resident evil 6 is still one of the last capcom action games to anchor itself on player agency, and it has an enemy suite which is designed to match this. they're legible in their behaviour and they're consistent in how you can affect them. the game's most compelling qualities might be relegated to side content in its fantastic mercenaries mode versus the vulgar bombast presented in its campaign, but even those mercenaries scenarios are fledgling score attack exercises with legitimate thought given to the waves of enemies converging on your location. mess around a bit and you’ll find a game teeming with an onslaught of strong enemy types which is at no point at risk of illegibility, in which the effect your actions can have on enemies is always consistent, in which enemies still adhere to more classical ideas of encounter design, and in which the resource management imposed by stamina (versus the knife) yields just as many meaningful decisions on a moment to moment basis with similar consequences for misuse without throttling the strongest aspects of the game or precluding the player from engaging on those terms. the game is, almost to a fault, an intentionally spearheaded evolution of principles which are enshrined by both the original re4 and re5 – it’s fundamentally the same type of game. RE4R, meanwhile, belongs to a different caste of games in this regard by eschewing clarity and consistency for a middle ground which neither matches the deliberate rhythms of the original nor the dizzying highs of re6’s combat systems.

if i had to pick a favourite element of RE4R, it would be everything to do with luis, but if i have to choose something else i’d have to pick something which i haven’t seen much discussion of yet – the treasure economy. or at least it would be in theory, because regrettably and frustratingly, it’s still emblematic of a lot of the game’s issues. in the original game, treasure becomes an afterthought on subsequent playthroughs – you know where it is and you attempt to maximize the benefits you’ll reap by virtue of your patience, or you don’t bother and you forego the PTAs. seeing a fitting grounds for expansion, RE4R opts to introduce more layers to treasures – now, the way gems are laid in treasures can be optimized to provide higher payouts depending on the way you’ve combined gems, but it could take even longer to put together. this, combined with a lower turnout on PTAs in hardcore, makes for a tantalizing risk/reward economy – you’re always just on the verge of upgrades, and the treasures are massive boons, but if you’re patient you might be able to reach an even greater payday. the issue is that for all the touches of inconsistency present in the game, treasure is once again consistent for some reason. once you know where things are located on playthrough 1, you’ll know where they’re located on playthrough 2 – why include the gem payout table at all if people are going to go through the same rhythms again so they can optimize their payouts? if they had kept a system in which the treasures were consistent, but the gems were randomized across playthroughs, this would have been a wonderful system which i think would have served as an intelligent expansion of the original’s tenets because it would have kept players constantly thinking. further harming this is the fact that treasures are easier to find than ever, and the spinel trading system is subject to a lot of the same considerations which mostly leave something to be desired in spite of how strong the working concept is.

RE4R is not a bad game, but it’s a frustratingly risk averse one – we’re talking about a game whose hallmarks include attache case tetris and they have decided to include an auto-organizer at the click of a button. its best qualities are rehashes of either the game it’s based on or of contemporary third person-shooters that still arguably retain more to unpack and think about (the evil within 2, dead space 2, debatably the last of us). it’s a shock to the system to play a modern TPS that isn’t meandering in pace or languidly focused on some misguided appropriation of cinematic expression to its detriment, but even RE4R’s slower-paced moments – total anathema to the game it’s in conversation with – still present SOMETHING different that sticks out in my memory, some kind of hook to latch onto. there’s a late game section which uncharacteristically wrests control from your grasp and forces you to march forward which, for a few moments, taps into a new idea which the game could have called its own if it had the gumption. instead it opted to pay homage to the original's action game legacy - it's not the wrong decision per se, but without that substantive design backing it up, i'm not certain it was the right one.

- admittedly great soundtrack though, not exactly an aesthetic quality of the original that shone.
- love the new merchant
- narratively it's tonally confused but there are a few moments that make me think they're a little in on the joke. i'd submit it's not quite as self-serious as you'd expect from one of these remakes but that doesn't mean it has as much fun with the source material as you'd like. the villains are charisma voids here since they don't show up to talk their shit ever and it's telling that they dumped like half of salazar's most iconic lines into his boss fight since he had no other opportunity to reference them. come on guys, do something new, even re3make abandoned the most iconic line from the original game because it was the right thing to do.
- environments look great from time to time, enemies...much less so. the artist who likes object heads and sharp teeth got their hands on re4, now just you wait and see what he does with re5
- oh yeah they're remaking re5, no question about it. funniest decision of all time. im willing to betray all my principles on remakes to see that. at this point im just along for the ride, they haven't put out a resident evil game i've really liked in a long while.
- there's an interesting wrinkle in this game's narrative - it's this newly introduced thread about the capacity people have for change, which i think is a somewhat fitting idea given the parasite motif, but all the strongest changes are basically just reserved for luis and ashley and no one else gets anything neat. not sure where they were going with this ultimately.
- what's up with the minecart section in this. even re6 has a traditional minecart section and that game also has free movement so don't bother trying to say they needed to script it here
- the thing i was really looking for here was some REmake level thread which justified its existence - something that showed they gave a lot of thought to the original game's mechanics and intended to evolve it while providing a fundamentally different experience. REmake is very much a Side B to the original RE1's Side A - you won't get value from it without understanding the original title it's in conversation with. regrettably, this was not the case and RE4R's remixes of the original game's content are much more pedestrian and conventional.
- good on them for making krauser a boss fight this time and i enjoy the krauser encounters in the original
- i'm really underselling how much i enjoyed luis in this game
- separate ways dlc...zzz...

rather than place movement on the analog stick, am2 took an unorthodox approach and mapped it to ryo's gaze. through this, the player interacts with shenmue's painstaking representation of urban japan primarily through the act of sight. ryo is a natural observer, of signs, of people, of animals, of forklifts moving to and fro and waves undulating below. when ryo focuses on an object in the world, the player gently melts into his head to embody him. you take his perspective to roll a gacha toy between your fingers, or check your watch, or browse the shelves of a convenience store. this is certainly an ADV of sorts with sprinkles of what would become "open world" gameplay, but first and foremost it is a game of sight and perception. succinctly, it is eyes entertainment.

the meticulous attention to detail and passive nature of play fosters an undeniable sense of atomization. the game does not explicitly critique capitalism, but by creating this diorama-like visage of it, the game uncovers the listlessness at the heart of this era in history. ryo's hero's journey is constantly undermined by his delinquent status, loose social bonds, and overall impotence against forces with greater means than him. outside of the sanctuary of the hazuki dojo, ryo plunges into a world where he can do little but observe those around him. crowds of people, each with unique ways to spurn ryo's questions. when ryo isn't dutifully gathering scraps of information in his notebook, he can do little else other than window shop in a market district enclosed in the influence of former US navy occupation. what can he do other than pour money into pointless tasks and have stilted conversations with his acquaintances? at best he can convert a parking lot into a makeshift practice space for martial arts. in other instances I found myself staring at my phone waiting for buses to arrive or shops to open; would ryo not have done the same to suck up his time had the option existed? there are sparks of life to find, but virtually every point of contact is transactional, every activity is gated by money, every part of ryo's life wilting from his isolation after his father's death.

it makes sense then that disc 3 represents a significant change for ryo as he shifts into employment at the harbor. his absence of purpose morphs into routine living, and he begins to form bonds with his coworkers. ryo's lack of community ties pushes him into the workforce as a sole reluctant method of social engagement, his ulterior motive to investigate the mad angels aside. at the same time, his time in dobuita becomes severely limited, and the fragments of relationships he formed previously become even more distant. one gets the sense that his lunch break camaraderie and daily forklift races fill part of this void. his primary action becomes moving the forklift and fighting gang members after prior weeks spent primarily with the action of sight, signaling the shift from eyes to hands. the inability of ryo to settle in outside of labor is telling, and the eventual termination of his employment closes this chapter before he quietly sets off on his nomadic quest to find lan di. these were the only solid bonds he had, after all.

where the game inevitably stumbles is in where it artificially blocks these bonds. limited conversations are expected (although frankly these are astonishing for the era), but to lock characterization for a person like nozomi behind phone conversations when she's so easily accessible in the world feels awkward. the game occasionally expects this kind of unusual logic in order to get the most out of its world, with missable, timed events slipping through new players' fingers. however, it's unquestionable that the novelty present at the game's release has persisted thanks to the dearth of those willing to be as daring in its recreation of life. just wish there was one more motorcycle section...

This and RE7 are the two series entries I hadn't played the longest and was the most curious to revisit, and with RE8 featuring Chris + many similarities to 4 and 5, I thought this might be a good opportunity to refresh my memory. In the case of 5, I decided less than halfway through that I'd quit because I was honestly kind of bored and time is a little too precious at the moment.

Under that light, this 3 out of 5 score may be surprising; I'm coming away from RE5 feeling there's enough of interest going on here on paper that warrants a quick write-up. You could chalk it up to there being way too much of RE4's DNA in 5 for it to be straight-up bad, but that's a little cynical when it actually does elevate itself meaningfully from its predecessor in a few ways. Being able to quick-select weapons and items with the D-Pad is an obvious QoL improvement that, in practice, legitimately incentivizes more spontaneous play — it’s easy to want to tap into weapons you otherwise wouldn’t if they’re right at your fingertips. But it also goes hand-in-hand with a now real-time inventory that's still one of the most elegant, yet tension-inducing systems I've seen for this kind of thing. While RE4's attache case has become far more iconic, RE5's square grid takes that fun novelty of freely positioning your items and turns it into a legitimately relevant choice: your 3x3 item grid directly corresponds to the four D-Pad directions (so a shotgun on the leftmost square can be accessed by pressing left, while the First Aid Spray in the top right can't be equipped the same way,) which is both intuitive and something you'll have to regularly manage intelligently while under the active stress of combat. From that perspective, even putting ammo on your quick-select and being able to hand it to Sheva more quickly that way becomes a valid consideration.

I guess that’s a good opportunity to discuss RE5’s most divisive aspect. I actually feel deciding what weapons to give Sheva and how to manage her inventory space adds sincerely novel layers to gameplay in a way I haven't quite seen like this elsewhere. I recall giving her a sniper rifle being a good way to keep her from getting hit constantly back on PS3, which is both sort of interesting? Because it's a logical result of the mechanics presented? (it's obvious that she aims extremely well but is also very trigger-happy, so giving her a weapon with high damage, long reach and slow fire makes natural sense to optimize her AI’s behavior) But these kinds of considerations can’t help but come across as unintuitive hacks in the moment: in a game with resource management and non-regenerating health, having to specifically leave the way those resources are spent to an AI + a number of dynamic unpredictable factors never feels quite right. Babysitting Sheva because she will otherwise get hit constantly or churn through different types of ammo seemingly at random ironically feels like what the internet always tries to convince you Ashley (who’s transparently deterministic) was like in RE4.

Which begs the question of whether RE5 would've been better off as a solo-game. Sheva's inclusion has much deeper implications on the flow of the campaign than is initially evident, and it's clear that a lot of the encounter design flat-out isn't as good as it was in RE4. It's most obvious with bosses, where a lot of interesting elements get thrown at a wall, only for the game to not capitalize on them. There's this extended on-rails sequence early in the game, at the end of which you fight one of those El Gigante type enemies from RE4 by targeting its weak spots. You dodge some of its punches with QTE prompts, then watch it pull this long pylon from the ground to hit you with. You would expect that pylon to now present some kind of new obstacle, but instead you end up ALSO dodging it via the same QTE as every other attack in this fight.

Another early boss (the crawling bat thing) is set within this circular arena with a couple huts and some elevation changes. You would expect those level design features to factor into the fight somehow, but instead you’re meant to linearly bait it into some proximity mines (place mine, walk back, wait for it to run in, then dash past it, quick-turn, place another mine.) It would play out the exact same way if the arena was just a straight line instead. In a game with this much intelligent game design, it’s surprising how often newly-introduced elements don’t actually provide gameplay variety.

Those two scenarios also serve as such obvious points of comparison for how RE4 always went those couple extra notches with its encounters. The El Gigante fights in either game speak for themselves, clearly being able to run around and choose weapons freely and having to scrounge for ammo as shit goes down in RE4 is more engaging. But even RE4's take on an on-rails sequence, the mine cart set piece, where you get to move between carts freely, have enemies jump in from all sides, and need to avoid multiple kinds of obstacles, takes such a gigantic dump on RE5 that it's kind of hard to believe it was made five years prior.

While all that sounds pretty negative, I hope it comes across that RE5 is more just... boring, rather than offensive. I couldn't find a smooth segue into the weapon upgrade system for this review, but that shit is still exemplary (love how upgrading capacity restores your ammo) and something more looter-shooter type games should take serious note of more. So while RE5 does overall present something substantial and different from its predecessor, I wouldn't say it's engaging enough to really warrant more than one playthrough when you could be playing that game instead.

(footnotes: the headshot context melee attack being changed from Leon's wide-reaching roundhouse to a more linear punch kinda sucks and doesn't really allow you to take as many risks with crowd-control)

Shenmue represents most of the problems I have with cinematic games, trying its hardest to emulate other works of art without understanding how or why stories succeeded in the first place. Normally, I’m unreasonably charitable to these sorts of games, even when they’re putting on airs of ‘prestigious’ art, but Shenmue’s affectation is so uniquely hollow that I struggled to see the good in it. As a pastiche of arthouse film, Shenmue manages to capture the surface level qualities (de-emphasis on plot, deliberate tempo, a focus on the realistic and mundane) but has none of the underlying substance that makes this (vaguely defined) genre work. The expressive visuals, nuanced characterization, thematic depth, and strong emotional core that makes these movies meaningful? They’re nowhere to be found in Shenmue.

Shenmue wants to immerse you in the town of Dobuita, but it gives you no reason to care about the town in the first place - the presentation is too flat and matter of fact to be visually engaging, with an atmosphere as dry and unimpressive as a local news program. It’s all a misguided attempt at ‘realism,’ further hampered by the limitations of real time rendering, providing a world that’s too blocky and undetailed to pass as any form of ‘reality.’ Even modern titles on cutting-edge hardware are nowhere close to emulating reality, so to see this attempted on something as old as the dreamcast feels totally wasteful. To be fair, Shenmue tries to liven up its presentation through fancy cinematography during cutscenes, but the restless camerawork comes off as gimmicky, haphazardly zooming and cutting and swiveling around characters for seemingly no reason. Copying cinematic techniques with little purpose in mind, never punctuating the script or enhancing the emotional impact of the scenes.

While the presentation was uninteresting, the script is somehow even worse. A bloated cast of stock characters are never defined beyond their singular character traits (and blood type?), with the protagonist somehow being the most boring of all. Ryo is a hollow shell of a human, incapable of any semblance of emotional intelligence or self reflection, never revealing any clear or defined character beyond the monotony of his brooding appearance. This is supposed to be a character study of a young man going through the grief of his father’s death, but the script does nothing to convey this, creating a character so vague and unrealized that he might as well be silent. In an actual movie, Ryo could provide subtle characterization through his actor’s performance and body language with minimal reliance on the script, but a dreamcast game could never hope to accomplish that! Games can’t handle this level of subtlety through animation alone and need to find emotional nuance elsewhere!

The whole plot just goes through the motions of a bottom of the barrel revenge story and somehow expects you to get emotionally invested in a non-character giving up on his non-friends and his non-neighbors so he can fight some non-villains and avenge his non-dad who was only on screen for 5 minutes. Most stories would try to explore the dad’s character and really sell you on how much he meant to others, but Shenmue really scrapes by on the bare minimum. There’s also some sort of romantic drama buried deep in there (included purely out of obligation), but it doesn’t accomplish anything because the 2 leads have absolutely zero chemistry and, once again, you run into the limitations of the hardware, characters’ faces too blocky and rigid to sell any sort of emotion.

To give the game some credit, it has some interesting themes in the 3rd disc, with the game turning towards a neorealist story of life in the working class - a shipping dock where people are too busy trying to survive to care about the blatant crime or injustice they see on a daily basis. But this final act doesn’t do much of anything with the premise. Ryo enters the workforce on the precipice of Japan’s economic bubble and the story does nothing to explore these socio-economic conditions, mostly using this setting as window dressing to propel B-Movie action sequences (most of which, once again, don’t stand up to actual Hong Kong cinema). Rather, Shenmue’s greatest quality is that its writing is so vaporous that you can project whatever meaning you want onto the experience - like a mirage, you can find something of value from the narrative, but only when viewed from a safe distance where you never have to engage with the text.

It might seem strange to avoid talking about Shenmue’s gameplay or unique approach to openworld design in this review, but that’s only because the format doesn’t matter. Of course, delivery and form are extremely important when it comes to storytelling, but Shenmue’s grounded slice of life realism means nothing when it’s in service of such vapid narrative and presentation. I love the idea of a world that doesn’t revolve around the player, that forces you to slow down and engage in the mundanity of day to day life, stopping to take in small details that would be overlooked in most titles - I’m just waiting for someone else to do the format justice. Someone else that can flesh out a world beyond technical details and understands that being slow doesn’t equate to being meaningful.

Shenmovies:

Have you seen any of these popular movies? Most of them are only superficially similar to Shenmue, but fans of the series might enjoy them! Yu Suzuki even took inspiration from a few of them when designing the series!

Casablanca
My Neighbor Totoro
Tokyo Story
Police Story
Chungking Express
Fist of Legend
Roman Holiday
The Hustler
Your Name
The Grandmaster
Reign of Assassins
Come Drink With Me
Ashes of Time
A Touch of Zen
Late Spring
In The Mood For Love
La Strada

in the days before resident evil 4, third-person shooters rarely followed a set framework for their mechanics, ranging from the auto-aim of syphon filter to the centered reticle of max payne to old-school resident evil's fixed camera angles and inability to move while firing. as a member of the survival horror subgenre of TPSs, silent hill 2 draws from the RE template while adding its own twists into the formula.

while protagonist james' background is never mentioned, we can assume he has formal combat training given his talent with an array of firearms as well as improvised weaponry. by pulling the right trigger, james enters an aiming stance where he will fix his sights on a nearby target. pressing the cross button at this point will cause james to discharge his gun, which can be repeated multiple times to inflict sequential damage on a target. however, attempting to fire with an empty clip will trap him in place while dry reloading. the player must carefully count their ammo usage in the chaos of combat in order to avoid this occurance and safely reload from the inventory menu.

much like this game's ps1 predecessor, james has access to three different types of firearms. the first is the pistol, which provides high manueverability in exchange for low firepower. the shotgun is the middle tier weapon, as it seems to be a semi-automatic with the ability to fire off six shells in succession, but it has a notable amount of recoil. this weapon is designed in an unorthodox fashion compared to its contemporaries, where spread of the shotgun is rather focused and thus is mainly used for blowing enemies back at close range. finally, the rifle provides the highest firepower in exchange for heavy recoil, sluggish recovery time, and low ammo capacity. this weapon sees the most use in slower boss battles, where the damage output becomes a necessity. the tradeoffs between each of these create dynamism in each encounter, where weapon selection becomes as important as actually disposing of enemies. this is unfortunately undercut by the generous amount of ammo for each weapon, making resource conservation less of a focus. however, the ammo allotment is tightly designed such that players can't simply run into battle willy-nilly with the rifle: certain enemies naturally counteract each weapon based on their own behaviors, attack patterns, and agility, and many fights will need to be conducted with the handgun to ensure that precious rifle ammo isn't needlessly wasted on enemies that can easily avoid its shots.

ranged combat dominates much of the latter half of the game, but james enters into silent hill with no equipment and must conduct on-site procurement a la konami's other famous playstation franchise metal gear solid. given the barren state of the town, james must make do with both a wood plank and a steel pipe as he slowly builds up his arsenal of weaponry. the game's biggest enhancement over the original silent hill is its evolution of its melee mechanics. for example, silent hill 2 deftly weaves in the pressure-sensitive buttons of the ps2 in order to differentiate between two types of close-ranged attacks. softly holding the cross button creates gentler, more strategic blows, such as the plank's walking swing and the pipe's lunge. these attacks can be used to overwhelm opponents in order to stagger them for the heavier melee strike. by forcefully pressing the button, james will unleash an nasty overhead capable of quickly downing enemies. developing an understanding of how to correctly manipulate the pressure sensor in order to use each move at will goes a long way in terms of enriching james' arsenal. melee weapons also have one important upside over their ranged brethren: they allow the player to block attacks by holding the square button when standing still. silent hill 3 would extend this to a universal parry, but silent hill 2's implementation feels natural and easy to use in the heat of battle. while these options become less consequential as the game extends into the second half, they do reward those who prefer to stay up close and personal by rewarding james with the giant knife. this hefty blade betrays the developer's japanese side by calling to mind such classic weapons such as cloud's buster sword or guts' ferocious dragon slayer.

there's one other primary attack that must be mentioned: the stomp. by pressing the cross button without aiming over a downed enemy, james will coup de grâce his opponent with a deadly heel strike to the head. this iconic technique is a series staple, and it presages similar attacks that would appear in later games of its ilk such as resident evil 5 and dead space. while in the original resident evil games zombies would often rise up after briefly tasting carpet, the effect was primarily to catch unsuspecting or overeager players unawares when they hadn't quite finished off their foe as well as offering the chance to run by to those low on ammo. in silent hill's case, stomping a downed enemy is the primary way of killing most targets due to the speed of its use compared to simply filling an opponent full of lead. this is especially important for the lying figure enemies, who can deal major damage by scrambling from a fallen state. the average enemy will be able to arise multiple times if left unaccounted for, forcing stomps as a necessity for those hoping to cleanly end encounters. this is especially apparent in group encounters, where other enemies may cut off downed ones from james' approach. in these cases crowd control becomes integral to survival, as the player must prioritize enemies with enough space around them that james can run up to them and stomp them upon toppling them without getting side-swiped by another enemy along the way. when the player has a better grasp of the combat, they may line up enemies in such a fashion that they inadvertently strike one another thanks to the game's friendly fire, potentially toppling or staggering them with minimal input from the player. these nuances make silent hill 2 more than just blindly firing at enemies when it's at its best in terms of encounter design.

as for enemies, the game primarily cycles between three: the lying figure, the mannequin, and the nurse. the lying figure slowly approaches james upon seeing him, emitting an acid spray when james comes into range. the mannequin meanwhile remains in a random position until james comes into range, flailing wildly with its appendages at any provocation from the player. finally, the nurse menacingly struts towards james upon seeing him, swingingly carelessly with a steel pipe at anyone in the vicinity. all three of these require a delicate understanding from the player of their general health pool, behavior in close quarters, and primary weapon of choice for dispatching them. it's unfortunate that the lying figures end up becoming too frequently utilized, especially in the labyrinth zone, which diminishes the impact of the nurses in particular, who rarely show up once james enters the historical society. various other enemies such as the grate-swinging mandarins and the abstract daddies with their devastating command grab show up sparingly as well.

boss fights are not puzzle-based in any way and instead primarily require the player to put distance between james and the boss, fire off shots, and then run for safe territory. while not terribly interesting, bosses in general were rarely well-designed at this point of third-person shooter history. of these, pyramid head is certainly the most notable given his timer-driven boss fights where shots scored on his metallic helmet reduce the amount of time until he leaves the area. other bosses require more finesse, such as eddie and his game of cat-and-mouse in a meat locker between frozen cadavers. skilled players will find that with tight execution they can perform a stunlock on him by using the rifle's shot to stagger him and then following up with rifle shots repeatedly until the fight ends. while most strategies for these fights feel rote, there are certainly ways for astute players to develop novel strategies for them. the major downside to some bosses who reside in larger arenas is that the camera is unable to keep track of them given that it centers on james at all times. this certainly isn't a game-breaker thanks to james being able to automatically aim at off-screen enemies when facing in their direction, but it does make positioning considerations rather awkward.

as a hallmark of the playstation 2's early action lineup, silent hill 2 provides one of the most focused gun-toting romps of the early 00s. it's hard to compare it directly to those that followed in its wake given the modern focus on stick-driven aiming and over-the-shoulder viewpoints, but parallels can be drawn between its synergy between melee and ranged combat and its positioning-focused combat encounters to modern shooters, whether they derive from survival horror antecedents or not. aspects of it have aged poorly such as the awkward camera controls and the lack of enemy variety, which may put off players more used to today's iterations of these genre conventions. however, the simple viscerality of the firing mechanics and small weapon pool combined with the tactics involved with positioning and weapon selection lend the game an arcade-like quality that has been lost in modernity. revisiting these games is vital for understanding the development of this incredibly popular genre today.

I was given the honor to playtest this by the developer (known on this very site as MagneticBurn), a good friend of mine who shares a lot of interests with me and sounds like the evil bird from Rio when he laughs.

Rather than a more ambitious first outing, he opted for a simple shmup that presents itself as accessible even for people inexperienced in the genre (or savescummers such as myself). It gets the job done very nicely. Proudly wearing influences such as Thunder Force and Darius on its sleeves, it still remains distinct with its much more forgiving difficulty and its striking visuals. I've been a fan of his art ever since I'd seen some of it and it shines through very nicely here, maybe at its brightest yet.

One thing I really like about this one that I don't see much in other games is the "free run" mode. This essentially allows you to just waltz through the game with infinite lives at the cost of score and achievements, which sounds a bit silly at first but it provides a great way to practice some trickier bits if needed. It's interesting to see a shmup that holds your hand a little, and in my opinion it's quite welcome as someone who just isn't very good at games. If free run sounds lame to you, fret not! It's always entirely optional and you can just go straight to basic or advanced mode if you please. Everybody wins! (I'd assume so).


I don't really have many complaints. Call it bias, but I think this is great in all the important regards. The only thing I can really think of is that the character portrait in the top left feels a little expressionless after I was spoiled by Pizza Tower earlier this year. Nothing totally necessary, but would make for a nice finishing touch. I did mention this in testing, though, so maybe it'll be updated a little if he feels like it.

At the end of the day, it's very exciting to see this out and I'm glad I could help in some form leading up to release. I hope you guys enjoy this as much as I did.

re4 for normal ones!

just AIN'T as interesting as the OG! the game that forced you into loading a dishwasher for managing your inventory and tactically surrendering movement to reload your guns. this one doesn't feature any WILD ideas like those, and instead turns up another pretty standard, albeit OBVIOUSLY wellpolished and funenough 'move around like a normal video game character and point and shoot at stuff' kind of game that I've unfortunately already played doooozens of times before! who cares!!! it's just not WEIRD enough for me anymore!!!!!! the rules I'm asked to learn and contend with are too.... CONTEMPORARY......

It doesn't even iterate on the more adventure game focus from 2make like I would have wanted (NO, being able to backtrack and compulsively kill 3/3 rats is not open map design!!!!). it's kinda content on jUST being a 'less contentious' version of linear ol' re4 again! with an auto-sort button for your attache case here and basically infinite health for your 'escort mission partner' there. what digestive features!!! how... utterly forgettable they'll make the experience.........

perfectly serviceable and roundhousing and shooting dudes IS still wicked, but whatever man. I'm left disappointed it doesn't actually chart that new course for the series; instead wallowing in the same kind of fun we were already having back in 2005. a remake like this that's already so similar to its source material - that doesn't create meaningful new stories with its more grounded narrative focus shit - cannot POSSIBLY be enduring. we are left approaching another game design DEAD-END. because now that the legendary re4 remake has come and cemented more 'action resi' with the basic bitch plot as the modern style, they'll all just keep coming out like this until we hit the eventual equivalents to re5/6 and all those other dark age copies with their diminishing returns all over again!

the cycle continues! story of my video game life......