Resident Evil Requiem has recently been released, and with it revived the discussions around RE4 Remake regarding the different approach to action gameplay that Capcom has taken to modern Resident Evil. Seeing the oft repeated points has motivated me to expand on some of what I said about these games, and while I still stand by everything I said in my RE4 Remake review, I am a bit more knowledgeable about how the game works now and a little softer on it as a result, especially considering that Requiem doubled down on the worst parts and excised the few good parts. I will expand on that at the end, but first I want to talk about the various stun systems that have been attempted and what they bring to the table.
I’ve come to find that this is a rare game where I take issue with pretty much all of it, rather than being annoyed by just the gameplay, and it seems to all come down to the same core reason: Doom The Dark Ages is a very one-note game. Its gameplay, aesthetic, story, and soundtrack all feel like downgrades from Eternal and to some extent 2016 as well, in ways that made me feel like this game lacked a spark of creativity and desire to actually push their vision forward that I had got from Eternal.
I don’t talk about them a lot in this blog, but I love fighting games! It’s a genre that has had a hold on me since 2015 and I still enjoy them greatly. I’ve even gone as far as to compete in locals and managed to place 5th in Street Fighter 6 for Toryuken 2024, Ontario’s biggest tournament that year. Unfortunately, Fighting Games are in a bit of a weird place right now. Two years ago, SF6 released to critical acclaim heralding what felt like a new golden age of fighting games at the time. Rollback netcode became standard, many classics received modern re-releases with good netplay, and it seemed pretty much everyone had a game for them to play and people to play with worldwide. It was a pretty exciting time for the scene which had gotten bigger than it ever was before! Unfortunately, fast forward to 2025 and things don’t look so bright anymore.
The cracks in SF6’s design have revealed themselves quickly with all the intense competition it fostered and Capcom has been slow to respond, leading to a stale meta that has dampened the enthusiasm around the game. Strive’s latest season, as well intentioned as it was, failed its goals and inadvertently created a competitively unhealthy meta of oppressive top tiers with extreme damage and un-interactive mixups. Tekken 8 suffered from similar issues and had clear feedback from its passionate competitive playerbase, to which the devs promised them a Season 2 that would adjust the game to strengthen defensive play only to betray them with a patch that comically inflated all the game’s problems and led to the game getting review bombed on Steam and losing many players.
In spite of everything I’m about to say, Monster Hunter Wilds will likely be my favorite action game of 2025, and unmatched in their niche Capcom still makes the kind of action games that appeal to me the most. Capcom isn’t afraid to experiment with its strong foundation while other AAA devs continue to homogenize their gameplay to suit the market’s defined taste for Soulslike action. However, not all experiments pan out, and with new approaches there is always risk.
I wanted to make a post to gush a little about the games I’ve to come to appreciate both as a little writing exercise to learn to talk about things I like more often (lol) and for any readers who want to get to know me and my taste a bit better. This list is in no particular order.
Devil May Cry 4
An era-defining game for me, one that I am not exactly proud of having here. It’s a game with many problems, featuring a subpar campaign with a polarizing enemy roster, but it also has its iteration of Dante, the most complex and satisfying action game character to me. The game’s animations, physics, and systems are all perfectly tuned to make it essentially the Melee of action games: A game of unparalleled speed and smoothness once mastered, but also an arthritis-inducer that is difficult to get into. I got sucked in, I learned the ins-and-outs, and I played DMC4 until it fried my dopamine receptors for good.
Metal Gear Solid V is the most gameplay focused of the numbered MGS games, eschewing the linear story focus for a big buffet of stealth action scenarios. While the game is praised by the mainstream for achieving an enjoyable stealth sandbox, it is occasionally criticized for easily exploitable gameplay, mainly blamed on the lack of complex bases similar to the Ground Zeroes prologue, and the overpowered buddies and tools that the player can unlock throughout the game. The game’s open world nature often makes it easy to get around threats and approach any base from a favorable angle to snipe off or avoid most guards. While I agree with some of these criticisms, I think MGSV’s worst gameplay issues come from a more fundamental level, and if not for those issues some of MGSV’s level design problems could have been alleviated.
Monster Hunter is my favorite 3D action game series. Though many claim to do deep methodical combat, few nail it the way Monster Hunter does. It makes the player contend with a real sense of commitment that punishes you for not thinking two steps ahead, and gives you weapons that all control and move very uniquely to force entirely different approaches to combat. Among its qualities is one underappreciated aspect that really makes it stand out compared to modern action games, and that is its approach to defense: your dodge moves have only brief invincibility while enemy attacks tend to cover a ton of space for a long time. No perfectly timed dodge roll will save you from a continuous breath of fire or an aerial divebomb with an AoE the size of a small village. More than any other of its ilk, Monster Hunter demands understanding of the 3D space that enemies control, and for players to recognize when and where it’s viable to attack - not just because of the window of time, but also because of what space it would leave you in. When I see what the rest of the genre is doing, I feel that dimension of action games is starting to become rarer and rarer, and often there is a certain type of mechanic that is the culprit.
A game with a beautiful aesthetic, great music, and all the pieces for a compelling tower-defense/action hybrid that fails for me due to botched execution of its progression curve and a dire lack of challenge, compounded by many annoying tertiary elements that show how unaware the game is of its strengths and weaknesses.
To begin, I find there to be a lot of fundamental issues with regard to the game’s Day/Night cycle and how that impacts the experience of a player who is too well-prepared for what the game is willing to throw at them. Every stage begins with a day phase that requires you to look around the location for villagers to rescue and defilement to cleanse in order to get the currency you will need to complete the mission and give villagers equipment that allows them to fight with you. This is followed by a night phase where enemies spawn in waves until the night ends. Each day/night cycle takes around 8 minutes, 4 for the day and the other 4 for the night, and stages generally require 3-4 Day/Night cycles to complete.
This is a guide that I initially wrote just to share around with friends who were learning Monster Hunter, forgot about it entirely and realized I should probably publish it. The information here is not very in-depth, but the parts about how most monster patterns operate should be useful to give a new player an idea for what to look for when learning how to fight monsters
As usual with my writing, this review is going to be focused on Final Fantasy VII Remake’s gameplay, an aspect of which I regard highly but might be easy to overlook for most people who play the game, mainly due to the game’s own fault. I did enjoy the game’s other aspects enough that it motivated me to play the original game to completion and I will leave it at that.
