What the Hell Happened to Resident Evil?

What the Hell Happened to Resident Evil?

OPINION

Resident Evil is almost single-handedly responsible for popularizing the survival-horror genre and for many years epitomized it, being the first thing to come to mind when recalling the genre. Why then have Capcom seen fit to completely f**k with their winning formula, ripping this otherwise brilliant series from its survival-horror roots and planting it in the bland realm of the action game?

Resident Evil 4


What the Hell Happened to Resident Evil?

Sigh. It was all set up so well, like the third lord of the rings movie or return of the jedi, players worldwide waited for Resident Evil 4 to come along and blow its predecessors out of the water. Instead it spat on them and walked past holding its head high as it appealed to an entirely new audience that fell at its feet.

Resident Evil 4 follows Leon Kennedy as he travels to a Spanish-speaking unnamed European country in order to rescue the kidnapped daughter of the president of the United States of America, Ashley Graham (Seriously. He has joined the secret service and is performing duties reminiscent of action-movie heroes). It turns out Ashley is being held by a cult of deranged people infected by parasites and turned into mindless killing machines. Not zombies mind you, just pissed off villagers wielding pitchforks and torches. Resident Evil 4 doesn’t have any zombies, the T or G-viruses aren’t mentioned, Umbrella plays a very small supporting role and the main antagonist for the most part of the game is a midget with a squeaky voice.

The whole game involves shooting wave after wave of villagers in wide-open spaces with various weapons with lots of ammo, lots of health items and no zombies. (come ON, making a Resident Evil game without zombies is like making a Silent Hill game not based in silent hill!) Leon and Ashley manage to kill the midget, then the big cult boss and his minions and escape into the sunset on a jet-ski in the most pathetic and unsatisfactory way ever.

Resident Evil 4 is not scary, it’s not a survival horror. It is an action game that happens to have the same title as some much better games. Critics praised Resident Evil 4 as the best Resident Evil to date as it was more “fun” and “approachable”, cleverly forgetting that survival horror games are -supposed- to be challenging and scary to play. Due to so many people liking the now-ruined franchise, Capcom went on to make Resident Evil 5, which I’m not going to discuss. Suffice to say it is more over-the-top bullsh*t that dances on the grave of the once-great series.

What happened?


What the Hell Happened to Resident Evil?

The Umbrella Corporation went from being the main driving force of the series as the ultimate embodiment of evil to what equates to a comic book super villain. They changed their main objective from creating the ultimate weapon under the guise of an innocent pharmaceuticals company to wanting to take over the world and make the population its slaves, placing Albert Wesker in the driving seat (who was just one of Umbrella’s pawns but is now the one behind it all?). The series went from being an allegory for evil faceless corporations and scientists meddling with genetics to mad scientists making super weapons to enslave the human race just because it sat better with a more mainstream audience.

It just seems like Capcom wanted to make an action game, but wasn’t confident enough to release a new independent product so instead slapped the Resident Evil name on it and kicked it out the door, not stopping to think what they were doing to the series in the process.

So that’s it. Resident Evil was a series that started off strong, rose to greater and greater heights then went mainstream, selling more copies than ever, but lost its most dedicated fanbase in the process. The whole thing reminds me of the rise and fall of your favourite rock band, as they rose to fame then sold out and went where the money was, forgetting the message they set out to portray.

It saddens me to think that Umbrella has died. Honestly, with all the changes to the characters and settings, I’m most upset at the thought of Umbrella, one of the most evil entities in video gaming, turning into a Bond villain, a laughably pathetic and one-dimensional shadow of its former self. The Umbrella Corporation stood out as a memorable videogame character in its own right. It hung like a bat over player’s heads throughout the series, watching and plotting, but when it revealed itself it turned out to be made of rubber on a piece of elastic.

Rest in piece, Resident Evil, I will always remember the good old days when scenes of undead hands reaching through boarded up windows stopped me sleeping throughout years of my adolescent life.