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rachelkaser · 1 year

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Resident Evil 4 Remake: 4 characters who were improved, and 2 who were ignored

After several weeks and multiple playthroughs of Resident Evil 4 Remake, I’ve finally made up my mind on which topic I wanted to write about. Believe me, there was a lot of ground to cover -- if you want an overview of what I think of the game generally, go read my review on GamesBeat. But here I wanted to keep it to one specific thing about the game: The characters.

More specifically, I want to go over which characters I think were improved in the remake, at least with regards to their overall writing and story arcs. I mean no disrespect to the original game, but the characters there, such as they were, were parodies and stock figures more so than people.

I’ll talk about four character that I think got an upgrade, in terms of character or (to a lesser extent) gameplay. I’ll also talk about two characters who could have used an upgrade, but were not given one -- and it might not be the ones you think.

I think it goes without saying, but just to be clear, there are going to be SPOILERS for Resident Evil 4 Remake in this post. If you haven’t played it yet, read at your own risk.

Character Improved: Ashley Graham

The original Ashley Graham has become the poster child for “annoying video game NPC” especially under the subcategory “escort missions.” Granted, I doubt I would have done much better than she did were I dropped into an infested foreign village as a college student. But even so, her grating voice and personality were not built to endear her to the player. As with everything else on this list, don’t mistake what I say as being a criticism of the original game. The original Ashley was deliberately written that way for maximum comedic effect.

Everything in RE4 was campy and exaggerated. Leon was a parody of a slick action hero. Ada was a stereotypical vamp in an impractical dress. The villains all spoke their evil monologues in self-indulgent drawls. Unfortunately, Ashley’s archetype, the damsel in distress, was also exaggerated -- and the exaggerated damsel is, by necessity, kind of shrill and needy. Gamers became fonder of her over time, if begrudgingly in many cases, but let’s not pretend the devs didn’t know how annoying she was when they made her.

Just to clarify: When I say “improved,” what I mean is that the character was changed in a way that made them better fit the world. Resident Evil 4 was never meant to be a compelling yarn but an action-packed good time. Resident Evil 4 Remake had ambitions to be both, and that meant the characters, Ashley included, had to change. As such, the new Ashley has been rewritten to be far more likeable and helpful. It sounds like an oxymoron, but she comes across as both younger and smarter.

In her first scene, the new Ashley attempts to defend herself when Leon enters her room, already making her a bit more competent than her previous iteration. She bolts out of the open door the first chance she gets, not listening to Leon. You later find out this is because she was abducted by Krauser, an American agent she probably thought she could trust. Therefore, she’s less inclined to blindly obey an agent she doesn’t know until the approaching Ganado leave her no choice.

She gets more conversations with Leon, commenting when he startles her throwing out a grenade or when he does something ridiculous like swing from a chandelier. Hints of her personality outside the crisis occasionally shine through, such as when she tells Leon she wants to be an agent and save the world with him. She helps in gameplay without having to be asked, dropping a Regenerator down a chasm of her own accord should it get too close to her. I feel that change alone has to have endeared her to most RE4R players.

The fact that she’s more proactive in the story also helps. She’s the one who cures Leon of his Plaga, figuring it out on her own despite having been too out of it to see him start the process on her. She helps Leon escape Mendez’s burning boss arena by smashing a window with a chair. She even leaps at the chance to drive the wrecking ball machine (and her apologies should she accidentally smack Leon with it are adorable). One of my favorite changes in RE4R is that she acknowledges Luis’s help and shows some emotion when Leon tells her about his death.

There’s one change that improves both her and Leon: The fact that she’s infested with a Plaga and has been for some time is far more important in the remake. The encroaching parasite absolutely terrifies her, and she nearly has a panic attack when Saddler remotely mind-controls her during the castle section. I appreciate that the game treats her like the vulnerable young woman she is rather than like the brunt of a game-long joke. She isn’t subject to Leon and Luis’s inappropriate teasing, and they’re quicker to reassure her that they’re friendly and want to help her.

I want to praise the new version of Ashley’s chapter, which is the only part of RE4R that puts the “horror” into “survival horror.” Granted, if I’m being really honest, there’s slightly less context for this section than there was in the original -- in the original, the enemies were cultists combing the castle looking for her; in the remake, they’re random, Plaga-infested suits of armor that are hanging out in the library. But I’m not inclined to criticize that because the whole Ashley section already felt like an out-of-body experience.

But alongside the tougher and nastier enemies, Ashley is more determined and courageous in this section. She’s unarmed and terrified, but she perseveres because she has to, and her pluck had me grinning ear to ear. My favorite moment was when she has to crawl under several immobilized Armaduras and pleads with them to behave themselves. The new Ashley isn’t completely free of the original’s annoying characteristics, but it’s a whole lot more excusable than it was the first time around.

Character Improved: Luis Serra Navarro

Let’s face it: Leon S. Kennedy is not the greatest judge of character in the world. His longest-lasting and most meaningful relationship in the whole series is with a woman who either can’t or won’t give him the time of day. It’s rare to see him get a meaningful moment of camaraderie with another character. So to see his relationship with Luis Sera -- here rechristened as Luis Serra Navarro -- go from a tentative détente to an actual friendship where they help each other feels rare and glorious.

Luis was always a bit of a wild card in the original game. It wasn’t exactly clear where he came from or what his deal was. We knew he had some kind of connection to the village, but not exactly what. He claims at various times to be a former police officer from Madrid or a researcher who worked on Las Plagas. How much of it is true, Leon never discovers. There are various points in the story where it seems Luis is going to give Leon and Ashley some answers, but he never gets around to it before Saddler impales him.

Luis in RE4R, on the other hand, is far more forthcoming and amiable. While he doesn’t disclose everything to Leon -- he conceals that he was once an Umbrella researcher -- he tells the heavily armed American stranger everything he needs to know to escape the situation safely. As the game progresses and he and Leon learn more about each other, he shares his reasons for helping them: He feels guilty about assisting Los Illuminados and wants to undo some of the damage he’s done.

Capcom knew not to fix what wasn’t broken, as Luis’s best moment from the original game, the cabin battle, is brought into the remake almost completely unchanged. He still helps Leon in combat, tossing him ammo when he gets low and attacking enemies that are giving him trouble. Sure, he’s still got a bit of a cheeky attitude, but the scene where it’s most prominently displayed is also the scene where he tells Leon where he can find Ashley, so I think we can forgive him that one.

Luis is much more compassionate in the remake. He explains to a scared Ashley what’s wrong with her and promises to help, and goes out of his way to get the suppressant to Leon. Given that his deal with Ada was for the Amber and he’s the only one who knows where it’s hidden, he could easily grab it and bail, but he doesn’t. And speaking of Ada, Luis is much more hesitant about contacting her, knowing that whomever she’s working for could be just as bad as Saddler, if not worse.

If the original’s backstory wasn’t explained to my satisfaction, two parts of it are expanded in the remake. First, his connection to the village. RE4R doesn’t precisely spell it out, but anyone who’s even slightly paying attention can piece together that Luis was originally raised in the village by his grandfather. Leon finds his grandfather’s diary, where the old man effuses about his grandson’s brilliance and how he’s wasted in a small town. I like to imagine the Red 9 Luis wields is actually his grandfather’s.

Another element is his work with Umbrella. In the original, it’s not explained where Luis’s scientific bonafides came from (not that we really required explanation), just that he was a researcher who balked at Saddler’s plans for world domination. In this one, we discover that not only was Luis part of Umbrella, he was in part responsible for the Nemesis, having been part of the European team that created it all the way back in the original RE3. Considering they don’t address that in the RE3 Remake, that’s a pretty deep cut (and it makes sense, given Luis’s history with the Plaga and how tentacle-y Nemmy is, though I’m not sure which one came first).

Of course, I’ve not yet addressed the biggest change to Luis -- namely, that he dies much later in the remake than he does in the original. Here he accompanies Leon through the entire mine level, including the outrageous mine cart chase and the Novistador infestation. He gets a more interesting (if less ostentatious) death, being knifed in the back by Krauser and surviving just long enough to shoot the knife out of his killer’s hands at a critical moment (taking Ada’s place in that scene, which doesn’t bother me).

Also, maybe I’m the only one who noticed or cared about this, but I appreciate that he’s more Spanish in this one. Far be it for lil ol’ American me to judge someone for not being an adequate representation of their country, but the original Luis always sounded like someone trying on a vague approximation of the right accent. Not only does Luis have a better voice this time, but he now has an appropriately Spanish name. Perhaps it’s a touch stereotypical to have him be so obsessed with Don Quixote, but hey, I’m obsessed with it and I’m not remotely Spanish.

Character Ignored: Ingrid Hunnigan

This one was a disappointment. I loved Hunnigan in the original game. In RE4′s world of hammy lunacy, she was the grounded character, the one who let you know that there was order and safety for Leon outside of his mission. Someone had to be the straight man, and Leon only plays the part intermittently. Ingrid Hunnigan, Leon’s handler, was the voice of order in the chaotic, fast-paced world of RE4, and we all loved her for that.

The version of her that appears in RE4R doesn’t play as much of a role in the plot, if only because Leon doesn’t need quite the same level of moral support. The two of them end up getting cut off from each other early in the castle level -- around the same place the villains hijacked Leon’s radio signal in the original game. So it’s not that we have less Hunnigan in the remake, per se. But it’s more that they completely whiffed the chance to give her more attention than they did in the original game.

The version we have in RE4R is . . . passable. Given that the remake doesn’t really need someone to play straight man as often, it makes sense that Hunnigan’s role in the game would be somewhat muted. I don’t mind that she’s no longer subject to Leon’s ridiculously un-smooth flirtation attempts. That was cute before, but this new, more serious Leon would give us all even more secondhand cringe than the original did.

Now that I think of it, since Salazar and Saddler didn’t hijack Leon’s communications in the remake, there’s not much of an explanation given for why he’s cut off from her? If it were just an interference issue, wouldn’t that clear up at least slightly on the way to the island? Regardless, I think there was still room for Hunnigan to play Leon’s tether to reality -- not necessarily because the villains are so cartoonish, but because Leon’s kinda losing his grip thanks in part to his parasite hitchhiker.

The remake makes the plot point about Leon and Ashley having Las Plagas implanted in their bodies more important and uses it to add a sense of urgency to the story. One of my favorite new additions is a lengthy sequence in which Leon has to fight off Plaga-induced visions in the final stretch to reach the cure. Wouldn’t it be trippy as hell if we heard Hunnigan’s voice during these sequences, sliding in and out as Leon starts to lose it? In-game, he just kinda snaps out of it and unlocks the door to the lab with no explanation -- wouldn’t it be great if, instead, it was Hunnigan’s desperate attempts to reach him that woke him up?

Here’s an alternate scenario: Maybe Hunnigan could have been a secondary antagonist? I don’t mean a villain, but someone who begins working against Leon as the mission goes sideways. I’m not the first one to point it out, but once Leon was certain Ashley was in the village, he should not have been the only law enforcement officer on the spot. You could make the case that everything happening in a night could have stymied backup, but I think that leaves open a new possibility to make the mission more hectic and time-sensitive.

To that end, maybe Hunnigan could have tried to call in the Spanish authorities and/or a backup Interpol squad, but each time Leon keeps trying to reassure her that this wouldn’t be helpful and he’s got the situation under control -- perhaps because he’s fearful of having another Raccoon City, where every police officer besides him got absolutely mauled. The game keeps hinting Leon has leftover guilt from that incident -- perhaps that would have been a way to exacerbate it?

The player might be tempted to think she has a point, given that Ashley slips out of Leon’s grasp like a greased cat. This would have made Mike the Helicopter Pilot’s death more interesting. Mike is Hunnigan’s way of trying to help, compromising with Leon’s lone wolf attitude while still providing what, from her perspective, is much-needed firepower. And Mike is helpful, at first. Then he gets killed by the Novistadors, proving that Los Illuminados are able to fend off a military assault and that Leon is right to be going this alone. Also, Mike the Helicopter Pilot? One of my favorite things about the remake.

Character Improved: Ada Wong

I think this might be a more controversial take -- especially considering I criticized this depiction of Ada in my official review. And don’t get me wrong, I’m still not really a fan . . . though, I will say that anyone who might have used my critique of Lily Gao’s performance as an excuse to harass her should go flog themselves, because that is unacceptable. While I have my reservations about Ada’s interactions with other characters (which might still be improved in the inevitable Separate Ways DLC), I still appreciate this updated take on her. Let me explain.

Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 4 (the originals, that is) felt like they were from entirely different planets. If I were to put them in front of a person who knew nothing about games, I’m willing to bet money they would never peg them as being from the same franchise. That’s not a criticism, by the way -- just an observation of the generational differences that affected the series.

Resident Evil 4 had a vastly different tone from RE2. The original RE2 was, while a little corny, intended to be a sober horror game. So it makes sense that Ada in that game is more of a dark femme fatale, beautiful and beguiling to the naïve Leon but still a ruthless and efficient spy who is willing to kill to accomplish her goals. Ada in RE4, on the other hand, is a more openly sexy and flirtatious character, less serious and more flamboyant. Again, this completely fits the tone of the game, as everyone is less serious and more flamboyant in RE4.

I like to use her outfits as a point of comparison. Ada in RE2 wore a short red dress, black leggings, and ballet flats -- not the most practical outfit for a zombie-infested city, but it fit her cover story of being a civilian looking for her boyfriend, and one could make the case that Ada didn’t know exactly how big a mess Raccoon City was. In RE4, on the other hand, she wore a stylish red cheongsam and black heels -- not because it fit her cover story, or because she didn’t know the seriousness of her mission, but apparently because that’s just what she wanted to wear.

The remakes, on the other hand, are more or less homogenizing the major games in the series. These new games are more consistent in tone, gameplay, and story. Your mileage may vary on whether you enjoy that, but I look at it as simply a different artistic directive -- not good or bad. One of the major sources of that consistency is the characters. In 2005, it beggared belief that the flippy, quippy government agent was the same baby-faced cop from Raccoon City. In RE4R, I can completely believe it’s the same person.

To keep to that more consistent sense of tone and character, Ada can no longer be that stylishly appointed nor that overtly flirtatious. It wouldn’t be in keeping with her RE2R design. But she is still stylishly dressed and flirty, just in a more restrained sense. I appreciate as well that they give Ada a sense of agency I felt she lacked with regards to the original game’s ending. Ada’s always walked the line between good and bad, but at least in RE4R she doesn’t just blithely ride into the sunset with the BBEG’s key to world domination in her pocket.

So yes, while I do love both versions of Ada, I like that this one is written to be more in-line with her portrayal in RE2R, the same as with Leon. RE4R does pay homage to the original in the sense that she’s still dressed far sexier than I would think practical for the setting -- a skin-tight turtleneck sweater dress with thigh-high boots. But at least you could make the argument that it’s workable for a mission on what appears to be a chilly weekend in Europe.

Character Improved: Jack Krauser

As with all the characters on this list, I would never dream of suggesting the hardass military officer from the original game wasn’t a perfectly adequate specimen for the time. Quite the opposite. But let’s be honest with ourselves -- he was as much of a cheesy parody of action movie BS as Leon himself was. I love him dearly for that, but that kind of character wasn’t going to work in the remake.

Out of all the villains of the game, Krauser’s undergone perhaps the biggest facelift. Like all of them, he gets a general threat upgrade and has had most of his sillier affectations removed. Krauser is also changed from a former comrade-in-arms of Leon’s fallen from grace to his former drill instructor. He still has his flare for the dramatic, but here it’s less dark Rambo and more Lt. Col. Kilgore. I’ve heard some gamers aren’t huge fans of his new voice, but I think it’s at least of comparable quality to the original.

Leon establishes almost as soon as he sees Krauser that the new version was always an asshole, but he at least had some kind of a code of honor. It’s a little more clear in the remake that Krauser is a cautionary tale of a good soldier going bad thanks to ill fortune and a lack of faith in his superiors. Even in his final moments, he encourages Leon to finish him and complete his mission. I actually kind of hope he’s not in the Separate Ways DLC because I like his big finish in the main game.

This change extends beyond the original game and into The Darkside Chronicles, to my surprise. They keep one element of Krauser’s backstory consistent: Namely, that he and Leon were both involved in Operation Javier, which left him psychologically scarred and with a massive chip on his shoulder. However, they’ve altered this somewhat to imply that Operation Javier was some kind of government screw-up that was covered up, and Krauser was left to die. This is not Operation Javier as we were shown in Darkside Chronicles.

I can only see this as a good thing because one of the big disappointments of Darkside Chronicles was the reveal of why Krauser became a villain in the first place. I wasn’t exactly expecting a Shakespearean tragedy of a fallen hero, but let’s just say that the reason he betrayed his friend and country was way pettier than RE4 implies. So RE4R retroactively creates a better backstory for Krauser, if only in a read-between-the-lines kind of way.

Also, this relieves Krauser of the responsibility of being the one to tie the story to Umbrella. In the original game, that part came as a non sequitur that Krauser blurts out. The remake shifting that responsibility to Luis is not exactly contextualized much better, but it at least feels a bit less like something the devs threw in at the eleventh hour when they remembered they were making a Resident Evil game.

This makes his role in Los Illuminados clearer. In the original, he was Wesker’s infiltrator who became a little too enamored with having his own Plaga, which is why Wesker sent Ada to finish his original mission. It makes a bit more sense that Los Illuminados would proactively reach out to and convert a government agent, rather than happily accepting one who just happened to turn up at their door.

And I’m not the first one to say it, but his new boss battles are so much fun. The parrying mechanic feels like it was created specifically for the Krauser fight, replacing the QTEs of the original. While Leon shares some boss fight banter with all of the big bads, the stuff he has with Krauser feels way more personal and nasty. The game may not exactly spell out what kind of history the two of them have together, but you can definitely feel it in the way they insult each other.

I’m not saying the new Krauser is perfect, mind you -- I still think it's too much of coincidence that a random American soldier Leon knows is one of the final bosses of the game. But at least I understand who he is, what he wants, and why he’s so mad at Leon a little bit better. And Leon having a more personal connection to one of the bads was a fun element of the original that’s given a bit more emotional weight in the remake.

Character Ignored: Osmund Saddler

Ah, here he is: The big bad of the game, or at least the final one. Saddler is the leader of Los Illuminados and the mastermind behind Ashley’s kidnapping, so him keeping his position as the final enemy Leon must destroy is fitting -- but it feels like the RE4R devs missed an opportunity to flesh him out even more. All of Saddler’s lieutenants get a bit more meat on their figurative bones: Mendez’s history as leader of the village is explored; Salazar’s lineage is expanded on; and Krauser’s military record is completely overhauled. But Saddler himself? Not so much.

Saddler had a presence through the whole of the original game. In the remake, we don’t meet him in the flesh until the last few hours of the game, when he confronts Leon and Ashley as they’re almost to Luis’s cure machine. Granted, he makes quite an impression, mind-controlling Ashley and forcing her to shoot Leon. But considering we’ve seen Mendez, Salazar, and Krauser (making his earlier-than-before appearance in the castle section) already, Saddler feels almost like an afterthought in this adaptation.

Unlike Hunnigan, who gets the same amount of screentime as the original but feels less necessary, Saddler straight up gets deprived of screentime for the majority of the game. In the original title, he appears in both the village and castle segments of the game and talks to Leon over the radio. None of that happens in the remake, and Leon only “sees” him via flashes across the Plaga hivemind after he’s infected. So by the time the two actually interact, it feels like too little, too late.

I understand that some changes needed to be made to Saddler -- he was by far the campiest villain in the original, with his oh-so-slimy voice and jabs at Leon’s American-ness. He implied more than once that he wasn’t so much a devout cult leader as a con artist trying to use Las Plagas to gain wealth and power. In the remake, he fully believes in his cause and intends to use Ashley to infect as many people as possible, seeming to care little for wealth.

The fact that he’s in so little of the game comparatively feels like a huge missed opportunity. His new motives and possible loss of identity to the will of the Plaga would make for a great new villain arc, and his aesthetic has only gotten creepier with the graphical upgrade. And granted, there are hints of a richer backstory for him, as Leon finds evidence on the island that Saddler’s ancestors have been involved with Las Plagas for a long time.

But again -- and I hate to repeat myself -- it’s not enough to make up for his dearth of actual screentime. The trippy visions of him over the hivemind are cool, but lack any sort of context. Leon doesn’t discuss seeing these things with Ashley or comment on the mysterious man’s identity. By the time Saddler starts to explain himself, Leon is so thoroughly done with this shit that he just shoots him before he can say anything. He and Ada repeat this before the boss fight, so Saddler never has a chance to explain his new motives.

The one positive I will add is that RE4R explains why Saddler is so resistant to Leon rescuing Ashley. Given that his plan in both versions involves Ashley going back home and infecting her father, the President, with Las Plagas, he sure is cavalier about her safety. In the remake, it’s implied that he’s waiting until her Plaga has fully matured and she’s not capable of fighting it off anymore. If she goes back with enough willpower to inform someone that something is wrong, Saddler’s plan is scuppered, so he’d probably rather she die than for the plan to go off half-cocked.

As with Hunnigan, let me propose an alternate scenario: If we must keep Saddler confined to the hivemind visions, I would like to see him deliberately induce those visions for Leon. Throughout most of the game, Leon seems to see him mostly by accident, like he’s tapping Saddler’s telepathic phone. I would like to see Saddler turn to the camera and tell Leon (and the player) that he knows the American is listening, that he knows Leon is aware of his plans, and that there’s nothing Leon can do to stop him.

As it is, it feels like we missed a chance to get a really threatening and badass version of Saddler. The remake expands on his non-existent backstory to reveal that he and his family have been steadily working on restoring Las Plagas for centuries -- you’d think Saddler would have more to say to Leon and Ashley, the instruments of his plan’s completion. Mendez, Salazar, and Krauser all got their moments to shine in the remake, while Saddler himself is confined to RE4R’s final hour.

That’s my take on the characters in Resident Evil 4 Remake. If you think differently -- or heck, if you think I put too much thought into it -- feel free to drop me a line letting me know.

#midweek madness #resident evil 4 remake #resident evil 4 #leon s kennedy #ada wong #ashley graham #capcom #video games

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doom-nerdo-666 · 1 year

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Doom 3 could use a proper release and not a "remake"

(Image here is someone's YT thumbnail, the channel being AkajiCZ)

Ever since the Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 remakes, some people expect Doom 3 to also get a remake, but i feel like saying some things:

Doom 3 should have a proper re-release first and some of its features could be:

Restoring/not cutting the content that later releases removed (There was some lightning tech that was only cut because John Carmack borrowed it from somewhere but still).

Better sounds/music settings (Like how in the intro music, there's a E1M1 reference that you can barely hear, so imagine settings to change that).

Or even a "music jukebox/playlist" for the few existing music tracks and maybe some sound effects.

Subtitle settings/options.

Art gallery, specially for concept art (I know the OG Xbox version had a video showcasing concept art but still).

Model viewer since D3 is when Doom first had detailed 3D models and the art style gives some demons a lot of details that can be overlooked.

Photo mode.

Options for alternate sounds (Specially the beta/alpha D3 sounds composed by Trent Reznor but also because BFG edition had some differences in the sound effects).

Maybe actual options for game changing stuff like the lantern being carried or whether or not people do care about the shotgun that much.

Farfetched but make the OG Xbox version a bonus feature like how Nightdive's Quake remaster has the 64 port as an addon.

There's still good ideas worth including here.

A new expansion could be cool

Like one that tries to have more new content than Lost Mission.

A cool idea is if the weapon roster itself is different from that of main D3 to spice up variety.

Or maybe introduction of new mechanics to explore the D3 "format" a bit more.

Maybe one that even tries to explore cut content, since Kenneth Scott once remade the Birdman.

Also make actual use of the power ups that were in multiplayer only because they look cool.

What's wrong with BFG edition and later versions

These two links showcase some examples:

Resurrection of Evil has cut content like minigames and levels/areas.

I think in original RoE, the player had a lantern attached to the pistol.

Some effects were removed.

Some characters had visual changes for some reason.

The shoulder attached lantern.

Lots more ammo pickups.

Somehow more lights.

Enemy placement was changed in various places.

Maledect doesn't spawn Forgotten Ones.

CANNOT skip cutscenes.

I think even the intro with the UAC text was changed and downgraded a bit.

Maybe there were positive changes like the crying lady now having tears on her eyes or how the Martian Buddy website doesn't exist anymore, so they had to create a different way of getting a locker code.

Still, it's bizarre that some of this even happened because you'd think they'd look more into some issues people have with D3.

Instead, they created new problems and didn't fix much.

Lost Mission wasn't bad, even if it didn't have a lot of new content and reused some areas (But there's story reasons for it, i guess).

But even its ports of D1 and 2 had weird changes, even if most people use the original IWAD versions anyway and the new Unity ports ended up better than the PSN/BFG editions.

At least learn something from modders

Mostly because even the Unity Doom ports improved with help from fans and how D64's official new release has the collaboration of Kaiser, who worked behind D64 EX.

But also because D3 has its own fair share of mods that improve/fix things or at least tweak them in ways to satisfy some fans.

Even for a new expansion with new content, it'd be great.

I'm sure most people already know of the D3 Phobos mod that recreates the unused Arachnotron design.

Depending on how different a D3 remake is, it might as well be another reboot/its own thing

And this is a series that already changed directions and most of its games are different.

A "D3 remake" might as well be a sequel/follow up that D3 never had (Specially if RoE is not enough and the cancelled D4 wasn't supposed to be a D3 follow up in the first place).

Could be a way to explore this part of the series and give it justice, while also fixing some flaws.

Because the 2016/Eternal formula is almost an "opposite wing" to D3: It'd be weird trying to connect these 2 sides of the series in a canonical way.

D3 was always its own timeline and there's a lot about gameplay/tone/direction/aesthetics etc that makes these games seperate, even if still Doom.

At least a D3 follow up could be the sequel it never got before and be to D3 what Eternal is to 2016.

A lot of these games already look "modern-ish" enough

Lot of games that already felt "realistic" enough are getting "remasters" or "remakes" when "updated ports" make more sense.

Specially with an arguement for older games being abstract, unless they benefit from the varied interpretations or later remakes end up misinterpretating something (Which also makes videogame remakes in general a double edge sword for both new and old).

I also wonder if people even "want" this or are just accustomed to an idea that was considered absurd at some point.

Almost the equivalent to putting a frog in water, then slowly turn up the temperature and the frog doesn't mind.

I also did a thread about "remastering" the older Doom games and some things to be considered.

One day, people will think Doom 2016 needs a remaster/remake (Unless the only purpose is to improve the engine, since Eternal got rid of megatextures).

About Doom 3 itself

It's a flawed game and i can see how fans had to put up with it being the "latest game" in the series for a long time until D2016 came out.

But i also think most of its flaws are more on execution than the actual concept.

Partially because of the saying "not a bad game, just not a GOOD DOOM game either".

Either from arguements like what elements it carries/expands on from Doom (Or the same about the new games) or even how old Doom "never left" because of the fanbase and modding scenes.

Maybe D3 should have been a spin-off with a subtle instead of a "3" in the name.

But D3 being in a weird spot as a divisive game is also why i think it deserves a proper release and not what it ended up with.

Anyway, besides my rant about classic Doom remasters and the links to later D3 release differences, i got some other links worth checking:

D3 concept art.

A thread where someone suggests how BFG Edition could improve and part of why i made this post.

This post in itself could have been better like what else a proper D3 re-release could have etc.

#doom #id software #idea #opinions #doom 3 #remake

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spinningbuster98 · 3 months

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youtube

Resident Evil 4's sense of atmosphere is really underrated I feel

Yeah it's way more action packed than other games (I'll get into that next time) and it's extremely silly and corny, but it also knows how to pull off a genuine sense of dread when it wants to

This game has brown as its primary color, a fact that in most other circumstances should lead me to bash it, but here it actually works to its advantage, helping it to push this overall rural, backwater and dusty look. One third of this game takes place in an old run down village in the middle of the mountains, while another third is set in an ancient castle populated by evil cultists, it makes sense that everything would look old, decrepit and dusty.

Then you add things like fog effects galore, rain, lightning and especially the music

RE4's ost isn't exactly catchy, it's mostly atmospheric pieces, and overall I wouldn't put it at really the same level as RE2 and RE1's music, but it absolutely gets the job down when it comes to helping to create an unsettling vibe, or even a rather relaxing one when it wants to

I'm bringing this all up now because, now that Leon has woken up from that little episode of his, it's nighttime, meaning it's dark, it's raining, there's fog everywhere and the first Ganado that you meet surprises you by bursting his own head open, revealing the wriggling parasite inside

This essentially forces you to reconsider how you'll approach these guys from now on. Usually aiming for the head is the quickest way of dealing with zombie-like enemies, but now it has a random chance of revealing the Plaga, giving you another thing to worry about which can be deadly in the middle of a fight against multiple Ganados. But at the same time you kind of have to aim for the head, since otherwise enemies take too long to kill, thus creating a bit of tense decision making during the thick of it

We also encounter a bit of a recurring miniboss: El Gigante

These guys are much better bosses than Del Lago, mainly because they're essentially just like regular enemies only giant-sized. If you saved the dog at the start of the game (which you should, you twisted bastards) it'll even show up suddenly to help you against El Gigante by distracting him!

And then the game trolls you because, on your way back to the church, you'll see a dog far in the distance in the fog. You'll probably think it's the dog from earlier and approach it, except it's an infected dog that can sprout tentacles and who will lounge at you and even has two friends with him. Well played game :)

And inside the church we finally meet Ashley, along with the main villain of the game: Osmund Saddler!

His plan makes little sense because he really can't help but to shoot himself in the foot

He kidnapped the daughter of the president of the USA, infecting her with a Plaga with the intention of sending her back and infect the president too

Ok....so why the hell are you telling all of this to Leon? Why are you even trying to kill him? Just let him rescue her without him knowing all of this and bang mission accomplished! Instead he spills his shit like your typical villain monologuing and won't even kill Leon himself because "eh my underlings will do it for me!". He says he first wants to bargain with the president for some donations....but dude we're talking about controlling the mind of the president of the USA! You can have all the money in the world AFTER you do that!

He's a stupid, STUPID villain....and I love him all the same because look at him. Look at the way he talks! He's so hammy! He's like a cross between Emperor Palpatine and your typical Bond villain! He delights in his eeeevil plan and sounds like he's getting off just telling Leon about it. Considering just how unapologetically cheesy RE4 often is I have little doubt that this was intentional. I'll sure take dumb but charmingly cheesy Saddler from the original over boring and generic religious zealot Saddler from the remake any day, that's for sure!

#resident evil 4 #my gameplay #Youtube

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honda-hatch · 10 months

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alright I'm gonna ramble about the RE games/community now

fuckin Resident Evil, man. RE may not have been my introduction to M-rated games, but it also sorta was. Everyone already knows that DMC1 was originally Resident Evil 4. Both REmake and RE4 were also motivation to play M-rated games, though. So let us start at the beginning.

I finally got to play REmake when I got it in a humble bundle with RE4. I played REmake first, and boy, was I enchanted. I often get motivation to play games by seeing footage, and then thinking that it would be fun to control that. That might be a poor way of explaining it, but its all I got. REmake, coldest take imaginable, is a borderline perfect game. The mansion is magical to explore, the enemies are spooky, the visuals are beautiful, and the layout and pacing of the game are so good that I can still run through most of the game without even thinking about it. Of course, the areas following the mansion aren't quite as neat, but that's fine, and in my opinion, not even that much of a downside, as I usually want to get through each subsequent area faster and faster. The only thing that really irks me? People want another damn remake. Fuckers are so caught up with games accommodating their dumb asses that they just can't stand to learn another control type to play a game. OOOOOH woe is you!! You just can't get a handle on tank controls! "clunky! clunky! clunky!" If my 12 year old self, who, as I may have mentioned before, was born after 9/11, can manage to get a hang of this game and speedrun it with barely any practice, you can take ten minutes to get a hang of tank controls. shut the fuck up. There are so many games that genuinely need a remake, and RE1 is probably the last on the list.

RE2 is a fun time. Leon is hilarious, Claire is cool, and the game feels pretty straightforward. RE2 isn't all that stressful at any given moment, and almost feels linear with how clear its progression is. Pair that with iconic visuals and music, and you understand why its still considered a classic to this day.

RE3 is... something. I don't hate RE3. Far from it. It makes Jill cool, Nemesis is scary but not annoying, the live selection system is fun, and the story is entertaining, standing out because of its incredible conclusion that wraps up the first trilogy in a nice little bow. But the dodge mechanic is weird -- ironically, its easier to dodge Nemesis than a normal zombie, because Nemesis was clearly designed with telegraphed windups in mind, whereas the regular zombie grab definitely wasn't. The progression is a little less clear, with the majority of the game having you run around larger areas of Raccoon to grab stuff, with things being measurably less obvious than RE2, for better or worse. I think my opinion is also a little funky because I've only played it once (though recently), and I had a fuckton of ammo by the end. I think I'd enjoy it more if I actually spend more time blasting zombies. Special shoutout to the snap sound effect that accompanies a critical headshot with the pistol. Orgasmic.

RE4 has been discussed to death. I don't think I can add anything to that discussion, frankly. It's unbelievably fun and replayable, Leon is my favorite himbo, I've played it 13 times... it's an inarguable classic that shaped the industry going forward. In its niche, it hasn't really been surpassed. Sure, Dead Space is great, but only its sequel comes close to RE4's level of fun and replayability in my mind. (DS1 and 2 are still incredible, though). RE5 certainly didn't.

RE5. Goddamn. I played this with a friend, and I don't see how you could've done this solo. The setting isn't quite as fun, is way more "kinda racist" and there's a stupid filter over the whole game. I personally dislike the UI and font choice, and the stupid square system drives me crazy (yes I know it's to make co-op easier). The story feels like its connected by a fraying string, nobody really has an arc (Chris only has something vaguely resembling one), and the final boss is dumb adventure game bullshit. It baffles me that people think that RE5 is the improved version of RE4. It's just straight-up incorrect.

RE6, I've barely played. I couldn't really stand it after I had to do a ten minute walking section and then had to do stupid wave defense. I don't even think I could get my RE5 friend to play with me. pass.

RE7 and 8 I haven't gotten around to. I own them, but something about that first person perspective makes them less appealing to me. I've played plenty of first person games, it's just something about them in particular. idk

Umbrella chronicles is terrible (crappy shooting, terrible voice acting, cheap-looking), darkside chronicles isn't bad if you don't mind crazy camerawork; it fixes prrety much everything terrible about UC. and enjoy rail shooters. maybe I should ramble about those next. I'm gonna go give Leon a kiss

oh fuck I forgot to talk about the community

like I said, they're all spoiled and remake hungry, and so many refuse to learn a new control style. and they're all horny as fuck and are stupid and I hate them I hate them I hate them

Resident Evil has never had a genuinely good story and rides on its characters but I hate all the horny fucks who don't shut up

I didn't mean for this to be negative. Leon sends his himbo love

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mrbigbrother · 1 year

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Why I refuse to play the remake of Resident Evil 4. PART 2 😒

Since the release of the Resident Evil 4 remake, it has done well critically and financially for Capcom. And despite my grievances, it will more than likely push the franchise even deeper into the era of the Remake we are trapped in. Again, it doesn't look like a bad game at all...but It's just not the same. This is not the game I grew up with. Nor is it a game that really takes the series anywhere new...I hate Remakes. I have come to hate them so much. And I have a pretty good reason why you should hate them too, as what I am about to say will hopefully breed just the slightest bit of resentment so you may feel just a hint of some of the same resentment that I have, and have carried for nearly 18 years.

So instead of a remake of RE4...why couldn't this game have been a direct sequel? Ya know...something that the fans have been asking about for over EIGHTEEN FUCKING YEARS!!! Was it so hard to ask for a new chapter to feature Leon as he was in RE4 (2005)? If final fantasy can make sequels to FF10, then why not give the same treatment to Resident Evil's finest hour? But no...they didn't do it then, they didn't do it then, they didn't do it 18 years later, and probably not even 18 years from now. So I guess a sequel to the greatest Resident Evil was just too much to ask for. Okay. Fine.

But I have another question worth asking,

why...hasn't Paul Mercier voiced Leon since the 05 game? Let me also add that I liked the younger depiction of Leon in the Resident Evil 2 remake, because it establishes that there would be a deal of maturity and age for Leon from the events of RE2 and 4. but it doesn't work in the remake...why may you ask? By that point, Leon is supposed to be an older and much wiser guy who has been highly trained to carry out these kinds of dangerous and highly delicate missions. So not only does this New Leon not sound like him with the VA change, he doesn't even feel like the same person because his physical design show little to none of the physical maturity he had leading up to the events of RE4. That's another popular thing that happens in remake culture: just random ass recasts for no reason that only upsets the fans and gets them talking about the game. Outrage is free marketing.

And I get it. Capcom had to learn from their mistakes before we were even able to get to this point in time. I get it. I can't just suddenly get what I want by just getting mad. Or sad...

There was a time, when Resident Evil 4 (2005) didn't need the year stamp to distinguish it from something else. There was a time when Resident Evil 4, was the most impressive and cutting edge survival horror game the world had ever seen. It was a masterpiece. It was a game that I played through so many times, that I don't think that there is one aspect about it, no easter egg or anything hidden that I didn't find. I have played that game so thoroughly, that I might have tried to play it blindfolded. I can say that, when it comes to gaming, RE4 represents something that other mediums couldn't possibly emulate. And boy did hollywood try so hard just to always fail even to this day. It captured everything that is great about gaming. RE4 is one of those games that reminds us of why we love video games...

RE4 (2023), has effectively robbed the original of its identity. Which means, instead of Hollywood emulating video games...video games are not emulating hollywood in its absolute worst era. Which means that right now, Video Games, could be in its own worst era. Why is it a bad thing? because remakes, do not deserve to piggyback off of the hard work of yesterday's artists. The path that was paved yesterday, must be walked on today, so we may continue to build the path forward. Remakes are part of the Nostalgia Limbo, that we are being forced into. Nobody really asks for remakes. People want something new. And when they don't get that or are dissatisfied with the new thing, they look back at the things that they loved before. And that part of us, is being exploited. We are no longer going forward, because the artists of yesterday are either dead or cancelled, and the artists of today don't know how to build paths forward, so they build towers going up! They build the towers higher, and higher, inch new feat making the whole thing more and more wobbly and unstable, until finally, the industry's tower of babylon can't stand up any more and topples to the ground.

Only then will people realize, that going up, isn't really going anywhere. Because as soon as they fall, they find themselves right back where they started, at ground level.

So...what made the original...THE Resident Evil 4, so special? Because it was one step forward for the Resident Evil series, and then one giant leap forward for all of gaming still felt today.

Think about that.

Now... let's try and move forward.

AND WHERE ARE MY MOTHER FUCKING QUICK TIME EVENTS? RE4 WAS THE ONLY GAME THAT EVER DID THEM RIGHT!!!!

#resident evil 4 #resident evil 4 remake #resident evil #capcom #remakes #forward #up

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blazehedgehog · 3 years

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So.... How about that Sonic Color port?

I don't get the white-knuckle outrage people have about it.

One, bad ports and remasters like this happen a lot. Sonic Colors Ultimate was not the first, and will not be the last. I've told this story before, but it's the one that sticks out the most in my head:

Back in 2011 or 2012, a company called "Just Add Water" announced they were going to remaster Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath. This was important, because Stranger was an Original Xbox exclusive, came out at the tail end of the console's life span, and was a commercial failure. The game was essentially left to rot on the Xbox.

But Stranger's Wrath was a critical darling, people loved that game, so the idea that finally, FINALLY, it would be getting proper PC and modern console releases was a big deal. An easy slam dunk for Just Add Water.

They released the remaster on PC first, a straight-across port from the Xbox hardware, and it was a technical disaster. Tons of effects were broken and it barely ran, especially if you were unlucky enough to have a Radeon GPU.

At the time, there was a thread on the NeoGAF forum (years before it imploded) and developers from Just Add Water were posting in it, seeing how people liked the port. There were a lot of posts from hopeful fans complaining about it being broken on their machine (I was one of them). The developer's response was to make fun of people for having weak PCs, while revealing that "the game usually averaged 30fps at a resolution of 800x600" on their test machine, which was a somewhat high end system for the time. 30fps for a six year old Xbox game on a ~$700 PC build. At a resolution of 600p no less, when we were approaching the dawn of 4K games on PC.

It was disgraceful. I was mad. They were proud of this. They were arrogant about this. What a great favor they had done for us bringing Stranger's Wrath to PC where only the top 25% of their install base could run the game acceptably at low settings.

Just Add Water, perhaps realizing the growing number of scorned users, vowed that they would improve the PC port "soon." In the mean time, they ported Stranger's Wrath to every other platform under the sun. Playstation 3, Vita, Xbox 360, I think even Wii U. The PC version remained in the same broken state. They made announcements for other Oddworld games. They started porting Munch's Odyssey to other platforms, as well. Finally, something like three or four years later, after they'd already wrung everything out of the Oddworld franchise everywhere else, they went back released an updated version of Stranger's Wrath for the PC that looked and played correctly.

That was their definition of "soon."

Sonic Colors and Stranger's Wrath still aren't the only examples of this. I mean, Gearbox's original PC version of Halo was a complete mess of arbitrarily changed effects, and only now, 13 years later, did The Master Chief Collection finally fix that broken port.

Or what about the original 2007 PC port of Resident Evil 4? That looked like this:

The game originally shipped with a complete lack of any lighting whatsoever! It was also a port of the PS2 version, so the textures were visibly worse than the original Gamecube and Wii versions. AND it still ran like unoptimized garbage, too! It took Capcom another 4-5 years to put out the "Ultimate Edition" port we have today.

All of these ultra-dramatic Sonic fans out there like "SEGA WILL PAY THE PRICE FOR HAVING CROSSED US THIS DAY" are like... yeah, it sucks that the port could be better, and we did not deserve to have it be this bad, but could you tone it down just a little?

I mean, we knew going in to this that the port looked a little funky, based on videos Sega was putting out that featured clearly broken effects. Sure, there was the hope that things would get fixed before release, but that's all it should have been: hope. Cool your jets, wait and see. But you don't have to go full Skeletor.

Based on what I've heard, from people I know and from what other rumors have said that seems to line up, it sounds like Sonic Colors Ultimate was a victim of covid-19. I was first informed that Sega was prepping a Sonic Colors remake/remaster in 2019, and it seems like the originally targeted release date was Christmas 2020. However, apparently, in early fall 2020, a performance evaluation revealed the game was in no state to release thanks to covid guidelines gumming up the development, and apparently Blind Squirrel was brought in to rescue the project.

That's probably why Sonic Colors Ultimate is this weird mishmash of original game code + an implementation of Godot bolted on over the top of it. Blind Squirrel tried to clean up the mess as best they could, but it wasn't good enough. The Switch version caught it the worst.

This isn't an excuse for the quality of the remaster. It sucks and we deserve better, but you could say that about a lot of things during this pandemic. We just don't need the big theatrics and the bickering over what is just another mediocre remaster.

I canceled my pre-order and I'm waiting to see if it gets any significant updates before I consider buying it.

#questions #anonymous #sonic colors #ultimate edition #sega #sonic team #blind squirrel #remaster #godot

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cateringisalie · 3 years

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9 years later and we have at last got a new Eva film and the end of the Rebuild project.

Much was made at the start of Rebuild of the desire to introduce Eva to a new audience. 1.0 more or less leant into its original goal and restaged episodes 1 to 6 of the TV series with a bigger budget, CGI, some more blunt and early reveals and a few weird alterations for the existing fan base. The Angel numbering was off; everyone knows Lilith is stuck in the basement, Seele just default to their monoliths. Kaworu is actively introduced at the tail-end rather than alluded to in the opening titles. As an intro, its fine (though most would agree the equivalent stage of the TV series isn’t really a struggle to cope with either), though a few stylistic and environmental changes lead many to conclude this was a direct sequel to End of Evangelion. 2.0 seemed content to build off of the intro but steer away from the relevant section of episodes – roughly 8 to 17. Recognisable moments like the falling Angel, the corrupted Unit 03 and the ribbon angel and Unit 01’s impossible reactivation share the screen with altered relationship dynamics. Now we get Mari one of the few wholly new characters who gets to open the second film in a wildly dramatic fashion. The key of Nebuchadnezzar (which does at least re-enter proceedings in the final film, but I am even shakier on what it is or used for – even fandom seem to have struggle to explain this as anything other than a blunt drop-in replacement for the Adam embryo in the TV series). And come the end its time for Third Impact already, Shinji altering the world around him to rescue Rei from the depths of an Angel. Kaworu uses an unfamiliar spear to incapacitate Shinji and the preview hints at a story further from the rails than ever. 3.0 is as promised more or less completely divorced from anything Eva had done before. Just not the off-the rails version 2.0 advertised. Some will be quick to note that none of the Rebuild previews have entirely accurately advertised their subsequent instalment; 1.0’s features at least one key scene that never happened (Mistao slapping Ristuko in a seeming allusion to the Sea of Dirac Angel) while even the sequences of animation that did make it look nothing alike. Which is fair, but even then 2.0’s bears absolutely no resemblance to 3.0 and even 3.0’s very strange preview doesn’t really jibe with 3.0+1.0 ultimately. 3.0 is post-post-apocalypse and with a whole 14 years just evaporated between films. There’s a distinct last third of Nadia feel to it. About the only part similar to a former incarnation is Kaworu and Shinji’s relationship which while not even roughly mapping to episode 24 serves the same function; to make Shinji distraught before the climax of this story. But 3.0 is also the point where that initial premise of the series slams headlong into the drift from familiar territory. Where the film is a quantum leap away from the mystery terms and slow reveals. The oddities and confusions pile up given the glimpsed state of the world, the strange gridded moon, the sea of Eva corpses, the strange state of Lilith in the depths of Nerv. An awful lot happened while Shinji was (for reasons no one has explained or seems to care about except me) IN SPACE and the film only ever alludes to the sequence of events occurring between these two films in the broadest of strokes. Which if done a certain way can be compelling though I did not find it to be the case here in the slightest. It’s a huge struggle to build up even a vague idea of what went down and that’s with heavy deferral back to the TV series again. If you’re new, none of this means much of anything. Even mixed media doesn’t help. The reveal there was a limited run manga of events prior to 3.0 had a potential for answers, but upon reading a synopsis... Nope. Helps not even a tiny amount. Also this mixed media attitude is never to be encouraged. So, I didn’t like film 3 much at all. Film 4 does little to not be based on where it left off. Which is a small mercy that it doesn’t effectively toss everything out again and skip further ahead in time. And 3.0+1.0 does at least make use of some of what 2.0 revealed and setup in the spirit of trying to get this into something cohesive. It fails, but it tried. Maybe the points it touches on were the intended direction of the films. Maybe Anno changed his mind on this one. It’s not like Rebuild’s failure to cohere should be a surprise – the title of the film is simply confusing in sequence. Titled neither 4.0 nor 4.44, instead we have the pretty inexplicable 3.0+1.0 which is just annoying to type. Even thematically this doesn’t feel right given its more like 2.0 mushed into 3.0 but I suppose that’s technically film 5 so... Unless, 1.0 here is supposed to mean the original TV series or EoE, which... End of Evangelion figures unexpectedly largely in the film. Could be that its meant to infer some collection of the Eva cast (the original pilots + Mari? The Ikari family + Mari? The pilots from 1.0 (Shinji and Rei) plus the pilots from 3.0 (Asuka and Mari)?). The other part of course, is that the three prior films had titles in the form of [Thing](Not)]Thing]. 3.0+1.0 decides to dispense with this entirely and instead is titled “Thrice Upon a Time”. Nothing like confusing matters (and instead media library ordering) by not only giving the film a title that puts it before the 3rd film (since prior to this cinema releases are .0 and the home media (excepting the first release of 1.0) are triple digits of their instalment number) but also has another reference to three within it. It might be some kind of holy trinity allusion, some play on Third Impact, or an acknowledgement that this is theoretically the third version of events surrounding the end of the world (if you take TV series as 1, EoE as 2, and Rebuild as 3). Also potentially a literary reference about cyclical time and messages from the future which is all well and good and fits into a whole other essay about how Rebuild and FFVII Remake are operating on the same basis and making many of the same mistakes by both trying to be fan-service for the new fans and draw in new ones and do the big fan-moments similarly but diverge wildly off in others. Good start! The final film starts with bombast as per 2 and 3 (and thus focused on Mari) though the setup and point of the action is possibly more confused and less explicable (which is saying something given 3.0 opened with retrieving Unit 01 from space. No, I will continue to complain about not getting this. Yes it was very exciting but why was Unit 01 in space? In a strange crucifix coffin. Anyone at all?) – and only vaguely connected to anything resembling the plot. At least 2.0 and 3.0 had some immediate and long term stakes with a cover for Kaji stealing something and bringing Shinji into the plot. This film opens with a scrounge for spare parts in a red Paris that the tertiary cast make no longer red while Mari fights off a massed horde of Evas while battleships are puppeteered from orbit. It’s all terrible cool and everything, but given at no point do we even begin to understand what is going on or what the stakes even are. Which is a problem with the latter half of the sequence. 2.0 might have started with an Eva vs Angel fight but while there was ambiguity over the situation it at least seemed to lead into the eventual plot. Here we’re getting Eva spare parts for later and a whole dose of new terminology the film has no interest in explaining. Which is par for the course for prior Eva incarnations but again, I feel there was more explanation setting the weirdness up. Here we are reduced to keywords that sound important. The film proper opens with our familiar trio of Eva pilots winding up at a village with their old classmates (which of course, to follow the proliferations of 3 all the way down and also match to Tokyo-3, is in fact, Village 3. The far future sequel to Resident Evil 8 presumably). Who are necessarily now 14 years older than them. Asuka is naked (in a sequence to contrast to 1.0 and 2.0) or in her underwear for far too much of this sequence (and just as creepy as 2.0 got with this) as Shinji struggles in the aftermath of Kaworu’s death, Ayanami (critically not the Rei of 2.0) learns about life (and visits a library with – I’m not kidding – a poster for Sugar Sugar Rune on display. I like to think not many in the audience caught this slightly odd reference). 30 minutes of the film are taken up with Rei being happy and contented with her life while Shinji slowly recovers and re-enters polite society (sulks, throws up at the sight of the DSS collar, is insulted and force-fed). There’s a good case for this section just being an unnecessary time filler, though you don’t need to fill time in a film that is 2 ½ hours. But if it was cut down, perhaps it would have the same strange feeling as 1.0 had where the aftermath of Shinji’s second Angel fight lead was mostly skipped and left that part of 1.0 feeling strangely hasty and actively (and badly) abridged. Maybe that’s just my familiarity with the source material again. There’s still an edge of weirdness in the air on the film hits the 45 minute mark; even prior to this gigantic sections of the land are missing, and some things just float around now (apparently because). Past this mark is where weirdness creeps in; the barriers keeping the village from suffering the fate of Paris – the structures a curious match to the Cocytus facility at the start of 2.0. There are headless Eva copies who roam the landscape. An indicator on Ayanami’s suit runs down. Shinji is advised to talk to his father before he loses the opportunity forever. This one made me laugh, and even Asuka comments that given who Shinji’s father is and what he’s done don’t really make this plausible (or sensible). Ayanami concludes her pastoral life and this stage of the film by transforming back to her original white plug-suit; her AT Field then dissipates and she bursts in a familiar spill of LCL. For such a previously central character, Rei or Ayanami or Lilith will have exceptionally little bearing on the remainder of the film. The plot now kicks in properly as Gendo decides enough is enough and he’s going to be doing some world ending. Our Eva pilots are ready but not the same; we have Asuka, Mari and Shinji. And standing orders for Shinji to be shot if he tries to pilot anything (but given we’re at the end of the world and basically the original plan fails to stop Nerv bringing about the end of the world, that people still try to shoot him is... a little weird and an almost pointless resolution of factors the quaternary cast brought up in 3.0). The entire rest of the film is even more impenetrable and confusing than Kaworu’s sweeping explanations of what happened between films 2 and 3. If 3.0 fumbled the ball on being newcomer friendly 3.0+1.0 actively doesn’t care. Not that familiarity with series helps since so much new terminology is thrown at the audience. The entire cast – literally the entire cast – are not only caught up on but also understand the varying levels of psychological, biological and religious nonsense that Eva has formerly wielded as something almost coherent. You, as audience member, are not privy to a fraction of this understanding and thus left to flail for the remainder of the film making what you can of the maddening breadcrumb trail of exclamations and partial explanations. Shinji is no help here and infuriatingly asks barely a single question about what is going on (thankfully he does prompt Gendo to explain a few things – presumably where even the staff had gotten lost on what was supposedly going on). For existing fans, you might get a sense of it by application of known quantities from the previous incarnations (I pity newcomers struggling to make sense of this). What the Lance of Cassius is a thing introduced abruptly into the series – and contrasted with the Lance of Longinus you can muddle through to get some idea of what was going on. 3.0+1.0 however, decides that even that grip on its story is too much and adds a bunch more unnamed spears. Some of them formed from Lilith. This is a thing of some import apparently, though ultimately is effectively buzzword name-checking. We know who Lilith is in context from both 1.0 and the TV series but how that relates to spear formation is beyond me. And then there’s the part where one of the flying ships (there were four made according to Seele’s plan. Seele, the former sinister puppet-masters, who died in film 3, and if the flying ships were their idea or this stated at all, I had totally forgotten it in the last 9 years (checking wikia seems to indicate no one else knew this either so I feel vindicated). Seele feel an artefact of the old Eva Anno has no time for – EoE had what equated to three groups vying for control of the process of human instrumentality. Seele are adhering to a prophecy of sorts, Gendo is trying to subvert that process for his own ends, and Misato is trying to stop it. In terms of economical story-telling, the distinction between Seele and Gendo’s goals in causing Third Impact are so slim as to be basically zero (few critical differences though), I suspect Seele were deemed unnecessary and shuffled out of proceedings hastily despite their continued name-checking at this late stage) is turned into another spear because if all the spears are used up, the end of the world can’t be averted. You will have to forgive me for failing to notice how and where most of these spears (save three) wound up or what most of that means or why or how or anything. But we have a budget to squander and why not channel the Gurren Lagann energy for action one last time? And there is some action, this presumably part of what a good section of the audience have waited for with baited breath, that thing the TV series so rapidly lost interest in; that EoE staged for narrative cruelty. Smashy giant robot action time! So we get billions of Eva enemies for Asuka and Mari to cut through without problem. They explode and fall away despite exhaustively overwhelming numbers. There is a palpable lack of threat here. A few hitches but nothing the pilots can’t cope with. It’s just empty fan-service, a boast about how much can be rendered into a single frame. We get Asuka, unable to stab critically important Unit 13 (looking distinctly Unit 01-like just with four arms), and then hooking into an odd leftover thread from 2.0. Her accident in the activation test of Unit 03 has left her with a part of herself now more correctly classified as an Angel. And like 2.0 for surprise value, her Eva has special Angel blood injectors to again overcharge her Eva (which seems to be a thing in the latter three films – turn the Eva safety off and go beserk. As if Unit 01 didn’t do that all on its own in the first and second film). And this too fails. But this too is just another moment of important and pretention. Where the audience is meant to gasp at Eva/Angel hybridisation (not that the dividing line between Angles and Evas is ever completely clear (not least Unit 03)), at Asuka revealing herself to be part Angel (as if Kaworu and Rei weren’t established examples). So her Eva bloated and animalistic is... just another moment. We saw this in 2.0 with Mari releasing her limiters. We saw it in 3.0 in almost the same way. The distinction isn’t meaningfully different to the last few times the Evas were let off the leash and became more brutal. And just like the prior times this escalation of Eva body horror, ferocity, blood and over-indulged violence doesn’t actually help the situation. Asuka fails in her task as the Unit 13 counter-attacks. She’s saved by getting pulled out of reality moments before her end. Of course this being narrative, this being Eva; Gendo, the architect of this situation, is three steps ahead. Misato’s flying ship is badly and perhaps critically damaged so Gendo can retrieve the limbless body of Unit 01 formerly powering the flying ship. Shooting Gendo doesn’t work thanks to the key of Nebuchadnezzar (which did... Uh. Something? Kaji noted it as the lost number kept as a spare in 2.0 which implied Angel or Eva or... No I don’t know nor can I make sense of what it’s done to Gendo. Wikia informs me that while it’s never seen on-screen past the one time, its case is in some shots of 3.0. How amazing) and he leaves. And thus, of course, Shinji must get in the f-ing robot once more. But we’re back to the confident, more certain Shinji who 2.0 birthed as we enter the last (but still very long) final stage of the film – and restage End of Evangelion. Curious of course; EoE by turns can feel like a legitimate replacement for the final two TV series episodes or a bleakly, darkly, disturbing and flippant retort to the low-budget metaphysic version of the TV apocalypse. EoE to some has been not so much the intended ending (though buying a complete set of the old Eva in Japan will always net you the 26 original TV episodes, the four amended episodes and EoE), but more a poisoned chalice for the people who wanted a less introspective version of the end of the world and the process of human instrumentality. Anno was free to do what he wanted and veer off the tracks here – he can’t get away from the end of the world – this is integral to Eva’s base concept. 2.0’s glimpse of Second and the starts of Third Impact depict a process completely unfamiliar from the TV series’s version (reading Wikia explains some of 2.0’s imagery but is still bewildering with reference to 3.0+1.0’s reveals). In Rebuild, the end of the world is staged in the space below the strange aftermath of Second Impact, in an anti-universe where humans cannot venture. And yet, we are still clearly revisiting End of Evangelion. Not exactly the same, but a lot of imagery (the symbols in the sky, the gigantic form of Lilith at multiple points, the crucifix explosions across Earth’s surface) – to say nothing of some actual sections of animation – are taken straight from the 1997 film. Those moments and images were haunting and disturbing (the more overtly sexualised imagery has been completely removed). Clearly no matter what was said at the time or in the interim, EoE is in fact how the ending must play out; this is, or has become, what happens externally and internally when these characters attempt to force a next stage of evolution. The End of Evangelion will always be the end. ...just not quite the same. Not least it is missing most of the infamous moments (Shinji in Asuka’s hospital room is notably completely absent). There’s no moment where Shinji strangles Asuka, Komm Susser Tod is missing entire (in favour of something similar sounding but in Japanese), the live-action sequences of the empty cinema or the world without Evas aren’t utilised (though some live action footage is included), Rei betraying Gendo and beginning Third Impact outside his control etc. It's actively absurd to type this, but Lilith – Lilith! – has less character here. Which is so astonishingly absurd given the only depiction of Lilith we get is effectively Rei/Rei was Lilith the entire time, but those introspective sequences hinting at something more involved with Rei or the points Lilith does talk directly to Shinji are gone too. This shouldn’t be a surprise – we are after all missing a Rei character at the climax. Mostly. 3.0+1.0 almost expects you to remember the last time you saw Eva end the world and contrast it to this new version. The EoE imagery, the footage of Lilith descending from the crucifix, the looming figure of Lilith rising as humanity ends. Even something like the sequence of the backsides of cels running backward is reused – this footage also cribbed from EoE and played out on a wall between two characters. The animation breaks down into scratchy storyboards and later degenerates from finished footage down to outlines, animatics, and storyboard. The end of the world is this time around is more heavily meta. Both EoE and the TV episodes “staged” the process of Instrumentality (or parts of it) for Shinji. It occurs in filming spaces and on sets, there’s lighting equipment and dolls as stand-ins. The strange artificiality of pulling back the curtain on the TV or film production, or else the effect of setting the camera back further than you should for filming a theatrical experience. But even that’s a false layer given a true pull-back would be to people in front of computers or previously drawing key-frames. Here the staging is more blunt still. It begins with an Eva vs Eva fight between Gendo and Shinji in the anti-universe where their brains make sense of the impossible space with artificially staged areas of familiar locations. A fight in a city has a huge sheet as a backdrop and carboard buildings the Evas kick around. They fight in front of Nerv headquarters and in Misato’s kitchen. A blow knocks over a section of scenery and sprawls Shinji in the studio space surrounding the set. A crossroads of sort where Shinji will move on from Gendo to meet with Rei, Kaworu and Asuka. The major difference to EoE is that the end here is much more concerned with Gendo; we dive into his psyche and his past. His isolation and desire for it. This feels extremely confessional for Anno all things considered given Gendo was always previously kept at arm’s length. This feels revealing about the man behind it all, a reflection of the director. He has admitted during production that at his stage of life he is far closer to Gendo than Shinji – I think this is barely obfuscated here. The flashback is more about understanding Gendo and how Yui changed him than anything about Evas or the end of the world. Gendo’s motivation is revealed to be the same as always; this is how he gets to be with Yui again. Odd details catch as this past plays out. And is that Mari in his memories? Mari, who Fuyustuki calls Mary Iscariot upon meeting her and has prepared something for her. Which feels much more like religious buzz words; there’s an obvious implication coached in that selection of a name, but how it actually relates to the story or the circumstances is really unclear. Nor am I clear on what Fuyutsuki prepared. He explodes into LCL like last time too. The process is so close to EoE but the mood is lighter and the reasoning behind the cast a little different. Asuka is part of a clone series – same as Rei. Just without the physical signifiers that Kaworu and Rei exhibit and the prior short-hand for clones in this universe (as noted, their design is intended to invoke lab rats). Nice consistency there. The beach ending from EoE is re-done under a blue sky; Asuka is saved thanks to Shinji and Mari working in concert. Kaworu’s beach meeting with Shinji is restaged, the newer, confident Shinji discussing the circular system that delivers Kaworu into his place at the end of the world. So Eva has happened before, meta-wise or time-wise or dimensionally. Take it as you will, no interpretation is more valid than another. Only that Kaworu remembers them all. It’s happened before and it’s expected to happen again. But Shinji’s different now, so the end of the world is different. Now it’s time to move on; Kaworu is left with Kaji to tend the earth assured the cycle of Eva productions is at an end – both have been dead all this time. Anno’s attitude to his seeming forever association with this one franchise his and his desire to set it down and move on? EoE finished in space; 3.0+1.0 finishes beneath the Antarctic. The idea of Unit 01 living forever as a testament to humanity is no factor at all Shinji intending (and his parents possibly driving) the final riddance of the Evas from reality – none can be allowed to remain. But now, the film takes an odd turn, and as with EoE, there’s the coda. In EoE this was the beach scene. For Rebuild: The sun shines, the sky is blue. An adult Shinji sits in a train station and meets with Mari. She’s older too now; the pair share a kiss and run from the station hand in hand. So. Uh. Yeah. That happened. There’s Kaworu and Rei seemingly alive and well as adults. And Asuka of course. But Shinji winds up with Mari. Mari who knew everything the whole time and might somehow have been part of Gendo’s group at university and known Yui and no, we are not getting any insight into those peculiarities! (or more plausibly it could be Mari’s mother who looks near identical to Mari but... What are we meant to take from this, really?). Mari who met Shinji in a handful of brief moments and has never spent any actual time with him. Mari won the love-triangle! But this is not some simple alternate reality, a different better take world where the cast existed in something resembling our reality; Shinji still wears the exploding DSS collar given to him before rejoining the giant robot fray. Mari effortlessly removes it from his neck. The film ends with a live-action sequence – this is reportedly Anno’s hometown. The world without Evas; we passed the relevant date while 3.0+1.0 was stalled. Shinji made it to 2014, or more plausibly past it in a world without Second Impact. And he’s happy, well-adjusted, and... Not really recognisable as Shinji. Shinji now exists in the present, not the future as he had for so long in pop-culture. But he’s in a different 2021; a world without the pandemic. And that was Rebuild; a project intended as a new introduction to Evangelion that blatantly had its entire core conceit revised at least twice (the 4th film delayed because of Shin Godzilla and then a struggle to write at all) that increasingly and confusingly leant more and more on its famed initial incarnation even as it veered increasingly and erratically away from the familiar sequences. I liked 3.0+1.0 more than 3.0, but can’t help but still bemoan whatever 3.0 was going to be when 2.0 happened. The alternate other sequence. And despite it all, despite the allusions to a repetition of Eva and of this being the break in the chain, even those working on and involved with the film see even this as a definitive end. Even Anno’s not convinced that’s the last word. Eva will come back all over again; naturally – there’s money to be made here, and what’s yet another alternate take to add to the TV series, the manga, the games, the other manga, EoE, Rebuild and so on. Kaworu apparently is indeed doomed to revisit this forever alongside everyone else and also remember that for once he was gifted a true end. An impossible conclusion for modern pop-culture it feels.

#long post

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thearkhound · 5 years

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Famitsu #403: Hideo Kojima interview (Metal Gear Solid)

The following is translation of an interview with Hideo Kojima that published in Weekly Famitsu #403 (September 6, 1996). A second part of this interview was published in the following issue, which would be be Famitsu #404 (September 13, 1996), which I currently don’t have access to, but I’ll post my translation if I ever get a hold of it one day.

This interview was conducted shortly after the game officially unveiled to the public in late 1996 and touches upon some ideas that did not make it into the game.

Metal Gear has a special feeling

Metal Gear is quite an old game. Why did you decide to make a sequel after all this time?

Hideo Kojima: Metal Gear came out in 1987. Has it really been ten years? The truth is that Metal Gear was actually the first game that I’ve made when I’ve joined Konami. There’s that emotional attachment, as well as a feeling of tension of “being seen or not by the enemy” that was characteristic of Metal Gear that I wanted to explore further.

For example, let’s say your character hides under a desk. When that happens, the point of view changes to under the desk and the nearby soldiers will walk around making noises. Or you hear the footsteps of a soldier, so you quickly hide inside a locker to avoid making noises. I wanted to express that kind of tension. I had the same concept with the original Metal Gear, but I wasn’t able to express it with the hardware available at the time. However, we finally have a 32-bit console capable of using many polygons, so I can finally do what I wanted to.

So you had the idea for over ten years?

Kojima: Yes, that’s right. But I started working on it a bit late since we did Policenauts first. (laughs)

It seems there are a lot of things you can do with the current 32-bit consoles that couldn’t be done with the older hardware at the time.

Kojima: At the time I wasn’t thinking of 3D, so I did the best I could under those circumstances. Since 3D is possible, on one hand you can now do this and that and anything, but in contrast everything is now harder to make. (laughs)

So will this new Metal Gear game serve as a conclusion to the previous games?

Kojima: It’s a new type of Metal Gear. To be honest, I don’t think most modern players are even aware of the original Metal Gear. So I wanted to remake Metal Gear so that people could play it again. (laughs)

Can you explain in detail what kind of game is it?

Kojima: It’s a polygon-based 3D action game. The basic idea is to infiltrate an enemy fortress where guards are roaming and you must proceed while avoiding being spotted by the enemy as much as possible and avoid all sorts of traps.

It doesn’t sound a flashy game where all you just shoot stuff.

Kojima: That’s the idea. If you get spotted by an enemy, he will called for backup with a radio or something. However, if all you do throughout the game is just hide from the enemy, then it’ll be quite a stressful experience, so there are instances where you must fight a boss-class enemy in a fancy showdown. I wanted to keep a careful balance between tension and combat.

Sounds similar to another game that became a hit recently.

Kojima: Comparisons to Resident Evil seems to be unavoidable based on its appearance. (laughs) However, I think you will experience a completely different sense of heart-pounding excitement in Metal Gear Solid. There won’t be such thing as having to readjust to the controls because the perspective has been changed. Basically your perspective remains the same throughout the game and your character will always go up when you press up on the directional pad. I wanted to realize a simple and efficient control system for players who have never played a 3D game before without making them feel out-of-place.

Menu-driven or action-based? That’s the only difference

Can you tell us a rough outline of the story?

Kojima: The hero of the game is a mercenary named Solid Snake, who also appeared in the original Metal Gear and its sequel Metal Gear 2. The setting is a nuclear weapons storage facility owned by the U.S. military located in Alaska that has been hijacked by special forces group called FOX HOUND. That’s the reason why Snake has been sent there. From his perspective, it’s a battle between himself and the members of the special forces group he used to belonged to.

So you’re saying there will be an element of human drama involved similar to the ones in Snatcher and Policenauts...

Kojima: That’s right. I’m very obsessive when it comes to making such things. In other words, Metal Gear Solid is pretty much the same as Snatcher and Policenauts, even if the method of unraveling the story is different. The themes I want players to feel is the same whether the story is unraveled by action-based gameplay or by navigating through menus. However, I think the players is able to empathize more if there is some action-based gameplay. On the other hand, action-based gameplay alone will get in the way of the story, so regulating that is difficult.

In other words, finding a balance between the action-based portions and the story you want to show is pretty important.

Kojima: Having to adjust that balance seems to be the most difficult part. I want to use movement and camera work well and show things without feeling out of place. I want to show for example, a startling movement that causes a sudden noise, naturally in one flow. While we use motion capturing, we also have a staff member who worked as an animation for almost a decade and his handmade animations is pretty nice too. You can create something nice if you know how to use these things well.

Regarding camera work, the composition will not change much and we will frequently employ cinematic techniques in which the camera moves in or away. Pre-rendered videos won’t be used much. We might used them to cut-in an image, but the actual events will be rendered in polygons. For that purpose, each character will have around 3 or 4 models.

Can you explain that?

Kojima: Suppose you’re projecting a character from a distance. If the camera moves closer to the character, the character model will become rougher as its gets close. In order to avoid this, we replace the character model with a version that has more polygons as the camera approaches the character. This is a technique often used in movies for visual effects.

You don’t want to interrupt the flow of the game as much as possible.

Kojima: The more realistic your worldview is, the more important such a thing will be. But pre-rendered videos have their merits too. You want to throw-in a video because it’s easier to express subtler effects that way.

What kind of world are you building with that much attention?

Kojima: I wanted to make a hardboiled world. And I wanted to demonstrate it as entertainment. Since we use war as a motif, there’s some heroic parts. You have your guns blazing, shooting at bad guys. You are cool, you are a hero, you’re that sort-of guy. However, if all that remains are just stuff that was cool, then I really wouldn’t call that “entertainment.” I want players to be conscious of what war means and what is a nuclear weapon by the time they’re done watching ending.

#Hideo Kojima #Metal Gear Solid #Famitsu

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spacezeta · 5 years

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Devlog - About combat, or: let’s threaten the player

So here’s the devlog about combat that I was going to write the other week but then the camera one turned out way too long!

And if you thought the camera one was long, boy do I have a surprise for you...

So here’s a fairly long (and a little bit rant-y) write-up of my thought process about to combat or not to combat, and how to raise the stakes in a horror game in order to give more substance to the ‘horror’ part.

*Emphasis on thought process because as the game is still in development, I’m still figuring out the proper mechanics of it all

---

When we first started making this game, one of the first things that we ended up establishing was that there would be no combat. And looking back I’m not sure why - it just kind of... was. I guess it was to make things easier, but on hindsight we really should have thought that more thoroughly.

So that was the first version of the game that we developed (we had a sort of demo alpha thing done as a student project), but right away there were some glaring issues that needed to be addressed (hence the whole ‘reestructuring of the game’ that I’ve mentioned a few times before). One of the biggest issues weren’t exactly about combat, but rather how to create a tense atmosphere for the player. So follow me down the rabbit hole until I get to the bit about combat!

So. We’re making a horror game, right? And when you’re making a horror game you don’t want the player to feel all safe and happy and calm, you want them to feel tense, to be on edge, and, most importantly, you want to scare the living shit out of them. So how do we go about achieving that?

(No, not jumpscares, you cut that shit out right now)

What I think you should to (emphasis on I and think, as in, personal opinion, and you should, as in, me making this game) is basically make the player feel threatened. You make the player feel scared to enter a room because they don’t know what might be lurking inside. Have a constant threat of something looming over the player’s head everywhere they go. And while that might be an easy concept to grasp, the big issue lies in what exactly that threat is.

(No, not jumpscares! I said stop that!)

So here’s the thing about jumpscares:

They’re not a bad thing... when used in conjunction with other things. Used by itself, it’s just a very cheap way to get a reaction from the player. Sure, a monster popping out of nowhere to scream in your face is going to startle you - but that’s just it. It’s startling the player, not scaring them. If your brother hid in the dark to pop out and scream at you when you come in the room, you’re gonna be startled. And then you’re gonna be angry because that’s just not what normal person should be doing, Peter.

But anyway. A jumpscare is also only really effective the first few handful of times, because after that it loses its power and the player will probably just be going ‘Oh, boo to you too, Mr. Monster’. You need to save up on the jumpscares to only use them when a perfect opportunity arises (like when the tension is at its highest, or when the player is least expecting it and quickly build tension). There are a lot of situations where a jumpscare can come in handy, but it should never be used by itself. If you’re gonna Boo! at the player, Boo! at the player and then do something else along with it.

(Also I have a jumpscare pet peeve when jumpscares make absolutely no sense in-universe. Like, I can understand a monster screaming - monsters are, you could say, prone to shrieking and loud noises, so it makes sense. But when a horror game or movie have a thing pop out with a loud sound, a thing that by all means and laws of physics should make no sound whatsoever, it just grinds my gears so friggin much. Worse yet when the characters react to it! Boo, camera cut! Boo, title card says TUESDAY! Boo, there’s some paint on the wall! Boy what a loud wall!)

But I digress.

So, about the threatening the player bit...

How do we threaten the player to make them feel unsafe? That was the trickiest part to figure out during initial development.

One option is going for the being chased by enemies route. Think something like Outlast or Amnesia, where there’s no combat and you have to run away and hide from monsters to survive. Aaand we kind of just ruled that out. Partly because the map isn’t all that big which might have just ended up with the enemy and player running around in circles, and partly because if you don’t do it properly you might end up with something less threatening, and more troublesome. Like, say, you’re in the middle of completing a puzzle and suddenly an enemy pops out and you have to drop everything to run all the way back to shake them off to finally be able to go back and do what you were trying to do in the first place - that kind of troublesome.

A second option is having combat. Or enemies that appear and that you can deal with in one way or the other. Aaand we also ruled that out and I just don’t know what the friggity frack we were thinking. I was very dumb, essentially. I think I was influenced by this current trend in horror games to have no combat whatsoever, in order to maybe leave the player feeling helpless in the face of danger. And honestly, I should have just taken a long hard look at the horror classics that are influencing this game and realized: the!! friggin!! combat!! it’s there!!! dammit!!

So, no chasing and no combat. What the hell do we do?

Basically I did this thing of trying to make an idea work that clearly does not work but I tried and tried anyway instead of letting it go and it’s basically a really bad thing that I do, and now that I’m finally aware of doing it I’m trying really hard to stop.

Note to self: if an idea isn’t working, let it go! Try something else!

Long story short what we tried to do was this thing where being around an enemy drained your health/sanity/whatever and you needed to escape the room to be safe by pressing a series of quick time events to open the door and leave. It didn’t work.

So there’s combat now! The end!

Well, okay, not really.

So, combat at last.

When I say combat, I don’t mean the action-game-one-man-army kind of combat. I mean the combat that’s of the I-have-a-rusty-pipe-and-will-smack-the-shit-out-of-any-ugly-thing-that-comes-my-way-oh-god-what-the-hell-is-that-maybe-I-should-just-run kind. Think of the first Silent Hill games, the first Resident Evils and even Fatal Frame, where the combat essentially boils down to being a ghost paparazzo.

So, now that we’ve decided on combat, the looming threat that I mentioned before becomes fairly well defined: it’s the possibility of an enemy encounter. You can even play with that expectation, like having one or two fake out scares (just do not overdo - I’m looking at you, scenes of a random cat jumpscaring you out of nowhere), or by pulling the rug out from underneath the player by having an enemy pop out in a seemingly safe area and give them trust issues.

But for the player to dread meeting an enemy means the combat can’t be easy - but it also can’t be frustrating otherwise it just fails as a game mechanic. The player can’t breeze through enemy encounters, each one needs to feel like an actual threat that the player has to deal with (either by killing them or tactically retreating a.k.a. running away please don’t hurt me).

Kind of a side rant: Honestly, if someone asked me what the downfall of the Resident Evil games as a horror series was, I’d probably say it started with the combat. Not all of it, but I’d say a good deal of the blame was there. *Please note I haven’t played either RE7 (as someone who tends to get motion sickness, first person games are things that I avoid) or the RE2 remake (this one I will get as soon as it goes on sale because games are expensive and I got no money).

I mean, I still love RE4 with all my heart and those Regenerators will live on inside my nightmares, but I thought earlier games felt much more tense because the combat in 4 was a lot more action-y than horror-y, though it hadn’t entirely tilted over to the action side... Then 5 came and ruined it all and then 6 came and was like ‘what’s a horror game’ (and I say this as someone who had fun with 6!) and the rest is history.

But it did get me thinking about one thing: the combat mechanics. I found myself frustrated when trying to go back to older Resident Evil games and struggled to deal with the bare bones combat and the clunky tank controls (granted, the latter more than the former), so I started wondering how much of the tension in older games had to do with actual horror, and how much of it was due to the insecurity you get when dealing with awkward controls in a moment of crisis.

Playing around with combat mechanics

So, having figured out that I wanted combat, the question became ‘how to combat’. Or something along those lines. I didn’t want to make things too easy, but I also didn’t want to make the player frustrated.

Here’s the part where I repeat what I said right at the top of this post: as the game is still in development, I’m still figuring out the proper mechanics of it all. So basically I’m just gonna register here what my experiments have been so far, and, like I said in the camera devlog, there are no tank-like controls because those are just a pain to deal with.

So at first I made it so you could only attack after aiming... But then that felt clunky as hell considering this is melee. So I scrapped that idea and made it so you could walk and attack at the same time.

I did keep the aiming part though, but made it optional: you can still walk and attack, but attacking while aiming will deal higher damage.

And in the spirit of keeping the player from just mashing the attack button I’m trying out a little something: Chaining attacks to deal higher damage but also making it so that, should the player press the attack button again too fast, the animation will restart, basically cancelling the previous attack. This would be a nightmare in a fast paced action game but since it’s not, I’m hoping it’ll force the player to be a bit more careful when confronting an enemy without it becoming a frustrating mechanic so, again, it needs more playtesting!

Also enemies can also chain attack you for higher damage!

And that’s basically it! I’m sorry if after all this buildup it ended up being disappointing oops

But considering Observo is going to be a somewhat short game I don’t have the time to develop a complex battle system that’s just not gonna be used a lot in a game with puzzles as the main focus. So that’s it! Thank you so much to anyone who’s still reading this at this point, haha

#game development #devlog #indie game #gamedev #game dev #this is long #like really long #observo #updates

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videogamesincolor · 5 years

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Resident Evil 2 (2019) - Not quite the ‘re-imagining’ it purports to be (SPOILERS)

[Written: Feb 4-25, 2019. As always, act brand new on my post, you will catch the fastest block in the west.]

The 2019 iteration of Resident Evil 2 shares a lot of common ground with games like Silent Hill: Shattered Memories versus something like Bluepoint Games’ Shadow of the Colossus or even Sega’s Yakuza Kiwami series.

The first game is a re-imagining – effectively a reboot –, recreated from the ground up with almost little to do with its predecessor. The others are genuine remakes that change very little in the way of the framework or structure of the game and merely recreate or repair its presentation with the graphical fidelity (or control schemes) of the present era.

While both profit and rely on nostalgia, a remake has the specific ‘obligation’ to maintain what came before it. A re-imagining has cart blanche to do what it wants under the pretense that it has no obligation to restore or replicate. In the case of Resident Evil 2, it’s a bit funny in the fact that the existence of its reboot was reliant on the 2002 remake of Resident Evil.

During the re-release of the 2002 Resident Evil remake in 2015, Capcom more or less ransomed the idea of making a “remake” of Resident Evil 2 by placing the burden of that reality on the shoulders of Resident Evil HD. Or rather, the shoulders of their consumer base.

If Resident Evil HD didn’t meet publisher sales expectations, no “remake”. It was an easy sell, of course, because the Gamecube remake was not a game everyone played (on account of Nintendo console exclusivity). To no surprise, Resident Evil HD ended up being their “fastest selling digital title” in 2015. That same year, Capcom officially announced the Resident Evil 2 “remake” was becoming reality, went radio silent, and the aged fandom wept.

Common knowledge, but Capcom originally wanted a remake for RE2O in the vein of the 2002 remake. Mikami, however, was preoccupied with Resident Evil 4. He would never return to look back on the series because Capcom was Capcom, which inspired Mikami to depart from the company.

I think the assumption folk made (at the time), was that because the reboot was necessitated by the financial success of Resident Evil HD, Capcom might go for an experience similar to the 2002 remake, but with the graphical fidelity of present day consoles.

Graphical remasters and remakes are a “hit and miss” production. They happen because publishers (and by extension, developers), know there is profit to made in the machine of nostalgia, not (necessarily) because they’re interested in preserving or restoring old games. You see developers clearly holding back the desire to remix instead of being completely restorative, removing things they either didn’t like or expanding on things that couldn’t be done with previous hardware.

Yet, “if it ain’t broke, just update the visuals, maintain the rest”, is an adage some prefer. More often than not, remakes end up splitting older and younger audiences down the middle regardless of what changes or what remains. And that’s without taking into account bugged and half-hearted releases that never get addressed by devs.

But, Resident Evil 7 (“we swear it’s not a reboot”) happened, and it was fairly clear what direction Capcom was going to go in. While Capcom and fanbase for the game were content with calling Resident Evil 2 a “remake”, Capcom later insisted, “This is not a remake. It’s a retelling, a new game built from the ground up.” So, on the surface, RE2R definitely has more common with Shattered Memories than it does 2002’s Resident Evil. But, where Shattered Memories wasn’t interested in treading so familiar waters, the same cannot be said of this reboot.

The 2019 iteration of Resident Evil 2 is a monkey’s paw wish of a game, just based on the observation of how the established fanbase is reacting and my own personal feelings (as someone with no nostalgia for it). For some, they got exactly the experience they wanted (more RE7). For others, modifying the game (on PC, naturally) to recreate an experience closer to the 1998 release is a must. And then there are some who are simply disinterested in the game, content with the original, or dissatisfied with the creative or business choices made by Capcom (and given Capcom’s track record, I can’t blame them).

Within the game itself, there is a lot about the reboot that feels unfocused, hindered by budget, last minute decisions, a blandly retold narrative, and trying to cling to abstract bones in an effort to maintain the audience it courted, when abandoning those bones might’ve been a better idea.

I. Presentation – The "Realistic” “Re-Imagining”

If Marvin’s final moments with Leon or Claire weren’t enough to convince you the of the severity of the situation, maybe a emotionally manipulative scene with Dad and Zombie child will.

The Resident Evil series is not one known for its screenwriting. If anyone’s being real honest themselves, the shit’s bad 90% of the time, reached peak stupidity in RE6 and just kinda self-destructed from there. YMMV, but Resident Evil is the “so-bad-bad-its-good” game you could enjoy up to a point. The 2002 Resident Evil remake took a particularly poor script localization and improved upon its delivery, right down to the voice direction (which could still be a bit stilted). Yet, you never got the feeling RE1R was striving to be anything other than what it was: A cinematic-based video game that reveled in the aesthetic of Gothic environment design, mood, and b-movie monsters with a world domination plot thrown for extra spice. It had a decent sense of humor, and often poked fun at itself.

RE2O built its foundation on the basic principles of the original (isolation, aesthetic, framing, mood), but focused a little more on its humor, body horror and action-movie flair. The plot of RE2O was as bare-bones as it got with the presentation of its narrative. A new cop and an AWOL cop’s bike enthusiast sister wind up trapped in a police station, accidentally stumble across a corporate conspiracy and must escape a giant underground complex before it blows up. Simple stuff. And the dialog – with a fairly improved localization and English performances – got you from point A to point B.

For everything I didn’t like about RE7 (from its aesthetic, plot, combat, creature design, and its bologna white characters), it was, to some degree, an attempt to recapture the camp and b-movie horror that RE4 so firmly embraced without damaging its atmosphere. RE7 was self-aware enough to embrace the inanity that was its premise in a way the series had only recently attempted again in Resident Evil Revelations 2, which also had its tongue firmly placed in its cheek. Resident Evil is a game comfortable with its silliness, but can still deliver a tense mood and atmosphere.

It’s disappointing that RE2R adopts the tone of, “Please, take me seriously”, with all the self-awareness that RE6 had when it tried to be an action/thriller.

RE2R’s primary issue is tone and presentation. From the jump you can tell the scenario writers of RE2R want the game to be this gritty drama with “complex characters”, grounded in reality, right down to the HBO-levels of profanity and the redundant use of “bitch” littered throughout the script. In an attempt to remold a cast of characters designed for the absurd into “realistic” persons, what you get characters largely disinterested in their circumstances. Claire and Leon seem only mildly inconvenienced by the end of the world. They casually shout over explosions (that might as well not have happened), and often can’t be arsed to sound anything other than annoyed by most events that unfold around them as repetitive canned reactions regurgitate through the speakers.

The script doesn’t trust scenes like Leon’s one-to-one moments with Marvin to sell the dire circumstance. So, casually chauvinistic characters like the Gunshop owner (who got comically bodied by zombies) becomes a saccharine drama piece that stalls the progression of the plot in what might be one of most disingenuous moments I’ve seen in a game. When monsters like William Birkin, Mr. X, the Licker, and the plant monsters eventually begin to appear, they stand out and heighten the already problematic uncanny valley present in the game, and seem better suited for the elder games of the series.

You never really get moments like Chief Irons sorrowfully lamenting, “And to think taxidermy used to be my hobby”, Ada shrugging dismissively at Leon’s pride as a police officer, Annette getting conked upside the head by falling debris, or Claire tricking Mr. X into jumping over the ledge to go after the G-Virus hidden in Sherry’s locket and straight up calling him a sucker. The drab, washed out presentation of the plot, played so deadly serious, honestly made for a joyless experience.

RE2R asks and answers the questions like, “What if Leon was wearing civvies on the way to work?” or “What if Ada Wong pretended to be an FBI agent?” A lot of it comes off like a fan novelization that proudly boasts “My version of how Resident Evil 2 would go”. The first time you read it, maybe it’s an interesting take to indulge, but the more you revisit it, the more unessential or cosmetic the changes end up feeling. (The only real cosmetic change that doesn’t seem weird to me is the idea that the police hijacked a museum and made it their dumping grounds.)

A lot of changes to the plot seem to function largely on the assumption that things like Ada posing as a civilian, Sherry being sent to the police station by her parents (as opposed to leaving her in a unprotected living residence with no immediate help), the RPD knowing about the Mansion Incident and brushing off the survivors (Chris, Jill, Barry, etc.), or Ben the reporter locking himself a jail cell to avoid other monsters, are things that strain suspension of belief or just wouldn’t happen in “real life”. So things of that nature either get removed or reworked altogether, often times for jump scares telegraphed a mile away, or left hanging for prequel baiting (because Capcom knows folk are going to be clamoring for another remake of RE1 and RE3).

The plot and its progression feels condensed down to something that’s like the bullet points version of RE2O. It over-simplifies what was already a simpleton of a narrative, largely to compress a lot of events into two campaigns that now never work in harmony. To add insult to that injury, Claire and Leon never communicate, let alone work together. They pretty much forget the other exists, thus making that friendship pretty non-existent.

Say hello to your friends. Say hello people who care. Nothing’s better than friends.

With regard to the two campaigns, for all the focus Capcom places on Leon – the mascot of the reboot itself –, Claire’s campaign is probably a better presentation of a rebooted RE2O, even with its drawbacks to Claire as a character overall (more on that later). The highlight of Claire’s campaign is the fact that her friendship with Sherry Birkin remains intact. I actually think it gets a better representation here than in the original, or what was only marginally improved in side-games like Darkside Chronicles. The downside is that the two interact even less than they did in RE2O, the plot separating them immediately after forming a partnership.

There are some genuine moments of scripted walk-n-talk between Claire and Sherry as they explore the early parts of the game, which in turn makes Claire a far more engaging character than she is with Leon (who is devoid of any real charm or personality in this reboot). The downside, however, is that Sherry is reduced to a prop, where she was a far more proactive party in the original game. That and by the end of Claire’s campaign, there is a lot of “shitty mom” apologia from Claire, whose basic human decency makes her better guardian than Annette Birkin.

Annette Birkin is questionably re-framed as a sympathetic and even tragic hero character who “never meant for this to happen”, never-mind she and her husband (who is also framed as a victim) were involved in the testing, abuse and deaths of orphaned children in the name of science. Then there’s the whole virus that turns people into zombies. But, yeah, what a tragic figure.

My primary issue with the narrative of Leon’s campaign is that they decide to tie him more into the Umbrella plot (aka, Ada and Claire’s shtick) instead of having him focus on finding a way out and helping other people. The reboot actually had the opportunity to employ the “help the other survivors” bit I always felt was dropped in the original (but revisited in Outbreak), and put Leon’s altruistic character into more action. But, then the reboot removes this motivation altogether by making Marvin and RPD’s rescue efforts a complete and utter failure (thanks, Capcom).

His plot lacks any real momentum, largely because the game nixes his original cast dynamic. Despite nothing crucial happening in his campaign until the end of it, his bears the greatest consequence on the reboot’s compressed narrative. The outright removal of his friendship with Claire, and even the briefest interaction he has with Sherry, makes Leon pretty bland as hell.

The only time he comes off as remotely personable is when he interacted with Marvin. Otherwise, it’s one eye open, one eye closed with this iteration of the character. The fact that he’s less of a take charge personality, and more of pushover (to sad degrees) also makes for less entertaining interaction all around.

You can tell someone with no ability to write or direct romantic subplots handled this. Whoof.

And while I’m not against reworking the Ada/Leon dynamic where the start of an attraction is a little less like a brick to the head (”Ada wouldn’t do that. I KNOW her!”)? A): this is Capcom, so that didn’t happen, B): It’s still pretty much like a brick to the head, only this time it’s last minute, with less foundation, and outright unimaginative. Nothing about the execution of the “romance” in this game works at all. Where Ada and Leon at the very least had a functional rapport and partnership in RE2O, in the reboot the majority of their time is spent in passive aggressive disharmony. The outright antagonism between the two characters in the reboot is not only boring, but not remotely conducive for what follows near the climax.

As something that takes up the majority of his narrative, for worse instead of better, a lot the dialog – a direct consequence of what they choose to do with Ada – is comprised of uninspired “enemies-to-lovers” shtick, right down to drab flirt dialog and throwing one’s words back at the other (“I didn’t realize you were keeping score” / “I didn’t realize we were keeping score”).

The worst thing about his campaign is Ada’s depiction. The reboot effectively turns her into a character who does more damage to her own agenda than Leon being remotely present. I get the writers think having Ada posing as a federal agent is “smart” or “realistic”, but the character instead comes off as more suspicious than a civvie with a gun. She’s a pretty terrible spy in this reboot. Reboot Ada is an antagonistic character with zero charisma or personality, there’s no fun in finding out her ulterior motives. On top of that, the FBI shtick is probably the dullest iteration of the character since her “fringe observer” status in her RE6 campaign.

But, where you had complete control of her and she was motivated by her own subplot (that did intersect with Leon, sometimes), realized in gameplay and plot, RE2R reduces Ada to a purely cinematic and expositional tag-along character with no agency in the narrative. A lot of what was done to and happens to Ada’s character is purely in service of Leon’s plot and actions. They really fire-bombed the character, but if you’re a hardcore Ada/Leon shipper, then her function will have served its purpose, both for you and Leon’s arc.

Marvin Branagh is humanized on such a level he is no longer the same character from the original game, but his role is effectively the same one. Like Ada, Marvin was re-contextualized largely as a sacrifice to Leon’s character arc (this is not a vibe you get with Claire’s campaign ever). Chief Irons, who feels like he appears out of nowhere, with no buildup, has been reduced to this kind’ve ineffectual kidnapper who disappears just as quickly.

Resident Evil is at its best when it knows it’s an interactive horror b-movie – with action elements – and has a director who knows how to balance all those elements. Beyond the singular moment wherein Claire Redfield declares “I’m gonna kill the monster” while wielding a six shooter and Annette Birkin is actively cheering for the death of her Frankenstein husband, RE2R never tries to be that kind’ve game. It actively runs away from schlock, and so it is the less remarkable product.

Things gleamed from Resident Evil 2′s abandoned direction offer a far more interesting “re-imagining” than 2019 end result. To a degree.

Part of the problem with Capcom’s attempt to “re-imagine” RE2O is that it wants to cling so badly to the framework and story beats of the original game instead of creating an identity of its own. It wants the ability to say, “we’re a totally different story!”, but at the same time does very little to become a different story, and exiles itself to this island of nowhere because it actively alienates the connections to the games that come before and after it.

This is where I think, while a lot of people disliked Shattered Memories, it’s a better re-imagining of the original Silent Hill, because its bold enough to actually commit to that definition. Capcom’s execution here is pretty half-hearted, deliberately so.

I’ve only just chosen to acknowledge the prototype of Resident Evil 2, but despite knowing the devs were not happy with the end result (and just scrapped it), it does a lot of things that this reboot honestly should’ve at least attempted.

Not only does it handle the character plots in a way where scenario nonsense would not be a problem, you basically had (what are now) established (or nixed) characters in different roles, reasonably isolated from the RE1 plot, working in tandem with your player characters (Eliza and Leon) and their cast of characters, who were never designed to meet until the apparent end of the game. Also, Marvin had a larger role and a functional relationship with Leon (I hate Capcom).

As a “retelling” of RE2O, RE2R is pretty weak. There are so many ways Capcom could’ve “re-imagine” RE2O if they were being genuine about that, but the final product more or less proves they weren’t. It’s over-reliance on referencing or leaning on things from RE2O hinders more than helps the game. It invites comparison to what is a better product despite its age.

The reboot wants to be taken seriously, and does everything it can to project that image to the detriment of its presentation. RE2O more or less reveled in its silliness, and shlocky horror movie tropes and knew you would enjoy the ride anyway.

Separate Ways, Broken Scenarios

Claire and Leon working together, solving the problems...

RE2O’s scenario system was a fairly interesting way of presenting the story of two characters, and I always wondered why this was never more of a thing in games. Claire and Leon’s plot were separated on two discs (PS1). Leon was first, Claire, second. Completing one character’s “A Scenario” unlocked the other character’s “B Scenario”. Certain gameplay actions created minor consequences to affect the respective character’s scenarios (if you took a certain weapon or item over another, it wouldn’t appear in the other character’s alternate scenario).

The scenario system and the corresponding plots of the player characters were clearly developed in tandem with each other. Whatever goofs arose from therein, the narrative position of the characters remained firmly in place (largely because they were told through cinematics).

Claire’s B scenario always felt the most changed because the cinematics had to accommodate for a change to get Claire in places I was otherwise unaccustomed to seeing her. Legit, some of the cinematic differences were wild.

Back in June 2018, Capcom made it clear that RE2R was not intended to have a scenario campaign at all. The decision was (apparently) made back in 2017, when it was clear doing an A/B scenario was going to be costly on a AAA budget. It was only going to be a single campaign for Leon and Claire. So, Claire and Leon’s campaigns in RE2R are, structurally and plot-wise, “Scenario A and B did a fusion dance”.

In execution, their campaigns are like choose your own adventures. It asks the question “what if you went with Claire?” and its answer is “Leon de-spawns and doesn’t appear again until the end of the game”. It’s definitely not “Two strangers walkie-talkie a plan to escape a zombie infested city”.

Inside or outside, the B Scenario for the player characters barely differentiates itself from Scenario A

In this case, they should’ve stuck to their guns, just released one campaign per character (it’s not exactly like the absence of the B scenarios would actually impact their sales. Not with the fans whipped into a frenzy) and focused on getting their plot to work a little better.

“Claire B” and “Leon B” come off like a slapdash cut-and-paste job that made me question whether or not I had hit something on the controller that was causing the sequences to skip right through whole gameplay segments. Yet, now armed with the knowledge of a year before, it would explain why nothing in this game’s presentation ever feels like it gels, or was hastily put together.

Another issue the RE2R’s alternate scenarios make is not maintaining the characters static narrative placement as RE2O did. I think this is where you really start to see how little interest Capcom had in Claire as a character versus Leon.

RE2R’s “Claire A” Scenario opens with a brief clip of Claire on her bike, talking to someone on the phone about Chris, then hearing something in the gas station store. The game then proceeds to put her in the exact same circumstances as Leon, which is baffling. They really have her doing the Leon shtick and repeats what she did in “Leon A”, but inside the gas station. Whack.

If you play “Leon A” first, she appears out of nowhere like she’s been attacked outside the gas station somewhere nearby. Her motorcycle isn’t even anywhere in view, so, the natural assumption you make is that maybe they’ll show that later when you play “Claire B”. Maybe there’s another area you can explore.

Nah. In “Claire B” the exact same cinematic plays again, trailer music starts, cut to black, and, it jumps to her intro scene in “Leon A”. At no point are you given a unique gameplay level or cinematic for Claire to bridge the gap between Leon heading for the store exit and Claire being chased by zombies that suddenly surrounded the gas station. She lit. just spawned into the area! Whack.

Now for some awkward car dialog

The original game was smart enough to give you a cinematic where she scoped out an empty diner and happened across some zombies while Leon’s boots were being accosted outside by zombies near his jeep. It really sold the idea of events happening concurrently to two different people within the same area.

Claire in “Claire B” doesn’t even get a section where she runs through the city after escaping the T-bone incident. The game just drops you in the graveyard, and then drops you at the rear police station gate where Leon spots her outside. You do a lot of backtracking in RPD with zero character interaction, and then, about an hour into the game, you end up on the exact same track as you did in “Claire A” (meeting Sherry, saving Sherry, Birkin #3-5 fight, escape) with no scene restructuring or whatnot, just the standard “Extended Ending” shtick.

“Leon B” in RE2R shares the exact same problems as “Claire B”. It feels like an abridged version of “Leon A”. Beyond Leon standing outside the gas station store and instant transmission’ing to the back of the police station there are zero story differences. But, with Leon you always have the reassurance that you can just play “Leon A” if you want a more complete experience.

Driving motorcycles in the rain is, factually, an accident waiting to happen

Claire regardless of the scenario you choose for her, A or B, will never get a unique starting gameplay moment of her own. While I think they did a far better job of reworking “Claire A” better than either of Leon’s scenarios, that’s disappointing. Claire really feels like something of a afterthought.

Other detractors from the scenario nightmare include Mr. X following you around in the A Scenario and the B Scenario, instead of the B scenario only. Mr. X went from a fairly unsettling stalker of a boss enemy, who worked on slasher movie principals (the monster appears out of nowhere when you least expect him), then quickly transformed in a wearying exercise of dodging an enemy type that overstays its welcome. Both scenarios feature the helicopter crash and skylight Licker ambush, etc., etc..

If they couldn’t build upon or better realize what the 1998 game did, then the B Scenario was best left to the wayside. Naturally, Capcom didn’t follow their own advice and the want to cater to nostalgia bit them in the ass.

Water is wet.

II. Gameplay – Night of the Living Bullet Sponges

Lickers (who are still terrifying) are practically one-hit-kill monsters now. Yippie.

There is a lot about the cinematic presentation of the elder Resident Evil games that defines much of its identity. An identity strong enough that most games that came out during the high point of its career were content to copy or refine its formula (Temco’s Fatal Frame, Konami’s Silent Hill 3, and Capcom’s Onimusha and Haunting Ground for example). There is a lot that loses the more it – a two decade old franchise – attempts to keep up with an ever-changing landscape of what’s considered modern-gaming-at-the-moment, instead of going to sleep like Onimusha, or even being forcefully put out to pasture like Silent Hill and Dead Space.

RE2R is a standard third person shooter that de-emphasizes cinematic presentation within its plot and its game space. There are no establishing cinematics, and the Kamiya action-movie-esque flair that made the last stretch of the climax what it is, is thoroughly absent. RE2R instead opts to – present the plot of the game completely within the game space itself with minimal cinematics. Sometimes it works, other times, it doesn’t.

Lickers drop unceremoniously on your head in your first encounter, Mr. X just appears out of nowhere then hounds you like Jehovah’s Witnesses, the sound of a helicopter crash goes whizzing by in time for you to walk past the model that’s already in the wall, Marvin becomes a zombie with no real sense of mourning or terror about his passing, Ada Wong gets the worst on-screen send off, etc. Cinematic moments that were meant to emphasize and foreshadow the decaying situation of the police station and the stakes of the characters are just kinda nullified.

Sherry Birkin’s gameplay segment is one of my favorite parts of the reboot.

I think one of the reasons Claire’s campaign leaves a better impression on me than that of Leon’s is what they decided to with Sherry Birkin’s part in her plot. Leon’s scenario has Ada trudging through a boring sewer corridor hunting for fuse boxes and then the game knocks her out so Leon can come to her rescue. With Sherry, you get something a little more creative, something that doesn’t treat her like a momentary distraction from the player character like it does with Ada. The entire orphanage level, from its presentation, to its level design, is probably what I would’ve liked to haven seen more of in the game.

The game puts you in the shoes of Sherry, but instead of traveling through sewers on your own, you’re exploring and searching an empty building that invokes a mood similar to – but not like – 2002’s Resident Evil. Obviously, this choice was made to keep Leon and Claire’s paths from intersecting (fuck that, I guess), and in a lot of ways, the game abandons the mechanics of Resident Evil and becomes a modern Clocktower game.

Chief Irons becomes the scissorman to Sherry’s Jennifer Simpson, and you, the player, have to navigate a fairly limited space to get away from him. They basically expand upon the Natalia stealth segments from Resident Evil Revelations 2 and create a fantastic gameplay segment full of distressing near misses and a legitimate win for Sherry. (I only wish they had allowed her to lock Irons in the bathroom. He would’ve Nicholson’ed his way out anyway.) Unfortunately, it ends with a Deus Ex Birkin appearance and leaves the player asking more questions that it’s not interested in answering on any level. Also Mr. X just spontaneously appears as well, which only compounds the Deus Ex Birkin thing.

Where you could soccer kick a head from a zombie in the original, Claire and Leon can barely expend energy to shake ‘em off their shins. Fantastic.

Combat wise, in a lot of ways, RE2R feels like a chore. A regression of the advancements that RE4 and RE1R was able to strike a balance with, but later iterations leaned too heavily on or used too little. Hell, I even think it’s a regression of how Dead Space approached combat. RE1R encouraged the player of doing away with zombies much in the same fashion as its counterpart and RE2O, with tactile and visible indicators that the zombies were dead (pools of blood under the body, dismemberment, headshots), but, it also threw in the risk of dealing with a new threat (Crimson Heads) if you chose not to oil and burn the bodies you left behind as you cleared the area. The gameplay was solid about letting the player know their resources had been put to good use.

RE4 encouraged smarter gunplay, aided by laser sight, and critical damage hits to other areas of the Ganados. The risk of taking headshots were being attacked by the parasites that could take large chunks of your health out in tandem with the mobs that – one way or another – would catch up to you. Dead Space took the critical hit system of RE4 and transformed it into a mechanic that made the complete dismemberment of the Necromorph critical to survival. Effectively, both you and the enemies were fairly balanced against each the other. You were never so strong that you could blast through your opponents and your opponents were never so OP that you lost unnecessary resources trying to kill them.

The same really cannot be said of RE2R. Nothing about the combat or enemy encounters feels particularly balanced for much of anything save busywork and resource death. There is no real balance between yours and the strength your opponent. I’ve heard RE4’s adaptive difficulty is still in play here, but if it is, its implementation here is not great. I certainly never reached that flow-state where I felt I was in harmony with the game.

Yeah, I didn’t miss this bit at all.

Headshots are nullified in a way they’ve never been in the series, and right off you can tell what the devs consider a “challenge” in terms of gameplay. Zombies eat bullets as badly as any mid-tier B.O.W., regardless of what difficulty setting you choose. In standard I saw six-to-nine bullets go into the head of a zombie and there was no guarantee they were dead until you saw their head explode or maybe saw them twitch. In hardcore (my sister’s preferred mode), zombies will eat eight-to-twelve-or-more bullets to the head and the consequence is the same.

It’s imperative to try and incapacitate the undead, because minimizing your enemy count in RE2R is an exercise of frustration and often, a waste of bullets. Zombies move far faster than they did the original iteration of this game, practically zapping over to you no matter how much space is between you and them. They do just about the same, if not more, damage to you. The common defense against this is grenades, flashbangs and knives. If you haven’t used them for other things (like Ninja vanishing or crowd control), it’s the quickest way to get out of their hold. It’s simply not as reliable or was enjoyable a method to fight the zombies off in the vein RE4 provided (German Suplexes, kicks, elbows to the face, a knife that isn’t dollar store plastic, dodging, etc.).

If you can avoid them, by all means, avoid them. The consequence, however, is if you have to backtrack, well, you might be running into a bigger crowd, one that may include the problem monster of the given area (Lickers, Mr. X, Dogs, Plant Monsters, etc.) and potentially less resources. It’s a particular problem in the police station with Mr. X following you everywhere and not being remotely helpful enough to do some of the killing for you. He just gently pushes them out of the way.

A lot of the time, my sister was preoccupied with head-shots (against all odds) while I spent my time (trying to) cap their knees, and remove their limbs (so they couldn’t grab us after I capped their knees) so we could sprint our way through environments when the opportunity presented itself (largely to save ammo for another problem area). She’s the better shot, I’m only great with projectile weapons (so Claire’s campaign is even better to me in that regard), which I largely prefer on principal of strength. For me, there is no real satisfaction in the game’s combat, not even in a fight-or-flight sense (prime example: the village and castle encounters in RE4), or on a level capable of inducing the worst panic attack in me like Dead Space 2′s opening hospital sequence.

I was frustrated with near misses. My sister was a little more forgiving about the changes despite never being to make the clean headshots she wanted. We only really agreed on mutual dislike of the boss battles, but’s more or less how we feel about all of RE’s bosses. There is not a single one we’ve enjoyed fighting, and the worst ones were all in RE6 (which literally had us not talking to each other for days afterward) and Revelations 2.

Local zombie mocks police station’s lack of shutters

RE2R is pretty generous with its ammo cashes, with most of what you need readily available. The map, for the most part, makes locating items easier, but spotting them poorly lit environments, and around mini horde-like numbers that seemingly materialize out of nowhere is a bit of chore. Rarer types of ammo, like shotgun or automatic weapon ammo are often hidden in safes or lockers with combination locks.

Resource management returns in the reboot, copy-pasted from RE7, right down to the stark menu and a minimalist design that makes item management, I guess, less busy (color wise). It works, so it doesn’t bother me in context. The maps are definitely easier to read and a little more explicit about what items are where, but have otherwise maintained the “cleared” / “in progress” blue and red dynamic.

Depending on the difficulty level you’re playing on --- easy (assisted), normal (standard), or hard (hardcore) ---, your resources will be readily available to you, somewhere in the middle, or few and far between (in practice). Hard mode will have you rely on ink ribbons to save your game (like a standard PS1-PS2 game), and I think there are no checkpoints. Save points are scattered in new locations and are a brief safe haven.

Puzzles in Resident Evil have always been a series of frustrating events, particularly slide-and-complete-the-picture and “find the missing themed piece” puzzles. But, this game actually made me appreciate them, largely because the gun-play is no longer a satisfying aspect (and probably will never be again).

Mechanically speaking, a lot of the puzzles or item hunts from RE2O are sort’ve retained, but they’ve been mixed up or their importance to getting to one place or another has been (extremely) reduced or made even more convoluted. The reboot is definitely not that interested in puzzles, so it feels and is designed less like a dungeon crawler.

Item hunting in order to solve puzzles requires you backtrack quite a number of times through the environment-of-the-moment. However, backtracking is perhaps more nightmare-ish and gauntlet-like than previous entries because it seems like the game spawns more zombies into the area. And with Mr. X basically breaking the exploratory pace of the game, the want to explore your environment is actively discouraged.

[Sighs Loudly For a Thousand Years]

Despite the game’s over-reliance on Mr. X, breaking from the series formula of not over-exposing its mini-bosses (the Regeneradors, Verdugo, or even that huge Centipede in a Trenchcoat for example, were not following you everywhere), Mr. X was, for a short time, the only ‘combat’ element in this game that invoked the right kind of déjà vu.

It was actually satisfying knocking him down, and ducking his punches at the last minute. I mean, at least it was in levels having nothing to do that Ada Wong segment. (Then. he. kept. coming. back.)

Ending him isn’t quite as satisfying as it is in the original game. Not because he effectively became an SNK boss, but because the component that makes that fun (The Resurrection of Ada Wong and the emancipation of the Rocket Launcher) was removed entirely from the game for a sequence far, far blander in comparison.

III. Non-Union for Billion Dollar Corporations

Around 2015 or so, there were rumblings (outright vocalizations) from unionized voice actors that shed some light on some particularly horrible business practices that developers and publishers were carrying out on voice actors. They were either not being paid their due, or not allowed proper rest-time during the jobs they worked on. Big studios like Insomniac Games, EA Games, Activison, and the like were mistreating voice actors, often to the point where some confessed to experiencing vocal damage, stress or injuries sustained from shitty work conditions and people who clearly viewed their occupation as a lesser division of their project’s production.

At the same time, well before the strike became officiated, Capcom made the conscious decision not to hire unionized voice actors for the production of the Resident Evil 2 reboot. No one knew about this until 2017, when the game was well on its way to being released the following year (before a delay pushed it to 2019) and the Strike was ongoing. Alyson Court (on-again-off-again VA of Claire Redfield), Matthew Mercer (the most recent VA for Leon), and Courtenay Taylor (the most recent VA for Ada Wong) all announced that they weren’t reprising their roles in the game because the reboot was not a union project, but it was not a result of the strike.

Some vocalized their displeasure with this, even going as far as to say that they wouldn’t buy the game in a show of support of the actors. Others aren’t sparing it a glance because they’re otherwise disappointed with the creative direction anyway. But if the reception of the game from basic users – aware of the circumstances or not – is anything to go by, solidarity will typically lose out to FOMA (Fear of Missing Out). Especially if you’re not getting anything out of it personally or emotionally as a consumer of media.

I’m not particularly interested in demeaning non-union voice actors, (I’ve watched and paid for many a-thing that used non-union labor). Capcom, despite working on union projects, also continues to dabble in non-union label as well. I know Capcom’s likely wasn’t interested nor aiming to help voice actors not represented by SAG-AFTRA (or other organizations) become better known or gain better opportunities.

The less money they can probably shell out with non-union work, the better it is for them in the long run. Knowing the striking voice actors didn’t remotely get what they wanted out of negations (and probably didn’t get the support they wanted on account of whataboutism) will probably only embolden Capcom and other publishers and developers to make/continue behavior like this, whether or not another strike ever occur.

Resident Evil has never been particularly known for its voice acting beyond the scope of how terribly it started out in 1996 and kinda petered out on the platform of “meh, it’s not completely terrible” with later entries.

The series could hire some fantastic voice actors (Rino Ramano, Karen Dyer, Sally Cahill, and Paul Mercier, for example), and a lot of them can deliver some dud performances regardless of experience. At the end of the day, unless they have an equally strong director and screenwriter, you’re going to end up with an embarrassment of riches that may become memes one day (“Complete. Global. Saturation.”).

That said, RE2R’s issue seems to lie primarily within the writing. In an attempt “humanize” characters, major to minor, the script is often littered with profanity that not only distracts from the point of what you’re reading or listening to, but adds unnecessary fat to a script that’s already bogged down with dialog and text.

The downside to a rebooting a 20 year old game, is when corporations indulge in fandom bullshit. RE2R is pretty rife with cutesy dialog meant to whip the “Cleon” shippers into a frenzy. Its nauseating, really.

Claire and Leon’s conversation at the back of the police station is a prime example of that: Instead of having the dialog delivering urgency of the scene, the objective of the characters we get an aimless exchange full of flirty dialog, and two characters not all that concerned with zombies materializing behind them (given they take forever to put the fire under their boots). In RE2O, at least the writers were smart enough to have the characters meet in a zombie-free room or hall.

I’ve seen people make the Realism™ argument constantly with this game (esp. when counterpointing the gameplay criticisms), but, "realism” is a weak argument and esp. when you’re simply looking to be dismissive. When dialog begins to wander from its point, when profanity hinders more than helps your delivery, your story not only loses impact, it rather shows you’re a mite lazy or weak as a writer.

Comparatively, RE2O was able to communicate the urgency, anger and tone of their characters, and under no circumstances were they this reliant on profanity or long-winded dialog. The issue isn’t that profanity is present, or that the game is text or dialog heavy, it’s how its executed. And at present, the execution is lacking in a strong focus or reduces the game to script written by someone who just realized, “wait, I can make characters swear????”

I can honestly see why a lot of protagonists in survival-horror games were silent for so long outside of cinematics, or simply had substituted thoughts (”I better find Ashley quick”). Running commentary really does break the immersion.

Claire and Leon go from mildly relatable to mechanical models spewing canned reactions that lost their bite forty minutes ago. It’s like being stuck with multiple versions of the Generic Husband from RE7 who “what the fucks?” at every single thing when given the opportunity. So, in a lot of ways, it has a lot of the same problems that made the dialog in Resident Evil Revelations 2 anguish to listen to (hello, Moria Burton), but it lacks such charming (/s) quips like, “Holy balls, my life is awesome!”

That said, not all of the performances are terrible. The voice actors for Claire (Stephanie Panisello), Marvin (Christopher Mychael Watson) and Sherry (Eliza Pryor) probably leave the greatest impression, and are arguably the strongest performers in the game. Christopher Mychael Watson in particular gives a wildly different performance depending on who you’re playing as (Leon or Claire) and has the strongest rapport with Stephanie Panisello.

Nick Apostolides, on the other hand, he just turns in a really unremarkable performance as Leon. Like, in comparison to Mercer, Mercier, he simply does not charisma to inject personality into what is an otherwise really boring version of Leon. He definitely doesn’t have the hammy, but dead-serious delivery of Paul ”why does no one listen to me?” Haddad (Leon’s original VA).

I think one of the more disappointing sequences in the game is when Leon returns to the main lobby in the station and gets jumped by zombie Marvin. Instead of sounding devastated, Leon just sounds mildly disappointed his C.O is a zombie (Panisello gives you a better impression of Claire’s heartbreak). And because this scene isn’t a cinematic, you as a player are just running around in circles hoping you have enough ammo to kill the bullet sponge zombie Marvin. When Marvin is finally a gory mess on the ground, Leon saying, “Don’t worry, Lieutenant. I’ll stop this” (paraphrasing) to the pieces of Marvin’s body, comes off as unintentionally hilarious, right down to the delivery of Apostolides.

My feelings are about the same on Jolene Andersen (but we all can’t be Sally Cahill, can we?), but also makes me wonder why Capcom didn’t go the distance to hire a Chinese-American voice actress for Ada. They clearly had the opportunity to do so, they found a Black actor for Marvin, but they just didn’t bother with Ada.

The worst performances out of the bunch is probably Daddy Gunshop owner, “Hello Human” reporter guy, Annette “You’ll Never Get the G-Virus” Birkin, and Chief Irons.

IV. Capcom’s Adventures in Sexism Rebooted

One of these characters had some thought put into their design. It’s not the character on the left.

The Resident Evil series is no stranger the sexualization or objectification of female characters. Historically, for every step forward Resident Evil takes with the presentation of its female characters, it takes six steps back. If there is a female character in the series, the chances are she’s going to be wearing something meant purely for the male gaze, while her male companions wear something far more appropriate for the game’s plot. It only gets worse with alternate costumes, which are typically comprised of sexy school girl fantasies, Daisy Duke hot pants, anti-Black fetishism, and little red riding hood looks. (And no, costumes like Chris’ Sailor Man and Mad Max looks aren’t a counterpoint gotcha.)

RE2R, on the surface, seems to be yet another step-up in the presentation department for female characters in the series. Claire is wearing a leather jacket over a black tank top and sports jeans instead of shorts in new her default costume, they even presented Ada Wong in a world’s ugliest looking trenchcoat. Even better, one of Claire’s alternate costumes is a suit pants and shirt look. Claire has three alternate costumes that aren’t even remotely fanservice-y in the least and it’s great.

Then Capcom announced the “Classic Costume” for Claire and finally revealed Ada Wong without the trenchcoat, and it was business as usual. Claire Redfield’s “Classic Costume” in the reboot is, for lack of a better word, closer to fanservice-y than the original leotard under shorts, black shirt, and vest combo ever turned out to be. The only marked improvement made are the shorts are equal to the length of the leotards and no longer look like underwear.

Where the tank top worked with her new jacket and jeans, it throws the entire look of the original costume’s framing off, and based on the cinematics. While it’s nowhere near as sexualized as her Revelations 2 alt costume, Capcom’s intent here is pretty clear.

Effectively, Claire looks closer to a character who would appear in a Michael Bay produced horror film, whose talking points are usually how sexy the actress makes being terrified look. In the original she was simply meant to look “cool”. When she removed the vest, and wore the holster over her black shirt, she did.

Ada Wong goes from wearing a halter top dress with leggings, and flat heeled shoes that looked fairly maneuverable in, to looking as though she’s been zip-locked into a red slip that doesn’t fit her, finished off with a tacky tiny black bow, a choker and two inch heels.

The entire look of it rather screams at you like a flashing ad banner advertising for an explicit website fetishizing Chinese-American woman. A lot of the fan art coming out of the fandom for Ada Wong in the remake is reflecting more or less that, so the target audience has been completely satisfied in this regard.

She looks absolutely ridiculous in gameplay segments because the dress was designed with no reactionary physics. It doesn’t flex the way a dress does around legs. It looks like a bad mod made by a fan that wanted a “sexier” looking Ada Wong.

Even outside the context of alternate costumes, female characters like 18-Year old Rebecca Chambers (who isn’t even in this game) ends up being oddly sexualized in a photograph where she was originally just sitting on the ground with a basketball in front of her leg, grinning like a goofy kid on a Scholastic paperback from the 90s.

Were it not for the fact that they were legitimately aiming to make Annette Birkin look undesirable, I’d be surprised that she didn’t appear in this game wearing a lab coat, half-open dress shirt, office skirt and three inch heels with heavy makeup.

Meanwhile, Leon Kennedy gets a “Classic Costume” that gets no [major] alternations to its look and thus is restored, unlike Claire or Ada, normal civilian clothing, and a Noir costume. Ada basically got no alternate costumes despite her playability, and I think it was the same with Sherry as well?

Standard, tried and true sexism aside, when it comes right down to it, even if your female character has the reputation of characters like Leon, “How can I make her sexier?” is a question Capcom all too readily answers instead of being creative.

V. RE Engine or, a Trip into the Dark Valley of Uncanny Gray People Land

Photorealism in games isn’t something I’m crazy about and how I react to it ultimately depends on the developer. A lot of video games have been worse for it – dead eye and plastic looking characters is an issue that persists – while very few have used it to the advantage of their creativity.

The major thing that puts me off is the blandness of a photo-realistic white faces. Developers are have shown they can sleepwalk a photo-realistic white face with no issues, but when it comes to the faces of people of color, well, either their biases start to show in the designs (its real easy to make a caricature of Black or non-Black face for video game devs) or their limitations are inherent in their how they see faces that don’t look like them.

I find myself struggling to say what I enjoyed about this game on a visual aspect, because its biggest detriment is without a doubt the RE Engine.

Environment Design - You want it Darker

Creative Assembly’s Alien Isolation did something I really liked. And that’s make the player reliant upon its darkness. You spend as much time in the light as you do enshrouded in the dark. The A.I. systems of Amanda Ripley’s enemies: Hostile humans, androids on an aggressive warpath of helpfulness, and the Xenomorph make hyper-aware of just how exposed you are bathed in the light, just as the dark and shadow make you equally aware that you’re just as open to an attack from the Xenomorph who needs no light to see you should it ever spot you therein.

A lot of the design philosophies in RE2R were built on the groundwork established by RE7, but its disadvantage was the player’s familiarity with RE2O’s level design. In a lot ways, I think they opted for pitch black environments to break that confidence. There are several environments throughout the presentation of RE2R that are turn-the-lights-off dark (which makes for an unpleasant experience for my eyes), but in a way that’s more superficial than essential.

Most areas in the game contain low-level lightning most of the series is known for, but it lacks any of the color and saturation from older games that make set pieces stand out. The most light you’ll see in RE2R is within the lobby, library and upper offices of the police station and the underground lab at the climax of the game.

The closest the game ever gets to replicating the atmosphere and mood of the older Resident Evil games is probably the orphanage level and the later street level in Claire’s campaign. The lightning and shadows are perfect there. But, more often than not, RE2R is content to plunge you into a adversarial darkness repeatedly with a flashlight. In addition to the game’s muted or desaturated colors and washed out look, nothing about the environment design really stands out as remarkable outside of the aforementioned levels.

I don’t think I’ve read so many complaints about having to adjust the contrast, color, brightness, and etc just to get one area or another to look normal before this game (in relation to RE). It’s apparently bad enough that PC Modders are creating mods that fix the overall presentation of the game (more color contrast, sharper image, improved lightning). Devil May Cry 5‘s environment and lightning design tends to looks leagues better than this game, and its got its fair share of bland looking levels.

The screenshot is edited, but this is a solid approximation of how dark it is in a lot of areas.

Where almost no light worked in a game like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, SOMA, Penumbra, or even Silent Hill, RE2R’s design template actively discourages exploration in a way the older games did the opposite. It gives you the impression that the game has more to hide than it does to show you. The 2002 Resident Evil remake is still one of the best examples of cinematic light, dark, and shadow created purely for navigation purposes. The game is seventeen years old (holy shit), and legit, I don’t think there is a Resident Evil game in the series that nails how essential lightning is to your environment like this one.

On an aesthetic level, the reboot fails to capture the period of the world that its predecessor was basically developed, lived and breathed in. Setting aside product placement (“Pepsi”) and musical cues (“Baby one More Time”) is beyond Capcom’s budget, it’s the little things about the environment and level design in the reboot that really fails to say, “Here lay 1998. We’re a year away from the full-blown Y2K craze, floppy discs, and pagers were still a thing.”

There’s a tape recorder, yes, there are big, blocky computers sitting on hardwood desks and gas prices I still can’t believe my father grouched over in comparison to the shit they have us paying now, but, a lot of those things feel like superficial window dressing on a poster board.

The environment design and world of RE2R feels very much like a 2019 era world with very little ringing true of the 90s.. I don’t think any damages the authenticity of the world much like the design of the characters – who look a little too 21st century as opposed to individuals trapped in a moment of time – now twenty years ago – and the same can be said of the secret evil lair of the Umbrella Corporation.

Everything in the final level of the game feels like something of Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil (The HIVE), and less like a lab that was built and constructed with what a 90s era architect would think was cutting edge tech and aesthetic of the late 1990s. It got to a point where I honestly think they should’ve just set the reboot in 2018.

Character Design - Petrified Faces and Awkward Mouths

He’s lit. melting in the rain right now.

Photo-realistic characters live and die by how well they imitate life without setting off the alarms in your mind. RE2R falls on the spectrum of “missing your mark” in a lot of ways. Characters in RE7 had the look of wax mannequin dolls walking around terrorizing you’re equally doll-esque player characters (with no heads). Nothing about how these characters were rendered and animated was particularly great, and it constantly triggered the meant response of “there is something wrong with what I’m looking at” that often comes with the uncanny valley.

The biggest issue facing the grand majority of the white characters RE2R is the fact that Capcom is still manipulating faces like they’re still using stylized animation and not an engine “based in reality” to its detriment. Characters are puppet-esque, or look particularly unfinished in the washed out environment and desaturated colors. This is noticeable in throwaway characters like the trucker in the opening cinematic (eating a burger that reacts unlike food) with a face that seems ready to melt off of its model at any moment, Chief Irons, “Hello Human” reporter guy, and the father and zombie daughter from the trite Gunshop sequence begging for its SAG award. None of these characters emote or animate well and draw the eye to the imperfections of the engine than wow you with its animation.

Among the central cast, the characters that look the worst rendered in the RE Engine are probably Claire Redfield and Annette Birkin. Both characters look as though the face models simply did not cooperate with Capcom tweaking the faces. Annette is more puppet-like than say, Claire (who at least has genuine moments of humanity). The less than stellar facial and lip animation is extremely noticeable on Annette's model who might’ve been promoted to minor antagonist at the last minute, because she has no business moving so robotically. It probably doesn’t help matters that Capcom designed her character with the philosophy of “working women don’t care about their appearances” (paraphrased) in mind, which makes their changes to Ada and Claire all the more suspect.

Claire’s biggest issue seems to be that Capcom simply spent less time on her than they did Leon. The model’s face is often stiff and under-animated, so it looks like Claire’s face is struggling to emote. This is especially notifiable when you compare Claire’s model to her living counterpart (who is far more expressive in a still image than her 3D model). Capcom more than likely tweaked the model’s face more than a little bit, and to the character’s detriment. Honestly, it’s comparable to how she ended up looking in CGI film Degeneration (where her face barley animated). Claire’s model really, really, really needed more work, or Capcom needed to find a face they could work with better than the one they chose.

Leon is the character they clearly spent more time on, at least in terms of details. In general, his animations are probably stiffer than Claire. Most of the cinematics involving close-ups of Leon’s face make it appear as though Leon has mastered the art of talking through one’s teeth without moving their lips, and he’s not particularly emotive unless the emotion is an extreme one.

Out of the characters with any remote screen-time or plot-related dialog, the only ones that look slightly more remarkable are Ada Wong and Marvin Branagh. Marvin in particular might be the best example of what the RE Engine can do with unique faces and competent performance from the animators and the actor.

Ada Wong looks better than she ever did in Resident Evil 6, and while this not my favorite rendition of her character on any level, she is only female character in the game – in terms of character design – that got a decent face model.

The only drawback with these two characters that Marvin looks as ashy white as the white characters (and no blood-loss isn’t a justification for that) and he shares the same thousand yard dead-eye look in his eyes that a lot of the other characters have. The less-than-stellar facial animation is more than a little noticeable in Ada Wong’s sequences a well (was she snarling or trying to annunciate words at Annette?).

The zombies and non-human enemy types look better suited the grayscale, clay-esque look the RE Engine gives everything. Zombies require almost little to no real facial animation, but against the backdrop of reality they are truly out of place (to reiterate). The same can be said of characters like Mr. X or William Birkin’s monster form.

The big sell Capcom made with the zombies and monsters in RE2R is that they could render insane amounts of gore, based on the human anatomy. On paper, it definitely sounds like a cool idea, in execution? I’ve been so desensitized to gore and human guts – within the fictional spectrum – that this really doesn’t impress me. (My sister, on the other hand, needed a moment.)

It’s like, “Yeah, that guy’s arm is are hanging off alright.” But, unless you’re giving me RE4 or Dead Space level styled deaths, where the gore is put on display with a sort’ve Evil Dead irreverence, well, the most your doing is just demonstrating gross anatomy. It’s cool, but not exactly satisfying, esp. when taking the clay-esque look of the models into consideration. The masturbatory gore dislay is also probably a big reason why firearms and explosives against zombies no longer have the desired effect. The most you’ll be doing a lot of the time is peeling the skin off of a model, which I guess, is your cue to go, “Wow, look these physics, look at that gore.”

There are some developers who really know how to work with photo-realistic environments and, even moreso, how to render photo-realistic characters, be they based on living people or not. Remedy Entertainment (using the in-house engine, Northlight Engine), is one, and Naughty Dog – who still rely heavily on stylization – has only recently entered that threshold during the PS4 era.

A lot of this of course, is a consequence of experience with that medium. Naughty Dog’s history with more animated styles definitely helps more than harms their photo-realistic models and environment. Remedy Entertainment’s persistent desire to render the real world in a 3D environment has simply improved as the tech has gotten better.

Capcom, like Square Enix and the late Konami, was always at its best with hybrid blend of animation and photo-realism. Resident Evil was rendered and designed in such a way that it straddled the line of photo-realism and stylistic animation in way no other games did. It wasn’t too real, and it wasn’t too cartoony.

That creative style lent itself to their level design as one was often not without the other. The Gothic horror design of mansions or European countries, and the stark familiarity of places like a police station, a cruise ship or a prison island, were often picture-esque or surreal by design. The RE Engine is probably the biggest step backward in terms of design and atmosphere.

VI. Conclusion – “All Employees Proceed to the Bottom Platform.”

Hey, look, a callback to Resident Evil 2. Neat.

As a game I played with my sister, passing he controller to her every fifteen minutes, I had fun based purely on how she reacted to the game. Whatever my quibbles, the most fun I’ve had with this game is probably screaming and yelling with my sister, and acting as her personal exposition machine.

She asks so many questions about what the hell is going on in the greater scheme of the plot. She doesn’t care, per-say, but she asks anyway because she knows I like reading Wikipedia and thus have the answers. I can only tell her what I know from the previous games, which I know effectively don’t count for shit with this reboot.

That said, the reboot just made me weirdly appreciative of what went into the creation of the original Resident Evil 2, especially in terms of structure, gameplay and presentation. The reboot is ultimately something that feels like it was produced within a AAA space, right down to its paid DLC offerings, which once would’ve been natural unlockables in the game. It’s budget was probably sunk by the over-lavish requirements of the RE Engine, and just from looking at it, this game had budget it was straining against. It ultimately ends up making its predecessor all the more crucial and unique.

It kinda highlights just how useless exploiting nostalgia is in the process of replicating things. You don’t get the same results, and in the end you’re only playing an imitation of something that was a consequence of the right people coming together at the right period of time. It’s what makes things like polygonal character skins, or “play this game with lower resolution settings”, give the impression that devs largely miss the point or misunderstand what people like or continue to like about older productions, even when a newer imitation of it comes out (the discussions people have about Metal Gear Solid vs. The Twin Snakes highlights this best, I think).

I enjoyed Bluepoint’s Shadow of the Colossus, they went above and beyond the call of duty to reproduce the original, but I often find myself playing the older far more than its 2018 remake, because the latter ultimately lacks what Team Ico put into that game.

In its attempts to be a retelling of the game, RE2R probably would’ve been better off abandoning the entire framework and creating something entirely new (I say again). But because it never tries to be different enough from its counterpart, especially in terms of story beats, the end result is a condensed soup with missing flavor. Otherwise, I think restorative would’ve been a better move than remixing it. Not something I could say about Shattered Memories. If I could describe RE2R, outside of the interaction I had with it in the company of my sister, “boring” would be the kindest descriptor I could give it. Everything about its aesthetic, to the delivery as a much toned down version of RE2O, was not gripping [for] me.

Comparing this reboot to something like DMC5, something using the same engine, but manages to be more vibrant in design and presentation, makes RE2R look unremarkable in comparison. The visual quality of the game tended to remind me of the presentation of Ready at Dawn’s The Order 1886, which was also heavily reliant on photo-realistic graphics and a washed out presentation.

This game is nowhere near as engaging as its original. And because the campaigns are basically a Frankenstein hybrid of the original A/B set up, a lot of the changes to the plot seem really superfluous or detrimental to the structure overall.

They really did Ada dirty in this game.

Playing the events of RE2O as more overly dramatic or serious effectively makes for a really dull game. A more reality-based RE isn’t something I’m particularly interested in, especially since the end result appears to be a less exciting product. The fact that they did so little with or reduced characters like Marvin and Ada – who are nowhere near as present or independent of the scenario characters as they should be, just makes for a greater disappointment.

RE2R is a reboot of the original 1998 game in all the ways that are reflective of RE7’s design principals, carrying the pretense of realism on its shoulders. RE2R keeps some of the bones of RE2O, but discards the rest in exchange for something trying really hard to be different, but familiar enough to invoke déjà vu. If you spent the radio silence hoping for the lavish recreation Mikami made of his 1996 original in 2002 for Gamecube audiences, you sadly won’t find it here. If anything this more or less proves something like that will never happen again.

RE2R strives to be a third person iteration of RE7 with an older title. If you weren’t crazy for what a lot of people more or less called “Resident Evil in Name Only” when it was released in 2017, chances are you won’t enjoy your time with RE2R. If you were completely and utterly for RE7, the RE Engine and all that this blueprint entails, you’ll basically have a good time with RE2R and whatever else gets remade under this umbrella.

The last temptation I have toward this game is playing it heavily modified on the PC because the mods for this game actually look like something to mess with. I’m just waiting for the “Classic Ada” costume mod, because that dress is some of the laziest character design I’ve ever seen.

#resident evil 2 remake #resident evil #capcom #re engine #re2 remake spoilers #videogamesincolor #marvin branagh #reboot ada wong #resident evil series #resident evil 2 reimagined

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recentanimenews · 5 years

Text

Resident Evil 2 Remake Will Have you Seeing S.T.A.R.S.!

I’m supposed to gather some electric parts to turn on the mechanism that opens cell doors in the underground jail cell. I found one after dodging vicious zombie dogs, and now I’ve found myself climbing back into the very police station I was trying to escape less than an hour ago. I know where I need to go--by now the police station is somewhat safe, and I know the best routes to get to where I need to go… until I find myself needing to extinguish a fire. "No problem," I say, and go about doing so with some easy exploring. Things are going well. I’ve got good health, ammo, and then… Mr. X happens. Suddenly, everything I thought I knew had changed.

All the skills I remembered from playing Resident Evil 2 20 years ago vanish, as the huge Tyrant hounds my every movement. Open a door too fast? Footsteps. Shoot my gun? Louder footsteps. Suddenly… a door opens that I didn’t open. I panic, and run. "If I can just get to the save room, I’m fine…" And then I hear it. A Licker. I ran too fast and too loudly, and with only a second to spare I dodge into the S.T.A.R.S. office, safe for now, and pause the game. My breathing is ragged and I put the controller down for a moment. I’m terrified, excited, and above all, happy. This is the best feeling in the world!

Resident Evil was always my favorite horror franchise, and Resident Evil 2 was the game I spent the most time with when I was younger. I played it more than I played any other game in the series until the co-op fest of Resident Evil 5 with my partner. The zapping system of Resident Evil 2 entranced me; the idea that a game had multiple storylines that interacted with each other, and that the game itself changed when you played it again blew my mind. The campy charm of the weird puzzles, esoteric nonsense, and scary but cool monsters made it all a blast. And then Mr. X showed up in scenario B, and I lost my little mind! I couldn’t believe a game could have a monster chase me, know where I was going, and make me feel unsafe in areas I thought I cleared. Fast forward to 20 years later, and I found myself doing the exact same things I did when I was a kid, totally amazed by the experience I was having, and watching as nostalgia mixed with the new experiences introduced in this remake to create something truly special.

There’s no real way to beat around the bush: the Resident Evil 2 remake is an amazing game! If that’s what you wanted to know, you can stop reading now and go buy a copy of it right this instant. It might even be my Game of the Year, and the year just started, and yes, I know that Kingdom Hearts III just came out. But the Resident Evil 2 remake has an addictive and entrancing combination of things going right for it that make the game not only thrilling to play, but a game you constantly want to get back to playing. To play again and see if you can get a better score than you did, how much ammo you could have saved, what route you might have tried to avoid Mr. X better the next time (For the record, my Leon playthrough resulted in a 7.5 hour B rank, and I’m already gunning for that A!). If you have played Resident Evil before, you’ll likely find a lot to love in this game, and if this is your first introduction to the series (or maybe second following last year’s also stellar Resident Evil 7), you’re in for a real treat. And there’s an odd magic to this remake; if you never played Resident Evil 2, it’s still an amazing game, and if you were a fan of the original, the Resident Evil 2 remake might transcend to be an almost perfect game. The graphics are amazing, and the combination of sound, lighting, and effects make the game feel tense and scary even in well-lit areas, and downright terrifying in dark ones. Each area of the game (there are 3 major ones) have a distinct feel and sense to them, making them unique and exciting to explore.

But much of that, frankly, you probably already knew. The game looks amazing and borrows heavily from the new engine used in Resident Evil 7, changing from the first person perspective of that game to the somewhat more traditional over the shoulder camera from Resident Evil 4 through 6. The controls are fluid, particularly when compared to the older “Tank Control” style of the original, but at times I found the game still had a weird inorganic movement to it that made avoiding enemies still pretty challenging in tight areas, as if the remake combined the two control schemes of Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 4. This isn’t really a complaint, and if anything the Resident Evil 2 remake feels like the best version of Resident Evil controls since 5 (omitting 7 here since 7’s first-person view really changed the game experience). In terms of how the game feels, looks, and plays, there’s very little to complain about with this remake; it just works.

Perhaps the biggest discussion to bring up in terms of gameplay, however, is difficulty. I found myself caught off guard by the difficulty of the Resident Evil 2 remake even as someone who had played all of the previous titles, and even done runs of earlier titles at harder difficulty. Generally, I play the game on normal first, then go back and test myself with harder difficulty, or use easy difficulty to attempt a speedrun or pick up missed collectibles. In this remake, my first zombie encounter left me totally stunned and, honestly, panicking. I had shot him in the head 4 times… and he got back up! I found myself running low on ammo constantly early on because I kept trying to kill my enemies, angry at times that the monsters I had so easily killed when I was younger were now giving me trouble. And then I encountered my first Licker, and things changed.

This game is not about fighting. It is quite literally about surviving, which means making the decision of when to fight, when to run, and when to plan your next move. Normal difficulty will provide you with this question just as readily as hardcore will, and players should be prepared for that difficulty swing if they’re used to Resident Evil 4 style Super Secret Agent Leon, popping off Ganado heads and doing sick melee takedowns. You aren’t that Leon (or Code Veronica Claire) in this Resident Evil 2, you’re a person trapped in a hellscape with no way out and limited supplies. It was a funny thing to realize, because the term “survival horror” has rarely focused on the actual “survival” part, with more and more modern games focusing on early weakness transforming into endgame destruction on a grand scale as your character finds better weapons and levelled up. The Resident Evil 2 remake turns that on its head, instead focusing on making you think about the best way to get from point A to point B with the least possible risk to yourself. A mistaken calculation can cost you time, ammo, and health, and there are even times when you’ll need to judge if it’s better to take damage to avoid using up precious ammo, and you’ll certainly need that ammo when you face the bosses that this game throws at you occasionally!

Each boss fight is exciting and challenging, and while you may feel frustrated at the amount of ammo used, the game seems somewhat fair in helping you replenish yourself afterwards, and doubly rewards you for good planning and smart use of resources and your environment. At times I felt early on that I might struggle with the game and run out of ammo, but when I finally finished Leon A, I found myself literally swimming in ammunition that I could probably never use all of. Judicious use of non-combat items matters as well, and while the game doesn’t have a strict upgrade path like later installments did, you can still find ways to make your weapons better, usually by hunting safe combinations and exploring hidden areas off the beaten path. To this end, the map in Resident Evil 2 is an amazing ally and one of the best new features in the game. When you enter a new area, the map will turn red if there are any items, files, or important interactables to locate. The closer you get to that item (or, if like me, you actually brushed up against it but didn’t notice the prompt), the map will tell you exactly what that item is for you to go back and grab. Seeing what rooms were red and what weren’t really gave me a sense of knowing that I had finished an area (for the moment, at least), and tracking my progress in an organic manner.

One of the charms of Resident Evil 2, and the Resident Evil series as a whole, are its puzzles. It would probably not be incorrect to say that the Resident Evil games are actually puzzle games that occasionally have you shooting giant mutated zombies and other things. If you wanted to abstract that even further, it’s honestly fair to say that the avoidance and risk-reward routing through areas of Resident Evil 2 is a puzzle itself. This is probably also why Resident Evil 2 is one of the strongest in the franchise with its somewhat ridiculous set piece puzzles spread out around the police department. Finding weird keys, turning dials on giant statues, finding gems to insert into boxes are all within the game's experience, and it does little to ever try and make any of that make sense. In the Resident Evil 2 remake, there are a few attempts with the narrative change that the police station used to be an art museum, but it still makes little to no sense, and is lovable for it more than frustrating or silly. The sewer system, with its chess piece keys, is even sillier, and all in all adds up to what makes Resident Evil 2 so fun: its charm. The game has a weird charm about it that makes the experience fun to work through, even when fighting off flesh-eating monsters. The puzzles add a thoughtful but not particularly difficult wrinkle to that mix, making you think every action out in advance, and putting you on somewhat constant quests to find the one weird item you’ll need to open a door so you can collect a medallion to… well, you get the picture! All of that supposed backtracking may sound tedious, but it isn’t, because every time you venture back into the areas you’ve explored, not only might you find new secret places to explore or connect to, but the threats have likely changed too.

There are a few odd quirks to the game, however. One of which involves the DLC add-on that allows you to play the game with the original Resident Evil 2 score and sound effects for things like menus and typewriters; once I heard about it from friends, I bought it myself during the review and was blown away by how much it changes the experience! While it may not matter as much initially if you’re new to Resident Evil 2, playing with the original score was the missing component for me in some ways of merging the two versions of the game. Hearing the classic police station music play when I entered the main lobby was an amazing thing, and it made me feel like I was 20 years in the past, playing the game for the first time. Even if this remake is your first rodeo with the game, I honestly suggest getting the DLC to really complete the package; the new score is fine by all means, but the original score was a real work of art that fit the game perfectly. The added benefit of the Resident Evil 2 sound effects being thrown in was a great bonus.

My second issue with the game is voice acting. For whatever reason, Capcom decided not to use the union backed voice actors from past Resident Evil games; I’m not sure if development and recording for this game coincided with the SAG-AFTRA strike that took many voice actors out of games, but what I am sure of is that I think Capcom did the game a disservice by not working with the original actors to ensure the true feeling of Resident Evil 2 was preserved. The new voices of Leon, Claire, and the rest are fine, but they feel off or wrong in a way that you think you know what these characters might sound like, and they don’t. Some line readings are a little awkward (I’ve found this to be the case with Claire more than Leon), and while 20 years ago we might consider that campy charm, here it just sounds… odd. I don’t think there’ll ever be some way to fix this in DLC like with the music, and it makes me sad. I really enjoy the Resident Evil 2 remake, and don’t think I’d not play the game because of it, but I wish Capcom had waited or elected to pay the union actors and preserved the original personalities and intonations of the Resident Evil cast before release. As a few minor notes, if you get extremely anxious while playing horror games, or find games where monsters chase you constantly (like Alien: Isolation) hard to play, do know that Mr. X can be a bit of a handful (he’s really smart), but it doesn’t take up as much of the game as it seems. It can change the pacing and comfort level a bit, so be forewarned!

As we got our code right at release, I decided to take my time with the game and play through the storylines fully to see what the full game really had to offer. It may seem odd for a review, but here are a few tips that I learned while playing that I hope can help you out when you try out Resident Evil 2:

1) If you don’t think you’ll enter an area often or for a long time, aim for zombie’s legs rather than try to kill them if you can’t just dodge by them. It slows them down considerably and saves some ammo.

2) Blue herbs may seem worthless (there are like 2 enemies in the game that poison you) but can be combined with Red+Green herb mixtures to give poison healing but, more importantly, damage resistance! Great for boss fights!

3) Save frequently and cycle saves; I hunted a few trophies this way that I either missed initially, or would have needed to go back and do things I might not have done originally to get them.

4) Don’t worry about your ranking! That’s what replays are for! The game rewards multiple play through attempts through familiarity and speed.

5) Dogs suck. Run.

6) You get the ability to craft certain types of ammo. Always prioritize weapons that have scarce ammo but big impact on your play style or needs.

If you are a Resident Evil fan, you probably stopped reading this review after the second paragraph; the game is just that good and you probably already bought it. If you’re new or on the fence, or never got to experience Resident Evil 2 the first time, you should absolutely consider making this game part of your library. There are a lot of great reasons to play through the game multiple times, and Capcom has promised some new DLC expansions to add on to the game over time as well. Even without them, the Resident Evil 2 remake is an absolute blast of amazing gameplay and experiences that you’ll find yourself going back to again and again, wondering if this time, just maybe, you can get that S rank. So buckle up, take your G-Virus shots, and get ready to tag along with Leon and Claire.

REVIEW ROUNDUP

+ Amazing atmosphere, graphics, sound direction, and controls make this probably the best Resident Evil yet

+ There is a lot to do across multiple routes and reasons to keep replaying the game

+ It’s Resident Evil 2!

+/- Difficulty might turn off some at first, but it is worth sticking through and learning from your mistakes

- While almost everything else is fantastic, the non-union voice actors used instead of the original cast is a real letdown

Are you a member of S.T.A.R.S., returning for more? Or will this be your first encounter with Resident Evil? Let us know what you think of the game in the comments!

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Nicole is a features and a social video script writer for Crunchyroll. Known for punching dudes in Yakuza games on her Twitch channel while professing her love for Majima. She also has a blog, Figuratively Speaking. Follow her on Twitter: @ellyberries

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