A few months back I went back and replayed RE7 after several years and it's not bad as I remembered it. Is it incredibly flawed? Very. I also got RE8 at a steep discount. Thought it was eh. Completely alien to RE. It's trying to be this ass baby of RE4 and COD game. Is fun to play? Yeah, I had fun with it. Do I want more of that in the series going forward? No
i'm only quoting this one part of it but i'm adding my thoughts to the rest of your post and i'm just gonna ramble like an autist because i dearly love RE.
i can't stand the "mainstream fans" of the
Resident Evil franchise, because none of them know what they want, or think they want, and nobody can agree on anything. i'm not sure they ever could.
Resident Evil 4 was one of the most innovative games in the entire history of the video gaming industry and was simultaneously a necessary evolution to a franchise that was stagnating as early as
Resident Evil: Zero.
Resident Evil 5 refined on the gameplay of RE4, and then
Resident Evil 6 perfected it.
i also consider the original
Resident Evil 4 to be the greatest video game ever created in our lifetimes thanks to an astonishing confluence of development achievements under severe restrictions - it was a Gamecube exclusive, after all. amazing level design & pacing, otherworldly sound and music, the most fitting voice overs, the charm and campiness, the unique mixing of Western and Japanese cultural themes, the length of gameplay, the simple and sophisticated controls full of nuance to master. before abusive managers and executives went all-in on chasing the Call of Duty/MOBA/Arena shooter fame and faggotry, everybody wanted to make their own RE4.
Resident Evil 5 had the best gameplay, animations, and if you ask me, the most stunning graphics in all the franchise. lol @ console plebs who couldn't use ENB to remove the Saving Private Ryan filter, tho. it's criminal how trim the actual meat of RE5 was, with many lousy, boring padded levels. for the record, you can get 1000+ kills in an RE4 campaign, and maybe less than half of that in an RE5 run. most of RE5's locations are dull and uninteresting, with the bottom of the barrel being the fucking ancient african ruins. the Mercenaries experience was top notch, but most of the maps sucked too (a problem with the campaign), and the
Lost in Nightmares and
Desperate Escape DLCs were fantastic and played up the game's strengths. story-wise, it's safe to say CAPCOM cut their own throat by killing Wesker. the series has lacked a real, genuine, sincerely badass evil antagonist for over a decade now and you can't continue
any story without one. ironically, the CGI movies have set up passable villains who could sub in for Big Albert for a while but the problem is they're fucking movie villains and don't get to be in the games. Vendetta and Death Island's antagonists would have been excellent bad guys to satiate the audience if they had a chance to operate across multiple titles.
Resident Evil 6's gameplay was phenomenal, and
most campaign chapters were alright. Leon 1-3, Chris 1, 2 and 4, Jake 1-3 and some of Jake 4, Ada's for the most part. the game was rushed, though; it was released
unpolished,
not unfinished. CAPCOM's high standards slipped in many areas, but even RE6, with its bonkers dumb story and sub-par 'finish', blows several of RE4make's aspects out of the water. for example: RE4make's death scenes are fucking bad and the level of detail is unacceptable. go and look at some of the shit that can happen to everyone in RE6 and see how many corners were cut in future titles. also, there's a death scene for Ada in RE4make
Separate Ways with the lasers, where a red one decapitates her. her head doesn't actually come off, though. the vid i watched had freecam on and you can see they just stretched her head down from the neck and there's a huge model distortion as a result.
they were so fucking lazy.
the only reason RE still swims along is because of one very smart decision: reimagining
Resident Evil 2 and starting the 'what-if' REimagine series. aside from
Monster Hunter it's the only thing keeping CAPCOM relevant right now. i'm still reeling from RE3make, too. it was outsourced, and CAPCOM fucked every single one of us with it by character assassinating Jill (appearance, behaviors) and Brad (who is canonically a coward) and gutting everything of value. RE never had a main-game failure as massive as that one, and then we see-sawed with an overall good RE4make. that doesn't redeem them, and it's not sustainable either.
i wrote up all this because i have a vehement dislike for
Resident Evil 7 and, if not for
RE8: Village being what it was - and it wasn't
that great - the whole franchise would have died with 7. i can't describe the
disappointment i felt. it wasn't betrayal, but it felt like it. to use a metaphor, think of a close friend you might have had, someone who'd been part of your life for God-knows-how-long. imagine being separated for a few years, and finally meeting up face-to-face again, and seeing right away they are no longer the friend you knew, and may never be again. that was RE7 to me, yet i still feel what i've said is insufficient for how much of a let-down it was. i can't possibly express my relief that they changed course.
the reason -
my reasoning, to be clear - for RE7 having existed at all is because CAPCOM ran out out of good ideas, and i've yet to see anything to prove otherwise, or that they're "turning things around". following
Resident Evil 5, CAPCOM had slowly been flirting with and lowering themselves down to generic western tropes, and drawing inspiration from dumpster fires like
The Last of Us and
Outlast when developing spin-off titles. the
Resident Evil: Revelations games are less than mediocre and should be avoided at all costs. utterly miserable to play (and replay). RE7 has too many faults to go over succinctly, but primarily is that it's not and never will be a
Resident Evil game. there's hardly
any replay value, you can't skip cutscenes -
the fucking wrecked ship. the shock of seeing what they did to the legendary Chris Redfield - "I'm Redfield", the imposter says. no enemy variety, no innovation, and everything it established (Blue Umbrella, The Connections) was discarded like Liu Bei slam-dunking his infant son to the ground, same as everything they'd built up in the
Revelations games. the DLCs did not save the game either. excluding
Not A Hero and
End of Zoe, they were snuff and misery porn for the sake of it. you'd think they outsourced the game development to Serbia. nothing iconically RE can be gleaned in the game's material - in the world, in how it plays, in how it speaks - and what was suggested to be in any way related to
Resident Evil was phony - "I'm Redfield" - or is easier to consider a referential nod (Alyssa from RE: Outbreak games is named as the writer of a newspaper in the Baker's house).
RE2make put the series on life support long enough for
Resident Evil 8: Village to resuscitate it, but only just. the best things i can say about RE8 are that the graphics were fairly impressive, the shooting felt ok, and it had the
feel of
Resident Evil for a while... but the only good bossfight was Lady D and everyone else was retarded. Donna's fucking haunted house kills the soul of replayability. there weren't enough enemies to kill and the enemy variety was only marginally better than RE7. killing Ethan was yet another bitch move to throw away all the work they'd been doing up to that point, so we're functionally back to where we were after RE5 but worse: no villains, and even fewer heroes to root for. as i said, they have no good ideas left, which is why they're only doing 'REimagine' games now.
as for fewer heroes, well, i love Chris and all, but the only interesting plot thread they can spin going forward from RE8 is that the BSAA has become corrupt and are using BOWs. Chris is actively working against the interests of the organization he founded with Jill and Barry and that's insanely interesting to me. fat chance of them developing it meaningfully. i'm seriously afraid for what they'll do to my man in RE5make, and, God help us, Sheva.