A few players have snickered at "If you want the [D-Series] head, feel free to come by any time and I'll give it to you". Though, knowing Lucas, this may have also been intentional.
And earlier in that same conversation, Lucas remains dead quiet on the other end of the line... right up until Ethan says "We only need the head, and you've got it," at which point Lucas can't help but snicker himself.
Is Mia an innocent victim of Eveline or is she actually a cold-blooded monster who raised a Tyke BombChild Soldier for her employers with no real intention of treating her as a person, or somewhere in between?. When Eveline refers to Mia as her mommy, for example, Mia's reaction is one of horror rather than understanding. Then again, Eveline's own divisive status may influence player's reaction.
Lucas, to varying degrees. According to him, he's not under Eveline's control, courtesy of a serum from his mysterious "benefactors", and is only playing along for his own benefit, but he has the healing factor that comes of being infected and he still can see and interact with her hallucinations, which means Eveline does have a foothold in his mind on some level. Is he really free, or does Eveline just not focus on him because he's already as violent and insane as she needs him to be?
Also, did he actually murder a fellow child when he was only a boy or was that just his morbid diary fantasy with Oliver being a mere Imaginary Friend of his, making the crime non-existent?
Another one dealing with Lucas, his much more subdued portrayals in places before he became infected leave it unclear if he was always a cruel monster at heart who used his family's infection as a chance to finally drop his Mask of Sanity, or if he really was once a fairly normal, but still troubled, kid whose mind and personality were irreparably warped by Eveline's influence, even after he broke free of her control.
The Bakers' status as Good All Along also takes a serious hit with the possibility they may have ignored their son murdered a child (unless Imaginary Friend is at play and Oliver never existed to begin with). Even Zoe, the most innocent of the family, has been accused of being more interested in using Ethan to escape than helping her fellow victims of Eveline.
Eveline, as in Mia's flashback-section of the game, Eveline is far more mentally stable and tries to convince Mia to be her mother. However, she appears far more out-of-control three years later in both Mia's and Ethan's perspective, evident in her more wicked actions towards them. Is this behavior genuine? Or simply a consequence of dementia, brought by her rapid-aging which affects her physical brain as well? Or is it a side-effect from when she integrated Lucas into the Hive Mind, which rubbed off on her by accident? Or maybe some combination of the three? Word of God in the ending credits screenshots says that not taking her medication resulted in Eveline going completely insane along with her rapid aging.
Building on that, why did Eveline throw away the honest love the Bakers would have given her to start trying to force her family into growing larger. Was it because she's just an uncaring Spoiled Brat due to her upbringing? Was it uncontrollable instincts as a B.O.W to infect and grow, expressing themselves the only way they could with her warped mind? Was it simply part of the mental degeneration she suffered due to missing her treatments? Or even some combination thereof? Additionally, she actually went against her own programming as a B.O.W by staying with the Bakers in such a remote and isolated location, rather than leaving with them and seek out other people directly to infect in a more efficient manner as according to her programming. This only got more debate-inspiring with The Reveal in "Daughters" that she brainwashed them only a couple minutes after they brought her home and started taking care of her. Some players felt that Eveline, rather than being malicious, simply decided she liked the kind Bakers and wanted to stay with them longer than the "few days" they planned to take care of her for, in addition to her knowing that being given to the authorities would just result in her being locked up in a lab again. On the other hand, some found her smug proclamation that "they're [hers] now" after quickly and violently assimilating Zoe's family as proof of her malice.
The Connections. Are they another pharmaceutical company as evil as Umbrella used to be, or are they not as evil the game implies? Both Mia and Douglas are shown to be very decent people before Eveline went on a rampage. On another hand, they collaborated with Albert Wesker, along with HCF, to produce E-Series BOWs whose powers involve assimilating enemy soldiers and hired Lucas to watch over Eveline. BSSA and Umbrella higher-ups even sent Chris to capture Lucas to question about them. The Baker Incident Report in Village points more to the idea they're just like Umbrella by revealing their founder is Brandon Bailey, an uncredited Umbrella co-founder and, like Wesker, a student of Dr. James Marcus.
Angst? What Angst?: Ethan takes the excessive punishment he's given, from being stabbed in the hand to having his arm and potentially his leg cut off surprisingly well, not to mention that his wife as well as himself are infected by a fungal virus and just the sheer madness of the house and the Baker family in general. Unlike most examples of this trope, it's actually a plot point, since it's a sign that Ethan is far along in the Mold infection process.
Anti-Climax Boss: And it's unfortunately the Final Boss of the main game. After the well-made battles against Jack (both fights) and Marguerite, Eveline's battle is pretty much bereft of strategy or tension: just pumping as many bullets into a huge, all-but-stationary target as fast as you can before she unavoidably damages you orOne Hit Kills you outright.
Ass Pull: Part of Joe Baker's status as a Base-Breaking Character stems from the fact that there's nothing in the main game or any of the other DLCs that hint his existence.
The fight with Jack Baker. Is it a fair fight? No. If the player's quick enough, Ethan rams him over and over with his car. It's a fairly cathartic moment after spending some time hiding from him.
The second fight with Jack Baker, especially if both the handgun and the shotgun are brought to the battle. After pumping enough lead into him to defeat a small army, it eventually culminates in a chainsaw duel with him.
The second fight with Marguerite. As opposed to most of the fights which are more straight up brawls, the fight with Marguerite is a big game of cat and mouse as you sneak around a big green house trying to find her without her getting the jump on you. And there are a lot of special animations for the fight. Nothing is spookier than seeing a hand slowly reach out and grasp the doorway you are looking at before she walks through.
The third fight with Jack Baker. Having survived both previous encounters, he turns into a giant monstrosity with around nine eyes. Bonus points if the second shotgun is brought.
Naturally, the fourth and fifth fights with Jack, as Joe. When you win the fourth, Joe punts Jack’s head into the swamp. The fifth time, Jack is throwing room-sweeping tentacle attacks, and Joe is mocking him every time he lands a solid blow with the gauntlet.
Awesome Music: Comes with the territory, considering Capcom knows how to make awesome tracks.
The Save Room theme. It's reassuring but creepy enough to remind you that you're still all alone among a group of murderous, insane mutants. The emotion it invokes is that you're safe...at least for now.
The action-oriented background tracks, such as those that play in the DLC mission Nightmare, are very intense and fit the desperate nature of the combat perfectly.
On the complete opposite end, the tracks from Jack's 55th Birthday are pleasant and very charmingly Randy Newman-esque, well suited to the DLC's light-hearted approach.
At the end of End of Zoe, Joe finds an Umbrella powered gauntlet and proceeds to rip through Molded like wet tissue paper to get back to the Main House, all while this plays. Really gets you in a “storming-the-castle” kind of mood.
Awesome Video Game Level: Out of the five areas (Main House, Dockhouse, Lucas's Barn, the Boat, and the Mines), the Main House is easily the strongest. It's fairly creepy, full of excellent setpieces and is paced very well. The several Recurring Boss encounters with Jack are what primarily sell the sense danger in this section due to their dynamism and intensity, with each of the three major encounters (dining area, Garage and the Basement) having multiple different paths that constantly switch up the gameplay.
Eveline also has a pretty sharply divided reception in the fanbase, with fans being split almost neatly between those who sympathize with her as a Tragic Villain and those who think she's just a monster who combines being a Spoiled Brat with being a Walking Wasteland. The fact that she was designed from when she was a fetus to be this helps their case, as she had literally no chance to be a normal girl. This divide became much more prominent after the release of the "Banned Footage #2" DLC, in which we learn from the "Daughters" tape that Eveline immediately brainwashed the Bakers upon their rescuing her, to the extent that her first words to Zoe were to jeer that Jack & Marguerite now belonged to her. When taken with her general cruelty and delight in the suffering she inflicts, Jack's pity for her ends up saying far more about his sympathetic qualities than it does about hers. And then there are those who simply find her to be a boring ripoff of Alma from F.E.A.R. who clashes badly with the rest of the game's tone. The following game, Village, rectifies some of these problems by revealing she's a defective clone of Mother Miranda's daughter, Eva. Because of this, she was discarded by her own "mother" (who was even worse than Eveline), and horribly experimented on. She also, in her own way, helps Ethan by goading him into a Heroic Second Wind.
Joe Baker. On the one hand, he's a total badass who can punch out zombies with his fists, which can be very cathartic to anyone who has struggled with them the whole game. On the other hand, he comes out of nowhere as there was no mention of his existence in the main story, and many fans are disappointed that you play as him instead of Zoe and feel that the "punching out zombies" mechanic is silly and overpowered in what is otherwise a good horror game. In this case the character himself is sympathetic and no one actually dislikes Joe himself, but his being the protagonist of the side story in the first place is what's causing the divide.
One that occurred prior to the game's release; while the return to horror is what the fanbase have been wanting for years, many of the old school fans are upset that the game has gone in a direction influenced by other titles like P.T. and Outlast. The main complaint is that it's the polar opposite of 4, 5, and 6; it brings more than enough horror to make up for what the three aforementioned games lacked (5 and 6 especially), but abandons almost everything unique to the franchise in the process, leaving many to accuse Capcom of slapping the Resident Evil name onto an otherwise generic horror game simply for brand recognition. Other fans welcome the change because they feel that some of the previous installments before this one were too action-oriented. Of course, once the game itself was finally released, these arguments have died down significantly as the game does indeed remain true to the usual RE formula (albeit with some obvious changes here and there).
A late game decision changes whether you get the good or bad ending. This isn't exactly something new for the series, but the problem is that it's a Sadistic Choice between curing Mia or Zoe of their infection, except choosing to cure Zoe leads to her getting killed very shortly after and Mia eventually dying anyway, compared to the good ending having Mia survive and Zoe's fate be ambiguous. Fans haven't been pleased with this, given how pointless it is and the fact that despite wanting to save Zoe, who has helped you throughout the game, the story considers her 'condemned' alongside her family and her sole ulterior motive of wanting to escape when she's inches away from it as a vain hope. Mitigated with the End of Zoe DLC, which confirms the "save Mia" choice as canon, but also gives Zoe a well-earned happy ending.
The ending. Either it's a great finale that's been built up for the majority of the game, or it's a boring final boss so linear it's practically a Quick Time Event. Also, the fact the game ends with an advertisement for (admittedly free) DLC rubs some people the wrong way. Notably neither are new to the series and have more or less always been base-breaking.
Captain Obvious Reveal: The "secret" identity of the Swamp Man in the End of Zoe DLC is none other than Jack Baker. Anyone even remotely paying attention to his behavior can immediately see that he's male, looks nothing like other Molded, has a strong fixation on the daughter of the Baker family and even outright tries to use his famous "Welcome to the Family" punch in your first encounter with him.
Catharsis Factor: The Not A Hero DLC provides this for players who have been waiting for Lucas Baker to get their just desserts for a long time.
Complete Monster: Lucas Baker was known as the "Bad Seed" of the Baker family. A brilliant, yet malicious, inventor who once trapped a childhood bully to starve to death in the attic, Lucas liberated himself from Eveline's control but found he enjoyed his new powers and ability to "cut loose"—regularly capturing others and putting them in his deadly traps to test them out, Lucas also makes sure it's impossible to escape the traps so even if one solves them, they'll still die painfully. When Chris Redfield goes in, in the Not a Hero DLC, Lucas captures three of his soldiers and has Chris experience their deaths before trying to kill Chris as well. A complete destructive hedonist with no regard for anyone, even his own family, Lucas is a unique glimpse at a twisted, inventive Serial Killer in the world of Resident Evil.
Contested Sequel: Not the game itself (which was extremely well received) but the two Banned Footage DLC's heavily split the community on their quality, with no real consensus on how they both compare to the main game.
This extends to the final DLC's, Not A Hero and End of Zoe. While they aren't as divisive as the Banned Footage DLC's there is still a large split in the community regarding their quality. Some enjoy them and believe they tie up all the loose ends in the game and cater to different fans of the series, whereas others think the delay and time should have led to better quality DLC's or that the problems are more ingrained and that more time wouldn't have fixed them.
While he may be slightly divisive, there's no question that Joe Baker qualifies as this, as a badass old man who's lived out in the bayou alone, implicitly throughout the entire years-long nightmare his brother's family was going through, has mastered the art of killing molded with his bare hands, and will employ it liberally for the sake of saving his niece.
Jack Baker's boss fights are as insane as they are epic. If you mess up the first one, he throws you out of the car and proceeds to do donuts around the garage trying to run you over. In the second one, he comes at you with chainsaw scissors. Outside boss fights, he's just as delightfully strange, doing things like cutting off Lucas's hand and shooting himself in the face for basically no reason.
Crosses the Line Twice: Many of Lucas' atrocious actions would’ve been so unfunny and horrifying if it weren’t for his antics and hamminess.
Disappointing Last Level: The last half hour of the game, or so, has induced Ending Fatigue in a number of players. Cited reasons include less consistent pacing, less exploration, the fact that the game trades in its atmosphere for a more action-focused approach from the newer games, and the only choice in the game, whether to cure Zoe or Mia, ends up meaning almost nothing other than Ethan either saving his wife, or being the Sole Survivor. It should be noted that this endgame approach is in fact no different from earlier games, all the way to the very first one.
Eveline. She's an Artificial Human with a loveless background whose entire motivation in the story is to have a family. Some players will use this to insist that she's a tragic WoobieAnti-Villain who only does what she does because she's scared and lonely, ignoring that she's a gloating, tantrum-throwing monster who kills countless people in cruel ways for petty reasons, and whose desire to have a family was possibly a result of her design to ease infiltration. The deaths of Andre and Peter from the Sewer Gators crew? Mia returning to normal just as Ethan lands a killing blow on her? Her cutting off his hand and trying to kill him with a chainsaw while cackling? The Bakers' serial kidnappings and murders of innocent people? All of that was done by her. As another entry put it, Eveline "just wanting a family" is an understatement on par with saying that Jeffrey Dahmer "just wanted companionship and a good meal", and her "Why does everyone hate me?" at the end comes off as her simply Playing the Victim Card rather than her being Obliviously Evil, after she'd established herself throughout the entire story as being intelligent enough to know that she's causing horrible death and suffering with her whims, and taking very obvious delight in it every step of the way.
Despite the fact that he's a sadistic, murdering monster who enjoys coming up with horrific death traps and is very much Not Brainwashed, unlike his parents, Lucas Baker has managed to rack up a nice fanbase that is in no small part divided between players who think he's fun as a Black ComedyTrickster villain... and those who try to downplay or distract from his awfulness by suggesting that his murder of a classmate as a child didn't really happen (arguing it's an Ambiguous Situation due to the lack of any additional evidence to Lucas's word after about seventeen years), that everything he does goes back to his having been bullied for being eccentric as a kid, that he was a victim of Parental Abuse (for the record, Lucas mentions mild physical punishment for fairly trivial rude behavior in Daughters, but Jack's uninfected character is portrayed as kind and warmhearted, if conservative and strict), that the need to keep fooling Eveline into believing he's brainwashed is the sole or primary motivation for his torture of others (or that his brain was warped by the infection so that he stayed crazy and murderous even after breaking free rather than him really having full control over his actions), and so forth, often seemingly trying to reinvent him into a far more personable or easy-to-sympathize-with character than the darkly fun-loving, selfishly self-indulgent, and smug Card-Carrying Villain he is in the game - or to make Jack right about his insistence that Lucas wouldn't hurt anyone, never mind that it's no rarity for parents not to have unbiased views about their kids. He's even commonly shipped with Ethan, despite Ethan having nothing but contempt for Lucas and Lucas's interest in Ethan being so limited to leading him to his death that he ragequits his role in the game once Ethan outsmarts him; and Clancy, despite their interactions likewise consisting exclusively of one of them tormenting the other for kicks.
The entire Sewer Gator crew is insanely popular despite how little they appear, for their hilarious interactions, and fun personalities. It makes their fates all the more tragic.
Even though he's the main character in a DLC chapter, Joe Baker is becoming one of the popular RE7 protagonists. He's manliness personified by punching damn near everything, eat bugs for recovery, wrestle, hunt, and spear gators, and tears and punch his infected brother's head clean off. Arguably, he is perhaps one of the few people who will beat the shit out of the Molded without worrying infection.
Zoe is very popular character in both the east and west as she actively tries to help you, and her design being considered appealing. Predictably, many fans opinion goes sour if you save her since she dies, which triggers the bad ending. Capcom realizes this and created End of Zoe story DLC where the protagonist Joe Baker would successfully save her as well as Umbrella's forces under Chris Redfield.
Since The Reveal at the ending, fans had been wondering what happened in the Time Skip. Why would Chris Redfield work with the Umbrella Corporation? Did Chris join forces with Umbrella? Did Umbrella struck a deal with Chris and the B.S.A.A to handle bio-terror threats? Is Chris is keeping an eye on them to make sure they are on tight surveillance? Is it an Enemy Mine situation? Is it some sort of mind control? Whatever it is, Chris and Umbrella are apparently working together, as they help Ethan deal with the final boss. Word of God hasn't confirmed anything yet (aside from the fact that, yes, it is Chris and not an impostor), so it's up in the air about what happened. The reveal in the ending is especially mysterious considering that the Umbrella Corporation has been gone for fourteen years at the time the game takes place. Not a Hero reveals that Chris was hired specially to fight the Molded and Eveline as their fighting chance against them. It also reveals that Umbrella became a PMC in 2007 to clean up their own mess and fight bioterrorism around the world. Though Chris doesn't trust them, he has a place for the men who work under him.
A big question that is left hanging by the end of the game is: Who made Eveline? Rampant fan theories had pointed to just about every single faction mentioned in the entire history of Resident Evil lore, and some players even latched on to "Tentsu", a name that can be seen a few times on game textures related to Eveline (e.g. on some bottles in the D-Series cases), but even that can be rejected at any time since it was mentioned nowhere else. The company's name is revealed to be The Connections.
The game goes out of its way to hide Ethan's face. You can't see it in any reflective surface (even though you can see Mia's reflection when you play as her). When Mia's section starts and you find Ethan's body lying on his chest she starts to turn him around but he's taken away by the mold before you get a glimpse of his visage. Later, at the end of that section, the majority his face is obscured by the mold that holds his body in place when Mia finds him or looks at him through the security camera. This has precipitated theories about Ethan secretly being someone else, like a previously known character in the series. As it turned out, modders have found his face model in-game and he seems to be an entirely new character after all. Though, with the redesign to Chris Redfield's face in this game there's still room for speculation.
Evil Is Cool: The Baker Family very quickly endeared themselves to fans as some of the most memorable, entertaining and intimidating villains the franchise has had in quite a long time. Jack by being a bombastic Combat Sadomasochist, Marguerite with her terrifying Hair-Trigger Temper and Pest Controller powers and Lucas for essentially being the series' sociopathic version of Jigsaw.
"Family Man" for Jack, before the Bakers' actual names were revealed, based on a seconds-long onscreen appearance and one memetic line in the demo.
"Travis" for the Bladed-Molded, due to the name-tag used on a hatch containing the body of one of the Bakers' victims the first one you encounter crawls out of.
The .44 Magnum doesn't count due to a severe lack of ammunition usually, but a Handgun with Enhanced Bullets (or a Shotgun, or better yet their stronger broken variants if you know where to find them and how to repair them) can do some good work throughout most of the game if the player uses headshots exclusively and stockpiles ammunition for either. Being skilled enough to put that ammo to work without wasting it can more than justify using your Chem Fluids for crafting more ammo rather than healing on Easy or Normal. This is really emphasized with the Albert-R unlockable pistol, which turns even regular bullets into near-Shotgun level damage output, and which can usually one-shot a Molded with a single Enhanced Bullet to the head.
The Neuro Rounds for the Grenade Launcher are only kept from being this by their rarity; you only find one or two of them in the game, and making them requires the rare Supplements mixed with Super Chem Fluid. But, they have the ability to virtually paralyze any enemy you hit with them, slowing their movement to a crawl and causing them to attack less frequently. This is a huge edge in the fight against Mutated Jack.
The hidden craft recipe that a block of 10 Bullets plus a dose of Gunpowder gives you 5 Enhanced Bullets is this, as it lets you save those valuable Super Chem Fluids for Enhanced Medicine and Grenade Rounds.
The ability to Block also helps serve as this. In previous RE games, every attack that hit you typically did set amounts of damage, but Ethan's ability to hold up his hands in front of himself can actually negate surprising amounts of damage if you use it correctly. It can even prevent some enemies from doing grabs on you, which hurt a hell of a lot in their own right. It's practically required if you play Madhouse mode given how much more damage you take otherwise.
Even Psychostimulants count as this; because of the game's graphical system, the fact that every collectable icon or object with an item inside of it lights up with a marker whilst using them is a massive help in tracking down collectibles and valuable ammo. As an added bonus, it lets you avoid Lucas' booby-trapped boxes, as they won't display the marker. It's no wonder the X-Ray Glasses, which give you permanent Psychostimulant vision, are restricted to having successfully completed a speed run first. Once you get the glasses, psychostimulants are still useful, because you can combine them with separating agent for an easy source of Chem Fluid.
Goddamned Bats: More like "Goddamned Bugs"; once you reach the old house, it's filled with literal swarms of bugs located in various hives that can only be destroyed via the flamethrower. These bugs are very annoying, given that they're pretty hard to kill if you don't want to waste all your flamethrower fuel on them. Especially when you're trying to destroy the hives themselves, as it consumes quite a lot of fuel and endless amounts of swarms will fly and attack you unless you destroy it.
At one point, Marguerite complains about Ethan's "unwelcome" behavior, specifically stating "What have I done to deserve this except open my home and feed you?" These words sting more when you know the Bakers used to be a family of normal, friendly folks until they took in a lost girl who turned out to be an unstable bioweapon.
The ending of Ethan and Mia making it out alive together to continue their relationship thanks to a timely rescue by Chris Redfield becomes this during the beginning of Village, where Chris seems to raid Ethan's home and murder Mia in cold blood after everything the pair had gone through in this game. However, the blow is softened by the game later revealing that "Mia" was actually Mother Miranda disguised as her, while the real Mia is alive and well.
Remember at the beginning of the game where Jack punched Ethan and then stepped on him? Village later revealed that Ethan actually died from that attack and was revived by the Mold. This also helps further explain his surprising durability displayed throughout the game.
Hilarious in Hindsight: Peter in Clancy's tape snarkily calls Jack "Hillbilly Joe" before Andre corrects him. In fact, Jack's brother Joe does exist, and he's an actual hillbilly.
Fans figured the demo was set in Louisiana before it was officially stated to be set in Louisiana.
A common theory after the game's release was that Ethan had been infected by the Mold, which allowed his impossible healing and durability as well as explaining how he could see Eveline and see Jack and Zoe in the hive mind. The next game, Resident Evil Village, proved the theory true, as well as elaborating that Ethan has been dead since Jack first attacked him, with only the Mold keeping him going after that point.
Iron Woobie: Ethan goes through so much just to rescue his wife, but his Heroic Resolve pushes him to the point he's able to breeze through powerful enemies. He goes to the Woobie status if Mia dies in the bad ending.
Jerkass Woobie: Eveline, although the specific Jerkass to Woobie ratio is definitely a point of contention. At the very least, as horrible and cruel as she is in-game, she is still an Artificial Human created to kill who was never even given a chance at a normal life. The Woobie part of it is successfully increased in Village by revealing that she was cloned from Mother Miranda's daughter Eva, but was discarded by her for being defective. And Mother Miranda is just as unstable, if not more, than Eveline was.
Love to Hate: Lucas Baker for those who don't view him as a Draco in Leather Pants. They are well aware that he is a Not Brainwashed sadistic mass murderer and are horrified at the fates he gives his victims, but still love him anyways because of his Black Comedy antics and for his unique MO as a Serial Killer in the Resident Evil franchise.
Memetic Badass: Joe Baker is slowly getting this reputation among the Resident Evil Fandom thanks to being a Mountain Man who fends of the Molded with just his fists, spears and all other assortment of weapons. With many lamenting the fact that they should've played him from the beginning, while others are also lamenting that they're lucky Joe didn't become infected with the Mold and became Ethan's enemy which would make him an even bigger threat than Jack Baker.
Pretty much when the Bakers were infected by Eveline. After that, they succumbed to a hive mind that forced them to kidnap, murder, and cannibalize, turning the rest into the dreaded Molded in their basement. The Banned Footage DLC dives more into this, showing that Eveline infected the Bakers with almost malicious glee the moment they rescued her and took her in.
Lucas has well crossed it by now considering that he managed to escape from Eveline's control and instead of doing anything to try and help his parents escape too, he abandons them to their fates as Eveline's puppets because he thought the chance to kill people with creative death traps was too much fun to pass up.
Narm: It may not be as bad as the other games in the series, but it's still there.
Narm Charm: The Bakers, being the mutant cannibalistic swamprats they are, should be ridiculous antagonists, but manage to be genuinely scary thanks to a perfect mixture of Camp and creepy.
The idea of Resident Evil as a first person title has been shopped around since the development of the very first game. Plus, there's an option in Code: Veronica's Battle Game and the Survivor games have combat in first person and light gun elements.
The implicitly supernatural tone of the game isn't new since Resident Evil 4 was conceived with hallucinations/supernatural foes in mind. For that matter, the idea of exploring a haunted house calls to mind the original game's own Spiritual Predecessor, Sweet Home (1989), whose titular location was called "The house of residing evil."
Although you do ultimately return to the house afterwards, some have criticized the last few levels of the game for taking place inside a laboratorial tanker and later an underground base. However, this isn't really any different from previous games as you're eventually taken into a lab or base of some sort near the end.
One general criticism of the game, both before and after its release, is that Capcom was drawing too much inspiration from other popular horror series such as Outlast. This isn't a new thing, however, as the classic style present in the first games in the franchise was largely taken from Alone in the Dark- another popular survival horror series of its time made by Western developers.
The Block feature. Ethan is not the first to utilize that. Mark Wilkins is the first Resident Evil character to have said feature known as "Guard", albeit in Fixed Camera Angles and not 1st Person Mode.
Paranoia Fuel: The silent, wheelchair-bound old woman who sporadically appears throughout the house. She doesn't do anything, say anything, and you can't interact with her at all. She just sits there, watching. And this feeling only gets much worse with The Reveal toward the end of the game.
Realism-Induced Horror: Lucas isn't too far behind Chief Irons in this department, despite operating on a much smaller scale than the likes of the Umbrella Corporation, Wesker, and the Los Iluminados. In real life, you'd probably be very unlikely to run into mad scientists or a virus-enhanced superhuman, but Lucas could really be any weird kid you knew in school, who happens to have predatory, malignant tendencies just waiting for the right situation to unleash them.
Replacement Scrappy: One of the common complaints about Ethan is that he isn't interesting enough to be considered as the protagonist, in contrast to fan-favorites Chris Redfield and Leon S. Kennedy, as well as one-time protagonists such as Billy Coen, Carlos Olivera, and Jake Muller. Village would rectify this by making him emotive enough so he'll have a better reason to rescue his missing daughter.
Scrappy Mechanic: Many fans have criticized how slow the movement speed is in the game. Fans were also annoyed that even using the unlockable running shoes doesn't increase the movement speed of your running, only increasing your walking speed. CAPCOM would then listen to these complaints and fix it in Resident Evil Village, making the movement speed much faster.
Scrappy Weapon: Both the burner and machine gun are almost universally considered to be the worst weapons in the game. They both have very weak damage output and require massive amounts of ammunition to kill even the weakest Molded. Bullet for bullet, even normal handgun rounds are more effective. That being said, the Burner is a very useful tool for clearing away bugs, enemy and obstacle, in the Old House section where you assemble it, and can get a last hurrah as a really good weapon against area boss Marguerite Baker, even if it's atrocious against ordinary molded, while the late game gives you a whole lot of machine gun ammo to burn through. You're using a ton of it, yeah, but it gives you a ton to burn through.
Self-Imposed Challenge: It is possible to use the knife only. While it can be hard in boss fights, it's not impossible. The final end of the game will automatically drop Ethan if he does not have a gun in his inventory as he is required to finish off the final boss with specialized Albert-01.
Texture pop-in can be quite noticeable at times. Seeing how you'll never face any loading screens during normal gameplaynote Aside from transitioning to new characters, as in the VHS tapes or the Tanker segment unless you dart from one end of the map to another as fast as possible, having to look at a some low-res textures for a few seconds is mostly considered a small price to pay.
Ordinarily, reflective surfaces are either shattered or too dirty to show Ethan's reflection. The TV that Lucas set up in his trap house isn't, though, so it perfectly shows the chair you sit in while you don't appear in the reflection at all.
Some sections with lots of environmental effects (such as the massive amount of bugs falling from the ceiling in one part) are very low-res. However, unlike the other two, it's not too noticeable if you aren't paying attention.
The Beginning Hour demo is basically a less cerebral P.T., from reinventing itself as a first-person photo-realistic horror game to initially presenting itself as a project completely unrelated to its given franchise. Capcom has stated this to be a coincidence, given that Resident Evil 7 was actually in development since before P.T. came out. However, both titles shared a design lead in Jordan Amaro, a Konami designer who worked with Hideo Kojima on both P.T. and Metal Gear Solid V.
Being that its an immersive first-person Survival Horror with melee combat, powerful firearms limited by rare ammunition, and taking place in a run-down locale, a number of people consider it the closest thing to a new Condemned game that's likely to happen.
The main character even has the same first name. They are both called Ethan.
Later gameplay trailers gave a Clock Tower feel because of the Action Survivor protagonist going against few but really threatening antagonists, while keeping the data collecting and reading that it's a staple mechanic of survival horrors.
The mutant family is introduced with a dinner scene straight out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with the rundown house in the blazing Louisiana sunlight calling to mind season one of True Detective.
The final act of the game starting with the wrecked tanker all the way to the end could be forgiven for feeling like another expansion pack for First Encounter Assault Recon.
The "Bedroom" DLC features Marguerite tending to a captive and desperate to escape Clancy, with her mood swinging wildly between caring and violent, and her reacting incredibly poorly if she realizes Clancy's trying to get away. It has shades of Annie Wilkes.
The game is about a run-down house in the middle of nowhere inhabited by an evil force that possesses people and makes them Nigh-Invulnerable as they act hammily evil, and it's up to one man to fight his way out of this monster-ridden mess. As the game itself references, this all sounds a little... Groovy.
The kitchen of the Beginning Hour demo is filled with rotten food, a lot of which is covered in bugs. There's also what appears to be a cooked, unplucked, whole raven in the microwave.
During the trailer, there's a fast-forwarded time lapse of a wolf's body decomposing. The way the body just kind of collapses in on itself can make some people squirm.
Body Horror has been a staple in the franchise, but now? Ethan gets his left hand chainsawed off and stapled back on, Jack's pulsating brain is put on display after a self-inflictedwound, the very premise of the Molded. Needless to say, for those squeamish about gore, this is not exactly going to be fun for them.
For those who can handle blood and gore, there is a different kind of squick. Pretty much everything about Marguerite, her bugs and especially her second form which features what looks like an insect hive inside her vagina.
Stress-Relieving Gameplay: The End of Zoe DLC, rather than have the slow and careful inventory management style of the rest of the game, has you play as an Awesome Boxing Battler hillbilly that punches the monsters to death and shows absolutely no fear through the entire story.
That One Achievement: "You Gotta Know When To Hold 'Em" is an exercise in patience and sheer luck, both of which combined make for one painful achievement. The requirement is simple: Beat the Survival+ mode in the 21 DLC. Unfortunately, simple does not mean easy, as Lucas' version of Blackjack is heavily rigged against you. You need to defeat 10 opponents in a row without dying, which isn't helped by the fact that any progress on your doom counter is permanent. While you can unlock some powerful trump cards that you can and must use to sabotage your opponents, even that only helps so much since your opponents have a strong tendency to draw the best possible card for them. To make matters even worse, unlike regular Survival mode which used the finger guillotine, Survival+ uses the electric execution device for betting. This may have the benefit of giving you a bit more room for error, but it also means enemies require twice the amount of effort to take down and have more time to screw you over, which makes an already long game session downright tedious. A single attempt can take well over an hour, and if you lose a single match it's all the way back to the beginning.
On Madhouse mode, the very first boss, Mia, is a serious gatekeeper for the rest of the game. You have limited ammunition and medical supplies and the boss is a major bullet sponge, so unless you're really, really good at landing headshots (it takes 21 of them, and you've got a maximum of 27 bullets) you're probably going to have to finish the boss off with the axe. You can't even fall back on unlocks or pre-order bonuses to help, since those are all contained in the item boxes, and you don't find one of those until after the boss fight. Winning requires a combination of skill (to score headshots and block the incoming chainsaw), patience (to wait until you have a good shot lined up and not frantically waste ammo), and the knowledge that she can be lured into destroying the wall separating the main attic area from the room where you found the pistol (creating enough space for you to keep your distance while you work on the other two things).
The second fight with Jack can be a massive roadblock, especially if you've been liberal with your ammo usage up to that point. The first phase isn't bad, being essentially a regular encounter with him in an enclosed space where you have plenty of obstacles to keep him at a distance, but in the second phase, the famous chainsaw duel, he becomes a Damage-Sponge Boss with a litany of devastating attacks who you need to stun before you can damage him with the chainsaw. While he's still vulnerable to gunfire in this phase, he has so much health you'll probably run out of bullets before the end, requiring you to master the slow and awkward moveset of the chainsaw to take him out, all while dodging his unblockable One-Hit Kill attack and managing your fuel supply. You can open him up for heavy attacks by kicking body bags at him, but the positioning is finicky and if you don't hit him at just the right distance, it'll bounce right off doing nothing. To make matters worse, he can cut down the body bags with some of his attacks, reducing your options even further. It's an appropriately panic-inducing fight where you are definitely the underdog.
Marguerite is a very hard-hitter in normal mode. She has a tendency to crawl on walls and pounce on you, and those pounce attacks hit hard. Even if you are well prepared, get ready for a fight for your life when she does a bite attack. Especially said pounce attack smacks you to the ground when you're from Fine to Dying status. For added fun, she'll occasionally stop to produce hives which, if not interrupted, will spawn an entire swarm to attack.
The "Barn Fight," again on Madhouse mode. The Fat Molded are given a massive buff to their speed and defense, and now there's two of them you have to deal with, which is the worst part by far: You can't play ring-around-the-haybale to keep your distance because they both close in from opposite sides, and you can't effectively defend yourself against their vomit spray because even if you successfully block one, you'll be left wide open for the second to hit you. Those who beat easy and normal modes without getting much use out of the grenade launcher are in for a very rude awakening if they assume they won't need it here.
The Final Boss of the Survival+ mode in the 21 DLC is an undead version of Hoffman with knives embedded into his skull. Not only does he have the highest luck in the game and almost always draws to 21, but his most diabolical advantage are his two special trump cards: "Dead Silence" and "Oblivion". The former is a slightly nerfed version of Lucas' broken "Desperation" card from the story mode, completely preventing you from drawing any cards if you can't get rid of it. The latter is even worse. Unless you have a "Destroy++" trump card (which prevents your opponent from playing his own trump cards) on the board, Hoffman can just use "Oblivion" if you think you have him on the ropes to cancel the current round, which especially hurts if you just tried to use your most powerful trump cards.
That One Level: The entire Tanker section where you play as Mia, thanks to encountering plenty of enemies well before you find a way to defend yourself, a scarcity of healing items, having no way to tell just how much damage you've taken and being stuck with the machine gun as your primary weapon for both segments (you only start with one and have a codex in the flashback segment, but it also has no savepoints). On Madhouse difficulty, it's not much of an exaggeration to say you're as good as unarmed until you can get your hands on some remote bombs; nothing else you find packs enough punch to use against Fat Molded, and the place is positively stuffed with the fucking things.
In order to get the "True" ending, the "Midnight" version of the Beginning Hour demo requires you to evade or kill the Molded creature without getting hit by it in the very small, cramped basement area. This doesn't sound too bad at all, until you find out that blocking its attack counts as "getting hit," the hanging bodies you can kick into the Molded have a 50/50 shot of passing through the damn thing without knocking it down, and it reflexively charges to attack you if you shoot it in the head. Thank goodness the reward for accomplishing this isn't necessary in the main game, because it is ridiculously hard to get out of the basement completely unscathed unless you're very skilled or very lucky.
In Joe Must Die mode in End of Zoe, in order to unlock infinite ammo, you have to beat those Extreme + challenges and you can Earn Your Fun, right? Well unfortunately, Joe Must Die is not a forgiving mode, even if you somehow manage to beat it with your sanity intact. The mode itself is just as difficult as Madhouse in the main story, and some of the challenges preventsyou from using two gauntlets to breeze through them. The timer runs quicker than normal mode's challenges which means unless you know how to strategize your path and defeat your enemies quickly, you are really gonna have a bad time.
The shift from the two previous third person perspectives to being first-person caused enough of a Broken Base that some fans believed that RE7 would end up being the game that kills the franchise, which is rather ironic considering the outrage over the fifth and sixth games. This died down a bit once the game was finally released.
The main premise of the game has the main character arrive at a location infested with monsters after receiving a message from his believed to be dead wife. Many have been quick to draw comparisons to the sequel.
Mia and Mary have both even been believed dead for the same amount of time; 3 years. Unlike Mary, however, Mia is begging her husband to stay away, outright telling him to just forget about her and move on.
The games opening with a message from Mia that is expanded on later, and her swinging from a normal look to a grungier, monstrous form that seeks to harm Ethan resembles Nicole Brennan a little.
A criticism the game faced is that it has little-to-no connection to the events of previous installments, outside of the appearance of Chris Redfield and several call-backs in a rather short DLC (as far as we can tell). As such, many fans feel like the game comes off more like a reboot or spinoff than a mainline sequel game.
Eveline's death and her lamenting that everyone hates her could've been more developed and well played if it happened after the climax, rather than having her turn into a gigantic tentacle monster and cursing you throughout most of her battle right on the spot. Then again, it is possible Eveline was never meant to be a likable character to begin with, as she did cause the Baker family to do the messed up things they did.
Giving Zoe the serum only results in her dying shortly afterwards anyway, and Mia being a penultimate boss fight who you have to kill while everything else besides the ending is essentially the same no matter which choice you make. The developers could've made it so Zoe could serve as a rather interesting support role or even maybe playable, but the plot only works if Mia makes it to the ship and condemns Zoe no matter what you do.
The game takes place in a Louisiana swamp... And there isn't a single alligator BOW in the main game. There is one introduced in a DLC, however.
Unexpected Character: While she's not physically present in the game itself, fans definitely weren't expecting to see an article written by Alyssa Ashcroft to appear after all these years.
Win Back the Crowd: While fans are somewhat split on the first-person perspective and similarity to P.T., the reveal quickly won over many of those who've been desiring the series' return to its horror roots for years. Furthermore, professional reviews have been much more positive compared to the previous installments.
The Bakers themselves, with the exception of Lucas, were victims in the whole situation as well. Three years before the events of the game, they were decent people who found a young girl in a wrecked tanker and took her in out of the goodness of their hearts. In return, Eveline infected them all with her powers and turned them into crazed killers. Jack and Marguerite Baker ended up mutated beyond recognition, forcing Ethan to kill them; near the end of the game, Jack is genuinely distraught that his wife is dead, and when he thinks an irreversible death through the cure you inject him with is coming, he embraces it gleefully.
Zoe Baker in particular, had managed to fend off Eveline's control, but couldn't escape because she was still infected. She's still stuck on her family's property, desperate to get away while her own parents have been completely taken over by Eveline and her brother is indulging in pure sadism. The Bakers treat her with contempt, and you can even find a note by Marguerite claiming she wished the girl had never been born. And even if you do take the steps to cure her... it doesn't work and Eveline kills her as she pleads in terror.
Clancy, big time. While the other members of the Sewer Gators suffered painful but rather quick deaths, Clancy was instead kidnapped and tortured for a while. If we take the DLC at face-value, he was tied to a bed and stabbed by Marguerite as she tries feeding him human organs and then electrocuted as he had to play a high stakes game of Blackjack with another prisoner rung up by Lucas. After being forced to watch the other man die from having a running saw go through their face, a rightfully mortified Clancy is then told by Lucas that he has another game in mind. If you watched the 'Happy Birthday' tape,you know how this ends. Poor guy needed a hug badly.
", which was played during the trailers.