Look, most games take awhile to really finish. Resident Evil 5 is no different. Problem is, you get to the end and realize it totally sucks because it not only mashes up a bunch of superior games, but it also falls back on a bunch of trite movie conventions.
Just to give some perspective, the Resident Evil game franchise has topped 40 million units sold worldwide, easily topping Capcom’s next best selling game franchise. Resident Evil 5, the newest installment has contributed 4 million units by itself. Admittedly this places the franchise behind heavy hitters such as Zelda, Grand Theft Auto, and Mario. But it’s still ahead of Gears of War, Call of Duty, and Halo. And of course, Resident Evil is the only game franchise out of all of these titles to also sport a successful movie franchise. [By successful, I mean financially, not artistically.] So it’s fair to say that Resident Evil is a real powerhouse among videogame franchises.
I’ve mastered almost every Resident Evil game in the franchise (I got bored with the Verizon cell phone game and gave up). I’m not likely to be on WCG Gamer on Sci Fi anytime soon, but the few game series I commit to, I know very well. Resident Evil 5 came out in March and I’ve played it through a couple of times (though I haven’t unlocked all the trophies). So it is with heavy heart that I must say that the newest addition to the Resident Evil franchise, Resident Evil 5, just . . . kind of . . . sucks.
The real problem with this game is that it just seems desperate. Ironic, I know, for a survival horror game. But I mean it’s desperate to hold onto its place as a major player in videogame titles rather than provide a really fun game. This game throws in a bunch of pieces of different games to obviously try and peel off loyal followers of other games. For example, the game puts in various duck-and-cover scenarios obviously ripped off from Gears of War. It has the sniper sections from Call of Duty. It puts the main character into vehicle like Halo. And the big bosses require you to hit key vulnerable points and remove protective shielding just like Zelda. Frankly, I was kind of surprised you didn’t get to beat up hookers to steal their money like Grand Theft Auto.
All of this is inexplicable as most of the games that Resident Evil 5 apes lack the kind of staying power that the Resident Evil franchise has demonstrated over the long hall. IGN put a nice spin on the game saying it’s "evolved", but I had to wonder who paid them to say that. The core of this franchise is survival. Even though the original game pretty much ripped off Alone in the Dark, it was still incredibily innovative in its pacing. You struggled to get just a little more ammunition by unlocking a room you could see, but not enter, only to find that there was only one box of handgun shells. Even when they picked up the tempo in Resident Evil 4, you still worried that you would get killed. [And I really did not expect that it would be THAT unsettling to have my computer avatar get decapitated, but it still freaks me out every time I go back to play Resident Evil 4.]
The central flaw in this game was that you have no real reason to relate to your avatar. The two best games in the franchise, Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 4, focus on Leon Kennedy, a police officer who is just trying to do his job, but things go horribly wrong. In Resident Evil 2, he shows up for his first day on the job at the Racoon City Police Department to find it overrun by zombies. The rest of the game is his attempt to escape. He befriends other characters, but his motive is to survive. Resident Evil 4 gives him a promotion, but he’s now trying to rescue the President’s daughter. The tension in the game comes from him losing her and recapturing her all while trying to fight turning into a zombie himself. I admit it’s not Shakespeare, but for adventure/quest/puzzle/shooter games, it’s about as good a story as you can get. The plots aren’t necessarily innovative, but at least the core value appeals to a pretty universally accepted idea of heroism, helping other people at great personal risk.
Most importantly in these games, the villain is kind of incidental. Resident Evil 2, it’s a bad police chief and then an evil scientists. Resident Evil 4, it’s the leader of a religious cult. Sure, there’s an evil corporation in the background, but they aren’t really your motivation. They represent a force of evil that wishes you harm, that you must overcome. They exist to put you in a fight or flight frame of mind and your challenge is to maintain your humanity. In other words there’s no "message."
In Resident Evil 5, however, they are hoping that you hate drug companies enough that you’ll go with your character on his mission. That’s your guy’s sole motivation, bring down the evil drug company. It’s like The Constant Gardner on steroids. Literally. You should see the guns on Chris Redfield, your main character. HGH. I’m telling you. And to keep the game moving you pass up obvious opportunities to escape because your character is totally devoted to stopping the spread of bioweapons. You can’t copy Blackhawk Down when your guys can escape.
So because your main character is given this artificial motivation, you’re kind of divorced from the action. Sure, you don’t want to get killed, but there’s no reason to look for clues. You get to go after Albert Wesker, the Neo-esque boogeyman from the first game (and Code Veronica) because he "killed" your partner (in a flashback . . . in this game), but so what? The advantage videogames have is that they pull you into their story with very literal interaction. This game started with the obvious premise that we’ve all seen before–big, rich corporation exploiting the innocent citizenry. There’s even a bonus here as the innocent citizenry happen to also be African natives. And they even threw in a helpful African sidekick (who is also hot) to quell any complaints about racism. [Sadly, they even threw in some whiter looking zombies for diversity sake like a Salt ‘N Pepa video.]
But I guess they figure you won’t mind. You may even find it credible, an evil corporation turning impoverished people into vicious zombies. It’s not quite the vicious toxic waste of the Transporter 3, but it’s close. Corporations hate you, especially if you’re poor. You’re probably a young, teenage gamer, they think. This makes total sense. What else do corporations do except evil? All because Capcom felt like they needed to compete with the newer, popular games. So they threw a lot of the same game play mechanics together with the only acceptable villain these days, corporations, and figured you’d buy it.
And judging by the success of the game, it looks like at least one corporation is successful at turning people into zombies.
Hey R.J.,
Well, I’m glad we can at least agree that the game is sort of meh. And congratulations on getting and doing everything. That’s certainly time consuming, and I’m sorry you don’t feel it was as rewarding as previous games.
Don’t be sorry. I enjoyed the time spent to get everything, and it was mandatory due to the completist still wandering inside me. But, the story left such an impact (especially after seeing it multiple times) that I’m no longer motivated to go back and put in the effort to come up with fool-proof strategies for everything. Or to go the extra mile and think of interesting ways to go through it again. Oh, and write about/tape it.
Yeah, you’re right, I do like the Leon arc more than the Chris Redfield arc. Maybe that’s not fair, but you’ve got to admit both Leon outings are very strong while Redfield/Valentine stuff has kind of a loss of quality. One may be good, but 3 and 5 aren’t so much.
That’s your preference, and I have no problem with it. But my point still stands, which is that in 1/3/5 it isn’t so much about Umbrella as it is about Wesker, Chris and Jill smack dab in the middle. If you follow the arc closely, you’ll know that Chris isn’t really interested in bringing down Umbrella – it’s just a nice extra while getting the grand prize, Wesker who, as all the Umbrella bigshots are gradually being put out of the picture, “becomes” Umbrella in a sense.
1 was pretty similar to 2, you had a team on the job, trying to rescue another team, but then it has to survive itself. Umbrella is, as you stated, silently in the background.
In 3, it’s still silently in the background, even though Jill (and Chris) are now aware of Umbrella’s threat. Jill isn’t valiantly battling the minions of Umbrella, no, she’s desperately trying to survive the hell that is Raccoon City, filled as it is with the consequences of Umbrella’s experiment-gone-wrong.
In 5, you have the anti-bioweapon forces vs. Umbrella. Chris is “on the job”, just like Leon was, and then things go horribly wrong and Chris/Sheva need to survive. However, at this point, Chris can almost smell Wesker and he is not about to give up. Umbrella really isn’t in the picture anymore, leave alone Tricell, which surely must be considered a silly afterthought.
(And Code Veronica’s kind of a wash because it seems to straddle both arcs, though it’s more of a trapped/escape type of game.)
It’s true that CV is a sort of portmanteau for all the characters up to that point, but in the end, most of the game is centered around Claire/Phteeve, so I tend to place it more in the Leon/Claire arc.
And, while I agree that losing your partner would certainly make someone mad, the gamemakers certainly don’t capitalize on that in the game. I mean, we know she’s not dead because they introduce the weird hawk-faced person in the beginning. Can’t see that twist coming. And, of course, even that motivation gets erased in the game (too early, I thought).
Of course, but it *was* a very interesting concept, in my opinion. However (also in my opinion), Takeuchi blew it by allowing/forcing Chris to rescue Jill (otherwise it’s game over, after all). It would have been much more interesting (leave alone a step in the right direction, towards a mature plot line) if Jill – the irony – had completely turned hostile, forever allied with Wesker, without any option to reverse her viral transformation (which is also the “realistic” proposal here, since every virus-infested creature in the game is irreversibly hostile). Think about the kind of emotional processes *that* would have brought
along for Chris. How would his fight against Wesker go under those conditions? That would be something I’d be interested in.
But no, the developers chose the “lame duck” way out.
Also, why does Jill then stay behind? She has no conceivable reason to. She may still have her superpowers to help Chris and Sheva. She knows all about Wesker’s plans, his troops, the infrastructure. No, she stays behind because it’s “not her fight”. What?! Don’t know about you, but if I were Jill, I’d help the eff out of Chris and Sheva and then crush Wesker’s skull with my bare hands.
(of course the real reason is related to gameplay, but if Jill was irreversibly infected, the rest of the story would actually make sense instead of becoming increasingly ludicrous.)
True, the Umbrella story had been established in the first Resident Evil. But the fact that the game makers have to keep destroying the same corporate villain only makes the entire enterprise more tired.
Well, that’s because it’s a successful video game. What do you do when you have a successful video game (*cough* movie)? Right, you milk it with sequels, incrementally exploring and deepening the original premise. That’s why I was looking forward so much to 5: it would have been the ultimate conclusion. No more Wesker, no more Umbrella. But, given all the preceding games, the conclusion in 5 is conceptually absurd.
I guess that’s why I prefer Leon’s more humble goals, rescue and survival. Which, if you think about it, was what the first game was more about as well, with Umbrella as a backdrop.
And I hold that all the previous games had these humble goals: rescue and survival. But, in some, we had Jill, in others we had Claire.
But I’m not above admitting that I should probably just go with it. After all, there’s more story here than Left 4 Dead. (Sigh, if only there were a little more story there . . .)
Nahh, L4D is exactly what it needs to be. Unadulterated, mindless, FPS zombie gore splashing fun. Resident Evil was different and it still is, what with it now being unadulterated, mindless, *TPS Majini* gore splashing fun. Just don’t look at the beautiful cutscenes, or at least don’t listen to what is being said or your brain will malfunction more than it is now 🙂
Another thing that I didn’t mention, and maybe you were hoping for as well, was there was all this potential to play with light that never materialized. The big idea that I kept hearing in previews was that we (as players) would have to adapt to lighting changes with zombies in the shadows(like a fully realized version of the Gameboy Resident Evil). Other than the mine section, I don’t remember much of that. So the one area where they could’ve been more innovative, they kind of whiffed. Instead, they aped a lot of other game mechanics. It was disappointing.
I agree. I guess it got canned for not promoting aggressiveness. Or it was getting in the way of shooting infinite bullets into Majinis real fast. On the other hand, I don’t want to sound off negative about the entire game: some scenes were done really well. I loved the opening scene where you can feel the menacing villager’s eyes piercing your back. When I first entered the abandoned Umbrella lab, I thought the game was going to return to form (alas). The Sheva rescue scene at the end was done very well, too. Unfortunately, the negatives are burnt on my retinas so strongly that the positives are but a small white dot in the sea of blue, green and red I’m exposed to.
But on a positive note, as you point out, it made beaucoup bucks, so the franchise continues. Hopefully it will try to get back to basics (like the Nintendo retelling of the first one) rather than capitalize on what’s popular these days.
Don’t count on it too much. I fear Resident Evil as we once knew it has gone the way of the dodo. Perhaps it will return (in good time) like classic adventure games are doing now.
However, the problem is, exactly *because* RE5 made beaucoup bucks, this means that Capcom will now consider pushing the co-op format (with all the horrible design decisions it brought with it) and keep general gameplay in its current form. Perhaps they will add strafe’n’shoot and make it the FPS the kids are screaming for. Either way, I fear the “big reboot” will be in the story department, not so much in the gameplay department.
Thanks for your feedback concerning my response to a nearly-two-months old article :).
Well, I’m glad we can at least agree that the game is sort of meh. And congratulations on getting and doing everything. That’s certainly time consuming, and I’m sorry you don’t feel it was as rewarding as previous games.
Yeah, you’re right, I do like the Leon arc more than the Chris Redfield arc. Maybe that’s not fair, but you’ve got to admit both Leon outings are very strong while Redfield/Valentine stuff has kind of a loss of quality. One may be good, but 3 and 5 aren’t so much. (And Code Veronica’s kind of a wash because it seems to straddle both arcs, though it’s more of a trapped/escape type of game.) And, while I agree that losing your partner would certainly make someone mad, the gamemakers certainly don’t capitalize on that in the game. I mean, we know she’s not dead because they introduce the weird hawk-faced person in the beginning. Can’t see that twist coming. And, of course, even that motivation gets erased in the game (too early, I thought).
True, the Umbrella story had been established in the first Resident Evil. But the fact that the game makers have to keep destroying the same corporate villain only makes the entire enterprise more tired. I guess that’s why I prefer Leon’s more humble goals, rescue and survival. Which, if you think about it, was what the first game was more about as well, with Umbrella as a backdrop.
But I’m not above admitting that I should probably just go with it. After all, there’s more story here than Left 4 Dead. (Sigh, if only there were a little more story there . . .)
Another thing that I didn’t mention, and maybe you were hoping for as well, was there was all this potential to play with light that never materialized. The big idea that I kept hearing in previews was that we (as players) would have to adapt to lighting changes with zombies in the shadows(like a fully realized version of the Gameboy Resident Evil). Other than the mine section, I don’t remember much of that. So the one area where they could’ve been more innovative, they kind of whiffed. Instead, they aped a lot of other game mechanics. It was disappointing.
But on a positive note, as you point out, it made beaucoup bucks, so the franchise continues. Hopefully it will try to get back to basics (like the Nintendo retelling of the first one) rather than capitalize on what’s popular these days.
Disagree – you come over as a fan of the 2/CV/4 Leon arc, in full denial of the 1/3/5 Jill arc as I’m not seeing a lot about the latter here.
The concept “Umbrella Inc.” has been developed and has been the enemy in this series since the first part. Wesker started out as its henchman, but gradually devolved into the disappointing caricature of a supervillain we’ve seen in 5.
Wesker used/betrayed Umbrella to get to the Tyrant project, much as he uses/kills everyone in order to reach his personal goals. Umbrella is destroyed over the years, and we see Wesker finish off the remaining king pins. Then, he uses the name Umbrella and its reputation to cover up his own, dark motives.
During all this, Chris has been Wesker’s antagonist. Wesker grew to hate Chris, although he still admires his unfaltering motivation to bring him down. Chris hates Wesker more than ever. How would YOU feel if your life-long partner “died” because of a guy like Wesker?
So the reason why Umbrella is the bad corporation and why Chris fights Umbrella with all his might, is because to him, Umbrella is Wesker. Wesker is Umbrella. Umbrella is immediate and real, not a nameless corporation, just like Saddler or William Birkin was immediate and real to Leon.
For the rest, I agree that RE5 is desparate, that it tries to cater to too many people at a time. But on top of that comes a ridiculous story. This was supposed to be the final showdown of Chris vs. Wesker, the ultimate conclusion to the Jill arc. Instead, we get the most ridiculous plot and execution I have ever seen. It was a big disappointment for me. Normally, I’d write a speed guide, or a FAQ for every new Resident Evil, but this one has been such a bummer that I probably won’t be doing that.
Unprecedented. I unlocked everything, Achieved everything. I have a slew of interesting tricks and strategies for this game. Yet I don’t feel compelled in the slightest to write about it, simply because of the horrid plot. I stopped playing after unlocking everything and never looked back. Not motivated in the slightest to play it ever again, quite a contrast with RE4, which I still play from time to time, discovering new things as I go.
The sad thing is, this game sold like hotcakes, mainly it was riding on the wave of RE4. It got critical acclaim from the established reviewing core. So what do you think will happen to 6? Right.
Very interesting observations indeed, R. J. I think it’s very important that we understand the assumptions behind the narratives in video games as we do in any other cultural phenomena, and I think this is an exemplary analysis. The use of corporate America as the villain is indeed characteristic of much of popular culture today, as is the positing of vast, exploitative conspiracies that can be unraveled by a single, determined, honorable individual. That’s a very 1980s thought, and I think it will pass into the ether soon enough, as real serious, villains become emboldened in the real world in the coming months.