Resident Evil 4: The Shame

 So. It's time for the controversy. 

As I said, in this period I finally played through all of Resident Evil 4. Before that, I played together with university friends, but I missed sections and things. The game has been ported to other consoles by now, but it launched in the GameCube, which again was a strange move since Nintendo seems to focus on child games, and RE4 seems to be for an older audience. I did play through most of it in the past, but I wanted a 100% proper playthrough done by myself (and without the infinite rocket launcher I had last time I played sections) to see what was my real opinion of the game.

After having done that, I've confirmed what I already knew, but now can properly say: I think RE4 is one of the worst RE games by far. This is in direct conflict with the public opinion, that praised this game as a great reinvention of RE, with high technical quality, great gameplay, reinvention of the characters, etc. 

So let's compare its different aspects, and let's start with something that is good:The game indeed has much better graphics than previous ones, it's a big step up from Code Veronica (the latest before this one). It's a lot more detailed, with bigger maps, longer sections, and overall more modern look. By its time, it was indeed revolutionary. This, however, was a bit wasted by making everything brownish/grayish, which was a tendency of that time when making "realistically-looking" games, making them all quite boring to look at by using these tones that made all scenarios look similar, brown/black/grayish. The game didn't introduce this fashion and was just a victim of it, so we can excuse this, and recognize that technically is quite advanced. 

Then, the gameplay: RE4 introduces the 3rd-person view where you aim and shoot enemies and the camera follows you. This makes it more similar to a shooter, with the advantages this has: Combat becomes more personal and immediate, more tense, where you move from location to another, aim at different enemies, keep moving...Also I have to recognize this is a lot more fun than the previous gameplay, although more difficult too. The way they implemented the movement doesn't make it easy and it takes a bit of adaptation time, but once you understand it it's fine and it's enjoyable. The enemies this time are more mobile (we'll get back to this) and sometimes they launch things at you, so you need to keep moving and changing position and it's interesting.

Regarding puzzles, this game reduced the complexity quite a lot. Because of the gameplay, they put emphasis in the action and puzzles do stop the action, so they left some very basic ones, and then for the rest it felt totally linear: You find a key and immediately after you find a door that requires that key. Inventory space is limited, but only for weapons and health items, so anything puzzle or plot related is stored apart, which simplifies things of course but adds a lot of linearity, no backtracking to open a door that had something hidden or to unlock some box that had a secret code, you move from area to area and there's no need to ever go back, usually. I think that's clearly a downgrade from previous games where you had to think a bit about these things, and being in an area that has a door and making you grab two emblems from some box and just put them there and continue feels....cheap. I guess this is because of the previously mentioned linearity: If your map feels more like a maze or a real building or area, even if where to use the key is evident it still feels different, you go through same areas and feel a certain familiarity. 

Let's talk about the items. The scarcity of previous games is gone, and usually you keep finding plenty of ammo and resources as you advance. What's more, enemies drop items now when you kill them, and there's usually money or money related items, or ammo and health recovery items. Ammo and health occupy the real inventory space, that you have limited and need to reorganize to fit everything. The new inventory in this case feels nice and it's a bit of fun to reorganize everything so it's properly ordered and looks good. Money is then used to buy certain new weapons or upgrade them. There's a merchant now, a guy that offers to buy and sell you things, and that's how you can spend the money for these upgrades. Apart from the pistol, the magnum, the shotgun and the machine gun, this game introduces the rifle and the sniper rifle, a favorite of mine I have to say, which I have to admit is fun to use. There's a few options of each weapon, but sometimes the newest model may not be as good as the previous one in gun and shotgun cases, you need to look at the max values after a full upgrade that you can reach with the weapon to understand if, after upgrading it, you'll end up with a better or worse one. All weapons have laser sights that facilitate shooting a lot. Then, about the money objects, in the game you can find gems and art artifacts. You can sell those for plenty of money, and big enemies tend to drop big jewels and such. This way you can help finance the weapon upgrades.

Then, let's talk about monsters: In this game, zombies disappear. Instead, we have what they call "Las Plagas", which are parasites that turn people into monsters, slowly, from inside. At first they just control the people, but as they progress people turn more stupid, more violent, and big parasites start appearing inside them. It seems some of the infected have better control of the parasites and are able to command others, resulting in a situation where a town has been converted into some weird cult. These parasites resemble normal people and move quite faster than zombies, although some look ill. Since they're normal people, they can hold weapons and throw them to you or shoot you with them in the later stages of the game, which again means the game is more action.oriented because you need to evade more, run away, change positions, etc. More advanced forms, when killed, spawn these big parasites from their bodies. And some extreme examples mutate their bodies into huge monster/parasite kind of hybrid. There's infected people, infected dogs of course, or this giant "Ogre" that basically is a Harry Potter/ Lord of the rings movies' troll, which was a very popular design at that time and has no real explanation as to how it got produced apart from having more than one parasite inside. A new type of disgusting monster called regenerator also appears, which is immortal unless you use a heat vision and kill the parasites inside its body with a sniper rifle, and those turn out to be quite scary. Overall, you feel you're fighting humans mostly and therefore I think it's less scary, with a few exceptions where parasites emerge from the body or when the weirdest/more mutated ones appear.

From what I've explained you can see that this is a totally different experience than in previous games, although with some similarities (mutated eyes appearing in random areas of the body that indicate weak points, for example, or giant mutated monsters), but so far I've mentioned aspects that are fun and others that are more boring but not dramatic. My main concerns so far that I mentioned are that it's less scary, more linear and puzzles are easier, but the gameplay is nicer too, the new inventory is fun and the weapon upgrades and such things feel quite good. So, what's so bad?

The fucking plot and setting and characters. That's what so bad. That's what's unforgivable. This and quick-time events, but we'll get to them after discussing these elements first.

Let's start by the introductory situation: Umbrella has been denounced as a terrorist organization that governments of the world are fighting, including the, of course, glorious government of the US of A. Like, what? Umbrella was always a corrupt organization because they corrupted the government! The government was totally onboard with them! On RE3 they fucking nuked a city to hide the outbreak and all the shady crap that was happening in there! That was one of the main points of the series, that you were like a small rebel group trying to bring them down, David vs Goliath situation! I mean, yes, RE4 reinvents the game, but by making the corrupt governments as the "good guys" totally undermines a basic pillar of the saga, plus its a horrible, horrible way to defend the horrible governments we have around the word, including USA! 

Following this up, the main character is Leon from RE2. But now he's been assigned directly to protect, of course, the fucking president of USA/do his instructions. And now he's all tough and serious and snarky, like a bad boy/boring typical antihero macho-man. He reacts to everything in a bored, condescending tone most of the time, being confrontational with every character, even the ones that are supposed to be allies. In RE2 he was serious but caring and gentle, a rookie, just going through a crisis situation. Here they destroyed his personality and make him totally unlikeable. They fixed him a bit on RE6, which we will discuss later, but the damage done here is really bad. 

More horrible things: The game takes place "somewhere in the south of Europe". Except it's Spain. Clearly spain. They talk Spanish. All enemies have Spanish names, like "Las Plagas" as I mentioned. However, they fucked it up like a lot. I'm not a fan of Spain, but for fuck's sake, do some research. For starters, the people talk in a weird accent, clearly a mix of South-American accents, using some words and expressions that are not really used in Spain. I mean, was it so hard to hire a real Spanish person to do the voices and the lines? Then, the money used is "Pesetas", the old currency, not used by then (we already had euros by then). The place they show is like a horrible small town with grey skies (Spain is sunny as shit! And even rural areas do not look so horrible as the areas shown in there! Poor towns do not look at all like they look in the game!). Finally there's the names: Everywhere, they translated names adding Spanish articles and then using English articles. So, for example, the enemies are "Las Plagas". Not Plagas. "Las Plagas". Therefore, they talk about "the Las Plagas", basically like saying "The the plagues". They do this for EVERYTHING. I mean, Spanish is used in plenty of places, it's not an obscure secret language that you cannot find information about it. How can you mess all these things so badly?

Even more horror: The main plot point is that the bad guys have kidnapped the President's 20-year-old daughter, Ashley. First of all...How?? How security messes up this badly? Secondly, why send only Leon to investigate? And why the hell did they go to some remote location where a weird cult lives? Who found out she's there? They claim "a girl that resembles her was seen in the area". Again, how was she seen if she's been captured and everybody in the almost-deserted area is a cultist/infected person? Then, this means that a big part of the game is an escort mission. Luckily, she gets re-captured several times and during these periods you don't need to worry about protecting her, but the fact that you do need to protect her sometimes and she keeps getting kidnapped is quite annoying. Plus you can kill her by mistake. Plus she's slow and she keeps being typically "girly", in a very sexist way. Plus she's modeled to be "sexy", with a small skirt that prevents her from jumping or something....another character even comments on her big breasts, and she hits on you quite soon at the end (Leon rejects her at least). The whole thing is quite ridiculous.

More stuff: The evil guys are cartoonishly evil,  with evil laugh and evil talk and all that. One of them is especially annoying, keeps appearing and taunting you and then running away and leaving weaker enemies in your presence, so you can conveniently kill them one by one. Their plot apparently is to infect you and the girl so you can "rescue" her and then go to the president and infect him as well or just kill him to destabilize the government or something.And you know? They succeed! They infect both of you, quite early in the game actually! So, what goes wrong? Well, they...just don't keep you locked up. They keep Ashley locked up, but in your case they infect you and let you totally free. The infection takes time to get hold of you, so meanwhile you're just killing people, that they send to kill you? But why are they trying to kill you if they infected you? Or why not kill you the moment you fainted in front of them? It's like, a total mess, there's contradiction after contradiction after contradiction. By the end of the game, of course, you manage to cure yourself and her and kill everyone. And they could have prevented this by simply capturing you properly and locking you up, or well, just killing you, that would have worked too. While waiting for you to be infected they even sacrifice henchmen, that are discarded as "not worthy" or something. Like, why would you do that?? 

More ridiculous stuff:There's a character that helps you for a bit, that dies soon after, in another moment where the evil guy just appears out of nowhere from behind a door and just impales him. Why not do that with you too and solve the issue? Or capture you or something. Then, there's another henchmen, some type of soldier, that appears out of nowhere, talks with you as if you know each other, and you answer as if he was some old enemy or some old comrade or something. The thing is, this guy hasn't been shown anywhere else before that, so I have no idea of who he is, and this apparent rivalry has to be taken at face value. This is of course strange, and you don't feel that invested in defeating him as Leon seems to be, because well, you haven't really interacted with him before that, have you? Maybe there's some comic or some book or something before RE4 where the character appears, but just using the games as reference you're left wondering, which is never a good thing. And it's not like he reappears, you kill him in this game and that's that.

Related to this character, let's talk about the quick-time events. Quick-time events are moments where something happens in the game and you need to react fast and press something, like "press A!" to avoid some scripted danger. Like, pressing "A" usually makes you run, but in this it makes you jump two meters away from a falling rock. Stuff like that. Games that have them by surprise can be nasty, because e if you don't expect it you can just die. This happens in RE4, there are moments like this. If this happens while walking around, that's ok more or less. When you die you don't restart from the latest save but from the latest checkpoint, which tends to be you just entering the room. It's still annoying a bit, but well, it can be excused. However, RE4 does another thing hat is just...wrong: They put quick-time events in cutscenes, and in the worst example they put them in the middle of a conversation between you and the soldier bad guy. This means that you cannot really pay attention properly, because you need to be focused to press the right buttons at the right time. If you fail, you die and need to repeat the cutscene. This gets annoying fast. And it's not the only cutscene where this happens, but it's the worst one by far because there's like 5 of them at different times. They could have done exposition, fight-break with events, and then more exposition, but no, they mix both things and it ends up being messy. 

As a side note, the action of the cutscenes is also ridiculous now, you pull stunts from bad action movies where you seem to be a superhero, no normal person would be able to do this. Ada Wong reappears, by the way, and she also pulls stuff like that She, as usual, helps you but not always but having her own agenda at the same time, ending up being more help than nuisance of course. Her character is pretty similar as before, just cooler, so not as many complains there, but the general tone is still very exaggerated.

So, the game has all this crap. And people loved the game. They said it was an original reinvention of the saga, that it was revolutionary, that it modernized it and abandoned a semi-serious tone to really let itself go, turning into an autocritic, being silly on purpose and not taking itself seriously. And people loved the new interpretations of the character, and thought the plot was decent enough, etc. To that, I say what was said in IT Crowd: "People, what a bunch of bastards". The game "parodies" stupid action so well that it's indistinguishable from real stupid action, and therefore for me it makes no difference even if they did it "on purpose" as some sort of statement on the silliness of the premise. The game follows horrible tropes, stereotypes, sexism, racism, general plot stupidity and its only saving grace is the revamped gameplay, which I will admit is pretty good, but that's about it.  

I played it fully so I could say it with cause, and I can confirm it now: This is the biggest shame of the RE saga, even if it gave it extra life by being successful. This game damaged the next ones and tarnished the experience so much that made me lose interest a lot. 

RE5 and RE6 are heirs of this mess, and as heirs they share lots of issues with RE4. RE7 is different. But we'll get to all that in the following posts.