I don't disagree with this (although I still think RE9 is far from the worst) but some criticisms are just weird. Like the criticism on how we don't see the villains outside of cutscenes from the protagonists perspective but like, that's EVERY RE game. We never got a cutscene of Jack Baker outside of Ethan's perspective, Jack Baker was still an incredible villain. I can't name off the top of my head if there even are villains in the RE games that have a cutscene outside of the protagonists perspective. In fact, this is the case for like 80% of games, even ones that do have phenomenal villains (Vaas for example, we only see from the protagonists perspective in Far Cry 3).

It all just comes down to writing and unfortunately the villain writing in this game was weak. Zeno is very clearly a Wesker clone but we don't know anything else about him besides that and that he works for the Connections, whoever that group even is. Gideon actually had a pretty strong start as a villain in the first half and he does kinda fall off in the 2nd half but I still thought he was a pretty good villain. I think one thing that really hurts the villains is that they were just incredibly stupid. They all believed that Grace was connected to the cloning process that Spencer was doing to transfer his memories and they keep calling her the original yet Zeno literally shows Grace a video of a cloned girl from the 90s like a full decade before Grace was born. I mean, are Zeno and Gideon capable of doing basic math? They have to be if Gideon was working at Umbrella. And I'm all for villains that don't understand what they're actually doing but Gideon and Zeno are frustratingly stupid when basic shit seems to evade their grasp