Can Lady Dimitrescu in The Resident Evil DLC Avoid ‘Big Daddy’ Issues?

It was always going to happen, wasn’t it? The global gaming community’s love-in with Lady Dimitrescu, the giantess dame from Resident Evil Village, may well be one of the biggest ever online obsessions over a gaming character. The outpouring of adoration towards her ranged from charming and witty memes to weirdly sexual oversharing – as some people took to the internet to share with the world their desires to be crushed and trampled by the 10ft woman.

Befittingly of a woman of her physical and social stature, Dimitrescu was gaming’s breakout star of 2021, and Capcom’s decision to make her a playable character in the Mercenaries Mode of the upcoming Winters’ Expansion DLC on October 27 is almost certainly a response to her immense popularity.

Unsurprisingly, her gameplay reveal from a couple of days ago has gotten gamers freaking out again like it’s 2021. Playing as the giant vampiress, you’ll get to tear through enemies with your talons, fill up a ‘Thrill Gauge’ that increases your attack power, and even summon one of her ditsy blonde witch ‘daughters’ to your aid.

The excitement is understandable, but making a giant character like her playable isn’t easy, and if not executed correctly can even make the Lady lose some of her lustre. It’s a fine balance turning a near-invincible antagonist into a decidedly vulnerable protagonist, even if it’s for an extremely silly non-canonical mode. How do you maintain her air of regal badassery while balancing her relative to the other playable characters, especially human ones like Chris ‘Boulder Basher’ Redfield and Ethan ‘Why Does Bad Shit Keep Happening To Me’ Winters?

One game that serves as a cautionary tale in finding this balance is BioShock 2. The 2007 sequel to Bioshock casts you as a Big Daddy – the iconic boss-type enemy from the first game. These hulking mutated men, stuck inside giant brassy diving suits kitted with all manner of flesh-mangling machinery and Plasmids (magic powers, essentially), were a formidable presence in the first game; as you heard them morosely whale-calling and stomping down the decrepit corridors of Rapture, you’d often just take cover and let them go by without a fight, because confronting them could very well end in your death. Their foreboding presence – and horrific story – were a big part of what made Bioshock an excellent horror game.

So the idea of playing as this most fearsome of creatures was, like the prospect of playing as Lady Dimitrescu, extremely tantalising. Would single swings of your giant drill-hand send hordes of Splicers flying into the glassy walls of Rapture? Would Splicers run in fear at the sight of you, skulking off into the shadows of the city before ambushing you in greater numbers later on? 

The launch trailer for Bioshock 2 very much fed the fantasy that you’d be an all-powerful man-machine. Yes, there’d now be big dumb Splicers to give you a bit more of a run for your money in one-on-one encounters, but those regular grunt enemies that terrorised you throughout much of the first game would be no match in small numbers.

But it was not to be. One of the missed opportunities of Bioshock 2 was that instead of making you really feel like you were playing as this 7ft mechanised monstrosity, you were not really any more powerful than Jack, the very much human protagonist from the first game. You could still be taken down by relatively small numbers of Splicers, they didn’t go down as easily to your giant drill-hand as you’d have liked (insta-kill death animations weren’t really a done thing yet), and you often had to use defensive Plasmids like ‘Hypnotize’ to manage the heavy firepower coming your way. Instead of adapting the structure of the game and encounter design to this exciting new protagonist, developer 2K Marin largely adapted the protagonist to fit the structure of the first game. 

It just didn’t quite click.

An obstacle that Capcom isn’t facing with the Mercenaries mode of Resident Evil Village is that, unlike the main campaign, it isn’t a mode that relies on horror for its thrills. Where Bioshock 2 erroneously stuck to some of the horror trappings of the first game, Mercenaries mode has always been about letting your hair down and running amok on the game’s enemies without having to anxiously pick your shots and watch your ammo quite as much. In that regard, Dimitrescu is a perfect fit for the traditionally manic and cathartic game mode. 

But there’s still a balance to strike in making sure that she’s less fragile than the significantly more human playable characters while having her own weaknesses that keep things fresh and challenging.

Of course, Capcom could preserve the legendary aura of Lady Dimitrescu by making her something of an overpowered ‘cheat’ character, but after an hour or so of shredding enough Lycans to confetti and crushing them with gaudy antique furniture, the novelty of that would soon wear thin. It’s more likely that Dimitrescu will be far more killable in Mercenaries than she was in the main game.

Nerf her too much, and you risk undermining the character and her formidable standing among her fans. Make her too powerful, and you risk making the experience of playing as her being little more than a power fantasy that will soon wear thin. The trick is to tap into the Lady’s vast preternatural power while giving her a distinct weakness – an Achilles Heel to remind you that you’re not indestructible.