closing thoughts on Resident Evil 7
i finished up the last of the Resident Evil 7 DLCs i was interested in, End of Zoe. as a game, it was fun and delightfully silly (you play a guy who likes to punch things instead of shooting them, so now some of the zombies do wrestling moves instead of just trying to grab and bite you), but as a story, it really worked against the main game. spoilers for a nine-year-old game follow, naturally.
so it picks up after the canonical ending of RE7, where Ethan uses the only dose of the cure for Eveline's fungal infections on his wife, Mia, leaving the Zoe Baker, the only member of the Baker family to be anything other than an antagonist and massive pain in the ass, with a promise to send help. you step into the shoes of Jack Baker's heretofore unmentioned brother Joe, who I guess has been living in his shack in the bayou and not paid any attention to the fucked up shit happening to his brother's family for the last three years, Joe stumbles across Zoe, succumbing to the infection, and two Umbrella mercenaries who are actually trying to get her help, but this dumb hick doesn't know that so he beats the tar out of them. one of them tells him where to find the serum she needs to cure her before getting eaten by a zombie, and he spends the next hour or two punching zombies and throwing spears at infected alligators who are otherwise a one-hit death. he finally finds the full dose of serum, and then one of the wrestler zombies kidnaps Zoe and the whole thing starts over again. and when you find that zombie again... it turns out it's your brother Jack.
in the main game, Jack had been the main antagonist. he's your opponent in three of the four boss fights, he ends the first of them by telling you "you're about to witness something beautiful", grabbing your pistol, and blowing his own head off. then you find him again roaming the halls of the house, where you can fight him off temporarily but he's best avoided. the next boss fight has you hack him into pieces with a chainsaw, and it seems like he's actually for real done for this time, but after your escape from the house, just as Zoe synthesizes the two doses of serum to cure her and Mia, he appears as a giant mutated slug monster, and the only way to defeat him is to use one of the doses on him, leaving you to choose between saving Mia (who told you to stay away in the video that prompted you to come try to save her, and also cut your hand off with a chainsaw when she was succumbing to the zombie fungus), or Zoe, who's actually been trying to help you this whole time. the correct answer is Mia; if you choose Zoe she not only succumbs to the virus anyway and when you meet Mia again she's mad that you didn't save her and you have to kill her (or let her kill you, i suppose, and end the game there). but before meeting Mia again, when encased in the fungus that makes everyone into zombies, you see some sort of echo of Jack and Zoe, where Jack tells you that none of them wanted to be doing this, they're not killers by nature, and they hope you're able to destroy the source of the fungus so they can be at peace. it's really touching, and humanizes characters who otherwise would have just been fucked-up murderous hicks.
so you (as Joe again) have to beat the tar out of what's left of Jack, who had previously gotten what seemed like a definitive ending. it doesn't seem like there's actually any personality in this version of him, unlike every other time you encountered him as Ethan, so i guess it's really just reusing bits of his body which somehow survived getting turned into a big slug monster and then injected with the serum which turns it into, as best as i can tell, layers of flaky paper, like a wasp's nest. it just feels like it's cheapening the previous ending where you learn what he was like before all this happened. once you pulp him, Chris Redfield and his fellow mercenaries show up and call Ethan to let him know that they found Zoe and she's being treated, and Ethan gets to tell Zoe (who's still unconscious) that he kept his promise. so now the pain of having to choose who to save was all an illusion, because it turns out you can save everyone! and the guy you've been inhabiting for the last two hours really is just the stupid backwater hick all the Bakers seemed like at first! if he hadn't come in and messed everything up they simply could have helped Zoe right then and there.
it feels like a fool's errand to be putting this much thought into the story of a Resident Evil game, but nevertheless, i played it and i had all these thoughts and they needed to come out of my head. i just wish the team behind it could have gotten out of their own way instead of trying to do take-backsies on the emotional high points of the game.