#wtf is mission in elevator and why does it exist

[ogcassiopeia]

I humbly will request of SM Entertainment that they please stop putting TVXQ in an aluminum box for every photoshoot.

[pixelgrotto]

The horrific Resident Evil playthrough, part six

Resident Evil Zero starts with a bang and a wonderfully tight example of level design, as new STARS member and series cutie pie Rebecca Chambers investigates the Ecliptic Express, an Umbrella-operated train that’s become the testing ground for an early version of the zombie virus. On the train, she meets an escaped convict named Billy Coen, and the two of them have to blast their way through tight cars filled with bio-weapons and a great number of leeches, which play an important role in this game, before finding a way to stop their Orient Express outta hell.

I adored RE Zero’s Ecliptic Express, partly because I have a thing for old locomotives and also because it reminded me of 1997 adventure game The Last Express, but with zombies. The environment also felt wonderfully fresh, since aside from the ruined Raccoon City briefly featured in RE 2 and more prominently in RE 3, the majority of the series has, thus far, been content to fall into a fairly standard cycle of settings - mansions, ruined industrial complexes and underground laboratories. What better way to inject some variety into this mix than with a Gothic train, perhaps the perfect environment for a survival horror game thanks to its many rooms, narrow hallways and plentiful hiding spots for the walking dead? Unfortunately, the Ecliptic Express is more or less the highlight of RE Zero’s environments, and once Rebecca and Billy crash the train and end up in an old Umbrella training facility, the game once again falls back into the trope settings that Capcom was content to recycle. This was a disappointment, but RE Zero injects some unusual, experimental shifts into the gameplay experience that make up for packing its most atmospheric surprises into the first hour, though not all of them are entirely successful. Chief among these is the partner zapping system, which has players controlling two characters at the same time and occasionally separating them to solve puzzles, like when Rebecca has to stand on an elevator to reach a higher area and Billy has to work the controls. It’s good stuff, since if one thing has become clear to me since beginning this RE journey, it’s that the series has always harbored fantasies of being a partner affair but never was quite able to figure out how to do it. Previous games would only feature very brief sections where another character accompanied you, and the rest of the time, they would keep making ridiculous excuses for why they needed to split up, kinda like members of the Scooby-Doo gang. With Becca & Billy, finally this nonsense has been done away with, and while you now have twice the amount of inventory management to wrangle with, it’s great to finally explore these secluded, dangerous environs with some backup. The fact that Becca & Billy are actually good characters with chemistry helps, and while it’s understated, the story gradually forces them to trust each other more and more. It all stays mutually respectful and there’s no forced romance angle (even though I totally ship these two), but when Billy gets into a bit of a tight spot near the end of the game and Rebecca desperately shouts out his name in panic, you can sense how much she’s bonded with him through their shared night of terror.

I mentioned inventory management, and this leads me to RE Zero’s other big surprise - the magical connected item boxes that have been a series save point trademark are completely AWOL in Zero, and players can actually drop their stuff anywhere, a first in the franchise. Apparently, the devs implemented this to take advantage of the nonexistent load times of the cartridge-based Nintendo 64, which was supposed to be the original platform for this game. (Prototype footage of the N64 version exists and looks impressive, though the ROM’s never been leaked, unfortunately.) I’ve also read that they did it to bump up the difficulty level and intentionally go back to the essence of Sweet Home, the grandpappy of the series.

I thought Sweet Home was a fantastic hidden gem, but the limited inventory space and necessity to drop your items was actually my least favorite part of the gameplay, since it led to lots of housekeeping and backtracking where you’d realize you needed a particular tool but had left it on the ground ten screens away. And this problem exists in RE Zero as well, which is probably one of the lead criticisms that the game faces on the internet. In my opinion, Zero’s backtracking is nowhere near as bad as in Code Veronica, but there were definitely large stretches of the game where I was simply picking up all my crap and moving things to save point rooms, which I basically converted into makeshift item storage halls. There are also a lot of items in the game, like the hookshot, which take up two slots in Becca & Billy’s precious inventory space and aren’t used for a long time only for the game to suddenly drop a “hey you need this to progress” moment, which is liable to piss folks off. I can understand the devs wanting to make things harder, but there’s a fine line between challenge and annoyance, and Zero’s inventory wrangling occasionally enters the realm of the latter. It would’ve been best if the team had given players the ability to drop their stuff and included the traditional item boxes, but unfortunately, it seems like they were operating under the mentality of “we’ll give you ONE freedom but take ANOTHER away, muahaha!”

In the end, I was able to forgive most of the item problems thanks to the fact that I liked Rebecca and Billy so much, and I had more fun with RE Zero than most of the fanbase, which tends to view it unfavorably. If I were to rank all the classic Resident Evils, I’d actually put Zero right under REmake, RE 2 and RE 1, and in my eyes, it’s better than RE 3 and Code Veronica, which end up on the bottom of my list for different reasons. (RE 3 is competent fun but kinda by-the-numbers, and Code Veronica remains the only Resident Evil game which really felt like a slog the more I played of it.) 

Why then does Zero end up getting so many apathetic reactions? Well, it’s probably because aside from the inventory management problems, this game feels a little unnecessary, which is an issue that most prequels suffer from. Zero was advertised as revealing the details behind the tragic mission of the Bravo STARS, the team that you learn was slowly massacred over the course of Resident Evil 1. Unfortunately, aside from Rebecca and a few token cameos, the Bravo guys are barely in the game at all, and most of the plot revolves around the background of Umbrella and a case of backstabbing and industrial espionage where one of the original founders, James Marcus, was killed by his colleagues. Marcus, who created the zombie virus via experiments with leech DNA, was resurrected by the very leeches he experimented with, and now he’s out for revenge.

All of this is vaguely interesting, but if I’d been a hardcore RE fan back in the day and was promised a prequel that revealed the fates of the Bravo STARS only to be given a side story about a dude and his leeches, I’d probably go WTF. Capcom dropped the ball on their storytelling by providing something that nobody was really asking for, in other words, and I’ve found out through my meanderings on the Resident Evil Wiki that The Umbrella Chronicles, a spinoff game for the Wii, actually delves deeper into the deaths of Bravo team. That’s the sort of stuff Zero should’ve focused on in order to feel more needed in the grand scope of Resident Evil. Another option might have been to ax the prequel concept entirely, which leads me to another thought that’s only appropriate to bring up now that I’ve finished all of the “old school” Resident Evil games.

If it had been up to me, I probably would have plotted the course of the series differently after RE 2, which contains an interesting nugget of information hinting at an Umbrella Europe base that was never expanded upon to its full potential. The game seems to indicate that Jill, Chris and Barry are going to Europe to investigate and shut down this facility, and just about EVERY strategy guide, article and bit of speculative message board posting I can find from around that time was obsessed with this concept. It seems like everyone thought that Resident Evil 3 was going to be a rollicking European adventure…and it wasn’t, it was instead a game that took place at the same time as RE 2 and explained how Jill escaped Racoon City. Code Veronica never really expounded upon this tidbit of lore either - we get a very brief intro with Claire Redfield investigating an Umbrella headquarters in Paris, but then suddenly she’s captured and the vast majority of that game takes place on an island near South America.  I can’t help but feel like a massive opportunity was missed here, and if I’d been in charge of Capcom’s scenario division for these games in the late 90s, I would’ve changed the plot of Code Veronica and basically made that one Resident Evil 3 (which it was originally going to be if Capcom hadn’t wanted to keep the “main” RE games on a Sony console). I would’ve made it an adventure with Jill, Chris and Barry in Europe, and near the end I would’ve brought Claire in to join them and fight alongside her brother. Then, I would’ve made a spinoff game simply titled “Resident Evil: Nemesis” or something of the sort, and taken the general “escape Racoon City” plot of RE 3…but had it star Rebecca Chambers.  See how nicely that would’ve worked? Fans would’ve gotten their detailed peek at Umbrella Europe and the return of the classic combo of Jill + Chris + Barry. The weird Ashford siblings and Code Veronica doofus Steve could’ve still been incorporated into the story. Meanwhile, Rebecca could’ve starred in a game that felt necessary, since the beginning scenes of destroyed Racoon City were some of the best bits of RE 2, and there’s no reason why she couldn’t have met escaped convict Billy Coen while escaping the city. They could’ve worked together to flee from Nemesis, and I guess the mostly forgettable mercenaries of RE 3 could’ve made an appearance as well. 

Sadly, I don’t work at Capcom, and they planned these games totally differently. We finally would go to Europe proper with Leon Kennedy in the next RE game, but that one would mark a shift in both storytelling and atmosphere, as Resident Evil quickly transitioned away from its horror roots…and into the realm of fast-paced shoot ‘em up action.

Resident Evil 4 is next, and the playthrough continues! 

All screenshots taken by me. For more, check out this Twitter thread showing my step-by-step progress through the game.

[overthenexthill-archive2019]

i haven’t been able to finish my current me3 playthrough yet due to my brother hogging the xbox so he can play ARC: Evolved but here’s a list of things i remembered i hate in the OT in no particular order

the elevators

the asari

mark meer’s voice acting in ME1

liara’s writing if you don’t romance her (wtf bioware)...especially considering that the reason i generally DON’T romance her is because in ME1 at least, it feels like an adult dating a teenage girl.

femshep’s romance options and how most of them get fucking shafted to shit in ME3

how heteronormative ME2 was

jacob taylor’s loyalty mission and how racist it was

how racist and lazy the writing for jacob taylor was in general (ofc there are many reasons i dislike jacob in and of itself, but some it can be chalked up to bad writing)

jack’s chuppy ass default outfit in me2 (really bioware??? a woman could have the smallest titties in existence and she still wouldn’t be able to strap ‘em down with just a fucking belt. even if this game was written by mostly men, that’s still dumb as hell)

miranda’s largely unnecessary ass-shots

thane’s death

kai leng

that fact that you can’t call out kaidan for his bullshit cheating accusations in ME3 if you DO choose to romance someone else in ME2 as femshep if you romanced him in ME1, but mshep can do that to ashley (????? BIOWARE!)

the fact that an aro ace shepard it practically impossible to play after a certain point in the series without being a complete dick (and if you play the citadel dlc, impossible as femshep! because if you don’t romance anyone you wake up next to javik! lmao)

the fact that the dlc for the ME2 and 3 literally never goes on sale on pc like it does for the console versions, forcing me to pirate shit i already fucking paid for because i am unwilling to shell out £200+ on this shit again because EA and bioware are lazy money-grubbing fucks thanks ea thanks very much for your business practices

related to the above, but why did they never sell me2 or 3 with all the dlc included? that shit would sell like no one’s business...oh wait, EA...again.

the elevators