When stuff you love gets a bit shit : My relationship with Resident Evil

Hello all

For the past few months I have been very excited about a game called Resident Evil 6 being released. It finally came out on Tuesday and I must say that I am very disappointed with it and it's got me thinking about how you can go from loving something to wanting them to just end it.

My relationship with Resident Evil started back in 1997. My brother gave me a copy of a game I had seen advertised in several shops but I had never been interested in, Resident Evil. I asked what it was about and thought it sounded cool, so gave it a go, and right from the off I knew that this was special. Within an hour I had gotten further than my brother ever had.

Yes, it had several very cheesy scenes and the acting was dodgy to put it nicely, but it worked, it worked so incredibly well.

Right from the first encounter with a zombie, to the fight with a 200 foot high plant, to rapid dogs, giant robot men chasing you, to a conspiracy plot in an old mansion, there was nothing about this game that I didn't love.
To this day I have never actually completed the original Resident Evil game. It's the only game in the series that I have owned that I have yet to complete.

Skip forward about a year and I see Resident Evil 2 in a games shop. I beg my dad to buy it for me (I was only 13/14 at the time) and he does, after some pushing, and within seconds I am on the bus home and it goes straight in the Playstation. My mum is not impressed when she sees the words "This game contains scenes of explicit violence and gore" on the screen, not that I care as I'm all excited.

It took me a while to get used to Resident Evil 2. It played a lot differently and quicker than the previous installment, but the graphics were so much better. Although it looks VERY dated now, at the time I was blown away by it.

Again, the acting is a bit dodgy to say the least, but it's an improvement and I played the game so much that I was often completing the whole game in less than 1 hour and 15 minutes, without cheats. People refused to believe this until I invited them around and they watched as I sailed through the game, defeated the main boss and the end and the screen came up with a time that was under the 1 hour 15. I recently downloaded a copy of the game from the Playstation Network and although it had been at least 10 years since I had last played it, I was still completing it relatively quickly.

Again this game had some iconic moments, such as the first time Leon (who is my favourite character in the series) sees a licker, to Claire being harassed by a giant robot, to when a small character (depending on which character you were playing with) bursts in two as a bio-organic-weapon bursts from them like the Alien series.

About 2 more years pass and Resident Evil 3 emerges. By this point the series was in full flow and this was another great addition to it. I think this became the first game that I ever pre-ordered.

Resident Evil 3 is set both before and after the events of Resident Evil 2, so needed to make sure that it was careful about continuity errors, and to be fair it did a great job. It showed you more of the city that you had spent the previous game running around and it was presented beautifully, again dated by today's standards, but at the time it was beautiful. 

The story of this one focuses on Jill, one of the two main characters from the first game, and her desperate attempts to escape the city whilst being pursued by the Nemesis, an 8 foot tall mutant who you couldn't simply escape from by running through a nearby door, this guy would chase you and not give up until you had successfully pumped enough ammo into it to stop it for a few moments whilst you created enough distances between yourself and it. Even after that it would be back a few scenes later, and it was awesome to have that constant threat.

The acting improves immensely for this game and out of the first three games, is probably the best all around game.

Resident Evil : Code Veronica X was the first real disappointment I had with the series. After massive improvements with the games as they went on, this game felt really cartoony compared to the rest and the selection of weapons, the enemies, the general plot and various other things just weren't that great.

The main character in this game is Claire from Resident Evil 2, but she's not a strong enough character on which to support an entire game on, and I think the fact that she hasn't been in any of the subsequent 3 main series games says it all. With a poor main character this game really needed a strong supporting cast of characters and it really failed miserably in that sense.

The gameplay was not good at all in this game and the controls were awkward. Defeating the final boss only took a single shot from the weapon that is on the platform, but it was so difficult to aim and fire whilst the enemy was still in your sights that it just became a seemingly pointless endeavour.

The fact I completed this in 2001 and haven't played it since tells it's own story.

With a poor fourth game in the main series, Resident Evil needed a BIG fifth installment and after the two failed Outbreak games just outside of the main series, Resident Evil 4 was released in 2004 and wow, it was FUCKING awesome.

I can't praise this game highly enough and would go as far as saying it was one of the best games I have ever played. It just had every right about it. Although the plot moves away from zombies a bit, you don't feel like it is a massive shift because all in all they're not too dissimilar to zombies, with the exception of biting you they will try and drive a pitch-fork into your skull.

The main character is Leon from the second game and he is perfect as a lead role character and is actually believable in the role that he plays in the game. The bosses are separated just well enough that you can have plenty of time between to replenish ammo, enjoy cut scenes, etc, infact, the first boss, as in true boss, doesn't appear in the game until after around an hour's worth of gameplay.....depending how fast you play the game of course.

Graphically it's beautiful again and a vast improvement on the cartoony effect of Code Veronica, and it's re-playability is excellent. I am damn fast at Resident Evil games, but even the quickest I've ever been able to complete it is about 3 hours 15. Puzzles are still a key part of the game but unlike previous installments you don't have to constantly run around and back and forth between rooms over and over again, you can just get  on with it.

The ONLY problem with Resident Evil 4 was that it was brilliant when it worked.....but it rarely did. Because the game was pushing the PS2 to it's boundaries, often the PS2 wouldn't be having any of it and refused to even acknowledge that there was a disc there. Thankfully now the PS Network has provided a downloadable copy that isn't so much of an issue anymore, but it would have been nice at the time.

That's where I start running out of praise for the Resident Evil games.

Number 5 was released in 2009 and whilst not an awful game, dear lord it pissed me off.

The main character is Chris, one of the two main characters from the first game and a secondary playable character in Code Veronica X. Chris is a one dimensional character if ever there was one. He is basically an army guy with no personality, so it's hard to really want him to do well when he's in danger and he is just an ultimately bad character.

However, Chris is a computer game god compared to Sheva. At this stage Resident Evil decided to introduce co-op play, where you had a partner (either the computer or another person) controlling a character called Sheva, and dear fucking lord she was annoying. The AI for her was shocking, so much to the point where the majority of times when the "You're Dead" screen came up, it was because the computer has decided not to move her when there's a giant ball of lava coming towards her. Not to forget the times she would throw a grenade at you, it would explode, you'd got into a dying state, she'd come and inject you with medication and she would say "You've got to be careful!" .....I'VE GOT TO BE CAREFUL??? Fuck off. I'm not the one who's going around throwing grenades of people who are on my team.

Graphically Resident Evil 5 is actually alright and the opening chapter is actually quite reasonable, however, after that it goes downhill. You're suddenly faced with bosses but not told any back story about them, they're just there. In all other games there was like a build up so you would anticipate this impending doom, but nope, in this it was just a straight "hello there" and then a fight.

Then not to forgot the ultimately stupid bits in the game, such towards the end when Chris literally punches a boulder that's about as big as a bungalow out of the way.....you think I'm being sarcastic? Watch the second clip below.

Then we get onto Resident Evil 6, which in all the trailers looked awesome and to be fair, there are a lot of bits that I do like about Resident Evil 6, the only problem with that is that they all come in 1/3 of the game.

This game is divided into three scenarios, Leon, Chris and Jake, the latter being a newcomer to the series. Each has a different feel. Leon's is very close to the original games of the series, in other words it is very zombie based and running around trying to avoid being eating, and is by far the strongest of the three scenarios. It has a good supporting cast and is the most fun to play. Jake's is a bit hard to really judge but you don't get to learn a lot about the new character other than that he is a the son of the main bad guy from the rest of the series, and Chris' is basically just Resident Evil's attempts at Call of Duty. It belongs nowhere near a Resident Evil game.

Graphically Resident Evil 6 is a class above the other game, none of the other games in the series come close to it, and I'm taking into consideration how they looked at the time they were released compared to whatever was out at the time. You can tell that every single area has been designed for long periods of time and you know what, it has paid off. Graphically this game is stunning, absolutely stunning, especially in Leon's scenario and the sections of the three scenarios that take place in China.

Whilst boss fights were relatively few and far between before hand, this has a new boss fight seemingly around every corner, which pisses me off now end. There's no build up to the bosses, there's no general introduction for most of them, you learn virtually nothing about any of them, and yet there's a new one every five minutes. It becomes very tiresome, especially in Chris' scenario, when you're just faced with hours upon hours of shooting the same shit over and over again.

Yet again you also get a partner in your scenario but thankfully the AI has improved.....so much to the point where your partner seemingly NEVER runs out of ammo without ever picking any up. In Chris' scenario you are with by about 10 soldiers at one point, an enemy appears, they all fire at it and take it down without any input from me. I could have gone and got a drink and the enemy would still have been defeated....where's the fun in that?

I'm going to be honest, Resident Evil 6 feels very rushed and is probably the worst addition to the series if you ignore Code Veronica X, it just lacks originality, fun and that thing that makes you want to play a game over and over again. I completed all three scenarios within 48 hours of buying the game and to be honest, I'm that keen on picking it up again, whereas I still play number 4 on a regular basis.

And then came the quote that made me want to write this blog entry. Hiroyuki Kobayashi, the game's Executive Producer said "the fans and us as creators are the two parents and just like real parents, you’re not always going to agree on what is best for raising that child" going on to say "we want to make sure that what we do pleases them but the initial reaction might not always be positive. We do listen to the fans but we can’t be beholden to them at every turn or I don’t think we’ll ever make progress in terms of the series’ development."

In theory, it sounds like a good plan but they're not actually listening to what the fans want at all, and it's not just a small handful of fans, it's seemingly a vast majority. Virtually everyone moaned about the co-op feature and yet they keep putting it in. The problem is that if they don't start listening to what the majority of the fans want then they risk losing a lot of the fanbase for if they bring out a new game.