Finished the main Revelations campaign last night! There was some plot weirdness in the last few hours with lots of double crossing going on between the BSAA and the FBC...I described this on Twitter as "the BSAA boss setting everything up to entrap the FBC boss and the final boss being a totally different boss altogether." Overall it was a decently satisfying finale though.
First...a pic of my boys Keith and Quint for posterity!
I messed around with Raid mode for a while but as usual these extra modes in RE games don't really captivate me for too long, though I understand why some people love 'em. Personally the thing I liked the most about this game was how it felt like a throwback to the older titles in structure, and successfully managed to take good parts from Resident Evils 1 to Zero and mesh them with the action viewpoint that RE4 ushered in. It's still not as compelling as RE4 - there was just something about that game's pulse that made me want to keep playing it, whereas with Revelations I was okay to stop and take a break after each chapter ended. But it's certainly a more cohesive single player experience than RE5, and proves that over-the-shoulder can be scary if done carefully.
For some reason I keep thinking that it would really be awesome to see a Revelations demake in the 32-bit style of Resident Evils 1-3, with fixed camera angles and everything. That's a game that I would pay for. I guess at this point in my series playthrough I can confidently say that when it comes to Resident Evil, I am somewhat in the "prefer fixed camera angles" camp.
Final thoughts writeup on this one will come tomorrow or the day after...and then it's on to the elephant in the room! RE6!
First...a pic of my boys Keith and Quint for posterity!
- This room with the lasers that you have to slowly make your way through with the Genesis sucked. It's not particularly hard to navigate, just annoying. Later, when the level gets flooded, I died a bunch of times because I thought you had to swim through the lasers...eventually the game was kind enough to give me a YOU ARE DEAD screen which also told me I could just swim above them.
- I already knew about Jessica's betrayal so that wasn't much of a surprise, but I got sad when she shot Parker and the game played things off like Parker was gonna die. Way to kill off the cool dad character! I had a feeling that it was a cop-out though and luckily I was right...
- The big ass kaiju BOW that you have to fight after Parker "dies" was ripped right from the playbook of Resident Evil 5...in that it was kind of a crappy boss, lol. And it devolves into one of those Time Crisis gatling gun shoot 'em up sections that RE5 loved so much. At least the helicopter pilot dropping you ammo and rocket launchers throughout the fight is kind of a throwback to Resident Evil 1.
- They took the whole "Revelations" subtitle quite literally as the last two chapters start tossing a lot of random developments your way, including the whole mentor/trainee relationship with Parker and Raymond (a character I felt was extremely underdeveloped) and the whole plot with O'Brian setting everything up to expose the FBC... It's kinda convoluted and once again reminded me of Metal Gear/Ace Combat/your typical "international intrigue" anime scenario where something possibly gets lots in translation. It's not unentertaining, mind you, just sorta muddled by the end.
- I totally forgot about Norma, the Veltro leader, until they brought him back at the eleventh hour along with the deus ex machina of the third ship. He DOES have one of the coolest transformations in the whole series thus far, IMO. I do like his vaguely "aquatic Tyrant" final form.
- Fighting him was a pain in the ass though and based on what I've seen on the internet I'm not the only one who thought so. The limited timeframe you have to shoot his heart weak point is pretty unforgiving especially when he starts tossing illusions all over the arena. Took me three tries to kill him.
- And then we have the finale! I like how Parker survived and how O'Brian retires to go off and write a "detective novel" (possible Resident Evil fanfiction). And how the game hints at RE5's Lost in Nightmares DLC. Jill Valentine survives a haunted ship to live and fight another day...and be turned into a blonde by Wesker!
I messed around with Raid mode for a while but as usual these extra modes in RE games don't really captivate me for too long, though I understand why some people love 'em. Personally the thing I liked the most about this game was how it felt like a throwback to the older titles in structure, and successfully managed to take good parts from Resident Evils 1 to Zero and mesh them with the action viewpoint that RE4 ushered in. It's still not as compelling as RE4 - there was just something about that game's pulse that made me want to keep playing it, whereas with Revelations I was okay to stop and take a break after each chapter ended. But it's certainly a more cohesive single player experience than RE5, and proves that over-the-shoulder can be scary if done carefully.
For some reason I keep thinking that it would really be awesome to see a Revelations demake in the 32-bit style of Resident Evils 1-3, with fixed camera angles and everything. That's a game that I would pay for. I guess at this point in my series playthrough I can confidently say that when it comes to Resident Evil, I am somewhat in the "prefer fixed camera angles" camp.
Final thoughts writeup on this one will come tomorrow or the day after...and then it's on to the elephant in the room! RE6!