I mean, making it a personal story probably already makes it better than the batshit insanity of the last one
That's very true, but I thought my posts, or at least the last one made it clear I was more revolted by the poor game design than I was by the writing. If you went into a Mikami game expecting a good story, I'm not sure what to tell you. I love God Hand, Vanquish, REmake, Resident Evil 4, etc. as much as the next guy but it's certainly not for their stories (killer7 doesn't count, Suda51 was blatantly largely part of that writing process). You can argue there is charm to the writing in most of those, sure, but the story itself is usually either very simple or very dumb, usually both. Though the fact you're constantly just warping around with no context for anything happening certainly hurts the tension and atmosphere in general.
I don't remember Evil Within that well to be entirely honest and am going to give it a second go for fairness sake, but I will talk about what I do remember.
My problems with that game can largely be summed up by the opening, it is a boring slow walking scripted section where you're barely playing the game, which makes it far less interesting than any other scenario and there are multiple scripted sequences throughout the game like this, there are also just sequences where you run through small linear area where the monster chasing you practically just serves as a time limit, since it's just an instant kill once it gets near you, this isn't scary, it's tedious and it's what serves for most of the boss fights. Speaking of not being scary, going back to the opening, you can only shove so much gore on the screen with no context other than LOOK BLOOD SCARY OOOOOOO before it removes all meaning at all points. Ruvik's mansion was also tedious since you just get some sort of arbitrary time limit before instant kill guy appears and you have to hide and then he's gone again only to come back so scary. I don't even remember if I died more than once or twice in the game (only death I remember was when the regular enemies upgraded to having instant kills with the things coming out of them but the game doesn't inform you of this), but it was just not a fun experience. Also I played it on release so it was buggy as fuck and on PC unoptimized as could be, when the first invisible enemy showed up I thought the game forgot to render them.
The one thing I actually remember liking was the Safehead bossfight and I don't even remember why, but since there has been so much occasion for shit talking the game now that a sequel has been announced I feel like I'm being unfair because I don't remember most of it. And hey, I had high expectations going in the first time, I love Mikami, God Hand and killer7 are probably my two favorite games, but now I'm going in with low expectations and may probably just enjoy it for what it is this time because I can't be disappointed. I will probably stand by my statements about bad game design, but maybe I'll like the "experience".
