Resident Evil Village is a different kind of mostly great. That was the planned title for my essay right after I beat the game. Then I immediately jumped back in for another playthrough. Then a third. The only reason I haven’t dove in for a fourth playthrough is so I don’t burn myself out on the game. So while I originally planned to be “clever” and reference the title of my Resident Evil VII write-up, I’ve found that doing so would fail to illustrate just how much I’ve fallen in love with Village.
It certainly is a different kind of mostly great from its predecessor, and depending on your tastes it may even be worse. If Resident Evil VII was a course correction for the franchise, Resident Evil Village is a “regression”. It not only focuses far more on action-packed gameplay, but explodes into the excessive camp of prior games without the wonderful self-aware nature of Leon S. Kennedy in Resident Evil IV. Only the primary antagonist hams it up like the games of old, feeling oddly out of place with the otherwise straight-faced acting and delivery of the rest of the cast. Where the strength of Resident Evil VII was its focus on the small world of the Baker family, Resident Evil VIII sacrifices screen time belonging to its own bizarre family of freaks for the sake of a bombastic and epic conclusion with implications for a larger scale ninth entry in the franchise.
To summarize, Resident Evil Village betrays everything that made Resident Evil VII’s narrative work so well and made players care again.
As a modernized reinterpretation of Resident Evil IV, however, Village succeeds in much the same way as Resident Evil VII drew inspiration from and freshly envisioned the very first game. It’s so effective that I may actually like playingVillage better than IV, even if I’m not sure it’s a better game.
I am not a Sonic the Hedgehog fan. That’s not a surprise when you consider my preferred childhood games were either story-focused Japanese role-playing games or side-scrolling action games that encouraged thorough exploration of the map. While the most obvious example of this preference is Super Metroid, a title such as Mega Man X would become my favorite entry in the Blue Bomber’s multi-generational saga due to its scattering of upgrades and power-ups across its levels. Super Mario World was littered with hidden secrets and additional exits to its stages, each one revealing alternate paths throughout the world map.
Sonic the Hedgehog did not reward exploration. It’s not that the game punished exploration, either. Sonic himself was just not built to thoroughly spelunk through his maps. Instead, it’s a try-try-again approach to progressing through each stage, maintaining that sense of flow in order to reach the end point. Mirror’s Edge is, in some ways, a spiritual successor to the more abstracted concept of platforming that Sonic the Hedgehog introduced.
Nonetheless, I was a child during the early days of the “console wars”, incited to anger by the SEGA marketing campaign that dared treat my beloved Super Nintendo as the “dweeby” console. My hatred of the smug smirk on the blue blur has not fully washed away, and has often felt justified as I’ve sat in the spectator’s seats of SEGA’s constant efforts to keep the character relevant through the shifting landscape of gaming. Perhaps most shocking is that, despite all of the “How do you do fellow kids?” the hedgehog has suffered and endured throughout the aughts, he has somehow managed to maintain a cross-generational fandom of near-religious – if not fully religious – devotion.
Oddly enough, it is this cross-generational fandom that makes last year’s Sonic the Hedgehog so widely accepted. It feels somewhat engineered to feed into the interests of nearly every target demographic within the anthropomorphic runner’s crowd of enthusiasts, but not in the same cynical fashion that you’d expect such a work to function. It doesn’t feel designed by committee, nor does it feel like a work shoved out onto the Internet by a mind that cannot comprehend humor, capable only of regurgitating that which is perceived as funny or amusing.
I think, most importantly, it recognizes that Sonic himself is not a character so much as an icon.
In my previous essay on Arkham City, I noted how “distraction” was as much a theme of the gameplay as it seemed to be in the narrative. Batman’s attention seems to be pulled anywhere but the primary threat throughout the length of the game. Be it Catwoman strung up by Two-Face in the courthouse, Joker injecting his infected blood into Batman’s veins, Penguin imprisoning Mr. Freeze and torturing a group of previously undercover cops, or the various scattered diversions throughout the city, Batman just cannot seem to sit down and focus on the matter at hand.
I feel as if this is the result of two conflicting desires. The first is to tell yet another story centered on the Joker and his relationship to Batman. The second uses Hugo Strange to justify the existence of the rather implausible and titular Arkham City. While similar open-world superhero games like Marvel’s Spider-Man or the inFamous franchise are more than happy to include civilians in their city settings, Rocksteady and Warner Bros. Montreal seemed insistent on creating a game world where only thugs, criminals, and the occasional political prisoner exist. This is why future spin-off entry Arkham Origins takes place during a snowstorm where all the innocent, law-abiding citizens remain sheltered in their homes, or Arkham Knight’s Gotham takes place after the civilians have evacuated the city. It wouldn’t make sense to have civilians wandering the streets when so many armed criminals are on the loose. Why are so many armed criminals on the loose? For the sake of the gameplay desires and ambitions of the developers.
As such, Hugo Strange is used to contextualize Arkham City. As outlandish and “comic book” as the concept is, it works for the sake of the gameplay. However, once the context of the setting has been addressed, the game developers seem to just shrug it off in pursuit of the Joker storyline. Or, perhaps, the story itself only exists in order to string together set pieces. Someone had a cool idea for a fight against Mr. Freeze, but there needs to be a reason for that fight to exist. Ah! How about Penguin’s has trapped Mr. Freeze in the Iceberg Lounge, and in order to fight Mr. Freeze you must first defeat the Penguin? Oh, and we can throw in that shark idea while we’re at it! Wait, why is Batman rescuing Mr. Freeze?
This seems like the simplest explanation for Arkham City’s scatter-brained story. A series of set-pieces created first, stitched together by a desperate attempt to contextualize the whole lot of nonsense during the late stages of development. Unfortunately, there’s a key moment towards the game’s end that leads me to believe the writers – which included Paul Dini, one of the lead writers of the 90’s era animated series – had something a little more substantial in mind.
Note that the rest of this post will be heavy on spoilers.
I recently decided to revisit Batman: Arkham City the other day, inspired by rereading many of Shamus Young’s excellent analyses and essays regarding the caped crusader’s most popular game franchise. That it would be one of Shamus’ favorite game series, one in which he devoted hours to mastering and perfecting its combat, has always fascinated me. Don’t ask me to explain why, as I don’t think I have a suitable explanation. It just doesn’t seem to be a “very Shamus-y” title, and yet it’s one in which he is frequently comparing other games.
I myself have played the original Arkham Asylum several times – including a recent trip back last year to help ease the pain of unemployment – but I’ve only taken maybe two trips around the generally favored Arkham City since its release. I’ve always favored the former due to a preference for the linear gameplay design, taking inspiration from personal favorites such as Metroid Prime or – intentionally or coincidentally – the original Resident Evil. Smaller worlds and environments that you explore more intimately are more my cup of tea than sprawling cities or open-worlds behaving as obstacle-courses.
It’s that very open-world design that I imagine made Arkham City a favorite among the fanbase, however. Having played through the game again, I feel even more confident in the assertion that the sprawling urban playpen is what curries such player favor and fervor. What I also came to realize, however, was the nature in which this expanded scope would impact not just my enjoyment of the game’s world, but also its narrative.
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