---Resident Evil 5---
You's twos are just in time for the fireworks. BOOM! Hahahahahaha
Resident Evil 5. Capcom top seller. Career Luigi to RE4's Mario. One of my favorites, fight me. Played the good ol' OG PS3 version.
Chris Redfield, an accomplished agent of the BSAA's North American branch, volunteers for a mission in the Kijuju Autonomous Zone in Africa, where intel points to a deal notorious bioweapons smuggler named Ricardo Irving is planning to make. To help ease tensions, fellow BSAA agent, native Sheva Alomar is recruited to accompany Chris to the deal coordinates. Along the way, however, things are complicated by a new bioweapon collectively named Majini, and hushed whispers of a doomsday product named Uroboros. To get to the bottom of this mysterious plague, Chris will have to revisit two people from his past he thought were long dead.
I love this game. It took the direction RE4 went in and ran full speed. A lot of people say this is the point where RE lost sight of It's Survival Horror roots entirely, what with it being a third person shooter Co-op action game taking place almost entirely during the day in open environments against opponents who eventually utilize automatic firearms against you with the introduction of a cover system and....I'm not making a good case for myself here, am I?
I guess now is as good a time as any to discuss my interpretation and why this shift never bugged me so much. I like to look at long running, single storyline game series as just that, part of a continued narrative. Starting with RE0/REmake really hammered this home for me. The stakes start pretty small. You have a field medic for a police department in a single city and an escaped prisoner wandering through the woods, essentially. There's a grander tale, but it's largely irrelevant to the characters. The primary motivation is "escape without dying," it moves onto the next night, where the same police force is trapped in a Mansion. Basically one building, but it extends a bit further into double crossing, corporate evil, stopping an experiment, and escaping without dying. In RE5, we're following Chris Redfield's story. As dictated by the ploy, he's a veteran of this stuff now. The stakes were raised. Narratively, it makes sense that he's faced like nine small environments with zombies successfully before, and a tenth time would just be spinning wheels. For what I feel Resident Evil 5 is, the bombastic nature of it fits. It feels like the end of a saga to me. Like the first leg of Resident Evil has reached it's conclusion. I'll go into why this viewpoint damages later games slightly when I get to them, but moving on.
This game remains pretty crisp. For the generation it came out, it's still a pretty great looking game, and I'd argue it has something visually that Resident Evil 6 lacked. Not sure what. I love the creature designs, I love the stark differences to the main areas -town, swamp, laboratory/tanker. I know this is in the timeframe of the mass epidemic of "blurry, shitty lens flare everything is orange and brown," games, but I feel like RE5 had very distinct color/hues for each of it's primary areas. Orange, green, blue, black/steel grey. It just gelled for me.
I love the gameplay, too. Co-op is ideal for it, but I never have too much trouble playing solo, either. Sheva's AI isn't aging the best, but I've always found that with a bit of proactive work, she becomes manageable. Getting into her inventory and making her the least harmful to your stock works wonders, it's like setting Gambits for her, to borrow a FFXII term. Give her a surplus of white eggs so she'll heal herself but fucks off with the whole "first aid spray for a papercut," thing she loves doing. Give her a vest, a stun rod, and a submachine gun, since those bullets are like pez candies, and you're all set. Until you play on Professional difficulty, but hey.
Gunplay is tight, has some weight to it, Chris just feels good to handle (oh my) this time around. The expanded melee is fucking awesome, with the player having basically a new move for every part of the opponent that gets stunned. Also, the combo attacks, though a bit finnicky to set up, are really cool when they pay off. I also liked that on larger enemies, you perform your final combo attack automatically. The Gatling Gun Majini are always catching backhands and haymakers, and it does wonders for the machismo fueled adrenaline rush that the last area of the game becomes.
Regular enemies are a lot better than in RE4, I think. There wasn't much difference between Ganados/Illuminados/islanders beyond anesthetic stuff and damage dealt per hit, but here, the Majini behave differently and use differing attacks from the wetlands majini and the base majini. It's never too drastic, but you do have to change up your strategy on the fly between these areas. The sub-bosses are the weak spot, essentially being African versions of the RE4 ones, but even that is somewhat excusable because those enemies were so fun the first time.
I think boss fights were really cool in this one. Uroboros, Ndesu, U8, Popokarimu, Jill and Wesker being standouts, Irving being a low point. A lot of these were super fun in co-op, and it's always nice seeing boss fights in RE games be more than just firing at something until it dies. Same reason I enjoyed the Queen Leech in 0 and Plant 42 in REmake, I suppose. I've come to really enjoy the final fight with Wesker, too. Getting that melee kill in the fight in awesome.
Gameplay moment to moment, I really enjoyed going through these levels. Seemed like every chapter had a little bit of a gimmick, a twist on the arenas, etc. Chapter one had your classic RE4 Cabin siege, your RE4 quick time events, the mine segment where one player had to use the light. The swamp had an "open linear," (thanks Druckman) layout with the boat, then there was the light beam lasers of death in the temple, the Licker hallways, turret sections, the vertical firefight on the giant rotating elevator, good ol' fashioned cover shooter segments, battles on conveyor belts, etc. Just a lot of cool ideas that took what RE4 established with the general gunplay and extended it into scenarios where you had to do different things with it.
I was initially disappointed by the inventory system, because (I forgot to mention this before) the attache case Tetris in RE4 was super satisfying for someone with mild OCD like me, and it almost turned each pause into a little breather mini game. So having 16 slots was a step back for me, but having to navigate the menu in real time give it a little bit of the umph it would have been missing otherwise. I think the decision to nix the Yellow Herb and start each character with max health was a good call, too.
Music didn't do too, too much for me, but the standout tracks, I really enjoyed. The save theme, the Tanker theme, and the ending theme were all great. Everything else was serviceable, but not remarkable.
Storyline and characters, I mostly vibed with it. I LOVED the in depth files that were unlocked as you progressed. I was at the same time kind of disappointed that so much crucial information wasn't relayed in cutscenes, as A LOT of Wesker and Spencer's motivations, and most of Excella and Sheva's characters were relegated to these files. It would have been nice to see some of these elements reflected in the cutscenes. I know that the files have always been a part of RE, but it was always more environmental storytelling than anything. Supplemental details, and not pieces of information that affected your understanding of the main story.
What was in the game though, I enjoyed. This was about as good of a send off for Wesker and the original storyline as I could picture Capcom getting right, and the Stairway to the Sun being the source of the Progenitor Virus nicely tied Umbrella and Spencer to the events in Africa, making this entire game feel less frivolous than 4's very Gaiden feeling. RE5 also managed to tie in the Las Plagas, too, which retroactively made RE4 feel like it belonged more. Too many times has Wesker collected samples of something and put it to no real use, so props there.
The DLC's very fantastic, moreso Lost In Nightmares than Desperate Escape. The riff on the mandatory cabin siege in DE made it worth it. But all of LiN was pretty good. Nice slice of fanservice, and I loved the fixed camera angle Easter egg.
Random final notes: blonde Jill was a mistake. I loved the fight choreography in this game. All of the racist takes are severely overblown, game is a bit tone deaf at worst.
