the first twewy was a fruit of its age: a game about people trying to connect with each other, understating how bounds are importants and learning to accept themselves. settled in shibuya, the epicenter of japanese youth of it’s époque and pretty much adopting all of its aesthetics too: it’s emo, it’s stylish, it sounds like japanese pop, rap, it has scratches, it isn’t “clean”, it’s urban. even in a nintendo ds game, is a city that felt alive, not only for the care they had with the aesthetics but also because you could scan people’s minds and see their feelings, worries and experiences while living in such a city that shibuya was. it was also a game that could only exist on the nintendo ds: a game about utilizing the ds’ two screens to sustain its message. you played, in combat, controlling both neku and his partner of the week, utilizing your stylus and your d-pad to fight enemies on both “sides” at the same time -- basically you had to take care not only of yourself, but also of your partner, too, and when you were in sync, you could unleash an special power. it was weird, for sure, but it worked well enough to what the game was trying to say. yeah, there’s a mobile and a switch version today -- the last one being, basically, the canon one that leads to this game story -- but the original intent still is the ds one.

now, 14 years later, the context is different: people still have the same problems, but the gravity of this is changed by the internet. your presence online is more valuable than yours offline: is easier to form bounds, since you can find your own niche just searching for some keyword on twitter. is not that people are not afraid of being themselves, is more that they can be anyone today at a level that it’s true identity is messier than their own closets. today, the people you scan don’t care anymore about which CD he should buy at tower records or which clothes she should wear on a date. today they care about which CD is worth enough to be physically buyed and which boy is prettier enough on instagram to be worth a date. neo: the world ends with you is still a game about the importance of connections. not exactly about a protagonist that does not have any, but about a protagonist that must know how important they are. you now play with a whole team instead of a partner and each button of your controller represents both a pin and a player. while it seems strange, it’s actually a show of geniality: it gives the same feeling that you should adjust itself with the most comfortable and ergonomic pins, just like the DS gave, but now in a dualshock 4. you have plenty of options to customize your gameplay and it’s basically “what if control scheme was not a quality of life but instead a central game mechanic”. it is addicting too, you know? testing new pins, seeing they evolve, comparing their animation speed and which one has less friction. it feels really great, principally because you soon unlock a mechanic known as “drop the beat”, where you gain a percentage in order to do a special move. there’s a lot going on in this game’s combat and while some enemies are not That Fun, there are some great bosses at kingdom hearts 2 level of flashy-lasers-gimmicky-thing and overall quality and necessity of mastery of it’s system.

thematically, as i said, is still about the importance of connections, but more about understanding that your friends really does matter for you. instead of the fear of knowing new people, the fear now is of missing those people -- what if your best friend just gets erased? the question about accepting your true identity is still here, too. characters wearing masks to distant themselves from who they really are -- they are in fear of being genuine. what if no one likes it? sending a sticker saying “i love you” on telegram is easier than, actually, saying “i love you” in flesh and blood. you can see how those teenagers are influenced by how the internet treats relationships, in both bad and good ways, and also how the overall communication and relation-between-people have changed since the first the world ends with you released. it also talks about The System and how shit it is, where Higher Classes has shit privileges and can do whatever the shit they want to -- they are on the top, after all. having many teams fighting each other, directly and indirectly, trying to survive a game where it seems impossible to win, is pretty much how capitalism works: sometimes you just have to take care of your own group rather than help everyone in order to survive -- and this sucks. “systematic world, killing me” etc. this system, formed by old rules that doesn’t matter for the ones on top, is also what kills the chance of the youth to express themselves better and be able to have healthier relationships. you can’t just go and blame the one on top, so you just keep quiet. you can’t just go and tell how bad you feel, so you just keep quiet. you can’t just go and tell how much something matters to you, its cringe, so you just keep quiet. in the end, either die quietly or try to change things: if you could turn back time, would you do it right? and even if you don’t, would you mind doing it right, now? going against the system? trying to be yourself a little more? trying to understand others a little more? trying to show love a little more? the world ends with you, so you better change your fate.

What if Resident Evil 4 did away with tank controls in favor of ‘modern’ controls? That’s the question RE4make is trying to answer, and from which many of its other changes flow. After all, it’s precisely that control scheme which lent the OG many of its unique dynamics. Yet it is also an overwhelming reality of convention and industry standards that makes tank controls in a modern game an incredibly hard sell, which no doubt influenced RE4make’s decision to move away from it. But, I do not believe that tank controls are irreplaceable to the OG’s success. If there’s any opportunity a remake has, it’s to twist the original to see what happens, and RE4R sure has done some twisting. Now freed of tank controls, what are the consequences of that in the remake?

The most noticeable changes by far are that Leon can now aim and reload while moving, and sprint in any direction. In RE4 this was restricted to put more emphasis on aiming as an action and your main method of interaction with the world, as if you were playing a light gun shooter (not unlike how stealth games make your player character poor at combat to emphasize stealth, or how games with a melee focus restrict the usefulness of ranged weapons). In the remake, this was done away with for the sake of appealing to intuitiveness and player comfort. However, by having it play and control more similarly to other shooters on the market this came at the expense of identity. Not that identity and uniqueness really impacts the quality of the game, but people do not experience games by just their ‘objective’ quality. So on RE4’s launch many fans called it “not a real RE game” precisely because of how differently it played to older RE games, whereas nowadays the definition of a “real RE game” has become much looser. It may be a silly and illogical and inconsistent thing, but humans were never perfectly logical creatures to begin with. To mitigate this loss of identity by taking away what makes something unique, you're better off also giving something unique back.

These changes also have several other knock-on effects on a mechanical level. Ranged attacks are now much less oppressive since the player can now simply sidestep most of them, reloading your gun now leaves you much less vulnerable, and the range of enemy melee attacks had to be readjusted to keep up with the player’s newfound mobility. On top of that, there’s the fact that RE4R was designed from the ground up to be a multiplatform release, and thus had to be designed with keyboard/mouse controls in mind. RE4 was designed mainly around the limited movement speed of the crosshair to give you more accuracy on a gamepad; enemies would slow down when they got close enough so you had the proper time and space to line up a shot. Playing RE4 with KB/M controls on PC or motion controls on the Wii then made target acquisition and targeting specific limbs much faster, leading to a different experience where the player could more easily control any given situation. Removing tank controls from RE4 as is would result in a more toothless experience, contrary to the survival horror vibe it wants to go for.

So how does RE4R make sure enemies can keep up with the player’s newfound mobility? For starters, enemies are much more aggressive and harder to control. They initiate attacks from further away, have more tracking on their attacks, and their attacks cover a greater distance. More enemies can attack you at the same time, and most encounters tend to feature more enemies than in the original. RE4R also implements RE2make’s crosshair bloom, making it harder to land hits unless you stand still to steady your aim (unless you have a laser dot equipped on your pistol), but also having a fully steadied crosshair give your next shot enhanced properties on hit.

The most important, and potentially most interesting change by far is that Ganados now take multiple shots to stagger (more prevalently the case on Hardcore difficulty and above, most of this piece is written with the higher difficulty settings in mind). It’s a necessary change considering the ease of target acquisition with the new control scheme. Otherwise automatic weapons would become even more busted than they were in RE4, but also because being able to move while holding the knife would let you set up a lot of staggers for free. What makes this change so interesting however is how it could in turn interact with the ammo economy, reload management, and the new focus shot system. The player could double/triple tap a Ganado for a quick stagger, or they could risk standing still for a moment to line up a focus shot for a guaranteed stagger using only one bullet--saving up on ammo in the long term and staving off a reload in the short term. This way RE4R could have emulated the control constraints of the original in a way where the player wants to not move while aiming rather than being forced to do so, providing a best-of-both-worlds option where the original light gun-shooter dynamic can be preserved in a way that’s also intuitive to most players. Plus, said “focus shots” could be applied to the knife as well, again incentivizing rather than forcing you to stand still for enhanced attack properties. Not only that, but the fact that you’d have to consider firing more shots at once rather than doing one-tap-into-roundhouse repeatedly would add some more nuance to reload management and decision making than RE4 did[^2]! At the same time, the increased aggression of enemy encounters and enemies themselves would make it harder than in the original to stand still and line up a shot, so it’s not as if lining up focus shots would be completely free.

Now, note that I am speaking entirely theoretically. In practice, RE4R doesn’t work like what I just said at all. Focus shots do not cause guaranteed staggers, they only slightly increase the critical hit chance and stagger value of the next shot, which is only a minor reward for a major risk. It makes steadying your aim not worth doing outside the accuracy benefits. Even worse is when you apply the laser dot upgrade on a pistol, which automatically makes every shot a focus shot and makes the stand-still/focus shot dynamic largely irrelevant for pistols (just like in the original Deus Ex, for example). Here I wish the game had adopted a hybrid crosshair system where you had both the OG laser sight and the RE2R crosshair bloom/focus shot dynamic, but alas.

But perhaps the most damning design choices in RE4R for me are the following two combined: the pistols have a relatively low base rate of fire, and enemies can’t be consistently flinched (i.e., a hitstun reaction without a melee prompt) even upon being shot in the limbs. What this means is that even if you do want to double/triple-tap an enemy into a stagger, the time it takes to get off enough shots is so long that in most cases enemies are about to hit you before you can get a stagger off anyways. In a system where one shot guarantees a stagger a la the original, having a low rate of fire to emphasize careful aiming makes sense, but in the current system that asks you to shoot multiple times for a stagger, a low rate of fire is just painful. At the same time, you cannot create additional time and space to set up staggers by flinching enemies, because whether an enemy will flinch on hit is semi-random[^3]. This wouldn’t have been as much of a problem in games where your workhorse weapons had a higher rate of fire (it’s why in games with RNG-based hitstun like Doom, a fast-firing weapon like the Chaingun is your go-to stunlock weapon), but the opposite being true in this case only exacerbates the fact that trying to control crowds in RE4make is generally unreliable and too slow to match the Ganados’ new aggression and numbers.

As a result of crowds becoming more unreliable to control, it turns the original’s pseudo-beat ‘em up gameplay of enemy state manipulation and well-timed i-frames into something more akin to horde shooters like Devil Daggers and Serious Sam. When the state of an enemy or a group of enemies becomes harder and more inconsistent to manipulate, the player will naturally tend to mitigate as much inconsistency as possible by keeping their distance from said uncontrollable threats. Crowd control is now less a matter of creating CC/i-frame opportunities by manipulating enemies to your benefit, but rather trying to out-kill an onslaught of enemies before they overwhelm you. In the original you could play aggressively right in the thick of enemy crowds thanks to the many i-frame/CC options at your disposal, but in RE4R this has been significantly nerfed: vaulting over walls/through windows or climbing ladders no longer gives you i-frames, contextual animations have next to no exit i-frames after you’ve regained control (i.e. still being briefly invincible after Leon recovers from being knocked on the floor or after doing a suplex), and kicks have a smaller hitbox and a smaller effective range on account of enemies tending to be more spaced out from each other now. Being caught in the middle of a crowd in RE4R has a higher tendency to snowball into you being stunlocked to death now that enemies are more aggressive, i-frames aren’t as easy to get, your context melee moves not being as useful for CC anymore, and stuns not being as reliable. While RE4R might have done away with tank controls in favor of more “fluid” controls, trying to control the situation has never been more difficult.

That said, me being Serious Sam’s strongest online defender, I don’t think this kind of gameplay in a RE game is inherently problematic, but when you view RE4R through the lens of a horde shooter you can start to see why it doesn’t really succeed at being one either. For starters, RE4R makes it too easy to kite enemies forever. While there was nothing preventing you from doing so in the original, it’s something that didn’t come as naturally to do on account of Leon’s backwards movement speed being slower than his forwards speed. If you wanted to create some distance, you had to turn your back towards the enemy and so lose sight of the situation. But in RE4R Leon can run towards the camera, allowing him to see his pursuers while running at full speed, thus rendering that original dynamic void. As most enemies in RE4R cannot catch up to a sprinting Leon (outside of Garradors, who only appear sparingly), whether you can kite them forever depends on whether the level you’re in gives you enough space to do so. In RE4R that is the case most of the time, outside of setpiece encounters where you get gradually boxed in from every direction (like the village and cabin fight). The original also made kiting come less naturally to do simply because the context melee moves were that useful, and made you want to stick closer to enemies to take advantage of a stagger before the enemy recovered. Not only was it free damage, crowd control, and invincibility, but it also saved ammo. On paper this is still the case in RE4R, but as mentioned before, context melee moves are now much less safe to do in the middle of crowds, and less rewarding.

Furthermore, RE4’s and by extension RE4R’s enemy cast were never designed to be that interesting to fight from a distance. The nuances in fighting a group of Ganados wielding a mix of one-handed, two-handed or no weapons at all become significantly less pronounced when you aren’t in melee range. Pressure units like Plagas spawns, Chainsawmen and Brutes were not meant to be that threatening from a distance, and ranged enemies with crossbows and grenades were designed to complement regular melee Ganados rather than be any interesting to fight on their own, which is why they have lower HP. There are no real long-range pressure units outside of Crossbow Brutes to make kiting harder to pull off, and Crossbow Brutes only appear in the last third of the game. As a result, target prioritization often feels like a matter of targeting whoever happens to be closest, while occasionally focusing on the ranged Ganado here and there. The constantly shifting threats and priorities that RE4 had with its close-quarters combat or Serious Sam has in its diverse enemy horde compositions is a large part of what kept them engaging, yet RE4R feels like it has neither. For this new horde shooter-ish gameplay to really tick, RE4R would need more enemy types that can control space from different ranges as if it were Doom 2 in order to fit the more ranged focus of its combat, rather than stick with the original enemy roster where most enemy types are melee combatants.

The main consequence of how kite-heavy RE4R’s gameplay turned out is that fights now feel a lot more homogenous, despite many encounters being largely identical to their original counterparts! The nuances that the tank controls and pseudo-beat ‘em up gameplay brought to each encounter are largely gone, and what’s come in its place doesn’t truly fill the void (however, with more radical changes to the original formula, or by bringing it more in line with the original instead, it could have done so). While it’s true that fights in the original could easily be boiled down by doing headshots into roundhouses ad infinitum if you wanted to, the system still allowed for a high degree of control and aggression the better the player got, which combined with the nuances in enemy behavior and controlled injections of RNG kept the game fresh and engaging even across multiple playthroughs. RE4R’s system on the other hand relinquishes potential player control in favor of creating uncontrollable chaos, resulting in a more defensive and reactive game where reasonably skilled play is identical to higher skilled play simply because there is less space for expression. Playing “lame” is what RE4R’s higher difficulties push you into by default. Again, this style of gameplay that you commonly see in horde shooters isn’t inherently problematic, but RE4R doesn’t have the enemies or spaces or tools or target prioritization to make the process of planning around and dismantling hordes that interesting.

To give you a (sharp) edge amidst all this chaos, the game thankfully gives you room to breathe using the new knife. Now that moving away from tank controls would take focus away from the original light gun-shooter feel and thus by extent Leon’s signature preference for pistols, RE4R absolutely made the right call by instead focusing more on Leon’s signature knife. New knife moves include being able to perform takedowns on stunned or knocked down enemies, which instantly kills regular Ganados and deals massive damage to higher-tier Ganados, while also preventing Plagas spawns. You can backstab unaware enemies using the new stealth mechanic, which felt like something Leon should have been always able to do, what with him being a special agent. My favorite new interaction is how takedowns work together with the new wallsplat state: carefully aimed staggers or kicks that cause enemies to stumble backwards into a wall puts them in a wallsplat state, during which you can execute a knife takedown on them from the front for big damage. It adds a new and interesting dimension to fighting Chainsawmen and Brutes where you’re trying to position yourself correctly to chain multiple takedowns together, and so get rid of them quickly while saving up on bullets.

Of course, it’s impossible not to bring up the new knife parry[^4]. It works as you’d expect. Time a parry right--you escape damage. Time it perfectly–you get a free stagger on top. It’s the only tool in your arsenal to let you play with any degree of aggression rather than endless kiting, so regardless of your feelings about the prevalence of parries in modern action games, the knife parries are arguably a net positive inclusion in RE4R. Thankfully RE4R is sane enough not to have parries be the answer for every attack: you won’t be able to chain parry a stream of arrows/bullets, a knife won’t help much against fire or explosives, chainsaw swings can only be blocked with your knife and usually end up breaking it in the process, and hammer swings and grabs can only be ducked or ran away from rather than parried. Sounds good, right?

Well, there’s actually two major caveats that end up kneecapping the usefulness of parries in larger fights. One is that while perfect parrying attacks gives you some reward, successfully ducking grabs gives you nothing. Second is that unarmed grab-happy Ganados are present in almost every encounter, and you can increase their numbers if you disarm a Ganado holding a weapon. So what does this have to do with parrying? The issue is that even if you’re trying to play with some measure of aggression by parrying a group of enemies in their faces, the presence of unparryable unarmed Ganados will make parrying an unsafe choice compared to just kiting the entire group. You’ll parry one, and then you get grabbed immediately afterwards from behind. You could of course focus on the unarmed Ganado by doing a well-timed duck, but this in turn leaves you vulnerable to any other kind of attack, nor do you get any reward out of well-timed ducks. And even if perfect ducks gave you a free roundhouse kick like perfect parries, it still wouldn’t be an effective CC option with how nerfed the effective range of kicks has become and enemies being more spaced out in general. It’s a deadly mix that’s not worth getting close to.

While creating dynamic situations where some player options are less or more optimal than others is what action games should strive for, here we have a situation where next to no option except one (the almighty kite) ends up being the correct one, which is just as bad as one option being so strong that anything else is just redundant. It’s something that could have been avoided with more consistent flinch/stagger rules on (unarmed) enemies. If anything, that’s already how it works against Ganados with throwables in RE4R! You may not be able to parry explosions or fire, but you can shoot a ranged Ganado’s projectile to make it prematurely explode/deflect or shoot them in their arm to momentarily disable them. That way you can proactively create safe opportunities to deal with melee Ganados without having to keep kiting for an opening. Instead, you’ll just have to deal with the chaos.

As to why the developers chose to make RE4R more a game about being subjected to chaos, one can only guess, but mine is that it was done to bring it more in line with the Resident Evil 2 Remake that the team previously worked on. RE2R was unabashedly about risk mitigation and being subjected to RNG, also as a way of minimizing player control over situations for the sake of creating horror. How many shots it took to kill a zombie there was even more random! But the key reason it worked there and less so in RE4R is because of RE2R’s traditional survival horror structure. You could kite zombies, sure, but the even scarcer ammo management discouraged killing every zombie you see in favor of running past them, whereas the narrow halls of the RPD made running past zombies easier said than done. The fact that your objectives made you backtrack through zombie-filled rooms you already visited added more long-term considerations on whether to spend ammo on zombies in a room you’re likely to revisit often, and on how to plan your route through the map. Add an invincible pursuer enemy to the mix, and you get gameplay that really tickles the noggin’. The micro-level dynamics of dealing with individuals or groups of enemies in RE2R is simpler than in RE4R, but what kept RE2R engaging was the macro-level resource management and routing gameplay on top of that. RE4R being more of a linear action game means these macro-level dynamics couldn’t be as present. It’s probably why RE4 added more nuance to how micro-level engagements played out to keep the linear gameplay interesting, even if Leon roundhouse kicking and suplexing enemies would make the game end up feeling less scary. The remake then trying to make the horror more pronounced again by downplaying player control over situations without adding anything to fill the void probably wasn’t the best choice.

Overall, while the new additions from RE4R to RE4 are generally okay, the changes to existing elements end up feeling haphazard. It doesn’t quite try to refine/emulate the original, but at the same time doesn’t try to do something radically new either. Perhaps the intention was to bring it closer to RE2R in terms of gameplay, but in a linear action context that would never quite work. When changing a core element such as tank controls, especially in a game as mechanically lean as RE4 was, there will be a lot of ripple effects. Some will be obvious, but a lot will be more subtle. As it turns out, a lot of the subtler ones are also the little details that helped make the original tick. Without a clear vision on where to take the gameplay in a new modernized context, and without thorough knowledge on how the parts in the original moved and worked, it’s easy to end up with what feels like a stilted translation of an old text. At the very least, it is interesting to see how experiments like this pan out as a way of reexamining what made the original (not) work, and for trying out what-if scenarios. I did expect a remix of RE4 rather than a comprehensive reimagining, and that’s largely what I got.

I give it a 5/5 S.T.A.R.S.

Addenda:

The new ammo crafting system may feel like a thoughtless modernism, and perhaps it indeed was one, but I think it ends up being a major net positive. Basically, by introducing more crafting items with a high drop chance to the enemy loot table, you end up reducing the chances of you getting healing or ammo drops. The more items there are in a loot table, the lower the theoretical maximum drop chance of any given item is going to be. But at the same time, these crafting items let you mitigate these lower drop chances by giving you more direct control over what kind of ammo or grenade you want to craft. It’s a brilliant two-birds-with-one-stone solution! It makes resources more scarce to more often push outside your comfort zone and reconsider every shot (especially in comparison to how lenient RE4 could get ammo drops, even on Professional). At the same time, giving extra control over what resources you get prevents the game from feeling like you’re at the total mercy of RNGesus. It also has the hidden benefit of smoothing over and covering up the ammo rubberbanding the game does under the surface, which helps diminish the notion that you can expect the game to automatically start dropping extra bullets for your gun if you happen to almost run out.

Footnotes:

[^1]: Incidentally, the original already has a near-identical dynamic when it comes to the time it takes to target different limbs. Because of how OG Leon always recenters his aim to head-level when deploying his guns, it means that it’s always faster to move your crosshair over an enemy’s head (for doing headshot into roundhouse kick for crowd control) than it is to move it over their shins (for doing legshot into suplex for big single-target damage). Re-centering your camera upon aiming down sights is another one of those things that you absolutely could not get away with in a modern game, even though it comes at the potential expense of cool dynamics like these.

[^2]: Rather than one shot guaranteeing a stagger or a flinch reaction depending on the enemy hitbox you shot and the state they were in, now there’s a hidden bar for staggers and flinches that fills up the more damage you inflict. How much stagger/flinch value a shot inflicts is calculated via an obtuse formula which depends on the base stagger/flinch value of your current weapon, the damage of that weapon, whether it’s a focus shot, and some additional random deviation. Basically, as you upgrade the damage on your weapon, the more often it will inflict stagger/flinches on hit. What this means is that in the early game stuns are triggered inconsistently as all hell, and throughout the game it becomes difficult to intuit what exactly the minimum and maximum shots required to stun is, which becomes even more complicated since some enemy variants have different stagger resistances on top of that. Then to throw another wrench in the works, enemies in the Island get increased stagger resistance overall.

[^3]: Reloading is one of those things that gets taken for granted in most shooters, yet RE4 forcing you to stand still while reloading already makes it a more interesting implementation than those in most other games. When you consider that reloading and limited magazine capacity is the shooter equivalent of stamina systems in action games, you can start to see how barely any games try to do anything interesting with it and just include it for realism’s sake. Basically it’s an inevitable cooldown where the player can control when and where it gets reset. In RE4 this led to several interesting decisions, where sometimes it would be better to forego knifing a downed enemy in favor of reloading your gun so you were prepared once all other downed enemies woke up. In other situations where reloading was too unsafe to do, it’d push you to switch to another weapon that either doesn’t really fit the situation or uses an ammo type you’d rather not spend, which ended up creating cool moments of improvisation. RE4R having smaller base magazine capacities and making you expend more bullets at once would mean reloads have a larger presence in combat, but being able to freely move and even run while reloading cuts out most of the risks associated with reloading. Annoyingly there’s also the tendency on top for most shooters to just let you upgrade reload speeds and magazine capacities to the point where the downtime of reloads becomes irrelevant, which includes both RE4 and RE4R.

[^4]: Though I’d hesitate to call parries being new to RE4. The original already had parries, it was called “shoot an enemy in the face right before they hit you”. This even worked against Chainsawmen! Normally they tank blows to the head as a pressure unit should, but shoot a Chainsawman in the head right as he’s swinging off your head, and you get a guaranteed stagger! Then again, this is a bit easier said than done considering enemies would rear their head back right as they swung at you.

The Markdown markup for footnotes will remain unmarked as-is until Backloggd adds support for them like any sane website made in the Reiwa era.

To me, the heart and soul of Resident Evil 4 is the combat, and that’s what this review is about. Everything else about the remake is something I can take or leave, but I have many issues with the gameplay and its design, and I’d like to talk about why because it feels like everything that the original did right has been forgotten by both the devs and the fans.

To be clear, I am okay with Resident Evil 4 Remake being a different game than the original. In fact, I would like it more if it was more different and tried to execute a new idea well. My issue with it is that I don’t think the remake succeeds at carving out its own niche gameplay-wise, and instead it feels like a mismade version of RE4 held up by band-aid fixes to try to maintain the illusion of being a decent action game, and I will try to explain why I feel this way.

A core pillar of RE4 is the tank controls, they are what adds nuance to even the simplest encounters in the game and everything is designed around the limitations brought on by them. The Remake inevitably takes out the tank controls and, because of that, much of the original design crumbles, the solution to which is to make an entirely new game around the modernized controls. However, they did not do that, they instead applied a bunch of reactionary changes trying to make the game feel functional and challenging despite the removal of its core design pillar.

To illustrate this, let’s talk about one of the basic enemy types of the game, the axe-thrower. An axe is thrown at you in the original RE4, the tank controls prevent you from easily sidestepping the issue. You need to either walk forward at an angle to dodge it which drastically influences your positioning and can move you towards the crowd of enemies, or you need to shoot the axe as it’s being thrown at you to stop it. Both of these options have quite a bit of nuance to them, as dodging with your movement requires you to turn in advance since Leon’s turn speed isn’t instant, meaning that a level of prediction and foresight is required to pull this off, and shooting the axe requires you to ready your weapon, get a read on the axe’s trajectory to aim at it, and expend ammo. These are not the only ways, but they serve as good enough examples.

Come to the remake and now you have a variety of options to dodge the axe that make it a non-threat compared to the original. You can sidestep it to get out of the way, you can block it with your knife by holding a button, and you can duck under it to dodge it without needing to move. All this stuff lets you get around it in ways that dont push you into interesting situations. These enemies however are still here in the remake and they act about the same, seemingly just because they were there in the original, not because they do anything interesting for the combat. This to me exemplifies a lot of the ways most of the enemies lost their purpose and "fun" since the mechanics that made them interesting to deal with are gone, and illustrates the value that the tank based controls brought to simple interactions. For some reason we have even more options that are even easier to use against an enemy that is already made ineffective by the core system changes.

So how does the game maintain any challenge? The devs tried to do so in a couple ways but I don’t think they make for a fun or nuanced game. For one, they made it so that all unarmed enemies have long, lunging grabs that require you to sprint away from for quite a while as they chase you. If they are already close, they perform instant grabs that can’t be dodged in any way. Enemies also can’t get stunned by your shots as consistently so that you can’t counter their aggression with your guns. In short, on the highest difficulties your best bet is always keep a safe distance from all unarmed enemies. Yes, I am aware that lunging grabs can be ducked, but grabs that begin at close range cannot be ducked, so your gameplan is ultimately still the same, be far from enemies to prevent unwinnable situations. The ability to duck far lunging grabs ultimately doesn’t change your decision making in any significant way.

Another big factor is that melee was nerfed and made extremely inconsistent, especially on the higher difficulties. Shooting an enemy in the head no longer guarantees a stun that gives you a melee prompt, and the kick itself has a much smaller hitbox and no lasting i-frames. While the kick being nerfed is something I can understand and play around with, the fact that it was also made unusable due to the RNG to trigger it is baffling to me. I am okay with it taking more than one headshot, but you can shoot an enemy 5 times in the head in professional and never get the stun. If the stuns were consistent to trigger through applicable rules, you would be able to pick an enemy in the crowd to get a stun on, lure enemies around them for crowd controls, or use the kick animation to i-frame through other attacks by planning ahead. But because of its inconsistency it's not a reliable strategy that allows you to play aggressive and risky with enemies. The melee stun is now essentially a random thing that the game “gives you”, similar to how you randomly get crits, and that change on its own removes half the appeal of RE4 for me, and I don't think the game compensates for it sufficiently.

Given what they did to melees, it’s quite funny that they still have enemies who wear helmets to stop you from headshotting them. In the original this mattered a lot since it meant you can’t headstun them to use them for crowd control and i-frames, and instead you had to go for knee shots which were less reliable and weren’t useful for dealing with a crowd. Yet the enemies in the remake still wear helmets as if it matters, but all it does is simply force you to shoot them in the body which only takes one/two more shots more than shooting the head. It’s another case of the enemy design losing what made it compelling due to short-sighted changes in mechanics and the devs failing to realize how much it would take away from the game.

The kind of gameplay these changes lead to is one of constant backpedaling, since your melee is no longer strong and reliable, and enemies have instant lunging grabs with no counterplay to them at close range, at higher difficulties the game devolves to simply running away from enemies and shooting. Sometimes you get lucky and get to do a melee, but it’s not a part of the plan. The plan is to make space, sprint away, and circle around the arena and shoot. If anything gets in your way, a quick shotgun shot can disable them. The game’s challenge is now simply asking you to run and use ammo. I don’t think this is a particularly compelling gameplay loop when the ammo management never feels difficult as long as you hit your shots due to the leniency provided by the dynamic difficulty ensuring you get the drops for the weapons you are low on ammo on. Even if the ammo management was super tight, what kind of gameplay would that lead to? Simply clumping up enemies into tight corridors so you can shotgun/rifle multiple of them at a time for ammo efficiency? Or doing the same gameplan except slower to get focus shots with your pistol? Or if you play for rankings, simply run past all the enemies and encounters. It’s not fun to pull off, it’s simply boring.

There is another aspect to the defense in this game which I haven’t mentioned yet and that is the knife but I think it only exacerbates the game’s issues. On the surface you can say the knife adds more flexibility to the gameplay and parry allows you to get melees consistently, which is true, but to me that undermines the appeal of the mechanics it’s meant to interact with. The knife allows you to parry the attacks of any armed enemy, which in a kind of backwards way makes all the armed enemies way less dangerous than unarmed ones and their undodgeable grabs. Being able to get a melee off of it consistently is a sad way to relegate the mechanic, since it prevents you from using it aggressively and making your own choices when it comes to who and and when you want to use melees on, instead its simply something that happens to you, you get to do parry into melee if the game pits you against armed enemies that allows you to circumvent anything that could be challenging about them with an easy timing challenge. Even when made a bit more challenging with enemies varying their attack timings on Pro mode, the parry doesn’t ever feed into the rest of the game’s systems as the knife durability cost is virtually nothing for doing it. All it does is simply give you a “Get Out Of Jail For Free” card when it comes to armed enemies since their attacks are a boon to you, and in a backwards way it makes them easier than unarmed enemies and their grabs.
This is probably one of the places where I have the most disconnect with this game because I really don’t get the fun of parries in a game like this. Dodging through positioning and making decisions by planning around enemy behavior is where I get fun from this kind of action game, but with an instant parry like in RE4 with the static and slow enemies of this game it does absolutely nothing for me. If it had a big durability cost then maybe it would be a justifiable decision where you trade the damage and utility of the knife to escape a bad situation, but instead you just know the timing and nullify the entire enemy’s presence. The coolness of the animation is not enough to make up for how damaging it is to the game design to put so much on a simple timing challenge.

Ultimately, a big realization I made about RE4 Remake compared to the original is that it’s a game where things simply happen to you, rather than a game where you can make things happen.
You do the melee prompt when the game graces with you a stun animation, it’s not something you can reliably control and make decisions around.
You use knives to finish off enemies when the game lets you do so against transforming enemies, but you can’t control when it pops up since it doesn’t appear on most enemies and it’s not like you have a way of identifying Plagas enemies and knocking them down in advance. Because of that, stabbing grounded enemies never feels like a decision, just a prompt that you obey since you have little reason not to unless you wasted your knives getting grabbed. If every enemy on the ground had a stab prompt then at least you would be thinking about which enemies you choose to not do it on to save your knife resources.
You aren’t meant to use the knife aggressively since it can’t stun well anymore and the wide swings do pitiful damage, but you are meant to use it to parry attacks when an armed enemy happens to get into your range. When you parry attacks, you always get the same melee as a reward, you don’t get to make the choice of using a knee stun melee or a head stun melee for different purposes. You have little control in this game and most of the gameplay loop is obeying on-screen instructions in-between kiting and shooting

Compare this to the original RE4, where your backwards movement is much slower than your forward movement, so playing aggressively is encouraged, and running away from something comes at the cost of losing vision to it. You can choose what enemy to shoot in order to stun them, you choose where to shoot them to make a choice between the roundhouse kick for great crowd control or the straight kick/suplex for better single target damage. You can weave around enemies, bait them into quick attacks that you can feasibly whiff punish with your knife to get a headstun and turn close quarters situations in your favor. Compared to this, constant running away and shooting at enemies in the remake feels shallow and boring. To make it clear I don’t think the remake is hard, the strategy you are pushed into is so effective and easy to execute its hard to be very difficult once you get a hang of it, but it’s not fun either, and even if they found a way to make it hard it would just be boring due to how limited the mechanics are and how little options the player has in actually influencing the way fights progress.

And that about sums up my issues with the game. I can’t think of a good way to tie it together other than that I am deeply disappointed by what this remake had to offer. The devs clearly don’t have experience in making action games, they want to make a survival horror game so badly with the way professional is designed but it’s just not a good survival horror game either. If this was a more horror and resource management oriented RE4, that would be cool, but I think it’s simply a shitty action game where you point and click at enemies in-between kiting them.
If it were not a remake of RE4 then I would just see this as a mediocre third person shooter that tries hard with the encounter design, which is better than we get most of the time, but this game was made off the incredibly strong foundation of RE4 and yet managed to miss just about everything that was fun about it to me.
That this could be viewed as a good remake and a refinement of the original feels very strange to me, but I guess I’m completely divorced from the way people view action games nowadays. I guess as long as it has good animation work and easy controls it’s good enough, but I want more than that out of these games and the industry isn’t interested in providing that anymore. Unfortunate that I grew up to care about this stuff.

Addendum:
Since people gaslight themselves with this game into thinking the stuns are consistent, here is evidence of them being inconsistent and unreliable where I can shoot an enemy to death without ever getting a stun:
https://streamable.com/fovauq
https://streamable.com/a6jcux
https://streamable.com/nmb8lz
https://streamable.com/08vazy
First two clips are on hardcore with a fully upgraded Red9, last two clips are at the start of Professional.

Added and corrected. 2021/10/11
The quoted part of the lesson has been added and corrected without omission. And added 'on military song'. 2022/02/27

A small miracle by a small company in Kumamoto, Kyushu.
"Where is Kyushu? Oh, on the edge of Japan. Very rural."
Shut up!
The name of the miracle is Gunparade March.

Desperate war situation. Student soldiers. Militaries. Robots. Simulation.
This is a highly recommended game for those who like this kind of word.

A game so geeky it's almost forgotten, but this one is really important.
Without the Gunparade March, there would have been no Muv-Luv, and without Muv-Luv, there would have been no Attack on Titan. Does this help you to understand the importance of the matter?
Oh yes, and by the way, the 13 sentinels.

It may seem old-fashioned and inconvenient to play now. But even with all those negatives, Gunparade March had more than enough sparkle and ambition.

There are 22 controllable student characters. Three complete NPCs and a cat.
These 25 people and one cat will move around the school, which has become a garrison, using AI control to think independently, and will study, train and work every day. If you get to know each character, you can even fall in love with them, and they will teach you tactical commands that will help you in battle and wisdom that you can use in everyday life.
The field you can go to is not wide. But the relationships between these 25 people are deep.

The number of active days in the game is about two months. During these two months, as a new soldier, you will be fighting against monstrous enemies called Phantom Beasts.
If you fight hard and get results, the front will advance and your troops will be better supplied. In return, you'll be sent to more and more battlefields, and the fighting will get more intense... (Naturally, the longer you lose, the worse your supply gets.)
It is up to you to decide how this game world will end.

I was also impressed by the great enthusiasm of the text.
I will close this review with some English translations of some of the texts.

The first lesson after the start of the game.

The first lesson after the start of the game.
*Teacher: "Lesson one.
Don't be late. In the army, timing is everything. If you're late, you'll never be able to coordinate your forces. They will be destroyed individually.
If a hundred men come at you at once, you can't defeat them alone.
But if each of those 100 men comes in five minutes late, you, alone, can do quite well.
It's not one against one hundred, it's one to one a hundred times.
That's what I'm talking about. So don't be late.
I'm not saying don't be late without reason, like in a bad school.
You and your friends' lives depend on it.
Civilian teachers just can't understand this.
...OK, that's it, orientation over.
Now it's time for class. You don't have to take notes.
Make sure you remember what I say.
You won't have time to read your notes on the battlefield.
Now, students.
Kaka, that's not like me. Hey, samurai.
You're samurai.
You take up arms and fight to defend this country.
In other countries, we call them soldiers. In this country, we have a better name for it.
I don't know if you wanted to be a soldier, or if you didn't want to be a soldier, but you were drafted, or if you replaced your brother.
But you're samurai.
That's why you came here without refusing to be drafted.
You are not samurai because of your ability.
At least, not in this day and age.
The heart that takes up arms for someone else is samurai.
Now, Kumamoto has always been a fine soldier, from the time when this country was westernized, it has sent out the strongest divisions along with Tohoku for generations.
You are their youngest brothers.
You should be proud of yourselves. You should be proud that you are the descendants of the strongest soldiers.
Protagonist: "Sir, I'm(Boku) not from Kumamoto."
Teacher: "If you're a tanker, don't refer to yourself as 'I/僕/Boku'. If you are dealing with a superior, you must say 'Myself/自分/Jibun'.
So, you're not from Kumamoto? Hmmm.
I've been thinking about it since yesterday...
Well, okay. I'm not just talking about your hometown.
I want you to have confidence in yourselves.
Lesson 2.
A strong human on the battlefield is, in short, a human who knows how to use itself.
You've got to have confidence in yourself to use yourself.
Otherwise, you can't use yourself to your full potential, can you?
If guy and bitch aren't sure of yourself, in a pinch you'll abandon your friends and run away. Without demonstrating his ability.
That's why we give new and student soldier confidence and pride for now.
We are brave, we are the last shield that protects this country, the tip of the sword of this country.
They said there was nothing more behind them.
It is weak, but it is always the last thing on your mind when you plunge your feet into a pool of blood, go under a storm of shells and trample the corpses of your brothers-in-arms.
In any army, there is one thing that you ultimately trust. It's people and their loyalty.
When the economy collapses, when the weapons are destroyed, when the enemy is strong, when we are about to lose, I know, what I can trust.
It's not wads of cash, it's not weapons.
In times of trouble, it's the heart that ultimately comes to the rescue. The heart is the only thing that will not betray a good memory.
It's the same for individuals and for countries.
It is the good memories of each and every one of you, of this country, that the army will turn to at the last moment.
If they are not good, this country will perish.
If you have a few good memories, you will attract samurai. Young samurai who will protect this country.”*

The heroine's(The official description is Hero.) words after the above text.
*"Do you know what that is? That kind of lesson is called mind control.
...It's the government's elaborate job.
...Well, all right."*

Likewise, The heroine's words in the game's most intense battle.
*"For us in Shibamura, this battlefield is like home. We were born in the battle and we die in the battle.
I don't like it, but it's hometown.
It's our hometown, where our hearts are warmed.
We have found friends, lovers and trust here.
The path we choose is the path of battle. There is a pride that we must defend in battle and in death.
For the sake of all, we will fight in the front row."*

This is a line from a boss who doesn't get much screen time but has a strong presence.
”I don't like to waste soldiers. People should die more efficiently."

On military songs. An extra-curricular lesson by another teacher.
*Teacher: "...In times of distress, sing a song.
Singing is the only sacred and unspoken right of a soldier whose profession is to kill each other on command.
You can sing even if your hands are cut off or blocked. Officer can't tell you not to sing.
Because he sings too.
In times of distress, in times of sorrow, in times when you need to lift yourself up, the only thing that can help you is singing.
It's the Gunparade March.
'...A thousand million of you and me, we'll beat that fate. Let's sing a march for the future of someone somewhere. Yes, the future will always be with this march.'
Take up a gun for someone else's future.
Because if there is any meaning to this stupid war, it is that."*

It's a very quirky game, but I highly recommend it.

This is gonna be a long post but I want to talk about the more unique aspects of this game that aren't the game mechanics like the emotion system it has, how unique and impressive the AI is and so on that I've already seen people talk about. Most people into "strange" PS1-era video games have heard of this one before. It is a bit of an infamous title due to still being the only video game ever to win the Seiun Sci-fi award and at the time it was just made by a bunch of random staff that somehow made a mecha-focused game leagues above any of its competitors such as Front Mission, SRW, Sakura Wars and so on. It is also sometimes mentioned in relation to Muv-Luv and 13 Sentinels. The former has basically the same alternate-history concept and the way it handles a certain SF trope is very similar but otherwise they are quite different. With the latter, it is probably the primary influence (alongside Please Save My Earth and Megazone 23) which is pretty hilarious as one of the most common complaints with 13S is that it "doesn't do anything original" despite the fact that 90% of the people who say that don't even know what those three series are.
The influence of GPM on 13S isn't a simple plot point or anything like that though and much deeper than you would expect. Take 13S and remove the mystery files and imagine if every story in the story section was totally randomized. Not only that, but imagine the gameplay of 13S except it's not piss easy and it's incredibly complicated. But enough about other games, GPM has had a pretty legendary status as a long untranslated game. I have played through the game four times including the tutorial playthrough and it has been nearly a year.

First off, similar to 13S and Persona 3 the game is split into two sections being the social sections and the battle system. A good 90% of the game takes place in the school section while the rest of it is "SRPG" stuff. This may not sound like anything special but, if you ever wanted the social sections to tie into the battles in those previously mentioned games this is what you are looking for. Pretty much everything you do in the social sections matter, and each playthrough will be a different experience. The games social-link equivalent does not give you simple stat boosts or anything like that, almost every single classmate you have gives you entire game mechanics. Ranging from being able to see into peoples hearts and seeing who likes who to being able to use the Shining Finger from G Gundam, to being able to increase your social status and forcing your classmates to listen to you. Not only that, but there is perma-death. This isn't some FE style perma-death though. When a classmate dies, they hold an entire funeral for him and the way all the other characters act changes. Every single death matters. If you liked the aspect of not being able to control your classmates in Persona 3's battle section well, this is like that but a million times more complicated. The more someone likes you, the more likelier they are to help you during battle. This isn't all however, there are as many negative aspects as there are positive aspects to it. So if you are thinking of trying to be best friends with literally everyone, I learned the hard way that this is not a viable strategy. Most of the cast has beef with each other so you have to experience and choose who you want to get close to. For example, Katou is very useful and charming but getting close to her makes Kariya hate you because he feels jealous of your character. Kariya is disabled and on a wheelchair who needs help a lot of the time. Helping him up the stairs and stuff would normally make others sympathize with you more and see you as a helpful person, but if he hates you you lose this ability. On the other hand, getting close to a psychopath like Akane puts a rift between you and the rest of the cast. Moreover, the game is filled with beginners traps. If you get close to Mai Shibamura, the "main heroine" of the game you lose access to pretty much everyone else as they all hate her. The tradeoff is that Mai is easily the best character in the game and simply better than everyone else, despite this fact though if you get close to her it also locks you into one of the few scripted battles that a beginner has next to no chance of winning. There's something like this with every single character which is what makes it stand out so much to me. You have next to no control over how the world develops in the game, and you have to manually learn who likes who and vice versa by talking to them.

However, the more you play through the game the more you acquire this "knowledge" which leads you to be able to control the world more. This in turn is a requirement for the true ending in game. Once you fullfill the true ending requirements and "learn about the truth of the world", you start being referred to as a god and all your classmates start being afraid of you. This is another very unique aspect of the game, counting things like scripted bad endings there are around a dozen endings in the game. There are six normal endings depending on how you perform as a soldier, however besides the true ending most of the endings are the same besides the boosters they give for your next playthrough. The true ending though, is anything but simple. Pretty much the entire dialogue in the game changes once you fulfill the requirements for it. The requirements for it are harsh as well, you have to kill over 300 Genjuu (the beta/kaiju/alien equivalent of the game) and make sure no one among the 23 characters in the cast (yes, including your teachers) dies.
Oh yeah, the story. If you dislike long stretches of plot infodumps that RPGs tend to have, this is your game. Possibly the epitome of show don't tell. There is an overarching story but it takes a background to the point of the game, which is that the way you connect the strange happenings of the game is the "real story". Essentially, your experience while playing it matters more than the explanation to things. That isn't to say they don't explain anything but without spoiling much this game is unpredictable to say the least. Even with game mechanics, I've never seen any other mecha SRPG have war-time tax on simple items in the store. You have to pay fucking tax in this game. Simply put, this isn't a game that revolves around twists. The amount of stuff you can do is virtually limitless, if you want to become the commander of your platoon you can do it. If you think the battle system is bad, you can take a job that doesn't involve piloting such as being an engineer and sit out and skip all of the battles. Hell, if you want you can NEET it out too, not working at all and being lazy is an option as well. Planning an assassination against government officials, working for the black market, learning the origin behind the robots you pilot, "siding with the aliens", getting real close to the cat that suspiciously has god-tier stats, cursing your classmates and setting them up to die, working out like crazy and punching aliens while wearing your piloting suit and so on. All this stuff I mentioned isn't even half of it, I recommend not looking up many guides as learning that every single action has a consequence is one of the things I liked about the game. Oh yeah, there is an "Illusion" meter in the game that is basically a schizophrenia stat. You should absolutely grind that to see some wild shit.
So in the end how does all of this come together? Well, barely. The music is very underwhelming. The visuals of the games besides the battles are in the negatives. A lot of the character scenarios feel unfinished, and it doesn't help that for some reason all the social link equivalents are in randomized order for the most part. I would say the game is complete as it is but, if you go into it expecting a set beginning and an end you will be disappointed. A lot of stuff was cut as well, going into minor spoiler territory here there are 5+1(the tutorial chara) playable characters. Originally, every single character was meant to be playable. You can still play as every character through a cheat code but all of their scenarios are unfinished and insanely glitchy. Moreover, all the ED cutscenes have a bunch of CGs that you don't see in game: all content that was cut and reproduced as an audio drama. Said audio drama is largely unavailable, I had to physically buy most of the discs and uploaded what I have on YT but I'm still missing the last two.
There's a ton of stuff about the game that I haven't mentioned due to spoilers. Some crucial game mechanics, the meta element that the entire game revolves around, etc. One final note is that if you're the type that lacks reading comprehension and whines about Muv-Luv and similar games being fascist then steer clear of this game because it makes ML nationalism seem like a joke.
Gunparade March lived up to the hype for me and I still think about it every day but, I feel like a lot of people won't really like it much. It really is a lightning in a bottle tier game. I'm hoping LOOP8 will be good but it isn't looking that great and the other sequels are not great. Still, if you like any of the aforementioned games or if anything I said about it sounds interesting it is absolutely worth checking out in the case that it gets translated. Just know that whatever the game seems like to you, it's probably nothing like that in reality.