ENTRY 12: THE SPIRIT (Rin Yamaoka)
"While using her Yamaoka’s Haunting Power, both The Spirit and Survivors cannot be seen by one another. Instead, Survivors are revealed by their Scratch Marks, breathing, and interactions with the environment. Each chase becomes a battle of wits, a duel where only the sharpest mind-games prevail."
LORE SUMMARY: Rin worked hard to try and help her parents with their bills, but her father was still overworked to the point of eventually snapping. He murdered her mother with a katana, cutting her into many small pieces, then chopped Rin up slowly and horribly as soon as she arrived home. Her final thoughts were intense rage, hatred and desire for vengeance.
LORE SUMMARY: Rin worked hard to try and help her parents with their bills, but her father was still overworked to the point of eventually snapping. He murdered her mother with a katana, cutting her into many small pieces, then chopped Rin up slowly and horribly as soon as she arrived home. Her final thoughts were intense rage, hatred and desire for vengeance.
Rin might actually be the only killer in the game who never killed anyone before the fog. She's an onryo, the kind of Japanese ghost popularized in more modern times by movies like The Grudge, so her drive to kill comes from the anger in her soul after her own death. A cool and interesting twist for this game, but it also makes her one of its saddest characters. I guess the Entity has her thinking that everyone is her father, or that she'll eventually get her revenge on him, somehow.
Her design is alright, a pale grey-blue ghost woman with wild black hair, wearing only bandages. She's actually partially dismembered, her limbs still hovering together in place, with shards of glass embedded throughout. She has very cool ghost powers, automatically shifting in and out of visibility with a special power to completely enter the spirit realm, like the Wraith's invisibility, but with its own distinct set of advantages and disadvantages. You can't see the survivors, even, but you can still see all their activity and the red "scratch marks" they leave in their path, playing with the common notion that we're just as ethereal to ghosts as vice-versa.
But, oh yeah, she also has a sword. I'm not sure what to think of the sword. Yes, a ghost woman with a sword is awesome, but it's awesome in a way that also feels less "horrifying." I'm not sure why, considering a ghost with a knife still reads as horror, and a sword is simply the biggest and longest of knifes, but I guess swords simply carry too much Thrilling Adventure context to take as seriously as a weapon a horror ghost is chasing you with. Like I guess I'd be scared of a naked ghost woman with a sword, but it would be in the same sense that I'd be scared of a fire breathing dragon or an intergalactic alien battleship. There would still be an underlying "holy shit, this kicks ass" that just kind of undermines the dread, just a little, kind of the same issue you can't help but have with Dead by Daylight's mad inventor cowboy or giant beautiful axe-throwing mountain woman. There's such a fine line between what's "horrifying" and "thrilling," which I guess is why slashers traditionally fall into the category of "thriller" film anyway. The Spirit objectively rules, I'm just saying she rules almost TOO much to fulfill the role of Spooky Ghost, if Spooky Ghost is what you really wanted.
BEST SKIN(S):
"NIGHTMARE SERPENT:" this popular (I think) skin gives her long, demonic horns and a bunch of spectral green snakes that wind through her body, which is pretty cool! Again, so cool that it ceases to feel Ghostly, but still. Ghost snakes!!!
"CRYSTALLINE APPARITION:" a beautiful winter look, icy blue and white with frozen hair, lots of icy shards and a sword that's now comprised of many jagged icicles. Maybe they were going for a bit of yuki-onna, too, with the ribbon she wears?
"BLAZING LINEAGE:" oh, I love her oozing Halloween skin! Putrid and tumorous and dribbling as usual for the "blighted" skins, but she also has a grotesque oni-skull sort of face with a third eye in her forehead and a big, wide slobbering mouth. I have accepted, at this point, that Dead by Daylight's default "ghostly haunting" Killer is just not a spine chilling ethereal phantasm so much as she is something that stepped out of a metal album cover. Good for her.
BREAK TIME!
Reviewing Dead by Daylight killers isn't one of my usual 31-day Halloween specials. That's a status actually occupied this year by Mortasheen, but Mortasheen is my own original project that not everybody's going to care about. Mortasheen also happens to take time away from the many video game articles I usually put out for the Halloween season, so these Killer Reviews are kind of a little bonus compromise.There are, however, only currently 23 original killers to review, so rather than end these early on the 23rd, I'll be focusing the coming week on other things and pick these up again for the final stretch of October!
