Trophyhunting Anonymous - Resident Evil Village

Originally written on Cohost November 13, 2022

RE Village marks Platinum trophy #254 on my long list of completed games over many years. It's actually been a bit over a year since I originally beat and completed everything to do with Village's main story content (all its collectibles, difficulty modes, among other things) and it was all a lot of fun to do, but the single trophy related to the series' Mercenaries mode eluded me due to a general lack of interest.

I've actually enjoyed the mode in prior games (with RE5's being the highlight of the whole game), but something about Village's take on it always felt really tiresome during my early attempts. It felt really annoying to try and string long enemy combos due to their placement and lack of aggresion, Ethan's kit (who was the sole playable character at the time) always felt really underpowered, and it often felt hard to suss out what the "correct" path to follow in a stage was due to the first person POV. It made for a really frustrating experience where a bit of AI RNG often dictated whether or not you reached the arbitrary point milestone to get the required S ranks.

Lacking motivation, I put down the game for a long while until something changed. Which it did, even if it took a while.

With the Winter's Expansion released, Mercenaries got a plethora of changes rolled into the base game directly addressing the very reasons I'd originally given up on the mode, from more aggressive enemies that pushed towards you rather than lingering around to slightly shifted around enemy placements so planning out a "route" was a lot more intutituve. Chief among those changes though is the addition of multiple new playable characters; of which I'd be abusing Mr. Chris Roidfield and his punching abilities. He's supposed to be "balanced" around not being able to use healing items or block to avoid incoming damage, but his superior weapons and aggressive abilities (including, unsurprisingly, the ability to punch enemies straight up) still make short work of areas where Ethan struggles to get by. He makes short work of the rebalanced enemies and stages, making the whole thing a much more fun experience.

The DLC also adds Heisenberg and Lady D as playable characters, but they require playing the new stages which I haven't done yet. I probably won't put too much time into that though, since I don't enjoy The Mercenaries THAT much to replay it on my free time.

I'm still not quite done with the rest of the DLC, as I'm also missing a run of the main DLC campaign on its highest difficulty, but just getting the base Mercenaries content done felt like enough of an achievement to mentally cap this off and write about it. The PS5 version will then likely be Platinum trophy #255 once I transfer the save over, but we don't talk about those kinds of illicit trophies...

Final thoughts -

Man, what a game. Despite its many shortcomings as a "horror" experience, I still can't help but think fondly on my time spent with it. It may not be as inherently creepy as the game that came right before it, but Village remains a much more fun ~game~ to play with its much improved gunplay, enemy variety and stage layouts. I'm glad the DLC exists to give some underused areas from the main game one last last hoorah before shelving the Winter's story for good. I'm eagerly looking forward to what Capcom cooks up next in the series, after RE4R is done being a kinda pointless remake.