Ironically, the final boss of Resident Evil 4 is the one that I never died to.
Saddler, the evil cult leader intent on using the US President to spread mind-controlling parasites to the globe's populace (so... RFK Jr.?) undergoes a monstrous transformation and we fight him on what seems to be a big oil rig.
The fight, which I imagine is not too dissimilar to how it worked in the original (though without any quicktime events) has you blasting away at eyeballs on his new vaguely arachnid form to stun him so that you can get a critical knife attack in his... er... mouth-eye. Other than the top half of his old human face, there's very little human about his appearance anymore.
The final phase of the fight felt pretty simple - he becomes a mass of tentacles with a central eye/egg in which perhaps some remnant of his human form sits, and I just shot it a bunch of times with my sniper rifle until Ada tossed me a rocket launcher to finish the job.
There's a last-minute (well, 2-minute) escape sequence in which we run out of the island facility. There's one scary moment with a Ganado that comes after us, but most are writhing in pain with the death of the hive mind monarch in Saddler. We get on a jetski for the second half of this, and while we have some falling rocks to dodge, I don't think the intent here is to be at all challenging - it's a cathartic moment of explosions and speed.
After the Krauser fight - the real fight - in which I died maybe seven or more times (I actually had 14 deaths total in that chapter, which is I think over three times as many as I died in any other chapter, but there are some other hazards there) I was actually expecting to really struggle with Saddler, but maybe it was dumb luck or just a fight that played to my strengths, but I seemed to do exactly what I was supposed to.
The ending of the game fully transitions us out of whatever horror existed, the transformation from the folk horror insanity of the game's opening into this full 1980s-style action sequence completed.
The game is good, though I do think that it does suffer quite a bit after leaving the castle. Other than the sequence that introduces the Regeneradors, which has that real Umbrella "evil science" feel, the military vibes of the island don't really lend to a sense of creeping dread. I've already written about this, so I won't belabor the point.
I've started "Separate Ways," which was evidently a bonus campaign unlocked after beating the game originally, but is now a DLC. I got the whole Deluxe Edition for 12 bucks on the PS Store, so it was well worth the price.
Here, we see the events of the game from Ada's perspective, playing across familiar locations but in a different order and with different tools. Ada has a grappling-gun which lets her play a lot more with the verticality of spaces, at least when the game lets you.
The game mechanics are largely similar - we meet the Merchant and will want to trade him treasures for big chunks of money to immediately spend on upgrading weapons. Given that I never really used it in the main game, I've decided to focus Ada on her TMP submachine gun. Of course, I don't think you can really focus on just one weapon, because you'll run out of ammo quickly enough.
Ada is, of course, also a tonally different protagonist from Leon - she's a mercenary, and only stirred toward heroism against her better judgment. The fact that she's working for Albert Wesker, RE's perennial big bad (though I think he was definitively killed off in 5 - though I would not remotely put it past them to revive him in 9 or some later game) does not reflect very well on her, even if the post-credits scene from the main game does see her realizing just how deadly the thing she's getting for him could be, and has her abandon the job and take her dominant Plaga sample somewhere Wesker can't get to it.
Still, there is some fun to be had in following Ada's journey - we see that she's the one who rings the bell at the beginning of the game to stop the village fight, and we see what happens when she shoots Mendez to distract him from Leon in the village chief's house.
The pace, of course, is accelerated, and I've been struggling to gather the pesetas to spend on all the upgrades I want for her (stupidly, I dumped some resources to try to make room for the crossbow weapon only to send it to storage anyway because I forgot that was an option).
So far, the DLC has been in familiar locations, though I'm given to understand it's not exclusively so.
Anyway, even when I'm done with that, I shan't be done with ResE so soon - I found that the RE2 remake was available for just twelve bucks on the Playstation Store and figured I'd give that one a shot as well. Umbrella and Raccoon City are elements of the series I've been aware of for decades, so it'll be nice to see what it's like (I'm given to understand that, at least between the remakes, 2 was better-received than 3).
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