Retronauts - 599: Resident Evil 5 & 6

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

Remember when Capcom pursued complete global saturation? Diamond Feit, Richard Eisenbeis, and Alex Aniel team up to recount the ultimate horror entertainment of Resident Evil 5 & 6. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week of Retronauts, a punch of boulders. Hello, welcome back to Retronauts. Thank you so much for joining us. to what's sure to be a giant-sized episode, because we're talking about two of the biggest games in one of the biggest series in the video game world, and that is Resident Evil. Specifically, this week we're going to talk about Resident Evil's, Residents, Residents' Evils, yes, fives and sixes. So that's our target today. Now, of course, I'm your host, Diamond Fight, and I've got more than seven minutes to record this podcast, much more than seven minutes. And joining me,

So we got two, actually, two, I believe, first-time guests on the program. Why don't we start with the man wearing a cap on my screen? All right. My name is Richard Eisenbeiss. I live and work in Japan. I've been writing about video games professionally for over a decade at this point. You might have read my stuff on IGN or Kotaku, but I'm currently an associate editor and Japan correspondent over at Anime News Network.

And I still write about games whenever I get the chance. Yes. And let's be honest, these are some anime-ass Resident Evil's. Let's say that front. Oh, yeah. Some anime-ass Resident Evil's. And our other guest, after multiple attempts to get him on the show, an expert so important that he's written a book. It's off-camera. You can't see it. He's written a book. Please introduce yourself a book-writing guest. Hi, it's great to be here. This is Alex. I'm known as CVX Freak on the interwebs. During the day, I work in the game industry. in a physical video game publishing.

I also run a music label, but in my free time, if I'm not traveling, I'm probably playing or at least thinking about all things Resident Evil. And it's good to be here. Thank you. Thank you, Alex. Well, Alex, let's be frank, because you travel so often and you have multiple devices, like even when you're traveling, you're playing Resident Evil at this point, aren't you? Like, you're on an airplane, you're playing Resident Evil somewhere?

Yeah. Yeah, the world's become quite accommodating, you know, to that kind of thing. thing now that the switch came out and a bunch of Resident Evil's came out for that the Steam Deck came out and obviously that can run all the Resident Evil games and then more recently

Capcom has been putting them on iPhones and Macs and iPads which is perfect for me because I'm such a dedicated Mac user and it's nice traveling with nothing but an iPhone but the ability to play Resident Evil

it's like somebody answered my prayers I used to travel, you know, get on long 12-hour flights back to Japan. And I sat there thinking, oh, man, it'd be nice if I could go play a Resident Evil game right now. You know, back in the day, we had two options, Guidon, and then maybe the original on DS, Resident Evil Deadly Silence, and then we got Revelations 1. But, you know, it didn't feel like until the late 2010, when we had, like, a bunch of different Resident Evil games you could play on the go. Oh, man. And even with Resident Evil Revelations 1,

did you have it on the 3DS with that extra thing to get the twin sticks on it? I was a bit old school. Like you had the whole attachment you put it in. I didn't like that. I didn't like that, what do you call it? The Circle Pad Pro, right? I didn't really like that. That's the official. I was still kind of set in,

I was set in my ways and still playing it as if they were Resident Evil 4 on the GameCube where you... You don't, you know, you aim with the left stick rather than the right. So a little old-fashioned, it wasn't until funny enough, Resident Evil 6 came out, and that finally compelled me to start using the dual analog stick controls, you know, more often. And, you know, I haven't gone back since. But, yeah, to answer your question, yeah, I didn't play on that, on that accessory.

But I probably should go back and try it to see how it is. I actually gave it a try when Revelations turned 10 a couple years ago, I did dig out my 3DS and I broke out. I still have it. My, you know, I had the thing and I hooked it up and it worked pretty well, but ultimately I played the rest of the game on Switch because I just feel like it was, it was better. It was better with, also I could play my TV that way. So, you know, it was fine.

Right. But let's step back a second here because we're not talking about exclusively poor at World Residence. We're talking about, let's set the stage here, actually. We'll go back to the early, the early 21st century and talk about Resident Evil as a product because it went through kind of a weird phase. You know, I would say Resident Evil, I mean, Resident Evil has been popular now for, I guess, almost, we're coming up on the 28th, 28th anniversary.

Eighth, 28th anniversary. Yeah. It's turning 28 very soon. And it's been popular for basically all 28 of those years. But in the 21st century, I would say, the series was in kind of a little strange place because you had the three original PlayStation games, and then you had the Dreamcast game, which, of course, I think we all agree, is a classic. But also, like, it's on the Dreamcast, so it doesn't sell that well.

And then you have the GameCube games, which, again, very, very good GameCube games, but they're on the GameCube, so they don't sell that well. But in the meantime, you have the Resident Evil movies, which are doing great. And you've got lots of ports, which are putting Resident Evil lots of different places. As Alex mentioned, there was even a Resident Evil port to the DS of all things, which was just a top, what a time to be alive. to buy the original Resident Evil on a cartridge and play it on a DS and stab a zombie by poking the stylus on the screen.

Like, that's what we were doing 15, 17 years ago. But then, of course, Resident Evil 4. Resident Evil 4 came out, and Resilio 4 kind of changed everything. But we're not talking about Resolution 4 today, because we did a whole episode. There's a whole retronauts about Resolution 4. You can go back to episode number 225 if you want more about Resonable 4. But certainly, the impact of the game cannot be understated. huge game, hugely successful, even more successful on the PlayStation because that's where people

actually could play it. But now, of course, it's on everything. It's on, it's on Switch. It's on PC. It's probably on, it's on phones, I'm sure. It's on everything. But Capcom sees that. They take that energy. It's okay, well, obviously, our series is working. And according to sources, that came out, the Resident Evil 4 came out in early 2005. And according to the blogs and online articles. Capcom started working on Resident Evil 5 right away, but that would be a long process because Resident Evil 5 does not come out until March of 2009. So when this episode, when this podcast goes out, we will be celebrating the 15th anniversary of Resident Evil 5. A remarkable milestone in human history. That's insane. That's insane. And it is. Very discomforting.

Good Lord. It's reality. We're all going to one direction. We're all going to one direction on the timeline. It's fine. It's fine. So, what can we say? Resident Evil 5. Let's start with the credited producer who is a man named Jun Takuuchi. And Jun Tukuchi at Capcom, he goes way back. He started there in the early 90s. He's got credits on Super Nintendo games. He's got credits on the first two Resident Evil games. These days, still at

Capcom. He's credited as executive producer on a lot of the current Resident Evil games and, of course, other games they're making. So he's probably in a boardroom somewhere. I hope he's very happy doing doing what he's doing. I mean, he is the head of Capcom Division 1. Yeah. He gets the executive producer title, but he's actually the head of that division of Capcom. So he pretty much calls the shots.

And I think he's earned his way up, you know, over the past 10 years. Absolutely. It was a long road for him, but he's there now. And I'm sure, I'm sure, I'm not sure. I never met the man. I don't think. I don't think I met the man. But I'm hoping, I hope in my heart that he's pleased with where he's at today.

I hope he is. So for Resident Evil 5, I think it's significant because Resident Evil 5 reaches back and it reunites the core cast of the original Resident Evil. So you've got Chris Redfield, who's back for the first time since Code Veronica. You've got Jill Valentine, who's basically back for the first time since three, really. I mean, three was her game and she kind of disappeared for a while. And of course, you have Wesker back, and Wesker is back not as a cameo, not as a snarling side character. He is the main antagonist of this game. I mean, aside from, like, you know, capitalism and the virus, which are very, very bad,

but he is, like, the main human antagonist. Like, he's the one calling the shots. He's the one who's looking you, the player across the screen and saying, hey, I'm going to get you, you know. Can I interject? They actually, there is one other canon thing in there. The GameCube game umbrella chronicles, which I bought specifically because you play as Chris and Jill in a new mission, where they're going after the evidence

to take umbrella down in the U.S. government. And that's Ken. Yeah, that was a Wii game, not a GameCube game. Oh, was it a Wii game? Okay. Yes, that's the two. The two GameCube saved together.

It was the one where you... Right, right, because you had to be pointing at the screen, of course, with the Weima, duh, of course. But, yeah, no. And, I mean, I'm a huge Chris and Joe fan. Like, I love the original Resident Evil. I don't really care about Leon and Claire very much at all. Like, they're okay character.

I don't hate them, but they're not the ones I care about, basically. And so, yeah, like, honestly, like, it always got me that, like, do we have Jill showing up in things like Marvel versus Capcom, but we don't have her showing up in anything mainline, and the most we get for a very long time is Umbrella Chronicles, and then we start off Resident Evil 5 with the big twist of the game, right, Diamond? Yeah. Yeah, Resident Evil 5 as a story begins with Jill Valentine in the grave, which was kind of, I mean, if you play the game, this news comes at you very, very fast. But before the game was even out, I remember Kotako had a big headline with the picture of Jill's grave as like the lead-in photo. And for me, as someone who like didn't pay attention, you know, to the trailers or whatever, I was like, wait, she's dead. I was so upset. So upset. Yeah. I thought it could be a big spoiler. I thought it was a big spoiler, but then, of course, you play the game, and it's like, oh, no, no, she's, according to the game fiction, she's already dead.

So, like, it's not a big deal. And, of course, spoilers, she's not actually dead. She's fine. She's fine. I actually remember, when I picked up the game for the very first time and started playing it, I was like, if this isn't just a Chris Redfield revenge quest, I'm going to hate this game. But if it all it is, is him going gung-ho to get revenge for Jill, I'm like, all right, then I'll play the game. I wasn't disappointed. I'll tell you that much.

Not in that aspect anyway. Well, certainly that is a huge part of Chris's character in this game. He's definitely, he's upset about losing Jill, and he's not sure how, you know, is it okay for him to work with the people? And, you know, throughout the course of the game, he's going to grow, I would say, grow a little bit of the person. But he's also growing physically because let's also be straight. The Chris Redfield we see in Resident Evil 5 is not like the Chris Redfield we see in any other past games, because he, he, he has skipped no days, no arm days, no leg day.

He has, he has worked out every day. He is a massive mountain of meat at this point. He's enormous. I know people joke about that. I mean, I know people joke about that so much. But like the way I look at it is it actually makes a lot of sense on a character level. And I know that sounds crazy. But when you think about it, Jill dies because Chris isn't strong enough to fight Wesker in his superhuman BS.

Right? He's trying to fight a Superman, gets totally whooped, and Jill has to sacrifice herself, knock Wesker out a window to save Chris. Yeah, I bet the man went home and just lifted weights, just waiting for the day he would run into another superhuman strong character so he could punch him in the face. And let me tell you, if you play Resident Evil 5 right, you get to punch Wesker in the face an awful lot. You get to punch a lot of things in the face, including, as I allude to the show, a giant boulder. Yes. But actually, Richard, going back to what you said, I think it was very important that you brought it up because Umbrella Chronicles is actually the first game to feature actor, D.C. Douglas as the voice of Wesker, because Wesker's available and there's actually a campaign where you can actually play as Wesker, right, escaping the mansion, you know, since they decided after the fact that, oh, he didn't die in the mansion, he made it out. But I would argue that here in Residential 5 is where Douglas truly makes the character his own because he gets to have just incredible speech after.

incredible speech and snarling glances and one-liners and he is just he's a monster in this game and Douglas just rings every line, every syllable for what it's worth. And I feel like even though he doesn't really voice the character these days whenever he comes up in like, you know, side missions or whatever, like Douglas has moved on to other projects. But I still, in my head, I still hear Douglas a lot as Wesker. Like Douglas is a fantastic Wesker in this game. Oh yeah. He is the Wesker as far as I'm concerned. concerned. Although a lot of the actors have changed over the years for Chris, Jill, and Wesker as well. Yeah, I would say, like, probably the only, the only actor who, like, stuck with the thing the longest, I think it was probably Allison Court as Claire.

But even she has left, like, she's not Claire in the remake for RE2 or anything. Or, I think, Death Island, I don't think either. But she was, but Allison was. Yeah, no, yeah, you're right. She's, Allison Court hasn't been the voice actress for Claire since Operation. Raccoon City, 2012. Okay. But she hung in there. She had a long run as a character. She had a long run. She did, yeah. But I think for a lot of various political reasons, voice actors change all the time. And so it's unfortunate, but I do think that the new people are also pretty good.

So what do we have here are five? So one of the big changes for Rhythmio-5 is this new lore they've got going on. Because since we're now operating beyond the borders of the United States, we can't talk about, you know, there's no more stars doesn't matter anymore. We need a new global organization to send our heroes around the world to fight terrorism and zombies. So Resileneo 5 is premier of the BSAA, the bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance, BSAA, which comes up in a lot of games around this time and just becomes like the new, that's just the new buzzword. I guess somewhere in there's the FBC, but that's the Revelations games, but... Yeah, the FBC is, what, the precursor? But it was an American organization, I believe, in the lore. Yeah, there's some jurisdictional nonsense over there.

But in this game, it's all about the BSSA. Chris and Jell are both shown wearing, you know, BSSA-specific uniforms with big patches on them. And, you know, that's their whole thing now. Because this game, you know, we've looked behind the pastor scenes of Europe in Resident Evil 4. So Resonimo 5 takes place in Africa, specifically in the

fictional nation of Kijuju. But basically it's Africa as imagined by people who don't really have a lot of information about Africa. You know, like, it's very generic as far as locations ago. I believe that they call it, quote unquote, West Africa to just, you know, narrow it down

to, you know, the second biggest landmass on the planet. Yeah, they did actually Like one of the developers Had family living in Africa at the time I think it was in either Ghana or maybe I think it was Ghana And I think that person actually did send

A lot of reference material to Capcom Regarding the locale And I do believe early on in development Capcom's developers actually did go to Ghana To do location scouting and Photography So it's not like they did they did to the extent that they could i think uh they made a good faith effort at trying

to capture the uh the authenticity of that kind of a place well part of that authenticity involves local you know local talent and chris is not alone on this mission because that's the big that's kind of the big deal of resonable five the fact that you are no longer playing a single hero on this quest you are playing as two people now if you're a single player the second character will be controlled by the computer. But if you have a friend, in my case, Richard and I happen to play this game together 15 years ago. If you have a friend, the two of you can play the game together. So this is an entire co-op-based game. That is the number one word. So even if you are alone playing this game, you will not be alone on the screen. You will have a partner. And that

partner is the Shiva Al-Amar, and she is a local employee of the BSA-A. Yeah. So it's Chris Redfield and Shiva Alamar fighting together, shooting zombies together. Excuse me, not zombies. They're called the, oh, my God. Oh. Magini. Magini, yes. Right.

But like, I want to actually point out something. So, yes. I love co-op. I love co-op gaming so much. And I know people constantly kind of crap on Resident Evil 5 because, oh, it can't be scary if it's co-op. I don't think that's true. especially when Revelations 2 came along. But as far as this one goes,

it's a much more of an action game. But there were so few couch co-op games of this type at the time when this game came out. Before then we had games like, you know, you could co-op Halo and stuff like that. But slowly as things transitioned onto online, you had less and less games where you could actually couch co-op. And there was a drought that started around this time.

So I remember when I had my PlayStation 3, you know, if I wanted to couch co-op a game with a person, I had almost no options. And then came this game. I must have beaten Resident Evil 5 half a dozen times with different partners because it was just the one game that I could play. And I mean, I mean, a diamond knows this, but I have the platinum on the darn game and I believe you're one trophy off from it due to timing, yes. We'll get to that.

We'll get to that later. Okay, we'll get to that. But, yeah, I mean, I played it a million times because of that. And it's funny when I look back and, like, so many people disliked it for the reason I like it the most. Hmm. I actually thought the co-op was one of the more respected elements of the game, at least for me. Like, I never had much complaint about the co-op element insofar as you're playing with somebody else, and there are a lot of interesting things to do.

I always thought that the criticism for R.E.5 was in other areas in terms of gameplay design and locale, some story, level design. But yeah, maybe we can talk about that too. Yeah. But I always thought the co-op is great. Yeah. And like I, in preparation for this podcast, I sat down and I played it with my wife. She is, she's not what I would call a hardcore gamer. You know, she plays some Mario. She plays some Animal Crossing. She plays stuff like that. She doesn't, generally doesn't, she likes horror games, but generally can't play them because she gets jump scared. Right. And, uh, but, but this was just the right difficulty that it might have taken her a good, you know, hour to get used to it. But once she was used to it, you know, we went through the whole game and had a good old time.

Uh, it's, it's one of those games like even, you know, having very different skill levels in the gamers, you can still have an absolute, uh, blast. playing at co-op. Yeah, I think somewhere in between the two points that you're making here, I think what happens with the co-op, because I think in general people appreciate the co-op factor, but I think what Richard, what you touched on is that the co-op, by including co-op throughout the entire game, it does fundamentally change the feeling of the game. Right.

You know, but I think for some people, that was a big change for them. And I know people who are big Resident Evil fans who simply never played five or six because it was so co-op dependent, and it's like, that's not what they want. from Residivol. They want the solo experience. They want to be alone. They want to be scared. Similarly, of course, the fact that we're in a new African setting, you know, most of the game takes place outdoors and it's like daylight outside, which some people also thought was a bad idea. So that, oh, it's not scare anymore. You know, Residio 4, mostly at night, mostly under clouds or like in caverns or stuff. But this is more like more outdoors, more sunshiny. But like, it's not a

happy, smiley sunshine world of Resident Evil 5. There's terrible things, there's terrible monsters, you know, like really gross stuff happens all throughout the game. So to me, I feel like, yeah, it is sunny. And yes, you can get a good look at what's happening in the world, but that doesn't make it, to me, that doesn't take away from the atmosphere. I think it is still a very creepy game, you know, for most of its run. Sure.

And it does have a lot of, like, well, there are a lot of outdoor sunny ones. There are also parts where, like, there's a set of mine caves you go through that are so dark. One player has to hold the flashlight while the other player has to shoot everything. And then you have the strange temple thing with the sun lasers underground, which is another thing. But, again, like, I think they still managed to get a lot of variety out of the locales and made the most out of the fact that they were out in the sun, that they could do. stuff that they hadn't really been able to do previously. Absolutely. So, let's talk about controls a little bit, because Resident Evil 5 takes a lot from

Resident Evil 4 as far as the basics go. Again, we've got the camera behind the character. It's kind of sitting over their shoulder. By default, by default, Resident Evil is indeed a single-stick control game like Resident Evil 4. However, because this was a new thing, was actually the first, I think, HD Resident Evil game, and they know that the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 have dual sticks, there is an alternate control method

and that lets you steer your character with the left stick and move the camera around with the right stick. So even though it defaults to a more traditional play style, it does include, you know, as an option from the start, a, you know, quote unquote modern style that lets you, you know, move and look and look around. However, most importantly, you still cannot move and shoot at the same time.

That is still a line they do not cross. So you can look all you want, You can move the camera all you want. But when it comes time to pull out your gun, you plant your feet and you must stop and shoot. And here's a fun fact. When I replayed it, I replayed it. I was replaying the PS4 version of the game when I recently replayed it. For that, the default controller is the two sticks.

I didn't have to go into the options to change anything. Okay. Yeah, yeah, but I do remember like, because, yeah, back in the day, when you and I played it way back then, I remember we had to switch it to like D settings or something to, get the twin stick controls. Were you playing the Japanese version? Yes. Or were you playing the American version?

I think we're playing Japanese, right? I think we're playing Japanese, right? Because we were already living here in Japan at the time, so we bought probably the local copy. Right. I don't remember 100% for sure, but I think the Japanese one had the old RE4 controls as the default. Oh, my original. The Western versions

had. Oh. Yeah. Or at least on PlayStation, possibly. I'd have to go back and reconfirmed because I haven't played the old PS3 version in over a decade at this point. But yeah, I'm pretty sure like the default was different depending on what territory you were in. And I think that's probably due to player preference, if anything. Hmm, fascinating. I could be wrong, but yeah. That's, that's a very interesting possibility that I hadn't considered because by that point I was already living in Japan, so I would not have known. Interesting. So what else has changed? Well, the inventory system has changed. For one thing,

Attachia case is gone. We have no more attach a case. Don't worry about, there's no more of this. There's no more of planning your weapons and your ammo and your herbs, which some people enjoy as many game. In fact, there are indie games out there now called, I think it's called Save Room, right? Where you just, the whole game is you move your inventory around a case. So in Residential 5, what they've did is every character, both of the characters have nine slots. And these are just generic slots. Now, for the slots, the, you know, the sort of cardinal up down, left, right directions. Those are automatic D-pad shortcuts. So if you have a gun, you're probably going to put it in those buttons. That way you can quickly switch your weapons if you need to switch your weapons. Everything else just goes into a slot wherever you want to put it, and you can, you know, ammo stacks to a certain degree, health items to stack to a certain degree. But basically you have nine slots, and that's it. So it's very much extremely, it's much more simplified over the complicated, you know,

well, complicated is perhaps the wrong word. Let's say complex. the complex system of Resonimo 4 has very much simplified Resonimo 5 but of course you have two characters so that's also the fact that you have two people so two of you can care each character has their own items

if you're close to each other on the screen you can share items if one of you heals all the heels are now like sprays so if you heal yourself next to your partner you automatically heal them both which is a nice you know a nice time saver yeah good quality of life yes but this change

this change is certainly not without its Not without detractors, because some people really like, you know, the system of figuring out how they play things. Because when you reduce everything to one slot, that also means, you know, okay, so a rocket launcher is the same as an egg. That's what's telling me, a rocket launcher and egg are the same now. And you do pick up a lot of those damn eggs, too. There are a lot of eggs in this game. And they really do get in the way of your inventory. They really do.

And then half of them heal you and half of them poison you. Oh, it's just, it's a thing. There's a level with a lot of chickens, then you get a lot of eggs, yes. But also, significance is the merchant. The merchant. Everyone loves the merchant in Resolution before. I'm sorry, the merchant died on the way back to his home planet. He is not in this game at all.

Indeed, there basically is no merchant at all. All the stuff that you would normally do, upgrades, buying things, selling things, all that stuff is just done in menus in between levels. So there's just no personality there. all, which again, something else that people thought was changed that they didn't care for. But I would say it's probably, I would say the inventory stuff and the sort of menu stuff is probably to accommodate the fact that it's a co-op game. So you've got two different people doing stuff at the same time, so it would really be

very difficult that two different people controlling their, you know, inventory and upgrading and buying stuff while talking to a fake person and going down the same menu and, you know, talking to you like a pirate. Oh, also, very significant, the new inventory system means you do not pause the game to do your inventory, which is a major change, because up until this point, most Resident Evil games have been dedicated inventory screen where you can, you know, mix your herbs or load your gun or do whatever you're going to do. But now, Residential 5, you can open your inventory whatever you want, but the zombies will not stop, the monsters will not stop, so be quick. Be quick about it. Yeah, and honestly, I found that to be one of the most kind of fun things in the game. like I kept weapons on my D-pad. I never put healing on my D-pad this last time.

So there would be times where I was like, look at my health bar, look at my wife's health bar, and be like, all right, run up these stairs, go to a corner stand still, and then I would just go into my menu really quickly and heal us both. And it kind of added some extra tension. Like you've got to do it real quickly. You've got to get it done. But yeah, I don't know if I'd call it a bad thing.

It was certainly, it felt like a necessary thing more than anything else. Yeah. I think all these changes have their roots in common sense. But because this game took so much from Resonimo 4 but also changed so many small things for Resident 4, I think some people who love Resident 4 reacted negatively because, oh, I liked that. I liked that. Why did you lose that? Also, speaking of inventory, we should do that.

Yes. Oh, yeah, I was just going to say, that's the crux of my biggest criticisms about Resident Evil 5 is that despite it being a pretty well-made game. I do think it's ultimately co-op aside a bit of a duller version of Resident Evil 4. Like you brought up earlier, like the merchant's gone, right? I feel like Resident Evil 5 takes itself very seriously and having things like the merchant would be very, very incompatible with the kind of solemn mood that the game is going for. And a lot of the things people remember Resident Evil 5 for, like a lot of the memes are unintentional,

if you think about it, like, Westers' lines or the Boulder, things like that. Like, I don't think the team intentionally, like, planned for that to be as funny as it ended up being... I don't, no, I don't think so. No, I file that right next to the idea that, you know, the original Resident Evil had cheesy voice acting on purpose. No, no, it was not on purpose. It was a Japanese staff, you know, directing English speakers, and they just said, go, talk slower,

talk slower, you know? Wow. What a mansion, you know? Whereas, yeah, Reservable 4, like, they were all obviously having so much fun with every little thing in the game, whether it was Salazar or the merchant or even Sadler and even Leon himself, right? And so, yeah, like when Redis Evil 5 came out, I did like the advancements, I guess, in the storytelling. Because I do think that it's the first Resident Evil game in the entire series where the story, even by today's stand. standards due to the great voice acting, due to the great cinematic direction. I do think it's actually stood the test of time from a storytelling dialogue perspective.

Like if they remade Resident Evil 5 tomorrow and they went Last of Us style and didn't replace the voice acting, I don't think it would be too out of place in a modern game. But yeah, you do lose a lot of the stuff that I think people became very attached to you with Resident Evil 4. And I think that really informs people's opinions about five. as a result, and I think that's true for me. Can I go down my list of things that I noticed, like my complaints from my replay recently of what I have about the game?

Because, like, these are kind of interesting things that I noticed that I kind of forgotten over the 12 years I hadn't played the game, right? Okay. Like, one of them is, I forgot how much I hate the opening of the game. If you don't remember, the opening of the game is a redo of the opening of Resident Evil 4, where you're thrown into an arena with countless enemies, and you just have to hold out. But nobody tells you there's a time limit to holding out. So, like, that's a huge turnoff to me. because I'm going to tell you something. I have played and replayed every single Resident Evil game except for Resident Evil 4,

which I quit after failing that opening area five times in a row because I had no idea that you needed to hold out. Like, I didn't know what the point was. And the game does not explain that to you in any way, shape, or form. And I was so upset by it, I was just like, I don't want to play this game. It was just such a turnoff right at the beginning. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm sure if I went back and played it today, I'd have a lot of fun with the game. I have actually no doubt, and maybe one day I will.

Maybe I'm just not playing it now, just to be spiteful. But I really disliked it. It really did turn me off to the point where I didn't want to continue the game. And like I said, I've played every other game in the series several times. And so when Five started the same way, I remember I was super upset, except for one thing. That was the demo of the game, and I played it with you. And it was a lot more fun when I had someone else in it with me. And just that was, I guess, enough to get me over the hump into the main game where, yes,

arenas like that do happen very occasionally in the game, but nothing like right at the beginning where it's literally just an infinite amount of people coming at you for like three or four minutes. But I just, I still hate that. Like, even going through it recently, I still hate it. It's just, and it's also much harder than, like, the first three-fourths of the game. Like, it's easily the hardest part in the first three-fourths of the game. I also, I remember playing the demo and struggling with the demo actually initially.

I remember, like, at first, when we played the demo and the demo, so, like, leads you in that hallway, and you all of a sudden, you know, you get spotted and you're in this room, you're being surrounded. And I think it took us a couple tries to, like, get past that because it's like, oh, geez, we're getting surrounded again, you know? So it was, it definitely was a challenge to get, to get used to it. But once you get used to it, I feel like it makes a big difference. But I, I absolutely understand that feeling of like when you get, when you're getting surrounded and you don't really understand, like, am I supposed to run away? Am I, you know, when do they stop?

You know, can I get away from these people? Like, there is no, but I guess by design, like, there is no safe spot. You just have to, you know, you can move if you want, but you have to keep, if you move, you have to keep moving. Yeah, like, like you start off in a place that's actually relatively defendable, but then the big guys come that don't go down to your little pea shooters and you have

to leave. And I understand it's literally throwing you in the fire to teach you that you run, you turn, you shoot a couple times, you run again, you climb things, you jump around from box to box, like it's you may have to stand still to shoot

but you have to move to survive. But I feel that maybe there's a better way of teaching you that than slaughtering you in the first 10 minutes of the game over and over until you figure it out. But that's that. The other one is another thing that I noticed that's, it might even be present in six as well, I think,

is the checkpoint versus safe point system. Yes. You save at the end of every chapter. You get checkpoints, but the checkpoints aren't saving your progress. They're only for if you die. If you die, you restart at the checkpoint. If you quit out and load back in, you start at the beginning of the chapter.

Yes. Is that how this works? Yeah. And it's the same in six as well. It's baffling. But like, because, yeah, there was a time that, like, I was playing with my wife and we were just full. Our inventory was so full. And we didn't want to give up anything.

I was just like, well, we just had a checkpoint. Why don't we just quit out, go into the inventory management, sell some stuff, get some stuff ready and go back in. And then we start up and we're at the very beginning of the chapter again. And we're like, oh, so I guess that's that. How many times did you try that? I think we did it once on accident and once on purpose. But, yeah, no, that's how it is. Like, once we were...

I always thought it went back to the checkpoint. Yeah, it's an interesting thing. Maybe only if you die, right? Yeah, it's only if you died, you restarted the checkpoint. Which, don't get wrong, is a great quality of life thing. But it's actually funny because where we did die on purpose, there was a shotgun you could pick up right in front of this chapter start point. So we get out of the chapter's start point, like whatever it was, like 6-2 or something,

walk down the stairs, there's a shotgun, but we've already played this section, but my inventory is saved from the checkpoint while my game progress is saved from the beginning of the chapter. So suddenly we both have this new shotgun. Instead of just getting one copy of it, we got two. So it's a, I think there might be some item duplication stuff there. Yes, actually, I'm glad you brought up, Richard, because yes, because of of the way this sort of checkpointing saving system works, there is a glitch in the game that I think is still present in modern ports where two players can trade items and one player can save

their inventory, one player cannot save their inventory, and this is a way to duplicate certain items, which in the game, if you duplicate something that's worth a lot of money, this means you can make a lot of money very, very quickly, and unlock a lot of the special things that are only available late game like infinite ammo or infinite like, you know, so there is a glitch in the game that I don't know if it's still present in all modes, but certainly at the time it was, it was just standard. Like you couldn't, I don't think there was a way to patch it out because like, that was just how the game worked, how it saved the data, like, yeah, and all due to the inventory system

and the save system. Yeah, so yeah, it was an interesting choice, we'll say. And then the other thing, I guess the other thing that I kind of wanted to mention was the bosses in the game. Yes. Because I found some of them great, some of them hilarious, and some of them aggravating beyond belief. Like, there's a boss in the mid to late game called Uroboros. And yes. Oroboros is an interesting fight because I had totally forgotten how to fight this boss. So it was like going in blind when I played it recently. Oh, no. And it is one of the most unintuitive things I've ever had to do in a boss fight. Because basically, the boss has weak

points, right? So you'll throw like a fire grenade at it or hit it with a flamethrower and it stops moving. And I thought like, okay, then we shoot the kind of weak points on it. So I'd shoot off its arms and then it's just kind of this worm coming at me that can't attack. But we went through every bullet we had, my wife and I. And then every bullet in that room. And boy, are there a lot, is there are a lot of ammo in that room. And it didn't go down. And we just couldn't do it. And it was, it was crazy. We did it like three times before I was finally like, I guess I got to look this up. Like, I really don't know. And it's because it's a very specific thing. You have to hit it with either a fire grenade launcher or a fire grenade, which makes it pop out special

weak points that come out from only those two weapons. And not the flamethrower. The flamethrower, The flamethrower does not get them to pop out. The flamethrower gets them to stay out. So basically one person chucks a fire grenade, the next picks up a flamethrower, uses the flamethrower, and uses all the flamethrower of fuel, while then the first person switches back to a shotgun or whatever and shoots the special weak points. And I was just like, that is so unbelievably unintuitive. How was I ever supposed to figure that out?

This was on the PS4 version, right? Yes. I actually hear that because that version runs at 60 frames, the damage calculations for that one boss are actually out of whack. And so I don't remember the specific reason why, but in the PS3 and 360 versions, that boss was not a problem. You can actually kill it the way you would assume you can kill it with the flamethrower. But there's something about how the frame rate is higher in the PS4 or the PC port.

And then for whatever reason, the flamethrower's damage calculations don't seem to register, and that's the reason why you weren't having any luck killing it. This is something someone told me a while back, and I did, I have had the same frustrations about this boss that you just described, and I actually just use the rocket launcher nowadays because that's the other thing. That was the other thing the guide said was buy rocket launcher, shoot it in the face, go home, and I was like, okay, okay, okay, but let's try the correct way. But I was kind of baffled, but that makes sense. Why? I had no memory of having to do it that way, and yet, like, oh, okay, there we go, just different ports, different versions.

Now, the other fight that was interesting is the Jill fight. I killed Jill three times in this playthrough. And I didn't mean to any time. Because I had gone through and upgraded the strongest normal pistol, not the magnum, but the strongest pistol to max. And so it's actually already doing as much or more than a shotgun with normal pistol shots. and it was only like two or three shots to the jewel in her chest and she would go down dead and so there were times where I was trying to stun her

so that I could throw her or damage her enough that you can grab her to rip the jewel out of her chest and I just shot her one too many times that she went down and it's like, came over, go home and I'm like, well, murder Jill again, my bad. Oh God, I have a funny memory of that battle. Go, go, go, go. I just wanted to say that.

I remember playing in, single player back at the PS 3, 360 days, and I remember grabbing Jill, and then Sheva takes a magnum, aims it right at Jill's chest,

and I gasp extremely loudly, thinking this is the end. And then actually, like, the co-op, the CPU character doesn't kill Jill. She actually does hit the thing, and she doesn't die, even though by

By all logic, she definitely should have. And then, you know, we were able to, I was able to complete the chapter, but I just have, when you were talking about your story, I just had a flashback of that. And I thought it was really hilarious. Yeah. And the other thing with that is, there's two ways to get the jewel off her chest, like after you shoot it once or twice to get it loose. The first is the way that I guess it's most likely. You get behind her, Chris puts her in an arm bar or in a head block, basically. Or a full Nelson. She puts in a full Nelson and Cheval walks up and pulls. Again, my wife isn't bad at video games, but she cannot tap fast enough to pull that jewel off. And so we must have done that.

I must have grabbed her three or four dozen times, and we couldn't do it. And finally, I was just like, all right, there's got to be another way. And it's you throw a flash grenade at her feet, you throw Jill over your shoulder onto the ground, and then Chris can pull it that way. And so that's eventually how we had to do it.

But I was just kind of like, oh, quick time events, how I have not missed thee in the modern era as much. Because, yeah, just could not tap fast enough. I think this might be something else that got affected by the frame rate going up. It could be. Yeah, you do have to incapacitate her to some extent. But I do believe if you do hurt her enough, yeah. Yeah, because originally when you throw it. It doesn't matter how fast you tap it, right?

Right. Yeah, because like originally when, like, Chris throws her, she immediately jumps back up. but once you like shoot the jewel two or three times or one or two times she'll start to spark basically and whenever jill sparks you can grab her or you can throw her and she'll actually stay down when you throw her but like yeah it was just one of those things where I was just like I just felt bad for my wife because I was just like she's just jamming that button as fast as she can and it's just not working and I'm just like oh no wonderful game design here people thank you so much for these quick time events of a bygone hate

Yeah, it's a very complicated scenario because, as we said at the top, you know, the game starts by telling you that Jill is dead, and then during the game you discover Jill is not dead, but she's apparently evil now because Wesker has controlled her, and Wesker has controlled her by means of a giant ass, like, gem that's right above her cleavage. And this is why Jill is wearing a, like, a catsuit thing that is just unzipped right below the gem, so you can clearly see the gem on her. chest. And then you have this weird fight where you have to, like, damage Jill to weaken her and weaken the stone so that Chris can just, Chris or Shiva can just pull it off. But if you do too much damage and Jill dies and you lose because you can't kill Jill. But you have to hit her to some degree, otherwise you can't take it off. So it's just, it's a really weird seesaw that you have to go through. But it's very funny, though, because, like, I bet everyone who ever played that game blind has killed Joe. Like, like, I bet.

every single person who ever played that has killed her and been like, oh, my God, I killed Jill. I had no idea that could have any kind of thing. I mean, I remember killing her, you know, more than once, and I wasn't trying to. I was trying to hit, you know, either trying to hit the jewel or I thought, you know, I thought you missed, you know. Yeah. God. Have you tried using all the rocket launcher on her?

It'll work. I've done that as a joke. But yeah. Yeah. But I think I should. I think the Jill fight was meant to be. like R.E. 5's answer to the Krauser fight from 4, and I don't really think

it comes anywhere near. No. Four's game, unfortunately. I don't think so, no. But I will say this. While those are the boss fights that I had issues with this time, I was surprised that I remembered, because like to get the platinum, one of the things you had to do

was beat the game on the hardest difficulty with no deaths in any stage. Like if you died, you know, you could load your save and try again. So, you know, you could potentially try again. and again. But I'll tell you, that meant I got really good at the Wesker fight, the first Wesker fight in the hangar. And I love that fight now, because basically one person just takes Wesker on is Chris, and then the person who's Sheva goes around and builds a rocket launcher,

basically. That's what the fight is supposed to be. But you, but I was, I still had the muscle memory or the or the memory of how to fight Wesker. So that every time Wesker comes in to do his superhuman super speed BS, you just punch him in the face and knock him over. And it was so cathartic to just keep wailing on him while while, you know, Shavva's running around building a rocket launcher. And I like that that was a possibility. It made you like, Wesker just so beats the snod out of everybody in every cutscene that it felt

really good to, in the actual game itself, if you're good enough, just return it for a while, for an indefinite amount of time while you're getting the, you know, necessary McGuffin to stop the fight. And I like that. I thought that was pretty cool. I wanted to really quickly highlight some of the other characters in this game because, you know, like every Resident Evil game, there's characters who aren't just the heroes of the game.

And again, I do think this is an area where Resident Evil 5 falls a little shy of Resident Evil 4 because Resident 5 has a lot of fun characters that I feel like are still very popular. for a lot of people today. And these guys, not as much. I mean, you have Josh Stone. Josh Stone is another BSA agent. He's another African agent. He's usually there throughout the campaign. As a support guy, he drives up his vehicle sometimes.

He assists you. And I think it's a pretty fun guy. And, you know, when you do get to play him as him eventually, which we'll get to later, he does big wrestling moves, which is very fun. Yeah, and he actually, I like that he connects with Shevah. Like there she is she and he know each other right have a past relationship And it makes her feel like more part of the story because it like it starts off and yeah she's the you know Chris is the stranger in the strange land. She's the the local guide and then suddenly it very quickly becomes Chris going to find jill and nothing's going to stop him

And you know Josh helps give sheva more of a connection to the overall story and I'll say that my wife constantly would turn to me and she's like, he's going to die, isn't he? Every time Josh popped up, she was like, he's dead. He's going to die. And I'm like, I don't know. I honestly thought he would die before the game came out. For reasons I don't wish to get into, but I did think that he was doomed and it was actually very, very refreshing to see that he wasn't. Yeah, he just like, he goes off on his own, you're sure he's dead. And then he's just like he shows up and he's just like, hey, I'm alive still. I guess. I guess. I guess. I guess. I I guess this is a bit of a segue to something Diamond wanted to talk about,

but in the earlier Resident Evil games, unfortunately, and this is something they've remedied in later games, but the black character always dies pretty early. Yeah. It's very unfortunate. One, two, and three, we see this. And so when five popped up, I was like, oh, no. But then, yeah, he actually sticks to the end, and I really like that.

yeah and like he's surprised like it's shown that he must be like the most resourceful person around because if you're having to go through this with a partner the whole time and he's like and it's not only like he's there it's like i'm here also got a chopper also got a boat also got a truck like he is just on it like every single time and it's just like you you slop it everywhere and he's like oh no i just drove well you guys went through a mine in an ancient city He's in... What did you do? Why?

He's incredibly competent. And, yeah, especially in his DLC, you can see what he's really capable of. And pretty impressive character. It's too bad they haven't brought him back since then. Yeah. On the flip side, there are two characters who are definitely, you know, on the side of evil. You've got a arms dealer named Ricardo Irving, who I think Chris, I think that's the initial, the initial carrot. Like, Chris is supposed to be following him and, like, you're supposed to be trying to find Irving or something.

Yeah, I was shocked at that. Like, replaying it, like, he is the goal. Like, Wesker doesn't even enter the story until past the halfway point. The first entire half of the game is just chasing Irving. Yeah, there's little teases that, oh, Irving might know something about Jill because there was a picture of Jill on Irving's laptop or something like that. But that's like it. Like, you're just chasing Irving and he's just almost a joke character.

He's like a terrible villain. He's nothing intimidating about him. Yeah, he's a, he's a weasly little guy, and, you know, eventually he just turns into a giant monster. Likewise, Excella. Excella Gione is a very busty scientist who doesn't wear them in much clothing, and she's, like, hang out with Wesker. She's getting them injections from time to time. Yes, the scientist CEO of people who have secretly gotten all of Umbrella's research, and literally her motivation, Diamond. her motivation is she wants to bone Wesker.

That is literally her motivation. She thinks that once the world is destroyed in the new virus, she and Wesker are going to be the new Adam and Eve. That is literally her motivation for the entire game, as she wants to bone Wesker. And she's annoyed it like Jill, because Jill is always like with Wesker or doing Wesker's bidding because she's been enslaved, basically.

And it's just, yeah, it's, uh, I know if only this were the peak of that kind of story, but unfortunately, R.E.6 actually brings something even worse to the table. Yeah, it's a... We'll talk about that later, but when it comes to wanting to bone people, you know, let's talk about RE6. Well, Excel does not become Eve to Adam, and she does not get with Wesker, and dead she turns to a giant monster and you have to kill her. With a space laser. You kill him with a space laser, and that was very fun. Yes. You kill her with an orbital space laser. But yeah, as Quest go, the main story of Resident Evil 5 is a long one.

You start off, and you're going through villages, and then you go through this as caves, and there's, you know, there's boats. There's a lot of, correct or not wrong, I don't feel like Resident Evil 4 had many opportunities to sit in a turret and just shoot things, right? That's uncommon in Resident Evil 4, correct? There was one section where you could do it very briefly, or maybe two. Okay. There was that one part on the island toward the end before Mike kicks the bucket. And then maybe there might have been one, because there's the remake as well, which is probably fudging with my memory at this point.

Right, right, right. But one or two, yeah, not that many. Residential 5 says, screw that. Residential 5 has a lot of mandatory turret segments. There are entire, their entire chapter where you're basically on a truck or a boat and you, like you and your partner, both Chris and Shiva are shooting at things coming from all directions and someone else is driving and you just, you got to be shooting. You got to be shooting all the time. I fucking hate these chapters, especially in professional mode.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay. So can we tell the story now, Diamond? Can we tell the story now? Yeah, I'll tell the story. So there's an entire boss, which is a turret sequence. A boss who I believe is called N-desu, like N-a-past-be. Dessu? Yeah, which sounds Japanese, but I don't think it is. It does. It's, yeah, and the whole idea is that after driving on a truck, you have to stop, and then you're fighting this giant boss, and the only thing you do is you're in this truck and you have to shoot the, you cannot move, you have to shoot this guy, and if he picks up a giant boulder, you have to, like, destroy the boulder before he throws it at you. If he comes too close, he's to, like, hit him enough so he stops, he doesn't punch you because, like, he can punch, like, the truck and, like, hurt both of you. It's a very strange, like, reality going on here.

And in the case of Richard and I, we played the game a lot. We unlocked all the things you could possibly unlock in the game, which means we had all the weapons you could possibly use. But when you're in a turtence sequence, you have to use the turrets. So even though we had magnums and rocket launchers and everything could possibly want to fight a boss and kill it in one shot, no, you have to fight this guy with your turrets. And you have to, if you do it on professional mode, there is very little leeway for error. you know, anything he does to you, he can mess you up really, really quickly.

There's lots of enemies in the background who are, like, shooting at you that you to eliminate while you're fighting him at the same time. And it is just, it's a nightmare. And that is the one thing I couldn't do. And that is the one chapter I couldn't beat on professional, which is why I don't have a Resident Evil 5 platinum. That's the other reason. And eventually, what happened is I think I spent a day grinding it.

And that's how I finally got that level done. I just sat there for a day and I got really good. But, like, you have to. And it actually, it might have been easier with the computer, because the computer only aims at the correct spots. Yes. Like, it either hits the, because there's two spots to hit, the weak point and the stun point.

And you hit the weak point to do damage. You hit the stun point to stop whatever crazy attacks about to wreck you. And it always shoots at the right one at the right time. Not even, it's not even the, it's not even the boss itself. That's annoying, really. To me, it's always been the goddamn respawning Magini in the background. Off to the corner.

Yeah, because you can... And you can do some clever stuff. Like, there's some exploding barrels that you, if you plan out when to use them. That was the thing that really helped me was like, he picks up the rock, don't bother shooting the rock. Shoot the barrel and keep

shooting them in the face. Like, skip as many of those annoying, tough to do things on professional as you possibly can with those barrels. But like I said, I mean, I won't say it didn't really take me a day, but it did take me like an hour or two of just do it again

and again, because that's how you had to do it. And getting that final, that was my final trophy as well. And that's the one that Diamond still lacks, but that was, it was horrible. And it's not like we were bad at the game

because we had literally done everything else. Yeah. At that point. It was just that one thing. And it's also, the game is also very bad, like I was talking about with the Uro Burroughs fight, about showing what is actually a weak point and what is not.

And it was very hard to tell, like, when you were actually doing damage or when you were doing, like, fake damage. Like, you're hitting it, but it wasn't actually doing damage, or when you were hitting it and doing a lot of damage. But, no, I mean, that was, that was, it still is one of the things I dislike.

Like, even going through it again recently, like, when I got to that boss, I was just like, here we go again. And you have to also dodge, but it's two people doing the quick time events. And if either one you miss, you both take massive damage. And yeah, it's a thing.

Yeah, and we should also mention that late in the game, you end up fighting a lot of Magini who are decked out in combat gear, which isn't that different in Resident Evil 4, but in Residential 5, the game literally turns into a cover shooter. There's literally a button that will say, oh, take cover, take cover. So that's another thing that sort of makes Residential 5 a sort of an odd beast, in that because it's 2009 and because so many games, have already come out and done the cover shooter and done two-player co-op and done things like

this, what happens is when it comes out, people are comparing Resuming 5 with these other games. And it's not always a great comparison because other games maybe have more dynamic combat or maybe more combat options, whereas Reserville 5 is still all about stopping and shooting, but also you're doing cover shooting, but also you're doing these quick time events, and also you're doing, yeah, you get like these weird turret bosses. There's a lot of strange stuff happening at the same time, which I think sort of reflects negatively on RE5 sort of overall reputation

because some parts of the game are just kind of like wait, why are we doing this now? Why are we fighting cockroaches? Like what's going? It's just... Oh man, yeah, those cockroaches. I think some parts of the game are awesome and some parts of the game are just kind of head scratchers.

Yeah, like I have to say, I really dislike the numerous quick time events sections, especially because the quick time events are random half the time. Some are always the same and some are different. And again, this is co-op quick time events. One person misses, you both die.

You have to start over. And sometimes there's a cutscene before the, an unskippable cutscene before the quick time events, which is a choice. The motorcycle one specifically. Well, I also want to highlight one of the thing that's very important, before we talk about the reception, I want to mention that because along, among the firsts that are happening here, Resonil 5 has D.L. This is a new thing, DLC. And the bulk of it arrives a year later in 2010, and there are two additional chapters they release, and they're basically two very different takes. The first one's called Lost and Nightmares, and it's a chance for you to play as Jill and Chris pursuing Wesker into some castle in Europe somewhere, and it's all to set up the prelude, which is, you know, what you see in the game where, you know, Jill sacrifices herself to kill Wesker and, you know, in the end, neither them die, but you don't know this. And Lost of Nightmares, to me is kind of like, to me that's the response to people who said that Resident Evil 5 wasn't scary.

Because Lost of Nightmares takes all the Resident Evil 5 stuff, but puts you in a dark place with narrow hallways and giant monsters that are kind of slow. They have like ship sankers or whatever. Like there's fewer enemies, but they're tougher. And you really have to be careful where you're going. You have to navigate these sort of like underground like waterways and like unlock certain doors. It's tense, and it's nerve-wracking, and I remember really enjoying it. It's like, oh, this game, yeah, this game can do all the scares you want old school. They can do that.

Like, they even have, they even throw in a Keeper's Diary, like, note just to remind you the Keeper's Diary is scary. Yeah. And the second one called Desperate Escape lets you play as Jill and Josh, and you're fighting waves and waves of Mangini. And that one is just kind of like a balls to the wall, like action extravaganza, which is just really, really exciting. just like a really fun, you know, sequence of combat. Yeah. Lost in Nightmares, I think, is my favorite thing about Resident Evil Five. It's great. It's great.

And, like, well, first of all, it starts off. And the place you're in is the castle is what the original mansion from Resident Evil One is based on. Right. So the layout for the first, like, five or six rooms in there, like the dog hallway exists. Yeah, yeah. The dining room exists. Certain other rooms exist. exist. And like the main entryway is the exact same as in Resident Evil One. And so it's fun like that because it messes with your nostalgia. Because in that entire area that looks like the mansion, you do not run into a single enemy. Yep. Not one. But it tricks you into thinking they're coming. You go through the dog hallway. You're like, they're coming. I know those freaking dogs are coming. And then when the windows do break, a bird just flies through. And that's it. You know, little things. But it has. But it has.

has a trap room with a ceiling that comes down and your partner has to, you know, run and save you. You have to, one has a thing where you're playing the Moonlight Sonata while the other person has to go in and get a, go through a secret door that opens while the person's playing, stuff like that. And then when you do get to the monsters, they are such a bullet sponges that it is dumb to kill them. You will run completely out of ammo if you try to kill more than one of them. And so because of that, you have this very cool thing of like, you figure out where the loops are to, to like, trap them in a loop while you run, you know, you run around a box and they come one way and you go the other or whatever. And the final area actually has like three of

them. And so you're trying, you're two people balancing three of these unstoppable enemies that are slow, but relentless while you're trying to get these different things, uh, different peas to open different doors and keep it unlocked. It's a very, very, very different game from the main game, but it's so much fun, even though it's like an hour long, even on your first time through. Yeah, neither one of these DLCs is very long, although I must say, as Richard, as you and I discovered, you know, I like you said, talk about the checkpoints. They have checkpoints, but you cannot save.

Yes. So if you're playing this game and you decide, oh, I'm tired, or, oh, I got to go, I got let's finish this later. No, you cannot finish it later. You have to start over again. Yeah. Oh, and I will say, like, as much as I loved Lice and Nightmares, I hated desperate escape. Not because of the plot.

The plot is fine. I love Jill and Josh working together, forming their own little friendship as they have to escape to go help Chris and Sheva. But, like, the fact of the matter is, it takes my most hated thing of Resident Evil 5 and just does nothing but that. It's nothing but continuous arenas of infinite enemies. You just have to keep going. You will never kill them all. You just keep going as more and more spawn in. And then you start having to go.

There's watchtowers with rocket launchers. Rocket launcher turrets and fire unlimited rockets. And you just keep getting hit by them even as you try to dodge. And, oh, enemies everywhere. And it's just, it's, I understand they're trying to go like as far opposite as you could go from Lost in Nightmares. But, man, I just did not have fun with it. Not when we originally did it and not now. Again, story is fine.

I enjoyed that bit of it, but the actual, like, I don't know. Like, that was never the thing I liked about it. I liked kind of the much more main games, kind of like mostly methodical combat. You know, the enemies were coming. You would shoot them. You would reposition. You would get to a new place. You would continue to fight.

But there was a finite amount that you were whittling down through using your ammo right and through moving around to the correct positions. And I also like that the game was good about, I guess this is the whole, the main game, like the kind of the key to actually doing the game is you shoot them in the leg and then punch them in the face and then stomp on their head. Like, that's how you're supposed to play the game.

You don't just gun them down. You'll never have a, well, on the harder difficulties, you'll never have enough ammo for that. But like, if you get really good at it, I really love the pattern. You shoot them in the leg, one person punches them, one person stabs them on the ground, the other person stabs them on the ground, you move to the next one.

And you get into this really cool rhythm between you and your partner, where you're not using a lot of ammo and you're just one, just methodically going through them. But when you have an infinite amount, that no longer really works. Like, you just have to run. So, yeah. Well, I think it's time to talk about how Reson 2 5 was received, which means we have to talk about one thing that is, I don't want to go off too deep under this because, honestly, it is a long conversation. And, you know, no one on the podcast today is black, although say that out loud. But that's an issue because when Resident Evil 5 is first revealed publicly and once it comes out, there is a lot of talk. And a lot of people are saying, hey, is this racist?

You know, I'm going to a quick quote here because I think a lot of credit goes to Ngui Kroll, who wrote a lot about it when he first reacted to the trailer. He said, I look at the Resident Evil 5 trailer and I was like, wow, no one black worked on this game. because I wonder, and I haven't sort of really dug into that much, but I wonder what sort of advice Capcom gave him. The point isn't that you can have black zombies. There was a lot of imagery in the trailer that dovetailed with classic racist imagery. What was not funny, but sort of interesting, was there were so many gamers who could not see it at all. Like, literally couldn't see it.

So how could you have a conversation with people who don't understand what you're talking about and think you're sort of seeing race where nothing exists? And there is a lot of that. And, you know, I think because that was based on the trailer, I think they did try to adjust the, the finished product by mixing up the race of the people like you meet in Africa, because Africa is a big place. But ultimately, they don't really fix the problem, which is like a lot of these, a lot of the scripted moments or cutscenes are clearly based on, you know, classic cinema moments or, you know, like, images of like savagery. And it's like, yes, they're monsters, but also, like, you've got black people dragging white women by their hair. and there's an entire chapter where you're fighting guys in like bones and like straw masks and like all this stuff and like you know the dialogue's like oh they're reverting to primitive culture because they're like infected but like okay but you're still fighting like natives and grass skirts with like rocket launchers like what's happening like what are we doing here it's like it's a weird it's a weird thing that can't be escaped you can't just write it off and say oh they didn't know like I don't think they sat down and said boy we really want to make this game super racist you know, what are your ideas?

Like, that's not what they set out to do. But the finished product has a lot of really sketchy stuff in it, and I think. And I think it's, it was kind of a big deal to happen at the time because a lot of conversations didn't really happen in video games at that point in the press. I think it happens a lot more now. I think we have a lot more conversations about, like, is this okay? You know, should this have worked out that way? But back in 2008, 2009, it really was uncommon to have these conversations.

Yeah. I mean, it is kind of the elephant in the room because that was the big kind of conversation. And, of course, like, I'm a white guy, right? I don't really, like, when I was playing it, I didn't see anything like that to me. Because I don't have the cultural knowledge or cultural context or history to see it like that. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. And if, you know, various black people in the media are saying, hey, this is problematic.

Well, it doesn't matter if it's not problematic to me, the white guy. What matters is that it's problematic to them, right? And so if they say it is, then it is because that's how they literally feel. You can't explain a way like, oh, you can't feel that way. Like, what kind of craziness is that? Everyone's entitled to how they feel just because, you know, I don't have the same connection to it. But then again, even I can see, like, the primitive masks and caricatures and, like, as you

said, the white woman being drugged by the hair, like, yeah, I mean, come on, come on. It's a lot. It's a lot. But I do think it was 100% unintentional. Yeah, I would say it was unintentional. And like I mentioned earlier, they did make a conscious effort to research the background of the setting. But I do think that the end result had a lot of problems in it, even before release.

I happened to be a history major. So I actually did have some background in this sort of thing. And even when I was 20, when the game came out, or when the game was announced, rather, I remember being bothered by a lot of the discourse that said, you know, no, this is, you know, the depictions of people are fair game as long as it's quote-unquote accurate, right? but I always felt that, you know, like that really missed the point. I didn't really think the comparisons to Resident Evil 4 made sense. And I'm really glad that we do like, like you said, Diamond,

we can have these conversations a lot more honestly. And I'm pretty sure if Capcom were to remake the game, that's a conversation they're going to have to have internally and try to figure out a way to approach the subject matter respectfully. Well, one thing's for certain. when Reson 2O5 sells a ton, so, so, so many copies, in the first few months, they move 5 million copies. At one point, ResonUO5 becomes the biggest selling Capcom game of all time, and Capcom is a

company that has sold a lot of video games, and for a while there, Residential 5 was number one. As of this recording, it is officially number six at just under 9 million copies sold. So it is, it still today is a very popular game, and a lot of people bought it. A lot of people have played it over the years, and, you know, it did very, very well. For a long time, I know it was the best-selling Rosen and Evil game as well. Is it still the best-selling Resident Evil game? No.

Tasmicly it is. Oh, excuse me. I guess it depends on how you look at it. If you combine every version of RE5, PS3, 360, PC, PS4, Xbox 1, and then there's the gold edition that came out. If you combine all of them, then it's still technically at the top by like a million units or so. But yeah, in terms of like singular releases, which is also kind of hard to define. It is no longer at the top. That would be the remake of Resident Evil 2.

Still sold a lot, though. It's like 14 million copies. Yeah. And it's funny because like, you know, it's like, oh, the super action oriented one that got so kind of who poohed on for being action instead of horror. And let's be serious. Did you see how much it's sold? Is there any wonder that 6 is a very, very similar game in the action front? Yeah, I mean, I think it corresponded with, like, gaming becoming more mainstream

and Reserville 4 having had a good reputation going into it as well. Plus, like, just movement in the industry in general, like, Call of Duty became massive at this time, and Uncharted became massive at this time. And I do think that this obviously will factor into our RE6 discussion as well, but Capcom was very much trend chasing at this point, and I think they were really looking for easy, easy things that they could mimic in order to kind of compete with the big boys in the gaming industry with unfortunately very mixed results.

You know, I'm going to be able to be. I'm not. I'm not. You know, Well, yes. Let's move on. Let's move on to number six, because, yes, as we said, we had Resum 5 came out in 2009. It sold very, very well. So, yeah, when it comes to making a sequel, what do you do? You look at all this stuff, it's like, well, the last one sold to that gangbusters. The answer is more of that. You know, it's like disco stew. If these trends continue, eh.

So, let's talk about, first of all, it's not Juntakeuchi this time. Now the producer is Hirouki Kobayashi. and Kobayashi, again, long-time Capcom guy. It's funny, he joined in 1995, and his first credited work was on the original Resident Evil. He was part of that original staff. He was associate producer, Code Veronica, producer of the remake on GameCube, R.E4 in GameCube. He's credited on all the animated movies from Degeneration through Infinite Darkness. He actually just left Capcom a couple years ago to join NetEase when they were thrown on cash like what. So he's not with Resident Evil or Capcom at this point, but Kobashi had a long

career at Copcom and most of it was involved with at least some kind of Resident Evil like almost every year. He was doing something, whether it was producing or overseeing or, you know, like supervising something. He was deep in the Resident Evil stuff. And, you know, as he gave a lot of interviews in the lead up to the release, the words you heard a lot were ultimate horror entertainment. So the word survival horror is kind of, that's passe, we're not doing that anymore. Now we're talking about ultimate horror entertainment. You'll see this quote used a lot, and that's what they were going for. They decided, okay, people want action, let's give them action.

You know, I would also say it might be a case of last blockbuster syndrome. That's nothing to the video store. That has the case where if a company has a very successful product, they might decide, oh, we need to pursue this same product again, instead of realizing, oh, wait, we need to learn from lessons from what's going on around us and see what's happening in the market in general. You know, Nintendo does this sometimes, but I think Capcom did this with Reson 5 and Resident Evil 6, in my opinion. Because Resident 6 comes out, and Resident 1 is very much more Resident 1 5, because, number 1, again,

the entire game is co-op. What what they've done this time is instead of having one team, you now have three teams. The game gives you three scenarios, unlocked at the start, and you can choose which campaign you want to play with a different team in each campaign. And they're all open. So there's no like one, oh, you do this one first and you do what you want to play.

It doesn't matter. That's how you do it. Yeah. And there is obviously the 0.5, the fourth campaign, which does also exist. Right. Interestingly, open in the PS4 version from the start. Yeah.

When the game launched in 2012, that was locked and you had to beat the other three campaigns to access it. But they actually unlocked it later on with a patch so modern ports of six just have it open from the start. Oh, okay. The other funny thing about that is that the, the Ada campaign was very

much built around Ada herself as single player, but they realized that oh, wait, we made the entire rest of the game co-op. We need to put a co-op partner in there. So they added agent to the Ada campaign. Agent, agent is just a faceless

hunk dude who just hangs out with her and is not in any cutscenes and doesn't do anything unless you're playing as him he's just there that's interesting that was so janky oh god like because agent can't really use the uh what do you call the boat not the bo gun the um the grappling hook the hook the hook shot yeah the grappling gun yeah the hook shot like agent can't use it so when ada uses it this agent teleports he just appears he's like watson in that homes and watson video he just appears behind ada somewhere it's like oh oh what are you doing here

See, that's funny because while I did five co-op, I did six alone when I was doing my my playthrough for this. And actually, I had never beaten six before. I think I got about halfway through it and ended up stopping back in the day when I originally did it. So I actually had a lot of fun going through and finishing it up this time. But yeah, like when I finally got to Ada's campaign, which I did last on purpose, I did a single player.

And there is no, of course, agent in the single. player version. So there is no mysterious guy just kind of lurking around her. No, it's just completely single player if you play it, if you select a single player for it. But what I think is funny is that because they have this sort of multi-campaign approach, to me, it's almost a throwback to the old days because, you know, in the old, the original Resident Evil game, you know, the first two games, you had a choice. Oh, are you playing as Chris or you're playing as Jill? You know, are you playing as Claire? Are you playing as Leon? And those, you know, they have their own unique things. So in that sense, it's kind of a throwback, but in a more modern sense,

it's kind of like, here are three different stories, and they're all kind of different. So, like, to me, it's almost like, what do you want? We're giving you everything. What do you want? You tell us what you want. Here it is. It's all for you. And I think, I think a lot of people react to this like, this is too much. It's just too much. If you want to play, if you, if you play the entirety of Resident Evil 6, I think it's one of the longer games in the series because it's just there's so much. It's so much there. It's the longest.

Yeah. And not in a good way. So yeah, like, I think when you break it down, the three main campaigns are very, very different from one another. Because Leon's is very much more of a throwback to the older

games in four. You're doing a lot of the very methodical, you know, walking around doing little groups of enemies, so on and so forth. Meanwhile, Chris and Pierce's group is just five. It's five again. Just machine guns, lots of enemies, areas that are lots of circular areas where you'll, you know, you shoot, run, repeat, shoot, run, repeat.

And then Jake and, oh, no, brain fart, cherry. Jerry. Jake and Sherry's is this kind of mixture between the two. but in a very kind of odd way because they're yeah I don't know it's kind of hard to explain there because there's also feels very different from the other too

but the one thing I really appreciated about this is it was not just a story thing it was not just a gameplay thing but each character plays significantly differently they each have one special thing from the start that none of the others have Like, for example, Sherry's gun, her pistol, can shoot three bullets in a spread.

Like, if you pull the trigger once, it shoots three bullets. Leon can dual-wield pistols, things like that. So each of them, what's her name? Leon's partner. Helena? Helena. Helena. Helena starts with the Hydra shotgun that no one else gets in the game.

So each of them has something like that. And then also their melee attacks, which become very, very important in this game, are all different as well and it doesn't just feel like Chris is a re-skin of Jake who is a re-skin of Leon. They do not feel like that when you're playing them. Yes, yes, absolutely. Um, well, let's talk about the control thing because one of the big things is that they definitely took the notes from five and they said, okay, we heard you don't want to stop and shoot anymore, because in this game, you can move so much.

You can run and shoot. You can lie down and shoot. You can like roll around on the ground and shoot. Like you can do all, you can shoot whatever you want at any time. um melee is also available like you know in four and five you have to like stun an enemy somehow and then like context sensitive like hit them right but in six like you can just do melee whatever you want as long as you have like stamina there's a stamina meter but basically you can do me melee is whenever you want you can open with a melee and then shoot them if you want to do like john cla van dam you know it's absolutely the the go-to that i was going through the whole game is the very first thing you do when you see an enemy or a group of enemies is you just sprint to the nearest one and jump kick it in the face. Like, that is just the way that you start every fight because it's just a free big hit. And like the very first thing I did, like, we didn't mention this, but like in the last game, in five, you get your money, you take your money, you spend it to, you know, upgrade the rate of fire of a gun or a, uh, increase its ammo capacity or its damage. But in six, you upgrade specific skills. So the very first skill I got was the melee one because it's just like, your melee, you never run out of ammo.

And trust me, there are many times when kicking something in the face and stomping on its head is the go-to way to deal with it. Like, no matter where you are in the game, it is a vital thing. And I do not regret getting that first. Yeah, currency has been replaced with skill points. And you spend your skill points on sort of like, yeah, general attributes and buffs. Like, you know, more firepower, more melee damage. a, like, faster stamina refills, like, all these little things. And, you know, like, the big stuff at the end of the game is, like, you know, unlimited ammo stuff.

Like, that's how you get it, you know, through a lot of play. Yeah. And, like, there's some creative ones. Like, there's one that I really like that's, like, it takes away your crosshair, but doubles your damage. Oh. Interesting. And that's, like, that's a creative one. Or one that's, like, the last bullet in your clip does, like, triple damage or something like that.

So it encourages you to actually run through your clips all the way. And so there were various little things. And there were a lot that made it easier if you didn't have a real partner. Like it would make your partner better. Like they would do more damage or aim better or little things like that. So it actually allowed you to not just get more powerful, but to kind of tailor your experience as well. Yeah.

It's a lot of customization options, obviously, you know, which is catered around replay, replay, replay. Also, big change. Inventory, there's, I mean, there is a limit, but also there's kind of not a limit. Like, you no longer have to worry about, like, weapons. Like, oh, no, can I pick this weapon? You can always pick up the weapon. There's always room for one weapon.

You can only hold so much ammo and so much health. Like now in this game, your herbs combine into tablets, like tick-tacks, and you can only hold so many of them. It's like there are limits of what you can hold. hold but it's also like you can hold more than you could ever hold than any of the previous games like there's no more item boxes you're you're almost never going to like have too much like you know you can if you find a new gun just pick it up just get it and and and you'll you'll probably use it yeah with that i had an interesting kind of experience actually because like i will say the best quality of life thing is the the the first aid kit tablets the like you know you

combine your herbs you put it in the first aid tablet and you go for it like that was so helpful in item management. But the thing that I hated is there's actually quite a lot of ammo drops. And you can actually increase the ammo drops through the skills that we were talking about. So, but here's the thing. I don't know why this drove me insane. But like, for your pistol, you can hold 150 bullets. You can only hold 40 of any other ammo.

So like before it takes up a second spot in your inventory, which is kind of, which is okay when it's a rifle or a shotgun, not okay when it's a machine gun. So like whenever I was playing a character that's machine gun heavy like Chris, like I'm sitting there like all right, three of my inventory slots are just machine gun

bullets because I go through them so fast. And so I did run into times where I was just like, oh, another grenade? Well, I don't need that. I'm just going to throw that away. Better to have another stack of bullets kind of thing. But compared to five, I felt

like I had inventory for days. Yeah. Just days and days. Oh, but I'll also say, like, one of the other amazingly cool quality of life things is that your health is no longer a health bar. It's like segmented blocks. So, and as long as when a block is completely erased, okay, you're going to have to take a tablet to cure yourself of that, like, box. But if the box is like three-fourths depleted, as long as you don't take damage for like five seconds, it'll refill on it. zone. So you're a lot more capable of playing risky, getting in there with the melee, because you can get, even if you take a hit, as long as it's not from a big, crazy, you know, super powerful

guy. Like, you're going to just take the hit and then heal from it naturally. And, yeah, it allows you to play differently, a little more recklessly, which helps in the various campaigns. Which, of course, was a very popular trend of the time where more and more shooters had some sort of regenerating health system instead of, you know, constantly depleting and constantly, like, healing. It's like, oh, you automatically heal some damage, you know, like, that's just, that was very popular. So it's like, oh, now it's in Red than Evil. That's Rital 6. I don't think it's possible to tell the story of Resident Evil 6 in a single podcast. Did I try?

We get the broadstrokes? Yeah. No, we get the broadstrokes because it's not, like, basically it's just crazy U.S. government guy. Okay, wait, are we going full spoilers? In that case, it's crazy government guy plans a worldwide bioterrorist attack because he wants to bone Ada Wong, uh, that's it.

If you really, really want to go for it, that's really what it boils down to. Though you do not find that out until you play Ida's root through the story, that that's actually what it's about. But that's true. Also, there's an, we also have to mention

there's an evil Ada clone in this game. There's Ada Wong and there's an evil Ada Wong. Yes. Guy is, guy is so enamored with Ada Wong that he creates a way of creating, well, taking normal people and turning them into Ada Wong zombie clones so that he can get with Ada because Ada doesn't want to be with him. And when that Ada goes crazy, real Ada starts going around trying to hunt that Ada and figure out why there's another Ada Wong around. But then Chris, Chris and Leon and

everybody can't tell the difference between the two Edas, even though they appear one right after another wearing different clothes, like none of them ever go, hey, why did she have an outfit change like 25 seconds ago? That's weird. Like, no one picks up on it. The only one who doesn't care is like Leon, Leon's just kind of like, I'm sure there was a reason for it. And I'm just kind of like, Leon, you're right, but you're also thinking with your dick. So I don't know if that counts. Yeah, it is just, it is a bonkers international journey. You've got, I think everyone goes to China at some point. I know Jake and Sherry are in Europe for a while.

Leon and Helena are in the U.S. for a long time. They meet the president. The president is a zombie. Leon shoots the president of the United States. Yep. But does not say president evil. He does not say president evil. God damn you, Leon.

You say president evil when you shoot the president. Yeah, the aforementioned government guy turns to a T-Rex at some point. That was cool. T-Rex. I like that. my favorite part. Although I was really sad that that wasn't the final part. Like, that was the one, right? Like, you're fighting him and he's a T-Rex. I'm like, that's it. That's where you... That's the final boss. That's good. And then, no, no, we have to have one more. Like, literally you fight him, what? Three times? Like, three times in a row. It's literally like, boss-fight, boss-fight, boss-fight. And it's just like, come on. He was a T-Rex. The dino crisis homage. Yeah.

We can't get a dynocris, but we got a T-Rex in Resident Evil 6. Yeah. I'll say this. Like, I do, like, there's some interesting things. Like, I think the Jake Sherry story is great. It's about two people who are basically the equivalent of super humans, right? Even though. Children of monsters.

Jake is Wesker's illegitimate son, apparently. And so while he's not, like, he doesn't have the super speed powers of the super strength powers, he does have the immunity, like the immunity to pretty much every virus, which is his key point. And then Sherry has, well, she's Wolverine. She can take any kind of damage and shrug it off. And they do actually make it this really kind of thing about these two people who are kind of outcasts in very different ways, but they form like this really strong core friendship between them. And Sherry's optimism, which comes as a direct result of Claire and Leon in Resident Evil 2 is able to inspire Wesker's son to basically get over his daddy issues and realize

he can be more than a mercenary. He can actually be like a really good guy. And it works. I don't think there's a beat in that story that doesn't work with those two. And Chris and Pears go to C-Lab, right? They go down to C-Lab. Chris and Pierce is as good as everything is in that one. Chris's story is the most schizophrenic I have ever seen in a resonant evil because it starts off and he has amnesia and just has been like disappeared for several months. And then he goes and gets on a total revenge boner against Ada Wong because she killed everyone in his last team and turned him to

zombies. But of course this is evil Ada Wong, not the real Ada Wong, but you know, I don't think he ever figures that out. But it's like this crazy revenge thing that doesn't make sense because he wasn't even that revenge driven when Wesker killed Jill. Like even that, like, he's far more upset. So he goes from amnesia

to I'm going to like murder Ada Wong. And then suddenly there's literally a fight between Leon and Chris and it's kind of the climax of the whole thing. Leon's trying to protect Ada Wong, the real one. Chris is trying to kill Ada Wong. They fight it out.

And then Ada just kind of throws up a flashbang and escapes. And then suddenly Leon just puts his hand on Chris's shoulder and is like, just don't kill her, Chris. And Chris is like, okay, I have given up on revenge. And that's it. There's no reason that he gives up on his revenge boker. He's just kind of like, Leon, you have said nothing, but it makes a lot of sense to me.

And then, now that we have apparently completely stopped the revenge aspect, he goes to, as you put it, underlab C-Lab or whatever, runs into Jake and Sherry. And in the middle of this conflict, he just kind of turns to him. And he's like, hey, Jake, I killed your dad, by the way. I thought you should know in this moment of crisis. And it's just like, what? Chris, what is wrong with you? Like, what has happened to you over this game?

Well, he thought he was going to die on that mission. I think that's kind of the subtext they were going for. Maybe it's not very evident. Is that what is it supposed to be? I mean, you saw the cutscene at the beginning, right? He's like, I want you to take over the BSAA. I kind of felt like he was going down there to die. That's the impression that I got.

He certainly thinks that he could die. That's true. And so he's like, okay, well, well, here's my chance for dramatic player. I guess. But then that's the only thing that really doesn't make sense about that with Jake. is Jake reacts very poorly to that. Like, Wesker abandoned his kid, left him to basically starve as a mercenary from like the time as a baby. His dad was like the world's greatest bioterrorist.

And then Chris is like literally like, I mean, Chris, again, he goes from crazy revenge boner to like super stoic in a in a light switch moment. And it's just like, yeah, Resident Evil Six is pretty much toxic masculinity to gain. Because every guy in that game, except Leon, is like unbelievably pissed off in one way or another. Whether it's justified or not, given how long the game is, like, you just get really tired of how annoyed everybody is. But I will say this. I did love one line, even though that confrontation is so weird, you have this point where, like, Jake has his gun to Chris's head and he says to him. So he killed my dad. was it for business or personal?

And I like that because this makes it a very Chris-centric character moment. And Chris's response is very simple. Both. And I like that because it's very true if you go back and play five. Like he's killing him for both reasons. Like, yes, I'm doing it to save the world. And yes, I'm doing it because what the hell did you do to Joe? Like, these are very clear things.

And it was kind of a So it like tied in very well But at the same time It was just such a schizophrenic story Leon's on the other hand Made perfect sense the whole way through His and Helena Leon is basically good guy

Leon the whole time Even when it's like Oh the president getting turned into a zombie Is 100% Helena's fault Even though she was being blackmailed or whatever And Leon just kind of like Yeah crazy crap that Okay

It's like yeah he was like totally my bud my friend um but i mean i've seen some stuff i can hardly blame you at this point yeah leon this is like if you watch the movies that he's in that takes place after six and if he watched the movie that also starts before six by this point in the timeline leon seems like he's pretty much done with like emotional attachment to anything or anybody except ada he he he's been through a lot and And I think at that point, he just doesn't give a shit anymore. Yeah. So that's an interesting way of looking at it.

It really makes for an entertaining characterization on Leon's part. Like, he said you're a Chris fan, really. I'm a big Leon fan. And this is, despite everything in the story working against all the characters, I do think Leon comes out the best because he has, I think he had the most to lose in general, but he kind of like manages to keep it together. And he's not, you know, insufferable as a result. I get the titles mixed up all the time

Which is the movie where Leon goes on vacation to some Eastern European country And then Ada ends up fighting the president of that country And like a weird like Matrix fight And that was damnation That's damnation, okay Yeah, damnation is a whole bunch of crazy Right, not to be confused with degeneration

Then that is the one that takes place after Yeah But that never like that was like I never really thought about that with Leon But like yeah I think I think you're right. I think he is very compartmentalized at that point because, like, he does get a reaction. You do get a pretty good reaction when he sees

when he meets Sherry, meets up with her. Like, there's very clear, like, he has attachment to her. But you're right, that there's very few things he seems to really get upset about. It's just kind of like, this is how it is and this is how we're going to get through it.

And I'm forgiving. I can pretty much forget anything at this point. so yeah I do like the moment where he I feel like he very casually tells Helena's like all right we have to fake our own deaths very matter

factly in that moment very matter of factly we got to fake our own deaths now yeah it's it's a thing but just while we're kind of on the plot before I think we probably dive into some of the other gameplay stuff like I did want to say that as with five

and six as a whole both of them I do love how the recent movie, Death Island, it really ties back to five and six. Like, that's really what it's about more than anything. Jill is dealing with all the stuff that happened to her in five. Chris is dealing with all the stuff that happened to him in six. He's still trying to get over what happened to peers. He's afraid that what happened to, like stuff that happened to peers and how it affected him and that whole thing that happened to him in six is going to happen to Jill.

And he's really trying to be supportive without being. bossy father figure. And meanwhile, Jill is dealing with the fact that she is a superhuman now, just like Sherry. She doesn't age anymore. She was tortured, did horrible things, tried to kill the people that she cares about the most, you know, this kind of stuff. And I think what is it? Rebecca says, like, you know, the only person who sees her is a monster is Jill. She's the only one who can't forgive what she did. And so you get kind of a thing like that with her working with, you know, a lot with Leon and a lot with Chris in the movie. And so I liked how that made it better.

And I just have to, my, my kind of dream for the future is, I hope in Resident Evil 8 we get to see like Rose and Jill, two people who are superhumans who can have some kind of bonding because Rose's story is so much about her feeling isolated and alone. But Sherry exists and so does Jill. She's not completely alone, even if Rose is. far more powerful than either of them. And, like, I don't know. Like, I think there's a lot of timing and you can do.

I'm sorry, nine, yes. Yes, I meant to say nine. Excuse me, not eight, nine, yes, of course. Yeah. Death Island's really funny. Leon needs to stop attacking BSA people whenever he sees them. His ambush for Jill. But I do like...

Death Island pretty much is an homage to something else in the series. and like the final battle is just the icing on the cake. But yeah, it is kind of a nice wrap-up to the story that started in five because obviously seven and village have very little to do with five and six. So I agree with you there. It's good to see their characterizations come full circle. Yeah, because they haven't happened yet. They haven't, yeah, not as of Death Island.

Yeah. So like, but I always thought, like, as I was playing through Resident Evil 8 and you, especially the D.L.C. where you're Rose, like, her whole thing, is like, you know, she feels super isolated, you know, she, the only person in the world she trusts is Chris, basically. And I always thought that was kind of strange and interesting because if that's the case, where's Jill? And surely Jill or Sherry, both of them exist. And there are other superhumans in the world, even if they can't do the incredibly scary stuff that, you know, characters like Rose and Eveleen could do. But that's, sorry, that's a little

side story, but I do like how with recent works, you can see how 5 and 6 are being kind of brought back towards the 4, which is good, I think, even if they were kind of pushed aside once 7 and 8

revitalized the series. Amen. So I think it's fair to say that So I think it's fair to say that Resident Evil 6 goes over the top. I think that's fair to say Really? You've got a lot of action set pieces You've got a lot of quick time events

You've got a lot of cinematics You've got a lot of story beats You've got like I said There's a lot of world travel You're going all over the place It is a lot It is a big extravaganza It's you know as I said

What do they scroll to the notes They call it ultimate horror entertainment Is what they're calling They make this You know They spent years in this They spend I don't know How many billions of the end

To make this game and it comes out, and it's a big deal. Femitsu, Femitsu gives Resident Evil 6 a 39 out of 40, an almost perfect score. We shouldn't talk about Fonitzu in this. Yeah. Okay, I'm just saying. I'm just saying that loud. That's a fact.

It's a fact. 39 out of 40. That's what they said. It is a fact. Yeah. Critics in the West are not as kind. I have a quote here from Jose Otero. Hey, Jose, what's up?

Jose, Venet. Then it went up at the time. He says, The developers have iterated it on survival horror concept and turned it into an inclusive and competently made cooperative action game, but the end results feels far removed from the series' roots. And he gave it a C-plus.

Even harsher, we have a quote here from Kevin Van Ornd than at GameSpot. It might still be GameSpot, I'm unsure, but Kevin Van Orn says, this atmospheric third-person shooter, this has no survival horror game, certainly, hits a number of high notes, weaving multiple stories into a single narrative,

that you untangle from different perspectives. It's unfortunate that actually interacting with Resident Evil 6 is an excruciating chore. This is a wannabe action film that resents your interference and punishes you by forcing one horrible quick-time event after another

upon you. He gave it a 4.5 out of 10. He's right about those quick-time events. There are a lot of quick-time events. And they're the worst kinds. The freaking Mario Party kind where you're going to have to put your, you've got to circle

the thumb stick, you know, you've got to put it around so you can put your palm on the thumb stick and spin and give yourself some blisters and I'm just like, I could I could live my life with me for having to do one of those. That's such a funny way to describe it. There are so many, yeah, there's like, there's mashing ones,

there's spinning ones, I think there's like timing ones, like there's so many and you don't know what's going to happen, you know, time to land a plane, mash your button, time to climb over this Jeep, spin your stick, time to inject somebody, time it, like it's all, it's all so much. And again, some people, some people play this game and they just ride it for what, they ride it like a roller coaster, like, okay, I enjoyed the roller coaster. Other people looked at it and said, no, no, I'm not doing this. And it's just, and it's a big sort of turning point, I would say. Some people, you know, I think there are people who embrace five that rejected six. And there are people who loved five and just said, okay, well, this is more of five. And they love six. There are both kinds of fans. fans out there. And I did want to, I wanted to point out one other thing about that, like, that the game really did that I thought is the coolest thing. And it was the running into other random players as you play through the campaign. So like, for example, there are certain boss battles that will happen in several different campaigns. So let's say I'm playing as Jake and Sherry. There's a Chris and Pierce boss battle that they both have. And if you're playing online, just with your PlayStation Network, turned on, online, and another person is playing as Chris and Pierce at that boss battle,

you will get randomly matched with that pair of people, and you'll suddenly have a four-person co-op boss battle. And that also happens with Ada. She'll come in, and like there's a scene where Helena and Leon are fighting zombies, and Ada shows up in a chopper. And so one person will be piloting the chopper is Ada, and they're just a random player. You've never seen before. they're not part of your team and then you know you have your two others doing it there and there's several

like every basically every major boss battle is like that where you will get you know assuming a lot of people are playing you'll get paired with another random person it's it's the journey effect you get random you know paired with a random person who helps you out uh and and i know that's that was done again later in um devil may cry five did the same thing wow uh where you would be playing and like is one of the routes and if somebody else was playing one of the other routes you would occasionally end up in the same area fighting together and I just like even going back through it I was like that is such a cool feature it doesn't have to happen you know they're AI versions of the characters of no one else is around but like that just coming into it and then the other thing was

that there was an option to let a person another player become an enemy in your game where they would take over one of the random zombies or whatever, and they could come after you as well. And you could turn that on or off as well at your discretion. But I thought those were really cool additions that deserved to be shouted out. Well, whatever the critics said, fans certainly showed up again because at that point, when Resident Evil 6th launched, they shipped 4.5 million copies, which Capcom said was the highest ever they've ever shipped. That's what they said at the time in 2012. As it's recording, it is ranked right behind Resident Evil 5 as the seventh.

best-selling Capcom game all the time. So whether you love it or hate it, Resident Evil 6, like 5 before it sold a lot and a lot, a lot of copies. It's still, you know, both 5 and 6 are both still readily available on all kinds of platforms, including your Switch. But, but the people at Capcom, they were not absent. They listened. I have a quote here from Kobayashi right about lunchtime. He said, the way I always think of it is that if Resident Evil represents a child, then the fans and us as creators are the two parents. The results of games are like the children that are born between the both of us. And just like real parents, you're not always going to agree on what is best for raising that child.

So, you know, and I think you can see, in the long run, of course, five and six, big sellers, very action-oriented. They have the detractors, but some people love them. But obviously, clearly, people at Cap-Pum's notes, because what happens? after 6 comes out, 2012, the next couple of years, Capcom really doubles down on remasters and ports, and the refrain you hear in the press a lot, and I know this because I was there in the press, I was doing these interviews,

people kept saying, oh, we want Resident Evil to be scary again. We want Resident Evil to be scary again. Like, here's Resident Evil Zero Remaster. Here's Resident Evil Remake Remaster. Here's Four on Modern Platforms. Here's Revelations 2. And they keep saying, Resident Evil's going to be scary again, was scary again. So when we finally get Resident Evil 7 in 2017, like the series is completely

different and they absolutely decided, oh, we want scary, we want it now. So you can see how the company clearly shifted gears and reacted to the sales. Even though they had huge sales, they still said, okay, we sold a lot of copies, but is this what we want to do or do we want to change gears? And they changed gears. It sold a lot, but it actually undershot. their expectations. And if you think about how massive the game is and how much voice acting and how much have any cinematic, how much music there is, it's doubtful that Capcom made a ton of money or got as much back as they were expecting.

And I do think that that helped inform their decision to take future entries and take a more measured approach where it's not about the biggest game you can possibly make, but it's the best game that you can possibly make, even if it's a lot smaller. And if you compare the volume of pretty much any Resident Evil game that's come out after 6, with the exception of the 4 remake, it's very slimmed down. I think they've made them efficiently, and they're not as big. So, yeah, I do think that's something that's worth mentioning when it comes to 6. Yes, it sold a lot of copies, but did it meet their initial 7 million prediction, right?

I think they're expecting it to sell 7 million copies within the first 6. months or so, and they definitely did not get there. And a lot of the coffees that they did end up selling in the years following were, like, you know, bargain bin discounts. And so, yeah, I think, I think they really did make the right decision to kind of reevaluate, because seven is a much better game than six, and still one of my favorites personally. Yeah. But, yeah, this goes back to Alex, what you said at the start of the conversation, really, is that if you look at the top, what was happening at the time is that, you know, games were getting big, and games were selling big, and the business of games was getting huge, and lots of video games were getting, like, press just based solely on how much money they were making. And a lot of companies were looking at that, oh, well, I want that, I want that kind of money.

I want Call of Duty money. I want Grant the Thotto 5 money. So I'm sure the folks of Capcom that said, oh, well, if Resident Evil 5 was popular, if we make an even bigger Resident Evil 5, we'll make even more money and we'll sell even more copies. ends up that, no, Resident Evil 6 did not outsell Resident Evil 5. And so, you're right. They probably did, you know, what they wanted and what they got was not, was not the same thing. Exactly. Yeah, but I think it's also important to, even though, yes, yes, seven is seven and eight are both way, way, way different from five and six. That doesn't mean that they threw five and six completely out the window, because I will say, like, what was the best part of five and six? I think we can all agree probably the co-op, right? That's the best part of those games. And from that core aspect, we get Revelations 2, which is, in my opinion, by far the best,

maybe the best co-op experience I've ever had, because that's the game where they take co-op to the next level by making it, what I say is asymmetrical co-op. We have, you know, whether you have Claire and Moira, Claire can use the guns. Moira can't. So Moira has a flashlight and a crowbar. She can only, so she can blind the enemies and hit them with a crowbar. Claire can shoot them. And only by working together, like using those two strengths, can you get through it?

And then you have Barry and the girl whose name I can't remember, where you have invisible enemies that the little girl can see that Barry can't and you have to work together again like that and I feel like that in that game I believe it is just so much fun to play like that and it

never would have existed without five and six Natalia's little girl right? Yes I've actually never played Revelations to in co-op I just never felt compelled to do so maybe I should change that. Is it like

like RE5, where you both can just get through it together and you're like doing puzzles at the same time? Or is it Yeah, it does, it occasionally... More like an agent sort of thing. No, it occasionally splits you off a little bit, but it's very close to five and six. You know, you're there, you're both together. But the trick is, there's a big thing about trading off melee attacks. So if Claire stuns with the gun, shoots it in the leg, or it'll be like, so Moyer will hit it with the flashlight. Claire will shoot him in the leg Moyer will hit with the crowbar Claire will hit him on the ground with a knife

and you do this, it's this very back and forth thing between the two partners in order to do the maximum amount of damage but they also have very different strengths and weaknesses that work out because like yes only one character can shoot regardless of whether

it's barrier Claire and then the other one can't but they have very important things to do like if I remember Natalia she chucks bricks at enemies. She can stun them by checking a brick at them. Like, that's her kind of thing. She can point to invisible ones so Barry can see where to shoot and then you can chuck bricks. And so when you're playing as co-op, it's this very interesting thing because it's not like one person can completely carry the game while the other just

watches. You have to work together and, you know, exploit what one can do that the other can't. But again, I think that's kind of the natural evolution. Because as much as I like Chris and Claire, like they, or sorry, Chris and Sheva, they play identically, you know, and then, oh, we get little differences in like what weapons they can use in six or what melee attacks they have in six. And then we get Revelations two, where they're just completely different skill sets. And it's a clear evolution through those games. So I feel

like it wasn't all thrown away. It was just, they branched it off. They were like, okay, let's go back to horror with seven. We'll go to horror, like lost in nightmares, really. for Revelations, too. And I think they made a good game out of it. Hmm. I have one more theory I want to share before we wrap up up.

are over two hours. My theory, this is my theory, again, based on the timeline of it all, because Resident Evil goes all in on action and you have so many of these big action games, and this is around the same time that Konami just kind of shrugs and gives up on Silent Hill. Like, I don't know what's do is Silent Hill. Let's stop making Silent Hill. And I feel like with those two big mainline horror series, either disappearing or changing gears, I think that's what sparks a lot of indie developers say, oh, well, if they're not going to make it, If they're going to make the harm games that I like, then I'm going to make them. And I feel like that's why, you know, 10 years later, more than 10 years later now,

I feel like that that's why we have a boom of so many games that I like that because people have been making their own kind of thing for the last few years, inspired by what they used to like and just isn't there anymore. That's my theory. No, no. I think you're 100% correct. Like, when actually, question, when did PT come out? When did that drop?

2014. We turn 10 years this summer. So we have like, so right. So right around that time, yeah, we're done with Resident Evil Six. It was super action-y. But then we get the smaller games. We get five nights at Freddy's. We get these kind of horror games that are very popular on YouTube,

that are very popular with let's plays, that kind of thing. And those, you know, have a huge resurgence, which leads into then we get, you know, PT and more and more games of this variety. And so I feel like on a level, I'm sure that also. helped influence, oh, okay, we're going to make Resident Evil seven first-person horror. You know, it's amnesia, it's Five Nights at Freddy's, it's these kind of games are all built this way. So let's do it. Yeah, I think horror is a genre. I think horror is genre is very popular now. And I feel like, I think part of that popularity comes from this time when horror

was not seen as popular for some reason by the people who made the most popular horror games. They both sort of, you know, Capcom was trying to do the action stuff. and Konami was just like, I don't know, here, go clean the gym. You know, like, they took, Konami just, like, completely lost the plot with almost everything over there. I don't know. I mean, we're recording this in the wake of a brand new Silent Hill thing, which some people really like, you know, that that brand new short message thing, which is clearly a different, a different direction for Silent Hill, and we'll, I don't know what's going to happen next, but because Silent Hill also has Ascension, which is absolutely not a game, and I don't know, I don't know what to call it, but anyway, this is not a Silent Hill podcast. This is not a Silent Hill podcast. We're not doing this.

Anyway, that's my theory. This has been Retro Nuts. We've been talking for two hours. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm sure we're going to have more talk about Resident Evil and horror games and things to talk in the future. But before I wrap this up, I want my guests to say goodbye to the audience. So, Alex, first, please. Is anything you like to tell the audience about as far as you or your internet presence or things you want to sell them?

Go right ahead, please, Alex. I think Dino Crisis sucks. I'm just kidding. I know, I know. Yeah, it's been great being on. I really enjoyed this conversation and looking back at five and six, especially after 15 years. Where did the time go?

You can find me on X, Twitter, whatever you want to call it, at CVX Freak. I also have a substack where I write about Resident Evil regularly. I'm writing a second book about the history of Resident Evil at the moment. Yes. So hopefully I'll have more to show someday, hopefully before the next Dino Crisis game comes out, which is never coming out. So hopefully I get it out at some point because I do have a long way to go. But yeah, thank you for having me. Sweet.

And that first book, by the way, Itchy Tasty. Look that up. Itchy Tasty. Wonderful book. You speak to the people who made all the classic Resident Evil games, and it's just a great time. Fascinating stuff. I do. Richard, would I tell people where to find you on the internet and what you're up to?

Sure. You can find me on Twitter or X or whatever at Biggest in Japan. You can pretty much find me anywhere under that, all one word, biggest in Japan. I write daily for anime news network. You know, it's mostly focused on anime, of course. But anytime there's, you know, anything game-related or event-game-related, I do my best to write about it and talk about it. So, yes, please.

I would love it if you'd drop by my Twitter or read something I write on anime news network. Thank you very much. Yes, and as for us, this has been Retronauts. Thank you very much for listening to Retronauts. If you listen to the show for free, thank you very much for listening to Retronauts. However, if you go to patreon.com slash Retronauts,

well, let me tell you, for $3 a month, you get every episode, one week early at a higher bit rate, and then for $5 a month, which is just $2 more than the $3 month, it's nothing, it's nothing really, you get two bonus episodes every month, you get a bonus column from me every week, and I read the column to you as a little podcast, you get a monthly community podcast, also featuring me, and you get Discord access. We've been doing this now exclusive-wise. We've had exclusives now for about four years, so that's hundreds, hundreds of exclusive

of episodes you can listen to right now for five dollars, Patreon.com slash retinauts. As for me, personally, the individual diamond fight, my advice is look for, Fight Club, F-E-I-T, that is my last name, C-L-U-B, that is a descriptor of Chris Redfield's big old meat hooks. He's got clubs, he's got club for hands. He's just, he's tough guy. And that's it, everybody. Good night. We're going to be able to be able to be. Thank you.