Resident Evil 4 Retrospective

I'm not doing a spork on RE4 the way I am RE5 and RE6, but I did just buy it again and play through it, so I may as well look back on it here and see how it played out. I'll be doing this mostly from the lens of how it compares and contrasts to RE5, which I returned from and which built on this game's engine and polished it.

So, my thoughts are as follows:

• The horror atmosphere is there from the very beginning, but unlike with RE5, it stays through to the end. Every time you're getting a little bored of cutting down Ganados, you get a new location or a new boss or a new way of getting fucked up that is frankly chilling. Bitorez Mendez, the Garradors, Verdugo, the Regeneradors and Iron Maidens, and U-3 are all standout examples. The music is also frightening all the way through, and opponents like J.J. and militant infested are a lot less common. I was too afraid to play this game at night sometimes.
• In general this game is a lot less "extreme" than RE5. Chainsaw Man is to be feared...significantly less than the Chainsaw Majini. You wouldn't dream of trying to take on a Chainsaw Majini head-on in any encounter without anything but the highest-power weaponry like magnums or rocket launchers. In this game, I wouldn't dream of using a magnum or rocket launcher on Chainsaw Man because he goes down too easily to require that much firepower. The same goes for J.J.
• The flash grenades are not quite as useful here, since the Plaga mutants that show themselves by bursting out of the enemies' heads are not nearly as difficult to kill in the first place as RE5's Cephalo and Duvalia. They stagger incredibly easy and a single shotgun shell will take them out if you're close enough.
• Bitorez and Salazar are incredibly enjoyable as antagonists, both because they perfectly nail the angle they work with. Bitorez is a deadly serious titan of a man who was utterly terrifying to behold, while Salazar was entertaining in his hamminess and humorous interact
• Some technical differences between this game and the next one that a Resident Evil veteran will have to get used to will involve the weapon system.
  
  • 90% of your weapons aren't found, they're bought. This means cash becomes much more valuable, but unfortunately there's even less of it to go around than in RE5...Far less.
  • You are not supposed to be a weapons collector in this game. If you go spending all your cash on the latest available weapons, you'll quickly run out of room with which to store them in the attache case--bigger attache cases can be bought, but buying those are mutually exclusive with spending money on weapons as they're quite expensive.
  • Speaking of, the attache case is interesting. It's both more and less useful than the simple nine-slot-system in Resident Evil 5. In RE5, a rocket launcher takes up no more space than a single grenade, so store as many weapons as you like alongside it. On the other hand, that also conversely means a grenade takes up exactly the same space as a rocket launcher. In RE4, you can quite literally fill half your attache case with healing herbs and grenades, and still have room to spare without making a painful choice between offense and defense.
  • Unlike in RE5, where the weapons of each given type are more or less balanced as they all have their strengths and weaknesses, in this game, every new weapon the Merchant packs is pretty much designed to replace the old one, being superior in virtually every respect. Even in cases where two weapons of the same type can compete well when fully upgraded, in the instance a new weapon becomes available it will be superior to the one you have right then, even if you've pumped money into it already.
  • There is literally only one machine gun ever accessible except for the super-awesome bonus weapon. It's the Tactical Machine Pistol, or TMP. Since it resembles the VZ61 Scorpion from RE5 and Ada's Ammo Box 50 from RE6, players coming to Resident Evil 4 from those games will be suspicious of it--but I urge them to give it a try. It's alarmingly effective as a weapon, controlling both crowds and sub-bosses with ease and it fires at a faster rate than it loses ammo count. Pretty much anything you point it at has a lifespan of half seconds.
• And on the con side...if I were sporking this game, I'd have an "Idiot Plot" count. Because really, that's what it is. The plot of the game is collossally stupid. Like RE5, it's to be enjoyed more for the game than the story, but unlike RE5, that isn't because the game tried to tell a #deep plot and failed on all levels--it's because the plot is simply. Fucking. Stupid. In very basic ways. They should never have shown Saddler injecting Leon so early in the game (chapter 1!) and then dragging out the "rescue Ashley before the Plaga takes over" plot for an entire game thereafter. It makes the issue look like a non-issue. And then Saddler continuing to kidnap Ashley back when his plan relies on them going to the United States...
•  Assignment Ada? Assigment Annoying. I do not remember having this much trouble in Separate Ways, which is probably because Ada wasn't made of fucking paper in Separate ways. Seriously, she can't take so much as a scratch or she dies. This is especially frustrating considering she has to fight J.J. no less than three times. The boss at the end is Krauser, which is....kind of out of nowhere.
• Speaking of Separate Ways, the thing I can best compare it to is the Jetstream Sam DLC from Metal Gear Rising that came nine years after this. Yeah, fun enough, but more limited than the main campaign, and you barely do anything new at all. You go through the same areas and fight the same bosses in an incredibly condensed version of the main game while only changing the character you're playing as--which ends up changing almost nothing. Still better than Resident Evil 5's idea of a separate campaign for Sheva--as in, there wasn't one. At least she gets a different weapon in the bowgun.
• Ah, the Mercenaries.
  
  • As much as I enjoy Wesker, why is he here? He wasn't even in the main campaign except for a name drop. He wasn't even in Ada's campaign except as a face on a screen. Hell, he wasn't even in the country!
  • Why the HELL is H.U.N.K. here?! No, seriously, why? He wasn't seen or heard from in this game!
  • Wesker is a crutch character. He comes stocked with both hand and flash grenades, has a souped-up, silenced handgun with a 5x critical rate for headshots, decent health, a semi-auto sniper rifle, a Killer7 magnum, and melee that instantly kills anything it touches. However, he also has no knife to break boxes with and no extra ammo.
  • Krauser similarly is made for the enjoyment of dominating any stage he lands. He has only one weapon, the bow and arrow, but it is a hilariously overpowered weapon that will kill anything it's pointed at (and if it doesn't, a second shot or melee follow-up is a guarantee), especially with headshots. The huge damage output easily outweighs the slower firing speed, and he has the highest health of any character with a full ring, so arrows, stray bullets from J.J., and explosives won't stand much of a chance of killing him. The fact that he only has one weapon also means he won't be picking up extraneous ammo he doesn't need (the way Leon or Ada would) and thus is always stocked. And all of that is without talking about the plaga arm bonus that is tailor-made to kill Super Salvador and anything else in its path in one hit. I love Krauser.