One of the best games ever made, but you knew that.

I don't need to explain what Resident Evil 4 is, or the story of its development, or the influence that it still holds over the entire industry nearly two decades later. I just want to talk about what this game means to me, because your own personal experience with Resident Evil 4 is the last unique thing that anyone could hope to say about it in 2023.

Resident Evil 4 came to me when I was a teenager, as I imagine it did for most other people. I think it was the Best Friends zaibatsu that turned me on to it in the first place, but there was an undercurrent running through the gaming zeitgeist that commanded you to play it. That commanded you to enjoy it. Resident Evil 4 was a game that I was supposed to like, and so I did. I liked fitting in. It helped that it was a fun game. I liked being able to tell people on the internet that it was one of the best things ever made (in all of my ignorance; I'd probably only played fifteen video games in my life up to that point) and arguing with anyone who dared say otherwise. I knew that Resident Evil 4 was good, and everyone else needed to know that, too.

Then I got a bit older, and I got a bit sourer, and I started questioning a lot of things. About myself, about the world, about my hobbies. Suddenly, liking Resident Evil 4 felt kind of lame. Like, sure, it was still good, but everyone said that. I thought Dead Space 2 was the better game because it didn't have tank controls and it was scarier. That became the new, hot take that I could hold to my chest. Fuck what everyone else was saying, it was time for me to say something fresh. Something new. It was something I could argue about that felt novel, and I could feel the first tendrils of a personality starting to grow deep within me. Someone in middle school once teased me with the line "where'd you download that opinion from", and it got to me so bad that I still remember it over a decade later. Never again. I had thoughts of my own, now.

And from there, I just kind of passively accepted that as the new way of things. Resident Evil 4 was old, and passe, and Dead Space 2 was the successor to the throne. I never played either of them again after I got into my sophomore year of high school, and I didn't even finish Resident Evil 4 the last time that I played it. The two games have been laying dormant on my shelves and in my Steam library for eight years each. But the news of the Resident Evil 4 remake spurred me to check out the original again. I had fond memories and — with age — I'd become a bit less of a contrarian for the sake of being contrary. It was time for a retrospective.

Walking through the village made me tear up. I was home again.

I beat Resident Evil 4 a lot when I was a teenager. I would come home from school and play it on days when my friends weren't around for Call of Duty matchmaking or miniature Mortal Kombat 9 tourneys. I had forgotten how much I had loved it while I'd been playing it; I'd forgotten a lot about the game as a whole.

I didn't like it just because someone else put me on to it. I liked it because it was good. I liked it because it was fun. I liked it because I could be cool and stylish and slick one moment, and then be shitting my pants over the sound of a breathing regenerator the next.

Resident Evil 4 is still the same game that I loved as a teenager, with all of its pock marks and blemishes. The quick time events are an odd inclusion. Massive, flashing DODGE and KICK prompts can override your fire button, which can make you take an unfair hit. Resources on the mandatory first normal mode playthrough are so plentiful as to make the game trivial with any effort spent on health and ammo conservation. It's sleazy in a way that feels exploitative rather than self-aware. Ashley can be a pain if you end up telling her to wait in a safe area where enemies will later spawn in from nowhere. The economy is completely fucked, what with the fact that you can buy fifteen insta-kill rocket launchers to use against bosses for the same amount of pesetas it takes to fully upgrade a magnum.

And I don't care about any of that. When I played Resident Evil 4 again for the sake of this review, nearly a decade after I'd last touched it, I was a teenager again.

This home isn't perfect, but it's mine.