The whole fucking plothook to Village just didn't make any sense to me at all. Chris and his goons bust into his house in the middle of the fucking night, riddle his wife with bullets, Chris himself comes in and for good measure puts a couple more in her fucking dome while she's on the floor, Ethan understandably freaks the fuck out and Chris just goes... "Sorry bro" and "Ethan, no!", and makes no fucking effort whatsoever to explain himself, why he's there, what he's doing, what just happened, etc. It's never fucking explained until you're like 3/4 of the way through the game. It's out of character for Chris, makes no fucking sense for basically any character in general, and it's a lazy 'hook' to set up the main plot. I get what they were going for I guess, the whole: "oh shit wow is Chris Redfield a villain now?!?!" but I mean it's obvious that he's fucking not, he's made it his life's work to fuck up basically anyone that ever had any dealings with Umbrella, Umbrella's progenitors or Umbrella's successors. Why the fuck would he do a heel turn now?
It was lazy, poor storytelling, and incredibly so, even for Resident Evil - which isn't really a series I expect good, competent storytelling from in the first place, but even for RE it was beyond the pale and retarded. That's not even getting into the fact that you're fighting lycans, vampires, women made out of insects and fucking Walmart Great Value brand Magneto. Essentially the fungus/mold just became a plot device so they could come up with cool, fantastical monster designs to fit with the weird 'storybook' dark fantasy deal they wanted to go for - which sure, that's an interesting concept, but it isn't Resident Evil. Really, it's more like Bloodborne or some shit, and they should have just shelved this entire thing until they could just make another fucking standalone game, kick off another franchise or fit it with one of their old, very much neglected franchises. Shit, the grimdark fantasy shit would have been more at home in a Devil May Cry game, but that's a franchise they know can't really put asses in seats anymore, I guess. Then they could have come up with some other way to wrap up Ethan's character, if they felt they needed to, although his characterization was sort of lacking from the very beginning.
And that's not getting into the dogshit DLC, either. The whole time I spent with it, I was thinking: "they would have been better off just making this into another game or a spin-off", it basically feels like proto-RE4 in first-person with aspects of Bloodborne and Castlevania with a handful of shoehorned-in Resident Evil cliches/trappings, like references to Umbrella or Spencer and hey, Chris Redfield is in it, so it must be an RE game!
IMO Requiem kinda went similarly aside from the Grace parts. Every bit of Leon's portion in RC felt like The Last of Us or some other post-apocalyptic zombie game, and returning to Raccoon City in the first place was lazy. That place was fucking shown being wiped off the map in myriad ways throughout every game in the series that took place in/near it, nothing should remain there aside from a big crater, a tall fence and maybe an observation tower [referenced in Outbreak], there certainly shouldn't be approximately half of the city left standing and intact buildings that don't even have their windows blown out. And the zombies still being there and functional doesn't make any fucking sense, either. Wasn't it established in lore that they have to consume meat to sustain themselves? And it's referenced that some of these are the zombies from the original fucking outbreak, which lore-wise should be impossible.
Anyway, nowadays for me that's about all the RE franchise is good for, to bitch about how inconsistent they are with their fucking canon and complain about how it feels like I am most decidedly not a part of their target audience anymore, which is fair I guess. I'll probably pick up the Code Veronica remake if it doesn't look like dogshit [and they don't chop it to pieces like they did with the RE3 remake] but we already know Alfred isn't going to get called a crossdresser this time around and I'm sure they'll fuck up the canon massively in it, too.
