let’s go to the plagues
Almost twenty years ago, Leon Kennedy died, cut in half after only a few minutes of play. And it was a real shock. The violence of the scene, so close to the start of the game, the gloomy context, the absence of the usual zombies… Nothing in Resident Evil 4 had been spared me that evening, when I was coming home late from my first job. grueling and poorly paid. Part of that pay had just gone into a GameCube game that I didn’t like and that made me feel good.
It’s funny how an impression of 20 years can come back to you when you start a game. The same apprehension, the same fear when approaching the village stake, the same feeling of not mastering the character that I have Between hands. Damn, was I scared as soon as I started in this sumptuous remake of Resident Evil 4? Because it must be admitted that Capcom’s in-house engine – the aptly named RE Engine – is cut out for this type of production.
Resident Evil 4 is Special Agent Kennedy whose mission is to save the daughter of the President of the United States in a remote village in Spain, and who is soon beset by hostile inhabitants and a manipulative maniac. the chainsaw. This scenario is a distressing nullity, even for the time, but we know that this somewhat stupid mission is only a pretext. Pretext that I would have liked to see disappear in this new version.
We moved forward with very clichéd replies from the protagonist, and we read a plethora of documents placed there to explain the plans of the antagonists. I’m not sure that this narrative aspect can still suffice nowadays, when God of War, Uncharted or The Last of Us have set new milestones. Definitely, Resident Evil 4 couldn’t cut a rewrite. By bringing out its classics and creating new entries to its license, Capcom works a bit like NetherRealm and its Mortal Kombat: we take a nanard license and we work there so that the most enormous elements pass and are taken seriously.
And while many games slowly teach you their mechanics, and today only Souls-Like confronts you with a boss in its first moments, Resident Evil 4 begins with shock therapy, confronting the player with an immediate challenge.
I was scared yes, but also more serene, after 20 years of exploring the most sordid corners of video games and facing thousands of horrors, each more terrifying than the next. But I bypassed the village, just so as not to disturb the little local festival and its warm bonfire… Today, I appreciate even more than before these dark, dead sets and all the putrescence that emanates from Capcom productions, until you feel a certain disgust of pleasure.
In recent years, Capcom has remade Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3, with the former being very well received. We all knew a Resident Evil 4 remake was on the table. But we all wondered why. For having relaunched it a little before this test, Resident Evil 4 is still very effective today, and is available on a good number of platforms. So this remake has the daunting task of bringing fans together (and RE6’s attempt was disastrous in that regard) while establishing itself as more than just a redesign.
It was obvious that the Resident Evil 4 remake would modernize the original game’s control system. In 2005, he proposed and imposed the over-the-shoulder view, which would later be found in a lot of games, from Dead Space to God of War. But remember: Leon couldn’t aim and move at the same time, a legacy of gameplay from the first three Resident Evils. The gameplay therefore had to evolve to adapt to the horrors of the game, but also to the habits of current players. Leon is much faster and more agile, but so are his enemies. They will rush to pin you down, forcing you to always be on the move. But your hero benefits from a new parry mechanic to even out the odds, allowing you to block almost any attack with your knife by tapping at the right time.
But it also seems to me that this remake is larger, offers a more connected and organic world. It adds beautiful fog and light effects that really immerse us in a chilling horror atmosphere. The developers rely on our knowledge of the original game to surprise us. While the first half of the adventure is mostly straight-forward, the second half takes risks by changing enemy designs, altering boss encounters, and offering new stories. We are not in a transformation as deep as Resident Evil 3 Remake, but we feel that the game has been recomposed piece by piece, redesigned to be more fluid without sticking more than necessary to the original game.
By removing what might seem superfluous, Capcom had to realize that the game might be too direct, and added some side quests, which are essentially collection quests. These are nice little extras that I encourage you to do for the quality of the rewards.
As I noted above, Resident Evil 4 does not attempt to tell a very complex story (even as intimate as that of Ethan Winters), and it was difficult for example to appreciate the character of Ashley, and her relationship with Leon. In the remake, she has been rewritten and looks less like the ultra ball of the original version, even if we could have gone further in her characterization. And then, we finally took off her mini-skirt, details that will not have failed to govern some fans of the scrutiny of panties. The storytelling is a marked improvement. Some characters gain prominence and spawn time, which benefits gameplay and plot.
We can totally dispute the fashion of Remasters and Remakes. You could say that in recent years, the biggest games have mostly been re-releases or improvements of stable productions that have already proven themselves – like big-budget cinema. Capcom, with its usual recycling of titles, could have been easily criticized here. But for Resident Evil 4, and its recent video game productions (I’m not talking about movies or series), the publisher-developer takes it very seriously and offers more than a Remaster. It’s a modern rehash of their classic that redefined a genre twenty years ago, a version that can exist alongside the original, on its own as well as through it. It’s a nice balance that has been found here, despite the little risk taken on the modernization of the story which might have needed it a little.
Resident Evil 4
And Bref
Resident Evil 4 has been copied many times, only too rarely giving birth to such a successful offspring. Capcom has taken over control and is adapting its own license to current standards. Isn’t it normal that this is a big success?