I love SMT, but I've stalled out on this one. It takes a number of disappointing mechanical steps back from SMT IV Apocalypse, struggles to maintain the series' signature bleak tone, and, most importantly, seriously missteps in its level design. Nominally open world, in that there is a lot of empty space to run through and plenty of collect-a-thon garbage to gather, the game is as linear as can be in truth. This roundabout nature makes exploration long, tiring, and disorienting, which is a problem when it's most of the experience. I'm sure I'll come back and finish it at some point but right now I just don't have the patience.

The systems are excellent, so is the music. Everything else is just kinda there. The open world elements are very well done for their first attempt, but the few dungeons that exist feel like they put a bunch of ants in a box and drew maps based on how they moved - unintuitive, frustrating and boring. Alignment being a simple choice might be a divisive one, I think I would have preferred a better implementation of SMT4's system. Characters are laughably bad except for Abdiel and Tsukuyomi, they're pretty cool. I'd say my biggest complaint is that Da'at simply does not feel like Tokyo, it could be any apocalyptic wasteland for all that matters, Tokyo Tower is the only explicitly name-dropped landmark (aside from the Diet Building) so it leaves a good first impression that it's the stage for the first boss. Everything from then on is just non-descript deserted urban wasteland. There could be interesting things done with the ambiguity and liminality of this but they don't really.

This is the stupidest RE installment yet, the Ethan Winters saga is the most homogenically western and cliche-ridden American horror duology literature I've played in years.

VILLAGE writer Anthony Johnston gets lost in his snobbish American lens delivering a portrait of a lost rural village where the most uninspired monsters clumsily assault us. Licantropes riding horses, Vampires, zombies with swords? A guy with magneto abilities that transforms himself into ... A transformer ??? What the Fuck (well at least this one is more creative, even if it causes embarrassment)

Although inspired by RE4, the cliches also devour the approach to action and navigation, with a standard array of weapons and a first-person perspective, the combat does not differ one bit from the rest of survival FPS of the last decade, feeling The regression of the multiple and superior combat options in RE4, and the semi-open level design does not turn out to be as threatening or challenging to navigate as the corridors of RE2 2019, or Union, the city of The Evil Within 2, seems the Little inspiration of VILLAGE turns to the voyeurism of playing hide and seek with Lady Dimitrescu and her daughters (visual delight for otakus) and the grotesque images of Ethan being injured and maimed,.a waste of energy from my point of view. Not a theme park, not a true gender collage.

It is curious that this game makes me appreciate The evil within 2 more since in essence they are the same, a Japanese collage of universal horror with strong American influences, but while VILLAGE takes it in a bland and voyeuristic way, the evil within 2 is more elegant and creative with its context and spatial flow. Oh! and the setting in rural lost towns has to end, the anonymous rural Spain frozen in time with pesetas included from R4 was fun, but .

BTW, if you are going to comment on something like "American through a non-American lens", please save it, the point is not the lens, it is the cliche and voyeurism to which cities and villages are reduced under that vision