u/Sadworld99

Been singing this one to myself for like a decade

Echoing some points others have made in the sub. The gameplay here is pretty amazing, melee combat and stealth in particular feel crunchy, rewarding and sometimes even cinematic. The sense of control you feel during action set pieces is genuinely fresh and impressive, last time I seen anything like this was Sleeping Dogs and, personally, I felt that game struggled the most when balancing the combat and shooting. Here that balance shines. I cant think of a better dev team for this game and I'm really happy with how it turned out.

And now the other thing. I read pre release hype where it was stated the dev team was going for, in tacsim, using the stealth combat playgrounds from the campaign to create somethin similar to the hitman endgame in replayability. I figure most of us who made it to the endgame cleared it pretty quickly and, if you're anything like me, scratched our heads wondering where the rest of it is. Probably gonna end up being a moot point, though. If the game is successful enough then I'm sure more content will come down the line. Campaign dlc is pretty much a given, but I'm mostly hoping for more endgame stuff.

With exclusive content paywalled at twenty dollars. No disc and, as of yet, not a moment of gameplay revealed to the public. (EDIT: I said in the original post body that IGN was shilling the ultimate edition. An extremely polite and probably very cool irl redditor pointed out my mistake, I've since edited it out). My personal opinion is that the game is probably going to be very good, though I wonder who exactly will be able to run it anyhow. The screenshots and footage I've seen seem a little generous, maybe even optimistic to that end when I compare them to the various whisperings I've heard that the game is targeting 40 fps on premium gen consoles, 30 for the rest of us. PC performance will (I'm guessing) be a little more flexible, fingers crossed, but I'll say for my part that 30-40 fps is a clean, hard deal breaker for even a twenty dollar game. Still, we've no confirmation yet and anyways it's become a tradition for developers, especially AAA developers, to be somewhere between coy to straight up dishonest about performance figures. I don't expect that to change here. Rockstars last few games, to my memory, have each launched targeting 30 fps on console. None of them for eighty dollars, mind you. What about this game could possibly be worth that much money? Are we good with a digital (only) download that costs a weeks worth of food?

On ps5. Don't see it anywhere

Spoilers mostly for RE9 follow. If you work with and/or have raised children, you'll notice that only one of these games has a realistically depicted child. Emily, the poor thing, genuinely triggered my empathy and protective instinct, that's true. I needed no outside guidance to clear a path for her once the (brief) section started in which she was in my care. I was thankful Capcom gave the option to leave her on the couch. I didn't want her to hear the screaming. Her voice actress does great work with her, that should be said too. Grace adopting Emily in the epilogue is sweet and cool, and a great turn for both characters, but you do not parent Emily in game. No in game time is dedicated to any parenting. There's an escort mission, that's all. I get an almost bio essentialist vibe from people calling it a parenting sim, like playing as a woman in any proximity to a child changes the genre somehow. The amount of actual time you spend with Emily is massively overreported to (imo)match the narrative that it's some kind of natalist game and hold it up next to Pragmata, a game that more prominently features a "child".

Diana is shaped like a child and occasionally acts like a child, mostly a flattened stereotype of one, but is mostly an amalgam of moe stereotypes. She's never anything but cute, energetic and girly in my experience with the game. This makes sense, spoilers, spoilers, spoilers, that she's made as a replacement for a lost child. She can not age and she isn't human, and learns to imitate humanity over the course of the game. I don't think her not being a child is a weakness of the writing, pretty much the opposite. However, if you go into parenting thinking your kid is just gonna be eternally sweet, cute and bubbly, you're gonna end up going out for milk. Kids are complicated. They feel huge emotions, they will call you out on yours and they, crucially, are not always cute. Parenting is complicated. You don't exclusively get to be a hero to your kid, not every time anyways, you have to be there for tough times and the good ones. The voice actress for Diana, no shade intended because I think her performance matches the character, reeeeaaallly lays it on thick in comparison to the voice actress for Emily and now I'm done comparing the games, time to talk about fan response.

We've all seen the posturing that Capcom is doing an anti feminism by positively depicting parenthood, that these two games are related by their depicting parenthood, boosting birth rates or whatever. It's my opinion that neither of these games depict parenthood and only one of them even depicts a child. I think that fans and tourists are doing all the heavy lifting for this one, neither game intends to position itself as an anti feminist, natalist truth bomb, but the rotted to shit state of media discourse has turned both games, pragmata much more successfully, into dog whistles. It's a shame in my opinion, especially in the case of Pragmata, for the discourse around a game to overshadow the work itself. Pragmata deserves to stand on its own two feet without the often creepy, bizarrely misogynistic propaganda machine propping it up. RE 9 deserves to exist basically without being compared to Pragmata at all.