That's the only one thing I hate about it actually. It's just incredibly unimaginative.
The massive Scorpion just suddenly appearing on a train? Was it in the woods? It just shows up with no foreplay. There's no mention of it being used as an experimental subject later on like the others either. Plus gameplay wise, that it's crammed into the train car for the fight removes any interest to the fight. All it can do is walk towards you until you shoot it in the face and then it stumbles back. You can easily face it without threat of being hit.
I think the official description for it was that it was an experiment (along with the spiders) that Marcus was working on but swiftly abandoned for reasons unknown, only to somehow resurface in the forest. I agree that it's incredibly flakey and the boss battle wasn't that exciting either.
The centipede fight is also pretty awful and its behaviour of grabbing Rebecca and circling the room until you kill it is just bad design.
Yeah, just felt like a shitty version of the Yawn battle. Which is what my whole point is about Zero - that everything it does is really overdone throughout the series. I don't recall ever actually dying during the centurion battle. I just feel like most of the enemies in Zero were just not living up to their potential.
The bat is 'thematically' cool for being in a church and looks decent but it's the one example of the old aiming scheme in old style REs just not being up to scratch.
Yes! Playing through Remake HD once more right now, I'm starting to begin to learn the nuances and appreciate the boss battles. There are reliable ways to beat Neptune and Plant 42 without taking any damage. In Zero, the battles like the Bat one, are pretty fucking hard to do so. Sometimes you just have to spray and pray with the bat and if you're too close to death already it just becomes a nightmare and sometimes warrants a restart.
That being said I feel like the Church was pretty underutilised as a setting too.
The only ones I can stand are the menial enemies. I love the monkeys and the way they're introduced, and I don't mind the locust enemies either. The toad enemy is at best funny but appears only once and he gets a Magnum bullet from me every time because of his kill grab.
The Eliminators were easily the most annoying enemy in the entire game for me. Once again I just found them so unpredictable and hard to avoid whenever doing a speed run or some other kind of constrained run of the game. They could so easily overwhelm you too.
I still love the Lurkers though. I never saw them as being funny I thought they were pretty fucking terrifying but once again rather underutilised. Seeing them move through the water so quickly scared me a little bit, but that was only ever in cinematics so that never really translated to the actual gameplay.
As for the grasshoppers / plague crawlers, they were pretty harmless. I remember reading a file in the game or something saying that they developed them but then realised they were shit weapons so discarded them to be destroyed, but some escaped and subsequently breeded.
I'm pretty happy with their design though, even if they are the least threatening enemy in the game. The concept art for what these enemies could've been was pretty shit and I'm glad they went a more organic route: -
Yeesh.
In REmake, I felt like Neptune and the Cerberus dogs made sense, and even if the spiders and Plant 42 made less sense, they're not so bad.
I honestly felt like Plant 42 even made sense, as did the spiders given their proximity to the events taking place in Zero and the labs in the first game. I also like how Plant 42 was obviously built upon to create the Ivy enemies in RE2.
Still nothing's as bad as Outbreak 2. I mean - I haven't played it for this reason - isn't there a whole zoo thing going on with an undead elephant etc? I looked at the back of the box many years ago and I recall I saw a giant undead flea enemy and I swiftly put it back down.
Honestly I wouldn't let it get to you, the Outbreak games are great fun. I felt like that made sense - if the virus got into a Zoo wouldn't it be expected to see such things happen? They already touched upon the idea of fleas and other animals like mosquitoes sucking on the blood of infected with Resident Evil 3.
Capcom even played around with the ideas of Ticks in Resident Evil 1, where they replaced the hunters in the underground area exclusively in the Sega Saturn version of the game: -
But yeah don't let that put you off, Outbreak 2 is still a great game.
I think boss wise RE0 is pretty lame, the only one I think is decent is the reject Tyrant you face twice. Other than that what disappointed me most was the lack of Crimson Heads when I first played it. I couldn't understand why such a major element didn't return, even if it had been in development for longer.
Yeah both Crimson Heads and Defense Items were great ideas I wish we'd seen in other games somehow. As for the prototype tyrant, another cool idea that I love.
But Umbrella needs to learn to dispose of it's shit properly, half the shit from Zero wouldn't even exist if they just did their jobs >_>
