It is good, but far from being legendary in a franchise full of legendary games. Grace's care center segment is one of the greatest maps in survival horror history and features some truly fantastic resource management and enemy AI, especially on Standard (Classic) and Insanity difficulties. It just sucks that after she finishes the care center the game becomes the most bland RE action game of all time.
Leon's segments just feel so hollow. He controls worse than he did in RE4R in nearly every way. Guns feel less impactful, melee feels unresponsive and parry breaks flow super hard now. Checkpoints every 5 steps, enemies that are significantly less interesting to fight than RE4's ganados and outside of a couple specific rooms/sections there's no interesting level design to speak of. The RE2 nostalgia is also so tiresome. I don't care about Mr. X returning, I don't care about returning to RPD to see like 20% of it in ruin for all of 10 minutes. The credit system is also so blatantly video gamey in a way that would feel silly in old RE games let alone the modern era of grounded titles. There is no real variety in weapons and its only there for half the game so there's no interesting ways to interact with the economy like in RE4, RE5 or even RE8 (which already had an inferior economy system). There's also no real escalation in his campaign. The enemies you fight in his tutorial sections are the same ones you're fighting at the end. They shove these extremely lame armed soldiers in front of you for two whole rooms and then give you the most absurdly tanky lickers in franchise history for funsies but those also exist in all of 2 rooms. The parry being repairable is also just insane. Not only does it feel worse than RE4R's parry but its significantly more powerful and abuseable. They even rehash Krauser's stellar knife fight from RE4R but make it significantly worse because they widen the parry window to make it nearly impossible to fail. Just baffling, utterly baffling.
Also idk why they bothered with a split campaign if there is barely any interaction between the characters. Aside from the number of bullets Grace ends her fight against The Girl with determining how many bullets Leon starts Raccoon City with there isn't any actual interaction between the characters. Sure, after Leon's fight against Chunk you explore the care center and get to mop up enemies that Grace struggled with, but with no knowledge that was ever gonna happen you probably already killed the singers, chef and chunk as Grace and so Leon doesn't really have anything interesting to fight. Not to mention it isn't like Grace is really rewarded with an empty care center at that point. Before leaving the building you can maybe scoop up a couple bullets, that's about it. Very underwhelming. They don't share any resources either. Leon uses credits and doesn't even get access to that until almost all of Grace's gameplay is over anyways. Leon doesn't even share the ink ribbon system, after care center ink ribbons just do not matter at all.
It's a game that looks like it has a lot of really amazing ideas and ambition when you look at it from the top down, but then you get into it and realize that its fairly cobbled together and almost everything it does outside of that 1 brilliant section is just hollow and underdeveloped. I'm a massive RE fangirl and to me even the worst RE game is still better than most other video games and RE9 is no exception. Despite how many negative things I have to say, I'd still rather play it over most other AAA games released over the last few years. It is just a shame that it doesn't really have any meaningfully defining characteristics and that the stuff it does try to do to be unique don't really amount to much.
It feels like a game that is made for people who want to look cool for minimal effort or watch an interactive movie. Everything about Leon's gameplay is dumbed down, scaled back and executed worse and after you finish the detonator you're treated to the most heavily scripted and uninteresting turret segment in the franchise into a dull walk through RPD into a dull flashback stealth segment into a lame and unnecessary Mr. X boss and - again - more walking. Plant 43's boss fight is insultingly basic, even Plant 42 in the RE1R was more dynamic and interesting to fight. Hell even before all of that absurd padding post-detonator you have plenty of fluff. After you finish care center you have a boring scripted escape sequence in the blood lab followed by a VERY boring sniper sequence followed by a "puzzle" boss fight with The Girl that is impossible to fail because the game makes sure to give you double the Requiem bullets needed to win it for free.
God the story also bugged me which is rare for RE. RE games tend to be pretty meh in terms of story but I love the characters so I tend to ignore the plotholes and enjoy the character drama. Victor seemed like a dope villain up until the end of care center only to get thrown into the lame motorcycle segment and killed before randomly coming back to kill the other villain in Zeno before he has a chance to even do anything at all. It is baffling that they did everything they could to make sure neither character got to shine and become an icon of the franchise. And then they randomly handwave the one piece of effective drama by just saving Emily offscreen at the end with absolutely no buildup. It would have been fine if we had a gameplay segment of having to rescue her, but nah they just dig her body out of the monster she turned into and we get to act like nothing happened. It is so spineless!!!
I just don't know why I'd ever go back to replay it. I'd play up to the end of care center as Grace and then turn it off as I exit the building. Every RE game has something unique to offer players or excels in one particular area that makes it worth revisiting and iconic in its own way. RE9 has nothing but an ok action game that is worse than every other RE action game strapped to a brilliant survival horror segment. I wish Leon just wasn't in this game at all, if we had an entire game with Grace it might have been an all time great.
Like 20% of it is fucking brilliant and the other 80% ranges from bad to just decent. I think I'd maybe put it above RE0 and RE3 Remake but below every other mainline game, even RE8 which is a game I'm not that big a fan of. At least RE8 is unique in a lot of ways and had actual ideas even if I didn't love how most of them were executed. I'd say it bugs me that it is getting such rave reviews from most people but I'm never gonna be the type to try and tell someone they should hate something. The game really is good, but only because it takes countless ideas from legendary RE games and makes them worse. If you take 10/10 ideas and implement them poorly you're still left with an 7/10 sometimes and that's good enough. No reason for me to ever come back though, I'll just replay the actual 10s this game takes its ideas from instead.
I tend to disagree with mainstream audiences on game design a lot though so it makes sense that the masses think it is the best thing ever and I came away far more mixed.
RageBurner
