Highlights

  • Resident Evil Village learned from its predecessor's success by enhancing enemy variety and creating a dysfunctional family drama with interconnected antagonists.
  • Lady Dimitrescu's presence in Village avoids the oversaturation that Jack Baker arguably has at the cost of less screen time.

Resident Evil 7’s impact can’t be overstated concerning how it propelled the survival horror franchise even further into the stratosphere and allowed it to reinvent itself once again. The Resident Evil remakes definitely had a helping hand to lend in that reinvention, but without Resident Evil 7’s drastic swing back toward legitimate horror it’s unclear if Resident Evil would be nearly as prominent as it is today. Resident Evil Village would then follow it with another dramatic shift and it’s interesting to see how well one worked compared to the other and what a Resident Evil 9 could learn from both.

Resident Evil Village is easily one of the wildest direction transitions the series has taken thus far with a fantastical landscape and monstrous enemies. Here, it’s perfectly evident how Village learned from Resident Evil 7 when it came to buffing its enemy variety. Like Resident Evil 7, Village is also primarily a dysfunctional family drama where its key antagonists are interconnected. At face value, though, some villains or bosses in the series’ seventh and eighth mainline entries deserved one another’s role; for example, Jack Baker arguably overstays his welcome while Lady Alcina Dimitrescu is underutilized.

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Jack Baker is Around Nearly Every Corner in Resident Evil 7

Jack has three boss fights—five including Resident Evil 7 ’s End of Zoe and Nightmare DLCs .

To be fair, a single antagonist having multiple boss fights and at different stages of evolution isn’t uncommon for Resident Evil. In fact, it’s a classic trope of the series dating back to the original Resident Evil 2 with William Birkin. Plus, many players may adore Jack and therefore admire how often he reappears in Resident Evil 7, showcasing his hilarious unwillingness to die and how malignant the Mold is as a newfound bioweapon variant.

So to say Jack overstays his welcome may be undeserved, though when Marguerite’s lone boss fight is debatably far more engaging and memorable than any of Jack’s it points to an issue with Resident Evil 7 regurgitating Jack ad nauseam and to the point of becoming a trivial foe. Jack’s resiliency is narratively significant but results in him not being as impactful in gameplay, particularly because his boss fights in the base game are all toe-to-toe bouts in claustrophobic rooms with a new gimmick involved in each one.

Lady Dimitrescu is Buried Beneath Other Antagonists in Resident Evil Village

If Lady Dimitrescu served Jack’s role in Village and had multiple boss fights with new gimmicks in each, Village wouldn’t have had to rush her transformation into a hulking white dragon-esque creature. Village technically featured repeat boss fights with the Dimitrescu daughters who are all individual characters sharing near-identical fights in unique locations, whereas no other boss has multiple fights of their own.

That said, Village also has more antagonists than Resident Evil 7 and consequently more charismatic personalities that the sequel needs to split time between. But while Donna Beneviento and Moreau are more or less fleeting spectacles, Lady Dimitrescu had an incredible presence without even considering why she enamors many fans in particular.

Lady Dimitrescu’s regal rage makes her a phenomenal antagonist, even if her pursuer role in Castle Dimitrescu isn’t nearly as intimidating or challenging as Mr. X’s in the Resident Evil 2 remake. As a polar opposite to Jack, Lady Dimitrescu’s terror and intrigue are almost fully derived from how little players see her. Having much more of Lady Dimitrescu in Village might’ve sullied this mystique around her, so perhaps it was the right choice on Capcom’s part; still, it’s difficult to imagine that’s possible with Jack being such a beloved, fan-favorite character despite how oversaturated he is in Resident Evil 7 and its DLCs.