Operation Backlog Completion 2025

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Shadows of Rose

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  6 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
Oct 112023
 

Two years ago, I played Resident Evil Village and generally enjoyed it despite some mixed feelings.

Last year, its story DLC Shadows of Rose came out, and I picked it up… only to forget about it until this year.

But now it’s finally time to talk about Shadows of Rose.

Note: Certain implied spoilers for Resident Evil Village are impossible to avoid while discussing the premise of Shadows of Rose, so keep that in mind if you haven’t finished Village yet.

Shadows of Rose is set 16 years after the events of the main game and follows Rose as she sends her consciousness into the Megamycete in an attempt to rid herself of her powers by finding a Purifying Crystal. This setup for the story allows for a bit more psychological and supernatural horror, although it didn’t lean into it as much as I expect.

For the most part, it feels like a miniature version of Village’s castle and house sections. You explore with a mild amount of backtracking and puzzle-solving, and face enemies both with guns and with Rose’s powers, which you unlock as you progress.

I worried a character with special powers might feel overpowered for a survival horror game, but instead they serve more as a means of stalling enemies to buy yourself some extra time. They also play a role in exploration, which helped the DLC feel a bit more distinct.

Story-wise, Shadows of Rose is fine. It didn’t wow me with anything exceptional, but it was a decent personal story for Rose. The most disappointing thing about the DLC is probably that it takes advantage of its Megamycete concept to just reuse areas from the main game. That makes it feel like a bit of a retread. It would have been much more interesting to see unique places from the Megamycete’s many stored memories. Similarly, it ends with the main game’s epilogue scene instead of adding anything new.

Where the DLC shines the brightest (or darkest), though, is in its scares. Shadows of Rose made me jump a few times, and its take on House Beneviento comes close to the main game’s section in terms of scariness. It might even surpass it. I wanted a scary game for October, and this was a good choice.

I still have concerns that the series could be leaning back toward action-oriented adventures instead of the slower-paced survival horror style that finally made a return, but as far as this DLC goes, I had quite a good, spooky time with Shadows of Rose.

Final Fantasy XVI New Trailer, Resident Evil 4 Remake Confirmed

 Video games  2 Responses »  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Jun 032022
 

There was a State of Play yesterday, and it had a few nice surprises.

In particular, all I wanted was news about Final Fantasy XVI, and we finally got it!

Final Fantasy XVI now has a summer 2023 release window. That’s a bit further off than I was hoping, since I thought it might actually come out this year, but on the other hand, it gives me more time to work through my backlog.

(Especially with games like Xenoblade Chronicles 3 coming out this year already.)

The release window came along with a new trailer. It’s age-restricted so you can’t watch it outside of Youtube, but I’ll embed it below so you can follow the link.

It’s now rated as “likely Mature,” so it seems this will be an M-rated game like was speculated before.

The trailer introduces some new characters, most notably a woman named Benedikta Harman, who is Garuda’s Dominant, and a man named Hugo Kupka, who is Titan’s Dominant. The official Final Fantasy XVI website has more details about these two, saying that Benedikta “crosses paths with a like-minded Clive and is forced to face her past” and Hugo amasses a fortune but “Benedikta Harman will teach him money and power are far from all the world has to offer.”

The website was also updated with some beautiful new screenshots, including the one I used in this post, so be sure to check those out. It looks incredible.

Getting back to the trailer, we also got a better look at combat.

Three main types of combat appear to be showcased. One type shows Clive up against a single opponent, with each of them having a large health bar. Boss battles, perhaps? We also see Clive facing several enemies with small health bars above their heads. One of these short clips has a different UI for Clive, but we’ll get back to that in a minute. Finally, we see several combat segments in which the player appears to be controlling an Eikon, fighting another Eikon.

Combat seems to be fast-paced and stylish, with special abilities linked to some sort of class system the player can switch between. Judging by the icons in the upper-left, this probably is related to the Eikons.

Now, much attention has been drawn to the fact that Clive appears to be fighting alone. There is no indication of party members in this trailer. However, one thing does stand out as odd, and that’s the UI difference I mentioned above. Most combat clips in this trailer show three class icons in the upper left beside the health bar. However, the clip at 0:49 instead shows Clive’s name there.

Showing his name in the UI suggests it might be possible to control someone other than Clive. On the other hand, that never reappears in any of the other combat scenes, so I don’t know what that means.

The other possibility of having a party, or at least companions outside of combat, is the way Benedikta and Harman are described. I wouldn’t rule out the idea of them traveling together with Clive. That could be linked to how he apparently gains power over multiple Eikons.

Anyway, there’s a lot we don’t know about Final Fantasy XVI, but I’m cautiously optimistic. Combat looks very different for Final Fantasy, but it has a strong team behind it, including the main scenario writer for Heavensward (which I greatly enjoyed), Kazutoyo Maehiro, as the creative director and screenplay writer. And while it was widely assumed already, it’s now officially confirmed that Final Fantasy XIV composer Masayoshi Soken is also the composer for Final Fantasy XVI.

So I’m interested. I want them to say there’s a party, but either way, I’m looking forward to more details about the game being revealed.

Before we finish up for today, the State of Play also included the official announcement from Capcom of a Resident Evil 4 remake for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

Now, I haven’t made a big secret of the fact that I’m in the minority that doesn’t like Resident Evil 4, and I resent it for steering the series more toward action. But the interesting thing here is that the remake looks like it might have more horror elements. If they remake Resident Evil 4 as an actual survival horror game… yeah, I’d be on board with that.

The official Resident Evil 4 remake website also says it will have “a reimagined storyline,” so it sounds like it might be significantly different from the original. I’m not sold yet, but I’ll be keeping my eye on it. It’s set for March 24, 2023.

And those were the two big announcements from the State of Play that caught my attention. What are your thoughts on the new Final Fantasy XVI trailer and the Resident Evil 4 remake?

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Resident Evil Village

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  4 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Oct 222021
 

I don’t understand Capcom sometimes. I really don’t.

Last year, one of our spooky October games was Resident Evil 7, so it’s only fitting that we take a look at Resident Evil Village this year.

Village picks up after the events of Resident Evil 7. Ethan Winters returns as the protagonist, trapped in an isolated village full of monsters as he searches for his kidnapped daughter. Like its predecessor, it has a tone that feels very unusual for Resident Evil at first, this time leaning into supernatural horror with vampires, werewolves, and similar creatures.

It attempts to explain all of this, of course, and I didn’t especially mind that shift in direction in the first place.

No, my major concern ahead of Village’s launch was that it might focus too much on action, and the demo together with the reviews left me with mixed feelings. But I saw enough encouragement from other survival horror fans that I took the plunge and bought Resident Evil Village (shortly after launch, in fact; I just ended up taking a long break partway through it).

Now that I’ve finished it, I have more mixed feelings than ever.

There are a lot of great things in Village. I loved the exploration in the village and the first major area. Searching for keys, backtracking, unlocking new areas – the classic gameplay loop was there. For me, the merchant dragged it down a bit, since finding treasure to sell to a merchant so I can buy items and upgrades isn’t the sort of thing I look for in a survival horror game (and I wasn’t crazy about enemies dropping resources, either).

The system wasn’t terrible, but my initial satisfaction of returning to a previous area with a new key item that let me unlock more areas and find more items faded into emptiness when I realized most of the new items would be treasures to sell.

You also can upgrade your physical attributes by killing animals for meat and bringing it back to the merchant. I actually liked that, since it made sense and didn’t make me feel too overpowered. In general, this whole aspect of the game was something I would have preferred to do without, but could accept because of the rest of the gameplay.

One section of the game was also so terrifying, I’d rank it up there as one of the scariest moments in any horror game I’ve played. I loved it.

But then, in the latter part of the game, it shifted toward action. It kept some basic aspects of the structure but had a bigger emphasis on shooting things. Then it veered even harder into action from there. Honestly, it went so far, I might have found it endearing if I wasn’t worried about Capcom’s direction for the series.

Can they just not help themselves? Are they still trying to appeal to two different audiences with the same game? Do they really want to make an action game and used this to test the waters?

If you’d asked me in the first half of the game, maybe even the first 3/4, I would have recommended Resident Evil Village in a heartbeat. It had action trappings that didn’t take away from the survival horror gameplay, and it followed in the footsteps of Resident Evil 7. But if you asked me during the final sections, I would have said no, they’ve gone back to action horror, it’s not like the old games at all.

Remember when Capcom went through a period of claiming each new Resident Evil game had both action sections and classic survival horror sections? That’s what this is. This is the game they claimed to have made so many times, but coming off of the success of Resident Evil 7 and the Resident Evil 2 remake’s return to horror, I’m not sure why they decided to do it.

I don’t know how I feel about Resident Evil Village, and I don’t know where the series is going. Resident Evil 9 could be an incredible horror game, or it could be a return to action. It all depends on what lessons Capcom takes from Resident Evil Village.

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