Welcome to the final chapter in Episode Four: Metamorphosis for Resident Evil: Revelations 2 from Capcom on the Nintendo Switch. This article will cover Barry Burton and Natalia Korda as they work to find out the truth behind Moira's disappearance/death, their escape from the island, and the epilogue that indirectly ties to Resident Evil 6. There will be spoilers if you have not yet played the game and are looking forward to it.
With Claire & Moira's chapter only lasting 20 minutes, I was only a little worried that the same would be true for Barry & Natalia's chapter. I was pretty sure that Capcom would not have an entire episode from an episodic game last fewer than 60 minutes when they would typically play for 3+ hours collectively. Taking into account the length of C&M's chapter though, it definitely felt like Capcom then over-compensated by making this final chapter for Barry & Natalia nearly three hours long; or at least my playthrough was 2h47m. There were so many locations and events that happened, not including the tiered final boss battle and the epilogue that I had completely forgotten about some of what I did until I went back through the screenshots I took in preparation for this article.
So Barry and Natalia start off kind of separated with Barry having been thrown off a not-too-high cliff by Alex Wesker (in her mutated not-quite-dead-Uroboros-Virus-infected state) and just fled after trying to kill Natalia. The majority of B&N's chapter is them exploring, escaping parts of the island that had not been explored before in any previous chapter, which was a nice touch because going through the same area as other characters (like the sewers but slightly different because the water had drained out) felt like Capcom was cutting corners. One area was the water/slues-gate area that felt like it could have more going on, but it just ended up being more of a location that you passed through.
Then there was the first major puzzle of the chapter, being what I think was supposed to be a shipping container crane-type device. This area involved moving platforms, pushing buttons to unlock access further down the crane and traversing obviously rickety platforms while working your way through the area. Thankfully there were not any Afflicted, Glasps, Slingers, or anything else to get in the way of the puzzle, but it really felt like there should have been more going on here. Granted there was a Gold Medal Achievement that claimed you could solve the crane puzzle in a few a three moves, whereas I probably took upwards of 15-20, just because I spent a lot of time backtracking and figuring out how everything worked. But no, the puzzle started out fun as I figured out what exactly I was supposed to be doing and how to make my way through it all, but about halfway through it just felt cumbersome with all of the backtracking and pushing buttons to solve the thing. Maybe if you did not try to get all of the items hidden in boxes or hidden items found by Natalia you could solve it in fewer than 15+ moves, but I would rather have a few extra exploding bottles and 1000 BP from earning a Gold Medal; I don't actually know how many BP that medal was worth.
The next section leads to an underground tunnel system that introduced a new mechanic, or at least I believe it was a new mechanic that I at least do not recall happening earlier in the game. For a large section of this specific area, there was a toxic gas that would not immediately kill B&N, but it did give them coughing fits and their vision would start to degrade; in-game this was translated to the game losing color and saturation as well as developing tunnel vision making finding your way through the tunnels progressively more and more difficult. The format for this area was that there was a central hub that contained platforms allowing the player to get out of the toxic gas and contained several tunnels that shot off in different directions, forcing the player to go out to collect items, unlock deeper passageways and then head back before the gas took effect. Then on top of all of this, there would occasionally be Rottens lurking around corners, and even with Natalia's enemy-detecting abilities, they would still pop up; some of the enemies were permanently grounded and would never get up in this area, presumably to confuse the player from the ones that would actually get up and attack. I did die a handful of times in this area due to the gas causing my vision to deteriorate and got turned around in the tunnels more than once.
Following the underground tunnels, B&N were led into a large mansion because Resident Evil. Yes, the mansion seemed very out of place after the look and feel of the rest of the game, but at the same time, it didn't because it is a Resident Evil game. Its inclusion was probably for the sole purpose of banking on the player's nostalgia for the first Resident Evil game and the feeling of exploring the Spencer Mansion, or the police station in RE2, or the mansion on the island in RE: Code Veronica X, or any of the other mansions that seem to make it into this series. Was it a welcome one? Sure, I am not going to complain because it did, in all honesty, remind me of the first game to a certain extent. There were locked doors behind emblems, there was backtracking through rooms, there were keys, there were stairwells down into basement areas. You know, Resident Evil. At the same time I did feel pandered to, so there was that as well.
The next area was more of a transitional hallway, but for me, it was not as creepy as I felt that it was designed to be.
Since in an earlier cutscene the player was told that Alex Wesker had used Natalia as a sort of soul/consciousness-host-type-thing (or at least that was how I understood it to be), I guess that the inclusion of dolls that B&N came across at the end of Episode 2 could be connected to Natalia being a child? And in Alex's insanity post suicide and "brought back / healed?" by the Uroboros-Virus, maybe she decided to string up parts of naked dolls all over the place? Maybe Alex sees Natalia as a doll herself, an object to hold her consciousness, and that these burning dolls are effigies of Natalia, hence why they are on fire? Then you also have to wonder when Alex went around lighting all of these candles, but that's a common fallacy in video games, so we will ignore that for now.
The penultimate area was the inevitable boss battle against Alex that was two-tiered. The first half was your standard boss battle in a large area, taking shots at Alex as she scurried up through ducts and vents to throw projectiles at you and swipe at you when you got close enough. It is battles like this that make me wonder how this would go down in a two-player co-op game. Maybe have Natalia throw bottles at Alex because I certainly did not see any bricks and I cannot imagine that they would have much of an effect. Both attempts at this battle I took control of Barry and was thankful that I had a pretty decent surplus of magnum and rifle ammunition because I had those guns decked out with mods so they were each doing upwards of 1500 damage with each hit whereas the starting handgun does only 100 damage; I just found out that there are damage mods that go as high as 20, but during my playthrough, I only found the Damage 3 or 4 mod.
The second half of the battle (because of course there is going to be a second-half) occurs after it is revealed that Moira did, in fact, survive the fall of Red Tower (due to the decision(s) I made in Claire & Moira's chapter. Barry, Natalia, and Moira leave the battle arena and find Claire outside the cliff waiting with a helicopter (something I feel like will be explained in the final bonus episode, "The Struggle." This is when Alex-Mark II shows up in all her Uroboros-Worm-Filled-Body and then Barry makes the dumbest decision of his career. He tells Moira and Claire who are on the helicopter and outfitted with some heavy firepower, to fall back and that he will take care of Alex all by his lonesome. I could see Barry making this decision if Moira had in-fact died, being a final act of revenge, telling Claire to take Natalia to safety while he has a final showdown with the monster that killed his daughter, then sure Barry, play cowboy. But taking on the monstrosity that Alex Wesker became is just stupid.
The level design here was that you run through caves/mines in the side of the mountain, taking shots at Alex as she chases you and when you make your way out, you then take control of Claire from the helicopter and shoot at Alex with a sniper rifle. This part was rather difficult with the Joy-Con, mainly because it was a controller (as opposed to mouse/keyboard) because Monster Alex is moving, the helicopter is moving/bobbing and there are terrain obstacles that obscure your view of Alex. What I did like about this transition though was that if felt like Barry was nearly invincible, either not taking any damage while the player took control of Claire, or could not be killed. Taking this into account, I tried to sprint through the mine/cave areas as quickly as possible, in one instance even backtracking through the same way I entered thereby shortening the amount of contact time Barry had with Alex. Eventually after dealing enough damage from both Barry and Claire, Barry prompts Claire to break out the big shit and you fire a rocket into Alex. I do not know if it is an auto-lock-on mechanism or if you can take multiple shots, but I thankfully did not have to find out and hit her with my first shot.
The game then goes through your standard sequence of events. Barry heroically walks back and boards the helicopter while having a moment with Moira, seemingly having repaired their damaged relationship and everyone is all smiles. The epilogue contains information about Resident Evil 6 told through Claire communicating to someone (I haven't played RE6 yet), then through TV reports and brief glimpses of newspaper articles of the events in China. Upon reaching the Burton home, we see Natalia who has now been adopted by the Burtons upstairs reading a book by Franz Kafka who had a major influence on this game, stating pretty straightforwardly that Alex's mind/psyche/soul is becoming more present in Natalia's body or has taken it over completely. So Alex Wesker kind of does win in the end, or at least her ultimate plan was successful.
With the game and story ending in this manner, it obviously is opening up to additional sequels, either in the Revelations series or including them in future RE games. I would imagine that they will have to wait some time because unless Capcom decides to go full-in on infanticide or have Natalia fight the take over of her body, Big Daddy Barry is going to have to kill a child; or it could be Moira if it's decided that she will become a mainstay character.
Now, all I have to do is play The Struggle episode before I come to my final conclusions for the game in its entirety. So stay tuned for that article to appear sometime in February as I do not see myself being able to find the time to play that story and write the article before the end of January.
~JWfW/JDub/Cooking Crack/Jaconian
Give Me Just One Night
P.S.
And like all of the previous articles, here is my score for this episode:
You know, having 72.9% accuracy considering how bad I felt I was shooting Alex from the helicopter, I think I did a halfway decent job. I still have no idea what the flea-looking-blob-things were, but at least I was able to find three of the Tower Medallions and I am willing to bet that there were some in the caves/mines that I absolutely had no time to look around for.
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