Wow, yeah, I'm still digesting it.
So I won't lie, I'm an Ethan fan/defender. He wasn't a sparkling personality in RE7, but he was exactly what he was supposed to be: a scared, confused man caught up in something big. He wasn't a trained soldier or officer (Chris, Leon, Barry, Jill, Rebecca, Sheva, et cetera), and he wasn't even someone with youthful wrecklessness and bravado (Claire, Steve, Ashley). He's a twenty-something married engineer just trying to find his wife.
In RE8, though, you really feel for the dude: he's a dad trying to piece together his broken life. He tries so hard to help the people around him, and is constantly failing. Meanwhile, he's being beaten, bitten, and brutalized. I'm really feeling bad for this guy.
Then they kill him off. Wait, what? Even when he returns, it's revealed/retconned that he's been dead since the beginning of RE7. That sort of hurt. He's been walking mold ever since, and oh, he's dead AGAIN.
By this point, I'm shedding a few manly tears. I've been with Ethan for two games and more than four years at this point, just watching the nicest guy in the series getting kicked around in a disaster of a life he can't help. Dude just loves his wife and kid, and everything he does is for them. RE8 makes him more likable than he's ever been, then informs you he's been dead for four years (casting a weird, retroactive shadow on RE7), and then kills him off for good, while yet again Chris survives and the relative newcomer dies.
(And while I don't want Chris to die, he's a favorite, it sucks to lose both Piers and Ethan!)
Meanwhile, the BSAA, good guys since RE5 and a replacement for the corrupt FBC, are apparently the bad guys now, standing in direct opposition to Chris and utilizing bioweapons as soldiers to boot.
So is Chris still with Blue Umbrella, or is he working by himself/for a different group? What the heck is going on with the BSAA? The Connections are still around, but 8 tells us almost nothing about them besides they're behind the events of both 7 and 8.
Meanwhile, the Mold apparently predates the T-Virus, and Miranda/the Mold are essentially the foundation for the entire series, with Miranda mentoring Spencer, teaching him about the Mold, and inspiring him to create his own bio evolutions. I'm glad that they're connecting RE7/8 to the series, but making 8 the basis for everything that's happened over the entire course of the series might be a bit much, that sort of bias we have where whatever is current is considered to be more important than what happened in the past.
I spent half a day ruminating on that last 20% of the game before finding out things still might not be as they seem. Curiously, photo mode tricks allegedly show that that lone figure walking toward the car in the post-credits sequence is... Ethan. Again, wait, what? Did Capcom just want a shadowy figure and chose a poor model that they never expected anyone to see, or is Ethan actually alive? Is it somehow Miranda, taking his form?
So, I mean, I don't know. I'm genuinely excited for RE9, I just hope they follow through with the story to a proper conclusion/answers, unlike Umbrella disappearing between CV and RE4, Natalia being forgotten after Rev 2, and basically everything from RE6 just hanging as loose threads. I need to know about Ethan, about the BSAA and Blue Umbrella, what happens with Rose, and at least something revelatory about the Connections, since we've heard about them for two games at this point and know nothing beyond "a big secret group that does bioweapons research".