The corresponding blog post by Shamus had already gone into great detail regarding the boss fight with the Ouroboros creature, but I am most interested in the response in the comments section. Many had made note of their own awful experiences to this boss, or referenced other streamers that had a similarly confusing time. Yet still there was the odd comment, shrugging their shoulders and saying “I don’t know what to tell ya, I found it simple to comprehend”.
I am a strong believer that true objectivity may be impossible, but it is still something to strive for when examining a work critically. You want to understand the developer’s intent and what common response players have to it. However, there is no disregarding of personal taste and whether the subjective preferences of the developer will align with the audience or not. This is where “intended audience” becomes an important factor, and while it must be taken into account for anyone seeking as objective an analysis as possible, it must also be recognized that, sometimes, one person’s experience is just that: one person’s experience.
That is to say, while it is possible to immediately understand the logistics of the fight, there are too many questionable or vague features that go against common gaming expectations to make the proper course of action clear.
In his connecting blog post for this episode, Shamus brought up a lot of arguments he had heard in defense of the Resident Evil franchise. I don’t think each of those defenses were intended for Resident Evil 5, specifically. The one regarding controls, for example, was likely meant for the first three games plus the Code Veronica spin-off, where the tank controls were always of controversy even at the time.
In regards to the story, however, I think Shamus is correct in that the developers weren’t intentionally trying to imitate Western B-movie shlock. There are a surprising number of fans of grindhouse style features in the older sphere of Japanese game developers, but those games have a clearly distinct style to match. MadWorld or Shadows of the Damned bear those marks far more closely than anything Capcom has produced. Instead, Resident Evil is clearly inspired by the classic George Romero series of Living Dead films and more, a variety of creature features from several decades of time, as well as modern Hollywood trends.
However, this also dismisses the nature of Japanese entertainment itself and the variety of clashing tones it can possess. Having seen a variety of live-action films in addition to anime, Japanese entertainment often has a certain tone, or combination of tones, that do not always fit the standards of Western entertainment. Or rather, you ask two people to make two desserts based on chocolate and one person presents you with a cake while the other provides a milkshake. They are both sweet and chocolatey desserts, certainly, and both will contribute to a potential diabetes problem, but they aren’t the same kind of dessert.
Japan’s sense of humor, self-awareness, and concept of “cool” can often come off like that, and when presented out of context with the intent of appealing to a global audience, it can become downright goofy or dumb.
Our adventure through Plagas infested Africa continues as Shamus and I venture back into Resident Evil 5. We had performed some experiments and confirmed that the theory of the game dropping the other player’s ammunition types was largely correct. It seems like a rather misguided method of encouraging cooperation between players, or perhaps is weighted too heavily towards providing ammo of the wrong type. This almost always guarantees that, as the player’s resources dwindle throughout a fight, they’ll have to rely on their partner staying close and navigating the inventory in order to make the trade. Not only do the game’s encounters encourage the players to split up, but the fights are often intense enough that opening the inventory will leave you vulnerable.
Obviously this system can be managed, as I have played the game multiple times with multiple different friends throughout the years. It’s more a matter of an implementation that is not quite ideal, as it often makes cooperating more difficult. Simultaneously, there’s the trouble of playing the game solo with only the artificial intelligence as your companion. After a strange disconnection, Shamus was forced to watch the stream as A.I. Sheva made strange decisions and wasted all of his pistol ammunition. My own experience recollects instances of Sheva wasting shotgun ammunition trying to shoot an enemy at a rifle’s distance, or that was intended to be shot with turrets planted in the environment. The A.I. was incapable of manning said turrets on their own, instead needing to be instructed by the player. It taught me that the A.I. will waste ammo on their own, and that constantly instructing them was only costing me time and leaving me vulnerable, so better to leave it with the pistol and let it run out of the most common ammunition, turning the remainder of the fight into a single-player experience.
I feel that the inventory’s three-by-three design was in part chosen as an easy way to map item shortcuts to the D-Pad, but in 2007 Dead Space would not only allow the player to simply set those shortcuts up themselves, but healing and stasis energy would always be mapped to two separate buttons. Perhaps it would have been worth adding an additional three slots to Resident Evil 5’s inventory and adopting the Dead Space model instead – especially if you were going to force armor to take up a slot.
Juggling inventory between two players certainly forces teamwork, but the question is whether it’s fun and enjoyable or if you’ve managed to frustrate not one, but two players with this constant chore.
February of last year marked the beginning of Shamus and I streaming Resident Evil 5, one of my most beloved yet flawed games. There’s nothing quite like it, nor has there been anything like it since. I imagine some might point to Resident Evil 6 as being similar, but that game had so many AAA ambitions that all collapsed under the sheer weight and lack of focus to it all. Here, Resident Evil 5 seems like a simple enough proposition: take what made Resident Evil 4 so good, and reconfigure it for two-player co-op.
I had written an introduction for Shamus to try and set the scene as a brief explanation as to why this game exists, as well as propose my own mission to try and analyze and figure out what the game does well. Instead, the series was more mocking and groaning than it was positive analysis, as so many decisions end up being quite baffling and even confusing. It is a game that I think will need a proper analytical video one day.
As for this episode in particular, Shamus had many a gripe regarding the ammunition system. At first we were under the impression that the game intended certain weapons for certain characters – so the shotgun for Chris and the TMP and rifle for Sheva – but as the series went on, I began to theorize if the ammunition system is instead based around what your partner has, specifically, in order to encourage teamwork.
Such a creative decision would truly encapsulate all that makes Resident Evil 5 what it is.
Here we are at the conclusion of Batman: Arkham Origins, a game I greatly enjoyed streaming with friend Shamus Young despite the technical difficulties. Even in the last stretch of gameplay we were griping about story and boss design, completely baffled by the decisions that led to this end product.
Shamus’ final thoughts on the game tackled many of the justifications for Batman’s behavior in Arkham City, Arkham Origins, and Arkham Knight. It should be noted that Paul Dini, responsible for much of the animated series’ quality in writing and chief writer of Arkham Asylum, had less involvement in Arkham City and then no involvement after that. The man that came to define Batman for many had little or no involvement in the games where he feels most out-of-character.
Even disregarding the animated series, this Batman feels out of character for the one found in Batman: Year One, Batman: The Long Halloween, and Batman: Dark Victory. Perhaps it’s a matter of preferring certain writer’s interpretations, or being ignorant of other notable Batman storylines, but it feels like the chief writers at both Rocksteady and Warner Bros. Interactive Montreal have very different ideas of just who Batman is compared to some of the authors of his best stories.
Which could also explain why none of the villains feel right, either.
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