Nope, sorry.  You're killing black people...that's all that matters.  The game is racist.  End of story.

Sigh...

People familiar with the series see the trailer and know that Umbrella or some other sinister organization is probably behind the scenes, but people not familiar with the series just see a white guy and a bunch of Africans throwing things at him. Capcom put out this trailer to promote the game and they had to expect that people would jump to conclusions based on it.

Is it right that people evaluate this trailer without knowing the full details of the series? Not really

Should Capcom assume that people will take the trailer at face value and interpret it in the worst possible way? Yes, if they want to avoid bad publicity

They should have probably mentioned Umbrella and at least one or two other events of the other games of the series in there too for the people who have no idea what was going on when they saw it.

So it was fine to go to a Eastern European town and slaughter thousands of "white" zombies but it is not OK to go to Africa and kill "black" zombies? Do you hear what you are saying? The setting is in Africa. Where alot of black people live! Its just reasonable that if you are in Africa and killing African zombies that they will probably be, by in large, BLACK! This is what is wrong with America  today. We have double standards, and hypersensitivity that go farther in highlighting the racism than in diminishing it.

The topic has sort of moved beyond this part of the discussion though stof.  I mean no one here (as is pretty obvious from the statements) believes that it's wrong to have a game set in Africa based on the race.  The original complaint is stupid and baseless, but as has been pointed out, given some of the slightly deeper political situations in Africa itself, the idea of a first world country going in and murdering a 3rd world country's populace to "save them from themselves" doesn't go over very well.  There are some valid complaints about the premise of the game.  Honestly my biggest complaint with it is I just think the writing is going to be bad.

 RE4 was in Western Europe unless you think there's a Spanish speaking country in Europe aside from Spain.

I did think it was kind of bizarre that they presented Spain as though it were a third world nation. And the "foreigner coming in to save people from themselves by killing them" bit was there in RE4 too.

I wasn't offended by the trailer. I'm mostly playing devil's advocate here.

 You're right naz. But I posted about that one too

Non Sequor said:  I don't think anyone's saying that Africa can't be a setting for a videogame, just that they're inviting criticism by the way they've framed things. The trailer doesn't provide any details of the story, but they make it look like "white foreigner comes to save black people from destroying themselves." There are all sorts of ways they could change things to make this come across better. If they used a local hero rather than a foreigner and/or if they emphasized the Africans being used by Umbrella Corp they wouldn't be drawing this criticism. 

stof said:  I think that's the most important word right there. Trailer. We don't have any idea what the story is for this game. When the game comes out, it might actually be a rather scathing criticism of corporate abuse in Africa (Umbrella corp exploiting Africans)

I think the difference is in 2 major ways:

1. Any idiot knows Spain is a first world country. Obviously the village was fictional.

2. Leon was not doing the imperialistic "save them from themselves" thing. He was killing them for one purpose: to save himself and the president's daughter. We obviously don't know what the exact plot details are yet but I can see how him saying "I've got a job to do" can be taken in a bad way from a political standpoint. It's not really about racism as much as it is a cultural and political fopah.

Edit:  I should again say that personally I don't have a problem with it, I just see how it could be insensitive to some.  I'm more worried about the general plot of the game without the writers that made RE what it is in the first place. 

The woman complaining about that cartoonish game in the post made by BenKennobi88, IS a racist herself. I looked at that whole trailer and if she hadn't been there making her ridiculous commentary I would have never even come close to calling that game racist. If Capcom has to make ANY changes to this game because of this it will be a horrible tragedy. Racism is racism no matter the color of your skin.

This is so fucking stupid. First of all their isn't only black people in the game, there are also some characters of south asian descent. So why did this person focus only on the characters of african descent? That is my first question. Also why dosen't the person talk about games where the player kills germans or japanese. Are those game less racist because your killing whites and asians? How selfish is it to think that only one race can be immune to being portrayed as evil? As someone of south asian descent (from Bangladesh if anyone cares) I'm not offended and I don't think anyone should be offended because I don't think Capcom is racist against brown people or black people; I think they were trying to make the game more intresting by putting it in a unique setting. The only thing this game is racist against is zombies and if you think otherwise than I strongly disagree with you.