Think I'm over NG+, it's fun but Ashley just kills it when I'm trying to speedrun. Gets grabbed or incapacitated and fucks things up. Dunno if I'll finish this second run. Got about 1/3rd into the castle in 2 hours, so figure I could probably do the whole thing in about 5, but seems like there's not much of real NG+ unlocks outside of professional difficulty?
Great game, but I feel like if I'm going to do another run, might as well do the OG RE4 so it's a bit different.
Going back through the game again, Village section feels pretty consistently great from start to finish outside the Lord of the Lake boss fight which sucks and is boring and a waste of time. The boat sandbox is a bit dull but it's such a short section if you know what you're doing and are ignoring side content so it's ok. But yeah, the lake section is the only slightly boring bit in the village run on replay. Everywhere else is pretty tightly paced. I really enjoyed the house standoff this time around. Also whether it's hardcore difficulty or standard difficulty, I swear the dynamite spam part at the start of ch.2 is the toughest section in the village because it's so easy to get staggered/grabbed and then blown up during those animations.
Castle...the opening catapult bit felt like one of the worst sections in the game to me because it feels like there's RNG with the catapults. Yeah you can shortcut the cannon up through the grate window on the initial stairs, but the combination of RNG catapults landing + RNG Ashley seems to fuck me a lot even knowing what to do in a 2nd run. Nothing like avoiding catapult hits but Ashley eats the catapult and becomes incapacitated and then you run to pick her up and you both eat a catapult and die. Anyhow I want to watch speedrunners do this section to see the most efficient way to run it that works exactly the same 99% of the time. Water room is kind of annoying when trying to speedrun it just because since there's so many enemies its easy for Ashley to keep getting grabbed. I feel like if you do water room slowly it's fine, I didn't have any problem with it on my first run because I wasn't rushing. Otherwise castle's all great so far.
One thing that always throws me off is how early the parry window is on enemies that cleave you. I try to perfect parry and I wait until they lift the weapon above their head to hit parry and then it goes into the cutscene of them cleaving me. Feels like you need to parry right when they start to lift their arm upwards, which is just a lot different than parry timings in most games where you want to wait until the last second when the hit is about to connect.