Have you ever played a game so good that it brought tears to your eyes? Maybe even more than once? I just did, and I feel obligated to tell everyone else about this beautiful piece of fiction.
Before I dive into this game, let’s talk about why this franchise is near and dear to my heart. Imagine this, you’re twelve years old, and your father comes home with a game for the “el quatro”, that game is Resident Evil 2. I still have vivid memories about playing late at night, fearing for my life as I run around the R.P.D. Now as a somewhat older person, I reminisce about the GOAT, Leon Kennedy, but shocker, he’s not been the reason that I hold the new game in such high regard.
First and foremost, let’s talk about the other side of the dual-protagonist gameplay, Grace Ashcroft. This girl can be described as a nervous trainwreck, or a crybaby, or a girl who can’t get a single sentence out without stuttering. But that’s what makes her such a good character, it feels real, and I guarantee that a good fifty percent of people would act just like she did, if put into her situation. And I believe that taking somewhat average people and putting them through nightmares has been an amazing trend for the past couple of games, starting with the no-longer-living legend, Ethan Winters. And Grace certainly did her part of making the game feel terrifying, for the most part.
Secondly, let’s talk about the amazing side characters that still stick out to me after completing the game. About three hours into the game, you’ll run into this girl named Emily, she’s blind and no older than eight, and this game effects my heart in places that I never knew it could, by discovering my adoration of children, my immediate instincts were to get her out of the area she was trapped in safely. I would love to continue to sing my praises about this amazing character, but a disdain for spoiling a recently released game will have me holding my tongue. Another character that I enjoyed was Leon’s Porsche, although it wasn’t a real character, it felt like it had a soul, and just seeing it made my heart race.
Main character-wise, I think they did a great job of managing the pace between the incompetent grace, and the hardened veteran Leon, but towards the end of the game we see Leon’s portion transition from a normal zombie game, to a full on open-world exploration, and averages about three to four hours to complete. And although I would never complain about playing as the GOAT for that long, I can understand that there are some people who would see that as dry or boring.
Let’s talk about the bad:
1: the length. On my first playthrough, which I did on the standard classic difficulty, took almost ten hours to complete, and from my research, it takes the average person around thirteen hours to complete, but this is coming from a franchise where we see games set more around the eighteen to twenty hour range, so take that as you will.
2: the ending. I’m going to keep this as vague as possible while still ranting, because there’s probably at least one of you out there reading this that hasn’t played it yet. I find it childish when a game reverses decisions you made earlier that left you in tears, it reminds me of reading books where the ending goes somewhere along the lines of “ and then they woke up”. It deflates the choices you make, and makes further playthroughs less enjoyable (at least to me) when I know that a gut-wrenching scene won’t matter later on. Also, the hinting at other characters that are mainstays in the franchise, but not showing them is terrible, it reminds me of MCU aftercredit scenes, and don’t even get me started on those. But aside from those two things, I loved the ending for other reasons, that you should probably experience yourself instead of having me tell you.
Resident Evil Nine was a mastercraft, a complex flurry of fear, sadness, anger, denial, and any other emotions you feel after being in terrifying situations, and blended with Leon’s portions, which felt like they were ripped straight out of an action movie, combined to make an amazing game that feels deserving of my final rating: 10/10
Bonus
In order to prove that I’m not a larper, I’m going to rank all the mainline Resident Evil games.
1:RE4
2:RE7
3:RE9
4:RE2
5:RE8
6:RE3
7:RE5
8:RE0
9:RE
10:RE6
If your list looks different in any way than mine, I want you to take a long look in the mirror, and wonder what went wrong in your life.
