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
Princess Zelda is busy holding back Calamity Ganon in Hyrule Castle, locked in a state of immortality as she tries her best to save the land from ruin. You can either embark on a journey to recruit allies and reclaim the Divine Beasts or simply dick around for hundreds of hours. Ultimately, it’s up to you, and thus any sense of urgency tied to the plot is lost. Player agency is the most important thing here, so for better or worse, the story takes a backseat until you’re ready to tackle it. A number of main characters like Sidon, Riju, and Purah can be found across the game’s major cities, but they’re mostly passive. They’ll initiate cutscenes and dialogue to push the plot forward once you engage with them, but up to that point, they just sort of exist, rarely influencing the world until you decide to acknowledge they even exist.
This train of thought originates from the remake of Resident Evil 3, which was a painfully underwhelming successor to the phenomenal remake of Resident Evil 2. The latter was one of Capcom’s best games in years, ushering in a new era of Elden Ring Survival Tips horror brilliance that I was confident it would build upon. With the arrival of Resident Evil 3 and Village, it seems it is opting for an action-oriented approach that won’t risk alienating those who aren’t willing to negotiate with horror. It’s the smart move, but creatively, it feels like a hollow one. Resident Evil is at its weakest when the action ramps up, giving way to adequate gunplay instead of allowing its atmosphere and monsters to do the heavy lift
I’m worried that Breath of the Wild 2 likely won’t heed this advice, with Zelda being yeeted into a hole in the latest trailer and seemingly imprisoned as Link, Ganon, or whoever we end up playing as is tasked with saving her and freeing the realm. It’s far too early to draw conclusions about exactly how BOTW2 will play out, but it’s easy to assume that Nintendo will abide by series conventions and go for something safe.
There are a few things that always come up when you talk to someone about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild . Weapon degradation is one of the defining discourses around the game, with fans either despising the fact your equipment bursts into nothing after a handful of strikes or adoring how it forces you to think outside the box and constantly adapt your strategy to a changing inventory.
There are countless ways to tackle the majority of combat encounters and puzzles, while exploration offers the same level of malleability as the world around you shifts and changes with the day/night cycle. It isn’t perfect, and I’ve expressed annoyance at rain grounding my heroic himbo on more than one occasion, but I’d be a fool to ask for its removal. Countless games have taken inspiration from Breath of the Wild’s revitalisation of the open world formula, with Genshin Impact and Immortals Fenyx Rising being the most notable, and guess what – they both let you climb in the rain. Mihoyo and Ubisoft likely recognised the occasional frustration of this and decided to make things easier for you, while also secretly knowing that it sacrifices something in the process.
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
Suffice to say, Resident Evil 4 has definitely shown its age. Given that Resident Evil 4 was both a unique detour for the Resident Evil series, as well as one of the best overall action games of that era, a Resident Evil 4 Remake certainly has some big shoes to fill if it is to ignite the necessary nostalgia, while also creating something refreshingly
There are also some other possibilities in the direction Resident Evil 4 may take, given the direction of the recent two Resident Evil remakes. For example, it has been speculated that spiders were cut from both games because Capcom wanted the series to take on a more realistic approach. If being more realistic is the trajectory Capcom wants to maintain in developing more Resident Evil remakes, including its fourth game, there are some obvious stand-out features in Resident Evil 4 which defied the franchise’s more realistic traditions previously, and were more akin to third-person action games at the t
