I have been a screeching fan-boy over games of all types for far too long. Of course, I try to put up a front of objectivity. If someone asks me if a game I like is good, I give the old “Oh ye, it’s alright, I guess” but I swear they can hear the screeching as it echoes through the back annals of my brain. I love games. But no game is perfect. Sekiro and Resident Evil 4 come pretty close though.
Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy X, Tears of the Kingdom, Doom Eternal – all near-perfect. And by perfect, I don’t mean they’re groundbreaking or amazing or even good games. I mean they went for a particular experience and realized it fully with the mechanics they implemented and the design choices they made. Final Fantasy X perfected turn-based combat and told a story in a way that could’ve only been told in the way they told it. But damn those mini-games suck.
Every game deserves the appreciation that it earns, and not to be compared unfairly. You wouldn’t compare a strawberry to a suspension bridge in a ‘Best Object’ competition. So a title like ‘Game of the Year’ doesn’t mean anything. It feels awkward looking at a list of five completely different games and trying to decide which one’s the best when they shouldn’t be compared in the first place. A game must only be compared against itself. How well do the core mechanics work towards the experience that the game is trying to create? Perfection is simply another term for self-awareness. That being said, I think it’s valuable to consider when a game is so close to perfect but falls short with only one bad design choice.
A Pretty Environment
Resident Evil 4
I must preface this section first by saying that I was not the biggest fan of RE4 when it came out. I’m more of a fan of the earlier ones. The RE2 version of Leon felt so much more satisfying because he was just a rookie cop in a city turned into hell. So if he survived, it was because you were good enough to beat the game and keep him alive. In RE4, he’s this super-cop trained to hunt bioweapons around the world. It’s more of a power fantasy than a survival horror. I also struggled to get behind the environments, the farm and castle settings felt kinda samey to me. That being said, I do recognize why people love it so much and I have come around in time.
Evolution
Though the settings didn’t resonate with me, they do perfectly create the experience that the game is going for. That of being isolated in a foreign land. Of being a man on a mission that even when everything goes wrong, you must still complete your orders. The over-the-shoulder aiming mechanics feel like a proper evolution from the previous games. Keeping the tank controls but giving you far more freedom to aim feels like Leon has progressed as a soldier. Even the goofy parts fit in with the inherent goofiness of the horror genre. A village of farmers have been injected with a parasite that turns them all into killers, that feels goofy to me. All of the elements of Resident Evil 4 coalesce into a near-perfect experience… except for one mechanic.
I loved the inclusion of the parry technique in the remake
The Fault
You may be expecting me to say that the annoying Ashley parts are what ruin it but no. Yes, keeping Ashley alive is annoying as heck. But you are there to save the president’s daughter, her being annoying fits into the experience. Even trying to decide whether or not to waste yellow herbs on her plays into it because you have to decide which strategy best suits the mission. Can you trust her to keep herself alive with her little health at the expense of your own, or should you concentrate on yourself and your skills to keep her alive? Almost everyone will choose to use the herbs on themselves, so I can see why they took that mechanic out for the remake, but my point is that Ashley fits. What doesn’t fit is how shaky Leon’s damn aim is.
We’re supposed to believe that guy went through all this super soldier training to prime him with the confidence to take out an entire village’s worth of inhabitants single-handedly and they didn’t teach him how to aim straight? His arms were less shaky when he was a rookie. I get that they’re trying to be realistic, making his hands sway with all the adrenalin of trying to stay alive. But they don’t jitter like someone with nerves, they move like he’s got a neurodegenerative disorder. Also, Leon never acts nervous for a second in the entire game. It’s jarring having him quip at some giant monster and then have a panic attack as soon as you press the aim button.
You can’t see it because it’s a photo but I assure you, the cursor is shaking
It’s Just Not Fun
It makes no sense but I wouldn’t have as much of a problem with it if it wasn’t literally the core loop of the game. If they were trying to artificially raise the difficulty, they did so in the most frustrating way possible. By adding the element of randomness to the core loop. Give me more aggressive enemies with larger health bars any day, but don’t inject unnecessary RNG into the main thing that you’re doing in the game.
What’s also frustrating is that they fixed it in later installments. It made more sense for them to screw it up back in the PS2 era when developers were still playing around with 3D shooting mechanics but his arms aren’t flapping around in the RE2 Remake. This illustrates the point I made earlier because the RE4 Remake is supposed to be a continuation of the other remakes. Why did Leon get worse at aiming?
I thought they had learned that shaky aim adds no fun to the game at all and only detracts from the experience, but apparently they did not. They could’ve at least had an option in the menu to turn it off. I would go as far as to say that Leon’s arm shaking is one of the worst gaming decisions ever made. Because it’s easy to make a bad game with bad ideas, but they made a fantastic game and ruined it.
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- This guy can do backflips and kick people to death
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- But he can’t keep his arms straight while aiming
Sekiro
Sekiro is my favorite game. It’s hard to pin down what I think is the best game ever made, but Sekiro would be very high up on the list, if not at the top. Whenever I’m in between games, I always find myself coming back to Sekiro. I replay lots of games all the time, the Jak series, the MGS series, The Messenger, Sifu, old Final Fantasys. But I’ll play them because I want the experience of beating them again. With Sekiro, I’ll play it just to get better at it. I’ll replay bosses over and over just to get better at their attack patterns. Even writing about it now makes me want to go play it. And it has a frankly awe-inspiring modding community that have made beautiful adjustments to the difficulty and design. There isn’t a game out there that induces a flow-state as well as Sekiro does.
The Lightning of Tomoe
Why’s It So Good?
We are at the rotting edge of Souls-like fatigue and I would argue for good reason. The Souls-like genre does such a good job at providing a solid action foundation that every developer wants to make one. Or at the very least, take elements from the Souls-like playbook. The core loop of the Souls-like genre is so tight that they can get away with making their games incredibly difficult. The best way to test how well the mechanics work in your game is by jumping the difficulty up like crazy and seeing how well it works. A lot of games fail because of technical stuff like their hitboxes, animations, invincibility frames, input buffering, etc.
The Mikiri counter is such an awesome technique
There’s a lot of debate about whether games should be difficult or not but I would argue that most games just simply cannot get away with it. I think that all games should have some level of difficulty. What’s the point of playing a game if you’re not being challenged in some way? There are books and movies and shows for when you want a good story, the only thing that sets the gaming medium apart is that it can challenge you. Sekiro perfectly achieves difficulty while keeping everything fair because of how tightly designed it is in all aspects but one.
The Fault
The Sekiro experience is one of challenging yourself to react accordingly to your opponent’s movements. A lot of people liken it to a rhythm game and I can see why. You’re essentially dancing with your opponents, which is not unlike true swordfighting. Reacting to any minute movement in a way that’ll give you an edge in the battle. And the game perfectly accentuates this type of experience with all of its mechanics. The parry mechanic that defines Sekiro is a stroke of genius. It’s simple, just press the block button in time with your opponent’s attacks. And with that simplicity, they can design their bosses with as much intricacy as they like and you’ll always have the perfect counter as long as you’re skilled enough. All you need is to be able to see what you’re opponent is doing and everything works perfectly. There in is the fault: the camera.
No one likes this ape
For the most part, the camera is fine. You can lock onto your opponent and it’ll track to them so you always know how to respond to their movements. But once you back up to the edge of the arena, the camera shoots right up Sekiro’s butthole and you can’t see a thing. With how action-packed it all is, it’ll seemingly come out of nowhere. You’ll be in perfect control, fully in a flow state. Then you stray just a little too close to the wall or a piece of the environment and it’s all lost in an instant. Some of the fights will also be in really confined areas as well which just does not work. You should be fighting these hard bosses, not the camera.
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- How does this camera angle help me?
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- It more than not results in death.
Design Choice or Technical Issue?
You could make the argument that it forces the player to be conscious of their surroundings, which I agree with. But sometimes the enemies will be so aggressive that there’s nothing you can do to avoid the wall. And being pressed up against a wall shouldn’t mean instant death, it should mean you have to fight harder to get yourself free. In a real fight, you don’t go blind as soon as your back touches a wall. Sifu doesn’t have this issue and I would call it a perfect game because of it.
This is what a perfect parry looks like
This may not be a design issue and more of a technical one. It seems that with the engine they use, the camera naturally wants to arc low and sink into the character when it’s being pressed up against a wall. It happens in Dark Souls, Bloodborne, all of them. On the other hand, it does feel intentional. As if they’re punishing you for straying too close to the edge of the arena. Like falling off of a ledge in a Mario game or something. But the entire point of Mario is to avoid pitfalls. In a game like Sekiro, the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. It only adds a level of unwelcome frustration to a near-perfect game.
I didn’t know how to finish this article so here’s a video of me beating Genichiro without a HUD or using any healing items.
