Resident Evil 4

[Lemon Zing]

The upcoming remake does not interest me, since Capcom already mucked up the RE3 remake in 2020.

While RE4 is a fun action game, I think it started RE going downhill. And an infected guy flogging you stuff is just truly NOT horror, to me.

"Hehe. Thank you!"

 

[Raggamuffin]

All these remakes. Are these big, bloated game devs admitting defeat?

The gaming world is oversaturated with lacklustre triple A titles that are merely a shadow of the depth and quality of their ancestors?

In game purchases and remakes/remasters just feel like cash grabs to me.

Ed

 

[Lemon Zing]

Yeah. They're always milking things. The movie industry is the same with all of these reboots and alternate sequels. They can now retcon the story to revive characters that were "killed off" in a prior film. So this leads you to think it will just go on forever.

RE4 isn't really a game I hold in high regards, because I see it as being the game that ruined the horror aspects of the franchise, and got everybody and their grandmother sucking up to Capcom. It just wasn't a scary sequel whatsoever. And they also destroyed the storyline with the Umbrella Corporation. Basically, every other game was to do with Umbrella, and RE4 deleted that in the opening scene.

In the other games, you explored a mansion, a police station, and even an entire city, trying to get every valuable item you could. RE4 made it way too easy.

You also just shoot the same looking villagers over and over again, and while that's perhaps fun, it wasn't really the point of RE to begin with. And having a vendor pop up everywhere to sell you guns and stuff, just didn't make it a terrifying experience. But then when RE8 came out, Capcom said that they copied RE4 because RE7 was supposedly too scary. So I feel like they just enjoy making up stories to get people to buy into their nonsense.

 

[AGXStarseed]

I've never played any of the Resident Evil games myself but I have seen retrospectives on them - one of which comes from author Will "The Critical Drinker" Jordan, back when he sounded more sober and was less sweary in his videos than he is now.
(I still like his videos - I just can't post many of them here).

In any case, here's his retrospective for Resident Evil 4 - in which he thankfully doesn't use bad swear words so I can post it here - where he goes over the history of its development, its plot and what makes it both good and bad.
See what you think:

 

[Lemon Zing]

Yep.

If you know about RE 3.5, it was nothing like the RE4 we got. It was kind of more supernatural, with a hook wielding villain following Leon. There was also enemies that were like living dolls. Not sure if that was just as a result of a hallucination or what, but none of this stuff was even characteristic of RE. After all, RE was more scientific, because it was usually about a virus making people into bioweapons.

Fortunately, they scrapped that nonsense. But in RE8, which I consider to be a rip off of RE4 anyway, they included a ventriloquist enemy with a doll type companion called Angie. It is a totally weird game that doesn't feel like anything RE related, besides RE7 because of Ethan Winters returning.

Everybody talks about the tall vampire woman referred to as Lady Dimitrescu, but I honestly thought the whole game was trash. Maybe it's good to play the once. But it's not a game I am in a hurry to play again. A lot of what's in that game is incredibly silly. There's even a guy who turns into a robot, called Heisenberg. How anybody can say this belongs in RE games, is just dumb, and they're probably not really a fan of the old games, because you can tell when they bring up the fixed camera angles and how they play.

To me, RE will always be the zombies and Umbrella. Basically, everything before 2005. Although one or two games since then haven't totally unimpressed me. But you can tell that Capcom just simply continues it, and the story no longer adds up, so they're content to just plod it along in spite of the plot going nowhere.