The Shinji Mikami / Hideki Kamiya / Hideaki Itsuno Review Megathread - by froghawk
froghawk on 6/1/2024 at 20:42
GHOSTWIRE: TOKYO (2022)
Inline Image:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d9/Ghostwire_Tokyo.pngDeveloper: Tango Gameworks
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Executive Producer: Shinji Mikami
Producers: Masato Kimura and Shinsaku Ohara
Director: Kenji Kimura
Tango's latest game is a new IP. After playing all of these Japanese games which star American characters, it's refreshing to finally play one which takes place in Japan and is firmly rooted in that culture, complete with a Western version that retains the Japanese audio and opts for subtitles. The game is otherwise an unsurprising thing for Bethesda to be releasing these days — it's a first person open world game with a skill upgrade tree and light stealth elements. There's quite a lot of verticality in the level design, so it feels a lot like if someone crossed an Arkane game with the open-world segments of The Evil Within 2, throwing in a hint of the Arkham games for good measure.
The story begins as a man named Akito is rushing to the hospital on a motorcycle to see his dying sister, Mari. He gets in an accident and appears to be dead. The spirit of a paranormal investigator who goes by KK then inhabits his body. Soon after, a fog descends over Shibuya, lifting everyone else's spirits out of their body. The streets are now empty, inhabited only by specters. A man in a Hannya mask (the main villain) shows up on the street TV screens and announces that he is everyone's only salvation. He steals Akito's comatose sister's body, intending to use her as some sort of vessel. Akito initially resists KK's possession, but agrees to work with him after realizing he can help rescue Mari, as KK provides him with psychic powers that allow him to harness the elements as weapons and find hidden things in his environment.
The story isn't particularly dense or fleshed out, nor are the characters particularly well developed. The villain especially feels like more of a plot device than a character — we never even get to see his face. It's the world-building where this game really shines. There's a database filled with educational information about Japanese culture and food, all based around the items you can pick up in the environment. It teaches you about the neighborhoods in Shibuya, and also characterizes the enemies (‘Visitors' — faceless malevolent ghosts) in interesting ways, as victims of their own negative feelings in life.
The graphics and art design are excellent — it's an extremely moody title, taking place on rainy city streets at night, filled with neon lights, dark corners, and reflections. There's also an option to turn on ray tracing, if you want to make it look really flashy. I actually preferred the vibe with ray tracing turned off, as the ray tracing made it brighter and less moody. Nonetheless, the ray tracing is surprisingly well optimized, to the point that it was almost workable on a mere GTX 1070.
Akito's arsenal includes harnessing the power of wind (which can essentially act as a machine gun once upgraded), water (which acts as a broad and powerful shotgun), and fire (which can cause burn damage or explosions). Each of these powers can be used in multiple ways, depending on how much it's charged up and on whether you choose to use the special form of each attack. Ammo for these attacks is found by breaking spirit items in the environment, which include things like the ghostly specters of bicycles and vending machines hovering and twitching in mid-air.
There's also a bow and arrow, and several types of talismans which allow you to do things like blowing yourself high up into the air, creating obstructions, and stunning enemies. Combat involves wearing enemies down until they get stunned and their crystal core is exposed for a limited time, at which point you have to get close to them and smash it — a task that can be difficult when surrounded by enemies. You can also sneak up on enemies from behind and rip out their core in a single move. There are areas of spiritual corruption blocking your path at times, which can be removed by finding their core and destroying it with a projectile.
The combat is quite difficult and tedious at the start of the game, but upgrades fix that relatively quickly. It can still get tedious, as the enemies feel very spongey if you don't use exactly the right techniques, and it takes just a little too long to charge up your moves in the field until the late-game upgrades. However, all of this just gives you more reason to rely on stealth, and the game provides some segments which force you to do just that. The stealth system is rudimentary, based on line of sight, but it gets the job done. There's usually enough stuff built into the environment to hide behind, and at a certain point you become able to create new temporary obstructions to hide behind.
This is exactly the kind of open world game I like, with a relatively small game area packed densely with stuff. The level design is quite appealing. The problem with this particular open world is that the streets start to look indistinguishable very quickly, so you're basically forced to rely on quest markers to know where you're going. It's just large enough for this to become a problem, plus there's a fast travel system, which makes knowledge of the streets even harder to obtain. It clearly wasn't designed to be traversed from memory — there simply aren't enough landmarks. Despite this, there's a side quest series where you have to track down the locations in photographs, with no quest marker help. I didn't even bother to do more than a couple of these.
The side quests are centered around resolving unfinished business for lingering ghosts in order to allow them to pass, and there's a good bit of variety in how that goes down. The reason spirits remain can be anything from a child getting separated from her mother to a suicide to someone... running out of toilet paper? I guess the implication is that they simply weren't ever able to find a way to wipe their butt, and thus just died on the stall? Anyway, resolving these situations can range finding the ghost haunting a building to getting involved in a big fight to finding someone a roll of toilet paper.
Unfortunately, there's also a lot of generic open world collecti-bullshit chores— save all 240,000 of the spirits hanging around the city (you collect around 100 at a time, but still... it's a lot), find all the graffiti, find all the tanuki hiding as objects, capture all the yokai (folklore spirits hanging around the city, which can be anything from flying weasels to haunted sheets of cloth), find the case reports, find historical artifacts to sell to magical cats (yes, you read that right)... well over half the game is devoted to finding all of this stuff. The main story only takes about 10-12hrs, but the rest of the content inflates the game to nearly 4x that length.
This leads the pacing to be just as wonky as The Evil Within games, only this time it succumbs to the classic open world trap of disrupting the momentum of the main plot with endless distractions. It's one of those games where the clock is ticking on an important plot point, but instead you end up aimlessly running around trying to find stuff in order to make yourself more powerful. It's all quite fun at first, but starts feeling a bit repetitive in chapter 3, and intensely so in chapter 4, when ends up being the longest chapter in the game by far thanks to all of the side stuff.
The fifth and sixth chapters, on the other hand, are quite short, consisting entirely of walking, cutscenes, and 3 quick and easy boss fights. Most of the emotional substance of the story happens right at the end, and it is quite moving — thought it would've been even more moving if more time had been spent fleshing out the characters, and less on running around aimlessly. The ease of this final segment makes all the grinding that preceded it feel especially pointless, so I would recommend only focusing on the main story and side quests.
Every open world game these days has to have a post-game where you return to the open world and finish doing whatever you were doing — but it doesn't make sense here with the way the plot wraps up, so continuing the game after beating it just drops you back at the end of Chapter 4 (albeit with all upgrades intact). I'd finished all the side quests before tackling the ending, so it truly felt like there was no reason to continue all the collectible stuff — I quit the game just a minute after returning.
On the whole, Ghostwire: Tokyo is an enjoyable title. It isn't quite fresh enough to defeat open-world fatigue, as the collectibles are the game's biggest weakpoint (and indeed quite fatiguing), but the concept feels novel and the immersion in Japanese culture is refreshing. Tango Gameworks have yet to release a remotely well-paced game, but at least the grinding is optional and unnecessary. Avoid the temptation to collect all the stuff, and you're likely to have a blast, even if the game isn't likely to be particularly memorable.
Prelude: The Corrupted Casefile
Ghostwire: Tokyo was released with a free prelude — a brief visual novel introducing us to a group of paranormal investigators in the Shibuya ward of Tokyo who have been investigating a number of disappearances caused by ghosts. This novel sees them investigating the case of a phone-addicted teenage boy who lost his friend. It isn't voiced, aside from the occasional explanation — you just click through text. I'm not sure how standard that is, as I am new to visual novels.
The art design is quite nice, stylized with outlines of negatives around everything. There's just a teeny bit of gameplay — tracing a sigil, and then a single battle where you can select from 3 different attacks and defenses, preferably in an order that keeps you safe. It's not likely to make you run out and buy the game — the writing isn't exactly amazing — but it's a cute little introduction to this world. It's not essential at all, as the important plot points are summarized in a readable in the main game.
The Spider's Thread
A free update included some extra content, including some extra side quests. As if there weren't enough Arkane similarities already, it also included a bonus roguelite game mode called ‘The Spider's Thread', in which the player must progress through 30 stages presented in random order without dying. If you've attained powers or upgrades, you get to keep those for your next attempt — but they are not the easiest thing to obtain! It's a pretty large addition, adding another 10-20hrs to the game. While it's definitely more fun than all the collectible stuff, I have yet to explore this mode too deeply, as I felt perfectly satiated by the main title.
(
https://medium.com/@froghawk/ghostwire-tokyo-2022-1ec0fdb8a0ae)
froghawk on 7/1/2024 at 19:29
RESIDENT EVIL 4 (2023)
Inline Image:
https://image.api.playstation.com/vulcan/ap/rnd/202210/0706/EVWyZD63pahuh95eKloFaJuC.pngDirectors: Yasuhiro Anpo and Kazunori Kadoi
Producer: Yoshiaki Hirabayashi
My initial reaction to hearing that Resident Evil 4 was getting the remake treatment was simply: why? The answer to that is obvious, of course — the previous two remakes were very successful, and RE4 is a fan favorite. Remaking it is a no-brainer from a profit perspective. However, it is nonetheless a very different prospect than the prior remakes, which brought older games which were largely unavailable to a new audience, in addition to updating them with the third person perspective the series has been using since RE4, thus providing a truly novel experience.
Code: Veronica would've benefitted similarly to RE2 and RE3 from this treatment — or even RE0 or a second remake of the original game — but no. They skipped over all those titles and instead opted to remake a title which was already in third person and still widely available, with a functioning PC version. This makes RE4 feel like more of a cash grab than the previous remakes, at least in theory. In practice, however, it certainly isn't lazy. RE4 is considerably longer than the other RE engine titles, and its linearity means there was considerably more level space to recreate than in the other remakes. This was a sizable project, handled with care.
Capcom learned their lesson from the RE3 remake. The development of the RE4 remake began in 2018 and was initially outsourced to the studio M-Two, who had assisted with the development of the RE3 remake. After that remake was widely criticized, Capcom moved the development of RE4 back in house in 2021, bringing back the directors from the widely praised RE2 remake to oversee it. As such, this is a much more thorough remake than RE3. Great care was taken to recreate the entire game without cutting corners. A few areas were consolidated or removed, but others were considerably expanded to compensate.
The result of this is that the pacing is better than the original, as some areas were expanded to be more interesting and notable, and parts that made the original island sequence feel interminable at times were removed. The improvement is large enough that it actually felt shorter than the original to me, despite taking me an hour longer to complete. The side quests have been tastefully expanded, leading to just a hair more backtracking without throwing off the pace. The expanded parts make some areas a bit more puzzle-oriented, allowing the game slot in better with the other RE engine titles.
The main new spin here is the tone. The original RE4 was a corny action movie parody — over the top and filled with one liners — but it also had an empty, desolate feeling, particularly in the village section. In order to make it fit with the other four RE engine titles, the tone of the remake was shifted to be more serious, with the most absurd moments removed or altered. The lighting is darker (and yet warmer and less washed out), the levels feel more claustrophobic, and of course there are loads of reused assets from the previous titles, making it feel more like part of the same universe.
There's an increased focus on horror, with quite a bit of optional gore and dismemberment which can be turned on or off in the menu. The game repeats tricks from RE7, like making you stare at some some disgusting stuff in pot or walk through nasty water, but they just don't land the same way in third person and after several exposures. The most horrific part is still the design of the plagas, especially when they explode out of the heads of enemies.
This change in tone isn't surprising, as all the previous remakes had a rather different atmosphere from the titles they were based on. The vibe here is serviceable, but it simply doesn't feel as engrossing and palpable as the original RE4, RE7, or the remakes of the first two games. Part of that is the new soundtrack, which plays with original themes in an interesting way at times, but is unsurprisingly an overall downgrade from the original, aside from a couple spooky bits. The creepy industrial elements of the original soundtrack are absent, replaced by something more subtle. The generic cutscene direction also contributes to this, as does the largely mediocre English voice acting (Wesker and Krauser are played with an over-the-top cheese that doesn't really fit here, while Ada Wong is played a little too deadpan). Some of Leon's famous one-liners are still intact, but they don't land quite as well in the context of this new tone.
The combat feels a bit more reliant on staggering and melee kills. The quicktime events have been excised, removing some of the original game's most frustrating moments. The biggest change is in the movement — the tank controls are gone and you can now move while aiming. Knives are now breakable, increasing the survival elements, and can be used to break free of an enemy capturing you like in the RE2 and RE3 remakes. The iconic village fight at the start of the game induces every bit as much of an adrenaline rush as it did the first time around, as do many moments throughout. The combat and movement feel smoother overall, though the combat can start to feel a little repetitive later in the game. The combat can start to feel a little repetitive later in the game, as the order of events needed to defeat an enemy is perhaps a bit too long, usually involving a parry followed by as many headshots as it takes to stagger an enemy, a melee attack once staggered, and sometimes a knife finisher if the enemy falls to the ground. If a plaga pops out of an enemy's head, then you've got a bullet sponge to defeat on top of all that.
Some of the boss fight designs were overhauled. Ramon used to be stationary, and now he looks more like Biollante and darts all over the room — a big improvement. The bomb timers were removed from the Krauser fight, among other changes, and the Saddler fight was simplified, with all the level pulling replaced by Saddler jumping between platforms. The U-3 fight was moved to the Separate Ways DLC — a wise choice to improve the game's pacing. Robo-Salazar was removed all together, reduced to a Salazar statue with a turning head shooting fire at the center of some scaffolding- another way in which the cheese and absurdity were toned down to give the remake a more serious tone. Is a little something lost in the process? Sure, but it more than makes up for that in other ways.
This version of the game has 4 difficulty modes — Assisted, Standard, Hardcore, and Professional. Hardcore mode makes enemies stronger and increases all the prices in the shop. Professional difficulty also makes parrying more difficult, as it must be perfectly timed to work. The typewriters are basically purposeless in the first three difficulty levels due to the frequency of autosaves, but Professional difficulty does not include them, giving the typewriters an actual purpose. New Game + allows you to change the difficulty, unlike in the original game, allowing for easier runs in the Hardcore and Professional modes with upgraded gear.
The game now includes a challenge system, like the previous RE engine titles, and completing them gives you funds to use in the extra content shop. The extra content shop mostly just includes cosmetics and models — aside from a few weapon rewards, it's far less useful in-game than the shop in RE: Village, providing less incentive to complete the challenges. In a controversial move, microtransactions were added to the game post-launch with a slough of pay-to-win DLC — a move that many saw as underhanded. Unlocking exclusive weapon upgrades is nearly impossible without it.
The plot is largely the same as it used to be, from what I recall, though the delivery of it has changed in some ways. The intro sequence was rewritten and expanded to be more relevant to the story and less about Umbrella (who barely feature here). The codec calls now happen during gameplay instead of cutting to an early MGS-style codec screen, allowing you to traverse the environment and pick up items while they're happening. The story still feels more like a side plot relative to the first three games. The class commentary didn't quite hit me as hard in this iteration as in the original, but I'm not sure why.
As the fifth game in the series to use the same engine and many of the same assets, it doesn't feel as novel or exciting as RE7 or the RE2 remake. Without the novelty of their perspective shifts, it feels exactly like what it is - RE4 recreated in the RE engine with some large quality of life improvements and a bit of the personality sanded off. I had great fun here, but if Capcom keeps pumping out more RE engine titles in this vein, I can see my interest waning quickly. Nonetheless, this remake is undeniably well done and enjoyable. I think it's safe to say that this team did as good of a job remaking RE4 as they did with RE2 - I just prefer the RE2 remake based on my personal tastes.
The Mercenaries
Inline Image:
https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/2109315/capsule_616x353.jpg?t=1680840059The Mercenaries mode was released as a free DLC shortly after the game's launch. This is perhaps the most fun iteration of this mode to exist yet. It recreates the four stages of the original game, so unlike the RE: Village iteration, each stage just has one level area where you have to work to increase the time available to you before the clock runs out. There are eight characters to pick from which gradually unlock, each with a different arsenal of weapons and sometimes abilities.
Each stage features ranks up to S++. The highest rank is only achievable by surviving to the end and eliminating all the enemies. A timer counts down from 2 minutes, but can be increased by finding floating green orbs or through headshots. A meter build to allow you to unleash Mayhem Mode, which either increases power or grants a special ability, depending on the character. The meter can be boosted with green floating orbs. Enemies are a hair easier to defeat than in the main game, allowing you to more easily battle a giant horde.
Separate Ways
Inline Image:
https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/2109300/capsule_616x353.jpg?t=1695269059The original Separate Ways was a two hour long bonus for the PS2 version of RE4, bringing you through sequences from the main game and one brief new area from Ada Wong's perspective. It was divided into 5 chapters, and completing each one unlocked a segment of ‘Ada's Report' — a file detailing her relationship with Wesker. The five chapters were disconnected from each other, with each showing Ada's involvement in a different episode of the main game.
The new version received a much bigger overhaul than the main game, heavily expanding it into a much larger continuous story taking place over 7 chapters. It includes several new areas attached to the reused parts of the main game's levels. It takes around 5 hours to complete, more than doubling the length of the original DLC. For only $10 at launch, it's a much better deal than the DLC additions to the previous RE: Engine titles or even than the RE3 remake, as it's only a hair shorter than that game.
The new Separate Ways is based around a brand new mechanic for traversing the levels — Ada's grappling hook, which makes it feel a bit like the Batman Arkham games. Traversing the levels thus feels very different in this DLC, giving it a new spin which elevates it from what was once a quick asset flip into a proper campaign of its own with considerably more novelty. There are a couple sections near the beginning which can be completed using only stealth kills, which is a nice touch (though I would've loved to see more of it). The soundtrack also has a totally different feel than that of the main game — it's more electronic and feels refreshing after the main game's soundtrack, even if it is still generic at times.
Some content which was cut from the main game for pacing reasons was moved to the DLC — most notably the laser hallway (the one moment here with quicktime events) and the U-3 boss, which was turned into a recurring boss here. This makes the character feel more fleshed out and feel like a bigger part of the overall story. The dropping platforms were cut from the final fight (which loosely recreates the final sequence of the original U-3 fight). The choice to relocate some of the content to this DLC was a wise one, making it feel less like an afterthought. If anything, the story of this DLC is more relevant to the series at large than that of the main game, allowing this add-on to finally feel essential.
(
https://medium.com/@froghawk/resident-evil-4-2023-62a2c29e5375)
froghawk on 19/6/2024 at 01:22
RESIDENT EVIL: DEATH ISLAND (2023)
Inline Image:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4f/Resident_Evil_-_Death_Island.pngDirected by Eiichirō Hasumi
Written by Makoto Fukami
Produced by Hiroyasu Shinohara
The fifth entry in the Japanese animated Resident Evil movie series thankfully returns to being just a movie, after Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness experimented with splitting a normal length film into four episodes. This one is directed by the same guy who wrote Infinite Darkness and written by the guy who wrote Resident Evil: Vendetta, and it's a direct sequel to the latter film. Ultimately, it's still pretty standalone — this connection only affects a single reprised character who serves as a secondary villain and ultimately isn't that important.
I wasn't really expecting these CG films to turn into a franchise of their own, but here we are. The spin this time is Resident Evil goes to Alcatraz. Very inventive. Maybe the team had been watching The Rock. As with Vendetta, this film takes place between RE6 & RE7. It's the first of the films to heavily feature Jill Valentine, and is somewhat themed around her recovery from the events of RE5. As such, it's the first to feature the full cast of playable characters from the early games (Chris & Claire Redfield, Leon Kennedy, Rebecca Chambers, and Jill Valentine), plus a new villain who tears them all down and makes them question their roles.
Through this villain, the film tries to touch on some slightly deeper ideas than the previous entries — namely about all of the characters truly serving large corporations, despite ostensibly fighting one. Unfortunately, it ends up as yet another action movie where the villain espouses the film's most interesting ideas while reaching totally cartoonish and nonsensical conclusions about what to do with them. The heroes save the day and maintain the status quo, never actually addressing the issues brought up by the villain at all. This particular trend is infuriating — I'd prefer if dumb action films didn't bring up any topical or interesting ideas at all, rather bringing them in for zeitgeist points while effectively coming out against them. For once, can't one of these action films have the characters actually address the good points made by the villain and maybe try to do something about it?
In this case, I suppose that could ruin the timeline — though I have no idea what plans they have for these characters, as only Chris Redfield has appeared in the games that take place after this. Still, I'm finding the way films are frequently paying lipservice to important ideas which are only ever espoused by the villain to be almost offense at this point. Marvel is certainly repeatedly guilty of this, and I wasn't expecting to see it happen in this series. Nonetheless, the villain's backstory is at least novel for the series, based around the trauma that came from seeing his Umbrella soldier cohort turn and getting orders to kill them. It's not remotely novel fare for zombie films, but I don't think it's been explored in the RE universe before.
The environments look as great as always, and the camerawork mimics live actions films in some interesting ways, including the use of shaky cam. However, the facial animation is still stiff and uncanny, and by far the weakest part of the look here — especially on the less prominent characters. The shaky cam at the start almost seems like an attempt to hide that. This makes the beginning feel a little awkward, as do a few other things, like referring to San Francisco as ‘Frisco'. I guess this is how they think Americans talk. It doesn't help that Frisco is an actual city in Texas.
Alcatraz would've made a good setting for a proper horror film, but instead this just another action movie that could've taken place on any island. It doesn't do much with the setting — it's even less interesting than The Rock in this regard, which is really saying something. What we're left with is just another generic action film which is effectively interchangeable with the prior entries. Forgettable action movies are par for the course with this film series — I can barely remember anything about any of them at this point, and am clearly continuing to watch them purely out of a sense of completionism. Again, I'm not sure why anyone thinks it's a good idea to translate games like these when the whole appeal was getting to interact with generic b-movies.
It all becomes too meta — movies into games into movies. Agame series which is all about cheesy b-movie tribute is now being turned into movies that are doing just the opposite and aiming for big blockbuster Hollywood stuff, modeled more after the shooter titles than the survival horror titles. They're probably still better than the American live action films — not that I would know, for the most part — but that's probably not saying much. If they're going to make these, I wish they would just embrace low budget silliness and make a cheap and corny horror film, but the machine has gotten too big at this point.
(
https://medium.com/@froghawk/resident-evil-death-island-2023-443778d909a5)