sinpai(n)

VISUALS The game looks incredibly good, even on my potato pc. I love the early streets in wrenwood, all rainy with the lights, it's literally like se7en, I love it. Thank god they toned down the yellow paint stuff and it is also much better integrated in the environment. Same goes for regular items. So much so that it took me a while to notice that I can break small vases on tables, but that's what makes me happy: playing around with the environment and finding things.

I appreciate the save and main menu being stylized again. It was honestly disappointing having 3R and 4R just copying the 2R menu. The map is really cool. It looks like a minimalized/sketched version of the map model. So seeing details like cabinets or cars is funny and even helpful. The end credits basically being 1:1 the title sequence of se7en, we love the Fincher references. (I love se7en did you notice)

FINALLY the games are gory again. Wow at the blood splatters. There are gruesome death scenes but a lot of them still avoid looking directly at the character. The zombies in Raccoon City looking like corpses is also wonderful.

I LOVE the straps of the long guns, they look so good and fit so well on the character. Or how they just hang on the side when the gun is equipped. Wonderful. The reloads are so nice, Leon taking a magazine from his belt, reloading, putting the old one on his belt. The sHOTGUN RELOAD ON THE SHOULDER WOW I’m unf-ing.

Leon's kicks finally look good again as if they were done by somebody that knows martial arts. I didn't get that feeling from 4R.

LOCATIONS I love how the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center looks. It reminds me of some corridors in my old school. It's a big location but most rooms have such a unique character with unique characters in them that yes, you can get lost, but you still kind of know where you are. It really is the best area to play around because it gives you so many options to deal with any enemy. You can use stealth, guns, distractions, other enemies, the environment. There are just so many possibilities.

The basement/processing part was cool, I enjoyed it aside from the "get 3 of these things again". I mean I enjoyed it from a setting perspective, it gave me RE Revelations 2 vibes.

The secret basement lab was meh, the sniping/chapel was cool, the final girl/sewers part was meh. I can appreciate it being a not in the face RE0 reference. Also it was the third time (HAHA!) dealing with the girl, again doing three things to progress. This already felt like the game was becoming more linear.

I love how Raccoon City looks (yes, even the grey and brown monotonous look) but it's very empty aside from the "forced" encounters. I get they were going with the "zombies aren't supposed to be here so it's SURPRISING" but they are still too few. I would have loved more interactivity with the environment too, basically Raccoon City is very underutilized. My favorite part was the tilted building. It played the most with post apocalyptic architecture, the glass windows, the elevators. I even thought I softlocked when I went back to this area but they gave us a cool way to still progress. So it's nice that you can revisit the areas. I even like the mortar area/enemies specifically with guns parts.

I love Vendetta and I like how the motorbike part looks, but it feels boring playing it. It's too on the rails. Victor suddenly appearing is also ??? why. And this is where the game becomes too linear, even in level design. The RPD isn't an encounter area (except for that one police zombie) and Zeno bringing grace here also makes no real sense. The RPD is mostly a nostalgia reference and mini fetch quest to the eastern office to give Leon a lead to ARK. At least they gave the RPD a slightly different layout for how the rooms connect. Oh, and I didn't like the inclusion of the Marvin/Kendo flashbacks, I think doing stuff like that (and how Capcom did it) is usually cheap. Kinda how HBO The Last of Us pulled it at the end with Joel in the hospital having a flashback to Sarah. It’s a very “telling” and not “showing” on a storytelling level.

It made me really happy what we can finally go through the basketball court as Leon (side eyeing 2R) and that there's also something to do ("There's no time for playing around.") The atmosphere around that subway wreck part was incredible, being below the surface but it still can go deeper, the wind blowing around, what a wonderful sound.

Otherwise I cant say much about the orphanage/subway/plant43 parts because they are WAY TO LINEAR even in level design. It's literally just walking through. And ARK didn't feel special at all to me because it's your usual shiny end game lab. Maybe the labs in 2R/3R being much cleaner and futuristic prevented me from seeing ARK more uniquely.

GAMEPLAY First: What the hell happened to New Game/New Game+ after finishing the game for the first time? From the second playthrough onwards the game isn't “New game” since you can get all your guns and charms early, but it's also not really true “New game+” because you are missing all upgrades. This really isn't useful for anyone, people going for NG+ can not really do that because you have to get all upgrades again. And this also really fucks over challenge and speedrunners or anyone just wanting to start a fresh playthrough. Because for proper NG you have to delete your whole save file. Adding to that Insanity difficulty isn't even playable without that half washed NG+. There's not even an option to turn off bonus shop content. Speedrunning and replayability is such a big part of this franchise going back all the way to the first game, how can they mess up so big. We don't even get a rating at the end (or even different stats like in RE4 and RE7.)

It's a bit disappointing that the good/bad ending gets only decided by one decision at the end and not gameplay decisions earlier in the game. Like in every other RE game with multiple endings.

I did try first person on Grace and I know her gameplay works best with it. The game does look incredible in first person too. But the camera jumps into cutscenes and pushes and grabs from enemies is too jarring to me, it ruins the "immersion" that first person is supposed to give me. And it's honestly really sad that you get the more responsive (closer to 2R/3R) movement in first person and the less responsive 4R movement in third person. People say Leon is so unresponsive and slow, or that this fits him because he’s 49 and almost dying. To which I say, no that’s not the reason, nothing about his movement implies that. Just being able to do all the melee combat he does contradicts this. This is another case of “modern” games trying for “realism” by implementing too slow blending animations in between actions, not realizing that this in-between blending (when realistic) is never so static. This is especially noticeable if you want to switch directions quickly, which is basically impossible because Grace or Leon need to do their little animation to stop their momentum. Combine that with the input delay for any movement or sprinting or crouching, it just makes the characters less satisfying to control.

The environment is very stiff, there are a few things you can destroy but it's barely anything. Nowhere near as much as in 4R. I love just shooting random things to see what happens (or slashing random things with knives or the hatchet). You can't even shoot windows so they break, except the floor windows in the tilted building. The same thing applies to the cars you can climb in the intro, it's a funny little RE6 gimmick, but you can't climb any car in Raccoon City later. That just makes me think: what was the point of introducing a mechanic but keeping it confined to the beginning and even a single location when it was totally possible to have it later too?

Sometimes the game actually feels too scripted. Specifically the stalker parts. I had it where the girl was in the side room but because of how scripted the area is she would suddenly teleport before me when there was no reason for it since I was not alerted to her. The game punishes you in situations like this just for thinking.

Most encounters in Raccoon City are very shallow though (garage, warehouse.) Just mindless with just multiple enemies condensed to one area. A lot of times it’s even possible to “skip” most of the encounter by spawn trapping the enemies with grenades (especially in ARK). The gas station and tilted building were much more interesting because they also implemented the environment. I feel like the game is missing more enemies as groups and more single enemies in random spots. Like, the encounters feel very under utilized for how much Leon can actually do. Instead Raccoon City was fetch quest into fetch quest into fetch quest into fetch quest (fuses, gas, detonator parts, crank). It doesn't help that nothing happens here plot or character wise.

I almost skipped mentioning it because of how pointless it is beyond the first playthrough: the orphanage section. It literally is a 10 minute cutscene you can walk through and it's probably the worst of any of the walking sim parts of the last few games. In RE7 you could completely skip the tapes. Sherry at least still had her puzzle. House Beneviento also had its puzzles and items you had to get, stuff you had to do. Here you are just completely at the mercy of how scripted the game is. You don't progress at your pace but at the game's pace. And I guess it really doesn't help that the sections prior (motorcycle+RPD) and after (orphanage+Plant43) are also way too linear. Tyrant is the only thing making things a bit interesting. Essentially you end up with 20 minutes or more of just pure linearity and that’s if you go fast (which is a lot when you can condense the whole game into two hours of gameplay). I'm not even looking at this stretch from a speedrunning perspective but at the most basic gameplay of what you need to do.

Aside from the armed enemies to change things up, the ARK encounters were boring, too. Too small and repetitive since there's nothing really going on. It’s just two or three rooms with a few lickers and zombies and the usual fetch quest to open a door.

I'm actually disappointed by how they implemented Leon's infection into the gameplay. That one "infected" walk was just a copy of the 4R scene where you carry Ashley (everyone hates it), and in the encounter prior you get interrupted a few times with coughs. Otherwise Leon still plays like Vergil in DMC5. It's a boring gameplay decision. I guess more severe changes to the combat would have impacted the gameplay but that's the point of this situation with how severely affected Leon is. Just the occasional coughing fit and I can go rambo again feels very lazy to me.

COMBAT The hatchet. The new big thing. Unfortunately the hatchet melee attacks are annoyingly unprecise. As in: you can’t really guesstimate in what position you will end up in after, especially if you do the heavy hatchet attack. 2R was so precise with how it handled aim+stab, 4R still was mostly precise but already worse. With the hatchet you can just end up beside the enemy you wanted to attack and miss even though you started the attack directly in front of them. It looks cool though. The game has the same prompt problem with the hatchet like 4R has with the knife where Leon would do a slash or swing instead of the stab prompt on downed enemies.

The parry is a bit broken too. Although it’s easier to normally parry everything, because you just have to hold and aim the hatchet to get a normal parry, perfect parries sometimes don’t even make any sense. I had perfect parries where it looks like the enemy attack had no hitbox collision with me. Perfect parries seem to work much closer to RE6 counter attacks than to RE4R parries which makes the timing really unintuitive.

Melee kicks seem very unbalanced, more towards casual difficulty. This is probably a result of the revamped stagger system. Often the enemies would fall to the ground or just die before actually getting stunned. Or I don’t understand the setup because on standard I rarely saw a (contextual) melee finisher and the hatchet prompt overwrites most finishers. I know the hatchet is cool and all but like, an option to still finish off enemies with a kick would be cool. Since they are in a stunned state and the hatchet costs durability, you know.

The magnet grabs from even a big distance are actually insane in this game. I'm used to it because of The Last of Us but holy are they unreasonable here sometimes. Also side grabs are bugged on Insanity, you can instantly get grabbed multiple times in a row by the same zombie, like a stunlock.

Speaking of grabs, Leon throwing enemies over his shoulder from backgrabs is disappointing and it gets really annoying and repetitive. Annoying especially because in RE2R and RE4 when an enemy grabs you from the back they can get rid of with a hit from the elbow (apparently it’s possible in RE4R too but apparently only happens under very specific circumstances, getting back grabbed while the enemy transforms, so it’s almost as if this move doesn’t exist). Variety just would have been nice to make those backgrabs not feel scripted.

BOSSES The bosses are honestly underwhelming, because they are just…there and then gone. People seem to love the spider and I can see why. We finally got spiders back in modern Resident Evil games after they were cut from 2R/3R. But it’s the first enemy you encounter once you reach Raccoon City, you get chased around for a minute until you reach the arena and then the fight is over as soon as it started. In a way the spider doesn’t feel like a boss but a slightly longer encounter with a single big enemy. And once I left the area I had already forgotten about it.

I actually don't have a problem with Super Tyrant. Because he was introduced with Zeno in the RPD, it felt like he had some purpose being there. The fight itself is also fine being a small rehash of Leon’s final boss in 2R, expanding on it now with the possibility to parry the previously undodgeable attack and use of cars in the environment.

Salaz- I mean Plant43 (same goes for the final Nemmy copypaste) is a boring flat 2d wall boss fight, you literally don’t have to move.

I’ve come to like Hunk even though he is just a rehash of the first Krauser fight in 4R. Krauser doesn’t really take any skill or strategizing, you can just stab stab stab him until the fight is over, Hunk is ready with more and varied attacks you can parry - thinking about Professional and Insanity difficulty here. It’s still possible to loop Hunk and cheese him but he tries to counter that, so there’s more about his AI you can or have to learn.

Okay the Victor boss fight. The first fight is fine, it’s basically tentacle Nemmy from RE3 (YOU CAN PARRY THE RAHKEEET). But final Nemmy is crap. They really brought back the most hated remake/modern era boss fight. I just really don’t like those flat wall boss fights, they are a very bad encounter design for a game with combat that is shining with movement and space. Even when thinking of the static fight that is Plant42 in RE1, at least there you could walk around the whole room and fight from every angle.

PLOT Yay, we got another Nakanishi game suffering from time and perspective jumps and I don’t necessarily mean the Grace/Leon jumps. There was one specific jump in the care center that felt odd to me, switching back to Grace in the basement after Leon found Gideon’s office. I have no idea why but I felt really interrupted by it. The wrenwood flashback and the orphanage section are literally walking cutscenes, and those are so bad that there was a mod DAY 1 to skip both. I guess there was more reason for the orphanage flashback in development because dataminers have found an image that implies Grace=Emily=Chloe and all the cloning shenanigans. There is no reason for the orphanage section to exist anymore once that plot point got cut as a fact in the story (although it exists as a red herring).

Now, this definitely happened because of my playstyle but the care center felt dragged out with nothing happening for a long time. I probably started exploring a lot of areas and started too many puzzles at the same time, but it picked up and came together really fast towards the end. Still the amount of "get three of this to open x" fetch quests is insanely annoying and uncreative even by RE standards.

It honestly makes no sense that Leon gets the confirmation from Gideon's office that his black spots are related to the T-Virus. The world and institutions know about the T-Virus, they even have various vaccines. They know how the virus is chemically, there’s no way no doctor or lab in that universe can not diagnose the illness as T-virus related. Even if they aren’t able to treat it.

The whole emotionalness about Emily dying and turning is completely thrown away with the already turned classic "I didn’t hit any of her vitals." Mr. 30 years of experience fighting BOWs would never not go for killing BOWs. And I really don’t get why he wouldn’t tell Grace something along the lines of "it’s useless, she already turned" LIKE HE ALWAYS DOES.

The second half with Grace just tagging along Victor&Zeno is stupid too, Victor just randomly dips and gets discarded on the walking sim highway while Zeno and Grace go to the RPD instead of heading straight to ARK because… ah yes, Leon needs to have his trip down the memory lane. The characters in general are very weak in their motivations into actions and have their actions happening passively via outer influences.

ARK is so incredibly rushed because, again, nothing really happens. Grace&Zeno are at the Elpis computer hacking (why wouldn’t The Connections just get somebody to defuse the rig or an actual hacker), Leon interrupts them and escapes with Grace, they decide to destroy Elpis because Zeno wants it and split up, Grace finds out the truth about Elpis in a deus ex moment, they get back to the hacking area where Zeno for whatever reason was just waiting for Leon&Grace while smoking two packs of cigarettes, doing nothing or aura farming, I guess.

Okay, both endings are kinda crap. The bad ending for the scene of Zeno just aura farming, Leon going "At least I could save you" while Grace is just watching Leon get killed and screaming "No no no!" (which is actually better in japanese because she says something like "No please don’t do it please stop!") The good ending for being all: Oh everything is good now, Leon is cured instantly, Victor suddenly appears out of nowhere and kills Zeno who just injected himself with a random ass thing he knows nothing about, Emily is alive because we aren’t allowed to kill kids even though we just killed Marie- I mean because Leon didn’t hit any of her vitals. I actually prefer the bad ending only because of how stupid the good ending is, there are no consequences whatsoever (in the whole game really).

Some people claim that the whole plot is about “the bad guys being stupid." No, the whole plot is about the bad guys being stupid when it suits the writers and not the characters. That's just bad storytelling. Say what you want about RE6, it has a cringe plot but at least it is somewhat consistent with the characters, the villains, and their intentions. And I guess another one of my problems is that this is now like the third or fourth time that Capcom pulled a "ACTUALLY THERE’S A BIGGER PUPPET MASTER BEHIND ALL THIS." Mikami was a genius for killing off Umbrella off screen by letting it go bankrupt in the intro of RE4. He destroyed that corporational bullshit fixation on Umbrella and made the whole BOW worldbuilding go worldwide into militarism and terrorism. You know, that was the whole point of BOWs, the whole reason they were made in RE1.

CHARACTERS Leon is Leon. Kinda? I did like him more than in RE4R because they toned down his constant stupid quips during gameplay that were very jarring in RE4R. Despite his massive amount of body muscles and stubble it looks like they don’t want to part with the baby boy look from RE2R. He looks so young when he’s not looking at least slightly annoyed. He does look better than in 4R but depending on the camera angle (usually not when looking down on him) he can look very weird, mostly his jawline. Because this design of Leon isn’t purely his remake model just aged up, it’s tweaked to have features resembling his pre RE engine era look.

I love that Leon got some kind of gadget again (like in RE4) and used it to free himself after getting captured by Gideon. I would have loved for him to use more of that.

Now this is specifically my take but I really hate how the remakes reduced Leon’s trauma to "he couldn’t save anyone" because it downplays how big the Raccoon City Incident situation is and its impact on him. It’s not just about him not being able to save people (which it never really was about in the original RE2 because there a big plot point was that both Claire and Leon were searching for and saving Sherry), but Umbrella fucking up the lives for everyone. Not just Umbrella but also the corrupt authorities (the chief, the mayor, the government), the scale is so much bigger. So not only did the lives of the 100k people living in Raccoon City get destroyed but also the lives of Leon and Sherry. And that’s not because Leon couldn’t save anyone. The city was already doomed before he got there. People were already the living dead. The remakes made him way too naive and one dimensional, so it’s annoying that Requiem keeps Leon’s trauma one dimensional (most noticeable in the stupid script of the bad ending.)

Harry is interesting but it kinda feels like they just added him to have him killed off because there are no stakes for anybody else.

“Not bad for someone at deths door.” As cool as seeing and fighting Hunk is, for me it’s another “it happens and then it’s instantly forgotten” moment. And it’s not believable to me that the guy who out of all the RE characters is maybe the most mission focused and calculating character, would go full on fanboy mode for Leon and engage with his banter. "No need for backup, I'll deal with the target myself. We finally meet UWU~" You could argue that that's what got Hunk killed, I say it’s bad characterization. (And he’s not dead, so Capcom please give me 4th survivor 2.0!)

The Spencer retcon. Or rather Schrödinger’s Spencer because the game plays with both Spencer actually being remorseful and him just trolling the bad guys that destroyed his Umbrella. But honestly none of these two work because it just contradicts the stories before Requiem and in RE9 itself. “Dementia” doesn’t suddenly make characters or plot work. Why tf does elpis mcguffin ex machina exist at all then, and why did it exist before Raccoon City got bombed when Umbrella was still strong and all.

I can’t really say much about Grace, I don’t dislike her but once the first half of the game ends her character is reduced to “it’s all my fault. again!” and “finally I can do something!” which is just too vague of a character and boring,

So aside from Grace bonding with Emily in the beginning, which gives her more motivation than just escaping the care center for her own sake, all characters feel like they have very weak motivations. It’s not that the protagonists need to know or understand the antagonists motivations but we need to, otherwise the characters come off as very inconsistent. I felt like that about Victor, especially in his boss fight as fun as his dialogue is. "SPENCERS VISION LIVES THROUGH MEEE." "SACRIFICES MUST BE MADE. In the grand scheme of things, a few lives.. are NOTHING!" His megalomania came out of nowhere to me (ignoring the highway part because that was just ridiculous but the same applies there.)

ACTING “What a fuckin shame… Every single time…” This actually hurts me to write, but Nick's performance as Leon is highly inconsistent which is really disappointing because of how good he was in RE2R. Normally it wouldn’t be a problem or as much noticeable but the incredible performances for Grace and Victor just contrast way too much. This already started in RE4R when Nick tried sounding more broody and obviously he tries to go for even more in RE9 because Leon is 20 years older and carries more scars and weight in his life.

But the way Nick pushes his voice to be deeper and gruffier is just so far removed from his natural tone (and maybe he doesn’t have much experience with that yet) that it actually hinders his ability to emote and give his lines intonation that doesn’t follow the same mechanical pattern. That’s why sometimes there are inconsistencies like: suddenly he sounds exactly like in RE4R for one or half a line, he doesn’t sound like he’s talking to the person opposed to him, he doesn’t sound like Leon is in the situation he’s supposed to be in but rather as if he is talking to the audience in an amateur theater way because that sentence was meant as a wink. And also why a lot of jokes fall really flat now, aside from being too forced because Leon just has to have a comment for everything.

I’ve seen people be annoyed by Grace’s constant stuttering or scared tone, but at least she’s incredibly believable in her performance. The comments she has for random things like when she gets a key item or enters a previously locked area sound like somebody talking to themself, with genuine curiosity or relaxation.

As expected though, the japanese voice over is close to perfect. I’m so glad my first playthrough was in japanese because the inconsistent voice direction and performances in english (Chloe is maybe the worst one) just would have taken me out way too much and I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed the game at all.

END: NITPICKS Some settings are weird, the sensitivity is unnecessarily hidden behind camera/character POV sub settings.

You can’t rebind the key for scope zoom and it’s the same key as sprint. So I had the game very often mess up my scope zoom (and sensitivity because that changes too between the zoom levels) which resulted in me being confused and stressed about where the enemies are.

On Grace’s inventory: Item descriptions can cover your HP/equipment information. Which can happen by default when you open your inventory if the game decides to select an item that does that.

The monochrome inventory isn’t too bad on Grace but on Leon it becomes very unclear and confusing what items you have, auto-sort doesn’t help with that. Thank god for the colored icons mod, Capcom should actually implement it in the game.

Aiming from cover (which also allows for a “shoulder swap” but only from cover). I found out this exists by accident because it got triggered on weird collision and not because it was supposed to happen. I guess they added this mechanic because of gun enemies in Raccoon City and ARK but it’s a very useless feature because of how long it also takes for you to aim from cover. Also it’s very underdeveloped, it works much like the aiming from cover in RE6 just slower, it’s very unintuitive.