Once again an improvement on the original game with so many extra options that make it an absolute joke if you decide to use them all. The difficulty is kind of all over the place, if you use everything on offer its really easy and if you don't its almost unfairly hard. The ranking system is once again very insubstantial with the moves being awarded in no way making up for the loss of on the fly powerups and upgrades. The amount of time it'll take you to memorize the stages to the point of keeping the A rank average up is too much especially with no easy way to replay stages once you've beaten them. If you get a really bad score one time that basically fucks your average for the rest of the playthrough with no way to undo it besides reloading a save. Really just not worth bothering with it at all. I'll give them credit for letting you use a couple of cyber elves without losing any points but you still need perfection regardless to keep your A rank status so just use as many as you feel like.

A decent time thanks to some of the problems of the original game getting ironed out. You barely have to interact with some of the mechanics though because of how short the game is and the moves you unlock by getting A ranks are so insubstantial (who even uses the buster that much) that you can ignore them entirely. Forms as well are just a weirdly implemented idea, you aren't getting more than a few without a guide. I had fun spamming cyber elves and using Zero's movement to speed through the game but it didn't leave much of an impression otherwise. Great music though.

Great game, could not explain the story if you put a gun to my head. Its a tad too confusing and interpretive for my tastes but I dig the world they build here lot. The inventory limit can add a lot of good tension and strategy early game it peters out hard later on when you have so many different guns and absolutely no way to carry more than a couple (with their ammo) and progress at the same time. I just never brought healing items out of the box because I was almost always full up on stuff. This isn't too much of an issue mind, you can dodge and slip past enemies easily enough but I had so much ammo by the end that I couldn't find a good place to use. Burning bodies to stop them from getting back up is a great mechanic since it lets you decide what places you want permanently safe to navigate (taken wholesale from RE1 Remake) but its sparsely used I feel. Overall an extremely well-made and intricate survival horror, albeit with some balancing issues.

Wanted to like it more than I did, I don't even mind the Junction as much as I thought I did. The story and pacing and just the undercooked world in general really bogs the whole experience down. Love how they just use early game enemies all the way up to the end because the level scaling is "definitely" enough to justify it and doesn't make encounters feel repetitive at all. I hope you like fighting the same Galbadian soldiers with the same Draws and the same item drops from the early-game over and over and over. I feel like they even knew when they included an easily accessible way to turn off encounters in the base game, fighting just isn't fun in VIII. You either murder everything in one hit because the scaling broke or you take ages to kill something even while spamming limit breaks because they had no idea how to balance the damage you do late game so encounters will just randomly have ridiculous HP.

The cast is one of the weakest in the series though I fuck with the character designs. Like man when I see the money they put into everything I just get sad that I can't get myself to enjoy the game more. It seems harsh to say its style over substance but I can't find a better way to put it, there's so many FMVs, so much animation on the characters for different scenes (they gave everyone fuckin tap dancing animations for ONE gag I cannot fault them for that) but I cannot get myself to feel invested in anything that happens in this game's world.

Fun enough game. The need to use your environment and block off enemies instead of dodging past listlessly shambling enemies is really interesting. The choice of using tranquilizers to temporarily remove a threat or spending rounds adds to the tension a ton too. When one of the raptors followed me into a room for the first time was genuinely shocked that they were this smart. Sadly the game just gets too repetitive and the amount of backtracking is gets egregious alongside the game's small enemy pool. You can feel the dev team struggling to get the game finished in time with how much reuse there is. If the level design was better and there were more hazards I'd consider it up there with the other PS1 RE games. As it is I wouldn't play it again over them.