Hear Me Out: On the Pitfalls of Resident Evil 4
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #193. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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We are what we’re afraid of.
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Before we get into this month’s column, let me get out ahead of the discourse with a singular take, distilled into its purest form, i.e., one of pure uncritical judgment: I hate Resident Evil 4. I have tried, multiple times, to play and enjoy Resident Evil 4, in all its various releases and iterations. Hell, I’m pretty sure a version of the remake is downloaded to my Steam Deck right now. But try as I might, I simply cannot overcome my animosity towards this game, this most lauded and vaunted of the Evils which Reside. If this positionality is anathema to you, I do not begrudge you metaphorically putting this column down and walking away, to spend your time on more worthwhile endeavors.
…are they gone? Okay, good. Now we can have a conversation. There are few games, save perhaps The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, that possess such a ravenous, nostalgia-goggled audience of fans as RE4. And now that I’ve gotten the clickbait out of the way (and perhaps enticed some small virality), I want to make it clear that my distaste for this game is not actually about the game itself, per se. RE4 appears to be a fine game, perhaps even a great game. It certainly did a lot of work to revolutionize how third-person shooters are designed and played, even today. So, I don’t dislike the game because it’s a bad game; I dislike it because it’s a terrible Resident Evil.
To expand: up until this point, the Resident Evil franchise had remained squarely in the tradition of survival horror, a genre it helped to pioneer. Main characters were slow and weak, resources were scarce, navigation was opaque. Everything was hard, and you were scared because of it. Resident Evil 2 stands out as an excellent example – you can play as rookie cop Leon Kennedy, bumbling his way through a zombie apocalypse and almost dying multiple times. You find yourself (or at least, I did) rooting for this dorky little loser, though you admittedly don’t have a ton of faith he’ll survive long past rolling the credits.
Until, that is, Resident Evil 4, when Leon returns, but now, he’s Better. Faster, stronger, smarter, more capable in every way and also now entirely unflappable, approaching all enemies with a sort of Terminator-esque indifference before mowing them down. Which is now way easier, by the way – rarely, if ever, does Leon find himself in a position without ammunition, which presupposes that his time in Raccoon City taught him a valuable lesson about inventory management that the game does not deign to pass on to you, the player.
This, ultimately, is why RE4 sucks. With a stoic badass behind the wheel of the game instead of a freaked out normie, the game loses a lot of its potential for frights, simply because the game cannot really envision Leon Kennedy failing. The player can fail, certainly, but this feels much more like dying in Doom than in a prior Resident Evil – it’s all user error, and not an anticipated outcome of a scary, high-stakes experience. Leon Kennedy isn’t the Doomguy, however, because that would also mean that RE4 would be cartoonishly violent fun. No, Leon has undergone a terrible transformation into something far, far worse: A Gary Stu.
While less spoken of that the female counterpart, the Mary Sue, Gary Stus still exist in the wild. You can find them, mostly, in low-budget action flicks or military-style shooter games, where the point of the male main character is not to Show Emotions or Be a Person, but to act as a manly, stoic-but-also-full-of-action vessel through which all important parts of the plot filter. He can do no wrong. Women love him, men want to be him, fish fear him. He exists not as a character but as a concept. The Platonic Form of Dude. And if you’re viewing the game through the lens of a character with no real emotion or vulnerability, it’s hard to experience tension or fear.
So, that’s why I hate Resident Evil 4. Not for any sort of meat-and-potatoes gameplay reason, but on an epistemological level, the level of what the game is supposed to be and do. RE4, though it is many things, is emphatically not scary. Leon is too cool and tough and smart and hot to die, and since you play him, the game treats your victory as much more of a given than prior entries. The opposite of fear isn’t power, it’s boredom, and that’s what Resident Evil 4 gives us.
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Emma Kostopolus loves all things that go bump in the night. When not playing scary games, you can find her in the kitchen, scientifically perfecting the recipe for fudge brownies. She has an Instagram where she logs the food and art she makes, along with her many cats.
