Perfect, but the original already was.
I imagine that my reaction to hearing about a Resident Evil 4 remake was pretty similar to most: confusion. What about Resident Evil 4 needed to be remade, really? The game was about a decade ahead of its time when it dropped in 2005, and virtually every third-person shooter made since then has had some of Leon Kennedy’s sharp-jawed, Bingo-quipping DNA inside of it somewhere. Moreover, the idea of trying to do Resident Evil 4 but again — or God forbid, better — is still kind of laughable. You’re going to remake one of the greatest and most influential games ever made on a lark to see if you can do it too? Good luck.
But, lo and behold, they did it. Resident Evil 4 Remake is a fucking phenomenal game. The combat is heavy and satisfying, it’s a delight to look at, the characters are all enjoyable, and I put thirty hours into it over the course of about a week and a half without really even noticing. I finished one playthrough, finished Separate Ways, and then immediately started another run on a harder difficulty. When I'm done with that run, I'm going to play it again, and again. It’s perfect.
How much does it deserve to be celebrated, though, when what it’s based off of was that good to begin with?
I’ve heard people talk about “remake culture” quite a bit in recent years in relation to video games, and I don’t think it’s an entirely wrong observation that the same games seem to be releasing a lot lately. Naughty Dog is perhaps the easiest studio to point and laugh at over this — The Last of Us is a series that’s about to have a higher number of remakes of its original games than the actual amount of original games — but it is something of a trend in the industry right now. Granted, we’ve been getting high-profile remakes and remasters of games for about fifteen fucking years now, so it’s hardly new, but people seem to be, for whatever reason, noticing it more lately. Common criticisms drifting up now are that remakes are lazy, and overly safe, and cash-grabby. I agree insofar as the fact that I’d vastly prefer if more games could look forward, rather than back. There are a lot of very talented creators out there with a lot of fresh concepts that ought to be allowed to flourish, and it’s stifling the maturity of the medium to insist that we just keep playing the hits every night with a different band.
Despite this, it remains evident that not all remakes are created equal. I found the Dead Space remake to be a complete bastardization of the original, with slippery, weightless gunplay and animations, and little actually improved aside from bringing back Gunnar Wright and some more technically impressive lighting effects. By contrast, I was surprised at how much Resident Evil 4 Remake impressed me, introducing much more committal combat into the original’s stage design and vastly expanding a lot of the systems that went woefully underused back in 2005. Both games have exceptional scores in both popular games coverage and right here on Backloggd, so either I missed something major in Dead Space, or people are just so predisposed to celebrating something good and old being new again that they just hand it a high score without really thinking about it. I’m sure it’s reductive, but I’m willing to bet it’s the latter. If you don’t trust me to say it, I’m certain that these high-profile, mega-budget companies making the fucking things would take my position; why would they be cranking these things out with the massive budgets and marketing campaigns that they’ve had if they weren’t confident people were going to drop everything to get a copy on release day? Saying you’re going to take something that people enjoyed and just make it again is an almost surefire way to guarantee a boatload of sales from those so caught in the hype cycle that they won’t even wait to see if it’s been fucked with before they buy it.
Anyway, I’m getting off-track. The point to make here is that I think there’s a single element that really makes Resident Evil 4 Remake stand out from among its more cynical contemporaries.
It was very clearly made by people who love the original.
“Yeah, yeah, the multi-million dollar game was made with goddamned love”, I know. But there are so many small changes here that I seriously doubt you’d be able to make or notice without having a deep appreciation and understanding for what the original was doing. EA never had a clue what made Dead Space great. Yasuhiro Anpo and company down at Capcom, however, get it.
Early on, during the village fight, there’s this tall tower standing down by the church entrance. There’s not much in there — just a herb and a ladder leading up — but this was an immensely safe spot to hide in the original. You could climb all the way up to the top, hang out for a few seconds, hop back down before the ganados started throwing molotovs at you, and then repeat. You could wait out the entire fight just by doing a simple loop of climbing up, dropping down, and then climbing back up again, and they couldn’t do a thing to stop you. Naturally, knowing about this safe spot, I went up the ladder and prepared to dig in. It was at this point that the floor gave out under Leon’s feet and dropped him right into the middle of the crowd congregating at the bottom.
To come up with a trap like this requires a few things on the part of the developers:
a) to know about the safe spot in the original game,
b) to expect the player to also know about the safe spot in the original game,
c) to bait the player into attempting to use the safe spot in the remake (by making the fight significantly more demanding)
It doesn’t sound like much, but take a second to consider the amount of understanding you need to have about Resident Evil 4 to be aware that the safe spot actually existed in the first place. It’s a decently-known exploit — enough so that the original developers accounted for it when they put out the game — but it’s nothing that a casual player would be aware of. It’s a remarkably small change in the grand scheme of things, but there’s a constant stream of these equally small changes throughout that add up to truly distinguish this from its predecessor. It’s just enough to keep old players disoriented while still being able to recognize what’s here. It’s a bit less of a remake and more of a remix. It feels like a very high-budget fangame, and I mean that in a good way.
With the release of Separate Ways adding back in a little more story context and some previously-excluded areas that I missed — the sewers, my beloved, are back — Resident Evil 4 Remake feels like a complete experience. I imagine that you’ll have a worse time without the DLC, and that kind of sucks when that shit came free with the original as long as you didn’t buy it on Gamecube. I managed to cop the base game and Separate Ways on sale for about fifty bucks, and they added Mercenaries mode to this in a patch at some point in the past couple months; this is definitely a game that is significantly better now than it was when it came out, which I think is kind of regrettable. It’s barely been out for eight months and I’m having a way better time for less money than people who picked it up on day one. This is a broader condemnation of the industry, I suppose. I like it when games come out feature-complete, and I'd argue this didn't. But hell, what does, anymore?
I do have my quibbles with the game. Unarmed enemies are the most dangerous fuckers alive because of that unblockable lunge they do that covers about two miles of distance and has to be ducked under at a precise time if they don’t flinch from being shot, which happens a lot on the harder difficulties. Knife parries are exceptionally overpowered and essentially give you a “get-out-of-bad-positioning free” card for a significant portion of the game. A lot of the music has been changed from its original synth-y sound to more of a Hans Zimmer-esque orchestral score, and that’s a major disappointment; the sequence where Mike comes down in his chopper is easily the worst offender of the lot, sounding like something pulled directly off of the Dark Knight Rises soundtrack. The reticle sway when Leon aims is a little extreme and definitely should have been tuned down a little. There’s something intangible that I feel was lost in getting rid of the tank controls and the stationary aiming; Resident Evil 4 definitely controls a bit more like everything else now, rather than controlling like what inspired everything else.
Even with those complaints, this is still a phenomenal title. I think the developers of this remake understood way more about what fans of the original wanted than anyone was expecting them to, and they’ve created something that stands alongside one of the greatest games ever made. By no means does it replace nor exceed the original, but it’s on the same level, and that alone is a borderline unthinkable achievement.
And they didn’t “make the mine thrower good” in this. It was always good, you cowards.
I imagine that my reaction to hearing about a Resident Evil 4 remake was pretty similar to most: confusion. What about Resident Evil 4 needed to be remade, really? The game was about a decade ahead of its time when it dropped in 2005, and virtually every third-person shooter made since then has had some of Leon Kennedy’s sharp-jawed, Bingo-quipping DNA inside of it somewhere. Moreover, the idea of trying to do Resident Evil 4 but again — or God forbid, better — is still kind of laughable. You’re going to remake one of the greatest and most influential games ever made on a lark to see if you can do it too? Good luck.
But, lo and behold, they did it. Resident Evil 4 Remake is a fucking phenomenal game. The combat is heavy and satisfying, it’s a delight to look at, the characters are all enjoyable, and I put thirty hours into it over the course of about a week and a half without really even noticing. I finished one playthrough, finished Separate Ways, and then immediately started another run on a harder difficulty. When I'm done with that run, I'm going to play it again, and again. It’s perfect.
How much does it deserve to be celebrated, though, when what it’s based off of was that good to begin with?
I’ve heard people talk about “remake culture” quite a bit in recent years in relation to video games, and I don’t think it’s an entirely wrong observation that the same games seem to be releasing a lot lately. Naughty Dog is perhaps the easiest studio to point and laugh at over this — The Last of Us is a series that’s about to have a higher number of remakes of its original games than the actual amount of original games — but it is something of a trend in the industry right now. Granted, we’ve been getting high-profile remakes and remasters of games for about fifteen fucking years now, so it’s hardly new, but people seem to be, for whatever reason, noticing it more lately. Common criticisms drifting up now are that remakes are lazy, and overly safe, and cash-grabby. I agree insofar as the fact that I’d vastly prefer if more games could look forward, rather than back. There are a lot of very talented creators out there with a lot of fresh concepts that ought to be allowed to flourish, and it’s stifling the maturity of the medium to insist that we just keep playing the hits every night with a different band.
Despite this, it remains evident that not all remakes are created equal. I found the Dead Space remake to be a complete bastardization of the original, with slippery, weightless gunplay and animations, and little actually improved aside from bringing back Gunnar Wright and some more technically impressive lighting effects. By contrast, I was surprised at how much Resident Evil 4 Remake impressed me, introducing much more committal combat into the original’s stage design and vastly expanding a lot of the systems that went woefully underused back in 2005. Both games have exceptional scores in both popular games coverage and right here on Backloggd, so either I missed something major in Dead Space, or people are just so predisposed to celebrating something good and old being new again that they just hand it a high score without really thinking about it. I’m sure it’s reductive, but I’m willing to bet it’s the latter. If you don’t trust me to say it, I’m certain that these high-profile, mega-budget companies making the fucking things would take my position; why would they be cranking these things out with the massive budgets and marketing campaigns that they’ve had if they weren’t confident people were going to drop everything to get a copy on release day? Saying you’re going to take something that people enjoyed and just make it again is an almost surefire way to guarantee a boatload of sales from those so caught in the hype cycle that they won’t even wait to see if it’s been fucked with before they buy it.
Anyway, I’m getting off-track. The point to make here is that I think there’s a single element that really makes Resident Evil 4 Remake stand out from among its more cynical contemporaries.
It was very clearly made by people who love the original.
“Yeah, yeah, the multi-million dollar game was made with goddamned love”, I know. But there are so many small changes here that I seriously doubt you’d be able to make or notice without having a deep appreciation and understanding for what the original was doing. EA never had a clue what made Dead Space great. Yasuhiro Anpo and company down at Capcom, however, get it.
Early on, during the village fight, there’s this tall tower standing down by the church entrance. There’s not much in there — just a herb and a ladder leading up — but this was an immensely safe spot to hide in the original. You could climb all the way up to the top, hang out for a few seconds, hop back down before the ganados started throwing molotovs at you, and then repeat. You could wait out the entire fight just by doing a simple loop of climbing up, dropping down, and then climbing back up again, and they couldn’t do a thing to stop you. Naturally, knowing about this safe spot, I went up the ladder and prepared to dig in. It was at this point that the floor gave out under Leon’s feet and dropped him right into the middle of the crowd congregating at the bottom.
To come up with a trap like this requires a few things on the part of the developers:
a) to know about the safe spot in the original game,
b) to expect the player to also know about the safe spot in the original game,
c) to bait the player into attempting to use the safe spot in the remake (by making the fight significantly more demanding)
It doesn’t sound like much, but take a second to consider the amount of understanding you need to have about Resident Evil 4 to be aware that the safe spot actually existed in the first place. It’s a decently-known exploit — enough so that the original developers accounted for it when they put out the game — but it’s nothing that a casual player would be aware of. It’s a remarkably small change in the grand scheme of things, but there’s a constant stream of these equally small changes throughout that add up to truly distinguish this from its predecessor. It’s just enough to keep old players disoriented while still being able to recognize what’s here. It’s a bit less of a remake and more of a remix. It feels like a very high-budget fangame, and I mean that in a good way.
With the release of Separate Ways adding back in a little more story context and some previously-excluded areas that I missed — the sewers, my beloved, are back — Resident Evil 4 Remake feels like a complete experience. I imagine that you’ll have a worse time without the DLC, and that kind of sucks when that shit came free with the original as long as you didn’t buy it on Gamecube. I managed to cop the base game and Separate Ways on sale for about fifty bucks, and they added Mercenaries mode to this in a patch at some point in the past couple months; this is definitely a game that is significantly better now than it was when it came out, which I think is kind of regrettable. It’s barely been out for eight months and I’m having a way better time for less money than people who picked it up on day one. This is a broader condemnation of the industry, I suppose. I like it when games come out feature-complete, and I'd argue this didn't. But hell, what does, anymore?
I do have my quibbles with the game. Unarmed enemies are the most dangerous fuckers alive because of that unblockable lunge they do that covers about two miles of distance and has to be ducked under at a precise time if they don’t flinch from being shot, which happens a lot on the harder difficulties. Knife parries are exceptionally overpowered and essentially give you a “get-out-of-bad-positioning free” card for a significant portion of the game. A lot of the music has been changed from its original synth-y sound to more of a Hans Zimmer-esque orchestral score, and that’s a major disappointment; the sequence where Mike comes down in his chopper is easily the worst offender of the lot, sounding like something pulled directly off of the Dark Knight Rises soundtrack. The reticle sway when Leon aims is a little extreme and definitely should have been tuned down a little. There’s something intangible that I feel was lost in getting rid of the tank controls and the stationary aiming; Resident Evil 4 definitely controls a bit more like everything else now, rather than controlling like what inspired everything else.
Even with those complaints, this is still a phenomenal title. I think the developers of this remake understood way more about what fans of the original wanted than anyone was expecting them to, and they’ve created something that stands alongside one of the greatest games ever made. By no means does it replace nor exceed the original, but it’s on the same level, and that alone is a borderline unthinkable achievement.
And they didn’t “make the mine thrower good” in this. It was always good, you cowards.
2 Comments
you fucking get it.
cowboyjosh
5 months ago