Resident Evil 5 (Xbox 360)
They're coming to get you, Barbara.
3/12/2009 8:34 PM | 121 Comments | Page 2 of 4
What's Hot: No more antique-typewriter save system; Co-op works well when you've got a person with a pulse to play with; Shorter than Resident Evil 4.
What's Not: Subhuman portayals of Africans are offensive; AI-controlled partner not helpful approximately 60 percent of the time; Nothing here that you haven't really seen or done already in Resident Evil 4 (or Lost Planet).
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
Things get even more troubling once you encounter zombie natives wearing bone necklaces and grass skirts and, quite literally, throwing spears. "You'd swear [the game] was written in the 1920s," wrote Dan Whitehead in a preview of the game for Eurogamer. I agree. All that's missing is the pot of boiling water containing the mustachioed explorer still wearing his pith helmet and quizzical expression.
Ironically, this is simultaneously the best and the worst localization job Capcom has done in its history. The English translation is better; the grammar and spelling mistakes (a longtime staple in Capcom games) are kept to a minimum. Yet the localizers and developers were profoundly ignorant of how Africans, and African-Americans, and big white dudes with liberal leanings, would process the game.
"What's a nice White Lady like you doing in a place like this?"
When
Evan Narcisse and I
spoke with Jun Takeuchi at the DICE Summit a few weeks back, I asked Takeuchi if Chris Redfield, who behaves like a selfish jackass throughout the entire game, is intended to be a satiric comment on American culture.
Turns out I was giving Takeuchi and his team too much credit. To my disappointment, he explained that this wasn't his intention at all. "[Chris] probably isn't a nice person to be around," he said. "He probably isn't good at dealing with other people because he takes his work so seriously. You can see that in a lot of other [Japanese] games, too. Japanese people tend to like those kinds of characters more than Americans do."
Which brings me to the most troubling aspect of
Resident Evil 5 -- and on a more global scale, with the videogames being produced by Japanese developers these days. They lack an awareness of the rest of the world, and an understanding of the subtext they create.
That once-charming Japanese irreverence? (Example: the absurd pseudo-macho things that
Street Fighter IV's characters say before and after fights.) It's not charming anymore; it's annoying and small-minded; it's lazy. It's no longer acceptable to explain away a game's shortcomings with the excuse that "it's Japanese," and therefore comprehendible only to Japanese people. The medium has become a global entertainment; it's not the niche hobby it was five or 10 years ago. And that ever-expanding audience -- different ethnicities, different tax brackets, different levels of education, different points of view -- must be considered.
"I'm Chris Redfield and I'm a dickhead."
, a game that cost millions of dollars to make, will hopefully stand as a tombstone for the end of a tradition. It's the beginning of the end of an era.
Resident Evil 5 will forever be remembered as an important game, for all the wrong reasons.
As for the gameplay, it's a solid, if unsurprising, endeavor. The presence of Takeuchi-san means that you can expect far more grand-scale boss fights
a là Lost Planet, which I personally could have done without. There's nothing in
Resident Evil 5 that's even remotely as nuanced or memorable as your encounters in
Resident Evil 4 with the Del Lago (the lake creature that you battle while in the rowboat) or the El Gigante. Instead, what you get are lots of massive, vaguely insectoid bosses with big, red, throbbing weak points.
