Ash, I'll address some of your points further down since I think you and DJO are making a couple of the same arguments, if you disagree feel free to extrapolate and I will respond at some point.
Now play again on professional difficulty
I'm surprised to see you say this. It's possible that I'm misremembering, but I thought you and I were very much of a mind that the whole "force a player to go through the game on easy mode before letting them play through on the
real difficulty" was shit design. Regardless though, while I generally enjoy a steep difficulty in games, the sections of RE4 that I did enjoy (which again, I
really enjoyed) were not particularly difficult. They were just silly, schlocky fun with cool-looking monsters, big boomsticks, and cheesy set design that would feel right at home in a Hammer movie if a Hammer movie actually had a budget; that is: the enjoyment wasn't coming from the difficulty.
I also think you're trying to save face. You recognize it's pretty cool for what it is but got to keep up appearances.
I'm really not. At this point in my life I give close to zero fucks about what people think of me outside of my cats, my family, and my boss. I greatly enjoy the Codex as a place to do some armchair design/criticism and talk a little bit of shit, but uhm, yeah I really don't care what anyone here thinks of me (except MCA of course. I hope he likes me!). Anyways, I think "cool for what it is" is a fair statement, but I would say that, when viewed as a complete package, "what it is" is a mediocre game. And in my vernacular "mediocre" is a synonym for "kinda shit". Is it the worst thing ever? By all means no. Like I said, I played through the whole damn thing, which clearly means I had some fun. But I've also watched all 17 seasons of Stargate SG-1 and its various spinoffs, and while I undeniably had some fun doing so, overall I would still describe the franchise as "kinda shit". I'm a Dad and I spend a lot of mental energy throughout the day engaging with my son, and sometimes at the end of the day I want to do something that
requires zero critical thinking, but that doesn't mean I can completely shut-off the part of my brain that
engages in critical thinking. Perhaps that's a personal flaw though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yes the story is trash. Who the fuck cares?
I respect you, but I loathe this argument. The absolute most generous way I can view it is as a misguided apologia for poor craftsmanship. A creative work, which I think games are, should strive to be perfect (obviously none will ever achieve this and
very, very few will ever come close), otherwise
why the fuck are you trying to make art ?! Certainly games with shit stories and great gameplay (for example Ultima Underworld) can be great and games with shit gameplay and great stories (for example PS:T) can be great, but is anyone seriously making the implied argument that PS:T wouldn't be better with gameplay as engaging as UU's or vice versa?
Yes the combat is slow, restrictive and somewhat clunky, yet they still managed to make it pretty fun despite its survival horror roots.
TBH didn't mind this at all after the first two chapters. As I said in my OP, complaints about the control scheme are bullshit imo; the game controls just fine.
It's cool because level design is constantly throwing new challenges of a wide variety at you
The game throws cinematic QTE after cinematic QTE at you and occasionally mixes it up with an on-rails sequence. I honestly don't get what you're talking about here.
weapon customization and overall weapon design is quite solid for what it is, grid inventory management is always a nice addition,
Agreed.
and enemy diversity placement and scripting is pretty good regardless of what you claim...so what if the dogs are rarely used (more than once for the record)? They're kinda not that fun to fight anyway, but the first time is tense regardless.
Disagree, and are you sure about the doggos? I only remember fighting them in the garden.
That's not what 'Gunplay' means
You're obviously correct. I meant gunfeel. It was late and I had a couple glasses of wine in me.
You're being disingenuous, the entire game doesn't take itself serious (and the further the game goes the more this becomes apparent)
I don't think I'm being disingenuous on this, but de gustibus non est disputandum; I will say that
I certainly wasn't taking the game seriously by its end, but it seemed to me that the game generally was, excepting the Castle segment. Perhaps this is just a flaw in my perception, but if we're (as someone earlier in this thread was) comparing RE4 to, say, Commando, RE4 comes off as much more self-serious to me.
>the first act of the game is awful
>proceeds to talk about the combat instead of the actual levels in the village
The village is pretty diverse in regards to what each level has as a challenge to the player
That's not my memory of it at all, and seeing as I just played through it a week ago I'm inclined to believe myself. The village consists primarily of:
A: Arenas where you either are on a survival timer or just have to murder everyone
B: Linear paths where you push forward killing mooks, and incrementally get ambushed by enemies coming from the rear.
Sure there are the occasional boss battles, but none of them are particularly inspired. I'm pretty sure that one of them (lake monster) is impossible to die to outside of QTEs, one of them (El Gigante) is a pretty basic, "shoot it in the face until it's stunned and then mash X", and the last (Village Chief) just amounts to "Unload everything you have and run around the environment in a circular pattern". Perhaps it was unique at the time (I will freely admit that I don't play many third-person shooters), but they all strike me as fairly drab design.
Also are you saying that you would headshot enemies, then wait for them to recover?
Yes, that is largely how I was playing in the village. I think there's probably a kernel of truth to your and Ash's implication that my playstyle is an unfun one, but at the same time it was what I felt the game was incentivizing me to do, and I'm also somewhat leery of "You're playing it wrong" as a rhetorical defense of game design.
RE4 is a great shooter, and one of the best of it's generation
This may be true, but I find it dubious. RE4's generation is one of my least sampled eras of gaming. I was in my early 20s when it came out and I was doing a lot of partying and skirt-chasing at the time, but relatively little gaming. Out of the games that I have sampled from that time though, I found the first two Metroid Primes far, far superior.
You're clearly incapable of having fun
Incapable? No, but certainly less and less capable with each passing year.