Resident Evil 8: Village - The Ultimate Critique

resident evil 8 village marks yet another massive transformation in the long beloved series that is resident evil i think the simplest way that i can explain what's happened to this franchise in this latest entry is simply to say that this is now an action series it's no longer a suspenseful horror game it's about the action and some people will love that some will hate it and i'm not joking by the end of this game it's gonna feel a lot closer to a battlefield title than it will to a classic resident evil game sure at the end of most of their entries in the last few years they've had big action sequences that act as sort of a capstone to the story but in this case it's on a whole nother level don't worry we'll get specific soon but for the sake of this introductory section of the video when we're trying to remain spoiler free for those of you who have not played the game yet or planned to it's important to say that this game it's very different from its predecessors so judging it purely against its predecessors just doesn't work what that means is that we have to grade this game in many ways as a standalone title we can reference back to resident evil 7 to what six and what the two remake and what three remake did we can bring those things up but this is such a fundamental departure from that formula even from that genre then it just doesn't work and don't get it twisted this was not an accident on the part of the developers you don't make a transformation this massive without meaning to clearly the developers treated this game as a reboot of sorts an attempt to get this game into the hands of the broader public a group of people who wouldn't have tried the previous games because they were too horror focused resident evil 8 certainly does have some horror elements still but it is far less of a horror game than it is an action game which is my point the developers have shed many of the burdens from the prior entries in favor of more enjoyable gameplay mechanics but in doing so they also fundamentally transformed the gameplay loop and even the tone as i said some will love this shift and some will hate it some like me are a little bit more apathetic i like it but i didn't have that much of an attachment to the previous entries so no love lost simply put i think that resident evil 8 is a good game it's fantastically well built and designed i also think the same of resident evil 7 but they are different games entirely and i don't mentally process them as successors to each other in any way other than their narratives building on this understand that as we discuss resident evil 8 we'll be touching on a lot that happen in resident evil 7 so if you're sensitive to spoilers for either game please be aware that this video will have to discuss everything i also can't beat around the bush too long on this one because any significant discussion of the game is going to show locations areas characters events and all sorts of things that many would consider to be spoilers in and of themselves so consider this your spoiler warning for resident evil 7 and for resident evil 8 village if you want my quick opinion i'd say that this game is really solid it's well made it's fun and it's certainly aaa quality but recommending it is tricky my first run on pc was about six hours and my subsequent runs on ps5 and series x were even shorter at 5.5 hours and four hours respectively and honestly six hours for a game that i paid 70 dollars for it's just not that impressive sure i felt like it was fun it was high quality it was polished and it was lean but it doesn't change the fact that for 60 or 70 or 80 dollars you can get a lot more game elsewhere now granted not every game needs to be a persona 5 or red day redemption 2 or assassin's creed valhalla but 6 hours really is not much you remember how much people freaked out when the order 1886 came out and was announced to be like four hours long and they were charging a full price for it like people lost their minds and it basically destroyed that franchise entirely this time around we're charging more and it's six hours long but nobody's really discussing it granted you can get more out of a game like resident evil 8 village by replaying and going on more detailed runs where you collect all of the doodads upgrade all of your weapons and search through every nook and cranny and that's why all of this is up to your personal preference after a lot of consideration i'm actually okay with the higher price tag and less hours i mean in my mind if i went out to a movie by the time you factor in popcorn candy driving there the tickets everything i would probably be spending about 60 dollars for a movie night with my wife and maybe some friends and that would only last like two and a half three hours so in terms of other forms of media it's not actually that aggressive but with video games it's something that should cause pause but after really thinking about it not just in the context of other media but also in and of itself this is a high quality experience it really is it's polished the acting is great the cinematics are great they put a lot of effort in here and what i'm thankful for is that there's not a lot of bloat here and having just played through all of assassin's creed valhalla for the upcoming critique on that game i i think i probably gave this one a little too much credit for not having a ton of bloat but that may just be me but importantly i don't have any issue if this is too steep for you if 60 bucks or 70 bucks depending on the platform you get it on and sales and all this if that's just not worth six hours to you that is totally fine and i do not blame you if you need more gameplay time then so be it in my mind it's actually the same evaluation that goes on when you're out at a fancy bar or club with somebody and you're looking at that cocktail menu and there's a ton of different choices ranging in price some people are okay with paying more for less quantity if it's a higher quality while others would much prefer to just order a fishbowl get a ton of bang for their buck get super sloshed even though it's of a very low quality depending on your circumstances goals and preferences both of these are fair choices to make and you're not necessarily wrong for making one over the other so if you look at the six hours you get for 70 bucks with resident evil 8 village and you are totally repulsed fair enough in that case i would just say wait for a sale and enjoy it then because there is a game here that's very very enjoyable it's purely a matter of trying to decide how much money you're willing to put up for how short of an experience you're likely to have if it's any consolation i really enjoyed my time with the game and it was one of the most high quality and lean experiences i've had with a triple aaa title in the last year and considering this year has had so few quality releases as of right now the time of recording this and more and more are being delayed by the day i think it's worth playing even if the price per hour is above and outside the range that i would normally consider acceptable but that's it for the introduction i'm now going to get into the specifics regarding the gameplay and the narrative so again spoiler warning we're going to go through the whole game the whole story all of the weapons that at least are worth looking at so buckle up as always if you enjoy this video or would like to see more like it please leave a like please subscribe these videos take weeks to make i spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on editors and all of the crap that has to go into the back end of this paying for a 16 freaking terabyte hard drive so i can store all of this footage in high quality enough codecs and formats that it looks good on your screen so if you want to see more of this happen all i ask is like subscribe and even just consider throwing a dollar into the patreon coffer i'll have it linked below no pressure if you do great if you don't no worries but patrons do get to see videos like this a full week before everybody else yeah so patrons are seeing this a week before you are also real quick shout out in rg top contributor on patreon i forgot to record it when i was doing the whole video so i wanted to take this opportunity thank you you're awesome also follow all of my social media pages so you get notified of when i'm going live to stream games like this you'll see a lot of streamed gameplay footage um in this video and that's because we played through this game for the first time with you guys over on twitch so if you want to be part of that make sure to head to those links below but with all of that said let's get into it so the first thing i want to tackle is the elephant in the room which is the gameplay a lot has changed here even above and beyond resident evil 7. resident evil 7 i would say was primarily a stealth suspense thriller you could probably say it was a suspenseful horror game but it lacked a lot of the jump scares and typical things you would see in terms of tropes with a lot of horror games which i prefer i'm glad that they didn't fall victim to those tropes but even so i would say it's more of a suspense thriller and every single element of the game's design is focused around giving the player just enough to get through a certain sequence they would give you a knife to barely fight off your attackers but not really do enough damage to feel as though you could go head to head you always needed to feel as though you were underneath them in terms of the power hierarchy and that you were always just a smidge away from death and it's that suspense that made that game so successful in what it was trying to do it was trying to be a suspense thriller it was very suspenseful and it was thrilling so they did it resident evil 8 village though has a very different goal in mind it's not trying to be a suspense thriller it's trying to be in action thriller very different as a result every element of the gameplay design is centered around making sure that you as the player are on the same level as the enemies if not above so whereas before the players down here and the enemies are up here this time around it's leveled out for most of the game and even tipped in the player's favor in many cases especially at the end of the game when you're beating up all of these big bosses this is also reflected in what was for me the most immediately noticeable change weapon and ammo abundance it's everywhere seriously no matter what weapon you're using you're likely to have full coffers of all of the ammo if you're playing on the normal difficulty or certainly of course the easier difficulty once you go into the harder difficulties which is what i did on my subsequent runs on ps5 and xbox series x it does get a little harder to find ammo that you need for all of your weapons but it's balanced by the fact that you will have a better understanding of the game and also that you'll realize you don't actually need to completely kill every single enemy in many levels some levels you do have to wipe the entire arena before you can move on but in many arenas you just have to get to that last door whether there are enemies still spawned in or not you just have to get to that end destination so you can save a lot of ammo that way and i could complain about that as a design feature that it just encourages this sprint horror gameplay which you see all over the place outlast for instance was famous for this where there wasn't a weapon so the only way you got through levels was just by either sneaking around enemies or just running around them and in many other horror games even ones where you do have weapons you can just run around the enemies get to the end checkpoint and you're fine in this case that is still something that happens but it's far far less common now in addition to ammo being found everywhere to the point where you never really have to worry about it so long as you're playing on a normal difficulty and even at higher difficulties it's far more abundant than it was in resident evil 7 but setting that aside the weapons themselves are very numerous and highly varied furthermore there's also a lot more customization than i expected i mean i had heard that the duke who was a character we saw in some of the opening trailers he was going to offer for sale many different weapons and upgrades to those weapons but i didn't realize just how comprehensive this system was like there's a lot here now i'm gonna quickly run through all the weapons that i used in my main run and uh kind of give you a run through of those i'm sure i've missed some i know for a fact i've missed some but uh i'm gonna go through the ones that stood out to me i don't know if one stood out to you and i don't mention it let me know but these are the ones i used and these are the uh different customizations that you can throw on them of course to begin we have the knife this is just a basic melee weapon you find it in west old town in the village can't be upgraded doesn't do much other than just stab and slash but it's nice to have a weapon that never runs out of ammo you can always rely on it at least to help you get out of sticky situations especially on harder difficulties when ammo can be a difficult thing to come by or if you go through for instance a boss fight where it drains all of your ammo you're about to get soft locked because you don't have any ammo left you can still pull out your knife and inflict some damage with that i think it highly likely that most people will not use the knife hardly at all throughout the course of their run at least their first run when they're playing on normal or a difficulty where they have more ammunition because the knife just doesn't compete with any of the plethora guns that we're going to talk about in just a second but again i'm glad it's here next we have the lemmy this is a handgun semi-automatic and it's part of the main story questline so you will pick it up in the old town village when you're exploring there's no miss in this one considering it's the first real gun that you find and will be using throughout the first hour or so of the game it's pretty solid it has a couple customization options such as a compensator to reduce recoil and then a higher capacity magazine it's useful it's nice but it doesn't really compete with some of the other pistols that we're going to be talking about that you find a little bit later on so it's highly likely that people will be dumping this thing once they find some of those better weapons in other words i just don't think you're going to see this in the end game next we have the basic pump action shotgun the m1897 you find this in a house not long after you find the lemmy it's one that you get pushed into a house as there's a bunch of monsters outside and you find it sitting on the table it's kind of cool because it's the first bigger boy weapon that you have and this thing just cleans up with those smaller enemies the the basic brutes even i think it feels pretty punchy it looks cool and amazingly enough it doesn't fall victim to some of the difficulties they had with the higher grade weapons in resident evil 7 which was that when you found one you knew it did more damage so you wanted to save it for bigger encounters which meant that you never actually used it because every time you went up against any enemy you were always like i think i can hold that with just my pistol or just i'll swap to my knife and i'll just slash him a bunch and i'll save the shotgun shells for something else never really falls victim to it i think part of that's because ammo is so abundant again it encourages you to use the weapon but also because there's so many enemies in almost every level that you go through which again we'll see in detail as we go through the main story that you kind of have to use it and i kind of like that option to be honest if you're going to put all these weapons in the game you should at the very least push the player to use them it wouldn't make any sense to give players all of these pistols and shotguns and a sniper rifle and all this stuff if players were just going to hoard the ammo because they were scared they would never get to actually use the weapon because they'd use one round on one enemy and then they never find sniper rifle ammo again so they just never use it it wouldn't make sense so i'm glad that they found a way in this case just throwing tons of enemies at you to push the player into using these weapons the shotgun also has some basic customization like swapping out the trigger so that fires faster and you can also change like some of the cosmetics on it uh it's it's fun but again this is one that likely will be dumped fairly quickly once players find some of the other weapons that are available the next is the sniper rifle which i actually expected to be my favorite weapon but it really wasn't i think part of it is that the sniping just doesn't really feel that great in here you can't really quick scope the tracking is odd the damage output is also kind of odd and furthermore the levels rarely are large enough to justify a sniper rifle very rarely usually the rooms at their max are maybe 20 yards long and even that for a sniper rifle just doesn't really make a lot of sense in many cases i found that the pistols were actually more reliable at greater distances than the sniper rifle because the sniper rifle you fire it it takes a second to recock it and by the time you actually are ready to fire again you got people rushing you it's not very viable in my humble opinion and that's coming from a guy that loves his sniping so just gonna say it this one does actually have a fair amount of customization but again i wouldn't recommend doing too much to this because i just don't think it's very viable as a weapon throughout the course of the game but again maybe some people would disagree with me i had ditched the sniper rifle by the time i got to the end of the game with some of the bigger bosses so it's possible that this rifle would have been really useful in those boss fights and that i missed out on some easy exploits but for me it just didn't make a lot of sense to use it and to keep my inventory filled with it and those are the weapons that are going to carry you through lady demetres castle so basically the first quarter or so of the game and they do a pretty good job of it it makes you feel as though you've got arsenal of weapons and i was pretty happy with what i had here so by the time i got out of the castle and i realized there was a lot more game to be had and a lot more weapons to be used i was actually pleasantly surprised i truly thought that this was going to be it but no in the workshop outside of the castle you can actually find another pistol in this case the m1911 which is a fully automatic pistol that shreds and i think most people are going to ditch their prior pistol for this one also has a couple of customization options they're pretty basic such as adding a higher capacity magazine something you would expect for a gun that just slaps bullets out if that's a term next we have probably one of my favorite guns in the whole game which is the w870 tack shotgun it's a tactical pump action shotgun as you would probably expect from the name and it is awesome again this is basically just a new and improved version of the shotgun that you were already using so most players are gonna dump the old one for the new one which is kind of a difficult thing to bring yourself to do because likely by this point in the game you've thrown tens of thousands of the in-game currency at these weapon upgrades and improvements so to just ditch the old one for a new one that often feels about on par if not a little bit worse than your fully upgraded weapon that you're currently using it's a little difficult to bring yourself to do because these later game weapons are way better especially when they're fully upgraded so don't try to hold on to the early game stuff i'm sure some people in the comments are going to be like no they're still viable you can do well with them later in the game you just have to hold on i'm not convinced i think these are significantly better but like i said the attack shotgun is probably my favorite weapon in the game so i'm a little biased next there's a grenade launcher it's fine it doesn't feel particularly good and it's not a weapon that you're going to be using continually so it's more of a novelty moving on next we've got the wolf spain this is a magnum revolver it looks super cool it feels fine to shoot but the ammo capacity limits it and in my view it's powerful it packs a punch but i didn't really use it for any extended period of time i kept it in my weapon wheel basically for a little while and then i was like eh i'll swap it back out it just didn't earn its spot as well as some of the other weapons that we've discussed and then there's also the sig 12 shotgun which is a semiotic big barreled behemoth of a shotgun it feels good to use it's fine but it's found so late in the game that many people are not going to have it fully upgraded and likely will stick with the shotgun they already were using the attack shotgun that we just discussed it's a fine weapon certainly but i do kind of wish that we had gotten access to it a little bit earlier and then beyond that we have the fully automatic assault rifle that you use at the very end of the game it it doesn't feel particularly good it's just kind of like a water gun to be honest like it it's just not notable in my eyes um and you can tell it was sort of the last thing that the weapons team likely had to design because they were trying to make sure that the games you actually used for the majority of the game felt good and played well so they focused on those and then like oh crap yeah we need the ar for the very end of the game and they threw that together pretty quickly it's fine there are other weapons that i've been told about but nothing that i used regularly throughout the course of my run so in my view these are the core weapons that 99 of players are going to be using throughout the course of the game and they're pretty varied i mean it would have been interesting to see what another sniper rifle that was really viable maybe one without a scope maybe just a marksman's rifle or something could have been like but beyond this i mean i think it's pretty good selection now these weapon mods and all of the weapon variety does encourage engagement which like i said is a really good thing now the shooting isn't great but it is serviceable and at least it doesn't feel as though you're shooting a water gun like it did in resident evil 7. i mean for real that pistol that you used in that game felt i mean it felt like a water gun it didn't feel like an actual gun there was no real punch there was nothing to it it was just like ping ping it just didn't feel very good they definitely put a lot more effort into it this time around still not great but it's better now beyond just throwing a ton of enemies at you at any given level to get you to use all of these weapons the gameplay designers also made sure to heavily incentivize you not just running around the enemies but actually killing them because they drop some serious loot big guys especially drop these special skulls and skeletons that can be sold for tens of thousands of the in-game currency and it seems pretty clear that the developers want you to fight in any instance that you can so all told the gun play actually feels pretty good but is it what's driving the player throughout the course of the experience at least most players i actually would guess not i don't think the gameplay is actually that good that it's gonna drive people for i mean granted it's only six hours but it's not gonna push people that hard for that long what i think is gonna do it are the charismatic villains and that's something that resident evil hasn't really done before to be honest sure we can go back to resident evil 4 and we can reference resident evil 2 and we can bring up the the baker family in resident evil 7 but all of those villains i wouldn't actually consider charismatic in my mind charisma is about gravitas about having sort of a gravity to your personality that when you start talking people shut up and start listening it's about having a charm so people like you but they don't really know why they just are interested and intrigued that's a part of it and then also just a magnetism they need to have people just attracted to them for some bizarre reason where they just want to watch it's like what michael jackson used to call the spark of the divine i know like insert little kid joke here but he used to say that his natural gift for performing his charisma was something that could not be learned could not be taught it was a drop of the divine and he didn't know where he got it or why he had it but he just did people wanted to look at him wanted to listen wanted to hear what he had to say it was a charisma yeah video about resident evil 8 village he didn't expect me to bring up michael jackson i just watched leaving neverland so it's on my mind i suppose it's messed up by the way that whole thing when we look at the family in resident evil 7 i don't think they meet most of these qualifications for charisma i i think that they're intriguing but more than anything they were repulsive you didn't want to spend time with the father or with the mother or with the brother like you wanted to get away so in my mind it's almost like an opposite draw it was a repulsion it pushed you away in resident evil 8 though it's actually kind of the opposite i wanted to see and hear more of the villains lady demetresque was of course very interesting people were obsessed with her in the lead-up to the game another individual such as heisenberg or moreau or mother miranda all have their own interesting appeal and it makes you want to explore the world not just to explore it but also to find out more about them and to hopefully meet them and see them and figure out what's going on and i can't stress enough just how huge this transformation this shift is for a horror franchise a suspense horror franchise prior to this you always wanted to get away from the villains now you weirdly want to go to them how bizarre is that now granted this is sort of a nonsensical motivation for the player or for ethan to go through the game it doesn't really make sense that you would seek out the villains uh just to find out more about them but to be fair nonsensical motivations are not a new thing to horror films and games most of the time you simply have to accept that this is just an artifact of the genre however in this case i actually found myself really enjoying the time that i got to spend with the antagonists and that's weird for me now of course some of these villains don't stick around for too long which i actually think is good lady dimitresk is out within just a couple of hours but i'm not really upset about it i mean the fact that each of the main villains get their own time and areas to shine in means that we get highly varied scenes and set pieces something that you'll see in the coming sections of the video speaking of let's go through this main story piece by piece bit by bit and look at what we've got here resident evil 8 village opens with what is probably one of my favorite opening sequences of any game ever and i'm not joking this whole animation and story ties together with the end of the game fantastically well something that we'll discuss when we get there it may seem totally random and out of place but it actually is an allegory for this game's whole story and it's pretty cool and maybe i'm alone in this but this whole section actually reminded me a lot of the section in harry potter and the deathly hallows when they're actually describing the deathly hallows that whole animation thing that they did i love it now once again we're playing as ethan winters the same guy that we played as in resident evil 7 and this is one of the reasons i thought that it might be important to go back through seven prior to playing eight because there might be some references here and there to what happened in that game and i'm glad i did because this game's plot is very very dependent on the player having at least a little understanding of what happened last time around like they show some cutscenes they show some things that kind of give you an idea of what happened if you didn't play the game but to be honest if you didn't play seven and you went into this i would imagine you were pretty lost especially towards the end i don't know if you if you played eight and you didn't play village let me know in the comments what you thought of all of this if you're able to follow it because i'm not sure if i would have been able to because it's a little a little crazy now after everything that happened with resident evil 7 ethan and mia decided to get out of louisiana understandably with their daughter rose and they've escaped somewhere now based on some dialogue it sounds as though they've escaped to romania i don't think it's particularly important uh to be honest where they are but it basically sets up where they're going to be which is in a village near transylvania because of course all told this whole opening sequence is really quiet and somewhat serene it's a new house ethan and mia are happy they're reading this children's story to rose ethan's a little upset with mia because the story seems much more mature than rose needs to be listening to which is fair it's a pretty dark story but mia insists on reading and there's a really weird vibe here and an awkward tension between mia and ethan it's just a little bizarre but considering what they went through the last game i just kind of hand waved it away as i mean i'd probably be pretty messed up too after everything that went on there one important thing to also note here is that mia brings out a bottle of wine that she says she really likes and has come across and so you and mia share a glass doesn't seem that important but it will be towards the end of the game i'm not joking remember this bottle of wine now mia's odd behavior just gets weirder and weirder eventually culminating in a full-blown argument at which point chris shows up out of nowhere and starts shooting up the place and uh kills mia she's dead this whole bit came out of nowhere i mean i knew that something had to happen to get you to the village and to give you a reason to push on through especially because in some of the trailers ethan keeps referencing that he needs to save his daughter and this and that so i figured there was something going on here but it happened a lot quicker than i expected so chris shows up takes the baby and ethan out of the house dragging them completely out of left field i mean we thought chris was a good guy and now he just murdered mia and is kidnapping the baby i it's very confusing even gets thrown in the back of a car they're driven off at which point the car wrecks and you wake up just outside of it all of the other agents that you see surrounding the vehicle are dead and chris and rose are nowhere to be found so naturally ethan decides to push on forward trying to follow some of the footprints in the snow to see if he can find where they went you push your way through the dark force and eventually arrive at a village yeah yeah that's why it's called that but it's not a normal village in fact it looks almost completely abandoned it's falling apart there's weird blood streaks everywhere it doesn't seem like a great place to be you push through a bunch of different buildings and eventually you find a man hiding in a closet who's got a gun in his hands ready to go this is the same sequence we saw in some of the opening trailers actually the announcement trailer to be honest so it's not really surprised when you come across it the old man gives ethan his first gun at which point he's of course immediately attacked by some sort of monster in the ceiling trying to escape ethan runs underneath the building into the crawl space and finds a ton of different bodies here this perhaps explains where everyone from the village went or at least a lot of them right as you get outside you find the lycan which is what's been causing all of this trouble you fight it kill it and then continue pushing through the village and this is our first exposure to all of the work they've done with this engine to get a lot more enemies on screen at once apparently one of the difficulties with resident evil 7 was that the re engine was pretty limited in terms of how many individual instances of characters could be on screen at any given time this is why usually whenever there was an enemy it was only one and it was in a confined space there was some issue with how it dealt with memory transfers and things i don't know i'm not a programmer i don't really understand it i just know what they tell me but they have done a lot of work on this and they're able to put a lot more characters on screen at one time in bigger arenas it's really an improvement in every way eventually all of these enemies dissipate after a big bell on the church rings which is a little eerie but whatever and then an old lady shows up again this lady we saw in the trailers and the demos beforehand but it's still kind of eerie to see her she seems to have a clear and concise knowledge of what exactly is going on here but she speaks in riddles and really obscure phrases so who knows what the hell she's talking about what stood out to me though is that this old lady says that the village has basically gone to crap since ethan's daughter was brought there for one it's odd that she knows that this little baby girl was ethan's two it seems as though the village has been kind of falling apart for a while so it almost seems as though the village has been going to hell for longer than just a couple hours which is presumably the length of time ethan's been unconscious after the car crash but this seems to be the case i mean either way it doesn't matter that much so we'll just carry on after speaking with the old woman you find another lady by the name of elena and her father has been pretty severely injured just recently by one of these lycan attacks everybody pushes into louise's house who's been sending out messages through the radio saying that you can come here for shelter and protection and it's here that we can see the larger group scene which again was something that we had ruined and spoiled for us in the trailers and demos that led up to the game's release it's unfortunate that they had to show so much of the game considering it's so short but i guess it's my own damn fault for watching so touche but either way after talking with everybody hearing their opinions on what's causing all of this and then of course a prayer beginning in an event that's surprised nobody the dude that is injured by the lichen starts freaking out and basically goes all zombie on them starts killing and attacking everybody ethan and that young woman elena pushed through the house escaping her father narrowly eventually finding a way to get out of the building as it goes up in flames as you're escaping the building elena's father comes back out of the fire somehow and calls to her there's this really awkward scene where she goes to try and save him even though he just murdered a bunch of people clearly is turning into a monster and is now trying to draw her into the flames either way she goes to him and falls what can only be like three feet and dies so sufficiently perplexed ethan pushes his way out of the building and continues his way up to the castle however once you get close to the castle you push your way up through find yourself captured in a cage of scrap metal i guess is what you would call this and you wake up basically in front of a tribunal this is our first time seeing all of the main enemies in one place and it's really cool to see in fact this is probably my favorite single shot of the whole game visually and in terms of what it means for the story the fact all the characters are there i just i love this eventually the pope looking lady on the step who seems to be the one in charge and who we soon find out is mother miranda says that heisenberg the individual who captured you can have ethan and can do with him as he wishes at which point heisenberg understandably sets ethan loose and has him run through a bunch of minds basically as a sort of uh gladiator escape attempt for their amusement it's a little odd but it does lead to a cool sequence where you're trying to escape through all of these different traps and platforming sections it's just kind of cool somehow ethan escapes and there's no further pursuit on the part of heisenberg or any of those other villains that we just happened to see and at first i thought it's just video game logic being video game logic they've got to make you escape so the game can continue of course but there actually is likely a reason for this and it's that heisenberg didn't actually want to kill you he wants to use you which will be important later after making your way through this little cave area you eventually push your way up to the castle and you meet the duke for the first time now this guy basically serves as the merchant for the game you find him all over the map in almost every instance and he'll just sell you whatever he's got buy your stuff off of you he's just a jolly little chubby man now to me he's actually one of the most interesting characters in the entire story i find him fascinating because i i like when there's a character like this that has a backstory that matches what his role is within the game's gameplay if that makes sense in this case he seems to be very pragmatic he's done deals with pretty much everybody in this village whether it's lady demon class or mother miranda he knows all of them and he has spots set up everywhere to sell goods in all of their individual locations whether it's in the castle or it's with heisenberg he has a spot set up there so that he can sell presumably heisenberg stuff or mother miranda stuff or lady demetresque stuff or you stuff he just goes where the money is however he does seem to have some issue with mother miranda and with everything that's going on here because for one he continually helps ethan especially at the end of the story he basically saves ethan and sets up the ending sequence of the game and furthermore he's also known to have helped out several villagers in direct contradiction of the orders of mother miranda doing things she asked him not to do but that he did to help them it was purely self-serving self-interest that drove him he probably wouldn't do those things that were forbidden by the most powerful individual in the village but instead he does it and that to me seems to suggest that he has at least some sort of opinion or at the very least motivation that goes beyond purely what is monetarily the smartest choice for him in a given instance but regardless you meet with a duke you sell him some stuff buy some stuff do whatever you got to do with him and then you enter the castle the second you go inside ethan is captured by a group of three sisters again these are the ones we saw in the demo and in the trailers he's brought to meet lady dimitresk and then he is left in the room for consumption later or something basically mother miranda tries out his blood is not particularly impressed it seems and then leaves and the sisters leave as well but again ethan escapes in this instance i can't really come up with an explanation as to why they just left him to escape especially when they could have just had one of the sisters stay here and watch him it doesn't seem as though they've got anything else better to do so it's a little odd they would just leave him here especially after he just escaped another deadly situation so it's a little convenient and in this case lady demon classic i don't think it's trying to help him out in any way she doesn't want him to escape secretly so it really seems as though it's just video games being video games so after you escape the room you make your way through the castle you find a bunch of statues which if you've ever played a video game before you will naturally know you need to complete in order to escape it's the only thing that's logical to be honest so you start to explore the castle trying to find the masks to put on top of the statues to allow you to escape now directly adjacent to this main hall the duke is actually there again he has shops set up all throughout the village because he does business with all of these different people and individuals in this case he's set up in the castle right next to lady dimitresk's front door he suggests that you should look for rows inside lady dimitresk's chambers and that it's likely there that at the very least you'll find some hint of rose a little ominous but you take it and you continue along your merry way working your way to those chambers while you're exploring the castle one of lady dimitresk's daughters in this case one of the vampires that we saw earlier bella comes and chases you into the dungeon it's here that we meet some of the enemies that we saw again in the demo sequence that you saw if you did the castle demo prior to the game's launch so it's nothing particularly new but you find your way out of it after seeing some of these ghosty ghoulies get pushed into another room by bella at which point you were actually able to kill her using the cold wind from the outside coming in it's a cool little realization once you figure out that they are uh scared or or they feel pain from the cold it's an interesting gimmick but it's not one that's really played with beyond this mere idea it's just gonna be for the rest of the sisters that you get them into a cold area and then you shoot the crap out of them and that's kind of it i was hoping that there would be different effects like maybe one of them is afraid of fire the others afraid of water or is weak to each of those but not the case it's just cold so you'll open doors open windows break bricks and do things like that to inflict damage but beyond that there's nothing really done with this idea so after killing the first of these three sisters ethan pushes his way through to lady dimitresk's chambers and once he gets there he sees her on a phone call with who is presumably mother miranda explaining something about a ceremony letting her know that ethan winters has found his way into the castle that she has him captured and this and that it's very vague very obscure but it seems as though they're saving ethan for some greater purpose than just killing him which could be why heisenberg didn't kill him before but it also begs the question as to why they had him go through a deadly gauntlet which based on all the bodies throughout the gauntlet that you saw is clearly deadly so if they're trying to preserve him and keep him alive what's the well what are we doing are we trying to kill him or we're trying to keep him alive let's make up our minds regardless lady demon class hangs up the phone and then leaves the room ethan enters the chambers and finds no hint or a clue or part of rose she's not there and of course being the badass that she is lady demon's class comes right back in sees ethan freaks out and slams him through the freaking floor while trying to escape her she attacks you once more and ethan of course loses his hand this is just par for the course at this point of course in resident evil 7 he lost many parts of his body and then just reattached them so this is nothing new but it actually will be important a little bit later i think there's a reason they're bringing it up again here but ever unable to finish him off the villains fail to kill ethan he grabs his hand and escapes over the next half hour or so you reattach your hand you find and kill the second daughter cassandra in the armory of the castle and then you find the third daughter daniela in the library and kill her as well again these individual mini boss fights aren't that engaging or interesting once you figure out that the cold is all you have to mess with you just open up the sun roof in this case i guess it's more of a snow roof freeze her and kill her or you break down a wall like there's really very little difference between each of these it's just kind of underwhelming but after killing each of them you find the second and third masks so now we're only one to go before we've put all four on the statues and presumably can escape the castle there's a couple interesting levels where lady dimitzklask is in the area and is sort of following you and you have to stealth your way around to get up to the roof where you find the fourth and final mask but nothing particularly notable it also appeared that you find the sniper rifle which is pretty cool but again beyond the roof sequence which is one of the larger areas in the game there really aren't many occasions where the sniper rifle is truly viable so it won't really go beyond this once you've placed all of the masks onto the statues back in the foyer the door opens up and ethan is able to escape outside to the tower and inside the tower he finds a dagger now if you were reading the notes as you explored the castle you'll actually know that this dagger seems to have some sort of super special ability to kill this sickness this evil that's surrounding the castle again it's something that you won't know if you didn't read the notes but either way i mean this thing looks so cool surely it's going to have some sort of special effect and sure enough it does there was something called the dagger of death's flowers somewhere in the castle it's apparently an antique from the middle ages that's coated in a concoction of poisons from across the continent it's said to have been crafted to kill demons and monsters it sounds fascinating but no one knows where it is what do you want to bet that's what that treasure is of course right after we pick up the dagger lady dimitclass reappears and grabs ethan trying to kill him she's had enough of his bossy but with his newfound toy ethan attacks her and the second that this blade makes contact you can see lady dimitclass realizes something has gone terribly wrong this dagger has some sort of poison or something on it that causes her to transform back to her original appearance which is a like weird demon sock puppet dragon it's pretty spoopy and over the course of the next 10 minutes or so you fight her on this tower eventually killing her using every bit of ammunition that you have the boss fight isn't too difficult it's just kind of a matter of using cover to dodge the basic attacks that this creature thing has and then shooting the weak point which is of course the humanoid figure that's on the back of the beast after killing her you drop into a lower area of the tower where you happen to find a yellow flask which is a little odd seems strange that they would be protecting this flask so carefully but you take it because it's probably important you push way back down into town and you find that old woman again who is once again being a really vague really obscure singing about ethan's daughter and it's just odd the notable thing is that she says at one point that rose is going to be a sacrifice of some sort presumably for that ceremony that lady dementless was bringing up earlier so there's certainly a time crunch because the ceremony seems to be imminent so there's no dilly dally we need to rush this is another piece of the puzzle like games do this all the time where they have the main content and then the side content and they want you to engage with the side content along with the main content as you go through so you know you're doing main story content then you're exploring over here and you're doing both at the same time the issue is that with a story like resident evil 8 or another time it happened was with fallout 4 if you have a missing child you're gonna rush to find them you know that's not something where you're like oh my daughter's been kidnapped and they're talking about sacrificing her in a ceremony okay well i'm gonna go explore that waterfall like it's not something that happens you rush you figure out where she is and that's your priority one of the reasons that i don't buy into the excuse when people are like well the game is only six hours but that's because you just did the main story you should have spent all that time also doing all the side content which can add two three or four hours like sure but if you're really engaged with the story which is a good thing then in my mind it's odd for you to go off and do that side content it just doesn't make sense because the side content is literally a distraction from the main story and the main story is asking you to hurry your ass up because your daughter could die at any moment granted you could do a repeated run where you don't take the main story as seriously and you spend plenty of time exploring every nook and cranny there's no issue with that my point is with the first run when you're engaged with the story and you're in it you're immersed it's understandable that a lot of people bypass the side content because the main story asked them to regardless you eventually find your way back to the village and you speak to the duke once more and the duke once again ever helpful tells you to look a little bit closer at that flask that you found yeah it turns out that the flask is actually a part of rose and that she's now i guess jelly or or honey or gatorade or whatever is in the jar it's not very clearly explained because when i saw this like oh it's a piece of rose they must have killed her and cut her up that's morbid but no apparently rose is still alive but it's like her essence or something i i don't really know i don't think you're meant to really think about it but basically all you need to know is that once you bring all of these flasks back presumably rose will be okay and will be saved so ethan doesn't really think about it that hard and neither should the player and you just continue trying to find the rest of the flasks and basically the duke just says that each of the remaining flasks have been set with each of the lords of the village which are the other main bosses that you have to encounter which makes sense as far as gameplay is concerned so you gotta go fight them take back the flasks of rose and then you will save her but again ethan amazingly is not very skeptical about this i get it you gotta kind of blast past the skepticism to make the story make sense but if my daughter had been turned into an orange julius i would probably have some questions but i mean again if i was in a world with vampires and zombies i'd probably be a little more flexible i would guess and here we start working our way through the rest of the bosses and each of these are sort of like their own individual level they have their own visual styles their own gameplay elements that come into play and they're each pretty well done we have house beneviento where ethan is going to come across donna who has the second flask and this is probably the spookiest of all of the levels in the game to be perfectly honest like the castle had some suspenseful moments if you were stealthing around corners and really playing it that way but this is the one time where it'll actually like freak you out like for real all of these dolls are super freaky especially the sound paired with it and then this creepy baby monster that you encounter the fetus monster straight out of the stick of truth like it's pretty horrible i'm not joking this is a clip of the fetus monster and then i'll show you the one from stick of truth i'm not about that khloe kardashian was in here this morning she had the biggest abortion i've ever seen okay and here is a clip of all of the baby dolls in the house it looks like a lonely grandmother's wet dream but in reality it's just truly horrifying you have to do this weird sort of hide-and-seek thing where you find the doll located somewhere in the house it it's spooky also throughout this whole level there's tons of visions and things that ethan has specifically with regards to mia it makes you question your whole relationship and it's honestly pretty interesting it's truly the only time this game really seems to play up the horror elements and the psychological horror elements of the franchise that we've seen in years past it's cool to see and it doesn't overstay its welcome which is also cool to see but regardless after going through all of this you eventually find donna and angie kill both of them at the same time which ends all of these visions and the weird spiritual crap that was going on inside the house you find the second flask and you gtfo or as they say on jesus chat line they gt owed the next place is moreau and this is the most morbid and morose individual that you'll encounter it's actually kind of interesting because on your way in he actually sets up a trap for you so you think as though you've just snuck straight up to the flask you grab it and you're gonna escape but in reality he set up this whole trap which is not something you would expect from him because his whole thing and his whole vibe is that he's the failure that mother miranda doesn't really love he's just there because he has to be there but he's trying to prove his worth honestly he's sort of a sympathetic character again we bring up the idea of these charismatic characters that have some sort of pull to them where you feel for them and this guy even though visually he's horrifying does have that once trapped ethan narrowly escapes the area and you come into this large water level basically and there's this gigantic monster in the water which turns out ismaro himself he can transform into this weird fish monster creature when he's in the water specifically and uh it makes for a pretty interesting level because as you go through this you're actually going to lower the level of the water which exposes more terrain for you to run on and then you're going to continue along the boss fight with this new level being revealed now while you're here you actually encounter chris for the first time in the village you haven't seen him since and understandably ethan freaks out when he sees him saying that he killed his wife and stole his daughter understandably pretty upset and even though chris could explain exactly what's going on here he doesn't instead he just tells ethan to back off to not mess with him and to let him do his own thing and this is frustrating because there's some really simple information that could have been shared with ethan that would explain everything that's going on why they seemingly killed mia and stole their daughter could make everything right as rain but instead they just don't talk about it which doesn't really make sense other than that they're trying to protect ethan and keep him out of all of this but you should know damn well especially after everything that went down in louisiana that ethan is not just gonna stop when his daughter's missing and his wife has presumably just been killed he's gonna keep going no matter what he basically has a death wish at this point and then of course moreau shows up and attacks everybody and destroys the building that you're in and delivers a monologue where basically he explains that the ceremony is being set up that lady demon classic referenced on the phone with mother miranda and that rose is going to be used in that ceremony to bring back the daughter of mother miranda so basically that sacrifice thing that we heard seems like that was true they're gonna kill rose in order to bring back mother miranda's daughter moreau also conveniently mentions that the only exit to this area is now underwater with the water having flooded everything and of course he's a giant sea monster right now so there's no escape over the next 10 to 30 minutes you explore the area find a crane for the windmill you're able to turn it which connects the electricity which allows you to raise the door or flood gate that filters out all of the water draining the whole sort of village area that's been under water up to this point now with the exit exposed and of course this giant sea monster not having any sea to monster within you jump down into that area and have a boss fight with moreau he has some different moves and different abilities like this aoe attack and then he has some projectiles that he launches it's fine it's an interesting enough boss fight but again it doesn't do anything truly unique and it has the same sort of visual element as the lady demon's boss fight where there's a humanoid creature within the creature and that's what you have to aim for which is something that you will already be conditioned to do so it's not like there's a learning curve or anything that you have to discover it's just shoot for that thing and then you do and he dies after you defeat moreau you go back into where you started collect the flask and make your way back out at which point you're contacted by heisenberg who says he'll make you a deal and he tells you to meet him at his factory to prove yourself effectively also one thing we should mention and discuss that i haven't brought up yet is how the game actually gates you literally from certain areas forcing you to go through in a particular order it's actually kind of cleverly done and uh i'm not mad about it because normally these games when they have a very linear track they want you to go on but they're trying to convince you it's open world is they'll just have arbitrary rules like hey this door opens once you've completed this area and that's it just happens you know there's nothing more than that but in this case there's an actual key that ethan has and every time you defeat one of these bosses they have a piece to that key that you add on to it making it more and more elaborate allowing it to open up the more and more complicated locks as you explore granted this is basically just a gating once you defeat this area's boss then you move on to this area and this gate will open and then this skate will open once you have that one it's basically all it is but at the very least there's a cool interesting and unique visual and and mechanistic representation of what's happening and why it's happening that's all i mean i i hate the arbitrary the gate's unlocked now because you did what you had to do so it's unlocked now i hate that in this case there's actually an in-game reason why you're able to get into that door that you weren't able to get into before and i like that and it rhymes so that's like that proves the point right there that means it's got to be true right now before going to the actual factory where heisenberg wants you to prove yourself he tells you to go to the stronghold and he's erected all of these signs up everywhere in the village pointing you there this because it's actually kind of hard to find and nobody is going to know where the stronghold is unless there's clear direction there i don't know i found this kind of funny just how bold all of these directions are because they're like yeah the player isn't gonna be able to find their way there we've gotta really make it obvious so they just literally drew giant arrows all over the village to point you that way it i don't know i find it kind of funny i'm like seriously could you not think of another way to do this like even just maybe you find a cat and the cat leads you there you're just like oh this cat's leading me here and you follow the cat that's all you need that's all it would take but no instead they're like we'll just throw a bunch of arrows everywhere and you'll you'll follow those i just find it funny now this really does seem to be the gauntlet that heisenberg is using to test whether or not ethan is a viable partner for him in his pursuits against mother miranda he puts you through waves and waves of lichens as you push your way through here it's a little exhausting you will use all of your ammo what's odd though is that there's a couple of these arenas where you don't actually have to defeat everybody you just have to get to the end checkpoint like we discussed earlier which is odd because narratively if the only reason you're here in this lair to defeat and fight all of these zombie lichen monsters is to prove yourself you would think the requirement would be that you have to defeat them all not just get to the next room but in this case you can just bypass them by going around saving your ammo which is going to be important because at the end of this stronghold gauntlet that you run through you actually run into the same guy you encountered earlier uh when all of those crazy zombie monsters greeted you in the village this guy actually has a name it's urias and he's just a gigantic mfr and hits like a train and takes a lot of bullets i don't know i never found a clear and concise way of defeating this guy i just had to unload on him trying to land headshots where i could even though i'm not sure if that actually does anything different i don't know he just seems like a bullet sponge and you just have to unload everything that you have so that's what i did and after you do that he drops dead and presumably you've proven yourself to heisenberg because all of a sudden he's quite impressed by you he gives you the go-ahead to push into the factory where they can talk mano a monoman to man and get everything out on the table also you'll have my eternal love and affection if you got that reference so if you did make sure to put it in the comment section below first person i see that got it i'll like favorite and we'll do whatever special thing that we do with comments let me know if you get the reference now once we arrive at the factory which does look very impressive we have a conversation with heisenberg it takes a minute for us to find him and actually get there because this whole level is designed like a corn maze it is so needlessly complicated to find your way through from one room to the next without backtracking accidentally part of it i think is that everything in factories kind of looks the same it's all cement so one cement wall looks like another i think that's part of it part of it also could be that it is intentionally designed to be confusing in terms of the layout it's supposed to feel like an oppressive and and claustrophobic maze which could make sense and the other part of it is that i might just be bad at figuring out where to go in this building so that could be part of it fully admit it i'm just saying i had difficulty figuring out where to go and when i needed to backtrack in a certain area i i got really lost on stream in front of a lot of people so i'm a little embarrassed which is probably where most of this is coming from but regardless you speak to heisenberg and he makes you an offer basically that you are going to use rose's powers to take out mother miranda once and for all and then he heisenberg and ethan will be in control of the whole village and everybody will live happily ever after the issue is for one of course heisenberg seems power hungry and if he's willing to overthrow mother miranda chances are he'd be very willing to overthrow ethan as well and backstab him once he got out of him what he needed so there's no real reason to trust heisenberg at all furthermore he's also implying that they need to use rose a baby to kill this woman i i don't blame ethan for refusing this so uh it's a no-go heisenberg kind of freaks out and throws ethan all the way down into the factory guts to be killed by his various machine infected zombie people so you fight your way through these guys are a little bit more complicated they have a weak point on their chest and backs um it's fine requires a little bit better aiming and this is actually a moment where i think sniper rifle can come in handy because it allows a one shot to these weak points you don't have to keep plinking away at them until they break but even still they're not particularly difficult they move very slowly they do hit hard but they move so slowly that you're able to get around them relatively easily and get the damage dealt that you need to so i don't find these guys particularly difficult but probably the most memorable enemy is propeller guy i don't know if he has an actual name i i tried googling it and everybody just calls him like propeller dude or propeller guy or propeller monster i don't know basically he's just a dude with a gigantic propeller and jet engine strapped to his chest and like that's all it is and uh you just run around dropping like mines and shooting his back as he breaks down walls and stuff like it's it's one of the weirder boss fights i've ever had i also lowkey think that we got some sort of glitch when we were playing this on stream because we were doing this boss fight for probably 10 to 15 minutes way longer than i think it was meant to go especially because he seemed on the verge of death for like 10 minutes i don't know what the problem was i guess if you want to go and see what i was doing wrong you could pull up the vod over on the twitch channel but it was just strange like it was so uncomfortably long and lengthy in terms of how long it took to kill him it seemed as though something was wrong so either something was wrong in terms of a glitch that was causing him not to die until something specific happened or there was some issue with the character and an enemy design where it felt as though something was wrong so either way there's an issue like if enemies are working right you shouldn't feel as though something's wrong it should feel good and like things are working if you think something's broken it probably is wait one of the viewers on twitch i just noticed i got a uh dm from him and he says that the propeller monster dude's name is sturm stern sturm huh i mean it's not like it matters he's a propeller dude and that's all he will ever be so i don't care now also while you're exploring the factory heisenberg is explaining his motivations through the pa system it's just general exposition he basically just says that mother miranda is sort of a tyrant and all of the lords are forced to serve underneath her and she's corrupted by her own motivations and she's cruel and evil and blah blah basically he feels as though he is on some sacred mission to stop her from achieving what she wants to achieve but i mean it really just seems as though he's trying to acquire that power for himself now after the boss fight with sturm or propeller dude whatever his name actually is you uh begin to make your way out of the factory again but heisenberg reappears and transforms into this like crazy kind of monster dude with all the metal power that he has i don't know if there's a name for like telekinetic movement and manipulation of metal i don't know if that's a thing but that's what he can do and uh he throws ethan down to the bottom of the factory once more where ironically you run into chris once again but unlike last time with moreau chris this time feels fit to actually explain some of what's going on to you which is quite nice of him so chris basically explains that the mia that they killed in your house was not actually mia it was actually mother miranda in disguise as mia because she was trying to like get close to rose to kidnap her or something as far as i can tell at this point they aren't sure what happened to the actual mia they kind of assumed that she was probably killed or something happened to her she's trapped somewhere they aren't sure so it doesn't really come up in great detail but the point is that miranda came as mia and that chris didn't kill mia which means that he's not actually a bad guy he's actually a good guy who you should trust i mean still it seems a little heavy-handed to come in and sort of pretend to kill your wife and then steal your daughter and then just not tell you about it at all you sure you can say it was for your own good as much as you want but it still seems like a dick move and this is why i said to remember the wine you remember how mia brought out that wine glass and bottle and then you both drank it and she's like oh it's from a winery i really like blah blah and then we saw that same wine in the village at the very beginning of the game yeah it's because mother miranda brought her local village's wine to the house because she liked it so she brought it and drank it with with ethan on the couch it's pretty crazy it's a great tie-in i mean i initially thought it was just like a lazy reuse of assets like oh the wine bottle that mia uses in the house is the same exact wine bottle that you see in the village they couldn't have made two different kinds of wine bottles like come on it's lazy turns out very intentional and i feel bad that i assumed they were just being lazy so well done dev team you subverted my expectations i'm impressed by you that is all but back to the matter at hand you've got heisenberg freaking out he's a gigantic mythical monster beast up on the surface and you need to stop him so chris has this bizarre tank looking thing you hop in and head to the surface to take him out once and for all at the same time chris starts working on blowing up the factory so that heisenberg can't create any more of his zombie terminator monsters so that he can't just take over the village or the whole world with them he has to basically start from scratch even if they fail to defeat him here what follows is one of the most bizarre boss fights that i can think of in a recent resident evil game like this thing is just crazy you're driving a tank launching missiles and machine guns it's just bizarre visually i guess it's cool but it feels very outdated as a boss fight i mean it's a big circular arena where you're just unloading it doesn't require any skill or finesse on the part of the player it's just a matter of going through the motions firing and like that's kind of it but regardless eventually you defeat heisenberg and kill him after you defeat eisenberg though mother miranda shows up and has rose and begins to lecture ethan about everything that's going on you know typical bad guy exposition stuff and over the course of this monologue she explains in clear detail everything that all of the other characters have been saying this whole game but in clear and concise detail because chances are a lot of people won't remember every detail that was said or might just not have been listening so she says it concisely here and that's basically that rose is the completed form of evelyn from resident evil 7 meaning that she is the complete pure form of the bio weapon which means that she can use her to bring back her daughter mother miranda's daughter from the dead which will allow her to truly be mother miranda once more yeah again it's not really worth delving into the mechanisms of like reincarnation and bringing a dead child back to life by sacrificing another it it doesn't really have to make sense because we're already kind of in the land of the silly and there's also lichens and zombies and vampires and stuff so i'm i'm not gonna dwell on it we'll just take it and move on look at me i'm maturing i'm like yeah we'll take this plot point that doesn't make a lot of sense so we'll just move on who am i however right after she stops talking she rips out ethan's heart killing him in what was to me probably one of the most startling changes of mood that i've seen in a while i'm not just saying this i think mother miranda might be bipolar from here the end of the game has a really odd tone and feel to it maybe it was just me but it just feels off maybe it's because they're trying to wrap up everything from resident evil 7 and 8 at the same time while also trying to tie up all of these other weird odds and ends that they set up over the course of this story but it just feels off to me i don't know exactly why it just does now after ethan's death we switch perspectives to chris who receives the update that ethan has been killed is a little bummed but not too surprised and basically says that miranda moved quicker than they expected so oops and then once again chris goes through everything the player likely already knows at this point just in case you weren't paying attention so that you're not confused in just a second he spells it out very clearly saying that they didn't actually kill mia they killed miranda who was pretending to be mia and disguised as her took ethan this fake mia and rose out of the house at the same time transported them in a van the fake mia who is mother miranda wasn't actually dead because she's like supernatural in some way was pretending to be dead broke out of the van causing it to crash killed all of those other people didn't kill ethan though but took rose to the village where she turned her into a mango lassi straight from an indian restaurant that's what happened they say it 15 times just in case you weren't paying attention it's a little drawn out and for a game this short i really don't think they needed to repeat it as often as they have at this point but it's what we're doing so chris and his squad basically decide that they're going to make their way to the ceremony to interrupt the whole thing and try and save rose and prevent all of this from happening and this is where we get to the battlefield section of the game that i referenced at the very beginning of this video where everything starts to just feel a little ridiculous like you just show up as chris with this fully automatic assault rifle way more powerful than anything you've used in the game up to this point and you go through the same village levels that you did as ethan earlier just mowing and plowing through enemies as chris you fight your way to the center of the village where there's a giant growth development as miranda has been preparing for this big ceremony she's setting up all this stuff these mold growths straight out of resident evil 7 and you fight your way there you use some air strikes that you have to balance while also fighting off waves of enemies kind of juggling all of these things at once you attack the big central uh structure it blows you make your way down into the heart of the mold growth fighting once again urias a bigger stronger version of him with your big and improved weapons after defeating him you continue pushing through and eventually you get to the opening of this lair upon entering you actually find mother miranda's lab because she's a scientist apparently and in what is likely a surprise to almost no one at this point in the game you will find mia who's alive for some reason turns out when mother miranda took her place she didn't actually kill me yet she just kind of kidnapped her and locked her away for some reason i mean clearly mother miranda doesn't have an issue killing people why is she getting so picky right now i i really don't know if there is a narrative reason why she didn't kill mia that i missed please let me know because it just seems odd that me is still here but anyway chris tells mia that ethan is actually dead mother miranda killed him she doesn't believe him and chris plants an explosive at the heart of the mold growth which once it goes off will likely cause everything to be destroyed at least that's the plan right like they're trying and then we suddenly cut to ethan who's dead in a cold frozen environment with evelyn from resident evil 7 laughing as she kind of runs around him and here it's evelyn that explains what exactly is going on and basically says that in the opening 30 45 minutes of resident evil 7 when ethan was initially attacked by the father the patriarch jack baker in that louisiana mansion he was actually killed and he's been dead ever since then like the opening moments of resident evil 7 he's been dead but somehow he has survived as a mold construct of his previous self which is why he's able to reattach his hand or various extremities and seemingly survive such extreme damage so many bullets so many slashes and be fine this is why i said earlier it seems as though there was a reason that they had lady dimitra's cut off ethan's hand once more just to remind players that that's something ethan can do he can reattach limbs just by kind of setting it on the stump and then he's fine and right after this revelation ethan wakes up in the back of the duke's carriage once again i said that the duke seems to be on ethan's side or at the very least against mother miranda because in this case he's actually helping him set up for the giant boss fight at the very end of the game against mother miranda but we do get one piece of information from the duke here which is that ethan cannot return to his world anymore he has died which for whatever reason kind of resets everything so he can't live in the world of the living the non-mold world basically he's too weak and he's gonna be stuck here and this is basically the end of the road so ready to take care of this once and for all ethan gets all of his gear together does whatever he needs to do with the duke and then heads in for the final boss fight against mother miranda who has already begun the ritual but hasn't completed it yet now quick recap on mother miranda just so we can really appreciate everything that's going on here according to all of the in-game texts that you can find she's likely over 100 years old and she's likely been in this village for over 100 years since the spanish flu epidemic that hit the world back in the early 19 teens it was during that whole epidemic that she lost her daughter eva just a little baby lost her was stricken with grief but under the village somehow she found a little bit of the mega my seat mold that's been the center of this whole conversation that's been the cause of everything that we've seen in these games she found it was infected by it and it gave her all of these inordinate powers and those powers are what have allowed her to live so long and have such extreme power and influence but now in order to revive her daughter she needs rose who's i guess the purest form of this mold effectively and she needs to give up some of her powers at the same time so as she's begun this ritual some of her powers have left her weakening her basically making her mortal but she hasn't completed the ritual yet so ethan interrupts it at the perfect time and it begins the boss fight now in terms of gameplay this final boss fight is actually pretty interesting it's tough there's a lot of new movement that you have to take into consideration but once again it relies on the same trope of having a humanoid figure within this spider-like body i guess is what you'd call it and you have to hit the humanoid form in order to deal actual damage i don't really have an issue with it it's fine it's interesting enough the set piece is fine uh it's mold i don't know what you expect uh and all told i think it's a relatively good way to wrap up this game once and for all and after a long boss fight you finally kill mother miranda she drops and kind of shrivels away revealing rose at the very core you grab her and make your way outside of the ritual ceremony site now once ethan's in the sunlight his body starts to deteriorate very quickly they've killed the core of the mold and he was already weak so he's gonna go with it chris tries to help him along but it's clear ethan's gonna die rose can be saved but they've gotta get out ethan who's been informed that mia is actually still alive gives rose back to chris tells him to take her back to mia and to take care of them he takes the detonator for that explosive that he set on the heart of the mold and begins to walk back towards it chris realizing he doesn't have any other choice and that ethan is going to make this sacrifice to save all of them realizes he's got to just go so he takes rose jumps into the transport where mia is also located and they bug out ethan detonates the bomb presumably killing himself and everything else in the village allowing everybody else to escape chris tells mia that ethan was still down at the site and he's the one that detonated the bomb and that he didn't have any other choice understandably mia is devastated but is happy to have rose back the crew flies off and then we transition to a shot years in the future it's a full-grown rose who goes to a cemetery and places flowers on ethan's grave there's a sweet little one-sided conversation that she has with ethan here but then some agent comes along and says that they have to go rose begins to get angry and there's some discussion over the walkie-talkie of the agent suggesting that they're watching her to take her out that they're ready to kill rose at any given moment if she explodes or freaks out for any reason this of course tells the player and viewer that there is some sort of innate power within her that this group is not messing around with but the agent says that she's got to go off to take care of something so rose begrudgingly gets in the car and they leave at that point the game is over so they're clearly setting up a sequel where rose is going to be the main character and that's something i'm excited to see i mean considering that she obviously has immense power i'm excited to see what they could do with that i think it could be really interesting but that's it that's resident evil 8. now it's pretty lean it's pretty short i i don't really have an issue with it because it's so lean but there are some odd plot points that they never really delve into in great depth and i think it's very likely that in order to get this game out in the middle of you know the pandemic and everything that we had to deal with uh in the last year or so um it's very likely that in order to get this game actually released and into the public's hands they needed to cut some stuff and lean it down which is why things like the flasks are so hastily tied together like you get to an altar they kind of go in there and that opens up a gate and it creates this altar which you lug to a new location which we didn't really discuss because i don't i don't want to delve into every nitty-gritty bit of how a level transitions from one to the other but it was very hastily thrown together you know and other pieces like some boss fights and arenas are really elaborate and have a lot of really interesting things put to them then others seem really hastily thrown together i mean it's really clear that lady demitzclask received most of the focus in terms of detail and design and then once we got to the other areas it started to have a lot of repeated content a lot of stuff was recycled because they needed to get the game out so they just started rushing through it i mean it's not bad but when you look at the factory sequence which has one really cool visual element and then everything else is just small hallways and concrete rooms which are really quick and easy to throw together for level designers and that's kind of it it feels a little anticlimactic so it seems to me that they put a lot of effort on the very beginning of the game and a lot of effort at the very end of the game and the rest just kind of had to figure itself out i mean it's not bad it's just clear that there's a lack of consistency from level to level from mission to mission from piece to peace and that a little bit more effort in the mid game probably could have elevated this whole experience up a few notches but in terms of the story it's pretty much as solid as you could ask for at least for a resident evil game there's a lot here that doesn't make a lot of sense there's a lot here that certainly you kind of have to take with a grain of salt but i mean it's a story about a mold that also can be people and people can be mold but not realize it like it it's a story that's a little crazy to begin with and as long as you take it at face value uh that it's a little ridiculous you can have a good time with it and i certainly did this time around as i've had with every other resident evil experience that i've had in the past and in terms of the setup for the next game it seems pretty clear to me that they're going to be using rose in either a main character protagonist position or perhaps they're going to set her up as the antagonist where you'll be playing as chris or mia or something i really don't know but it'll be interesting to see where they go with it but to be honest i'm really pleasantly surprised that we got a game this polished and this high quality in the middle of a year where we really have had some pretty lackluster releases and many more releases have been delayed and just given up on i guess it's just nice to see a quality product come after a year of disappointment and sadness so uh all told i think the game is solid but i don't blame you if you think it's too pricey for what it provides but at the very least maybe this video served as your exposure maybe this is all you really needed to uh to experience in order to feel as though you got the resident evil 8 village you know treatment as it were so hopefully you enjoyed this i know i did thank you for watching honestly and truly i love you all more than you could possibly possibly know again i'll ask just one more time consider joining the patreon it's only a buck to join you get these videos a week early you help make this a reality i think it's a fair trade considering i put these out for free but you know you do you i can't make you do anything i just would love you forever if you did so i'm just saying but that's it for me thank you so much for watching i love all of you more than you possibly know and i'll see you in the next critique which i'll leave it a secret for now bye-bye

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 87,156

Rating: 4.7455802 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: l72U1oUsNeQ

Length: 92min 11sec (5531 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 20 2021