Posts Tagged ‘Resident Evil 5’

Even Obama isn't safe from Japanese 'comedy'.

Capcom isn’t ignorant. It makes entertainment media for the world market and is aware of the issues involved; but maybe not fully. No matter how much you educate yourself on the subtleties of issues as historical and as deeply felt as race you can never truly appreciate it without living it. Resident Evil 5′s imagery does contain negative or offensive implications to some, but I suspect all of the scenes people are reacting to are iconic images drawn from other media (primarily cinema). The white muscle bound hero, the zombies in African tribal ware, the rioting mob even the (incredibly out of place) victimisation of a white blonde woman are all Hollywood tropes. While any individual element could be dismissed or explained the cumulative effect of all of them viewed concurrently become difficult to ignore. Capcom’s awareness drove them to create their paper thin narrative explanations for their design choices, but these became thinner with each passing digression.

Let’s face it this isn’t the first time Capcom has made use of racial iconography.

This one is going up a bit late thanks to a busy few weeks of work, games and site updates. It is a good one though, even if it is a little shorter than usual.

I take a trip to the UK to meet up with Darren and take DoFuss on the road for an early preview of Code Frogs upcoming title NintenDon King for Wii. On the way we get a chance chat. Darren finally gets around to revisiting Robocop 3 on the Amiga. I however get to tackle something a bit more contemporary with Resident Evil 5 and try to work out my conflicting emotions about it.

Bear with me on this. RE5 is like a bowling ball which has had an ice cream scoop sized hole taken out of the middle of it. Well not quite the middle, a little off center. It feels a little hollow and unbalanced. But the ‘bowling’ experience, throwing the ball, the atmosphere and slipping around in rental shoes, remains fun even if the game isn’t as ‘good’.

It’s hard to explain why this game feels hollow. A lot of it is to do with the characters. Previous installments managed to produce an interesting, frequently camp, cast. Though they were usually raging stereotypes, this worked in the games favor. Capcom never went out of their way to develop character, so their archetypal nature helped you fill in the blanks. In RE5 Capcom leave the same gaps in character development but now their motivations are unclear. Eventually you ‘unlock’ case files for each of the characters. These help fill out the back story but they tend to become available only after characters are no longer relevant.

Take the game’s initial target Irvine. His direct counterpart in RE4 would be Salazar. As an antagonist Salazar is ridiculous but his behavior is at least consistent, providing the player with a clear concept of his motivation. With Irvine, the writers seemed to want to make a more complex character, but couldn’t find away to convey this during the main narrative. This leads to him to ping-ponging between being confident and cowardly for no obvious reason. Even your motivation for chasing him seems unclear beyond the fact he’s annoying. It makes it hard to care. It’s only upon reading his file that you discover why his behavior oscillates so wildly and how involved he is in the proliferation of bio-weapons. It repeated for every character bar Wesker, you simply play through them like road bumps as opposed to being invested in the fight.

Similar problems extend to the story, which takes itself too seriously. I should qualify that at first, though the series did mimic many B-movie traits it was not in parody but in homage. The setting, the villain perpetually wearing sunglasses provided a mirror in to Japan’s view of American horror movies. RE-Code Veronica set the series off in a more camp direction. It continued to use the crazy puzzles seen the original games, but created a series of strange settings to keep the pace of the game moving. RE4 took this a stage further with walking statues chasing you and vast underground vaults erected to protect sections of puzzles just to open a door. RE5 seems to have decided to move towards a more serious style. Crazy puzzles are rare, and feel like a contractual obligation to the fans. Environments also feel like they are more grounded, but this only serve to exaggerate how artificial the game environments are, and leaves everything feeling soulless.

RE5 goes out of its way to recapture the atmosphere of RE4. Indeed maybe this is the problem. It hits many of the same milestones, trying to recapture the last installments’ magic. Sometimes a little too overtly. You can predict the majority of the game just by thinking back to the last installment and transferring the setting to Africa. Even the games few plot twists are as hackneyed as a Tom and Jerry episode.

Of course the RE always touted itself as survival horror but the series departed from the traditional tropes of the genre after the third game. Initially the changes were subtle. Resource management was down played, ammo became plentiful and enemies became more numerous, until it became a different kind of game. Suspense was replaced by action and survival was replaced by… well survival, but the fight kind rather than the flight kind.

The introduction of a partner (Sheva) also serves to dilute the horror experience. It was a concern I had back with RE0 on the Gamecube, but there you could at least separate from your partner. In RE5 you are bound throughout. Even if you leave control of Sheva to computer the ability of your partner to revive you makes you nearly invincible. Indeed the only times I died during my first play through the game was during quick-time-events and instant kill sections of the game. Oh, and one boss encounter when Sheva locked me in a furnace. This makes the only tense sections of the game times when you are up against a dude with a chainsaw or cut scenes when you’re not sure if it’s going to become a Q-T-E. So I suppose it does remain scary, but for the wrong reasons.