Resident Evil Village completed: My thoughts

I completed the game a night or two ago and then watched the entirety of the credits for that little teaser that they always put at the end as if we were watching a Marvel movie, that indicates where the story is going from that point forward.

I played Biohazard and mostly like it and now I have completed Village as well, both on the normal difficulty setting and mostly I found both to be a reasonably good gaming experience, but at the same time I am kind of falling out of love with the entire RE formula and this is for what I consider to be some really good reasons.

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For starters, the RE games all kind of function in a similar fashion. They are considered by many to be survival horror for a reason and one of the main reasons that is the case is because you are always on the precipice of running out of ammo at all times. You already know that your knife is damn near useless, so you don't want to be reduced to that.

I experimented with some of the settings because you can change it mid game as far as difficulty is concerned (which is nice) and one of the only things that I noticed about enemies was that they were greater in number and took 1 or 2 more hits to bring down. Other than that, the movements, the AI if you will, of the enemies remained the same... and in RE games just generally speaking this means that they are walking or flying in a straight line heading right for you with no lateral or dodging movements built in at all. The only difference seems to be how fast they move and how many hits they take regardless of what sort of enemy it is.

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Towards the later parts of the game you will encounter some armored enemies that take a tiny bit of expertise to eliminate, but honestly, even these enemies are extremely easy and only really offer any sort of challenge if there are multiples of them at one time and this happens on a regular basis as they are kind of the only enemy type that is going to reduce the number of explosive rounds that you have collected during all of your time playing the game up to this point

Now let's talk about the boss fights

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_{if you have been in this fight you already know there is nothing you can do but wait during this part}

I've kind of had a bit of a "beef" with RE boss fights going all the way back to the first one on PS1. These boss fights tend to be almost completely lacking in strategy and it is just a question of some very basic movements to get out of the way. Resident Evil has never been about fast movement on the part of the character that you are controlling outside of RE6 which is largely regarded to be an absolute turd as far as games are concerned.

The bosses in RE tend to be these fights that the only question is do you know when the enemy is invulnerable (which is stupid that this would EVER be the case) and did you bring enough healing things with you to survive the few hits that it seems are required that you take throughout a battle. Since you move as though you have boots made of stone on, dodging doesn't happen and running can be a waste of time as well seeing as how most of the boss fights kind of contain you in a tiny space that there is nowhere to run to anyway.

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The final boss battle was kind of nice with "Mother Miranda" because it is a beautiful fight with a really cool enemy but once again, we are mostly dealing with did you bring enough ammo? do you have enough healing items? I'm sure there are some experts out there that have figured out how to get through the battle with zero damage (I didn't look) but some of her attacks towards you are basically QuickTime events that are going to land and there is nothing you can do about that.

So to me the boss fights were interesting and graphically very nice looking but none of them posed any sort of real challenge. Actually, none of the fights at all posed much of a challenge other than when you don't actually have what it takes to destroy whatever it is that is attacking you yet and it becomes very clear very quickly that you are supposed to be running right now, not fighting.

Now lets get to something that really irked me about Village that I've not really experienced ever in an RE game and this is the voice acting of the main character named Ethan (who you play for almost all of the game). The voice actor is Todd Soley and I would be surprised if anyone even knows who that is because why would you.

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When Resident Evil was first released on the PS1, the voice acting was so terrible that I think they got halfway through it and decided that bad voice acting was going to be their thing. Barry was extremely bad and the dialogue was probably written by a Japanese guy with only a rudimentary understanding of the English language. But now that Resident Evil has become one of the biggest money-makers in the gaming world, one would think that they would have impeccable voice acting but that is not the case.

Todd Soley's voicing of Ethan Winters is god-awful to the point where anything that is supposed to be emotional is just stupid and for the most part I just wanted him to not talk at all. This wouldn't be so surprising if all the other voice actors were also bad but they aren't. In fact, all of the voice acting in Village is extremely good EXCEPT for the one person whose voice we have to hear the most. This took me out of the immersion of horror and just made it survival-cringe.

Seriously! How did they record certain segments of that and turn to one another and say "yep, that was perfect, no reason to have another go at recording that."

I don't know anything else about Todd but "Kratos" he is not and well, if Ethan appears in the upcoming RE games I suppose they will have no choice but to hire him again.

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I think there is a time and place for Resident Evil games but for the most part, there really isn't any real strategy going on. The enemies for the most part simply pop up around you so keeping the shotgun handy is probably something that most people are going to do. There are better and more powerful weapons but they aren't good for an enemy that you don't even see until it is right up on you and since basically every enemy makes a linear beeline right for you regardless of enemy type, simply waiting for them to get close before putting the hammer down on a the shotgun works almost every time. The exception is anything that is armored and you learn very quickly that ok, with these I use a pipebomb or a grenade than switch over to pistol and blast them in the extremely obvious weak point.

There just isn't much strategy here at all and while it get that ammo scarcity is their thing and always has been, I suppose I should be impressed that they have managed to crank these out over and over again with basically the same gameplay as we have been using since the 1990's but with better graphics.

If i had access to the latest RE game (I don't) I think I would still wait a while before I got involved.

Village is a decent game with some amazing visuals but the gameplay is pretty meh and requires zero skill. If you can tolerate the voice acting of Ethan I say get in there and have a look. It is decent but mostly a pretty boring experience that is kept interesting by the narrative and changing landscape.

This is not a game that I would ever play again.