Resident Evil rant this time.

 Preface: Not much to say this time.  I just don't think RE4 deserves as much praise as it gets.

This all came round when I happened upon a youtube video by Errant Signal’s Chris ‘Campster’ Franklin.  In it, he - along with HyperBit Hero (who’s real name I don’t know) - discuss the various issues that plagued RE5, from it’s conflicted design, awkward gamplay and of course the race thing.  They talked about how the game was so far removed from the “earlier games of the series”.  It was a real frustrating video for me to watch, not because I didn’t agree with them, but because they kept tap dancing around a simple fact.



RE5 is a carbon copy of the publicly and critically lauded RE4 and everything they complained about RE5 applies just as much - if not more so - to RE4.

For those who don’t know, it’s the one where the president’s daughter’s been kidnapped and we have to ask ourselves, are we bad enough dudes to rescue her?  That’s like…deep man.  Like, Inception don’t go this deep, ya feel?  Truth be told I didn’t have much beef with the games campy, z-grade story and characters as I was too busy trying to play what had to be the worst third person shooter I’d ever played.

Everything Chris ‘n Hyper complained about RE5’s design and gameplay can be directly attributed to RE4 and that’s the rub that no one wants to own up to.  RE4’s popularity was merely a matter of good timing.  People were still familiar enough with the PSX ‘adventure game’ styled puzzles and ‘2D’ style controls and the popularity of shooters had not yet been established enough, creating this situation where Capcom could release what was essentially a third person shooter using ‘adventure game’ styled controls.

I tried to play it again recently and simply found it intolerable.  Not just because the controls were ill suited to the task of shooting a bunch of cultists in a room I couldn’t leave until all were dead (no puzzle, just shoot’n), but at how needless it was.  I could have played this game using the standard control mechanics of a FPS and nothing would be significantly altered.  No gameplay mechanics would be broken, no designs irrevocably destroyed…nothing would change except my ability to play the game better. But, because this was Resident Evil 4 - i.e. the 4th in a popular franchise - it was saddled with a character who took up too much of the screen, controlled like a dump truck, and had to stand still in order to shoot any weapons because it supposedly wasn’t a shooter…even though it absolutely was.