While Resident Evil Village is a great game with moving dialogue and challenging gameplay, a handful of Ethan Winter’s post-boss quips can only be described as lame. A majority of them are too short, kitschy, and lack the punch that dialogue should come with after facing down and defeating a major boss. It doesn't do much to detract from a great game, but does make some encounters a little anticlimactic by sucking the air out of the room.
Ethan fights a total of eight bosses, including the four lords of Resident Evil Village, and over half of them end in truly lackluster comebacks, with the rest being forgettable at best. Compared to previous Resident Evil games and other segments of Village, the post-boss lines are confusing, anticlimactic, and sometimes laughable. Though there's plenty of good writing in the game, the rest of it strikes an odd contrast to these particularly weak moments.
After defeating Daniela Dimitrescu, for instance, Ethan mutters to himself, “I’m sick of bugs.” While this particular quote could be a quiet nod to Winter’s traumatic history with bugs, as in Resident Evil 7, it feels like an oddly out of place joke in a dark and horrific game. While she is the first Dimitrescu sister in Resident Evil Village to make use of the family’s ability to turn into a swarm of flies during a fight, she also sports more attack power than the previous sister, and utilizes her teleportation powers to flit around the library where the game’s second boss battle takes place, giving Ethan a host of more interesting things he could have fixated on.
Ethan’s Post-Boss Lines Feel Like Afterthoughts In RE Village
The final Dimitrescu daughter fight ends in a cramped room and another half-hearted insult from Ethan where he calls her a crazy witch. The obvious issue with this line is that Ethan encounters an actual witch earlier in the game, and Resident Evil Village hasn't shied away from coarse language up until this point, so the choice of the word ‘witch’ for the vampire Cassandra feels simultaneously tame and inaccurate.
Things get worse with RE Village’s vampire lord Lady Dimitrescu. As her new, mutated form begins to crumble and crystallize, she spits a curse at Ethan, to which he responds with, “You’re the one who’s cursed.” After beating the biggest boss of the game so far, such an immature, grade-school-level retort is laughable, and not what players would expect from an AAA horror game like Resident Evil Village.
Ethan also seems weirdly nonchalant after getting through one of the most horrific parts of the entire RE Village experience. After playing a deadly game of hide and seek with Donna Beneviento’s doll Angie in the second lord’s house, Ethan remarks on how anticlimactic the boss battle was by saying, “It’s... Over?” The protagonist deescalating the stakes like this does the same thing for players, and does nothing to drive home the horror of everything that transpired previous to that point. The Beneviento level was noticeably short and fast, despite its classic horror overtones, and having Ethan remark on it feels like it deflates the situation.
The second to last boss of Resident Evil Village is Karl Heisenberg, complete with a multi/stage battle and mech-suit transformation setting up something truly remarkable. Heisenberg spouts some memorable lines and chilling threats during the course of the fight, to which Ethan ultimately ends the verbal barrage with “Your funeral.” Short, predictable, and anticlimactic, there are so many better things that could’ve been said to commemorate the literally explosive death of the fourth and final lord.
There is something to be said for realism and succinctness in gritty horror games such as Resident Evil, but there is a fine difference between simplicity and prosaicness. This is not to say that all of Ethan’s post-boss quips are bad - contrarily, the ones following Moreau and Mother Miranda’s deaths land quite well. Ethan’s retorts are a mixed bag ranging from poetic to lame, but these low points perhaps only serve to underscore what Resident Evil Village ultimately is, which is a game with some moving and emotional dialogue - a few of Ethan’s wimpy comebacks notwithstanding.
