Resident Evil Village [SPOILERS] Do not pick VoS on NG

Intro

 
Spoilers ahead. 
 
VoS refers to Village of Shadows difficulty, which normally unlocks after you beat the game once, however pre-order gives it to you from the get go. 
 
Bellow will be presented 4 sequences, and why they were designed bad. 
 
I also want to point out that no difficulty needs to be balanced towards NG+, since it gives you infinite ammo. So any difficulty should be beatable on NG. 
 
 

Exhibit 1: Ambush in the village

 
This refers to one of the starting moments of the game, when you face an ambush by furries lycans. 
 
This sequence normally lasts about 5 minutes, and throws a lot of enemies at you, while giving scarce ammo. (I believe it is designed like this in order to teach you not to engage all enemies). 
 
VoS additions include fire arrow dudes on the roof, armored lycan in the basement and VoS health bars. I also think that it adds whole another minute on top of that five for you to survive. This sequence is mostly beaten by abusing AI and running around in circles, trying to waste as much time before using shelves, which are blocking doors. 
 
It took me about 3 hours to beat, and required precise positioning before starting encounter, starting it not the meant way (I shot a guy on the roof to abuse AI, so that I can gather all of the first waves behind me and block them with first shelf. Normally you enter house and step on the glass to trigger it). 
 
 

Exhibit 2: First daughter of Lady D

 
After you beat ambush it’s all smooth till you get to same section which was presented in Castle Demo. This involves catacombs section, and the next encounter with first daughter of Lady D, followed by a mini boss fight. 
 
I will point that even regular enemies take a lot a bullets to kill. If in previous section you were meant to run, here you need to fight them. 
 
So, after you get ambushed by her and rush to a crack in the wall with the wooden planks, the fight ultimately starts. Main difference from the normal fight is that VoS also spawns 2 enemies from the catacombs to assist her. All of this happens in a very small room and corridor, with no room to wiggle (because it has 3 enemies). Add giant health pools of 2 mobs (2 point-blank shots with upgraded shotgun do not kill them) and even bigger HP of boss herself, and you start looking for cheeses. Except there are no cheeses. 
 
I managed to beat her by loading back, purchasing pipe bomb recipes and crafting as much as I can beforehand, while not wasting any ammo on trash mobs. I was left with 8 slugs and about 20 pistol bullets, and 2-3 pipe bombs. I managed to burst her, and then abused restart button so that I don’t have to fight those two and waste precious ammo. 
 
 

Exhibit 3: Lady D herself.

 
This is a rather “minor” problem, since I wasted about 2 hours on her, instead of 3 hours on both previous encounters. 
 
Only problem I have is not enough ammo, even if you bring your own. I think it is fair to say that any boss fight needs to give you enough ammo in boss room if it expects you to beat it, and because boss fights should be about mechanics, not about managing shots beforehand. 
 
Quick math: I brought 2 clips of sniper ammo, about 4 clips of pistol ammo and 1 clip of shotgun ammo, the boss room gives you around 25 pistol bullets, 12 shotgun shells and 12 sniper bullets. 
 
I managed to beat her after having no ammo left on the last phase, screaming swear words in my native language and desperately swinging my knife. 
 
If not for design would’ve been a very cool boss. 
 
 

Exhibit 4: Fish man

 
VoS very own crown of ♥♥♥♥ jewels in terms of bad balance. 
 
I’ll just get straight to math: even if you manage to come to boss room not spending a single ammo since previous section, manage to gather all of explosives (GL and mines, pipe bombs don’t seem to work on him, but I might test it again). 
 
The following number may differ, but I tested it 3 times and tried to get as much resources as I could. This brings us to following numbers (combined with all that boss room gives you): 
1. 7-8 GL rounds 
2. 5-6 mines 
3. ~90 pistol rounds 
4. ~20 shotgun shells 
5. ~15-17 sniper ammo (depending on your sniper rifle upgrades) 
6. 3-4 healing bottles 
 
Despite all this, all weapons being upgraded to maximum, having ALL 3 HEALTH UPGRADES FROM FOOD I spent about 8 hours trying to beat him, with no luck. He can stun lock you to death with his vomit (which is broken, walls do not protect you from it). If you try distance from him, he charges forward, and you have to deal with him clipping in walls and damaging you in the process. 
 
And here’s why. Fish man has 3 types of attacks – melee, ranged and charge. Melee has 2 variations (whether he vomits or not), and ranged has quite a few. The problem with ranged attacks are that they are not projectiles, but liquid. REngine, despite being the best looking game engine in the industry, has a problem with liquid. It can be observed in starting sequence, when Mia pours wine, with blood cellar in castle. This makes all of his attacks kinda awkwardly clip through the walls, which sometimes damage you. Furthermore, his attacks stun lock you, without giving IFrames. This leads to very frustrating moment when you go from full HP to dead after getting hit by a random crop of his vomit, when you clearly dodged it. If you try to distance yourself from him during this, he will charge in you, and this brings us to our next problem. You can’t cancel his charge. I believe, that you technically can, but this requires at least 4 explosives (boss room also feature 4 red barrels, and for the purpose of experiment let’s assume they deal same damage as land mine). Even 2 mines don’t stun him from his charge. You kinda have to pray that you run enough, but it doesn’t work more times than it does, or block, which damages you non the less. 
 
Now, let’s get to damaging him. After dealing with all of this crap, you still have to kill him. To do that, you need to damage his white body, which comes from the mouth. It comes out during some attacks, and for a brief period of time. Also, even if it is sticking out, sometimes it does not treat it as a weak spot. On average, you can deal 2 sniper or shotgun shots with maximum fire rate during his attacks, without getting hit. However, stun locking him allows for 3 shotgun shots, which deals way more damage. To stun lock him, you need to use at least 2 explosives of any kind. I say at least because it’s not consistent. He can take as much as 4 GL shots and just shrug them off. For now, lets assume that it’s 3 explosions on average. The most explosions you can get in this boss fight is 18. This means 6 sure damage phases. And he takes at least 3 damage phases, even while damaging him in his animations, to progress one phase. And there is 3 of them. You can argue that “Well, then use his animations and damage him with other weaponry”. 1 shot from shotgun averages to 6 shots from upgraded M1911. This means 15 more shots, if you can stick 6 shots in his animations, which I highly doubt (all of this calculations are ignoring the fact that you can (and will) miss). And even if you don`t, boss fights should not take 20-30 minutes to beat. They just should not. 
 
It was my breaking point, and I can`t manage to beat him. 
 
 

Conclusion

 
In conclusion, I want to point out that it might that I’m just bad at the game, and fish man is indeed beatable on VoS NG. I would like to read about it in the comments. Furthermore, I implore all of you reading to upvote this so that anybody who is just starting RE 8, and wants to slap on VoS difficulty, would think otherwise. 
 
Thank you for your time. 
 

Here we come to an end for Resident Evil Village [SPOILERS] Do not pick VoS on NG hope you enjoy it. If you think we forget something to include or we should make an update to the post let us know via comment, and we will fix it asap! Thanks and have a great day!