Spectacle is all well and good, but it’s short-lived, and doesn’t stick in your mind like the haunting corridors of Raccoon City Police Station. I’m not going to remember the Lady Dimitrescu boss battle for years to come, but Leon’s first hesitant steps into Raccoon City are already cemented into my mind. Resident Evil 4 is filled with moments like this. Despite being a rollercoaster ride of gunfights and boss battles, it never fails in making you feel vulnerable. Leon could have a fully upgraded arsenal at his disposal, but not taking his surroundings into account would lead to an untimely de
Playable Zelda likely isn’t coming in Breath of the Wild 2. I’ve made my peace with that eventuality, even if it could help push the series forward in some truly meaningful ways. When all is said and done, Link is the hero of this story – the Hero of Time if you haven’t heard – and his presence is more than enough to carry an open world adventure we’ll spend hours being enamoured with when it arrives in 2022. Another mystery protagonist could be waiting in the wings, but whether they are related to Zelda remains to be s
Given the trajectory of Capcom’s admittedly stellar remakes thus far, I’m unsure it will do such a thing. It could be the opposite, with reimaginings of Resident Evil 2 and 3 opting to trim the fat in favour of tightly executed scares and chaotic action instead of giving us time to stew in our own horrific, b-movie circumstances. Compared to everything that came before it, Resident Evil 4 was a completely different beast. It took the clunky controls of the franchise and morphed them into a third-person shooter experience that felt deviantly modern by 2005 standards. It wasn’t afraid to push boundaries, setting the bar so high that I’d argue the genre is yet to surpass them even to
Now, the game did launch with a fair few missing features that were included in previous entries, so it certainly wasn’t (and still isn’t) perfect. Be that as it may, New Horizons still provided millions of people with an island escape when they needed it the m
I’ve touched on Breath of the Wild’s ending before, and how it’s an almost perfect example of melancholic hopefulness. The evil is vanquished, and now Link and Zelda are tasked with forming a new life together, with rebuilding Hyrule and comprehending what’s next after hundreds of years away from home. Hyrule is both keenly familiar and an unknown quantity, with so much changing over the past century while many of its core fundamentals remain the same. Now they need to move onward and figure out what to do next, carrying all of their past losses on their shoulders while adding further responsibilities to the p
It could be that I’m worrying over nothing, and Capcom plans to do Resident Evil 4 all the justice in the world, but many of the habits it has formed and repeated over the last generation have me thinking otherwise. I hope I’m proven wrong, since I’m still so excited for such a reboot, but not if it does a disservice to what came before
However, the recent gameplay trailer has me concerned about Princess Zelda’s exact role in the story, and whether she will once again act as a passive heroine who finds herself trapped in Hyrule Castle until Link can muster up the power to save her. Breath of the Wild saw Link venturing into Hyrule Castle to rescue Zelda, who had been holding the evil of Calamity Canon at bay for 100 years. Her power was fading, and she required Link’s help to prevent her kingdom from falling into an inescapable state of r
Breath of the Wild KOTOR 2 restoration Project seems to follow a similar trajectory, except Hyrule Castle is floating in the sky this time. See, it makes all the difference. Except it doesn’t really, and I can’t help but feel that potentially relegating Princess Zelda into the role of a helpless damsel in distress once again does a disservice to what is easily the best iteration of this character to date. In many ways, Zelda is the star of the show, especially in the previous game’s flashbacks where her struggle with accepting royal power and the inevitable loss of her friends becomes a crux for the unfolding narrat
However, neither of these games encourage experimentation like Breath of the Wild does, so it’s much easier to provide us with an easier mode of traversal instead of artificially increasing the time required to reach our destination. However you slice it, these games viewed climbing in the rain and weapon degradation as negatives, choosing to build upon Nintendo’s vision by removing them entirely. I understand why games that adopt so many of the ideas pioneered by Breath of the Wild opt to change them, because every game is different and it’s unfair to tar them all with the same brush. That being said, I don’t want the upcoming sequel to follow in their footsteps. Nintendo needs to stick to its guns, favouring clumsy wet traversal and obscenely delicate weapons over an adventure that simplifies things to the point of triviality.
