leaving the party

a journal-style blog ostensibly about role playing games

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  • playing resident evil: requiem is like playing two games. one of them is even quite good

    some story spoilers and structural spoilers below

    With Resident Evil: Requiem, Capcom has sort of made two video games. One, where you play as a woman who is very afraid, is very good! The other one, where you play as a Resident Evil legacy sequel protagonist, is just okay. Does it come out in the wash? I don’t really know. What I do know is that when I’m playing the legacy sequel, I often just find myself missing the girl.

    Requiem is essentially split into two halves. The first half follows Grace, a woman from the FBI who is kidnapped while investigating the site of her mothers murder, and quickly carried way over her head into a small private hospital; a secluded site of horrible human experimentation, now overrun with zombies. This, reader, is the really good part! Grace, as a character, is at the beginning of the game defined by her fear and her disempowerment, and it’s worth mentioning that her VA’s performance is stunningly good. Grace is the most anxious FBI agent there has ever been, a technical analyst way out of her depth, and Angela Sant’Albano sells her role more with every single quivering line she delivers. Grace is constantly being stalked; both narratively, by our antagonists since before the events of the game began, but then mechanically by zombies, monsters, and creatures inbetween or otherwise. As Grace, Requiem gets to really be a horror game, and some of Grace’s gameplay sections are the scariest this series has ever been! She has a gun, but more than anything it’s a deterrent used to slow zombies down enough to let you pass or to stop them if you get cornered. Her strength as a character is not in overpowering her enemies, but instead in carefully avoiding them and then outsmarting them.

    There are some seriously cool design decisions that go into these sections, my favorite of which being the zombies’ own memories and habits. There isn’t a huge variety of enemy types in this first half of the game, but each zombie in the hospital still walks with latent memories of their past lives and will follow their old habits even after death, Dawn of the Dead style. In Rhodes Hill hospital, there are patient caregivers who will go around turning out the lights after hours just as they did in life, custodians who will try to clean up messes you make, doctors who will walk on instinct to the operating table, patients who are aggravated to aggression by loud noises. Every single zombie has their own unique scripting, each of them remembering simple things that were important parts of their lives before they were turned. As Grace, you can pay attention to these habits and then exploit them, use them to your advantage, and slowly gain a sort of power over this terrible hospital by knowing how to game out what your most optimal path is, and figuring out how to take pieces off of the board one by one. It still manages to be a really terrifying game when it wants to be, but it maintains this classic Resident Evil 1/2 style of systemic mastery that you get simply through really coming to know this place where you’ve been trapped.

    Any time you start to get exhausted of the tension and fear in Grace’s section, the game swaps to Leon’s perspective: the cool guy with funny one liners. Leon’s role in these scenes is largely catharsis and release. In comparison to Grace, Leon is a one man army; he gets a shotgun pretty early, and to illustrate his power, gets to kill one of the giant stalking monsters that Grace spent an hour running and hiding from in just a couple minutes. “Sorry,” he says, “I’m not on the menu.” Bam!!! He kills some zombie in a lab coat, and says: “I think I want a second opinion.” Boom!!! Leon allows you to take a tour de force through the hospital, and just as soon as you get used to playing as him for about 15 minutes, the game wisely switches back to Grace, where the meat of the game really lives. This is a seriously satisfying little mode of play! The first half of the game ends up being sort of a 20/80 split, 20% being Leon’s John Wick-style romp through crowds of zombies, modeled after the Resident Evil 4 Remake and 80% being Graces walking, waking nightmare, modeled more after the Resident Evil 7 style of tense, disempowered, first person horror.

    My problems with the game only really start to pop up in the latter half, where Grace’s role as the protagonist isn’t just reversed: it is eclipsed. Grace is removed from the game as a playable character entirely for several hours in a row. The second half of the game follows Leon as he travels to — of course, where it all started — Raccoon City. This is where the game feels most indulgent in being “Resident Evil,” with all of the baggage that comes with, and this is where it falters as a consequence. Wesker is here! Remember that guy? Well, he’s back for some reason! Leon is back in Raccoon City once again! What do you know, he has to go back to the police station, and what do you know, the tyrant from Resident Evil 2 is back as well, and crashes through the roof! It’s a game full of callbacks like this and it feels a little bit cloying to me, feeling much more like a sequel to the series of remakes than a sequel to the new Resident Evil games that have been released since the series rebooted in 2017.

    Worse, to me, is the way Leon interacts with the world. His little romps of cool guy ultraviolence are pretty fun in short bursts, but spending so much time with him like you do in this second half reveals just how dull everything feels. Leon’s primary verb he uses to interact with the world is to kill; not to delay, not to escape, not to avoid, but to destroy. This brings out the drabness of the world which was at first cleverly disguised by Grace’s much more dynamic playstyle. What made the first half of the game so powerful — the tension, the horror, the relatability, the personality of everything, even the zombies! — is made to feel flat by the barrel of Leon’s guns. Everything in the ruins of Raccoon City is a drab brown, the zombies all near-identical gaunt nobodies. People reduced to obstacles for Leon to step ontop of. Everything is in service to Leon looking cool. Leon, here, becomes the true legacy sequel protagonist: he’s the coolest, and the best, and isn’t that what you came for? To see your favorite guy from your favorite Resident Evil games, back again, looking cool?

    It’s not all bad — it can actually be quite fun — but something is lost in this transition to the second half of the game, and that something is Grace, who is the reason this game works at all. Without her, the whole thing begins to fall apart while trying to stay true to the image of “Resident Evil” it now suddenly has to maintain.

    There are gender politics at play here, too. Leon, the cool guy, the big man, the strong man, the fan favorite, and Grace, the scared girl, who of course becomes the mother figure to another little, scared girl. There’s of course more to it than that, and I really do think Grace proves herself to be an incredible and very capable character, but images mean things and Resident Evil Requiem is painting an image here. I think it manages to steer clear of making this comparison belittling for Grace, but the juxtaposition is intentional between them still.

    Overall, maybe it does come out in the wash. At the end of Resident Evil Requiem, I ended up feeling that it was a game I actually liked a lot, something that is very rare for me in the AAA games space these days. Fitting to the title Requiem, the game feels like an homage to the direction the series has been going towards in the past decade, combining the two house styles of Resident Evil it has come to adopt ever since. Grace’s sections of the game are styled pretty heavily after the mechanics set in place by Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, the disempowerment and disorientation of Ethan Winter’s first person nightmare in the Bakers house. That feeling of being stalked, of never feeling quite safe, the horror that feels relatable to the player watching through the characters eyes in the first person, and the eventual mastery you can have over an environment that is hostile to you. Leon’s style, on the other hand being the style of the Resident Evil remakes beginning with the remake of Resident Evil 2: the third person action game, increasingly violent and tameable at the hot end of the barrel of a gun, littered with spin kicks and shotguns and funny little one liners. When Grace gets to have the driver seat, Leon subs in only for a sense of violent, joyful relief after you’re tired. But once Leon gets the idea that he’s driving, you shouldn’t expect to go back to the thoughtful, ominous horror you come to expect from Grace.

    Grace does comes back in the end, and thank God she does. Her gameplay section at the end of the game manages to actually be one of the best parts! Suddenly everything is scary again, in contrast to the last several hours which had dropped the “horror” from survival horror completely! Grace is now being stalked by an old fan favorite enemy, Lickers: fleshy, lithe, muscular, skinless creatures with exposed brains who are totally blind but hunt you down with their hearing. Here they make the incredibly fun decision of putting Grace through a gauntlet with a bunch of these little fuckers and then throwing regular zombies at you in the middle, knowing that if you shoot a single zombie you’ll draw all the Lickers straight to you. At this point in the game, Grace has like 80 bullets for me, more than she could ever need, but surrounded by Lickers and forced to keep herself quiet. She can’t shoot a single one or else she’ll draw them all straight toward her and then she’s dead! It’s a little irony that turns into a really tense section and one of my favorite moments in the game. Leon, on the other hand, gets an equivalent section where his game briefly turns into an honest to god third person cover shooter, where he has to kill actual, human guys with guns and tactical gear rather than zombies and monsters. Maybe this is just me, but if you fight someone with a gun in a Resident Evil game, it should be either a zombie with a machine gun who can’t aim, or a zombie who inexplicably has a bazooka. If I wanted to fight humans in tactical gear, I wouldn’t be playing Resident Evil.

    Don’t get me wrong, I love Leon. He’s a character I really love, and I still to this day think Resident Evil 4 is one of the best games of all time. I just wish that the juxtaposition between their two halves of the game didn’t make me feel so low on him. Instead, what we have is a really strong showing from a really great new character, and a really lack luster and indulgent showing from a fan favorite. That’s sequels for ya!

    thanks for reading. i stayed up late to write this really impulsively lol

  • chained echoes (2022) – podcast

    apple / spotify / pocket casts / overcast / youtube

    Wass6p. It’s 🐝 yourself Friday, and this month we can finally share our episode about Chained Echoes! This is one we’ve been looking forward to doing for quite a while, and it’s also our longest episode yet! I know it’s quite a lot, but this episode was really fun and I took down extensive timestamps in the description of the podcast, so I recommend listening over the course of several sessions. I hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it!

    some spoilers below. all spoilers are put after a warning in the episode

    Chained Echoes is an enormous and sprawling project, especially for an indie RPG, and especially for the very small size of the team of people involved in it. What I can’t stress enough is the scope of this game and the ambition behind it: being a fully featured 40+ hour RPG with a ton of original characters and stories (and a truly incredible soundtrack by Eddie Marianukroh), Chained Echoes has a huge, expansive world with a rich history, a detailed world, a super slick and satisfying battle system, and a whole bunch of Very Cool Mechs. Inspired by the Japanese RPGs from the 1990s like Xenogears, Final Fantasy VI, and Chrono Trigger, Mathias Linda has said that he wanted to invoke how he remembers these games feeling, rather than copy them directly. The result is a game that has all sorts of aesthetic trappings and tropes from these classic RPGs while maintaining a much more modern feeling, quality and polish. It isn’t just copying these games homework though: Chained Echoes alters the formula mechanically, creating one of the more satisfying collection of battle and progression systems I’ve seen from the genre.

    Systemically, Chained Echoes is a beautiful game. And I do mean that as an aesthetic piece, as it pulls from a rich history of games and inspirations, but I also mean it in the golden ratio sort of way: there is a perfect mathematical consistency to the systemic interactions at work. The progression system in Chained Echoes in particular sets itself apart from its inspirations, working in tandem with the game’s own narrative to create a tightly designed loop of gameplay and story progression that will repeat itself from beginning to end for the entirety of the game. There isn’t technically experience points or levels in this game: instead you get grimoire shards (named such after the Grand Grimoire your party chases after for most of the game). Replacing a tradition level system, grimoire shards are spent to unlock active abilities, stat boosts, and passive skills, and these shards are tightly controlled and only ever given to you after specific triggers: important story events, boss fights, and optional unique challenges completed from what the game calls the “reward board.” This means that major character and party progression isn’t gained from beating small time monsters in dungeons and fields, but is instead tethered to the things players will want to do if they take an interest in the game itself. By taking on unique challenges, seeking out difficult boss battles, and following along with the main story, your characters grow stronger, rewarding you for your interest and care rather than your propensity for crushing hundreds of goblins. This, in combination with the intentionally and carefully designed levels and world which has zero random battles, creates a system which largely eliminates most instances of grinding and rewards you for instead meeting the game where it’s at. This already satisfying progression loop benefits from a narrative that is exceptionally paced, ebbing and flowing perfectly in tune both with my desire to meander through the world and my lizard brain need to level up and get a move on to the next stunning set piece or important plot beat.

    This is layered on top of the battle system (and the other battle system, the one with Very Cool Mechs) which uses a new mechanic called the “overdrive meter” to set the pace of each turn based battle and force you to use more of your abilities, characters, and skills you might not typically try. You can think of the overdrive gauge as a temperature for battle; it gets too hot, and bad things will happen to you. The overdrive meter is constantly warming up, pushing closer and closer to overheating, and once it does it debuffs your whole team and makes all of your resources more expensive. Meanwhile, every couple of turns, the meter will display the icon of a different type of skill, sometimes asking you to do an elemental attack, sometimes a heal, sometimes a buff, and so on. The only way to tick the overdrive meter back where you want it is to switch out party members in battle or use the type of skill currently being displayed, forcing you to play with a constantly shifting variety of different strategies and party members in order to stay competitive. After each battle, your health and resources refill completely and your status effects disappear, which means that each battle is a fresh start where you are encouraged and often required to use every resource at your disposal to win. Because of these systems, the battle system often functions sort of like a complex puzzle where there are lots of different answers. The huge cast of player characters provides a huge variety in strategies: maybe I should keep Lenne out and focus on magic damage, or maybe I should switch her out for Robb for poison and other debuffs? Through the course of a single battle, you’ll have to change strategies several times if you’re trying to keep the overdrive and your resources in check.

    our battle with the loyal soldier, row, who i will be talking about shortly. here you can see the structure of the battle system through the user interface, highlighting the skill menu, player health/TP, turn order, and the overdrive.

    Which is to say that, as a game, systemically, I was and continue to be incredibly impressed by Chained Echoes. We spend a long time in the episode talking about how it all works and what made it click for us before we get into the spoilers section where we begin to dissect the plot and characters, and discuss what makes the game tick for us. For me, one of the big things I was looking forward to was Very Cool Mechs.

    This was one of the big selling points for me. The appeal is immediately obvious. Final Fantasy and Gundam! One of those combinations that could easily be a recipe for disaster, but is still incredibly attractive to me as an idea. And it works really well as a mechanic; the battle system when you’re in your sky armor (your Very Cool Mech) is similar but different, taking the look of the regular turn-based combat but increasing the scale of everything and changing how it feels to be slightly more mechanical. The overdrive system, which on foot forces you to swap out party members and use a variety of different abilities to control it, now forces you and your party of Very Cool Mechs to switch into higher and lower performing gears to prevent overheating, which is this great mechanical flavor that feels more like piloting a vehicle. Enemies that you might have been having trouble with on foot are effortlessly crushed in the sky armor as the damage numbers go from the low hundreds into the thousands the moment you’re in the suit. Being, as we all are, a big fan of relative size, the sense of scale is much appreciated.

    But being a fan of Very Cool Mechs, the way the mechs are implemented as a narrative device in this games central war becomes slightly underwhelming to me as we approach the latter half of the game, which is less focused on the horrors and political conflicts of war and more focused on the somewhat more abstract, metaphysical, god-like threats in this world. My perspective on what I want from mecha comes largely from Gundam and the stuff like it, and to me, what I think works best in shows like Gundam is a focus on war, and bodies, and the self, and the relationship between these three. Child soldiers being made implicitly by circumstance or explicitly through control to use machinery of war that makes them look bigger, stronger, and older than they are. Amuro Ray standing in the Gundam with his sights locked on Zeon soldiers outside of their mobile suits and not being able to pull the trigger, exclaiming how much easier it is when they’re in their machines — that dehumanizing distance between the person and the body when the body is a weapon of war. What I’ve also loved about it and its characters since the beginning is the focus it has on the personal and the political lives of a person in war; the relationships and rivalries between these people and pilots and soldiers sometimes on opposite sides of a battle, the respect or the hatred you feel for your enemies, the intimacy of battle.

    It does not, for most of the game, feel like Chained Echoes is interested in these sorts of questions. It flirts with these ideas quite a lot in the beginning: there’s a really good encounter with a pilot named Row in the first half of the game which brings out the best of this stuff. Row is one of the Sky Armor pilots in Farnsport, and he’s seen first celebrating the end of the war in Valandis at the beginning of the game, before things go sideways. He has a personal relationship with one of our protagonists, Lenne, who he doesn’t know is secretly a princess from the kingdom on the other side of this war. He thanks her personally for having earlier brought him medicine, which saved the lives of his wife and newborn child. He tells you all about how excited he is for his daughter to be raised in a world at peace. You get the impression then that this is a rare thing for this world; for children to be raised with their fathers intact, in a time without war. Later, when the great war in Valandis begins to start once again, Row discovers Lenne’s identity and attempts to take her as a hostage, in his eyes giving his country a token they can use to bring the gears of war to a grinding stop. Unfortunately for Row, we are forced to fight, and Row tragically is killed in the battle. This is all really great stuff and its presented very well, and each character is very torn between all of their political and personal relationships. Row himself is torn, as he has a personal relationship with Lenne that is being superceded by his national identity and his longing for peace.

    The trouble for me begins when Row is never mentioned a single time for the remainder of the game. Each character, and especially Lenne, seems to continue with their lives as if this whole chapter never happened. This I think is a demonstration of what I mean when I say it only flirts with these ideas: Chained Echoes is often willing to walk onto the diving board above these themes of politics and war, but it never really jumps in. His wife and his daughter never appear again, despite them being used as a device to tug at your emotions, and neither the princess who sent him on his mission nor the princess who killed him ever mention his name. Row’s absence after his death represents to me a greater absence of this thematic content it at first approaches, but then abandons as the games scope later narrows on the traditional metaphysical threats of the JRPGs it is inspired by. At the end of the day, Row is reduced from a realized character to a boss fight, and although he makes for quite a good boss fight, it is all the soldier of peace is remembered as.

    But still, like I had mentioned at the beginning of this post, what I have to keep in mind about this game is the ambition behind it. This is a spectacularly large game developed by one person with the help of a very small team of artists and musicians. Each of them has done really incredible and ambitious work, and in doing they’ve made something very special. Chained Echoes swings for the fences at every chance it gets. It might miss here and there — I talk more in this episode about a similar problem with the nuclear metaphor at the heart of this game — but I appreciate that it always swings.

    The next game that we’re covering on the Leaving the Party podcast is Parasite Eve! It’s our first time on the show playing a game from before the year 2000, and I’m very excited about this one. Tess and I are playing the game now, and I’ve already read the novel which it’s a sequel to (i will be doing a small book report next episode…). If you have questions about Parasite Eve or other questions you’d like us to answer on the show, please DM us on Bluesky or email us at leavingthepartypod@gmail.com. Stay tuned for next month!

    thanks for listening / reading etc

    PS: there’s a really fun historical detail that i wanted to mention in the podcast but didn’t remember to. It has to do with why the catacombs of the royal family of one of the great kingdoms in Valandis was moved. Princess Amelia tells us:

    Around 300 years ago, the sewer system was built in Farnsport which greatly improved the lives of the townspeople. Only the palace did not get any access to it, since under the palace lay the catacombs of our ancestors. It would have been an insult to let the feces of the palace pass through there, so for decades the royal family still had to use the old outhouse. That is until mad queen Hefnar came to power. She couldn’t bear to see the city dwellers were allowed to live a more hygienic life than she was. So despite opposition, she had the sewer system expanded into the palace. Of course, no royal wanted to be buried there anymore, Hefner least of all, so they had new catacombs built. However, it would have been an embarrassment for the court if the people learned that the old ancestral tomb had become a cesspool. Which is why they built the new catacombs far away and kept them a secret. This is probably why the church has yet to discover the tomb, even though they search for Lady Reina’s grave so eagerly.

    i just think this is awesome. the inside baseball knowledge on the royal familys poop tomb. very funny and i had to put it somewhere. thanks