Disclaimer: While I do my best not to spoil any critical story details in this sketch of an analysis, I do go over in broad terms the direction the stories both the 2005 game and the 2023 remake make.
On one hand Resident Evil 4 Remake makes a good game even more replayable. It adds great voice lines for characters who only had development in found notes in the original. There are disagreements over which gameplay changes made things more interesting and which made things less, but I think it’s a matter of preference. Resident Evil 4 (2005)’s Pro Difficulty can be beaten much more easily than Remake’s. Remake has more challenges and more decisions to make, especially as a new game that hasn’t been fully mapped out by speedrunners yet. One way this happens is you’re expected to move around far more in Remake. To get a good picture of what I mean by that, I’d recommend anyone give the Chainsaw Demo a try. A fight that I had a few simple plans for in the 2005 version quickly strips away your options for staying put. There seem to be less ways to funnel your enemies into tight spaces, and even if you do manage there’s no easy ways I found to stunlock them. It’s all more complicated, for better and worse.
On the other hand, what I want to talk about the most is how the remake almost completely does away with what made the original most memorable for me: Shinji Mikami’s project was essentially the most ambitious noir script I’ve ever seen. The noir is a genre that typically bores me to tears. From what I can tell, the movies and such in this genre want you to empathize with the American man’s fear of losing control, of becoming dominated by women, of being unable to rescue innocents from grand conspiracies, of watching their old friends and the elderly become corrupted, of getting driven out by foreigners, of being used for evil. Yet most of the time I’d fail to really feel the stakes for a petty man caught in the middle of someone else’s tragedy.
Resident Evil 4 breathed new life into (or reanimated, if you prefer) a genre that usually disinterests me by throwing in everything but the kitchen sink. The horror, the action, and the absurdities are more in-your-face, and so I really got invested in what Leon was going through, constantly being demeaned for trying to be “an American hero” and surrounded by a bunch of supposedly straight men and women never straight-talking. He was like a Philip Marlowe or Mike Hammer, but I could actually understand his pent-up rage (and he is very funny). Probably the most gamer thing I’ll ever write is: I wish the remake kept the misogyny (among the other noir genre staples). “She’s like a part of me I can’t let go.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC3w5hXzekQ
Resident Evil 4 Remake’s story is instead - in a broad sense - about people trying to do the right thing against, well, evil people and creatures, which I would argue was never anyone’s explicit intention in the original. In fact, the first line Leon says after killing his first villager in the original is the realization “He’s not a zombie.” It’s a scene where many have remarked that the villager might have been entirely in the right to feel threatened by Leon’s presence, invading his home with a gun drawn speaking a foreign language. The lines between good and evil are a lot more blurred. As I mentioned before, the casual misogyny is completely done away with, but Ada is also less of a deus ex machina or femme fatale for Leon, which makes me curious about how the Separate Ways DLC will go.
It makes sense that Capcom wouldn’t want their shiny new game to be a noir with stiff movement and cynical characters since I guess that genre has been pretty much dead for a while now, but the original RE4 will forever be iconic for its epic interpretation of the American hero literally almost becoming the parasite he’s always feared about others. I also wish Krauser would still refer to Leon as his comrade in the remake.
On one hand Resident Evil 4 Remake makes a good game even more replayable. It adds great voice lines for characters who only had development in found notes in the original. There are disagreements over which gameplay changes made things more interesting and which made things less, but I think it’s a matter of preference. Resident Evil 4 (2005)’s Pro Difficulty can be beaten much more easily than Remake’s. Remake has more challenges and more decisions to make, especially as a new game that hasn’t been fully mapped out by speedrunners yet. One way this happens is you’re expected to move around far more in Remake. To get a good picture of what I mean by that, I’d recommend anyone give the Chainsaw Demo a try. A fight that I had a few simple plans for in the 2005 version quickly strips away your options for staying put. There seem to be less ways to funnel your enemies into tight spaces, and even if you do manage there’s no easy ways I found to stunlock them. It’s all more complicated, for better and worse.
On the other hand, what I want to talk about the most is how the remake almost completely does away with what made the original most memorable for me: Shinji Mikami’s project was essentially the most ambitious noir script I’ve ever seen. The noir is a genre that typically bores me to tears. From what I can tell, the movies and such in this genre want you to empathize with the American man’s fear of losing control, of becoming dominated by women, of being unable to rescue innocents from grand conspiracies, of watching their old friends and the elderly become corrupted, of getting driven out by foreigners, of being used for evil. Yet most of the time I’d fail to really feel the stakes for a petty man caught in the middle of someone else’s tragedy.
Resident Evil 4 breathed new life into (or reanimated, if you prefer) a genre that usually disinterests me by throwing in everything but the kitchen sink. The horror, the action, and the absurdities are more in-your-face, and so I really got invested in what Leon was going through, constantly being demeaned for trying to be “an American hero” and surrounded by a bunch of supposedly straight men and women never straight-talking. He was like a Philip Marlowe or Mike Hammer, but I could actually understand his pent-up rage (and he is very funny). Probably the most gamer thing I’ll ever write is: I wish the remake kept the misogyny (among the other noir genre staples). “She’s like a part of me I can’t let go.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC3w5hXzekQ
Resident Evil 4 Remake’s story is instead - in a broad sense - about people trying to do the right thing against, well, evil people and creatures, which I would argue was never anyone’s explicit intention in the original. In fact, the first line Leon says after killing his first villager in the original is the realization “He’s not a zombie.” It’s a scene where many have remarked that the villager might have been entirely in the right to feel threatened by Leon’s presence, invading his home with a gun drawn speaking a foreign language. The lines between good and evil are a lot more blurred. As I mentioned before, the casual misogyny is completely done away with, but Ada is also less of a deus ex machina or femme fatale for Leon, which makes me curious about how the Separate Ways DLC will go.
It makes sense that Capcom wouldn’t want their shiny new game to be a noir with stiff movement and cynical characters since I guess that genre has been pretty much dead for a while now, but the original RE4 will forever be iconic for its epic interpretation of the American hero literally almost becoming the parasite he’s always feared about others. I also wish Krauser would still refer to Leon as his comrade in the remake.