OPINION: Resident Evil is probably better for taking a dive towards being a weird pseudo-action horror game occasionally starring the undead. Also opinion: Barring the REmake, which is probably the only example of a legitimately terrifying game in the series, the best versions of Resident Evil are the ones that aren't really about anything.
There have always been better alternatives to horror than Resident Evil as a series. Capcom probably understands this. The fourth and most famous numbered entry ditched a preoccupation with creating an atmosphere of dread and creepiness with one of tension and exhaust. When a moment of restituted happens in Resident Evil 4, it's generally a much needed break as a lead up to the next set piece and an opportunity for the player to chill out a little.
The best version of Resident Evil 4 is the one with the largest focus on an extra game mode that supplies the player with a character of their choice, a stock of ammunition and increasingly large hordes of cannibal villagers out for blood and sweet chainsaw executions.
Giving the player the opportunity to exist in a perfect vacuum is the best execution of Resident Evil.
After all, none of the character interactions in these games extend beyond the bizarre. Leon (the protagonist) is what Capcom imagines as the perfect American action hero in 4. He is soon supplanted by Chris Redfield, the dough faced and flat nosed special forces commando from the very first game only now grizzled and attempting to smuggle his guns into a foreign country in Resident Evil 5
(picture: caption: the guns are his arms)
Taking all of these aside and putting them in a blender is what gives you the Mercenaries, which had a release on the 3DS as the aptly named Resident Evil: Mercenaries 3D. A game with no cartoonish, hilariously evil pharmaceutical company or sneering British bio-terrorists.
Breaking the game up into these little intoxicatingly feverish set pieces where you're tasked with killing many quickly is basically the absolute crunchy inner core of the third person action game.
At some point last year I bought Resident Evil: Revelations 2 and let it sit in my Steam library while I wasted time on a bunch of puzzle games and visual novels and waifu simulators. Side point: Resident Evil is as much of a waifu simulator as a game like, well, Waifu Bartending.
I've played maybe the first chapter of the game I bought before I got easily sidetracked. There's a mode within the game that offers mission-based levels where you're a bloody steamroller cutting through re-spawning undead abominations until the end goal of the level.
It is Pure Resident Evil, distilled to its finest essences. Dumb, goofy costumes and over-the-top melee animations sandwiched with bizarrely complicated weapon customization and character progression. It is not Survival Horror as two words together. It is neither Survival nor Horror separately.
If traditional horror games are like reaching into a bucket of frothy bile so you can get a key to open the door in a rusty room you've been locked in. Then the purest form of Resident Evil must kicking the bucket across the floor and picking the key up from the ground.
Where I should be overjoyed that the newest entry unveiled at E3 will be returning to its roots, a part of me is sad I wont be solving international biological terror with shotguns and cowboy costumes.
that's the end I guess
