Finished the obscenely difficult Resident Evil: Gaiden using the VisualBoyAdvance emulator. For anyone who liked the resource-management aspect of survival horror, this title will not only give you a blowjob only a vacuum cleaner could match, it will also finger your asshole as a bonus.
The basic level design and player trajectory is very similar to traditional titles - explore a semi-linear location and find missing keys to open up the next floor, then turn around and run halfway across the map to trigger the next scripted event (sometimes finding your original path blocked off). When a zombie spots you, it will lunge and initiate combat. Combat is RT first-person and involves hitting the fire button when the speeding highlight is in the middle of an enemy selection bar. Closer enemies have larger bars and suffer more damage, but of course can now damage you with melee attacks. There's a good chance that being attacked by one enemy will drag nearby foes into the battle and sometimes spawn new zombies from the side of the screen. None of the foes (aside from a boss) hae ranged attacks and zombies are the only enemy type you'll face, with blue variants being stronger, faster, more alert and farther-reaching with their melee attacks.
Technically, you have a "party" of sorts once Barry, the protagonist, picks up Leon Kennedy and Lucia, a survivor. Although you can switch between them and assign them their own weapons, I didn't see the point to this since only one character can attack at a time. I suppose it helps spread damage across the party, but there are certain points where you'll randomly lose control of someone, only to switch back to them much later with the same health they had when they left. Later in the game, this lead to an impossible situation where a miniboss would be fought immediately after regaining control of Barry and would instantly kill him due to his low health, forcing me to go back two save points to before I lost control. A rather annoying oversight.
It is literally impossible to complete this game without running past as many enemies as possible, AND switching to your knife to fight the dozens of trash mobs you can't avoid in the tight corridors. Not only will enemies constantly respawn, but constant backtracking is necessary to try and find that ONE random zombie who happens to have a key item on them somewhere. Moreover, the bosses you run into require your best weapons to fight - and a lot of ammo to go with them, as after the first boss, encounters are no longer about inflicting maximum damage to a boss, but inflicting a consistent amount of damage within a short time period to keep pushing the enemy back, which in effect means pulling off almost-perfect consecutive critical hits seven-to-fifteen times with your best armaments.
There are ony three save slots for the fourteen scripted save locations in the game, and they're pretty well paced since you're going to want to reload and think about taking a different route or finding more items when you run into an impossible scenario.
The plot is typical of RE: Escaped B.O.W. in an isolated location, Umbrella special forces coming to clean up and steal the research, double-crosses etc. I'm not going to bother spoiler-tagging the ending since it's a fucking gameboy game and is non-canonical anyway - Leon appears to be either dead or vanished and has been replaced by a special green-blooded Tyrant that disguises itself as the original. I like to think this is commentary on Resident Evil 4
N.B. There are NO waifus
Retrogamer did a feature on the game a while back, uploaded by BioHaze: