This review contains spoilers
Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles was a decent enough time in the right hands, but to call it a particularly good light gun shooter would be a bit of a stretch. The game ended up selling surprisingly well though, passing over a million units on a console traditionally known for more family-friendly enterprises. Naturally, Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles materialized two years later and manages to be a significant improvement over the original game. While it still has its fair share of problems, I found that The Darkside Chronicles refined a lot of what made Umbrella Chronicles enjoyable and either improved or cut out what made it occasionally frustrating.
The biggest improvement that developer Cavia brings to the table is the game's much faster pace. While Umbrella Chronicles didn't play badly by any means, enemies tended to wander instead of targeting the player, which could make some encounters feel overly long or boring. Darkside Chronicles has no such thing; enemies make a mad dash toward you the moment they spawn in, playing closer to The House of the Dead than Cavia's previous offering. Headshots are more generous and generally on hard mode enemies are less tanky than they were in UC's equivalent difficulty. As a result, the game's combat loop feels a lot snappier and more fluid and this increased my enjoyment twofold. Cavia also added many quality-of-life improvements, such as being able to change your weapon loadout mid-level instead of having to wait until the end of the level, which means if you mistakenly picked an ill-suited loadout or simply wanted more immediate access to weapon variety you wouldn't have to wait until the level finished. Green herbs can now be saved for later instead of being immediately consumed like in UC, allowing for more strategic use of the item. In terms of enemy encounters, I can't think of anything that was particularly unfun or horrid, and the boss fights are generally tense and exciting renditions of classic Resident Evil fights. Some of them can be occasionally cheap, however, such as the first fight against Hilda Hidalgo where some attacks feel too difficult to properly counter (though perhaps this is just a skill issue on my part). Something I do miss from UC was the ability to counter enemy grabs with a special attack by waggling the Wii Remote, but that mechanic was sort of hit or miss anyway. The one big issue that everyone brings up when discussing this game however is the camera which is infamous for never quite staying still and imitating a shakey cam style of cinematography, intending to further immerse the player into the game world. While I don't consider it nearly as awful as some other people do, I still found it added very little to the experience and could even make it occasionally difficult to line up shots accurately. Still, despite those minor hiccups, The Darkside Chronicles presents game design improvements across the board from UC, and anyone who didn't particularly care for how that game played might click with this one as a result.
The Darkside Chronicles isn't just your usual light gun shooter with an excuse plot and nothing more. With this game, Cavia attempted some degree of cinematic storytelling, with the game presenting three main scenarios: a remake of Resident Evil 2, a remake of Code Veronica, and Operation Javier, an original scenario that attempts to fill in some blanks in Resident Evil 4's story. The remake scenarios are framed as flashbacks within Operation Javier, where Leon S. Kennedy fills in his partner, Jack Krauser, on the events of prior games as an excuse for a nostalgic romp through two of RE's most iconic entries. As expected, both RE2 and Code Veronica have been narratively abridged drastically, with Cavia focusing more on retaining the main story beats as opposed to the utmost accuracy. I don't have a problem with this as I doubt anyone is coming to these scenarios for the same level of storytelling as the games they're adapting. However, Code Veronica's scenario has quite a substantial amount of changes that are for both better and worse. For the positives: Alfred Ashford's descent into madness is more pronounced than in the original, with the Rockfort training complex peppered with his insane, childish graffiti of murdered families and devilish stick figures. While I don't know how much I'd care for this in an original title, it at least gives the fairly artistically pedestrian Code Veronica some additional flavor. Steve Burnside, a character who I found incredibly annoying if not outright creepy in the original has been rewritten to be much more tolerable here. Although he's still a jerkass kid, it feels more reasonably in line with the context of his character, and I felt bad for the guy a little bit. They also wrote out the scene in the original where he tries to kiss Claire while she is sleeping, which pretty much eliminates the creep factor for me. For the negatives: I heavily dislike the changes made to Alexia Ashford's characterization. While not a great villain by any means in the original, it is clear that she deeply cared for her brother, and her roaring rampage against Claire and Chris was an act of revenge for killing him. In Darkside, however, it is Alexia who kills Alfred as punishment for not waking her up on time, and her motivation for her actions is that she feels all must serve underneath her. This, to me, undermines the whole toxic power dynamic that the two had in the original and makes it a whole lot less interesting. Nevertheless, I never saw Code Veronica as a particularly well-written game to begin with so any script improvements are welcome, despite what flaws they might bring. As for Operation Javier, it presents a lot of concepts that I find fairly interesting, though I found the execution to be lackluster. Antagonist Javier Hidalgo might be a selfish cartel leader, but he still genuinely loves his daughter Manuela, and when she is diagnosed with an incurable disease, he is willing to inject her with the T-Veronica virus to keep her alive. This comes with the tradeoff of Manuela's organs needing to be regularly replaced, which Javier acquires by kidnapping and harvesting teenage girls. When sent to investigate, Krauser has an internal mental breakdown over his insecurities and lack of faith in his government and abilities, unbeknownst to Leon. Sounds like a pretty interesting premise for a game, right? Unfortunately, due to the nature of the game as a nostalgia romp, Operation Javier hardly gets any room to breathe. Concepts are dropped almost as quickly as they're introduced and hardly any of them is explored narratively or thematically. Manuela's character arc is learning to embrace the powers brought about by the virus and to stand up to her cruel father, but when her entire personality amounts to wanting to run away from her father, all I can manage to form for her is a baseline level of sympathy but nothing more substantial. Javier gets maybe three scenes where he chews the scenery before transforming into the inevitable giant mass of flesh as all Resident Evil villains do, and while his backstory is interesting it's once again hardly explored. Krauser was RE4's narrative weak point and exploring his character more was certainly a great idea, but this previously-untouched characterization doesn't amount to much more than what Capcom showed us in RE4, and we never get to know the Krauser before Darkside to make his eventual downfall impactful. This is a consequence of the game forcing the remake scenarios as flashbacks rather than entirely separate scenarios, giving Operation Javier little to no room to breathe. While Operation Javier might be a disappointingly executed pile of great ideas, the remakes of RE2 and Code Veronica are largely great trips through memory lane despite a few hiccups in the latter. I can't imagine fans being too disappointed with them.
When I was first reading about this game, I read that producer Masachika Kawata had stated: "The only thing really setting the visuals apart from next-generation consoles is the lack of HD display". What a pompous statement, I had thought, there's no way the game looked that good, especially after UC had been such a visual mixed bag. When I played the game, however, I began to understand the sentiment behind Kawata's statement, as much of an exaggeration as it is. Cavia's art team really upped their game here, whether it be Capcom allocating more dev time and budget or simply a refinement of their skillset, The Darkside Chronicles is a great-looking Wii game. Environments are teeming with detail and at a glance, it genuinely does resemble an early Xbox 360 game. Models are often a step up from their UC counterparts and the bosses are particularly impressive for their complexity. The game's use of baked and volumetric lighting can often be impressive, such as an early sequence in the RPD's licker hallway, which looked stunning. Texture quality isn't the Wii's strong suit, only featuring 24 megabytes of ram, but I found the textures in Darkside to be of fairly consistent quality. They're not jaw-dropping by any means but there weren't any noticeably low-quality ones beyond the Wii's modest resources, unlike UC where texture quality could be widely variable. Enemies often make use of at the time next-gen features, such as normal and specular mapping, providing them with much greater textural depth and detail than what most Wii games were willing to provide. The game's use of bloom and color grading also help to give it a more distinctive style, matching a lot of what was present at the time on PS3/360, and can look quite evocative at points. Although this may have been an emulation error since it felt rather out of character for the game, character shadows were often jittery and glitchy looking and simply didn't look like they were implemented correctly. Character models look half-decent at a glance, but facial animation is barely featured if not outright absent depending on the cutscene. There's a sequence where Annette Birkin holds the player at gunpoint, and her mouth never moves a muscle while she delivers her monologue. The game's CGI cutscenes are far superior to the rather mediocre ones featured in UC, featuring visuals that are almost on par with the animated RE films. It features solid animation, highly detailed character models, and well-storyboarded cinematography. There's a particular bird's-eye-view shot in the first cinematic where Leon and Krauser almost seem swallowed by the forest that I found interesting visually, or the zolly shot when Leon aims at mutant Hilda while she is distracted by Manuela's song. I wasn't always a fan of the stylistic choice of the intentionally amateur "documentaryesque" zoom-ins and depth of field adjustments and found them distracting. While facial animation isn't entirely convincing, it's still a step up from UC's and even Degeneration's poor lip sync. I also found the editing pretty solid, especially during action sequences, though I've always found the franchise's use of slow-motion to be exceptionally cheesy. Overall, even if the producers may have been exaggerating, The Darkside Chronicles is a genuinely great-looking game, especially within the context of the most underpowered console of that generation. Cavia pushed some technical boundaries to get this out the door and I do respect that, and I think it paid off in the end.
If The Darkside Chronicles is most well-known for anything, it has to be its soundtrack, featuring tracks from RE2 and Code Veronica remixed and rearranged by the original composers Shusaku Uchiyama and Takeshi Miura. Occasionally recorded from a live orchestra, it seems the two had one goal in mind: bigger. Every track has been remade to sound grander in scale and in a sense, "de-MIDI-fied". While I always found the compositional techniques and instrument choices of 90s game soundtracks to be endlessly fascinating, the more modern approach works very well here. Not every song is a blanket improvement, I found the strings in Darkside's rendition of "Escape From The Laboratory" to be annoyingly off-key from the original song and not in a way that benefitted it. The highlights for me have to be both of Alexia's boss themes, which have been sung with a live choir and the vocals give the impression of a crazed Alexia singing to herself while fighting, totally lost inside of her self-importance. The actual composition for the vocals has been changed to feel more natural as well, possibly a consequence of the real choir. Some songs have even been outright changed, with mutant Steve's boss theme "Sorrow" featuring epic, rhythmic chanting and a low end that seems to match the stomping of his monstrous feet. It's got to be one of my favorite songs in the series now. Although not every track is an improvement, I think Uchiyama and Miura really outdid themselves with this one, daring to be different with the songs they composed so long ago even if it didn't always work out, and it often did.
Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles is pretty much a blanket improvement over The Umbrella Chronicles, improving the game design, storytelling, visuals, and audio presentation. While the game does struggle with its storytelling, depictions of certain characters, and how it blends the three scenarios, it remains a fun romp through Resident Evil nostalgia that can be enjoyed whether you're a fan of the series or not, with highly impressive visuals and a fantastic soundtrack to boot. This one I can genuinely recommend to fans of light gun shooters, even if you're not familiar with Resident Evil, though die-hard fans are likely to get even more joy from Darkside. Recommended.
The biggest improvement that developer Cavia brings to the table is the game's much faster pace. While Umbrella Chronicles didn't play badly by any means, enemies tended to wander instead of targeting the player, which could make some encounters feel overly long or boring. Darkside Chronicles has no such thing; enemies make a mad dash toward you the moment they spawn in, playing closer to The House of the Dead than Cavia's previous offering. Headshots are more generous and generally on hard mode enemies are less tanky than they were in UC's equivalent difficulty. As a result, the game's combat loop feels a lot snappier and more fluid and this increased my enjoyment twofold. Cavia also added many quality-of-life improvements, such as being able to change your weapon loadout mid-level instead of having to wait until the end of the level, which means if you mistakenly picked an ill-suited loadout or simply wanted more immediate access to weapon variety you wouldn't have to wait until the level finished. Green herbs can now be saved for later instead of being immediately consumed like in UC, allowing for more strategic use of the item. In terms of enemy encounters, I can't think of anything that was particularly unfun or horrid, and the boss fights are generally tense and exciting renditions of classic Resident Evil fights. Some of them can be occasionally cheap, however, such as the first fight against Hilda Hidalgo where some attacks feel too difficult to properly counter (though perhaps this is just a skill issue on my part). Something I do miss from UC was the ability to counter enemy grabs with a special attack by waggling the Wii Remote, but that mechanic was sort of hit or miss anyway. The one big issue that everyone brings up when discussing this game however is the camera which is infamous for never quite staying still and imitating a shakey cam style of cinematography, intending to further immerse the player into the game world. While I don't consider it nearly as awful as some other people do, I still found it added very little to the experience and could even make it occasionally difficult to line up shots accurately. Still, despite those minor hiccups, The Darkside Chronicles presents game design improvements across the board from UC, and anyone who didn't particularly care for how that game played might click with this one as a result.
The Darkside Chronicles isn't just your usual light gun shooter with an excuse plot and nothing more. With this game, Cavia attempted some degree of cinematic storytelling, with the game presenting three main scenarios: a remake of Resident Evil 2, a remake of Code Veronica, and Operation Javier, an original scenario that attempts to fill in some blanks in Resident Evil 4's story. The remake scenarios are framed as flashbacks within Operation Javier, where Leon S. Kennedy fills in his partner, Jack Krauser, on the events of prior games as an excuse for a nostalgic romp through two of RE's most iconic entries. As expected, both RE2 and Code Veronica have been narratively abridged drastically, with Cavia focusing more on retaining the main story beats as opposed to the utmost accuracy. I don't have a problem with this as I doubt anyone is coming to these scenarios for the same level of storytelling as the games they're adapting. However, Code Veronica's scenario has quite a substantial amount of changes that are for both better and worse. For the positives: Alfred Ashford's descent into madness is more pronounced than in the original, with the Rockfort training complex peppered with his insane, childish graffiti of murdered families and devilish stick figures. While I don't know how much I'd care for this in an original title, it at least gives the fairly artistically pedestrian Code Veronica some additional flavor. Steve Burnside, a character who I found incredibly annoying if not outright creepy in the original has been rewritten to be much more tolerable here. Although he's still a jerkass kid, it feels more reasonably in line with the context of his character, and I felt bad for the guy a little bit. They also wrote out the scene in the original where he tries to kiss Claire while she is sleeping, which pretty much eliminates the creep factor for me. For the negatives: I heavily dislike the changes made to Alexia Ashford's characterization. While not a great villain by any means in the original, it is clear that she deeply cared for her brother, and her roaring rampage against Claire and Chris was an act of revenge for killing him. In Darkside, however, it is Alexia who kills Alfred as punishment for not waking her up on time, and her motivation for her actions is that she feels all must serve underneath her. This, to me, undermines the whole toxic power dynamic that the two had in the original and makes it a whole lot less interesting. Nevertheless, I never saw Code Veronica as a particularly well-written game to begin with so any script improvements are welcome, despite what flaws they might bring. As for Operation Javier, it presents a lot of concepts that I find fairly interesting, though I found the execution to be lackluster. Antagonist Javier Hidalgo might be a selfish cartel leader, but he still genuinely loves his daughter Manuela, and when she is diagnosed with an incurable disease, he is willing to inject her with the T-Veronica virus to keep her alive. This comes with the tradeoff of Manuela's organs needing to be regularly replaced, which Javier acquires by kidnapping and harvesting teenage girls. When sent to investigate, Krauser has an internal mental breakdown over his insecurities and lack of faith in his government and abilities, unbeknownst to Leon. Sounds like a pretty interesting premise for a game, right? Unfortunately, due to the nature of the game as a nostalgia romp, Operation Javier hardly gets any room to breathe. Concepts are dropped almost as quickly as they're introduced and hardly any of them is explored narratively or thematically. Manuela's character arc is learning to embrace the powers brought about by the virus and to stand up to her cruel father, but when her entire personality amounts to wanting to run away from her father, all I can manage to form for her is a baseline level of sympathy but nothing more substantial. Javier gets maybe three scenes where he chews the scenery before transforming into the inevitable giant mass of flesh as all Resident Evil villains do, and while his backstory is interesting it's once again hardly explored. Krauser was RE4's narrative weak point and exploring his character more was certainly a great idea, but this previously-untouched characterization doesn't amount to much more than what Capcom showed us in RE4, and we never get to know the Krauser before Darkside to make his eventual downfall impactful. This is a consequence of the game forcing the remake scenarios as flashbacks rather than entirely separate scenarios, giving Operation Javier little to no room to breathe. While Operation Javier might be a disappointingly executed pile of great ideas, the remakes of RE2 and Code Veronica are largely great trips through memory lane despite a few hiccups in the latter. I can't imagine fans being too disappointed with them.
When I was first reading about this game, I read that producer Masachika Kawata had stated: "The only thing really setting the visuals apart from next-generation consoles is the lack of HD display". What a pompous statement, I had thought, there's no way the game looked that good, especially after UC had been such a visual mixed bag. When I played the game, however, I began to understand the sentiment behind Kawata's statement, as much of an exaggeration as it is. Cavia's art team really upped their game here, whether it be Capcom allocating more dev time and budget or simply a refinement of their skillset, The Darkside Chronicles is a great-looking Wii game. Environments are teeming with detail and at a glance, it genuinely does resemble an early Xbox 360 game. Models are often a step up from their UC counterparts and the bosses are particularly impressive for their complexity. The game's use of baked and volumetric lighting can often be impressive, such as an early sequence in the RPD's licker hallway, which looked stunning. Texture quality isn't the Wii's strong suit, only featuring 24 megabytes of ram, but I found the textures in Darkside to be of fairly consistent quality. They're not jaw-dropping by any means but there weren't any noticeably low-quality ones beyond the Wii's modest resources, unlike UC where texture quality could be widely variable. Enemies often make use of at the time next-gen features, such as normal and specular mapping, providing them with much greater textural depth and detail than what most Wii games were willing to provide. The game's use of bloom and color grading also help to give it a more distinctive style, matching a lot of what was present at the time on PS3/360, and can look quite evocative at points. Although this may have been an emulation error since it felt rather out of character for the game, character shadows were often jittery and glitchy looking and simply didn't look like they were implemented correctly. Character models look half-decent at a glance, but facial animation is barely featured if not outright absent depending on the cutscene. There's a sequence where Annette Birkin holds the player at gunpoint, and her mouth never moves a muscle while she delivers her monologue. The game's CGI cutscenes are far superior to the rather mediocre ones featured in UC, featuring visuals that are almost on par with the animated RE films. It features solid animation, highly detailed character models, and well-storyboarded cinematography. There's a particular bird's-eye-view shot in the first cinematic where Leon and Krauser almost seem swallowed by the forest that I found interesting visually, or the zolly shot when Leon aims at mutant Hilda while she is distracted by Manuela's song. I wasn't always a fan of the stylistic choice of the intentionally amateur "documentaryesque" zoom-ins and depth of field adjustments and found them distracting. While facial animation isn't entirely convincing, it's still a step up from UC's and even Degeneration's poor lip sync. I also found the editing pretty solid, especially during action sequences, though I've always found the franchise's use of slow-motion to be exceptionally cheesy. Overall, even if the producers may have been exaggerating, The Darkside Chronicles is a genuinely great-looking game, especially within the context of the most underpowered console of that generation. Cavia pushed some technical boundaries to get this out the door and I do respect that, and I think it paid off in the end.
If The Darkside Chronicles is most well-known for anything, it has to be its soundtrack, featuring tracks from RE2 and Code Veronica remixed and rearranged by the original composers Shusaku Uchiyama and Takeshi Miura. Occasionally recorded from a live orchestra, it seems the two had one goal in mind: bigger. Every track has been remade to sound grander in scale and in a sense, "de-MIDI-fied". While I always found the compositional techniques and instrument choices of 90s game soundtracks to be endlessly fascinating, the more modern approach works very well here. Not every song is a blanket improvement, I found the strings in Darkside's rendition of "Escape From The Laboratory" to be annoyingly off-key from the original song and not in a way that benefitted it. The highlights for me have to be both of Alexia's boss themes, which have been sung with a live choir and the vocals give the impression of a crazed Alexia singing to herself while fighting, totally lost inside of her self-importance. The actual composition for the vocals has been changed to feel more natural as well, possibly a consequence of the real choir. Some songs have even been outright changed, with mutant Steve's boss theme "Sorrow" featuring epic, rhythmic chanting and a low end that seems to match the stomping of his monstrous feet. It's got to be one of my favorite songs in the series now. Although not every track is an improvement, I think Uchiyama and Miura really outdid themselves with this one, daring to be different with the songs they composed so long ago even if it didn't always work out, and it often did.
Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles is pretty much a blanket improvement over The Umbrella Chronicles, improving the game design, storytelling, visuals, and audio presentation. While the game does struggle with its storytelling, depictions of certain characters, and how it blends the three scenarios, it remains a fun romp through Resident Evil nostalgia that can be enjoyed whether you're a fan of the series or not, with highly impressive visuals and a fantastic soundtrack to boot. This one I can genuinely recommend to fans of light gun shooters, even if you're not familiar with Resident Evil, though die-hard fans are likely to get even more joy from Darkside. Recommended.