| BraLoD said: I already covered it way back then, when I said it's indeed not the same as before, but it still has the Resident Evil identity on it, and already pointed those core points, as focus on an investigation and puzzles, the need to manage the ammo and inventory, the presence of some really scaring monsters coupled with the major point, still into a heavy atmosphere and feeling like a Resident Evil game, despite the changes that came with the upgrade to the series. |
The series weren't killed, since more games were produced afterwards. It's just that the Resident Evil brand was tarnished and destroyed forever, since the most "representative game" at that point was nothing like what Resident Evil truly was.
To say Resident Evil 4 has a focus on puzzles is dumb, as well. The puzzle quality of Resident Evil 4 is laughable at most, and their presence in the game is barely meaningful (unless moving twice the Salazar symbol constitutes as a complex, hard puzzle-solving scheme); really the only worthwile puzzle I can think of is Ashley's, where you have to solve an actual moving puzzle. Exploration? I guess that'd be true, despite the game's linearity. Need to manage ammo? When enemies drop ammo themselves? Did you ever had any ammo problems in this game? Because I certainly didn't. And the game is balanced to actually calculate whether to give you ammo or not, so it's not like you risked being without ammo unless you were very very bad at the game (EDIT: and let's just not forget that the game becomes easier the lesser your % accuracy is). The heck is "the major point"? And what atmosphere, I ask again? The game's first minutes are extremely great, but then everything is throw away. Unless you can somehow tell me with a straight face that raiding a military base with the help of an helicopter, fighting some religious zealots in a big church and then some other weird shit, like going full speed while on a minecart (and making a blind jump to get to the safe point after dealing with some crazy dude with a chainsaw), fighting against some kind of superhuman dude who's keeping a medallion that prevents you from moving on, and let's just not forget the running away from a giant, mechanic statute that is trying to crush you, as "heavy atmosphere and feeling like a Resident Evil game", then I don't even know what to tell you.
The game just turned out to be so fun and cleverly designed, that's why it got critical acclaim; as every element the game is praised for is not what the previous games were praised for (further indicating just how vastly different and alien RE4 was to the franchise). There's no upgrade because the game disregards almost everything from the dogma of the previous games, so it's effectively destroying it to put something new and different in its place. Resident Evil VII can pretty much be critically acclaimed if it turns out to be an awesome game, regardless of its name (after all, this is not the first time Resident Evil has done so, look at Resident Evil 4!); would you call it Resident Evil when it does so? Or you just wait to see if it scores mediocre to say "See, that wasn't Resident Evil!".
But like I said, Mikami knew what he was doing, and the game itself is proof of it. We're going in circles? Try deepening your arguments a bit more instead of just saying things that don't really correlate on how Resident Evil 4 displays them.
