Translating a joke from one language into another is a challenge I don't envy translators for.
Oftentimes, a word-by-word translation can make the soul of the joke get "lost in translation".
[Leon] Not Good.
A skilled translator knows when it is better to instead change the content of the joke slightly,
in order to get the intended emotion across in a way that works better in the target language.
Creating a REMAKE for a critically acclaimed video game for a completely new generation - is in many ways very similar.
Ever since The Remastered version of the first Resident Evil was released in early 2015
and this overhaul turned out to be an excellent refurbishment of one of the most iconic horror games of all time
that managed to modernize pretty much every aspect of the game it was based on without taking any of its... soul away
fans of the series have been pleading Capcom to give Resident Evil 2 the same treatment:
a complete technical overhaul of the first appearance of Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield in the Raccoon City Zombie crisis
that doesn't take away from what made the original such a phantastic experience at the time.
And it didn't take long until fans got official confirmation from Capcom:
In August 2015 - Capcom officially confirmed that a Remake is in development.
[Yoshiaki Hirabayashi] We do it!
A very fortunate turn of events, of course, since Hideki Kamiya - the director of the original Resident Evil 2,
and among others also the director of games like Devil May and Okami,
had stated that he'd been trying to convince Capcom to remake RE2 for a long time already
and that the idea behind it was to fundamentally refurbish and improve the core of RE2
in the same way that the 2002 GameCube Remake had done for the first entry in the series.
The remake that is widely considered to be the superior version of the game
and among fans considered to be one of the most polished game experiences ever conceived.
Now, after this announcement in 2015 - we didn't hear any news about the Resident Evil 2 Remake for a good 3 years
and many people already believed that it might have ended up in development hell; since Capcom seemed to focus on other projects in the series.
Like the HD Remaster of the Spinoff Resident Evil 0
and the 7th entry in the series, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard.
But on this year's E3 we finally got an official trailer and several long gameplay demos of the Remake that's scheduled for January 2019.
From what we've seen so far - this remake looks visually absolutely stunning;
Capcom is employing the same graphics engine as Resident Evil 7
which delivers some truly impressive and incredibly atmospheric visuals.
But despite that - what we've been shown surprised a lot of people with a simple twist:
This Remake - while telling the same story as the original Resident Evil 2 - changes the genre.
Or at least the "game-mechanical" genre.
Resident Evil 2 2019 was turned from a fixed-camera-angle tank-control survival horror title
into a Resident-Evil 4 like over the shoulder 3rd person action survival horror game.
And despite a lot of very positive reactions to this reveal
of course it also caused a certain backlash of disappointed reactions -
or fans who saw this development as a big red flag.
And I mean... if we look at the gradual decline of the series ever since the shift to 3rd person
the scepticism is more than granted.
[grunts and punches boulder]
Now, remake culture has been pretty ubiquitous, not just in the game industry, but generally in media for a good while
and when it comes to crisping up fan-favorites for a new audience
(let's not mince words - with the unanimous primary goal of repurposing old goods into new means to print money for large, IP holding companies)
I consider myself generally sceptical
- and mostly would describe my stance as "carefully optimistic" at best, when a remake is announced.
Because if a remake of a critically acclaimed and unanimously respected piece of entertainment
is approached by the right people with the right philosophy -
the results can be absolutely amazing.
But very often, that's not the case.
Now since the Resident Evil series has always been one of my fondest game franchises
and my memories of the second game are still filled with nostalgia induced euphoria,
I've been analysing the whole situation for a good while,
followed interviews, trailers and articles; and read between the lines as much as possible
and pretty sincerely came to the conclusion that from what we've been shown so far,
this RE2make is chock full of green flags all over the project.
Now, of course - this game has not been released, yet.
There is still a LOT that can go wrong in the final product.
Balancing, pacing, technical issues and many other aspects might very well turn out to be disappointing and lackluster in the end.
I'm aware of that.
But with this video, I'd like to show you why I find myself, for a change, in the enthusiastically optimistic camp
and why I believe that Resident Evil 2 2019 might just become the perfect remake we never asked for.
Trust is earned when actions meet words.
Trust in a game developer, though, is a weird concept.
Especially when we're talking about large teams in [mockingly] "Triple A" studios,
because it is asking to put your faith in a group of people that is so large and consists of so many individuals
that it's - logically - almost ludicrous to be certain that they'll reliably deliver something
that will, in the end, hit your personal taste on the spot.
Yet, it's everything from uncommon that game developers,
by consistently showing that they both understand their field, their audience and the craft at the heart of their creations
that people develop something like a blind trust in their ability to deliver exactly what they stand for.
Great examples are how Nintendo has always been unquestionably trusted in making people happy with each new iteration of their core staples,
like the Zelda franchise or... well, Mario Kart for instance.
Or the complete dominance of LucasArts when it came to the development of the most acclaimed point and click adventure games in the 90s.
Pretty much everyone I knew at the time just blindly bought new games of them without reading anything about them when they came out,
just because they successfully established this reputation of reliably delivering 'the best of the best'.
And they pretty much never disappointed.
Capcom... used to have this kind of trust when it comes to Survival Horror
... for a good while.
Being the ones who literally invented the genre and subsequently delivered extremely high quality iterations of that formula.
They continuously showed a great feel for how their own staple had to be
and, that's the most important part here - evolved.
Especially every time when the original creator Shinji Mikami was on board, the series made an enormous leap in quality.
The 2002 gamecube Remake of Resident Evil
which is actually the version that the remaster from 2015 was based on
is widely considered to be the far superior version of Resident Evil.
It overhauled pretty much everything: graphics, controls,
acting, level design, enemy design, balancing and it even altered the story.
For instance it brought the tale of Lisa Trevor to the lore
which adds an incredible amount of depth to the backstory behind Spencer Mansion that fits the story like a glove.
It's still my favorite part about the entire Resident Evil lore to be honest.
What I'm hinting at here is that - although people were at the time scared of the fact that major parts of the original would be altered
- like especially the story
it turned out that this Remake brought Mikami's original vision so much closer to reality.
My point is: A remake is especially valuable when the core vision of the original game was ... for various reasons
not possible to realize at the time of its conception.
The streak went on until Resident Evil 4
and Mikami knew for a long time that it was time to shift the genre into a more dynamic camera system
and he also knew full well that this shift into a new mechanical genre necessarily *had* to bring changes in pacing and overall orchestration to the table
if the Resident Evil formula was to be evolved into a new era.
Resident Evil 4 was overall far more focused on action than all of its predecessors -
but the change in setting and overall themes, as well as a plethora of very clever game design choices
made it into one of the most acclaimed video games of all time.
But after this... the trust in the series slowly began to fade
Mikami eventually left Capcom and the direction of the series gradually shifted more towards action and spectacle
which was strongly influenced by ... money.
By the recurring fact that the yearly Call of Duties were repeatedly breaking every sales record in media history.
So Capcom thought it a good idea to gradually turn their flagship IP into a horror-themed Call of Duty.
Many people weren't really happy with that - myself included -
despite Resident Evil 5 being an objectively "good game".
But the shift more and more towards action made people wary of what was to come.
Resident Evil 6 then confirmed that the series was in a complete identity crisis.
It tried to deliver a little bit of everything - tried to make everyone happy
with the result that it ended up disappointing pretty much everybody at the same time.
The game was such a mess that the universal trust in Capcom was lost by a big part of the audience.
Now where am I going with this - if you know my videos, you might have a hunch.
Because last year - almost exactly 5 years after the launch of Resident Evil 6,
we finally got the seventh iteration: Resident Evil 7: Biohazard
and after it came out, I made an almost hour-long video gushing about why this game so brilliant.
If you're interested - link's in the description.
What's most important for this discussion right now is
that this was a game which I approached with exactly the kind of "careful curiosity" I talked about earlier.
Capcom stated that they intended to fully reboot the series in its roots - and that confused a lot of people at the time.
Their confusion grew even stronger when it turned out that this game would be played,
unlike any other game in the series before, from a first person perspective.
Of course, you know fandoms, the outcry was loud
but what I'm getting at is that - in the end, director Koshi Nikanishi had done everything right.
Now ... if you don't personally like Resident Evil 7 for whatever reasons you might have, that is of course 100% legit and okay.
But what is indisputable is that this game delivered exactly what it promised.
Not just despite, but among other things *because* of the shift into the first person perspective.
Series' creator Shinji Mikami had on numerous occasions stated that his original vision for the first Resident Evil was to make a game controlled from a first person perspective;
but in the PS1 era the technology was light-years away from what it would have needed to deliver what he had envisioned.
Resident Evil 7 finally delivered on that
and it went further - it created a completely new and unknown menace that players simply couldn't place.
This was an incredibly important part of what made the original so scary - the unknown
something that later iterations simply weren't able to deliver anymore because ... the evil was already well-known.
There was almost no other option for the developers of newer iterations of the series than to turn the series gradually towards action.
Because the discovery of "what's going on here?"
was already taken away by all the predecessors that had firmly established the zombie-and-virus-lore
to pretty much anyone who has ever touched a video game controller.
Resident Evil 7 made exploring an unknown mansion scary and nebulous again.
And if you think about the fact that the game is, in many ways, structured exactly like the original game
you could even say that Resident Evil 7 is, thematically, a second remake of the first game. Minus the core story.
My point is - the way they pulled this game off - and the Remaster of the first Resident Evil
managed to re-establish a part of this age-old trust in Capcom when it comes to survival horror for me.
Capcom had shown that they were back on track to treat the series for what it is
instead of trying to shoehorn it into something it's not in the hopes of bastardizing it to cash in on a market it doesn't belong in.
If an old game is remade - the main motivation behind it is...
Well.. to make money...
But aside from that - what makes a remake ... worthy?
Let me completely wreck the upvote downvote ratio of this video by explaining why I think
that 2016 Reboot of Doom is a far superior remake than this year's revamp of Shadow of the Colossus.
Since the originals of both of these games were absolute cornerstones of their respective time in video game history,
one has to ask, how do you translate a milestone video game into a new generation?
Now, let me say that up front - the 2018 remake of Shadow of the Colossus is a really good game.
It is technically meticulous, it's polished, it plays well and it tells one of the best stories in video games to date.
You technically can't do much wrong with it, right?
But it still... was to some people a... somewhat unfaithful remake.
The reason for that is because it does the very disposable thing that so many remakes do:
It simply takes the old game, refurbishes its assets, modernizes its control scheme and then puts it on shelves.
It goes the "safe route" and by that, it loses a portion of the original's soul on the way.
It's like the good joke that gets lost in translation.
What it fails to achieve is to take each individual element of the original game at face value and ask, fundamentally
"What is it that made this element work in its own timeframe?
"What does it add to the experience and... what IS the experience that the original aimed for with it?
"Why is this here?"
And then take each of these elements individually and translate their core emotional purpose
to a new technical and cultural generation of video games and gamers.
SotC's remake polishes all the graphics into glorious super high definition -
everything is rendered crystal clear and the once mysterious landscape that used to be shrouded in atmospheric fog has now a near infinite viewing distance.
This air of mystery of the original, of exploring a land that is untouched by anyone before you in eons -
the abstract feel of the environments and the opaqueness of the world you explore; it is all kind of gone now.
Everything gets shoved in your face now because we don't have technical limitations anymore, right?
But sometimes, technical limitations are a good thing.
The strange, physics based controls of the original were notably wonky and sometimes difficult to handle.
It created a power-dissonance between the player and the colossi.
Your horse agro was not directly steered with your analogue stick but responded to your touch and reacted like a living being that you communicate with.
All this in the remake has been made simple, direct and far more comfortable in the new game.
But this treats the original as if the team around Fumido Ueda simply wasn't skilled enough to create a smooth and easy control scheme.
It completely ignores that the deliberate disempowerment was a core aspect of the intended experience.
There is a fantastic video essay by Michael Saba about the power of deliberate player disempowerment that I recommend here for further reading
link's in the description!
There are more aspects in the - objectively good - Shadow of the Colossus Remake that caused core parts of the game's soul to be lost in translation.
To quote Heather Alexandra from her video for Kotaku on the subject:
Now - if you compare that to 2016's Doom
which is technically far more than a remake - it is a full-on reboot of the Doom franchise.
But the thing it does right is that it doesn't just take a title that was perfectly tailored to a specific era in video game history
both technologically and culturally
and simply slapped a new coat of paint on top of it, refurbished the controls a little and called it a day.
This remake took every single aspect that made the original great into individual jigsaw pieces
translated what they meant at their core into updated or new elements realized with contemporary technology and game design knowledge,
or sometimes outright discarded them - and then in the end worked on creating a completely new experience tailored to make those new jigsaw pieces fit together seamlessly.
The result is a completely new game
- but it managed to create an experience that comes very close to how the original Doom "felt" at the time
but for modern audiences.
This is exactly what Resident Evil 7 achieved.
because it is, as I said before, at its core, a remake of what the original Resident Evil used to be when it came out.
It also managed to pull that off while fundamentally changing the game mechanical genre of the game,
while preserving the soul - the "emotional" genre of the game.
The 2015 remaster was a service for die-hard fans to relive the most polished version of the original story possible in a fresh coat of paint....
(and notice how one of the most controversial "improvements of this one was the option of having camera-relative controls as opposed to the traditional tank controls -
which made the game, just like the new Shadow of the Colossus, far easier to control,
but which took away a lot of the core challenge and appeal of the original)
while 7 was the first step in bringing the series into a new generation.
And that... is exactly why the shift to a 3rd person perspective
is an absolutely brilliant choice for a remake that wants to translate Resident Evil 2 into the modern generation of survival horror.
Now - why not just keep the tank controls and make a simple remaster you might ask?
It worked for Resident Evil 1, didn't it?
The reason is - tank controls are and have been for a long time - outdated and very very unnatural to control.
Resident Evil 1 is a game that is completely and entirely built around the tank controls;
which is why a remaster instead of a remake was a good choice for this one.
But Resident Evil 2, already when it launched attempted everything it could
to be something more.. or different than the first entry in the series.
It employed the same technology but already understood that the unknown menace of "zombies" was not as mysterious anymore.
So it already attempted to shift towards a more exhilarating pace and designed new, completely unknown enemies
that perfectly underlined this marriage of hi-octane and claustrophobia.
But as great as the game was at the time, I distinctly remember, even back then playing the game with my friends,
that we already though how cool it would be to free-roam in the raccoon city police department;
to play this game from a first person perspective. (That was what we thought at the time...)
The environment is almost perfectly suited for that
and it already felt that the game wanted to be far more than it was technically capable to at the time!
The greatest challenge for the developers with this re-envisioning of this classic
is to fundamentally deconstruct the original Resident Evil 2 and ask what each piece contributes to the whole -
what lies at the core of all of the respective elements - and then take this as a mission statement for each segment, each mechanic, each enemy type, the control scheme and the level design
and even down to things like sound and graphic design.
To learn from the mistakes and loud feedback to games like Resident Evil 6 that attempted
but ultimately failed at translating the soul of the series into a new generation;
that didn't really know what it wanted to be and ended up being nothing special in any way.
And especially when you hear and read what the developers are sharing about the project so far
the entire thing, as I already said, is full of green flags.
Let's look into it.
Resident Evil 2's producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi -
(who was by the way also involved in the acclaimed and beloved GameCube remake of the first game)
stated in numerous interviews the meticulous process at the heart of
"recapturing the spirit of the original PS1 release and bring it to modern systems:
In an exclusive interview with videogamer.com, Hirabayashi stated:
On the subject of feedback to previous titles, he added:
This interview gives a good idea of how serious the developers take the task to respecting the soul of the original game
- instead of just 'writing over it'.
In an interview with Polygon, producer Tsuyoshi Kanda talked at great length and far more detail
about more refined challenges that the new technology and the transition to a 3rd person camera angle brings to the development of the game.
Some of the most important aspects he goes into shows that the team is really on top of things.
For instance the fact that the shift to a 3rd person camera perspective
which means that you are always able to freely look around and see the rooms you're in from every angle
takes the ability of the developers for some of the classic cheap tricks of fixed camera angle games away.
You're no longer able to hide enemies in plain sight;
enemies that might be right in front of the protagonist but that the player simply can't see due to the very cinematic angle of the camera.
This of course puts up a great challenge:
when rooms in the original were specifically designed to hide certain threats from the player's view to create a sense of menace,
in a 3rd person over-the-shoulder environment, the same core emotion has to be recreated with different tricks.
Kanda talks about employing means like lighting, particle effects like smoke and deliberate level design that achieves the same sensation in the player;
but this time it doesn't feel like the game is tricking you.
And we can already see that backed up in the gameplay that we've been shown so far
so that is good circumstantial evidence for the credibility of their statements.
He also mentions their goal to make the controls feel heavy enough
to strike the balance between feeling comfortable enough to not feel outdated,
but at the same time making them imprecise and bulky enough to give you the feeling that you're not in a competitive tournament shooter
but in a life and death situation controlling an actual, sometimes thoroughly intimidated, human being.
To not artificially constrain the players with outdated camera and control schemes,
but at the same time establishing a very similar - or an even more menacing sense of claustrophobia and helplessness in the face of this zombie apocalypse.
All of this has already been achieved to great effect in Resident Evil 7 before.
Despite its shift to first person - the design supported the claustrophobic feel of the origins of the series:
the gun feels comparably slow and clumsy, not like in a Call of Duty
but like someone who's not super adept in shooting a weapon would handle a firearm.
And the level design and general layout of the mansion offered dozens of places where potential threats could hide
which made traversing the environment constantly tense and scary.
It showed that they understood how to translate.
One of RE2's main challenges, Kanda states,
is to make the zombie that's completely ubiquitous in media these days - scary again.
And from what we've seen so far - the developers are doing a fantastic job.
The iconic scene of Leon in the Raccoon City Police Department, in its best moments, comes close to photorealism;
that comes from the weighted and realistic feel of Leon's movements and his almost intimate closeness to the camera,
as well as the fantastic use of things like lighting, animations and effects.
The environment is darker and far more menacing in tone than the original
but at the same time, it manages to carry over this same sense of urgency and danger.
Something that, from what we can see so far works wonderfully
is the responsiveness of the enemies depending on where you shoot them
you're able to make them stumble and topple over with aimed shots at the legs
which we can especially see in Claire's gameplay demo.
Which can be used strategically to stall the mutant at her heels that is far too strong to defeat in a single encounter.
It manages to translate the same sense of danger of the original scene that it references,
but it susccsessfully converts if to a new machanical genre, effectively.
And the animations look not just plain fantastic.. but are efficient in supporting all of this.
All of this - underlines exactly what I've been talking about
- exactly what should be at the core of making a worthy remake:
Taking what's great about a game that defined a generation - and translating its essence to a new one.
Now, another tiny thing that seriously gets my hopes up...
in all the footage we've seen so far, I haven't spotted a single jump scare...
that makes me happy...
I know there are definitely people who like cheap jump scares
and especially a lot of developers who equate lazy scares with good horror experiences...
but seriously; the fact that the developers of the RE2make didn't even once stoop to this trite, overused horror trope speaks volumes!
And about the decision of changing the main characters' attires...
and especially in giving Claire... more clothes in general...
seriously, do you *really* think it's a bad thing that video games have finally grown up enough
to not exclusively cater to horny boys anymore?
Now, the gist of this is... no matter what we're shown,
everything that's added to the pile has so far made me more optimistic and excited.
Not just for the quality of the remake in general - but also in a greater sense...
here's a long term fan of this series that felt let down by the direction it took for such a long time
that after a now seamless streak of great comebacks has regained a big part of this childlike trust he once had in Capcom.
But seriously, this is actually just me trying to rationalize my hope that Capcom might really... finally...
after years of confusion and despair among the fanbase
be in the middle of actually giving survival horror the CPR it so desperately needed.
So, thank you for watching the entirety of my long ramble about why I believe that Resident Evil 2 could become the perfect remake
that firmly cements the franchise - and in extension the whole genre of survival horror - back into the center of attention.
But as much as I attempted to support my opinion
- because that's all what it still is in the end, an opinion -
with observation and proof, the game... isn't out yet.
We've only seen a fraction of it and many things could still end up being disappointing in the end.
So I'd really love to hear your thoughts - what do you think about the shift to 3rd person?
What's your impression of the remake so far and are you equally enthusiastically optimistic as I am?
Or are you among the sceptics and see loads of red flags? Let me know what they are.
Because ultimately - to paraphrase producer Tsuyoshi Kanda one last time:
The franchise by now is so huge that there are an endless amount of different expectations to
"what makes a good Resident Evil" to so many different people that it's ultimately impossible to make everyone happy.
Let me know in the comments below what a *good* Resident Evil is for you!
And *if* RE2make should really turn out to be a complete failure
and all my excited ramblings turn out to be for naught in the end -
then you have my permission to...
[Vampires] Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!
[Vampires] Bad Vampire! Shame!
This channel is funded by the generous support of my Patrons.
If you'd like to help out as well, follow the link in the description or click the card in the top right to hop over to my Patreon.
This month a special thanks goes out to:
[To join: patreon.com/RagnarRoxShow]
Until next time: Ta ta!
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