The Resident Evil 4 Remake

My name is Leon. S. Kennedy; No way ___

So the time has come. Our most sincere warnings have not been heeded and against the best judgement of all the world we're currently looking at a Resident Evil 4 Remake rocketing towards us at speed of the ancients. (Which is to say it's due next year. Guess we're having a game free year for 2022.) At this rate we are absolutely going to see a Resident Evil 5 and 6 Remake, at which point they'll have successfully rewritten all the franchise to fit the RE7 model and they can stop? Nah, then they'll remake Revelations 1 and 2. Then... Umbrella Chronicles? We're well past the point of reasoning with the madlads and Capcom, and only abject insanity can inform their bizarre business decisions now. How else can we reconcile with a world that is threatening to re-release a game that was perfect where it was at. Not because of how it was made, or what it said, but because it was exactly what was needed when we needed it. You can't just replicate that magic! You can't remake it! All you can hope to do is preserve it. And I... heck, I just don't know.

To be clear, Resident Evil is actually on something of a hot streak recently. The likes of which I seriously couldn't have expected after the suicidal leap-into-the-abyss that the franchise was on before this renaissance. After Resident Evil 6 and Umbrella Corps it was really starting to seem like Capcom had lost the plot completely, even after 7 most were looking to one another nervously, rationalising the successful outing as little more than a flash-in-the-pan fluke moment. But Resident Evil 2 Remake? Resident Evil 8? Resident Evil 3: Remake? (Though it was lamentably short.) These ain't no one and dones. Resident Evil is back as the premier name in horror and I'm actually a bit chuffed to be able to say that. Walking around abandoned factories and being jumpscared by various off-brand rips of children's properties is fine and all, but the excitement of fighting for your sliver of health bar against an army of monsters is unmatched. (We really need a remake of The Suffering. Who owns those rights? Midway? Bugger.)

We're in exactly the right flow theoretically for Resident Evil to remake one of it's magnum opi, but does that translate into the real world so neatly? Maybe some products are just that smidge too perfect for any remake attempt and so it should never be tried, and maybe the very success streak in the horror market that Capcom are on is the problem that is going to bring RE4R down. Take for instance the fact that the original RE4 isn't even a hit for it's horror. Sure, there are horror elements to the game, such as the Sewer chase scene and the Regenerators, but the bulk of the game was this miss-match between traditional gothic horror elements and bombastic action set-pieces that should have clashed into a train wreck but instead synergised into- (wait, is this a Hegelian Dialectics moment? Am I ever going to understand that nonsense enough to be able to use that useless philosophical nugget?) 

In some ways the prevailing heart of horror that Resident Evil has been nailing lately is the very antithesis of what made Resident Evil 4 work. I mean just look at that reveal trailer, dour and brooding with a typically PSTD protagonist suffering from his past experience but swearing that this is the time he's going to set it right. All these modern reiterations and new versions of old game properties copy that exact same formula, it's really rather wild. Resident Evil 3 Remake had a tortured and haunted Jill who was brooding over the events of the one game that Capcom have skipped right past remaking, Rise of the Tomb Raider started with Lara in therapy for all of the super natural violence she perpetrated in the last game and 'Deus Ex: Mankind Divided' was spurred by the nihilistic declaration of 'I tried to save the world once, now look at it!'. The failed and/or tortured protagonist is a real edgy and avant-garde approach to take, or at least it is until it's been done so often it's wrapped back around into being a predictable trope again. This isn't going to be our happy-go-lucky, Zombie suplexing Leon Kennedy from prime RE.

I mean just think of what this more serious tone means for the game we already know and love! Can you imagine this 'Punished Venom Kennedy' quipping back to the call "I'm sending my right hand after you" with "Your right hand comes off!"? How about a laser-beam knife fight on an Island after gunning down monks with a minigun turret. (Or did the Monks have the minigun? RE4's craziness is starting to screw with my recollection again!) What if this whole new serious slant to the narrative causes us to more properly examine the premise of Resident Evil 4 and confront, as we've all joked in the past, how this narrative quite literally tells the story of an American Secret Service Agent far out of his jurisdiction wiping out a small Eastern European village because he thinks they're kind of weird and sort-of remind him of zombies. They weren't actually zombies, remember! They were just werido villagers who happened to be in a cult! Isn't that a little harder to swallow with a serious face?

But maybe that's the secret sauce we're not expecting. Maybe this renewal with straight faced seriousness is the tee-up that will make the ridiculousness of the premise and it's characters stand out even more starkly than they did before! How much more incredible would it be if Mr serious, PTSD suffering Leon, was caught fielding clumsy advances from the president's daughter, or getting uncomfortably flirty with his over-the-radio handler just because it's a female voice that isn't Ashley's. (Wait until he meets Hannigan and finds out she's not Asian. Quickest dropped romance sub-plot ever) Maybe this time the writers will remember to seed the player with some precedent as to Jack Krauser's existence so that his appearance holds some vague weight to it. (Have Leon off-handily mention that he owes his marksmen skills to Jack or something, I'm not your parent!)

Of course, new Resident Evil remake means new remake faces, and whilst we're getting what looks to be the same Leon from the previous Remake (and presumably the same Ada) our supporting cast is going to be brand new and photographically mapped to some increadibly attractive face for unclear Capcom reasons. This time we've seen Ashley who borrows her likeness from a Dutch Instagram model and I have to admit- this girl actually looks like the original model a little bit. It's not as jarring as the Russian super model face now stuck on Jill's head, at least. I mean, Ashley has lost a lot of her frumpiness in favour of morphing into this homogenously classic depiction of 'attractiveness', which is certainly going to make her a little less charming to hate; but what are ya gonna do? Capcom will Capcom.

At the end of the day do I have faith that Resident Evil 4 will be a good game? Of course I do, I know how good this new line of Resident Evil has been and have no evidence to infer they're going to falter anytime soon. But will it be the right kind of good, to match the ethereal fame of a Resident Evil game that totally rewrote third person action gaming and the overall narrative tone of one of gaming's oldest horror franchises? I just don't think so. And no matter how polished the game is, how professionally sealed the product ends up; it won't ever live up to what to a game which was as much a movement of culture as it was an entertainment product. is failing to live up to that a point of shame? Perhaps not, but it does leave me wondering how Capcom could be so utterly hubristic as to try. I'll still play it though, why not?