Anime Movie Review: One Piece 3D2Y

One Piece: 3D2Y [2014]

(I'll be offline for the forseeable couple of weeks, but I do have a bunch of articles that are basically ready to be posted automatically.)

Okay, this one was... interesting? Released around the time that the Dressrosa arc was hitting the anime, the 15th anniversary 3D2Y is an anime special that ran just shy of two hours, chronicling Luffy's training with Rayleigh... in a way. One of the escapees from Impel Down, Byrnndi World, shows up and acts as a menace, and because of an honestly odd series of coincidences for him to even come to Luffy's radar, Luffy and Hancock head off to fight World and rescue Sandersonia and Marigold. 

And... I don't know. The animation is pretty crisp and nice, I have to admit, particularly the surprise new-animation-style montage of the Marineford War that opens the special. But ultimately it's just pretty... one-note? It's still heads and shoulders better than many of the filler arcs I've seen, granted, but maybe I was just expecting a bit more?

And it's kind of frustrating, because I can see that there's the skeleton of a very good story here. Brynndi World (oh god, the name) is a pirate who feels betrayed when his brother and crewmates abandoned him in the past to be captured by the Marines, and have given up on everything but revenge -- his final act in this movie is quite literally firing off a cannon that would break his crew's precious ship. There are many times where his brother Byojack has a bit of a conversation or two that seems to lead to somewhere; and there are many times where World demands from Luffy if his attempts to save his brother amounted to anything... but ultimately? Ultimately I don't feel like the payoff is quite enough. The confrontation between World and Byojack just sort of trickles off, and the fight with Luffy devolves into a pretty standard "how dare you treat your nakama like that" spiel. And... and there's nothing wrong with the latter, because this is an anime movie, but I really wished that Luffy learning to unleash Armament Haki in this special is tied a bit more tied to the story. Instead, it's just tangentially related to World's story.

And it's a real, real huge shame. Because I actually did feel for Byrnndi World and Byojack's story by the end of these two hours, but the thing is that we've got way too much buildup and hints of their tragic story, and then all we had to show for it is just flashbacks and the actual present-day confrontation feels somewhat muted. 

There is also the somewhat wasted potential of actually showing how Luffy learns Haki beyond just 'rawr me angry RED HAWK!' because the beginning of the special actually does show a bit of Rayleigh's training; putting blindfolds on Luffy to have him learn Observation Haki. I'm not saying that every fight in this special has to have Luffy learn how to use an aspect of Haki, which would feel unrealistically convenient, but I really did expect Luffy to utilize some of the earlier training to give us the glimpse of how he would use Haki post-timeskip. 

Oh, and there's also the obvious 'hey, let's toss in a bunch of popular characters as fanservice'. Hancock is the one that has the biggest role, essentially acting as a deuteragonist with Luffy; but Buggy's crew, Mihawk, Perona and Akainu also show up... but none of them actually interacted with anyone else, which is disappointing. Buggy's scene of slapping Luffy awake doesn't even get registered by Luffy at all, which I found pretty bizarre. Other than that, though, I actually did like Buggy's inclusion here the most, mostly in showing how he 'racked up' achievements as a Shichibukai by capitalizing on the beatdowns made by Luffy and Hancock throughout the story. Otherwise it's actually kind of just Luffy and Hancock taking out every single one of the goons. And... well, some of the action scenes are pretty cool, at least? Even if Hancock fighting Nightin has some of the most eye-rolling 'the anime department really wants to appeal to the teenage boy demographic' shots ever. 

Action-scene wise... Byrnndi is a user of the Moa Moa no Mi (More More Fruit) that allows him to expand either the size or speed of things, but ultimately gets reduced to just Haki-based punchy-punches in the climax. The other goons include Sebastian (a dapper Fishman in a suit who gives us a brief but very entertaining melee fight with Luffy and Hancock), Nightin (the fanservice one, leading to one of the more eye-rolling fights that honestly feels more like a montage of Hancock's character quirks and attacks we've seen before) and Dr. Eggman Gairam (who uses the Kyubu Kyubu no Mi/Cube Cube Fruit for the requisite CGI scenes).

Still, ultimately, other than some flubs aside, I actually did think that this is a pretty fun standalone adventure. It's just kind of a shame that the cast is kind of limited and I think they could've done a lot more with Brynndi World's actually interesting character, but at least it's got some pretty animation. 

Reviewing 5E D&D Monsters - 5E Adventure Modules, Part 9 (Icewind Dale)

Our last two books in 5E for now are these ones, released in 2020! Tasha's Cauldron to Everything is a book like Xanathar, meant to be more of a supplement to sub-classes, spells and other fun options you need when you build your character or when you DM a game. It has a lack of any new monsters, so it doesn't have relevance in our discussion. I've been mentioning every 5E book so far, though, so I'll also note it here. 

Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden is the last adventure released in 2020, and it takes place in the titular Icewind Dale of the Forgotten Realms. It's an adventure that involves the frost and magic-filled land besieged by a magical and terrifying being called the Frostmaiden, and adventurers have to deal with mad wizards and ancient winter gods. I haven't actually read through the book fully and just skimmed through a copy owned by a friend. Again, I'm here for the monsters!

I probably could've done this in conjunction with the Wildemount book? Oh well, you guys get two relatively shorter entries in this series. I suppose next up I'm going to flip a coin on whether I cover 4E or 3.5E's first Monster Manual!

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Chardalyn Dragon

We're going more or less in order of the creatures as they show up in the bestiary. The Chardalyn Dragon is created out of the mysterious ore Chardalyn, which drives people crazy because it's infused with demonic energy. So the Chardalyn Dragon is a draconic construct made out of said cursed metal! A very cool artwork, and I've always had a personal soft spot for dragons with a stouter body with a lower center of mass. Really like the segmented armour plated neck and that face, too, with the beady eyes and the face looking like the faceplate of a knight's helmet. The Chardalyn Dragon is sentient, too, being absolutely filled with the malevolence from the evil metal, and it will corrupt and drive crazy anyone who gets too close to the dragon. Pretty cool -- dragon-shaped robotic constructs aren't exactly original to D&D, but I've always enjoyed them. 

Coldlight Walker

This is another cool one. It's a unique form of undead formed when someone dies from extreme cold, and their spirits remain behind as these Coldlight Walkers, created by winter gods to embody winter's wrath. I do like that their corpses shamble about, but have the unique property of growing so brightly with a spectral light so intense that our mortal eyes can't look at them. The visuals here are pretty eerie, a cloaked, shambling zombie with its face glowing brightly, and the tatters of the corpse's clothing also shows that the entire corpse is glowing with this unearthly light. The trope of eerie, dancing lights in the icy parts of the world is something that I think the art team of Icewind Dale really want to hammer home, and they sure succeeded! Pretty cool. 

Ice Troll

Frankly when we did the many, many troll variants in Volo's, I'm surprised we didn't get one of these! It's a shaggy, lanky-armed, muscular snowy troll! It's a trope that I feel is very, very common in a lot of children's cartoons and video games (most memorable in my head being World of Warcraft's Troggs and Skyrim's Trolls). Like, 'troll' is one of those mythological creatures that have so many different interpretation over different cultures, that I'm surprised that D&D has been relatively tame in keeping them as large muscular green-skinned brutes. I guess they didn't want an overlap with Yetis? But this guy looks just so much more savage than the Yeti. The Ice Troll's entry here mostly describes about its magical heart, though, which can cause some real weird stuff like giving anyone who consumes it troll regeneration powers, or creating a localized blizzard when it is buried. 

Knucklehead Trout

That looks so much more like some sort of sperm whale with fish anatomy, but actual sperm whales come in later in the book. That artwork is way too badass to be just a simple tiny fish! Although, well, a lot of small fishies do kind of look badass if magnified. Icewind Dale adds a lot of stats for regular animals, but I'm happy to see a couple of fictional ones, too, like these weird trout that are just too strong to be reeled in with regular nets. And, from its name and picture, presumably headbutts you if it gets angry. 

Living Spells

Oh, hey! 5E's first Living Spells first showed up in one of the Eberron books and looked pretty tame. But these ones are so much more fun! As their name implies, they're just spells that end up turning into animated things that runs around to kill adventurers. And Icewind Dale is such a land that has a lot of errant magical energy! These three are, from left to right, Living Bigby's Hand, Living Blade of Disaster and Living Demiplane. Bigby's Hand is already a spell that's rife in being turned into a floating enemy. It's a giant magical hand! I'm not as familiar with the other two spells, but a floating magical sword is pretty simple but neat as an enemy. Living Demiplane is pretty terrifying when you think about it, there's some eldritch horror shit in the concept of an entire tiny dimensional pocket that's self-aware, able to creep around and wants to pull people into itself. 

Magen

I've never quite much cared about these sort of 'artificial humanoid races' and I honestly wish that there was a term that all fantasy settings use. Like, there are like five different kinds of these artificial magical humanoids (that are often super-soldiers) running around in Magic: The Gathering, aren't there? Anyway, the Magen here are constructs, created by magic, and they look like humanoids with green skin. They bleed mercury, and when they die they explode into fire and smoke. It's honestly just a particularly fancy golem, then? It's pretty cool and the artwork is cool, but I kinda wished that there was more uniqueness to them. We get three variants here. "Demos" Magen are melee warriors, "Galvan" Magen can fly and Force-Lightning people, and "Hypnos" Magen are hypnotists. 

Mind Flayers

I was going to put these at the back with a lot of the other 'pre-existing monster variants', but lookit these little buds. LOOKIT THEM. Look at that first chibi Mind Flayer with his too-large collar and his adorable space invader gun. And look at that second Mind Flayer with those huge eyes and two giant squid tentacles that are so large they can support his entire teeny-weeny body. Who's a good buddy? Who's a good buddy? Who deserves all the tasty brains in the world? Yes, it's you, little buds!

The lore for these chibi-flayers is because of the unique 'quasi-magical' physiology of gnomes, which, for me, is unironically the first time gnomes have ever been interesting in  D&D book for me. The first one here is a "Gnome Ceremorph", which is just a small, gnome-sized mind flayer and one where the Illithid Tadpole implantation only goes slightly awry. It retains memories of its previous life, including the ability to invent things. Like a god-damn Disneyland ride laser pistol, hell yeah. When it goes 'horribly' awry, the creature becomes a Gnome Squidling, which is described as being deformed, having weak limbs, and needs to use levitation to move around. These guys are noted to be abominations to Mind Flayers, sort of like the Neothelid we saw a couple of times before. Clearly, those Mind Flayers don't know what they are doing. Look at that cute thing that I will adopt and will most definitely sneak into my tent at night and feast on my brain!

Snow Golem

A 'snowman' monster seems to be pretty obvious and I'm honestly surprised not more fantasy games do it more often. I guess they're afraid snowmen aren't 'scary' enough to exude an aura of menace like Yetis or Ice Elementals? Well, clearly the solution is to make the snow look lumpy, the limbs and legs look misshapen, and throw out any semblance of a friendly face and just put a single, crooked, toothy mouth on its face. What the fuck is that face, that's so creepy. I like it. Being made out of snow, Snow Golems are 100% immune to regular physical attacks, something that I honestly do think that more creatures in D&D probably should be -- but I guess that's not particularly fair to the warriors and berserkers in the group.

Tomb Tapper (a.k.a. "Thaluud")

Good lord, you go from 'weird trout' to 'snowman' to 'green magic people' to this Silent Hill motherfucker. Look at this thing! A face that's just a mound of flesh shaped like an executioner's hood, a massive multi-layered set of fangs in the stomach, reverse-jointed legs, and arms and legs that are just way too long... yeah, this is a pretty cool monster. They're created by arcanists and are called "Thaluud", meaning "Faceless". As with most crazy magical creations, they're created out of the harvested souls of victims sacrificed to create them, and these souls leave their memory inside the Tomb Tappers. They also have a lust for magic, and a hatred for any non-human spellcasters, which is because the crazy arcanists who created them made them to be living weapons against the Underdark creatures.  So much creepier and cooler than the Magen, I'm sorry. 

The bestiary also describes their biology in more detail than I expected, noting that they crush rock and absorb water to gain sustenance, and, in a pinch, will digest iron from the bones and blood of their victims. They communicate to each other by skin vibrations, which is such a weird thing to imagine this gaunt motherfucker doing. And they're sentient enough to be in awe of earth elementals, which they view as 'their source'. Because they have to hunt down Underdark monsters, they can dig underground with their claws, will hunt down any non-human spellcasters, and will kill them. This behaviour to hunt down magical items end up causing them to congregate in tombs in search of magical artifacts. Very very cool. I like these guys!

Verbeeg

Oh, a new type of giants? Interesting. These guys are described to be have 'gangly limbs and elongated faces', although the artwork honestly doesn't exaggerate these features too much. They look kind of friendly, in a way! Verbeegs are actually marauders, though, hunting down and robbing people in the wild, and sometimes cannibalizing their victims. They hang out and often lead ogres and hill giants, being the brains of the bunch. Okay, so like an Orog but for giants? Sure. The nice, druidic Verbeegs are called Longstriders, and they basically worship nature gods and defend the natural world. Not the most interesting thing out there, but I appreciate a new race tossed into the mix. 

Auril, the Frostmaiden

Our main antagonist and the one whose picture graces the very, very cool (heh) illustration of the book's cover! Auril comes in three forms, like a Zelda boss, although I can safely say that the first form, this hulking, eerie owl-headed humanoid is easily the most striking and memorable version of this goddess of winter. Snow owls are already pretty spooky thanks to the shape of their heads, and plopping one on a humanoid body, giving it curly ram horns, and making her a mysterious goddess of winter? Yeah, that's a badass embodiment of winter's wrath for sure!

Auril's second form is just a lady made up of spiky ice, and her third form is just a floating ice block. Surely that's a lot more 'elemental' and 'primal' than spooky owl lady, and the second form is consistent to previous editions' portrayal of her. Honestly, I'm sure I'll be all excited to fight her regardless whenever my D&D group decides to play through this adventure, but I really don't quite feel like those two feel more impressive than the genuinely spooky owl-goddess. Oh well, not going to really complain about it, Auril's first two forms do look pretty dope. 

Unlike Strahd or the demon lords or whatever, the bestiary segment doesn't really list a whole lot regarding Auril, and that's fair. I am supposed to read through the book itself to understand who she is and why she does what she does!

Kamen Rider Saber E39-40 Review: Solomon's God Complex

Kamen Rider Saber, Episodes 39-40:

Another pair of episodes of Kamen Rider Saber as we get closer to the end of the series.

Episode 39: Swordsmen, Follow the Path You Believe In!

Last episode, we had the debut of Xross Saber, Touma's (main) final form. Oh, and Tassel's back, because... he put his body back together? You know, on paper I do like the idea of a 'meta' character that commentates on stuff and then later gets actually involved with the story, but other than talking with Yuri a bit, and showing up in the backstory segments, Tassel hasn't really been an actual presence on this show. I mean, sure, the actor tries his best and he shows up every episode, but ultimately I felt like with so many characters on the show, it's hard for me to care for many of the secondary characters in the show, and Tassel really doesn't give me much motivation to really care for him. Also, Luna has apparently reformed/returned/something-something in Wonder World, so Master Logos decides to do yet another evil plan. 

But first, our heroes re-recruit Kento back into the fold. They last did this weird ore wa Huckleberry Finn skit, and this time it's a skit on the classic tale of Momotaro. I really don't find the whole sequence as funny as they probably thought it would be, but it's appropriately dorky for pre-emo Kento and Touma. It's neat to actually spend a scene to acknowledge this, which is the exact breathing space that this rather oddly-paced show really needs. 

Meanwhile, the Shindai siblings show up and confront Master Logos in Southern Base, and it does lead to one of the better fight scenes in these past couple of episodes since it actually features Durendal and Sabela using their unique powers to try and get their hand over Solomon's sheer power. It's a lot more interesting than just CGI effects being vaguely lobbed at each other, y'know? It's pretty short, and ultimately Durendal uses his time-stop powers to essentially distract Master Logos while Sabela turns into smoke and steal the remaining plot devices. Which, uh, I guess our heroes never got back? I think I would be more invested with this if the show actually took time to actually show off where the plot devices are. The siblings basically show up in the bookstore, and while Durendal collapses from his wounds, he returns the plot devices to our heroes and acts all tsundere about returning the debt. 

While all of this is going on, we get a minor B-plot about Kento meeting up with Ren. We get a conversation that honestly feels more like an afterthought, and Ren still goes off on his own until he 'finds the answer'. And... and I really want to care about Ren. I really do. But every single time he appears in an episode it's for like, maybe one or two scenes and every single one of those are just a rehash of the same "I think strength is the answer!" "Shit, strength is not the answer, but what is?" argument... it's hard for me to really get invested in him. Honestly I'm more interested in what Desast's game in all this is. 

Touma and Rintaro face off against Master Logos and discover that Storious is working with Logos. Did they not know this? Did no one ever figure out that Logos is working with the Meggido? Didn't Reika figure this out? Oh well, we lead into an actually pretty hilarious segment where Master Logos gives a pretty perfect delivery of him seemingly about to launch into a sob origin story... before ranting about how he has no sob story or a reason, was bored, and was pissed that his clan squandered the opportunity to be gods. Nice and straightforward, I appreciate this.

Logos also gives the revelation that Touma is doomed because Luna 'chose' Touma 15 years ago, and he delayed Touma's death so many years ago with his plotting? Or something? Okay, then. We get a fight, and Storious actually participates by creating the Charybdis Meggido out of books. We get a huge battle between the four of them with lots of explosions and stuff, but it's kind of unengaging if we're being honest. Rintaro uses his Tategami form to freeze-kick the Charybdis minion to death, while Xross Saber does a 'three volume' combo and accesses yet another powered-up form and beat down Solomon. Rintaro gets a particularly fun line mocking Master Logos as 'another Homo sapiens', perhaps the best usage of Rintaro's running gag. 

I feel like I talked a lot about this episode, but if we're being honest it's basically just Touma and Master Logos clashing once more as a bit of a buffer between the big events happening in 38 and 40. And... and I really felt like they could've done more. There were some neat lines, and there's the development of the Shindai siblings into becoming essentially real allies with our heroes, but there's also the fact that the Shindai siblings and Ren were barely in this episode. I don't know. I really just felt like they could've restructured this one into something more interesting. 

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Episode 40: Shining Friendship, the Three Swordsmen

Oh, right, the Luna/Tassel Wonder World storyline. Following up on the barely-developed plot point from 39 that Luna is wondering the Wonder World, we get Tassel narrating that he's running around looking for her. Meanwhile Master Logos is continuing to monologue and is getting more unhinged, referring to himself as 'god'. It's honestly so obvious in these episodes that Storious is just stringing Master Logos around in the background that it's kind of funny. 

This is essentially Master Logos's swan song, and the episode is actually well-structured, unlike the previous one. Granted, it also has Master Logos show off some last-minute powers, but at least it's thematic? We start off with the Shindai siblings again, but Logos uses his new powers to turn Ryoga into his puppet, and force Durendal to fight against Sabela. Sabela uses her smoke powers to somehow contact Northern Base, which causes the good guys to split up -- Buster and Slash go to help out Sabela, while the rest of the gang go off to stop Master Logos from getting Luna in the Wonder World. 

...which involves Master Logos stretching his hand like Mr. Fantastic through dimensions to grab Luna, which is at least a fun visual. Apparently they ran out of CGI sky-whales and dragons, because if not for the slightly-blurry filter, I wouldn't even really know that Wonder World is, y'know, Wonder World, so it's nice that something weird actually happens there. 

The main character trio show up to face off against Kamen Rider Solomon in the real world, while Yuri dual-wields the light and darkness blades to stop Solomon's hand in Wonder World. I mean, it really happens so quickly that I wonder why they even needed to show us the team sending Yuri off on his own to the Wonder World dimension, but eh. Solomon uses his vague puppeteer powers to gain control of Yuri, and dual-wields the swords of light and darkness. He can't use it on Touma because of Main Protagonist Powers, but he forces Rintaro and Kento to be his minions. The action scene is reasonably long and takes up much of the episode, but I did like that we had a dedicated scene for Solomon vs the three riders, and then Touma fighting his buddies, and finally later on the three of them working together against Solomon. 

Because they break free with their willpower and the power of friendship, because of course they do? It's... it's pretty basic, but since we're 40 episodes into this show and they've been doing a rather decent job at making the main trio feel like a bunch of buddies, I kind of buy it. It's just that I've seen this exact same plot point be done, and be done better even in Kamen Rider shows. Kento and Rintaro both get pretty good speeches but they both resist, and Yuri also resists to help them out. Touma takes Kento and Rintaro's primary transforming books and unlocks yet another new ultimate final form, which is called... Collaborative Three-Volume Xross Saber or something? If you can't tell, I really am kind of burnt out on them having a brand new final form practically every episode. The action scene of Kento and Rintaro untransformed but fighting alongside Touma is cool, especially Kento! He summons Aladdin's magic carpet and flies around and shit. They beat the hell out of Master Logos and set him and his transformation book on fire, which seems to be the end for Logos. 

Oh, all of this is inter-spliced with Tassel talking to Luna. Tassel is friendly and all, but he basically gives a bunch of exposition, giving Luna the choice to essentially bring her 'chosen one', Touma, into the Wonder World. Because Luna is apparently the living embodiment of Wonder World. Okay, that's... that's kind of neat? And makes sense with all the cryptic stuff being said about Luna by Tassel, Logos and Sofia. It's just that... if we're being honest, the show really doesn't do a particularly good job at making me care about this particular plot point. Again, it's nice that it's being developed and that there's this story going on in the background. Luna notes that she doesn't want to separate Touma from his friends, which ties in pretty well with the plotline of Rintaro and Kento breaking free from Master Logos's control. 

The Shindai siblings' subplot goes pretty much as you expect it to. Ryoga demands that everyone try to cut him down because he doesn't want to kill his sister, while Reika panics and refuses to kill her own brother. Buster and Slash show up, but they can't actually hold Ryoga down, but around the time that the emotional climax of the Yuri/Kento/Rintaro speeches happen, Ryoga also stops himself from slashing his own sister. I mostly make fun of the Shindai siblings for the weird brother-complex thing, but this was a neatly-delivered B-plot in this episode if nothing else. 

We don't really get a solid conclusion to the Tassel/Luna bit, but all the good guys have their friendships restored. We get a cute re-enactment of the credits scene with Touma, Kento and Rintaro crossing their swords together, and Mei uses a piece of wood to join in, that's fucking adorable. Meanwhile, the final scene in this episode has Master Logos crawl into some tunnel and the pieces of the Omni-Force book reforms while he's doing this insane laughing-crying bit... and then Storious shows up, disintegrates Logos while he's ranting and demanding that Storious kneel... and then Storious steps out with a brand new outfit and some killer lipstick, essentially cementing himself as the final villain of the show. 

And... and it's expected, right? It's basically what you'd expect, after seeing Master Logos so prominent as an antagonist while Storious slinks around in the background and just playing the smug yes-man. That particular plot point was well done, though. And... and I guess at the end of the day I really did enjoy Master Logos hamming shit up. If nothing else, the actor was entertaining. It's just that... well, a lot of these episodes feels pretty... vanilla, I guess? These sort of 'friends get controlled, but break free and get a power-up from the power of bonds' stories are very common in anime, and I've seen them done so much better. And these episodes are competently structured, but I just feel like I'm just going through the motions, watching them and talking about them. They're kind of missing that oomph that made me care for, like, the Zero-One or Zi-O or Build or Ex-Aid casts, if we're taking the last four shows into account. 

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Random Notes:

• A very small scene in the opening sequence of episode 39 is Tassel briefly noting that the little fairy-spirit of Fukamiya Hayato is moving on. I guess that's all we're getting out of Naoya Kaido, huh? That's very underwhelming. 
• An actually fun little running gag in the background of episode 39 is the return of Daishinji's sword obsession. Which means he gets to obsess all over poor, poor Yuri, trapped in his sword form. 
• No, seriously, I thought all the plot devices went back to their respective owners in that episode when Master Logos became Kamen Rider Solomon. This show is honestly not very good at making me remember who is in possession of the plot devices. OOO and Build had multiple plot devices exchange hands all the time, but they did it so much better than this. 
• RIP Master Logos. He's probably not quite of a hit of a villain compared to many of the other over-acted hammy god-complex villains we've had recently like Dan Kuroto, Amatsu Gai or Evol, but he was pretty fun and I definitely love the subversion that he doesn't actually have any sort of redeeming qualities or sob story.
• So part of Kamen Rider Solomon's powers is 'Solomon Zone', which teleports our heroes into an appropriate battlefield. An in-universe reason for the sudden tokusatsu action scene changes! And it's not into a warehouse this time! 
• I legitimately didn't realize that Touma's Xross-Saber-Three-Volume form is a new form until I checked on the Wiki. I thought he just used his three original books for a special attack. But then again that action scene had so much stuff going on that I honestly really didn't care too much for it.
• That triple-henshin of Saber, Blades and Espada with their visors glowing simultaneously in the smoke is very cool. 
• I gloss over the fight, but there was one cool quasi-slow-motion sequence with Espada and Solomon flash-stepping each other with their super speeds. 
• It's nowhere as neat as "I'll write the ending to this story" declaration Touma made in 37, but that's a... neat usage of Ryoga's "do not anger me" catchphrase. 

Reviewing Monsters: Resident Evil Village

Resident Evil VIII: Village [2021]

(I have drafts of the Revelations games basically done, but I'll post this one first since it's more timely) 

So Resident Evil had a new game this year! Officially simply called 'Resident Evil: Village', but formatted with 'Vill' as the Roman numerals 'VIII', Village is the eighth numbered installment in Capcom's Resident Evil game, picking up with the protagonist of the critically-acclaimed Resident Evil VII. (I did a bit of a stealth revision to my Resident Evil VII monster review article)

And I wasn't actually hyped at all by this game at first, leading up to its release. When the trailers dropped and it all focused on the Victorian-era giant vampire goth lady, I sort of rolled my eyes at it. Like many other video game franchises, Resident Evil had seemed to somewhat join the 'let's be a bit more serious' train with VII. And that's fine! VII is one of, if not the, best-executed story among all the Resident Evil games by a far, far shot. It took the franchise in a good direction, the storytelling beats are great, and the execution is definitely spectacular. It's just that it doesn't really feel that much like a Resident Evil game, though, if not for the fact that the enemies are fungus based creatures. I felt like I had the same experience with the months leading up to the release of Village. The trailers came out and... vampires are cool. Werewolves are neat. Don't get me wrong. Vampires and werewolves and all that gothic stuff are very, very cool! I love them, and I would play video games where it's all about vampires and stuff. It's just that they don't feel particularly creative, and for Resident Evil in particular I was worried that we're straying away from the over-the-top body horror mutation in favour of just swapping one horror trope for another. Oh, we had the swamp beasts in VII, let's go for vampires in VIII.

I was so, so wrong. This game is pretty damn good! Or, at least, from what I can tell by watching people play it. But this is a monster review, not a video game review, so monsters are definitely what we're going to talk about! And since the game is relatively recent, I'm not going to describe the story too much either, unless it pertains to the monsters. The hook is that Ethan Winters, the protagonist of Resident Evil VII, wakes up in an enigmatic mountain village after an unexplained attack on his house that left his wife dead and his daughter kidnapped, where the panicked villagers are besieged by strange creatures and worship an enigmatic cult. Obviously, things get pretty horror-y as Ethan has to fend himself against the mysterious overlords of the region as he infiltrates their castles to get his daughter back, learning many, many things not just about the Resident Evil universe, but about the backstory of what happened in VII.  Without further ado...

Common Enemies:

Lycan

And these are the first enemies of the game, the lycans. Obviously, based on lycanthropes/werewolves of European folklore. In practice, they're basically just stronger, faster and more bestial zombies, leaping and jumping and generally being far more agile than the shamblers that this franchise is normally associated with. A lot of the zombification process in popular culture do resemble a lot with what's originally associated with vampires or werewolves in traditional folklore -- if you get bitten, you get transformed into one of them. The Resident Evil games mostly stray away from this and have the zombie virus be airborne or waterborne, but the Lycans play this particular trope straight. A particularly pivotal moment of our protagonist discovering the true nature of the Lycans was when one of the villagers who had been bitter transformed and essentially went feral, attacking and slaughtering the rest of the villagers. Later on, we discover that the Lycans actually 'reproduce' with the Cadou, a form of parasitic nematode modified by the Mold from Resident Evil VII, making this a more hard-sci-fi form of the Las Plagas from Resident Evil 4. The Cadou are a lot more choosy with their hosts, though, and the berserk Lycans are the result of the parasite and host rejecting each other, leading to mostly just bestial instincts. 

The Lycans are pretty great designs for what they are, though admittedly a good part of it is thanks to the next-gen video game graphics capabilities. Very angry, animal-like humans that still unmistakably look human. And the graphics team truly made me appreciate a type of monster design that I'll normally brush over -- they did a very, very good job at making those Lycan faces look simultaneously intelligent but also feral. And while we don't get much of them, they are able to wield not just hatchets, but also able to use bows and arrows, ride horses, and are clearly intelligent enough (or have a good enough pack mentality) to serve the Four Lords, the primary antagonists of the game. The 'Large Lycan' seen on the right are smart enough to cobble together a makeshift set of armour and two arm-mounted... how do you describe those? Masses of planks of wood and jagged scrap metal? 

Also, I will freely admit that seeing brief glimpses of the demos of the game which just showed Ethan fighting the lycanthropes in the village did initially turn me off, since it seemed like the game just devolved into replacing zombies with lycanthropes and a vampire lord at the end... which sounds cool for a Ravenloft campaign, but not what 'Resident Evil' is to me. But the way these lycanthropes are executed in-game both as video game enemies and as a horror monster presence early in the game before our protagonist got a kitted-out shotgun is pretty damn well done. 

Vârcolac

Next up we have the Vârcolaci, drawing from the Romanian word for 'werewolf'. Or, well, 'wolf demon', but it's essentially used as 'werewolf' as well. These are a bit more literal werewolves, since these are the results of human experimentation in splicing wolf DNA into their spine. This is still a Resident Evil game, and I am happy that even though the setting of the game is still in a Gothic vampire castle with a witch-cult worshipping village, we still have insanely impractical experiments happening in the background. I really don't have much to say here beyond praising the graphics, that really is a feral-looking monster with a lot of very creepy fur and a nasty ghoul-mouth with terrifying glowing eyes. The more I look at the Vârcolac render's face the more creeped out I am, and concept art shows an even more grotesque mouth with a mouth that just looks delightfully wrong. 

The Vârcolac are feral and are essentially used by the Lycans as attack dogs. They tend to run around on all fours, which actually seems to be intentionally made to look awkward since even with longer arms, the human leg structure really isn't meant to allow one to run on all fours. These guys are basically rarer enemies and only a few are found throughout the game in Lycan-infested areas. The red, more flesh-coloured variant on the right, the Vârcolac Alfa, is a secret mini-boss that you find if you backtrack into a certain area but is essentially the same thing. 

Moroaică

Resident Evil Village has a lot more combat compared to its atmosphere-heavy predecessor, but its focus is still on the story and the primary antagonists -- which we'll cover at the end when we cover the bosses. But after clearing the village, Ethan finds himself in Castle Dimitrescu, who are the vampire equivalents of the setting. The vampires have a long, long history of kidnapping women and killing them to drain their blood, and the corpses of their victims are infected by Mold and raised as the Moroaice, drawing their name from a Romanian folklore ghost or vampire. Their backstory is neat and I do like that they're basically just vampire thralls while using Resident Evil's internal themes as an explanation to how they exist. They sure are well-animated and stuff, but they're the zombies of this particular installment. They're sword zombos! I don't think we've ever had sword zombies. 

Samcă

Far, far more interesting is around halfway through the castle, where we find the Samce, who draws their name from a Romanian folkloric demon that takes the place of a hideous old woman that attacks young children or pregnant women. The Samcă are basically Moroaică with wings instead of arms, but that's kind of oversimplifying things. These undead ladies perch and patrol the rooftops of Castle Dimitrescu, acting as fantasy horror gargoyles in all but name. They're also kind of vampires, because those long, tentacle-like tongues lash out to drink blood. Again, I really appreciate this effort of essentially keeping everything in this game consistent with the previously established flesh-mutant monsters, but having so many of them fit into the European penny-dreadful horror monster theme. I didn't quite catch it until I saw the Samcă render without moving, but they really don't have regular arms anymore -- what used to be human arms have exploded out into giant bat wings... and bat wings are, in essence, modified mammalian arms. Except in the Samcă, you can see the origins of what clearly used to be regular human finger anatomy. Nasty!

Hauler

So despite me mentioning the 'Four Lords', two of them really don't get particularly dedicated minions, which is... I understand it thanks to the pacing of the game, and it certainly works, but man, I secretly mourn the loss of the nonexistent puppet and fish-man enemies. Instead we jump from lycanthropes and vampire underlings to the fourth of the Lords, who, spoiler alert, has steampunk cyborg zombies. Yes, turns out that all this kind of ties back into the recurring antagonist organization Umbrella in ways that I will not spoil beyond that, and Heisenberg quickly rose into becoming my favourite bad guy from this game because he has what's basically a version of the secret lab that's quintessential to most Resident Evil games. Only instead of the high-tech basements or underground research stations of previous games, Heisenberg's factory is a mixture of gothic and steampunk.  

These guys, the Haulers, are the lowest of the low, shambling around with a set of steampunk VR goggles that are apparently used to stabilize their neural activity. In keeping with the theme, they have a fucking gear-axe that looks like a weapon from Warhammer 40K, which I found fucking ridiculous until I realized that, no, this is basically what I want Resident Evil to be. I want them to be as over-the-top with their concepts.

Soldat: Eins & Zwei

But the Haulers are failed prototypes who can't fight, and these guys are the real triumph of Heisenberg's madness. The Soldats! Steampunk cyborg zombies! Which really isn't as far-fetched even in the Resident Evil universe, because I remember the T.A.L.O.S. And, uh... I actually can't think of any right now, but I bet that there are a bunch of other cyborg zombie monsters in the many Resident Evil games. The most basic one here is Soldat Eins ('soldier one' in German) on the left, where Heisenberg took a corpse, implanted a Cadou parasite in the center (it's the glowing weak spot core on his chest) and animated everything with electricity. The Soldats are, essentially, mass-produced, weaponized Frankenstein's Monsters. Oh, and they have a giant fucking mean-looking industrial drill grafted onto their arms. Because that's what you do, you graft a giant motherfucking drill onto your soldiers. 

The Soldat Zwei does feel like an upgrade, because of the very simple fact that both his arms are replaced with drills. What's better than one drill arm? Two fucking drill arms. I love how ridiculous this is, and yet it also feels so in-character for a lunatic like Heisenberg to pick the most nasty-looking drill to replace the amputated arms of his little toy soldiers. The Zwei's weak point is on his back, and he's also swapped the VR goggles for a cool gas mask. 

Soldat: Jet & Panzer

Acting more like minibosses, these two guys are even more powerful versions of Soldat Zwei. Soldier Jet has a jetpack! Or, well, a jet... head? Jet-upper-torso? I love that I can't really tell how much of this guy is a corpse, or if it's just a mass of random junk parts covering his upper body like an Iron Man armour. And I love that this somehow works. This guy's hammerhead-shark-like head looks like it's grafted out of broken metal pieces, but somehow it allows the Soldat Jet to fly around and charge at you with its drills. 

Soldat Panzer, meanwhile, foregoes speed for just even more fucking drills, because this Heisenberg fellow seem to be pretty one-minded. I love just how over-the-top this thing is, it's just layers upon layers of scrap metal, and this guy's arms just ends in drills. He's slower, but you have to shoot off all his armour before his reactor core is exposed. 

Ultimately they're not my favourite monster type. I will always like the J'avo and the Las Plagas more, and even the Molded from RE7 are nearer and dearer to my heart. But these are fucking drill-cyborg zombies, and I love the absurdity of them conceptually, and how the game still manages to actually work them into the story in a way that makes sense. 

_________________________________

Bosses:

Dimitrescu Daughters

Playing not only on the 'vampire' trope but also the 'witch' trope are the Dimitrescu family, the first of Four Houses that rule over the unnamed village that this game takes place in. They're called Bela, Cassandra and Daniela, and they basically play the role of a recurring antagonist that keep pursuing and attacking Ethan as he runs around that particular large level of the game, the Dimitrescu castle. They're crazy, and they're apparently based on the Brides of Dracula except they're the children of the main vampire character. Neat and thematic, but they're kind of boring...

...wait, instead of turning into smoke or a swarm of bats, they turn into a swarm of flies? Okay, okay, that's actually kind of neat. I like my bugs, but a lot of species of flies are actually blood-sucking. That is a nice bit of detail. But then come the revelation that the three daughters weren't exactly human, or reanimated corpses, but rather, well... a literal mass of Cadou parasites that take the form of hundreds of blowflies, and, when combined with the Mold, ends up re-merging together into the form of their humanoid hosts. It's left ambiguous whether the 'personalities' of the three daughters are leftovers of the dead women that got turned into these walking fly-swarms, or if they developed new personalities after 'rising', but man, okay, they just went into being a variant of a common horror monster trope into a monster that ticked every single column in features that I like in a monster.  

Turning into a swarm of flies doesn't only explain the vampire tropes associated with the daughters -- drinking blood, passing through walls and turning into a swarm of flying creatures -- but also the weaknesses! Ethan finds out that the only way to actually make the daughters vulnerable is to expose them into the cold, frigid air of the mountainous region outside. Which, visually, really resembles how vampires are traditionally weak to sunlight since Ethan is stalked by the "vampires" within the castle, and he ends up killing the three daughters one by one in places where he has the opportunity to trap them where they are exposed to the light -- which also brings in the cold air with them. Very, very cool and very creative. I actually do like that in the RE-universe, it's the existence of these Lords that most likely inspired the classic folktales of vampires, werewolves and the like instead of the other way around. 

Countess Dimitrescu

The internet essentially exploded with fan art of Lady Dimitrescu here, who is very heavily featured in the promotional material of this game, because she is... how does the kids these days put it? "Big tiddy goth GF" or something like that? The picture doesn't really indicate it, but Countess Alcina Dimitrescu is not just a pale, well-dressed woman, but she is a big woman. Which apparently a lot of people found super attractive. It's not my thing, but I do admit that she's got a pretty neat dress style. Without spoiling too much, Lady Dimitrescu is a gigantic woman and she's also a vampire! Like her daughters, she's transformed into her current state with a Cadou parasite, essentially giving her longevity if not outright immortality... but also causes her to develop a need to consume fresh blood regularly, which she has been doing for more than sixty years by luring maidens into her castle and then turning them into part of her 'wine stock'. She and Heinsenberg are the two most vocal and confrontational of the Four Lords, having the most dialogue and scenes among the five primary antagonists of the games. Very interestingly, while they're all nasty people who did a very terrible thing to Ethan, I also did like the little plotline of how Dimitrescu gets increasingly unhinged and furious as Ethan picks off and kills her daughters one by one, and she gets even more frustrated that her master, Mother Miranda, might see her as a failure. 

This image doesn't show it, but in addition to being a giant that's easily twice the size of Ethan, she's also able to extend her fingers into massive, tapering claws like Marvel's Lady Deathstrike. Sharp enough to very demonstratably amputate limbs. Lady D essentially serves as the equivalent to the famous 'Mr. X' in the Resident Evil 2 remake, an 'intelligent' super-powerful enemy that stalks you across a large map as you try to complete puzzles and shit, and can't be truly killed until a specific story point. 

She is a cool giant vampire, and making her a giant vampire instead of just a regular-sized goth countess is a very smart decision. Yet I actively eye-rolled when I saw her hyped up as the primary antagonist. I really should've had more faith in Capcom, though, because:

Countess Dimitrescu, Monster Form

Yeah! Hell yeah! With the new direction that RE7 was taking the franchise, I actually wasn't sure that Lady D was going to get a proper, monsterified zombie-monster form, but she has and what a glorious one she has. The designers specifically confirmed that all of this is a pun on "Dracula", which literally means "son of the dragon", so Lady Dimitrescu, based on the vampiric dracula, turns into a giant zombie dragon! And what a fucking nasty dragon she is, made entirely of mutated zombie white flesh, with giant bat wings, tentacles growing out of her dragon legs, and that mouth! That mouth that's just like seven different sets of overlapping jaws ending with a tongue that has a lamprey mouth. And Lady Dimitrescu's humanoid form is still there, bursting out of the dragon's back, albeit with a mass of white tentacles growing out of her humanoid spine and head. The end result, especially when seen from afar, gives the impression of a woman riding a dragon, which is a very cool visual for such a fucked-up monster up close. 

I really don't have much else to say here other than to just really comment on how cool this is, and how I genuinely didn't expect this particular set of enemies to mutate and transform into giant Resident Evil monsters. Thank goodness I was proven wrong! The fight against Lady Dimitrescu happens on top of a castle tower for extra fantasy-RPG goodness, and, frankly, I actually thought that it was an interesting subversion because while Dimitrescu does have one of the most major and memorable roles, she's also the first one of the antagonists to be taken out, which isn't what I was expecting from the viral marketing. 

The Baby

Good fucking lord, this thing. So after the long, classic-action-dungeon Dimitrescu castle that's straight out of Resident Evil 4, we switch genres not just to horror, but to some Silent Hill style psychological horror with House Beneviento. Which barely even features any enemies, and is mostly just psychological creepiness and a lot of creepy moments of a fucked-up hallucination causing Ethan Winters to get even more mentally screwed-up. One of the themes of this game is Ethan's infant child being taken away from him, and I won't say more beyond that. 

But as Ethan wanders around trying to solve a morbid puzzle around a mannequin of his dead wife in an oddly immaculate and modern hospital-morgue location, suddenly everything goes dark, the sounds of a baby crying starts up and this thing starts stalking Ethan all over the place. Man, if solving puzzles while being stalked by Mr. X or Nemesis or Lady Dimitrescu was stressful enough, imagine having this thing stalk you while making creepy baby gurgling noises. What the fuck, man. To make things extra worse, Ethan can't even defend himself against this thing, which makes this maybe one of the few Resident Evil enemies that you can't even harm. 

And just look at this thing. It's obviously meant to be some sort of nasty miscarried fetus of some sort, but with its head stretched so long and have it yawn so large so grotesquely. In fact, the animation for the Baby killing Ethan is by eating him feet-first! While happily going "DADA YUMMY!" And the Baby crawls around on those nasty, blood-coloured deformed arms, but the lower half of the baby's body is twisted a full 180 degrees so that the legs are oriented the wrong way, and the end result is an absolutely nasty slug-monster that... my god, I really can't do this design justice. I normally don't like these sort of gory stuff and tend to find them juvenile, but this one? This one was sufficiently disturbing. A giant baby slug nightmare thing! And the most interesting part is? The Baby doesn't even exist, not really -- turns out almost the entirety of the House Beneviento level is a hallucination, so it's likely that the Baby is just a figment of Ethan's imagination, a symbol of Ethan's subconscious fear of losing his child and the true nature of that child, like the good Silent Hill game. One of the biggest "what the fuck" moments, and while I tend to roll my eyes at these sort of things, it's well-executed enough and fits with the Beneviento House theme and I really don't mind. 

Donna Beneviento & Angie

I must kind of confess that I expected more of Donna Beneviento? She barely has a role in the actual story of the game proper, although her role in the backstory is pretty neat. She's the one responsible for creating hallucinations with the fungus that she cultivates. And if nothing else, I always really abhor the idea of haunted dolls and shit, I find them pretty fucking scary! Donna Beneviento's whole segment is essentially themed around a combination of ghosts, poltergeists and haunted dolls, and in addition to the aforementioned Baby level, her 'boss fight' also involves you navigating her haunted house of murderous dolls while chasing her main puppet-doll that she speaks from, Angie. Angie does most of the speaking for her because she's shy, and implied to be suffering from some form of dissociative identity disorder or something equivalent to that.

Again, while the puppet dolls actually do move around even outside of hallucinations, turns out that Donna is mentally controlling them because she put parts of her Cadou parasite within them. When Ethan "fights" Angie, the puppet head shatters to reveal the writhing, tentacled fleshy parasite within... though when the hallucination clears turns out that Ethan is stabbing the face of the real Donna? It's a weird and different level, and I'm honestly kind of sad that we never got a fight against a mutated Donna and/or Angie. The opening cinematic identifies House Beneviento as the 'Weaver', a very cool spider-themed scarecrow puppet figure, and while what we got is pretty cool, I kind of wished Donna mutated into a giant spider scarecrow puppet ghost ventriloquist lady, you know? 

Salvatore Moreau

The third of the Four Lords is Salvatore Moreau, a hunchbacked simpleton that seemed to draw on the trope of horror villains like Igor, though his name also is a nod on the classic story Island of Doctor Moreau, which features animal-human hybrids. Turns out that he's a bit more involved than I thought he would be, especially when his cloak comes off and we see what's under it. It's not a hunchback, Moreau is just a mass of pretty nasty-looking cysts, pustules and tumours. And in classic Resident Evil fashion, there's obviously an eyeball stuck in there, and when he gets angry tentacles sprout out and wiggle around from his back-cysts. I thought that Moreau is a representation of something like the Creature from the Black Lagoon or a Kappa, but turns out he's based on Lovecraftian monsters! And you know what? Between the aquatic theme and being a deformed fish-man, I can kind of see it. And he is a fish-man, because he actually zips around pretty quickly in the water, which is where you finally see his uncloaked form. 

Poor Moreau was definitely the one that got the shortest end of the stick as far as Cadou mutations go, since the other three members of the Four Lords at least looked reasonably normal, even if Lady D is a giant and has a hunger for blood. It honestly makes one feel bad for Moreau -- the dude's clearly a simpleton and is so desperate for validation, for his 'mother's' approval and to not be mocked by his 'siblings'... of course, he also participated in the nasty things done to Ethan's daughter and is trying to murder him. Moreau has a true form that makes the Lovecraftian-genre theme a bit more prominent:

Salvatore Moreau, Mutated Form

In his actual boss fight, Ethan has to run around a whole large area of a half-sunken village with boards and metal planks littering the place, while a massive, gigantic fish-like creature bursts out of the water periodically and attacks you. Unlike his siblings, Moreau can actually choose to mutate back and forth between this giant form and his humanoid form, and... and once you really get a good look at him when you drive him onto land, what a fucking nasty monster this giant fish is. A massive petal-like mouth, with Moreau's human form poking out of it? Some semblance of a hunchback, only now it's filled with nothing but eyeballs? And a bunch of errant tentacles? A bunch of tiny, humanoid impractical arms, and then two massive larger ones that he uses to slowly drag himself around on land? The rest of his body tapers off into a fishy tail not very apparent here -- here is a concept art with the 'mouth' closed, and yeah, that does look like something from the Lovecraft genre. 

The battle with Moreau takes place in two phases -- the first one is a combination of platforming and solving puzzles, where Ethan needs to get out of the massive lake with a sunken village in it while a giant fish tries its best to murder him. And then later on Ethan drains the water, stranding Moreau in a swampy area and he has to duck in and out while a still-gigantic fish-fungus-zombie-monster tries to squish him and create massive acid rains. Honestly, pretty fucking cool for someone set up as the loser of the bunch. 

Conceptually, I don't think anything in this page is ever going to beat the fly swarm vampire, but visually, Moreau is probably one of the straight-up coolest of the many flesh-beast mutations that we've had in Resident Evil. I think one of the ones that I really felt could've been more interesting are the humans that just turn into mere giant animals, which we had a bunch of in Resident Evil 6. Moreau here is clearly so much more fucked up than a fish even though he's got fishy anatomy, but I love that from a distance he still has the silhouette of some sort of a giant swamp fish with arms. 

Uriaș/Uriaș Străjer/Uriaș Drac

Sort of a recurring miniboss, Uriaș (Romanian for 'giant') is... a gigantic Lycan with a badass mass of beard and a big-ass spiky hammer. The wiki lists Uriaș as a single character, but I'm pretty sure you kill him twice, most notably in the Stronghold level. He sure is a huge guy! Uriaș Străjer ("Sentinel Giant") has a big fuck-off mace with pretty cool spikes, he wears a wolf mask and has more prominent parasite tentacles growing out of him. Apparently Străjer is the brother of regular Uriaș, and is fought by Chris Redfield. Another variant that appears multiple times is called Uriaș Drac ("Devil Giant"), and he doesn't have a beard. Or a coat. And he has a relatively mundane-looking axe. He's just a tall, wounded muscleman, and basically acts as optional minibosses.

The first Uriaș is actually kind of cool, and it's neat to have a 'boss' for the Lycanthropes. But I actually found it surprising that Uriaș isn't actually a member of the Four Lords, and is just a non-speaking boss that essentially gets degraded into a miniboss with his two variants. It's basically a Lycan-flavoured version of El Gigante or Ndesu or Ogroman from previous installations. A giant zombie man! This one has a pretty cool weapon and a pretty cool beard, but otherwise he's honestly just kind of there. A neat one to add just a bit of variation to this game, though. 

Sturm

It's hard to realize what's going on here, but Heisenberg has replaced Sturm ("storm" in German) entire upper half of this Soldat's body with a motherfucking airplane engine, complete with a spinning rotor. Because, uh, that's clearly where you go from 'graft drill arms onto zombies'. Clearly there is some tactical advantage to replacing everything above the diaphragm with a fucking airplane engine. If nothing else it does make for a 'fuck, don't get close' because this guy runs around with spinning airplane rotors slicing up everything in its way. I actually feel sorry for Sturm here, who actually amputated his own arms with his own propeller. He's got a spinning fan of death instead of a face, I'd feel sorry for him if the sight of him wasn't such a huge 'run away from this motherfucker' red warning sign for you. 

Sturm stalks Ethan around Heisenberg's factory, serving as the miniboss as Ethan fights other Soldats and generally runs away from the sound of biplane rotor engines before finally fighting him at the end. The poor guy even explodes into flames as he dies! Honestly, if this doesn't cement Heisenberg as the mad scientist of the batch, I don't know what would. Speaking of which:

Karl Heisenberg

Yeah, Heisenberg is, I believe, the member of the Four Lords you first meet. And what a stylish way of introducing himself, because -- and you can't tell here from still images -- Heisenberg has Magneto powers. As in, his first introduction has him levitate a mass of scrap metal and encase Ethan in it, and later on he casually just uses magnetism superpowers to create ladders that float in the air and create a massive steampunk hammer with gears and rusty engine parts he has lying around. And it's... it's bizarre. The Resident Evil universe has had a lot of unrealistic mutations, but most of those tend to involve the creation of flesh or organs. Heisenberg just straight-up has X-Men superpowers, and the game handwaves it by saying that apparently, his Mold-Cadou mutation gave him powers equivalent to an electric stingray. Which, uh, really doesn't make sense since electric rays have electricity instead of magnet powers, and electromagnetism doesn't quite translate into Magneto powers. But this is a universe where Chris Redfield can punch a man-sized boulder into smithereens inside a volcano, so I really shouldn't be questioning logic here. 

I still find Heisenberg really weird conceptually, though I will admit that making the mad scientist archetype into a crass mechanic is kind of an interesting direction. Heisenberg is probably one of the more vocal characters, too, actually at one point trying to recruit Ethan to be his ally. Of course, he eventually fuses himself to his mass of mechanical spare parts, essentially transforming himself into a giant junkyard Transformer Gundam Evangelion Doom-bot straight out of Warhammer 40K. You know what? I ain't even complaining. It doesn't quite fit the gothic setting of everything else, but giant mechanical monsters is a horror trope, and at least Heisenber doesn't look too modern?

While the game doesn't really point it out -- and the actual in-game fight is pretty chaotic -- looking at a still of the model shows that it's not just Heisenberg encased within a massive mecha or whatever. No, in typical Resident Evil fashion, Heisenberg has mutated into a massive flesh-thing that fused with the 'torso' of his mecha, which at least makes him count as a giant zombie monster. His face is actually stretched into a Cronenberg-esque screaming flesh-bulb at the end of the mutated form's... well, it's still his head, isn't it? Mutant Heisenberg ends up becoming a giant head-torso of flesh and metal with two giant construction vehicle buzzsaw arms, but honestly? I... I don't mind him all that much? He's visually the one that's the biggest oddity compared to all of the other more gothic villains, but at the same time I felt like it's also appropriate for the character. 

Mother Miranda

The cult-like leader and main antagonist of the game, Mother Miranda is worshipped as a god-like deity not only by the villagers, but by the Four Lords -- who act like scared children at the prospect of betraying or disobeying Miranda. Thanks to some revelations at the end, it's also revealed that Miranda is tied into the greater Resident Evil universe at large, finally tying in VII and VIII into the greater storyline beyond the presence of Chris Redfield. Again, I won't be spoiling too much about Miranda's backstory, only that she's really ancient, she's trying to experiment with immortality (the Four Lords are her attempts at doing so, and in one way or another, are deemed failures by her), and her source of mutation is the original 'Mould' that led to all the monsters in VII and VIII. Without spoiling too much, it's actually an interesting way to take the storyline from VII and both expand it forwards while also simultaneously building up a backstory for it. 

Miranda's 'base' form is a masked woman with a clergy-like outfit, but with ten black angelic wings. There's definitely a 'witch' theme going on with how Miranda is first presented, but things quickly go towards 'fallen angel' or 'devil'. And since the villagers basically built a cult worshipping her, it kind of makes sense that she looks kind of angelic even if all my anime senses are tingling on how she's very obviously a video game boss. I love that the fallen-angel-priestess lady is a fungus monster. 

When the fight begins, thogh, Miranda gets wrapped up by massive fungal tendrils and transforms into this form, identified by the wiki as Miranda's "Mutated Form". It's essentially the same design if we boil it down to basic descriptions, but without any of the more heroic or holy trappings. All her priestess-like clothing has been ripped off, her halo is cracked and shattered, her claws are elongated in a pretty nasty way and her wings and skirt are masses of raggedy mould. Her face is a bit hard to see here, but the upper half is basically covered with a small carpet of mould, with a single eyeball at its center. I still love that one of the more badass enemies in this franchise is just sentient, nasty mould, and this particular character is a mould angel. Or rather, a mold devil, at this point, isn't she? Very neat, and probably my favourite Miranda form? She spends the first phase of her fight in this form. I like everything going on here, and the buildup and the battlefield Ethan confronts Miranda in just really adds to the cool factor of this boss fight. 

Miranda alternates between her reular form and two others that the Wiki call, respectively, her "Winged Form" and her "Spider Form". Very cool! The Winged form is basically the same design as her default one, just with larger, more bird-like wings, and she can somehow conjure fireballs. Are they mould fireballs? I mean, I know that puffballs and cannonball fungi can discharge their spores with force. Is that what Mother Miranda is doing to conjure her fireballs? Or am I just thinking too hard about the giant scary heretic fallen angel? A different attack animation has her summon streams of what looks to be chemical fluid to create explosive balls, so it might just be that but faster?

Miranda's next phase is her "Spider Form", where her wings have tapered off but solidified into giant jointed spider legs. I am always a sucker for these sort of back-mounted spider legs, a la Doctor Octopus from Marvel comics. This one has her scuttle around the ground and try to physically skewer and run you down. Actually kind of a dynamic one! It's pretty awesome, and I wouldn't think that such an otherwise humanoid mutant monster ends up becoming so cool, and I'm someone who tends to be ambivalent at this sort of monster design aesthetic. 

The Mutamycete/Megamycete

This is less of a boss fight but more of the plot device. After Miranda's defeat, she merges with the Megamycete ("Fungal Root" in the original Japanese), which is this huge, glowing mass of... well, just fungi. This is the source of the Mold that causes the whole storyline in VII and VIII, and this is essentially the equivalent for the 'devil' or the 'sealed elder god' in the horror story theme, being worshipped as the "Black God" by villagers as part of Mother Miranda's religion. Miranda's whole plan involves the property of the mutamycete colony that allows minds and personalities to still exist within the fungal network, which is such an interesting spin on the fact that fungi like mould are arguably simultaneously a single growing organism but also a colony.

Anyway, withot spoiling the story too much, Miranda-mycete is a gigantic building-sized fungus flower with a bunch of glowing polyps at the center. I haven't had a chance to mention it, but during the fight against Miranda, the fungal network running underneath the village essentially goes wild, creating gigantic hyphae that are able to easily slap helicopters out of the sky, and these hyphae look like gnarled, knobbly trees, which form the 'haunted forest' for the final showdown with the witches. They really commit into trying to spin the mould monsters to fit the horror aesthetic, and it's pretty amazing. I kind of actually wished we had maybe a couple of levels with the Mould enemies from Resident Evil VII to further tie it in together, but I guess Mother Miranda's experiments in creating the Cadou means that the fungal monsters in the village are all just that much more advanced?

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And that does it for the bestiary of Resident Evil Village. It's a lot more comprehensive than VII, and... and while I do like that VII basically took the idea of 'fungus monster' and based every single one of its monsters on that, VII also felt very, very lacking in terms of monster variety and creativity. They did amazing work with the little they showed us, but a wide selection of weird monster variations is why I fell in love with this franchise in the first place. There are some weird ones here because of the need to homage certain tropes of classic horror monsters, but honestly? Honestly, I actually end up really liking the monster selection here. Good show, Village. Do more of these, please! And if VII and Village are anything to go by, they finally are starting to characterize the bad guys, which is definitely a huge plpus point for me. We have way too many generic 'shoot zombies and slightly mutated zombies' games in the market, what sets Resident Evil apart is how creative they can get with their monster design.