You are once again entering the world of Survival Horror. Every passing day brings us one day closer to the launch of Resident Evil 6, and we're now less than 30 days away. We've been looking back on all of Capcom's previous installments in the series to prepare ourselves for the new adventure's arrival, and we're finally nearing the end of the long journey – after revisiting 0, 1, 2, 3 and Code: Veronica one at a time, there are just two games left on our stack to replay. We'll get to Resident Evil 5 in our final installment, but you know where we're going today. It's Resident Evil 4.
Resident Evil 4 is so fundamentally different from its predecessors that it's almost not a Resident Evil game at all. And, in fact, it turned out not to be one in its first form. RE4 first went into development back in 1999, and at the onset Capcom's creators decided to set out and make something totally different. Something cooler, edgier, more focused on action. They worked on the new approach diligently, but ultimately hit a roadblock – the project just didn't feel like Resident Evil any more. So they tweaked a few names here and there, tossed in some demons and decided to call the whole thing "Devil May Cry" instead. Perhaps you've heard of it?
Devil May Cry has gone on to become its own successful series for Capcom, but its origin as a failed attempt at Resident Evil 4 meant the RE team had to go back to the drawing board and start from scratch after Dante was born. RE4 then entered a rollercoaster of up and down development, constantly hitting obstacles and getting scrapped in one form after another. Work on the game behind the scenes at Capcom ultimately covered a span of six years, from 1999 until 2005, and along the way there were versions of the game featuring traditional zombies (gone from the final), a haunted castle (altered dramatically in the final) and a ghostly man wielding a hook (also gone from the final version - we got a chainsaw maniac instead).
All of the trials and troubles were ultimately worth it, though. Resident Evil 4 finally launched in its finished form in January 2005 as an exclusive for Nintendo's GameCube, and the praise from critics, fans and skeptics was immediate, intense and nearly universal in scope.
I say "nearly" universal because it'd be wrong to claim that everyone loved the new direction Capcom took for the franchise – Resident Evil 4 tossed out so many elements that had come to define the older games that some (rather hardcore) fans still refuse to acknowledge this game as a true sequel, saying the series ended with either Zero or Code: Veronica. Well, it didn't. It just got a whole lot different.
Resident Evil 4 ditched static, pre-rendered backgrounds. Code: Veronica had taken baby steps in that direction, but RE4 totally abandoned the old style of presentation – the camera now trailed right behind your character and every environment was fully rendered in interactive 3D. For a series that previously felt like it was played through the vantage point of stationary security cameras in hallway corners, it was a huge shift.
The change in viewing angle heralded a major upgrade that fans had been dying for the series to adopt for years as well – improved, actually functional controls. Finally freed from the stiff, unmanageable and unrealistic tank-like controls of the earlier games, RE4 let you fluidly move where you wanted, when you wanted without the directions for which way was "forward" getting flip-flopped on you every three seconds. Aiming weapons became much more natural as well, and enemies' reactions were upgraded to pay attention to whether they were shot in the leg, or the arm, or the head or torso.
The visual and control changes sped up the game's flow considerably, which contributed to the fact that RE4 now felt more like a title belonging in the action genre than the old survival horror category. Perhaps embracing that shift in tone, Capcom also eliminated many of the traditional shocks and scares of the old games, so playing RE4 was less of a frightening experience and more of an adrenaline-pumping one. And it's that part of the shift, perhaps, that made some Resident Evil purists decide to boycott this new adventure – because they played RE games, in part, because they enjoyed peeing their pants. (While RE4 left most people dry.)
But those weren't the only changes from the old RE status quo – Capcom kept making more breaks with the past by taking the series' storyline in a whole new direction. Raccoon City, the Umbrella Corporation and all the regular plot beats of the franchise's first five games had little to do with Resident Evil 4. This game took its protagonist from the past – Leon S. Kennedy, once upon a time featured as RE2's rookie cop – but then it thrust him into an all-new setting with all-new foes.
Six years after the Raccoon City incident, Leon has somehow progressed in his career to the point that a one-time rural city police officer is now working as an official United States government agent. He's deployed by himself into a remote, rustic farming community somewhere in Europe and given the assignment to find and bring home the President's missing daughter, Ashley Graham. So he pulls on his fluffy-collared bomber jacket and goes to work.
It isn't long before he runs into zombies, though . . . except, wait a minute, these aren't zombies! RE4 offers a more advanced foe instead, call Los Ganados. These Spanish-mumbling peasants aren't corpses reanimated by the T-Virus, but rather still-living people who've been infected and compromised by the "Las Plagas" plague. It makes them zombie-like in temperament and behavior, but their intact humanity allows them to do things the old zombies never could, like wield weapons in battle.
Leon ultimately does track down Ashley, and the two work together to escape the horrors around them – survival is ultimately an important theme. But RE4 never quite circles back around to really feeling like its predecessors, even after some cameos and callbacks to the past appear later on in the narrative. No, RE4 is definitely a breaking point. It marked the moment when Resident Evil was reborn and became, basically, a totally different property for Capcom going forward.
Resident Evil 4, if you didn't already know, was a phenomenal game and a huge success. There may have been a handful of detractors pining for the old days of the series, but the vast majority of gamers embraced all of Capcom's changes, respected the hard work put in to make it happen and bought, bought and bought the game again to rack up millions of units of sales on the GameCube. It was a huge boost to Nintendo's console, too, as the Big N had had very few third-party hits to ship exclusively to the little purple system. RE4 moved hardware, and even the most hardened Nintendo fans will admit that the game outclassed even the first-party efforts of the same generation – possibly including stand-outs like Metroid Prime.
But the celebration was short-lived. Resident Evil 4, a GameCube exclusive, announced and promoted as a GameCube exclusive for years, celebrated and embraced and prized by GameCube owners for being an exclusive, ultimately became the least exclusive Resident Evil game ever made. Capcom saw the potential for the game. They recognized how huge it would be. And the draw of dollars from other hardware was just too compelling – so the company backed out of its promise to offer the game only on GameCube and began furiously porting it to every other platform imaginable.
You've got to respect Capcom, in a way. They didn't just wimp out of exclusivity with Nintendo – they turned on that notion with force.
RE4 made its way to the PlayStation 2 before 2005 was over, in a version that was criticized for not being as visually sharp but which also contained additional content that made up for the lesser graphics. The Wii got a great version a few years later that swapped Wii Remote aiming into the control scheme and still ranks as one of our favorite Wii titles of all time. And the game came to PCs. And PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade in HD-ified form. And even mobile devices! Seriously, they shoehorned this game everywhere, even onto platforms without buttons. That's some incredibly thorough porting, there.
The Impact on Resident Evil 6
It's hard to be too upset about Resident Evil 4 being pushed to be so prolific, though, as it really is a sensational title that deserves to be enjoyed by as many people as possible – even if it's in a weird iPad edition. And RE4's expanded audience is probably the biggest thing Resident Evil 6 has got going for it, as this game is the one that has undeniably provided the template that the new sequel is following.
All the major changes continue to be reflected in RE6. The behind-the-shoulder camera angles, the more intelligent enemies, the action focus, the quick-time events. (Oh yeah, RE4 introduced those too. So thank Leon for all those button-mashing reflex moments.) Leon himself is back in a playable role once again too.
Let's just hope that one last piece of RE4's story provides inspiration too – since it was intended to be a GameCube exclusive and ultimately saw wide release to every other platforms, perhaps Resident Evil 6 will do the reverse. We'd love to see it shift from being only on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC and get a version for Wii U added to the release schedule.