I see that Requiem has recently revived the conversation around RE4 vs RE4R stun and in particular I see conversations flaring up due to Underthemayo declaring that less reliable headshot stuns are better than abusable iframe kicks since they get you to use all your weapons.
The conversation around it is really annoying with how much people are jumping into extremes, so id like to chip in with some stuff as well as expand on some thoughts I had regarding RE4R that I developed since writing my review on it.
One big thing I want to make clear is that despite preferring RE4 original, RE4R was right to not have single shot stunning. With your free movement, your aim speed no longer being pre-set and thus allowing you to freely flick to enemy heads for stuns, single shot guaranteed melees would be too abusable in the remake's context. You can experience this if you played the remake's Mercs mode in which all enemies stun from every shot and are made out of paper. It is incredibly trivializing.
However, that doesn't mean the way they did it do it was the best one. RE4R's stuns are based on hidden per weapon stat values that scale with your upgrades which has a lot of problematic implications. The best demonstration of the "skill ceiling" of RE4 and 4R are is in their No Merchant runs, which demonstrate the endpoint of each game's combat system. Both games are pretty easy on Professional as long as you keep upgrading your weapons. Take away the upgrades and now you have way less space, do far less damage, and need to make the most out of every bullet and enemy interaction
It is true that RE4's melee is incredibly strong, but it is also a very flexible mechanic to centralize the game around. In No Merchant, this makes the game shine, because the best way to play efficient in that game is to play aggressive, place your bullets well, kick as many enemies as possible, interact with their melee attacks, bait and punish with your knife to get stuns without using bullets, and master dancing around enemies with the tank control based movement. The melee is overpowered in the context of a regular playthrough, but in No Merchant, using it well is your only way to succeed. And when tested, it turns out using it well is not very trivial at all, and requires you learn all the enemies, their attacks, which you can juke and punish, which you need to stay away from, and how this all interplays with your knife ends up being very deep and fun to play.
However, in 4 Remake, because the possibility of getting stuns scales with your upgrades, doing a no upgrade run means that you cannot really interact with the enemies at close range in any reasonable way. Most runs here will involve trying to skip fights as much as possible, and in the rare attempt to kill enemies, waiting things out to stealth insta kill as many of them as possible, shooting them outside of their "leash" range, or finding a spot where all the enemies will tunnel into slowly, such as up a ladder, to camp with your shotgun. RE4R's ammo drop system is incredibly generous, and insures you always have a lot of shot from the weapons you are low on ammo for. It has to be, because due to the weakness of none-resource related mechanics, the player in this game cannot do anything without spending resources such as knife meter for parries or shotgun ammo for guaranteed interrupts. Usually, resource management in these games is touted as one of the primary skills tested, but in an action game context, what is really being tested is resource efficiency, how well you can use your resources. In RE4 original, you wanted to use your melee as much as possible since it didnt cost resources, and fall back to your guns when you judged melee to be impractical. However, in RE4R, without upgrades melee is always impractical, as such the game cannot ask you to do anything except for spend ammo, which you can't really optimize the use of in very interesting ways (besides obviously using the shotgun at close range). To avoid you getting soft locked, the game has to be generous with ammo.
This to me, exposes that RE4R's approach leads to a combat system with a very low skill ceiling compared to RE4, at least in the way it is currently balanced.
Despite this, both of these games are leagues ahead of Requiem's Leon combat, which only doubles down on what makes 4R lackluster to me. Before I speak on that, let me speak on what I think 4R does well.
4R's stun system is most guilty of being completely uncommunicated, and tied to stat upgrades, however, speaking on a purely conceptual level it is not bad and had the potential to even surpass RE5's stun system. Let me establish how RE5 works. Headshot stuns as long as they were not crits, were consistent as long as your weapon did enough damage. A pistol shot will always give a stun, whereas certain SMGs needed multiple shots to get a melee prompt stun. Try Sheva in Mercs if you wanted to see the difference between how these these two bullet types interact with head stuns. For legs, stuns were a 50/50 with a pistol, that you would roll until the enemy potentially dies or you get the stun.
In RE4R, stuns are a % chance that increases with every shot landed on an enemy. Different weapons, that have a different "wince" stat, increase the % chance for a stagger with each shot landed, while also rolling for that chance for every hit landed on a weakpoint. As you move up in the chapters, enemies gain more wince resistance, which you need to counter by upgrading your weapons damage which increases their wince stat. Some weapons have extremely high wince stat that makes it so that stuns are very consistent, the standouts here are The Punisher (especially with the laser sight which boosts wince), and the TMP. Even on Pro, a TMP shoots so many bullets that all increase the % chance for a stun substantially, that it is very easy to quickly reach 100% and guarantee the stun. The Punisher with laser sight will get you a stun in 2-3 shots on Pro as long as you keep upgrading it. With these tools, the game is actually not terrible to play. The stuns are not 100% consistent, but they are consistent enough that you can plan around getting them. You know a stun will take 3 shots max with Punisher to trigger, and that you can gamble for getting it on a 2nd shot, and potentially get lucky to get it in one shot. If you really really need a stun now, you can dump some TMP ammo to force it, but TMP ammo is more valuable than pistol ammo.
Different weapons being effective at stunning in different ways, is actually a great core idea for the game's design. Stuns can be balanced by how many shots they take to apply, and this could have been further enhanced by making it different per enemy type. The important part to me is that there needs to be an element of mastery possible, and with this in mind, the players can plan around slightly inconsistent stuns which are still common enough to be practical with the enemy and encounter design of RE4R. There is a level of uncertainty yes, but it can be factored into your gameplan in a way that is still permissive to aggressive play.
Knowing this only solves one half of the problem with RE4R, since walking away from enemies, spamming bullets, and shotgunning anyone who gets close is extremely effective and boring, but at least with tools like the Punisher/TMP, a more efficient and aggressive playstyle is possible. If it were up to me I would have also made it so your knife had a much higher wince rate so it can be a valuable stun tool as a trade off for the risk of being so close to enemies, and I wouldn't have the wince values scale based on damage upgrades at all, but I can see how you can finagle RE4R into something fun if these things were rebalanced.
Now what happened with Requiem? This stun system seems to have completely changed into something somehow more deterministic but worse. Stun seems to exist as a meter of some sort, but once that is extremely slow to increase. The Hatchet strong melee is the best tool for increasing stun, since Strong Melee > Light Melee > Strong Melee seems to guarantee a stun on Insanity. However the damage of different weapons seems to not factor into getting a stun, since Strong Melee > Light Melee > into a bunch of handgun bullets doesnt lead to a stun any quicker than if you had started dumping handgun bullets immediately. Your submachine guns in Requiem have never ever netted me a stun, and are turned into pure damage dispensers. In general, every gun that isnt the Shotgun in Requiem, is now a damage dispenser, none of the upgrades or options really seem to change this. Leon is also slower now, and enemies are harder to juke, so you really are left with no option but to keep distance, play passive, and use your shotgun when anything gets close. The only option for aggressive play now is your Parry, which is no longer on a limited resource like in 4 Remake, since you can easily sharpen your Hatchet, and on top of this, you can now parry all attacks. In 4 Remake, weapon attacks were parriable, but grabs from unarmed enemies were not, which allowed those enemies to actually control space. No in 4RE, even grabs are parriable, your parry is infinite, and if you time your parry perfectly, you get an instant kill opportunity on the enemy. This has lead to RE4 promoting one of two playstyles on Insanity. Either you play like a total wuss and shoot while keeping distance, or you parry everything until it dies. Either way, it is a poor combat system with room for depth, enjoyable encounters, or even a chance for skill expression and stylish play. Someone in the game balance department probably hates the animation department because they did their damnedest to ensure that you are discouraged from seeing all the new melee animations that were crafted for this game.
IDK this rant was kinda pointless. RE4 rocks, RE4R is mid, and Requiem Leon is boring as all hell. While I dont agree that RE4R/Requiem should have guaranteed one shot staggers, don't pretend that spending shotgun ammo is a much deeper system than spamming roundhouse kicks. But if I had to choose, id def prefer roundhousing fools over holding backwards on the analog stick for the whole game.