Finished Village and Shadows of Rose, some closing thoughts as I uninstall the game for now (might come back later to try a higher difficulty and NG+).
Let's start with Ethan Winters. The blank generic protagonist without a face (though technically he has one). Mixed reception among the fanbase. I will say that he grew on me throughout the game and especially the DLC as well. He's not your badass "too cool for school" character like many of the other (great) RE protagonists and he's your average, but capable, dad who is on a quest to fix things with his family. I can see people being annoyed or not liking him much as part of this grand franchise, having not played 7 myself (yet) I have only 8 to go on, but I appreciated him as a "one off" character. He works in this game for this story but beyond this point even if his fate was different, I don't know if I'd be thrilled to play him again. In the end I did feel for him and how ****ty it ended for him - sort of stuck in this hell landscape but at least he saved his family. I do think the great lengths they went to in order to hide his face even until the end were pretty comical though. I get it, you want to keep his face somewhat blurred/distorted (its not the focus) but when he's having his final moments with his daughter, couldn't we at least get to see that?
The gameplay itself really did feel a lot like RE4R to me, you get your treasures, some puzzles, loot, the duke and you get to upgrade/buy/sell weapons etc. The village setting where you also get to explore a castle was familiar as well. I don't think the locations or set pieces were AS good as RE4R, it was a little bit when a band follows up their masterpiece album with an album that's stylistically the same but just a little bit lesser of a version. For me the standout portions would have to be Lady D's castle, the spooky doll basement at house Beneviento and Heisenberg's factory. I did enjoy the aesthetic of the village itself. In terms of weapons I played with the starter gun for quite a while before getting M1911 which I started using instead. I used the first shotgun for a while before I 'upgraded' with the pump action one. The sniper got a lot of usage as well as the grenade thrower. One of my favorite parts of replaying these games is the thought of using different weapons on the next playthrough, so I'll keep that in mind for sure.
Shadows of Rose was interesting. I was a bit on the fence initially because it does 2 things that are generally not my thing. The first is when it feels like a walking simulator and you're just being led on a certain path and the gameplay isn't very exciting because the game just wants you to run from point A to point B and there's nothing in between to do (like look for items or solve puzzles etc). The second is more of a personal gripe I have where you have these hellish landscapes where they put random plot element (in this case the Megamycete) or in the Spider-Man 2 game it was symbiote-goo and you cover a lot of the stuff in that. But the DLC grew on me after you get to the castle and you are set on a path to do things. I kinda guessed who "Michael" would turn out to be right from the get go but it didn't hamper my enjoyment at all. Most memorable part? Again the creepy doll basement of house Beneviento. They found a way to re-use the creepiest part of the main game as the creepiest part of the DLC.
Overall I quite enjoyed the 14-15 hours it took me to play through the game and the DLC. I'm not really itching to start over right away, but I definitely want to in the future.