diminishing REturns

they turned my boy into a dour little slug made out of sand. why is he so slow? why is he so moody? where are the jokes? no one is making the proper amount of jokes except the merchant and he just keeps saying GUN RHYMES WITH FUN 50 times in a row, im getting concerned

yo ho ho-ld the fuckin phone... leon's a pirate now? you seen this treasure? oh my god dude, they took all the wrong lessons from RE8 and ch4 is a great example of it. there are at least three sidequests in this game about killing rats, a dozen others of near equal insignificance, blue medallions everywhere, and a gacha machine. god help you if you buy the treasure maps and realize this thing is a borderline collectathon if you let it have its way

meat of it ain't bad if you can ignore all that gunk tho. mechanics are tightly designed + requisite combat puzzle gauntlets are well tuned. says a lot that almost every single one of the best encounters are either ripped 1:1 or lightly remixed from the original, but RE4 is RE4 and I'm not gonna fuss that the opening village sequence, cabin, and water room still kick ass. still...... bit of a "resting on laurels" situation when I can only think of two new encounters (ramparts, wrecking ball) that reach the madcap peaks of the original and I'm not gonna give it a free pass for being a remake considering all the other ways it was willing to go off script for worse

if there's one thing I wanna take a big piss on it's whatever the fuck they were doing with the writing, cutscenes, and voice direction. luis and ashley, cover your ears, you did great, but man everyone else is a bummer. leon spends all game moping, krauser is a fuckin dork, and ada is in some kind of fugue state. on paper I don't mind the weird shit going on with salazar or hayseed preacher saddler I guess but goddam n this thing got outright shorn of most of its charm and camp in favour of RE2R's bland ass dry bones approach. people joke about the stuff they removed, but those absences tell on how buttoned up and business casual they inexplicably wanted to make this. compare krauser's intro cutscenes and you'll immediately understand what I'm saying here

there's some real cool shit in between all the moments where it's coasting on a much better game's blueprint or fumbling to find its own identity, and I'm not surprised folks are having a good time, but it never amounted to enough to make me feel like it needs to exist, or even should exist. it's undoubtedly the strongest of the last three remakes mechanically, but it's also the most unnecessary

repeatedly I asked myself while playing if I could see a scenario where I'd willingly reach for this instead of RE4 if I got the urge to suplex some parasitic yokels, and the answer was always the same

no thanks, bro

BORN TO ROLL
WORLD IS A STAR
星星 Roll em all 2004
I am prince man
410,757,864,530 DEAD PEOPLE

Mid. There is no other word for it. This is mid. It's embarassing.
Xenoblade 1 fans will claim that their cynical product is a "masterpiece" because of its character deaths yet these same fans will have the audacity to mock Justian Roiland's seminal work of art, High on Life for brilliant and original deconstruction of the video game genre by allowing players to kill a child, something that no video game has ever done before. To any Xenoblade 1 fan reading this, go back to watching MCU movies and eating McDonalds before ever daring to insult true works of art like High on Life ever again.