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A Guide to Resident Evil Village's Weirdest Unlockable Weapon

RE8’s LZ Answerer (aka: did you know you this game lets Ethan unlock a fricking lightsaber?) is surely the weirdest video-game-thing I have ever spent far too much time working to unlock – and then even more time figuring out once I had it. So GDI, I’m writing up a proper guide on this thing, because there is sweet-FA other info out there about it on the web.

For a novelty-weapon, this thing is complicated. It has multiple different modes, and multiple different colours, none of which are very intuitive and most of which aren’t actually very useful. But it can still be damn useful for anyone going for the knives-only achievement, and may even come in handy going for the no-healing-items achievement. And even as a pure novelty, c’mon – this game gives you a fricking lightsaber, how is that not awesome?

So here’s the lowdown.

Unlocking the LZ Answerer

For this, you need an SS Rank on every level in Mercenaries mode. Including the Hard levels, which is a heck of a job. But if you’ve bought the Winters Expansion (and you should), then by the time you’ve got SS ranks on every standard level, you’ll have unlocked Lady Dimitrescu as a playable character (just an S on the last level is needed). And Lady D is broken on hard mode.

Her rush-in-and-choke-slam move will one-shot any regular enemy besides the Soldat Panzer or Jet, and she can tank more damage than anyone else and use healing items if you’re stuck. You’ll still need regular attacks to deal with boss enemies, but getting SS or even SSS ranks in hard mode with Lady D is sometimes easier than scoring the same ranks in easy mode, because the scores you need are lower. She’s not your best option for SS ranks on the lower difficulty, and even with her, those hard mode stages are still a challenge, but she’s totally your best option.

Once you’ve got those scores, the Duke will sell you the LZ Answerer very cheaply at any point where you can access his shop – even if you’re reloading from an older save. Sadly, it’s not available in Mercenaries mode, or when you’re playing the main campaign as Chris.

If you're paying really close attention, you might note this thing uses the same model as Chris' target locator. Why it's called the 'LZ Answerer' we will probably never know.

Using the LZ Answerer

Here’s where things get complicated.

Switching Modes

The LZ Answerer has three different colour modes, each with different effects, and each of which can be activated in either single- or double-bladed versions. Like all ‘knives’, you can either slash with it or hold the aim button for a forward stab for extra damage.

To activate your sabre, hit the attack button, or hold the aim button.

To activate double-bladed mode, hold down the aim button. After a few seconds, the second blade will start extending. You have to keep holding aim until it’s finished extending or it’ll disappear again. You can actually attack during this period – Ethan will simply do a forward stab – as long as you don’t release the aim button. The annoying part is that if Ethan is knocked down or if you change weapons, the sabre will deactivate, and you’ll have to do this again.

You can change the colour of your sabre the same way you switch ammo for your grenade launcher: hold ‘aim’, and hit the interact button (F on keyboard). Switching colours will also switch you back to single-bladed mode, unfortunately.

Entering double-bladed mode doubles your damage and changes Ethan’s attack animation. It’s well worth using, but does take more time to activate, which becomes an issue under pressure – especially when Ethan gets knocked down mid-battle and you have to reactivate it again in a hurry.

Note that Ethan’s usual parry-ability to push an enemy away doesn’t work when you’re using the LZ Answerer, or any other knife-weapon. Apparently you’ve got to be holding a gun for that.

Colour Modes

Red: Attack mode. Sabre does maximum damage in this mode.

Blue: Defence mode. Sabre does less damage (about 1/4 of red), but can be used to parry attacks, knocking enemies back.

To parry successfully, you need to hit the block button just as an enemy attacks. Just holding block down will still block, but won’t knock the enemy back.

Green: Healing mode. Sabre does even less damage (about 1/12 of red or 1/3 of blue), but heals Ethan slightly with each hit.

Healing mode will also boost your HP when you attack farm animals, or some inactive Soldats. From my own experiments, this didn't work on the Soldats in Heisenberg's operating room, but did work on the first inactive Soldat you encounter, sitting in its chair, and on the Soldats you find lined up in alcoves in the passage by the backup generator room (one of which does attack you, so something of a pattern there).

Double-bladed mode: Doubles damage of whichever colour mode is active.

Damage reductions here are relative – I don’t have exact figures, but have done a bunch of experimentation on multiple difficulties, recording how many hits it took to down an enemy, so have some figures.

On Casual difficulty, a single-bladed red sabre will kill a standard lycan or moroi in 1 hit. Your blue sabre will need 4 hits – or 2 with a double-blade. For comparison, the Karambit knife (unlocked after you finish the game for the first time) took me up to 3 hits to take down a lycan. Some of those hits may have been misses – its range is so short that it’s often hard to tell if it’s connecting at all – but you can see the LZ Answerer is already starting to lose its edge.

To kill 1 lycan with the green sabre will take you around 6 hits, even if it’s in double-bladed mode, so presumably closer to 12 with a single blade (I say ‘presumably’ because good luck counting out 12 hits on a single lycan). Even on Casual.

Up the difficulty to Hardcore, and you’ll need 2 red hits to take down one lycan (or 1 hit in double-bladed mode). By Village of Shadows, you’re looking at 2 double-bladed hits from your red sabre per kill – so if we do the math, we’d be looking at 48 hits with a single-green sabre. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Where it really gets complicated

So in theory, this is a weapon with a lot of versatility: 6 different modes, the ability to parry and knock down enemies or even heal yourself, and do serious damage without spending ammo! In practice though, only the red mode is really useful (damage in other modes is just too steeply reduced), and even then, more of a novelty than a substitute for your guns.

See, here’s the thing: using the LZ Answerer really drives home that this is not a game designed for melee combat, and letting enemies get into melee range is a Bad Idea.

Even on casual difficulty, most enemies will strike at you the moment they get into range, and your sabre has no real impact or stopping power. Enemies will regularly take multiple hits from it without flinching, and it does nothing to interrupt incoming attacks.

So you can hit a lycan the moment you get into range, and that lycan will still tank the hit, dive straight through the blade, knock you into the dirt and go for your neck, locking you into an extended animation and forcing you to reactivate the sabre again from scratch before you can go in for another hit. If you want time to reactivate both blades, you’ll probably have to run away and come back.

In theory, being able to parry incoming attacks in blue-bladed defensive mode should be a good solution, but in practice, parried enemies are blown too far away to set them up for a counter-attack. By the time you’ve closed the distance, they’re probably getting back up again. Using your regular block in melee combat and then attacking immediately after is actually the more viable strategy. Note also that, even on a successful parry, Ethan still takes damage, and all that damage adds up pretty quickly.

But the biggest problem is that defensive mode reduces sabre damage by around 75%. That means up to 4 times more hits to take down an enemy, and at least 4 times more chances for them to get through your guard. By far the most effective strategy I could come up with – regardless of difficulty – with was to just rush enemies with my double-red sabre and take them down before they had the chance to react. With this thing, the best defence really is a good offense

Healing mode is only worse: one hit from a green sabre does barely 1/12 the damage of your red sabre, and you’ll need multiple hits to raise Ethan’s health by even a single colour phase. Trying to kill enemies at short range with what amounts to a pen knife just results in getting bitten more, and ending the battle with less health than you started.

Some Actual Tactical Advice

The long and short of all this is that in 99.9% of circumstances, there’s no reason to use any mode but red. The best tactic available is killing your enemy in one hit, before it ever gets the chance to attack at all.

Strategy-wise, I found two different semi-viable ways to use this thing in combat, both working best in double-bladed red mode. Switching colours mid-stream is just too slow to be practical under pressure.

Block as soon as an enemy gets close to you, then use the window after it attacks to attack back. You’ll take some damage, but not as much.

Charge in swinging the lightsabre madly, preferably while weaving to the left, hitting the enemy without putting yourself in a good position for it to hit you back. On lower difficulties, this will kill most enemies in one hit.

If you do get knocked down in the midst of a fight (and you will), you’ll probably end up finishing the fight with a single-bladed sabre. C'est la vie.

In Conclusion

So with all these issues, is there are a reason to use the LZ Answerer at all? Well, actually, yes.

For all its problems, the red sabre is still the best knife-class weapon in the game. Even in single-bladed mode, it does more damage than the Chris’ karambit, and has better range to boot. And if you’re going for the knives-only achievement, that’s not to be sneezed at.

Though green-bladed mode isn’t useful in combat, it will actually heal you a little even when attacking farm animals or (surprisingly!) inactive soldats. And if you’re going for the three-healing-items-or-less achievement, then that's actually useful.

That said, by the time you’ve unlocked the LZ Answerer, you should already have unlocked ‘special customisations’ for all your weapons (a much easier Mercenaries-mode unlockable). And with that bonus, Ethan’s basic starter pistol, the Lemi, also heals you a little with each hit. It doesn’t do much damage, but you can do damage with it from a safe distance, and that’s often going to be way more practical.

All that said, the green sabre can be more efficient. Testing this out, I found that, killing the two goats with the green sabre refilled my health all the way from red to dark green, whereas killing those same two goats with the Lemi only increase my health from red to orange. And being able to stand there and just whale on inactive Soldats is a pretty effective way of refilling your health too.

Ultimately, the LZ Answerer is mostly just a novelty weapon that can be pretty frustrating to use in practice. But as a cute gimmick that mostly exists as an excuse to play more Mercenaries and reuse Ethan’s knife-wielding animations in a fun way, that’s all it really needs to be. It’s neat, but you’re not missing a lot if you never unlock the thing, and that’s okay.

#info #re8 #unlocking this thing is my current goal in life #i gave up last time after getting SSS on the first stage and then not bejng able to get past A on the Castle #this was before the DLC came out then when it did i had already vowed against playing mercs again

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