The Castle, which seems to comprise kind of the second act of Resident Evil 4 (I believe of three,) is my favorite area of the game so far, but has my least favorite boss. Ramon Salazar is a little shit, but when Leon tries to get over with the fight quickly by shooting him multiple times (including in the forehead,) he returns as a giant monster with a massive set of mandibles.
Here are the things that make him an annoying fight:
There's only one very narrow weak point to hit (it only now occurs to me that he might still take damage when hit elsewhere, and I wonder if that would have made the fight easier) that is only open to target extremely briefly before he does a massive and hard-to-dodge attack. Second, he has an instant-kill attack he can do if he gets in melee. This is why I died to him like six or seven times, I think all of my deaths (except maybe one or two) came from this move.
It's a shame, because the Castle is such a very cool part of the game - gothic excess, lots of puzzles, and I've got to be honest, I didn't hate the part where we play as Ashley armed only with a blue lantern to freeze the parasites-in-armor (I know there's a name for them, like Armaradors or something).
Anyway, there's a fair amount of plot-induced losing Ashley, including right after our segment playing as her, and at this point, the escort-mission part of the game seems at least for now on hold. I'm given to understand that the remake worked hard to make her AI (remember when that wasn't such a loaded term? We're not talking LLMs here) less annoying - while she will get grabbed by enemies sometimes, it tends to only happen if you let yourself get swarmed, and she's pretty good at ducking out of the way of your line of fire.
The castle is pretty good, though there's a somewhat less exciting part at the end in which you are thrown underground into the mines below the castle, where Ramon's ancestors kept the source of the Plagas sealed - Ramon's the worst, and unleashed it for Sadler (Saddler?)
Anyway, while Ashley is missing and in the clutches of the cult, we team up with Luis, the former Umbrella scientist trying to make good. It's a brief arc, where Leon gets to have a kind of snarky banter, only for dear Luis to get knifed in the back by Leon's former CO, Krauser.
In the prologue, we're told that Leon was seemingly blackmailed/forced into joining US special forces, and one assumes that Krauser was the one that put him through his hellish training. We have a knife fight with him, which was honestly easy enough that I didn't feel that bad about reloading my save after not finishing one of the Merchant side-quests in the mines and doing the fight again.
Krauser leaves the battle unfinished, and we get a last little moment with Luis. The guy gives us a drug to suppress the progress of the parasite in Leon's body - setting the game's ticking clock back a little (though not yet for Ashley).
Anyway, we go to rescue Ashley from Salazar, but Krauser takes her on ahead while we fight the little (not so little anymore, I guess) monster.
Then, we hop in a speedboat with Ada Wong and head to some kind of island fortress. While I've barely scratched the surface of the island, it feels like a dramatic genre shift. The foes here are armed with more technologically advanced weapons, including one of those boar-mask-wearing brutes who has a freaking machine gun. Up until the point, ranged enemies have tended to have nothing but crossbows. There have been signs of technology throughout, but occasionally you can be lulled into thinking you're a 21st century soldier in a 17th century village. Now, though, a giant oil refinery looms in the distance.
And hey, this is, as I understand it, Resident Evil's classic formula: a facade of supernatural horror behind which lurks sci-fi terrors that are all too modern (even if they're pretty ludicrous, conceptually).
I'm given to understand the game is something of a three-act structure, and this marks the beginning of that third act. In retrospect, I probably would have been more thorough in the Village part if I had known I wasn't going to be able to come back. Currently I'm sitting on a super-valuable crown but don't have all the gems to fit into it. I'm also thinking of selling off some weapons I don't use very much to see if I can max out my upgrades on the ones I do - I hope the rate of money acquisition on the island ramps up (I did get what I assume to be the final Attache Case upgrade).
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