We love fixed attack angles! As fun as it can be to control hordes of enemies coming in at every angle, there’s an equal amount of joy in jockeying player characters with limited angles of attack into a perfect position against deviously placed enemies. And there’s no better example of this dynamic than controlling a SUPER VEHICLE-001 METAL SLUG.

The firing angle of your Slug’s turret turns as you move (or hold up/down), which makes the act of realigning your firing angle intrinsically tied to movement, and in turn intrinsically ties it to every other threat in the game that’s locking down your position. Backing up to turn your turret backwards may not always be safe when there’s a grenade or mine behind you. That the Slug’s cannon can only fire towards the right side of the screen creates an asymmetric situation where enemies coming from the left must be handled differently than those from the right. Given this fact, you’re always trying to figure out how to maneuver enemies in front of your cannon. Figure it out, and you’re rewarded with juicy damage. The coolest example of this has to be the stage 4 boss in Metal Slug 2/X, where if you narrowly avoid being hit by its cannon shells, you can have your Slug ride the shockwave of the explosion to propel yourself upwards and so get a perfect cannon firing angle at the boss’ weak point. Therein lies the joy of controlling an unwieldy massive thing: of getting it to do exactly what you want to and using it to systematically dismantle situations at full speed. Having to deal with multiple high-HP targets approaching you from multiple uncomfortable angles is where Slug combat shines.

With your angles of attack being limited, naturally the game keeps placing enemies in off-angle positions. The uneven stage terrain is crucial to making this dynamic work. Stage elements like barricades, slopes and trenches aren’t merely decorations, but actual hazards that serve to obfuscate getting a clean shot on the enemy (and vice versa!)[^1]. After all, in a game where your main attack angles are limited to the cardinal directions while on-foot or a limited turning speed in the Slug, controlling a situation where the stage terrain is completely flat would be too straightforward. If the enemies directly spawned into your line of fire, you would only need to hold down the fire button and move forwards without a thought. This is precisely why during moments where the terrain is flat, Metal Slug prefers to spawn enemies from above or below rather than from the left or right, playing with the fact that you can only shoot directly upwards.

Another key to making this dynamic work is there is no single weapon that can easily or consistently cover large parts of the screen. All weapons you get via POW drops are weak in at least one area[^2], and you can only carry one at a time. Arguably the Slug has the most versatility with its all-range Vulcan Gun and powerful Cannon blasts, but this means having to pilot the big unwieldy Slug. The fact that no weapon can quite consistently cover any given situation is what forces the player to engage with the dynamic of negotiating terrain and enemy placements at all, instead of it turning into a game holding down the fire button and running forwards. Powerful screen-covering weapons like Contra’s Spreadgun or Ninja Spirit’s Kusarigama work well within their own “shoot down enemies coming from every direction” context, but in the “jockeying for the proper firing angle” context of Metal Slug, it’s easy to see how such powerful weaponry could negate a lot of Metal Slug’s mechanical nuances.

Now controlling a big unwieldy thing with limited angles of attack is fun and all, but that still leaves the question of how you are supposed to avoid getting hit in such a thing. Metal Slug’s answer is as follows: ejecting from the Slug gives you a generous amount of i-frames, and the Slug will not collide with any enemy attacks if you are not piloting it. It’s these details that render Slug combat playable at all and what prevent it from turning into a battle of attrition. Consider the following. As enemy attacks in Metal Slug had to be designed to be (mostly) reactable and avoidable on-foot, being unable to avoid such clearly avoidable attacks in the Slug would not feel right on a visceral level. The amount of babysitting that would be required for the Slug to not take any hits would at worst be borderline impossible with the already cramped screen space of the game, and at best reinforce an incredibly slow and passive playstyle if you want to keep your Slug. That ejecting from the Slug makes you briefly invincible and the Slug does not collide with any attacks is the magic glue that gets around these issues and makes the interplay of on-foot/vehicle combat all work. (Which only makes it even more baffling that the game doesn’t really tell you or show you something as essential as ejecting from the Slug making you invincible…)

While we’ve covered the dynamics of jockeying for the right firing angle, we haven’t talked much about how to deal maximum damage once you get that firing angle. This is where things start getting dicey…

You see, grenades deal a lot of damage, but normally there’s a projectile limit of two grenades on-screen per player. However, this means that if you throw grenades at an enemy point-blank so they detonate right as you throw them, you can essentially throw grenades as fast as you can hit the fire button. That means that if you position yourself in an enemy’s face, you can deal ludicrous damage.

This gets even more nuts when you’re piloting a Slug, because while crouching in the Slug you throw grenades instead of firing cannon shells, and while in the Slug, the on-screen projectile limit for grenades is completely lifted! This technique is so powerful that you can demolish barriers in seconds and speedkill certain bosses before they can even get a real shot off! This gets particularly interesting against flying enemies such as the stage 2 boss or final boss, as you’re first trying to climb (your Slug) up platforms where your grenades can connect with the enemy aircraft. It’s an identical dynamic to what I described at the start of this article (w/r/t aligning your Slug’s cannon with a boss for bonus damage), except this one can also be done while on-foot. The only thing that keeps this technique in check is that you don’t have infinite grenades, as they can only be replenished from saving certain POWs or as drops from specific enemies. Sounds cool, right? Well…

It is cool that it gives you another avenue for optimizing damage and clear time, but there’s also such a thing as too much damage. If the nadespam technique is so powerful to the point of letting you skip otherwise fun and interesting encounters, then its existence is more of a net negative than anything. That said, skipping or bulldozing encounters outright can be acceptable if it’s challenging to pull off (which most applications of nadespam aren’t) or if it involves skipping encounters in the first quarter of the game that were easy by design and pose no huge challenge to experienced players anyways. The developers must have realized how overpowered this was, as they nerfed this starting from Metal Slug 2/X[^3]. Of course, one can simply choose not to use nadespam in order to keep these challenges intact. To reference the Xeet of the official Doom Xwitter account: “you control the buttons you press”. But this also comes at the cost of depriving yourself of the otherwise fun dynamic of point-blanking grenades for bonus damage! It’s not that it is inherently unfun, merely that it is unfortunately overpowered and creates balance issues out of the wazoo.

When you can stockpile and spend a powerful resource to such an extent, it is not only too powerful, but also leads to an incredibly all-or-nothing power curve that’s impossible to balance around[^4]. Take the final boss, for example. If you enter with a Slug and a good stockpile of grenades, it’s an excellent boss fight! You’re constantly jockeying your Slug up the platforms where you can get in position where your grenades and cannon shells can hit the boss, all the while dealing with homing missiles or direct shots impeding you--having to always calculate if it’s safe enough to squeeze in more damage or if it’s time to GTFO. But if you enter on-foot or die during and are reset to your peashooter pistol with only 10 grenades? WORST BULLETSPONGE BOSS EVER. An excruciatingly long fight with little means to optimize your damage as you’ll be out of nades immediately unless you get lucky with the item drops from the POWs (who only spawn in at bosses during set but long intervals). Then you get the stage 3 boss. Without nadespam you get a fun fight about dodging lasers from below and mines to your sides, but with nadespam you can kill it before it even fires its big gun. That’s the problem with all-or-nothing power curves: do you balance the game around the player being full power, or not? You could somehow try both as Metal Slug did, but it’s not a satisfactory solution. At the start you get encounters and bosses that are tuned to be still fair even if you die and can’t nadespam but die easily if you do, and at the end you get the exact opposite. Encounters are then balanced around nadespam or entering with your Slug by having enemies with tons of health, meaning they become painfully drawn out if you do end up losing or wasting all your grenades, Slugs, and weapons.

Is it then the fact that you lose most of your resources on death that lies at the root of this all-or-nothing power curve? For experienced players it might be, but for new or learning players who have yet to learn a route optimizing item drops? I doubt it. An experienced player will know when and where to use grenades, and knows how and when to get item drops from POWs. But once a learning player runs out of ammo/grenades or gets their Slug blown up even without dying, then what? Optimizing damage with grenades or your Slug, ejecting from your Slug as a makeshift defensive maneuver--those are dynamics that are now temporarily gone[^5]. The fact these are based on limited resources (that aren’t easily replenishable) means that running out not only depowers you but also gives you less tools to play the game with. This could work if grenades were easier to replenish and Slugs easier to keep with you, but that is simply not the case.

Even without the harsh punishment on death, for new players there’s still a necessary memorization burden that needs to be overcome if you want to not die and face a challenge with all the tools in your arsenal, but what exactly is gained from placing such a “you either know or you don’t” burden on the player? Of course, there will always be optimizations in games that are largely a matter of knowing, but to then make them mandatory if you want to play the game with all tools at your disposal? All that accomplishes is expediting the learning process—it doesn’t make the game more interesting. It certainly might be more profitable to an arcade operator, though.[^6]

If anything, I would say the real problem with Metal Slug is that it treats elements like the Slug or grenades or your weapons as limited power-ups rather than as core parts of your toolset. By designing the game around them being limited, or more specifically, around them possibly not being available to you at all–the game inherently limits the scope for how they can be used and how the game can challenge your usage of them. The game cannot–without severe concessions–design challenges around something you may have no access to at all. It is not that they are limited by resources at all that’s the issue, but rather that it’s a realistic possibility that you might not have access to these tools for noticeable periods of time. Nearly all PC FPS games in the 90s had limited ammunition for their weapons, but they were usually still designed in a way where if you played reasonably, you’d always have more than enough ammunition for your workhorse weapons. Encounters could be designed around the assumption that the player at least had access to those weapons, and that is precisely something that Metal Slug cannot assume. For example, a stage specifically designed around Slug combat can never really go all-out with the encounter design because of the risk that the player ends up permanently losing the Slug (which is partially why Stage 4, which gives you a Slug from the start, feels like it’s holding back the whole time). It can only clumsily try to design around them being both available and unavailable, which inherently limits the scope of the stage design than if it was something that was always readily available or almost never at all.

If these limited tools in Metal Slug were then more easily replenishable or weren’t limited by resources at all, then not only would it lighten the memorization/routing burden significantly, but it would also provide a more predictable set of tools to design stages around. If grenades are a tool that are nearly always available to you, then it’s easier to set enemy health values balanced around the existence of nadespam, and to have stages more thoroughly explore the application of grenades. If the Slug was a tool that was more readily available to you, then we could have more stages that more thoroughly explore the possibilities of vehicle gameplay or on-foot/vehicle interplay.

This would all require a more radical re-examination of Metal Slug’s gameplay formula, which at a glance is unfortunately not something I’ve seen the sequels try to attempt. Metal Slug’s formula certainly has potential that certainly shines through, but if it really wants to get there it should treat its own tools more as fixed parts of its toolset. I should note that it is still possible to take the long-term resource management route, that your ammo and the state of your Slug(s) carry over between stages and have multiple nuanced means to be managed, but this is also something that, again, requires a radical re-examination of the formula.

I give Metal Slug a THANK YOU! out of YOU'RE GREAT!

Footnotes:

[^1]: Slopes especially affect your Slug, as the firing angle of your cannon is relative to the orientation of your Slug.

[^2]: For example: The Shotgun is powerful and fires in a wide cone but lacks range and rate of fire. The Flame Shot penetrates enemies in a straight line but lacks damage. The Heavy Machine Gun can cover diagonal angles but also lacks damage. The Missile Launcher homes in on enemies, but it has an on-screen projectile limit that effectively limits its rate of fire at longer distances.

[^3]: In Metal Slug 2/X they added a maximum rate-of-fire limit to throwing grenades from a Slug specifically (there the rate of fire isn’t even tied to the number of grenades on-screen like when you’re on foot, so whether you point-blank nadespam in a Slug or not doesn’t matter!). In doing so they curbed the maximum potential power of this technique, but this also added the interesting nuance where if you do want to nadespam, you’d have to eject from the safety of the Slug and dump grenades point-blank on foot.

[^4]: Now, I do think it’s possible to make games with an all-or-nothing power curve without it turning into a balancing nightmare, and I think it relies on the speed with which you go from 0 to 100 and vice versa. Take something like Psyvariar, where you’re always playing on the razor’s edge of grazing bullets for brief but absolute invincibility as a reward. In Psyvariar you get real powerful real fast, but it requires constant focus to keep up and can be lost just as quickly. Designers can reasonably predict the player’s power levels and balance encounters around this, as the player can go from 0 to 100 at any time. Metal Slug’s power curve by contrast is slowly built-up using items you pick up throughout the stage. Once you’re fully powered-up it’s hard to lose your advantage, but if you do, the recovery from death is lengthy and crushing. Playing well then feels too rewarding while making a mistake feels too punishing. Encounters are either balanced around you being at full power, or they are not. Deaths can thus quickly spiral into a game over; staying at full power ends up feeling less like a reward and more like a requirement.

[^5]: Such ‘debuffs’ where you are temporarily locked out from using certain tools or moves can be interesting, as they can force you to change and improvise your strategy in the middle of a perilous situation. One example I like is how getting hit by Pukers in Dead Space 2 briefly disables your ability to sprint, thus forcing you to stand your ground against enemies instead of trying to create distance as you normally would. However, these kinds of debuffs only make the game more interesting if they still leave you with enough tools to let you approach a situation in interesting and nuanced ways. A debuff that for example transforms you into a weak character (such as a chicken) that can only do one or two moves is likely not going to bring many nuances to the gameplay. A pistol-only Metal Slug run then won’t have the same depth as if you had access to your full arsenal, let alone the appeal of what makes Metal Slug’s gameplay unique.

[^6]: Arcade games do tend to be unfairly put down as ‘quarter munchers’ by Western audiences (even though there is actual precedent for that in Western arcade halls specifically, but that’s a story for another time), however the fact remains that for arcade operators credits need to flow one way or another. One common resulting design tendency in arcade games was to look the other way when it comes to deaths spiraling into one another–something that’s also known as Gradius Syndrome. Games by Irem (the parent company that Team Nazca, the developers of Metal Slug, split off from) were rather notorious for this. You’d get a ton of games that–if you were at full power–were still technically fair, but if you died once you’d better hope you died at a spot where you could still recover your items, otherwise you could kiss your run goodbye. Arcade-style games originally developed for home systems have been less likely to exhibit this tendency, now that they no longer operate on actual quarters.

Once again, the Markdown markup for footnotes will remain as is until Backloggd adds support for them.

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.

There’s a tendency amongst some to analyze games by comparing them to another similar game that functions as a platonic ideal for how games of that kind should play like, but to me it’s precisely deviations from such a platonic ideal that make a game fascinating to me. Ninja Spirit/Saigo no Nindou is one such run ‘n gun game filled with minor oddities that you’d rarely see in both classic and modern run ‘n gun titles, but nonetheless ends up creating something interesting.

For one, you cannot walk while shooting. At first, this comes off as a rather arbitrary restriction. As enemies in Ninja Spirit constantly respawn from random sides of the screen, the more you stand still the more enemies get to respawn, resulting in what feels like a game with annoying staccato stop-start pacing. However, this changes when you realize that you can move and shoot at the same time while jumping.

This is where other oddities of Ninja Spirit begin to rear their head: you can hold the jump button to jump higher, but the game also has a very low gravity and weak mid-air control. Jumping is your main defensive move against enemies that cannot be shot down before they get into range, and the higher you jump the safer you are. But you must eventually come down, and the low gravity combined with weak mid-air control locks you in a weakly adjustable falling trajectory for a significant amount of time, during which you’re highly vulnerable to enemy attacks. This means that ideally you shouldn’t jump more or higher than necessary to minimize risk, but at the same time enemies and stage hazards force you to jump, and taking constant mini-risks by doing constant short hops forwards minimizes the overall time you have to spend on the respawning enemies![^1] Most of your deaths will be while falling, yet you must jump to survive. Accordingly, enemies in Ninja Spirit will attack different parts of the screen, forcing you to do short/medium/high jumps in different times and positions once multiple heavier enemies start to emergently overlap their attacks in unpredictable ways. This creates a unique player-enemy dynamic that would be nowhere as effective under standard run ‘n gun control conventions; the vulnerability of falling down would nowhere be as pronounced under higher gravity, and the player would have less reason to commit to inherently risky jumps if they could just shoot while walking.

This leads to another oddity about Ninja Spirit: most stages are almost completely flat! Stages 1 to 3 are next-to-completely flat, and only stage 4, 5 and 7 have some actual platforming going on. This sounds lazy, but remember that part of Ninja Spirit’s whole deal is jumping different heights/arcs as the situation demands: this is only any effective if you have the space to jump different heights/arcs in.[^2] The higher the floor and the lower the ceiling are, the more restricted your jumping options are. And because the stages are so wide and open, Ninja Spirit accordingly compensates by filling the screen with respawning enemies coming at you from every direction. Rather than the enemies being threatening when placed in specific spots in specific stage layouts a la Castlevania, enemies in Ninja Spirit are threatening because of the other enemies they’re combined with—taking a more Serious Sam than DOOM approach regarding enemy-level dynamics.

That is not to say Ninja Spirit does not (try to) do something interesting with its stage design, however. For example, while stage 4 has elevated floors and ceilings, it adds a twist by having enemies spawn and attack you from underneath the floor and the ceiling, and the latter half of the stage has the floor be broken up by bamboo pits that force you to advance by flipping your gravity and walking on the ceiling. However, your options are more limited on the ceiling, as you cannot jump while walking on the ceiling—pressing jump while ceiling-walking will simply make you fall back to the floor, which isn’t ideal if the floor is a bamboo pit and if the ceiling is being threatened by a heavy enemy that you cannot shoot down in time, thus making foresight a necessary skill to see if you can cross over a large pit safely.[^3] After that, stage 5 is a vertical mountain climb where the only way to progress is constantly jumping up narrow platforms, marking jumping as not just a defensive maneuver but also essential for just being able to progress at all. Moving on, stage 6 has the simplest yet most treacherous twist to the stage design: an uneven floor. Slight height variations in the layout irregularly force you to jump or fall to move forwards, which, when combined with the most intense enemy spawning the game has to offer, creates a recipe where your foresight will be pushed to its limits—doubly considering some enemies will also high jump rather than walk forwards if there’s a slight incline in their path. All the more to consider![^4]

That said, stage layouts are only one half of stage design in games--that other half being enemy placement—which in Ninja Spirit’s case may seem like haphazard chaos. Although enemies do constantly respawn from semi-random parts of the screen, Ninja Spirit does show some restraint in the type and number of enemies spawned. The enemies that constantly respawn from everywhere can all be taken out in one hit of any weapon, and the projectiles they fire can be canceled using your Sword or Kusarigama. Even though their spawn positions are semi-random, they can still be consistently dealt with using the tools at your disposal. Their function is more to add random noise to the mix and keep you on your toes while dealing with the heavy enemies, who present the bulk of the actual challenge in Ninja Spirit, as they cannot be easily burst down before they get into range. Per section, there are different enemy types that are allowed to be spawned, different limits to how many are allowed to be on screen, and different limits to what parts of the screen they’re allowed to spawn in from. There’s enough intentionality behind the enemy composition in Ninja Spirit to prevent every stage from feeling like an indistinguishable clusterfuck, even when the stage layout is just (almost) completely flat.

But, so far I’ve described Ninja Spirit more in theory—when it comes to how Ninja Spirit actually plays there are some caveats I must list. For starters, once you understand how absurdly powerful and versatile the Kusarigama is[^5], stages 1 to 3 and stage 5 can be played by and large on auto-pilot. These stages lack the environmental constraints of stage 4 and 7 or the multiple overlapping heavy enemy spawns of stage 6. A single heavy enemy spawn and the chaos created by fodder can’t really pose much of a threat to the all-mighty Kusarigama. Even if you limit yourself to using the Shuriken or the Bombs, the lack of pressure in the stage design would still persist. The boss fights also by and large lack the aspect of overlapping threats that the stages themselves can offer, with only the stage 4 boss (what with it being a 2v1 fight) and the final boss posing an exception.[^6]

One thing I’m trying to get across here is for everyone to more thoroughly examine mechanical oddities, especially when they deviate from some kind of platonic ideal for the genre. It’s easy to dismiss a game when its mechanical oddities don’t really have a narrative justification, or if some elements of it appear thoughtless. It’s easy to look at Ninja Spirit’s inability to walk while firing, its low gravity, its flat stage design, its weird air control, and conclude that you’re dealing with an unintuitive control scheme in a lazily designed game. In the name of intuitiveness, control standardization and quality-of-life improvements, these kinds of oddities that potentially enable new dynamics can easily become buried. Sure, the mechanical oddities may deviate from what makes [Trendsetter Game Most People Consider Great] great, but perhaps they also enable something new that the platonic ideal could not offer. Hence why it’s all the more important that when you criticize a game, that you should do so on its own merits, and not by how well it stacks up to something else. Nor should simply being different give something a free pass, but it certainly makes them extra worth examining.

For that reason I do recommend to everyone Ninja Spirit a look, to see how its randomly spawning chaos drives gameplay, how it manages to have Castlevania-esque committal jumps in a chaotic RNG-driven scenario, and the “enemy hell” feeling Ninja Spirit evokes by throwing legions of enemies from all directions at you. Stage 6 is really something that should be felt in person.

I do however wish that beating the game didn’t reward you with an epileptic seizure...

[^1]: The part of the game that really hammers this dynamic home is the swamp section in the second half of stage 3, where wading through the swamp (and the intensified number of enemies spawning in) slows your movement to a crawl until the monks forcing you to jump make you realize that moving forwards by bunnyhopping through the swamp lets you progress at standard speed. The swamp section is akin to Mario Bros.’ very first screen when it comes to wordlessly tutorializing an essential part of the game, which Ninja Spirit really should have done in the first stage rather than the third.

[^2]: By contrast, more typical run ‘n gun games have more limited potential jump arcs, but they compensate for it by letting you duck, and having more movement options and platform placements that help extend the possible amount of paths you can traverse on screen.

[^3]: The asymmetry of being unable to do regular jumps while walking on the ceiling and instead being forced to fall to the floor when jumping may seem like another inexplicable oddity. However, I think the developers made the right call there. In a game designed around variable commitment via variable jump heights, being able to escape over-commitment and the recovery of your slow falls by landing on the ceiling would feel like a betrayal of that, instead possibly turning a game of measured jumps into a game of ping-ponging constantly between the floor and ceiling as enemies struggle to keep up with you. Being forced to fall from the ceiling when jumping reintroduces that recovery again, turning the ceiling into more of a temporary safe haven that you can snap onto when the floor looks too hot. But because of this asymmetry you want to be walking on the floor when possible. There are good reasons to have walking on the floor and ceiling in 2D games be symmetric regarding your movement options (in Alien Soldier, this was done to maximize the player’s movement opportunities to compensate for the large player/enemy sprite already taking up most of the screen real estate), but in Ninja Spirit it’s better off being asymmetric for the aforementioned reasons.

[^4]: And then right before the final boss of Ninja Spirit there’s the infamous and abominable Ninja Pit, a section so indefensible and justly hated by everyone who lays eyes on it that we will not speak of it further, but for the sake of warning and good faith must be mentioned in passing.

[^5]: In Ninja Spirit you can freely switch between equipping your Sword, Shuriken, Bombs, and Kusarigama, which can respectively be characterized as Absolute Defense, Absolute Range, Absolute Damage, and Absolute Screen Coverage. The fact that the Kusarigama can be repeatedly whipped 240 degrees around you, cancel most enemy projectiles caught in the circle, and cover over half the screen doing so (on top of your two shadow clones echoing your Kusarigama whips as well) makes it very much too good at controlling the screen to the point where outside of specific situations there’s generally little point in using the Sword for its defensive capabilities or the Shuriken for their range. At the very least Bombs are still useful against single targets.

[^6]: The latter especially does something unique by throwing homing projectiles at you that can box you in and must have their trajectory be manipulated by your jumps. It’s actually a very cool fight once you get to grips with it, but it’s a complete bitch at first because manipulating projectile trajectories is a skill 95% of the game never expects out of you (what with the Kusarigama and Sword being able to cancel most projectiles anyways).