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RE8 RE Village Thoughts

Like, there shouldn't have been all this secrecy from Chris. How did he know about Miranda? I didn't read every note. But I think I want to get back to the original characters soon. For real...
 
Like, there shouldn't have been all this secrecy from Chris.

Chris wasn't wrong, though. Ethan is the only one who died on this mission, even though he did a lot of useful things.

Ethan could have ruined the whole operation if he'd known it wasn't his wife who was living with him.

How did he know about Miranda?

This is unknown, but Chris learned about Miranda's plan through Emily and after the Winters were moved to another country. We also don't know why the BSAA didn't take any action on the fact that Ethan isn't quite human.

But I wouldn't say that these holes were left unintentionally given the way the BSAA uses bioweapons, knew about Miranda before Chris, and tried to intercept Eveline. It is possible that the organization was watching the Winters to get a new Eveline.
 
In the Japanese script, the Giant's Chalice is called the Holy Grail, so it's not surprising why Spencer ended up in this region.

To be honest, I'd like to see a whole series in whatever format about Spencer's search for artifacts, lol.
 
I really enjoyed the exploration, quirky puzzles and combat. For me it was an awesome entry in the series. It reminded me of my thoughts while playing RE4, I could tell it was different but it still gave me the Resident Evil experience I was looking for. Can't wait to play the next game in the trilogy!
 
The first person exploration isn't as deep as the likes of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided or Prey 2017 but I like the "semi-open world" format, where you have a lot to explore and you could backtrack to uncover treasure or even secret bosses.
 
I'm now ready to make my personal comments about village and what I would like to see for the future of the RE games...

After playing the entire campaign and Reading several reviews and also trying to make sense of the story especially about Chris's part in it I think that while Village does go for an ammalgation of RE 7 perspective and RE 4 exploration, combat and variety of weapons, it's good but not enough to be game of the year of the triple A category...
I think it lacked creative boss battles, so it kinda felt like a letdown to me mostly because the first person view gunplay is basic, they need to go back to third person maybe or at least come up with better boss fight ideas, and furthermore make gameplay more fresh and interesting not resorting only to exploding barrels and the defend/block mechanic which seems a bit unoriginal.
Some nice puzzles are sprinkled throughout Village, House Beneviento was the one with more merits in that regard though it's mechanics of getting rid of the guns seems a throwback to RE 7 lucas baker traps segment mixed with the concept of 3.5 hallucination and the creepy dolls.

While the story had a few loose gaps that I think needed better explanations I think the ending does provide room for a new kind of experience ( but that is in case Capcom intends to make spin-offs due to what is revealed about the BSAA bows plus the Rosemary as a teen time gap).

While many would like a RE 9 with Rosemary continuing he story, I prefer if Capcom makes a spin-off series with her character where they can experiment with possible new gameplay elements and a third person view can return to exploit the same quick paced and extremely creative gameplay of RE 4 where we had more memorable confrontation with bosses (and sub-bosses for the most part) and different ways to dispatch enemies.
Since they finished ethan's story.
I suppose RE 9 has to focus mainly in things prior to that huge gap, so the BSAA bows and Chris trying to stop it might be a good way to kickstart the plot, I would like to see this new team of Chris in action, so maybe a campaign where Chris teams up with another member and then provide an unlockable story that happens at the same time frame with another old fans favorite characters showing up, like Leon and Jill maybe.

This way they won't make the fanbase get pissed because if the time gap is part of RE 9 most of the fan favorites are going to be too old to still be active, and the story wouldn't be able to proceed, unless they go for Sherry and Jake and possibly Chris again in a small role since he will be a bit older but could still be fitting a Barry Burton kind of role.
 
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I would say Resident Evil 4 has a deeper combat system, so all the other elements that are in this game effectively serve it. For example, the level design is a set of diverse arenas connected by spacious corridors. Thanks to their diversity and a good bestiary, the game maintains variability. On the other hand, these arenas make little sense in terms of realism, logic, or even infrastructure. In other words, they are just an arcade background for the gameplay. I won't talk about Salazar's castle, lol, but at least look at the second floor of the very first house. Why would a villager need it, ha-ha?

Resident Evil Village is a different story. Although people call it a Resident Evil 4 game or an action horror game, its design is much closer to horror titles. The entire environment is designed for environmental storytelling and backtracking. It is much more realistic, which means you have less variation for the fights. This also means that the developers could fill the created locations with enemies, and not design the locations for enemies.

As you have already said, the combat system is quite basic, which is typical for survival horror games in general, because the genre uses battles as a tool for the goal, and not as a goal.

So in a sense, I would rather call Resident Evil Village a survival horror game in the context of an action than an action horror game. I would even put the new game somewhere between CODE: Veronica and Resident Evil 4.

It's also true for progression and storytelling, you know.

The Dimitrescu Castle is quite a classic mansion for the series, where you have the main task in the form of finding four masks. Then the borders expand and you need to find four flasks for the Altar. This is all the big Metroidvania that the series has been doing since 1996. Even less survival horror titles have these elements, though they're more momentary and stylized, I'd say.

In the case of storytelling, I have often called Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil 5, and Resident Evil 6 as Devil May Cry games in the sense that these games separate the game experience from the cinematic experience of cutscenes. The cutscenes in these games are very cinematic and are directed like an expensive movie. I think they do a good job of developing the characters, for example. Resident Evil Village, on the contrary, has a more classic format, where they try to show you a continuous look at the experience of one person, so we rarely see the antagonists and learn about their characters and so on through the files. This is why players can be confused if they haven't read all the files, explored the entire environment, and listened to phrases during game situations. This is basically an epistolary and fragmentary format for presenting the plot, which differs, for example, from Resident Evil 6, where the game itself is very arcade, and the cinematography is responsible for the narrative.
 
So was that really Ethan's model with his face? 😯

Yeah.

I know some people are annoyed that Ethan is not quite human, so he may be going through severe injuries, but it seems to me that these claims are slightly exaggerated. To fuse the limbs, Ethan still needs a catalyst. And he can't grow limbs and organs from scratch, so because of the lack of a heart, his body was falling apart.

I don't doubt that the man at the end is Ethan, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a physical Ethan, you know. Ethan could communicate with Eveline's essence and see her daughter's memories in fragments, so the daughter herself, having excellent control over the fungus, could communicate with her father in the same way.
 
Resident Evil Village is a different story. Although people call it a Resident Evil 4 game or an action horror game, its design is much closer to horror titles. The entire environment is designed for environmental storytelling and backtracking. It is much more realistic, which means you have less variation for the fights. This also means that the developers could fill the created locations with enemies, and not design the locations for enemies.

As you have already said, the combat system is quite basic, which is typical for survival horror games in general, because the genre uses battles as a tool for the goal, and not as a goal.

The Dimitrescu Castle is quite a classic mansion for the series, where you have the main task in the form of finding four masks. Then the borders expand and you need to find four flasks for the Altar. This is all the big Metroidvania that the series has been doing since 1996. Even less survival horror titles have these elements, though they're more momentary and stylized, I'd say.

Yes much is due to the philosophy they went with for game immersion using RE Engine to provide more realistic visuals together with really atmospheric sound fx, while I do like first person view basic exploration I feel like that choice of perspective hinders the potential of mercenaries mode for instance, where a third person view would make room for different playable characters and each with their own skills and weapons, as seen in RE 4 with Krauser, Ada, Wesker, etc.

While having Ethan as main character did provide some very extreme scenes of dismemberment and violence that usually we didn't really witnessed during the previous RE games (and that was made possible because of these specific powers from his particular circumstances of his infection) this does make the game somewhat closer to 3.5 or more exactly RE 4 main character initial concept design (a DMC like hero supposed to be related with Spencer, named Tony).
 
The comments of the art director, which can be found in the game itself, confirm long-standing guesses that the symbol of the village reflects the crest of the four founders, and the embryo, of course, symbolizes the vessel for Eva.

Thanks to this, we can confidently look at this situation from a certain angle: the conversation between Spencer and Miranda in the cave where the ancient crest is engraved is equally important for both villains, so it was not only Oswell who was inspired by the symbol. He dreamed of changing the world through exponential infection, so his "umbrella" covers the entire planet when Miranda dreamed of bringing back her dead daughter, so her "umbrella" focuses on the vessel:

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Like, there shouldn't have been all this secrecy from Chris. How did he know about Miranda?
Chris' team must've been investigating prior it looks like they were hunting Miranda for some time, maybe year's... I think Chris knew Miranda was going to try to steal Ethan's baby that night faking to be Mia because someone from his team was tipped off by one of the people who lived around the village, or probably by Heisenberg (since he was not very happy with Miranda so the more people to put on her trail would buy him time to make his own plans to destroy her).
 
3. Heisenberg is really weird. Like how is he even magically picking up metal exactly? The mold feels... weird. His mutation is weird too.

First of all, I think it is important to say that the Cadou parasite is not something separate from the Mold, but is a vector of its infection. Miranda implanted the Mold genome into the nematode to increase the chances of compatibility from the Mold infection and thus create the perfect vessel for Eva. I think we can call the parasite a fungal generator and, of course, a fungal regulator.

When Marguerite Baker was infected by the Mold, the fungus began to consume every cell in her body, replacing it with its own replication. Eventually, when the Mold reached the brain walls, Marguerite became a fungus that replicates her.

Eveline's fungus was pure and did not have a large library of genetic information, but Marguerite shared food and habitat with the insects, so when she began to mutate, the fungus coordinated her mutation by including the arthropod's genetic information. Marguerite has become a chimera that even has a reproductive organ capable of giving birth to arthropods.

Heisenberg is also a chimera. The parasite gave him an electric organ. This does not mean that he lived together with the stingrays, of course, because the Black God has been collecting genetic information from different life forms for centuries, so the prasaite could have such a reference.

Such a mutation may also be a consequence of convergent evolution. For example, American scientists managed to generate electricity by attaching energy-producing cyanobacteria to a mushroom.

Of course, an electrical organ is connected to his nervous system, since any organs, whatever they are, must be adapted to the structure of the body in order to function. And this gave Heisenberg the ability to control them in the same way that we control our muscles. This means that by applying a current in a conscious way, it can affect the movement of electrons and excite magnetic fields.

Yeah, eels and stingrays also excite magnetic fields, but they're very weak.
 
Remember Metal Gear Solid (regardless if its the psone game or the game cube remake)?

I think Village takes that game as a frame of reference... like, in MGS we have the head honcho which is Liquid Snake, and his 4 lap dogs the player has to defeat first and then get to the end boss : revolver ocelot, psycho mantis, sniper wolf and vulcan raven.
Village has Miranda as the final boss, and her 4 village lords (Dimitrescu, Beneviento, Moreau and Heisenberg).

We also try to help people during the game and they all die (the villagers) like darpa chief and the president of armstech from mgs (but meryl and otacon survive). otacon helps snake and gives him tips similar to the role of the Duke merchant.
Meryl was in prison initially and we find Mia was held captive by Miranda.
There is a section Snake is captured and tortured by Ocelot, and during village there is a section Alcina and her daughters capture Ethan and kind of suck his blood, and toy with him.

Solid Snake and Gray fox are there kind of playing the same roles as Ethan and Chris Redfield in Village, Gray Fox dies to help Snake, just as Ethan has a last fight with Miranda and he and Chris go but Ethan stays so Chris can escape with Rose.

And finally when Snake goes to deactivate Metal Gear he actually activates it as it was part of Liquid's plan, while at the end Ethan beats the Lords but all of the flasks from the baby are used and it starts Miranda's ritual.

So basically the main elements of plot progression are the same.
 
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Hmm, quite an interesting perspective.

I personally think that the developers used the Resident Evil 7 formula, where there are also five antagonists with their own territory and the horror subgenre that they represented.

It seems that the developers used a lot of historical and religious references. The internationality of the founders, their crest, and the protection of the Holy Grail are allusions to the Templar Order. The developers used horror subgenres associated with the culture of these nations: Dimitrescu (Romanian) is associated with Count Dracula, and her daughters represent his three brides; Beneviento (Italian) creates live dolls, as if the scary fantasy of Carlo Collodi; the tragedy of Moreau's character (French) and his devoted love for Miranda resemble Quasimodo; Karl (German) is named after the German pioneer of ferromagnetism and quantum mechanics Werner Karl Heisenberg, and his metal army and the theme of tanks is associated with the Nazi and grotesque industrialization.

Once upon a time, the Templars found the Black God and could worship him. They created an ancient technology that they called the Holy Grail, because, according to legend, the Holy Grail gives immortality.

This led to Spencer's search for the Holy Grail in the 20th century. By the way, I think this is another parallel between Spencer and the Nazis. He practically died in the snow, but was found by a prophet of the Black God, equivalent to a Seraph. After getting the direction, Spencer started looking for the key to evolution and found it in Africa. There, he worked with Brandon Bailey, who could learn about Miranda from Spencer, so when he founded The Connections, he suggested a collaboration and created Eveline.

It's amazing how all this leads to an ordinary guy, Ethan, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
 
Hmm, quite an interesting perspective.

I personally think that the developers used the Resident Evil 7 formula, where there are also five antagonists with their own territory and the horror subgenre that they represented.

It seems that the developers used a lot of historical and religious references. The internationality of the founders, their crest, and the protection of the Holy Grail are allusions to the Templar Order.

So it's funny because even some of bosses and boss fights from mgs have similar ideas to the ones from Village and the 4 Lords, Vulcan Haven's first fight is one where he uses a Tank, and second time around he has a gatling gun whereas with Heisenberg the boss battle uses a tank plus heavy artillery.
Psycho Mantis does mind tricks, can take other people's appearance - correction: in fact decoy octopus is the one which impersonates people, but a bit contrary to other villains from MGS he is never directly confronted, dying the first time snake meets him (so psycho mantis is kinda similar to beneviento and decoy somewhat display abilities like the ones from Miranda)
Also interesting to note Ocelots hand gets chopped off by the ninja too, similar to what Dimitrescu does to Ethan at the castle segment.

While Dimitrescu is more menacing because of her size Sniper Wolf also is quite a sadistic bitch that also seemed to manipulate Otacon with her good looks and she relishes in killing her prey slowly too, she actually shoots Meryl a few times so it gets bloody tense there with the moment Sniper Wolf tries to lure Snake and kill him.
Incidentally MGS incident also features some snowy locations as Village does (but not in Europe, I think mgs setting is Alaska).

It's like developers drew some inspiration from the basic concepts (the skeletal structure) of metal gear solid and mixed with all the horror genre tropes for good measure.
Even the sub bosses from the castle do look like a subtle inspiration from MGS 4 female squad since they also kinda have some bit of dialogue that is quite odd before they succumb after battle just like Dimitrescu's daughters also scream and complain.
 
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Suddenly I wanted to write some thoughts:

1. It's no secret that Resident Evil 7 is a reminiscence of the first game with the addition of some of its early ideas (FPS, guest house, swamp). And I could also write a comment somewhere on the forum by Iwao that the Tyrant had to control the Zombies in the mansion, which is why the weapon was given this name in the first place. The idea does resemble Eveline, but what connects her to the Tyrants is that the syndicate's goal was to create weapons that could perfectly assimilate with the urban population. Umbrella created Tyrants for the same purpose, implanting limiters to restrain their grotesque forms. For me, this was a curious parallel, although I was in no hurry to connect the two projects from the point of view of the story. Except that I theorized that the fungal girls were a rival's action against the Tyrant project.

But now that we know that The Connections was founded by Brandon Bailey, maybe by working with a rival, he was trying to achieve what Umbrella couldn't? In this vein, Eveline can even be called the most complete version of Tyrant, although technically she is not part of the Tyrant project and was not created with the help of the t-Virus.

This point of view on the plot is even more interesting if we recall how in Gaiden, Umbrella had Tyrants who could transform into different people, mimicking even their clothes. You know, Miranda.

2. Probably, everyone noticed that the Lycans have features characteristic of the warriors of Wallachia. I certainly wrote about it somewhere on the forum.

Although the game does not give us direct historical references, the Dimitrescu Castle has a war room depicting the military history of the Dimitrescu family. There we can see archers, horsemen with spears, and even see the process of impaling on the castle gate.

In my opinion, there is a real possibility that in the process of rebirth of a person into a Lycan, mycorrhiza gives the life form not only the features of wolves, but also the features of long-fallen warriors.

In the piggy bank of this hypothesis, I can add that the Molded actually cried in End of Zoe, that is, they could imitate the traumatic experience of the victims who were eaten.

3. One of the things that has been mistranslated is that the Mold can create human tissue, brain, and so on if it will cooperate with other bacteria. The Japanese original says that the Mold simply replicates its equivalent counterparts.

When Jack lost his brain, the Mold rebuilt it from scratch. When a colony of fungi is structured into the Molded, this life form has a nervous system. This all tells us that the Mold can work with electrical activities.

That is why Cadou can replace the brain and heart. Karl Heisenberg used Cadou as a power source for the undead and even stimulated them inside the reactors.

4. The parasite is similar to the Black God, also pulsates and also stores the genetic information of different life forms, because Miranda injected the mycorrhiza genome into the nematodes. This is not a random mutation due to Mold, as I previously thought due to translation.

5. In the factory, you can find X-rays of the undead, which show a huge number of implanted metal appendages. Most likely, Heisenberg, by exciting magnetic fields, could control his metal army, since he has an idea of how it works. Miranda, on the other hand, will be extremely difficult to control the undead, even if she also replicates electrical organs for herself.

6. Some people wonder why at the end of the battle, Karl was able to raise Ethan almost to the skies, since he should only affect metals.

The fact is that a sufficiently powerful magnetic field affects not only metals, but also diamagnets, which people are.

Here, for example, is the famous experiment of the Nobel laureate Andre Geim, in which he managed to make a frog levitate in a magnetic field:


7. At the beginning of the game, you can find the jazz album of the band Miss D & the Pallboys:

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I assume this is a direct reference to the fact that Alcina was a jazz singer before Miranda found her. Not that it would surprise anyone, given her voice.

Also interesting to note Ocelots hand gets chopped off by the ninja too, similar to what Dimitrescu does to Ethan at the castle segment.

I think the developers very well conveyed the dark part of the history, when the nobles tortured people from the lower strata because of a sense of permissiveness. Like Bathory, for example.

I think Dimitrescu and her castle are so big, not just for the visual, but because they represent power.
 
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