So Resident Evil Mercenaries for the 3ds is fun. There's a few points of contention though, like...
Alright, I've been playing Nintendo since I was just a WEEE lad, but, if before I bought the 3ds, you asked me what the positions of the lettered buttons were on it, I would have told you:
y
x b
a
with complete certainty in my correctness. Apparently my child self never bothered to actually look at the controller because it's actually:
x
y a
b
and in my childhood this arrangement of letters never bothered me cause I learned the controls of all my favorite games by heart, without having to be told "A does this, and B does that" and so somewhere along the line my version of the controller became the truth in my mind.
Now, when a dude in RE Mercenaries grabs you, to avoid getting bitten you have to push a random button of those four, sometimes in a sequence. When it first asked me to press Y to get out of the grapple, it was actually maybe five failed attempts before I realized that Y is not at the top! and A is not at the bottom! That runs so deeply against everything I've taught myself as a child that, whenever I get grabbed, my HUNDREDS OF HOURS of careful practice and studying of Mercenaries in it's previous iterations is rendered useless! I'm reduced to a child again, forced to stare blank-eyed and confused at the letter pad trying to grasp where X and Y are, why A and B are in such conflicting positions, trying again and again to grasp whose intuition this was meant to mold to!
I mean, in RE Mercs 4 and 5, you only ever had to mash buttons in order to get out a grapple, which was exhilarating and exciting, it fit in with the pacing of the experience just fine. But this... Having to physically stop the adrenaline rushing experience so I can play Brain Age for three seconds (an eternity in Merc time) is such a horrid mood whiplash it almost renders me physically sick. This feeling is akin to having to re-break an arm that has set and healed in the wrong way...
and I'm experiencing my first regret over having chosen to purchase a 3DS XL over a normal sized one. RE Mercs is a game that requires split second decision making skills, but my hands have simply such a terrible time trying to properly grasp this huge handheld! When I need to do two or three actions actions in the span of a second it's a pain to my fingers to have to contort them over this gargantuan gaming system... It's possible to move whilst aiming, but with how I need to hold the 3DS I'd never know that, my hand simply can't do the necessary action to do that.
And for some reason the knife has been removed as a backup weapon and moved to a primary slot, but only for a few select characters? and while it's arguably more powerful now, it seems that it has an unreasonably small hitbox tied to it now.
And while I can't use glitchy exploits anymore like using invincibility frames to change weapons and reload them with impunity, I'm not too bothered by that. What I AM bothered by is that it would seem that the breadth of melees has been cut down, however slightly. Now it's not possible to headshot guys and run behind them for a necksnapping move, which is nothing less than disappointing!
Then there's a few design choices I'm not in complete agreement with, like how the inventory system is so streamlined. Managing your inventory in the heat of battle was quite possibly the only redeeming feature of RE 5's 3x3 box inventory system; it added another layer of depth and strategy to what was at first glance a simplistic game, in my opinion. Doing away with that in the handheld version is questionable in my eyes, especially since it's not streamlined enough that I still need to contort my hand over the screen and physically tap the grenade button in order to use them, there's no other alternative.
As an example, in RE 5 it was a legitimate strategy to discard guns you didn't like, so that ammo for them wouldn't spawn anymore. This added a great deal of playability and practice time in it's own right, and now that I'm forced to hold onto every weapon that my character walks into the mission with, I feel just a tad resentful.
And while I can appreciate unlockables, the presence of a rather large amount of them, hand-in-hand with leveling skills, I feel is attempting to add an element of grinding to prolong it's playability. That's just something I feel takes away from it's original charm, where in RE 4 and 5 you could approach Mercs and you'd be given a simple premise and goal along with the tools to complete them, and every victory and failure was resultant of your skill in hand and nothing else. Not how much time you put into leveling your materia-style skills, which does nothing but throw your own competency into question as far as I'm concerned.
Then there's just a few hiccups with the menu GUI that just grind my gears slightly, like how when the game autosaves, I'm always expecting it to just save real fast and then hurry me along to where I want to go. But no, it wants to press a button to advance past the saving screen, which is just jarring. Then there's how there's a linear mission structure that doesn't seem ordered in any meaningful way. I'm just so used to simply having all the stages presented to me, and I pick one, and that's that; but this just feels off...
And while it's a minor gripe, and while it may simply be me, it would seem that the level of aggressiveness that enemies show is very variable depending on which 'mission' you're on, which is bothersome when you're trained to expect enemies to act in a certain way, and then they either act way dumber or WAY WAY more aggressive. When a cultist lunges to grab me, it's like he's moving in benny hill fast motion! I'm not saying that's unfair, since I go into this game expecting to get my ass beaten a couple times, it's just kind of off-putting; especially when in the previous stage enemies would either get caught on corners trying to path to me or just stand around and wait for me to kill them.
I'm gonna play a bit more, I'm enjoying myself so far for what it's worth, but these are simply the issues I'm experiencing so far.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9441664 times)