T w e n t y S i d e d
Twenty-four minutes. That’s how long Chris and I fought the boss at the end of last week’s video. It doesn’t help that the plot seems to have lost its way, leaving us to blunder from one pointlessPointless for our heroes. The scenes serve the writer’s goals, but the protagonists are doing a lot of things that don’t clearly advance their goals. catastrophe to the next.
It feels like we should just leave and call in an airstrike, because there doesn’t seem to be anything here that doesn’t need to be killed or destroyed. But instead we’re blundering through this circus on foot, getting dragged into protracted fights with boring repetitive boss monsters with no relevance to the plot.I GUESS we’re supposed to be invested in Chris’ idiotic no-stakes search for Jill. Which… ugh. I’ll interrogate that once we get to the “reveal”.
Anyway, here’s the madness from last week:
I don’t know what to make of that boss fight.
On one hand, it felt like we were making progress in the sense that we were destroying glowy red bits, which is normally what you’re supposed to do in videogame land. On the other hand, those weak spots seemed to regenerate endlessly and there was no indication that we were getting closer to beating the thing.
Is this a test of burst damage output, where we have to get rid of ALL the glowy bits before they start to regenerate?
Is this a case where we have to get rid of one group of weak spots in order to expose the ACTUAL weak spots?
Is this a test of endurance, and you just need to keep plugging away at those weak points?
Is this some sort of puzzle boss where we need to use bullets to destroy some spots, and then the flame thrower to destroy others?
Even after going through the fight and then reviewing the footage later, I still don’t know what the intended strategy was or if we were doing it right.
We went through the cycle so many times that Chris had it memorized. He knew when it was going to teleport to the center of the arena, when it was going to swing at us, and when the bits were going to regenerate. But despite understanding what the boss was going to do, we were both stumped on what the game designer expected of us.
0/10. Did not enjoy. Would not be terrorized by again.
We’re getting down to the end here. Chris estimates that we probably have two sessions left. You can catch the chaos on Twitch tonight at 7pm Eastern.
Footnotes:
[1] Pointless for our heroes. The scenes serve the writer’s goals, but the protagonists are doing a lot of things that don’t clearly advance their goals.
[2] I GUESS we’re supposed to be invested in Chris’ idiotic no-stakes search for Jill. Which… ugh. I’ll interrogate that once we get to the “reveal”.
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One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
Looking it up on the wiki, you need to use fire damage to make the glowy bits come out, then shoot them for massive damage. As far as I can tell skimming Youtube the weak spots don’t actually regenerate when killed, it’s just that there’s a separate cycle controlling whether they’re out or not and this looks exactly like you’re killing them only for them to come back. Youtube shows me that making efficient use of grenades and gas canisters can kill it in three minutes, but most people take a lot longer.
Or if you bought the rocket launcher earlier you can one-shot it.
Yeah this fight was always like the Salazar fight in RE 4 for me. Buy the rocket launcher, get it over with, move on.
Oh, god, the Salazar fight. Yeah, I almost always lugged the rocket launcher through a level to short circuit it.
It still boggles the mind that the Arkham Asylum designers looked at that and said “Yeah, let’s put that in our game.”
Oddly enough, I’ve come to do pretty decently at the Salazar fight, though I always make sure the magnum is loaded. The tough part is making sure you are able to hit the “dodge” quicktime command when the evil parasite face is gonna lunge, but I believe there are ways to mitigate that which escape me at the moment (it’s been 9 months since I last played and I think it’s clear at this point my memory is quite terrible).
It’s not so much that they put this specific fight in their game as it is that the Salazar fight is a very straightforward stock boss fight template.
Which is really odd for RE4! You’ve got a lot of unique setpiece encounters like Del Lago, the showdown with Mendez, the Verdugo hunt, the… thing… that you fight on the container platforms, and later the running battle with Krauser. Sadler is kinda pushing into cliché monster territory at the end, but they distinguish that fight with all the environmental and situational things that you and the boss can both do.
But Salazar is… the boss that sits in the center of a big, semi-circular area and does huge downward smashes with its tentacle arms, which you’ve gotta dodge while forcing it to expose its central weakpoint. Did they order this boss fight out of a Sears catalog?
This must be at least the third time I’ve seen people go through this boss on stream and each time I’ve seen the players have the same “are we actually making progress in this fight” problem .
And the best bit is, despite knowing exactly what to do, the ‘deliberately scary’ tank controls meant you STILL got hit by it, right?
Okay, I’m projecting my own Resident Evil experiences onto the game I’ve never played. But still…
Yeah, I’d have checked out at that point. The combination of “frustrating boss” + “the story isn’t providing a good reason to fight it” has killed my interest in quite a few games in the past.
0/10. Did not enjoy. Would not be terrorized by again.
By… something?
By the boss. It’s like “0/10, would not eat at again”, it’s implied that the preposition at is referring to the place being reviewed.
I like to imagine the evil lady who gave the tour watching the fight with her cronies sadistically laughing at first. Then it gets awkwardly long. Some cronies hide their phones between their legs like students to pass the time. Someone tries to lighten the mood by joking that maybe they shouldn’t have littered the place with so many flamethrowers but Evil Lady glares him to silence. She’s standing the whole time in her evil pose, it’s more and more uncomfortable. She feels too self conscious to sit down now. She looks at her watch discretely. This “execution” has been going for 10 minutes now. Surely it’ll be over any time now…
I don’t know what to tell you, guys. I never had this fight last for so long. I usually run around the stage throwing down the gas cylinders as soon as the fight starts, as they’re a good way to do large damage to the whole thing with one shot. The flamethrower should be directed to the white pustules and not the middle of the body. Once the larger red pustules come out that’s where you unload your strongest firepower.
It’s been some time since I played this game, but I don’t remember ever finding this particularly confusing. Isn’t there a file that tells you about how to deal with this creature? I mean, after all, you do have an earlier fight with this sort of enemy that lays down its behavior.
You can shortcut the earlier fight by simply locking it in an incinerator.
The problem seems to be that shooting the first glowing pustules doesn’t necessarily generate the two primary weakpoints. I think it’s when you get rid of those that you’re supposed to burn away at the thing, and once the two actual weakpoints appear, you shoot those.
The problem is “shoot big glowing pustules” is more obvious than “Okay, it’s upright and limbless without a glowing weakpoint… now what?” because at that stage you’re supposed to be using incendiary grenades or the flamethrower to draw them out.
I like the way the level designers gave up at a couple points and just added “go here” arrows into the levels.
I fought it for 30 minutes and I just gave up and let it kill me when I ran out of bullets. Then I bought a rocket launcher and killed it in one hit. I screamed. I don’t remember the game being this bad…