Doing it better or worse: RE5

Hmm. Yah know, I had a couple of ideas. However, this got wrapped up in an idea I had for a full series reboot which… I know people would hate, but bares noting as my idea for RE5 wouldn’t work without all those details.

This reboot idea I would’ve named “Resident Evil Neohazard” and would take more inspiration from the RE1 and 2 prototype storylines, more so than what the Simplygone Remakes have used and/or bastardized. It’s not entirely fleshed out since I’ve gotten lazy over the course of the pandemic, and I was working on other things in between. Plus, RE5 isn’t a game I’m fond of for obvious reasons, so most of my ideas for it are pretty scatterbrained as they are.

But long story short:
-RE0 would not happen
-RE1’s events would be more “Escape Room” esque.
-Rebecca would not be a member of STARS, but a regular college student.
-Chris and Jill would NOT join the BSAA.
-Claire Redfield would not exist, instead being replaced with Elza Walker
-Prototype characters of RE1 would be turned into future tyrants.
-RE3 would not happen, but Raccoon gets blown up.
-Wesker stays dead after RE1
-The surviving Stars members (sans Brad Vickers) would go underground, not being affliated with any organization as they go full conspiracy theorist with guns.
-“Ada Wong is dead”
-Jill gets trapped on Sheena Island with Ark Thompson, but manages to escape.
-Sherry Birkin does NOT become a hostage of the US Government. Instead, she’s underground with Elza and the former Stars team
-Leon takes on a more villainous role, being more of a rival to Chris.
-RE4 takes place in the Spencer estate as originally intended, but would take place 2 years after Code Veronica. Europe would also be the origin of the T-Virus, not Africa
-Chris and Jill’s involvement with games after RE2 would involve them merely snooping around to uncover the truth of what happens, often going outside the boundaries of the law.
-RE4 would have Leon finding Spencer’s journal detailing where the “G-Virus” came from. IE… Africa.


So yeah, lets try and work with what the game already has since it’s

Leon’s mission, as it were, was to find Spencer, potentially kill him, and retrieve all evidence in regards to his corruption and involvement with the destruction of Raccoon City. That journal he finds is the catalyst for everything that happens in RE5. Not those stupid plagas. What happens is that with the destruction of Raccoon, Umbrella would soon go under. Considering Hunk’s operation in Raccoon City was borked by Birkin, most of their research on the T and G viruses were lost in the aftermath. And the people would want answers and justice for the victims of Raccoon. The US Government knew that Spencer was not going to budge or turn over his company’s research to the government without a fight, which is what Leon, Krauser, Bruce, and Fongling (the latter two from that Dead Aim game) would have given him. Leon was the only one left in the dark about the true purpose of their mission, so he doesn’t think about what happens next being connected.

Recovery teams snatched up the sources of T-Virus in the area, and the US Government re-produced them, and sold them to terrorist groups around the world. After several false flag incidents, America creates the BSAA as their personal response team to global bioterror incidents. In truth, Derrick Simmons (the bastard from RE6) wanted to maintain some semblance of control over the world by proxy of military intervention, as well as securing combat data for newly produced bio-weapons. New T-Variants were developed across the world, and the BSAA were the perfect genie pigs to ascertain their effectiveness. However, Simmons didn’t want to stop at the T-Virus. He wanted the G-Virus, the one bioweapon that was lost after Raccoon’s destruction. So he manipulated events to drag the BSAA into Africa.

So for RE5, Josh and Sheva would be the main focus.

Josh Stone would’ve joined the BSAA for financial reasons and a genuine desire to protect his homeland from any terrorist activities. He figures that his country and it’s surrounding neighbors have suffered enough throughout the centuries, and if joining the BSAA is what it takes to keep the peace, he will.

This puts him in conflict with Sheva Alomar who does NOT… join the BSAA. Instead, she joined a local armed militia in Kijuju known as the “Majini”. They oppose any government or faction that is directly controlled or influenced by international governments (primarily those from North America, Europe, and Asia) and continues their post-colonial rule. Yah know, just to piss off the reactionaries on youtube. 😛 Sheva’s motivations for this are directly from her bio in RE5 being the Umbrella killed her parents and indirectly left her to starve in a desert.

Sheva would consider Josh to be a traitor to their race by joining the BSAA, a paramilitary organization established by North America and controlled by the United Nations. On the other hand, Josh feels that Sheva is clouded by her trauma, lust for vengence, and joined people who do not have their country’s best interests in mind, thinking that they would initiate a more tyrannical government in Kijuju. He’s also suspicious of the Majini leader’s close ties to Arabic Governments.

Speaking of which, the Arabic supplier from the beginning of RE5 would actually be the middle-man between the Majini and one such government. Said government would’ve been in cahoots with Tricell and the US Government. See, what happens is that the Majini have been getting their asses kicked by the Kijuju military, so the Majini leader becomes desperate for any advantage he can get. The supplier would give him a sample of the “TX-Virus” (based on Mr. X from RE2) which would give the Majini men far more durability and pain suppression to withstand gun fire, making them much more potent as a fighting force.

Obviously, this was a ruse.

The Kijuju military was pretty damned efficient in fending off attacks from neighboring countries and private militias. People could barely stand a chance against them. So the only recourse was to use a viral outbreak to destabilize the region. The Arabic nation wanted to capture more citizens for slave labor, and the US Government did not want to risk an international incident by invading a foreign country without good cause (since Simmons was manipulating events for this purpose). So with this viral outbreak, America would be able to “intervene” with the BSAA. The Majini were basically manipulated into creating the very false flag that 2 foreign countries needed to get what they wanted.

Tricell… lets keep what RE5 already has for them, but also continue by having them as a front company for America’s continued BOW research and development. And their involvement in Africa would largely be a… yes, racially motivated testing ground for their viruses and BOWs, with news headlines across the world basically saying “viral outbreak” as though it were a common occurrence. A grand way to have people turn a blind eye to whatever they are doing. This is largely why Josh joins the BSAA since it gives him access to weapons and resources to combat the incidents going on in Africa.

Excella Gionne, the leader of Tricell, would eventually betray the US government upon locating the source of the G-Virus, and try to sell off it’s samples to the highest bidder, becoming the primary antagonist in the game.

So the game would have 2 concurrent storylines, one centered on Josh and his Partner, Doug from the Desperate Escape DLC, while the other is centered on Sheva and her partner, Keith Lumley from Revelations 1. Why Keith? Idk, seemed a natural fit since he and Sheva like using knives in fancy ways. Alternatively, he could be Josh’s partner transferred from the North American branch (as detailed in the ending of Rev 1) and he tries to “get fresh” with Sheva upon their meeting, and have the story come from his perspective rather than Josh and Sheva simply due to him being more relatable and/or entertaining. The story paths would not converge until they both reached the Marshlands with Josh and Sheva being separated from their respective partners as they both would join forces to uncover what exactly happened. Eventually, they would set aside their differences as they both realize their own organizations were both responsible for the outbreak in Kijuju. Majini for giving everyone that TX, and the UN for orchestrating these events (and using Tricell). Unfortunately, I never mapped these scenarios out in any meaningful way due to laziness and/or lack of imagination, I apologize.

I’d probably leave out the temple and the Volcano as these are 2 overly fantastical areas that seem a bit much for a Resident Evil title, feeling more akin to Indiana Jones than Black Hawk Down as Jun had claimed. And Definitely getting rid of the Ndipaya.

So… little bit of convoluted nonsense I came up with in regards to the G-Virus. Pretty much had to change Birkin’s entire motive and character for this to work.

William Birkin would’ve joined Umbrella for the sake of finding cures to the world’s most deadly diseases. Naively, he figured Umbrella, being a pharmaceutical company and all, would be the perfect company to work for. Unfortunately, Spencer, being the absolute rat bastard that he was, was far more interested in crafting viruses and bio-weapons for his own personal God Complex. The creation of the T-Virus was something that horrified him. At first, anyway. Birkin was assigned to James Marcus’s R&D team (the guy who practically made the T-Virus), and while under his wing, Birkin tried to modify the T-Virus into something less sinister. An infection that acted more as a cure for other ailments rather than something that was outright malicious. Unfortunately, all he managed to do was create a variant of the T-Virus that used lizards as a basis for regenerative capabilities. Marcus used this for his own future research which would’ve led to the creation of Lisa (REmake 1) and the existence of Crimson Heads. But around this time, Marcus had mentioned that Birkin would’ve been better off using those “Golgotha” samples from Africa if he was looking for a miracle cure. Out of curiousity, Birkin requested a business trip to Africa, which was permitted after Marcus praised Birkin’s ability in re-engineering the T-Virus for a variaty of different uses (T-Veronica, T-Abyss, T-Phobos, Birkin didn’t make these variants, but he came up with the method of repurposing them). After going to Kijuju, he finds the area where the Golgotha specimens were located. Golgotha would have a similar concept to something like Chromosome 24 from that God Awful Doom movie with the Rock. Basically, it’s a Chromosome that dictates whether you become Captain America or some shambling moron from the Walking Dead. However, unlike Doom, Golgotha would affect different people based specifically on DNA/Blood Type rather than their deeds in life (which… yeah). Golgotha would be found in the same flowers that the Progenitor Virus comes in, named so because it is theorized that those flowers were originally cultivated in Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified. How they got into Kijuju, well… yeah, I didn’t think about that one.

Consumption of the Golgotha plant would either heal a man or kill a man (as REmake 4 merchant would put it. Oh Amma, I can’t believe I quoted that game…), which, again, would be based on DNA. This picky function is why Spencer rejected Golgotha as a basis for BOWs as the variables wouldn’t be determined by him or his scientists, but by the plant itself. But for Birkin, who had already proven he could re-engineer viruses, was confident he could find a use for the Golgotha plants, and was more interested in it’s curative properties.

Returning to America, and taking several years, he manages to create the “G-Serum”. But he calls it a “Virus” to ward off suspicions from Spencer. However, Birkin became paranoid since Spencer had a bad habit of excommunicating his staff through lethal methods, and was afraid that Spencer would use his research for nefarious purposes. So he tries to sell the G-Serum to the US Government instead. This ofcourse results in Hunk’s assault on his lab, him getting gunned down, him injecting himself with G, turning into a monster, and causing the shit storm that was Raccoon City’s end. Of course Sherry gets infected, but NOT impregnated. Because that is still pretty fucked up. Sherry is infected, but she doesn’t suffer anything. Instead, she gets her Wolverine healing factor (demonstrated in RE6). Sherry is essentially Birkin’s first success with the G-Serum. Unfortunately, he was too monstrous to notice, and he gets killed eventually.

With Sherry NOT being a hostage of the Government, Derrick Simmons has no actual means of obtaining a G-Virus sample, hench the operation in Kijuju.

When Josh and Sheva discover the Golgotha flowers, Sheva stashes a few petals for later use. That use comes when she gets infected via infected bats in a cave. She would eat some of the petals which leads to her being cured and gaining those Super Soldier-tier abilities. Josh would see it as her being reckless, while Sheva would think it liberating. She starts thinking that if the Majini used Golgotha instead of that merchent’s T-Virus, things would’ve turned out differently.

Upon seeing Sheva take in the Golgotha sample, Excella Gionne would’ve taken this as her que to mutiny against America, and to use Golgotha for herself rather than turn it over to Simmons. Eventually, Josh and Sheva would’ve cornered Excella on that boat, she’d use a modified version of Golgotha, but realizes sshe screwed herself, turning into that giant plant monster as the final boss.

Alternatively, if Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine should be in the game, then I had 2 ideas.

1. The minimal amount of involvement. Jill or someone in their underground group would be able to hack the BSAA’s communications network, and talk Josh and Sheva through the whole ordeal, only going by the name “JV” until the end of the game.

2. Maximum amount of involvement. This one, I personally felt was dumb. Chris would find a way into Africa for his own purposes, possibly as a “second half” of the game similar to Code Veronica. Josh’d probably be captured or incapacitated in some degree, prompting Chris to take over for him. But then… Chris would be infected instead of Sheva, and she would give him the Golgotha Petals instead. Thus, Chris becomes a Super Soldier, and gives a tangible excuse for why he can punch boulders. I suppose it’s not as dumb as it could be, but it just seems like a cheap excuse to justify why he can punch boulders.

However the scenarios play out, Excella is beaten in the end, and Josh and Sheva, now knowing that the US Government had planned everything in regards to Kijuju’s incident, head for the US to join Chris and Jill’s underground in an effort to uncover everything they’d been involved in. As well, Doug would’ve been shadowing Josh and Sheva the entire time, and would take a few Golgotha samples from the boat they were on, turning them over to Simmons in time for RE6.

Like I said, it’s not entirely fleshed out, and the more I think about it, Josh and Sheva aren’t really strong enough characters to carry the game all their own. Then again, neither is Chris Redfield, but he gets a pass because he was in RE1. The overall goal would be removing most of the insensitive material, and have a story revolving more around the character’s sense of loyalties rather than… whatever theme RE5 was going for. Believing in a cause until one is forced to question their own beliefs, that sort of thing. Josh and Sheva simply aren’t fleshed out as characters, which speaks volumes as to how little of a shit Capcom gave when they made them, especially given how much effort was actually put into Helena, Piers, and Jake in RE6. The whole “sense of loyalties” gig would be a running theme for the Neohazard series as a whole as it also goes into Chris and Leon’s rivalry.

Does Anime contribute to loneliness?

I was trying to watch this anime series called “Metallic Rouge” some weeks back. Pretty sure some of you heard of it, and I like robot shit so this seemed to be up my ally, what with everyone turning into ugly ass Kamen Rider expies. And so far… i’ve only watched two episodes. Seems ok sans the Negrobo dying first trope, but… idk, I don’t have the energy for 13 episodes for some reason.

Idk, I used to watch anime more back in the day. Might be an age thing, idk. Or.. shit, maybe I’m going through another episode, idk. Them jabs ruined every damn thing. I guess after you’ve watch enough of this shit from the land of the rising sun, you’re bound to lose interest since their level of repititious plot beats rivals ours.

Starting to feel that… anime as a sub-genre (if you can call it that) might actually be harmful in this current climate of what people are calling a “loneliness epidemic”. Don’t know if any of y’all heard that one floating around for the past year, but it’s like there’s a mass scale of depression going on, probably as a result of social media turning everyone into fucking monsters and scaring the shit out of people, with influencers and gurus basically controlling people’s thoughts and perspectives of the world in the most fucked ways imaginable (I could go on for hours on that Red Pill/Manosphere shit). That’s not even touching just how divisive the shit has become. There are so many goddamn topics that cause shitstorms and debates before you ever even recognize what the hell the topics are, and literally before you know it, you’re given a label and ostricized before the goddamn world. Lets face it. People suck more than they used to. Either that, or the mainstreaming of internet connections has allowed us to get to know humanity better which… in turn, has made us more miserable, more cynical, more distrustful, more hostile, and a little mo’ nasty in a desire to over-punish certain individuals for the mere crime of not towing the line. People in general make most other folks feel nothing but pure misery. So for some, people choose to not interact with the rest of the world. Many people feel much safer in isolation than in the company of others, often delving into states of nihilism, misanthropy, and general apathy for the rest of the world. You might hear some memes like “We live in a society” or such things.

Whatever the case is, people, either of their own volition or by external forces, are withdrawn from the rest of the world. To that, I say tis good. A little solitude in these times goes a loooong way to not being miserable surrounded by often malicious and untrustworthy people.

But that’s kind of the issue with Anime in specific.

See, there’s a distinct difference between Western and Japanese cartoons. Western Cartoons are, not all the time but often, shallow. Oftentimes created with the distinct purposes of selling merchendise. Whether they have narrative weight, engrossing characters, or depth greater than a puddle, all of that is irrelevent. So long as it can convince you to buy a toy or a comic or any other junk associated with it, that’s often the most important factor. Cartoons that are geared towards adults are often too juvenile to buck the trend, and still fall into the trappings of commercialism to count. It’s only in more recent times that the west is trying to add more depth into their works, but they too often fall prey to juvenile spectacle such as verbal crassness, sex, and gore. At best, the most you would desire is more merch, and more spectacle. There is no emotional attachment involved because often, there is no emotion. There is just the product.

But on the otherside of the globe, it’s a different story. Japanese Cartoons, Anime, makes you want an ideal. An ideal social interaction. A lot of it boils down to the Power of Friendship, you all know how that goes, but… when I think about American values of individualism, and how the “Power of Friendship” might offend such sensibilities, I can’t help but think deep down that people would prefer having that sort of interaction with others. The way they write and direct these scenes when they depict a group of friends just doing things together, they do it in a way that the west could never. It’s very human, very genuine and sincere, and this is all accompanied by all this sappy music that tells you “this is the life”. (Most of) Anime is constantly telling you that you want a large gathering of friends, it tells you that you want companionship, and we know damn well Anime tells you that you want sex! Like full stop, Anime is pornographic as hell, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!

Anime is basically social media for people who don’t want to interact with other humans that just so happens to give you the same or similar level of insecurity. You’re watching people have these perfect lives surrounded by all these perfect friends who go on having the time of their lives. And then you look at yourself in a mirror when you’re done watching. Suddenly, there’s all these regrets of a life that went unfulfilled. The resentment of not having that large circle of friends, that resentment of not having companionship.

It’s all bullshit, of course, since the idea of a perfect relationship is completely unrealistic, especially in Japan. What with all the bullying (which is much worse there than in America in some cases), Hikkikomori, and suicide rates, the relationships we see in Anime are too fantastical to be considered real. But I often hear a sentiment from Anime fans that anime characters “feel real”.

I’ve always had this cynical idea that anime catered more to the outcasts of society, a notion that was seemingly validated after watching a documentary on Japanese loneliness and reading forums about why fanservice is so goddamn common in that it’s a way to exploit the loneliness of teenage boys because they work too much. As such, I can only assume that when these fans say they “feel real”, what they really mean is that it is their “idea” of what friendships are. Outcasts don’t typically have a large gathering of friends if they have any at all, so their frame of reference is limited to being outside looking in, their own tormentors, or fiction. The latter being the “safest” frame since outcasts do not thrive well in social environments thanks to sheer ostracization by the world around them. Being around people causes them pain from their mere presence. When they talk about their love of anime, I believe it has more to do with a yerning for the kind of social interaction that they cannot gain in the real world.

Anime fans mythologize anime (and by extension, Japanese culture) to a degree that is both sad and infuriating in most cases, but in this context, it’s sort of understandable. Anime gives them a safe environment to express their desire for basic and non-traumatic human interaction in a parasocial manner. Since the majority of anime fans start off as teenagers, anime is often more effective because the demographic is emotionally vulnerable. Even more so if they are the outcasts. What happens is they gain an intense emotional attachment to these works, so anime becomes far more important to them than it really is. Unfortunately, this also leads to them defending some of the more depraved and degenerate shit that happens in certain anime shows (SAO, Rose Rape, that kind of shit), and generally being more hostile to views contrary to their own. Or… hell, adopting utterly ridiculous beliefs for the salvation of their egos (Do they still take issue with Anime being called “Cartoons”?). It creates a volitile environment that would repel the more sensible people from engaging with them, and I realize I’m rambling again.

This intense emotional attachment has led to some people expressing certain kinds of sadness in relation to the end of their favorite series (sadly labeled as “Post Anime Depression”, by the balls of Ra, anime fans have a name for mental states related to cartoons!). I’d sooner put that on most anime endings being rather terrible and unsatisfyingly depressing (F/SN certainly counts), but most have likened them to the connections they’ve built with all of these different characters, and not being able to see them again now that the show’s over. True, fans online tend to dramatize their comments for sympathy points, but considering how defensive they become over shipping and waifus, idk. Might be the real feels.

Idk. Just a random thought I had at the moment. And before anyone asks, no I do not care about Keanu Reaves playing Shadow the Hedgehog.

Black Gamers need to stop defending RE5 (FMA, SAO)

I was debating with myself on whether or not I should even bother, but screw it. I’m practically all out of readers anyway, so I’ve no one to lose by self-indulging! 😛



IGN posted an article a couple of weeks back about Resident Evil 5 and why it cannot be remade. Now… yes, IGN, the journalist shitbirds that everyone has learned to never trust with a logical or rational take in their lives, but on the issue of RE5, I assume people became a little too desperate for content on their youtube channels and blogs when it comes to pandering to the griftosphere. While there are more important topics such as Sweet Baby apparently working with the Department of Homeland security and the FBI to monitor gamers online activities (including private spaces like Discord) in what could be the Game Industry’s attempt to purge all of their critics by force of Government Intervention, the internet cares more that IGN said a game is racist. It seems that Gamers love the Game Industry more than they love themselves.

Apparently there is a video by a Matt Pri-… something on RE5, and he mulled over everything that was wrong with the title, though the entire premise of his video is discredited by the very idea of a remake. To hopefully rectify all the issues he brought up. Then again, Capcom has been pretty shit with their remakes and often end up making completely inferior products because preserving everything that made the originals so special to people is apparently too much to ask for. But since RE5 was teased to all hell by the ending of REmake 4, it’s a foregone conclusion that a REmake 5 is coming whether people want it or not.

That being said, the video went into other details aside from racism, but you wouldn’t know that from the millions upon millions of responses to that one bit near the end of the vid which left people celebrating them getting nuked on twitter. “How DARE these fools declare that the game is racist!!!” Calling RE5 racist is apparently the worst thing you could ever do, but saying Tomodachi Life was anti-LGBT was a righteous cause that even Nintendo Fanboys got behind (btw, I’m still pissed about that). Even websites like Quora (A more reasonable Yahoo Answers imo) will outright insult people for questioning whether or not RE5 is racist, referring to people as retarded morons. Something that I haven’t seen on the site until I looked up that specific question.

I would sooner say “whatever, let the Griftosphere have their echochamber circle jerk for the uptenth time”, but I have to question… what do black gamers get out of defending RE5? Even way back in 2008-9 when the game was on the cusp of release, black gamers were adamant that they make sure to know that they didn’t have a problem with the game in it’s entirety, all the while making themselves look like actual fools. And I’m not just saying that. There were a couple of vids of these niggas who would shake and move about like they’re on ritalin, shouting at the top of their lungs about why RE5 wasn’t racist while also giving the vague description that they are beyond angry and frustrated by the mere notion.

Black gamers tend to go extra and overboard when they wanna push back against any notions of racism or discrimination in videogames, mostly because they know they have a white audience whom they feel the need to prove that they are objective in their opinions, a standard that even white gamers don’t hold themselves to on most occasions, but also because most black gamers (“MOST”, not “ALL”) tend to be outcasts of the black community as well, so they tend to carry some baggage from their own personal experiences, and identify more so with their white buddies than they do with other black people. That being said, most Black Gamers don’t want to feel they have to discontinue their support of products made by a corporation out of some moral obligation to a community they largely feel ostricized by. Videogames became their escape, and they will be damned if they give that up as well.

Even if those aren’t their reasons, their arguments in support of RE5 tend to fall flat because they jump to the logical fallacy of “arguing on the basis of context”. There’s one thing that’s consistent about fiction. Things don’t merely exist without the explicit desire of the authors to put the shit in there in the first place. Some have gone in length to say that a Resident Evil game taking place in Africa was “inevitable” if we paid attention to the series lore up until that point. Now… granted, I’ve only played RE0, REmake 1, RE2, and RE4. I don’t know of the lore in RE3 OG or Code Veronica since they cost more than a second mortgage. But the only time Africa was ever mentioned in any of these games… was in a backstory for Billy Coen via RE0. They were apparently sent out for a mission, but they had crappy intel, yet they were forced to gun down innocent Africans because the military didn’t want to go home empty handed. So Billy murked their asses in retaliation.

Absolutely none of that has anything to do with Umbrella or Viruses or anything of that sort. The only time (that I know of) where Umbrella’s operations had anything to do with Africa… came directly from RE5 itself as this was the game that delved into the origins of the T-Virus. This beyond a reasonable doubt is why RE5 is at the center of the series as it reveals where the series mainstay virus came from. If there’s anything in RE3 or CV regarding Africa, I would not know. But as far as I’m aware, Africa itself did not become important until the very game that’s based in Africa. Who knew?

But since everyone wants to argue that Africa is just this “important, inevitable setting for a Resident Evil Game”, they don’t spend a whole lot of time talking about the story. If they did, they’d be able to find about a million holes going on with it. Every plot detail in the game seems to have been made with the intent to justify the setting of the game when very little of what’s going is even remotely justified. The primary reason it takes place in Africa is because Albert Wesker wanted to use an abandoned Umbrella facility to research and create Uroburos. That’s… literally it. Nothing about the location makes it vital for Wesker’s plans as there’s possibly several other facilities in the world that Umbrella had control over that would make for more convenient and better hidden locations to conduct his research (made all the more egregious with Revelations 2 seeing as his sister already has a facility all the way in an isolated Russian island that no one seems to give a fuck about. Yeah yeah I know, they weren’t thinking that far ahead.) Some might think “well what about the Stairway to the Sun flower patch!? It has the Progenitor Virus which is the most vital component for Uroburos because of it’s natural selection nonsense!” What about it? Keep in mind, Wesker has superspeed granted by a virus. He can blitz that area and take as many flowers as he wants, then bounce when he’s done harvesting. He doesn’t need to stay in Africa to do anything.

But he apparently… “needed” the aid of Excella Gionne, the head of Tricell’s African division. What is Tricell? Well according to the game’s lore, Tricell used to be called “Travis Trading Company”. Back in the old days, Henry Travis took a 34 year expedition across Africa (34 years, what the absolute fucking shit!?) and detailed all of this in a book that he wanted to sell. However, everyone considered him to be a quack, and he died from depression, mostly because his brother wanted to keep that book in the family so he could exploit Africa for all it’s worth. All that information apparently led to the creation of Tricell. But it also led to Ozwell E Spencer going to Africa in search of the Stairway to the Sun. Which is funny because of RE8 making this entire premise a shitshow, now we can ask why Spencer felt the need to go to Africa for all of this shit when he could’ve gotten some cadou molds and started his God Complex right then and there. It gave Miranda virtual immortality and could mutate the shit out of anyone it touches. But alas.

Why is Excella helping Wesker? Because she’s a prideful girl boss cunt who wanted more respect from her company. And figured that Wesker could help her achieve this. By giving her the Plagas from RE4. This trite little plot detail only exists to validate the existence of RE4 because outside of Leon, Ada, and Wesker all being present, RE4 has virtually nothing to do with Resident Evil as a whole. Plus, with REmake 4 retconning Ada’s actions, the idiots in charge actually did something good and made RE4 irrelevant to the series (as it should be 😛 ). Jokes aside, they give that Plagas over to Ricardo Irving, a guy who controls the oil fields…. why!? To essentially create the excuse plot that involves the heroes. Irving was given control of several different BOWs for an Arms deal (Yeah, because THAT won’t attract any attention). And then we have the excuse that he’s going insane throughout the course of the game, so much so that he completely unleashes the Plagas and several BOWs throughout Kijuju for the distinct purpose of eluding capture by the BSAA.

Right then and there, Wesker and Excella should’ve stopped whatever they were doing because Irving completely exposed everything that was going on. Irving was needed for the sole purpose of gaining the funds necessary for Wesker and Excella to research and develop Uroburos, a fact he brings up before his boss fight. Makes sense given that he controls the oil fields in Kijuju, a good source of profit. But why the hell would he be involved in an arms deal for BOWs!? It would’ve made more sense if he was just securing funds from other shady deals, OR just by selling Oil at an inflated price, and nothing more. But they take a massive risk in having Irving sell BOWs for money!? Sure, the BSAA isn’t going to notice this!

The only logical reasoning I could think of in regards to this (which is still a HUGE fucking risk) is that, with Tricell as a member corporation of the Global Pharmaceutical Consortium, the organization that created and controls the BSAA, Excella could’ve used her position to lure the BSAA into traps set by Irving, and eliminate all opposition to her and Wesker’s plans. Then make it seem like the mission was impossible to complete, thus forcing the BSAA to retreat and no longer interfere with their operations.

Except… there was a file in the game that said the BSAA was made a U.N. military unit because people reasonably had no trust in corpo rats to be given big guns after Umbrella fucked the pooch in Raccoon. So Excella shouldn’t really have any actual control over the BSAA in the first place. Gah, Idk. I’m still trying to figure out why Chris would be a founding member of a military unit created by Big Pharma, one that UMBRELLA WAS A PART OF IN THE FIRST PLACE! RE5 has so much stupid shit going on, I’m shocked they didn’t remake that one first.

So in reality, the BOW outbreak in Kijuju was all done simply to lure the BSAA into a trap to kill them all off. Again, something that does not require Africa as a setting, and if all the above is true, was the most foolish diversion that Wesker and Excella could think of as it led Chris Redfield to them in the first place.

Another problem with RE5 is that it’s lore is largely unnecessary for the plot to go as it does. The lore exists as an explanation for where the T-Virus came from. A virus that isn’t even utilized in the game. I would’ve assumed the damn flowers, being the origin of the T-Virus, was the basis for Uroburos because so many of those flowers were kept in storage of that military boat they were on. That would also explain it’s incredible weakness to fire (Making T-Veronica the most powerful T-Variant since it gives chicks pyrokinesis and bug control… somehow). Except… the journals in the game actually inform us that this isn’t really the case.

Some guy named Brandon wrote some journal entries on the oh so fantastic Progenitor Virus, the basis for the T-Virus and the reason everyone is all up in Africa in the first place. And wouldn’t you know it, the Progenitor isn’t at all produced via the flowers. When Brandon and James Marcus (The Opera Singer in 0) tried to cultivate the flowers, they did not contain Progenitor at all. They went through several cultivation techniques and still couldn’t come up with anything. I’m no botanist, but that sounds like bullshit to me. So the flowers have to be in Africa, in this remote location, in a damn cave underground, just to have Progenitor. Seems like every virus after 2003 in the series comes from underground, and Umbrella would’ve been better off just digging holes for their kooky experiments. Las Plagas under Salazar’s Castle, Progenitor in an underground cavern, Megamycite in an underground cavern, so on and so forth. But if cultivating the flowers doesn’t create the Progenitor they needed, then the flowers ain’t the actual source.

So where the hell does Progenitor actually come from? But most importantly… why does this even matter?

I ask this because Brandon Bailey, in his own journal, talked about how often he sent back samples of Progenitor to James Marcus. Meaning several samples should’ve been stored somewhere in the Arklay region. What, did Marcus not keep any Progenitor samples on hand after his leech fetish? After Wesker and Birkin killed Marcus, Birkin didn’t find any Progenitor samples? According to Bailey, he had been sending samples for 30 years up until November of 98, ages after Marcus’s death, so there should’ve been some still around, enough for someone (like Ada or HUNK at least) to find before they blew all the labs up. This is kinda the problem of introducing new concepts in newer installments of a franchise, you kinda have to bullshit a lot of details in order for everything to make sense. Because the game had to come up with a feeble excuse of “well the Progenitor Flowers don’t contain the Progenitor Virus unless it’s specifically cultivated in an African cave, and only if they get water and nothing else”. All that says is that the flowers are not at all the source of the Progenitor Virus. Unfortunately, the game does not explain this AT ALL. I blew through all the files trying to find answers, they don’t exist. Where does the Progenitor actually come from? Or better yet… why didn’t they actually study the area the shit was growing in!? Perhaps the kind of nutrients in the water, the soil, anything that was unique to that fucking cave, that would’ve led to the creation of the Progenitor. Maybe there was a meteorite that landed in that region that produced those flowers, because the lore surrounding the Ndipaya and the Stairway to the Sun sounds like some shit they ripped off of Black Panther anyway, it might as well have come from space.

But in either case, the way Uroburos is utilized within the game… still doesn’t require Africa. Something tells me that in the middle of development, they had to rewrite the entire plot as a result of the controversies back in the late 2000s (most notably with Jill), but Uroburos is only used for like… 4 bosses. The first in Chapter 1 which feels too sudden in most cases, looking like your run of the mill BOW (Why the fuck would Wesker risk exposing his plans with a BOW that could be traced to his secret labs!? He’s pretty thorough when it comes to covering his tracks). The next way later in Chapter 5, the actual underground facility, Excella on the ship, and a desperate Wesker in a Volcano. That’s a whole lot of nothing for a virus that is supposed to be the main reason the game “had” to take place in Africa. Instead, the vast majority of enemies are Plagas based. Plagas because they originally intended for that to once again be the main culprit of the viral outbreak in Africa, which…. again, something that can happen virtually anywhere on the planet, but Africa was chosen. Nevermind that we never really see what’s so special about any of these viruses throughout the series since all they do is mutate the shit out of people, turning them all into eldritch abominations, but Uroburos is supposed to be Chromosome 24 from that terrible ass Doom movie in that the virus “chooses” who to infect and who to bless with super powers. Why Wesker does this is because he apparently developed an existential crisis thanks to made up monkey shit about him and several other children being kidnapped and experimented on to become the Wesker Children, and only he and Alex survived these trials. Now he developed a God Complex and wants to put the whole world through the same process he was… just because.

Yah know, I was more curious as to why he was collecting virus samples from around the world in the first place. Why did he want G-Virus samples, why did he want T-Veronica, why did he want Plagas? T-Abyss? Because PRIOR to his meeting with Spencer, he had NO PLANS with the viruses he collected, with only T-Veronica being expanded upon in the Rail Shooter that everyone refuses to play (a year or so after RE5’s release). We got none of that. Of course, there’s a file in the game (by a certain “Miguel”) that explains that they NEEDED all of these virus samples for Uroburos. But… why!? Uroburos wasn’t even in the cards until after 2006! Wesker’s been snatching up viruses since 98! How the fuck do you combine the viruses of T,G,Veronica, and Plagas to create this super bitch virus that’s nothing but black worms throughout the body!? Actually, scratch all that. Why… didn’t Wesker look into the same process that created him, The Wesker Children, and instead use that as a basis for his plans!? Whatever experiments worked on him, he could recreate and not have bothered with anything this fucking convoluted just to justify the setting of Africa in the first place. I mean… hell, why give Wesker this retarded backstory!? Why couldn’t he just be a dickhead who wanted to snatch up viruses, screw over Umbrella, and just sell to the highest bidder? He was pissed off at Umbrella because they wanted to get rid of his Tyrant project, and he felt like he spent a whole lot of work on that shit to have it be dumped in the trash. Bringing Wesker back from the dead was already a shitshow that Mikami put no real thought into, and with the rail shooters, we see how much of an asspull his survival was. If Wesker and Birkin had that sort of chemical on-hand that gave Wesker Super Strength and speed…. WHY THE FUCK DID YOU NEED ANYTHING ELSE!? In one of the files of RE5, they already stated that they wanted to use the Plagas to create super soldiers. Just give them whatever Wesker was using! Or… what, is Wesker that damn selfish that he doesn’t want to share the wealth!? He wants to be the only one with the badass powers while every other BOW is just fodder!? Oh Amma, the more I think about this, the more convinced I am that the lore of Resident Evil is just a shitshow.

Actually, since Uroburos has components of T-Veronica, shouldn’t it be fire proof and pyrokinetic!? The hell!?

I wouldn’t be rambling this much if you didn’t have niggas trying to validate why the game takes place in Africa based on the context of the plot. The plot isn’t good. It’s so haphazardly strung together that I’m almost convinced that RE6 was better written. Carla Radames just wanted to fuck shit up and destroy the world because she was pissed off at her boyfriend. I will take that over a spoiled scientist becoming a pretentious nihilist obsessed with evolution out of the blue.

But I’ve wasted enough time, lets actually talk about the main issue here. Is RE5 racist?

…. Yeah! Just… not in the way that people think.

You see, the main argument for why people were never convinced of RE5’s racism…. is because the initial reaction to the trailer that caused the outrage was “White guy goes to Africa to blast on niggas”. Now obviously, the gaming community shit itself with laughter at the mere notion because of, once again, “the fucking context”. So many talking points have been used and memed to death, but the 2 most consistent ones being “Well it’s Africa, of course there be niggas to shoot” and the dumbest one being “it wasn’t racist in RE4 because you were killing spaniards!”. But no, the problems actually start… with how Capcom chooses to rectify the controversy. First off, Capcom taking swift action to try and curb the controversy in the first place… was tacit admission by Capcom that the game came off pretty insensitive. Same reaction Nintendo had with Tomodachi Life. Today, this would’ve been written off as Capcom “bending the knee to DEI”, just another buzzword for SJWs I assume, or Capcom going “woke” or whatever nonsense these idiots come up with. Still trying to wrap my head around Rogue’s ass and titties being “woke”, goddammit. But whatever, Capcom took action to try and curb this shit. But their attempts to do so… come off worse than before.

Firstly, the portrayal of the Majini enemies. Majini being the African Ganados in this case. Capcom decided to slip in a more diverse array of enemies with some berber lookin fucks and maybe a Saddam look-alike here and there, but in the midst of designing the enemies, the black ones just look a whole lot more terrifying than the berber enemies. Like here, since my sister bought this shit for Amma knows what reason.

Fuck me, they REALLY wanted to get across that black people be scary as shit! The white mother fuckers just look angry or drowsy, but the black folks are just fierce! Look at the way their eyes be poppin! Out of all the non-zombie enemy types, why is it the negroes look the scariest!?

That’s not even touching their animations. Something that everyone seemed to ignore, but the way the Majini move and sound when compared to their Ganado counterparts, and even the J’avo, is really distinctive. In RE4 OG’s cutscenes, the Ganados movements are very much human-like, a point they wanted to get across when designing them to make sure they were NOT classified as zombies. They seemed more organized, more human, having actual human communication with each other as they organized and plotted against Leon. Pointing and directing themselves in a more orderly fashion to fight Leon. The J’avo act in a similar Fashion, especially in Jake and Sherry’s story.

Unfortunately, the Majini are portrayed as just being these animalistic, monstrous beings no different from the zombies you see in World War Z. The way they move is very inhuman and creepy, shaking and shuffling their bodies about as if they’re on ritalin. They swarm the heroes like a pack of wild dogs (The scene where they reunite with Josh in the Oil field, and the Desperate Escape DLC being the most egregious examples). You notice this more in cutscenes than in gameplay since a lot of their gameplay work was recycled from RE4, but it says a lot when the Plagas from RE4 has a completely different effect depending on ethnicity. The only thing that makes Type 2 Plagas different from the regular ones from Europe is how they infect the body and different variants, but the Majini seem more animalistic and disorganized in comparison.

Then there’s the Ndipaya Tribal enemies. Honestly, the fuckery with them speaks for itself, but people have tried to defend them for Amma knows what reason. Like… there’s no distinctively Spanish or Chinese enemies on par with the Ndipaya to make even a farcical fair comparison! About the extent of it with the Ganado are the cultists, and cultists are pretty damn interchangable these days. J’avo have no such variant. The Majini have a distinct African variant that looks and feels like it came out of the minds of Colonialists of the 19th century. And it’s honestly disturbing how the first thing out of Chris’s mouth when they get there is “They’re all infected”. Sure he’s right, but I would’ve honestly guessed “Hey, he’s a trespasser, and these guys are just defending their home”. I mean…. jeez, right!? They just show up out of the blue, and “they’re all infected, yep, SHOOT EM ALL!” That shit was not handled well at all, I don’t give a fuck what anyone says.

Speaking of Chris, one of these idiots literally said “How can the game be racist against Africans?! Chris Redfield is there to SAVE Africa!” Uhhh… NO! NO HE ISN’T! If you actually played the game extensively, you would know better than to say some shit like this. Chris’s entire reason for going into Kijuju is to find his white girlfriend, Jill Valentine. This is explained in a file and a cutscene. He had heard “rumors” that Jill was spotted in Kijuju, and requests to be a part of that mission in the hope that he finds her. After fighting an El Gigante, he literally ABANDONS the mission, goes rogue with Sheva, just to find Jill, and he becomes a literal broken record after this point. He’s gotta find Jill, gotta find Jill, Jill Jill Jill. Even Excella Gionne calls Chris out for this. You find all this evidence of Bioterrorism going on, and he’s so absorbed in finding Jill that he stops giving a fraction of a fuck about anyone or anything else. As a matter of fact, when they DO find Jill and free her from mind control, Jill tells Chris that he has to stop Wesker from unleashing Uroburos, or millions will die. His response!? “Well yeah, but-” WELL YEAH, BUT!? What the fuck!? WHAT THE FUCK!? Wesker is talking genocide of the entire planet, and you’re so preoccupied with Jill’s tight as suit that you can’t even focus on saving the world!? Chris doesn’t give a fuck about anyone else but himself and Jill. This is shown at the very beginning when their supplier is executed before an angry mob, and he literally refuses to save his life! See this is why people like Leon better, he actually gives a shit about saving people. Chris is just an asshole! This was a major reason why said youtuber (I don’t remember his name, but he’s an idiot) I feel is a complete liar who’s only motivation was to defend RE5 for the salvation of his image as a Black Gamer who is “fair” and “objective” in his judgement, but clearly has not played the game extensively to know a damn thing about what he’s talking about. Course his stupidity was vindicated when he said Native Americans didn’t care about the Redskins name. I remember way back in Elementary School, we had Native Americans actually visit us to tell about their cultural ways. One of the kids (trying to be cute because kids are assholes) literally asked them about the football team itself. The father of these visitors said it straight up! “I’ll be glad when they change that name!” Bullshit they didn’t care!

As a matter of fact, the heroes of Resident Evil… never really save the areas they’re in. They often only save the people closest to them, but the areas that have a viral outbreak are always LOST! They’re blown up, and anyone who was still in the area is toast. The Arklay region didn’t have any leftovers, but Raccoon, Sheena, Rockfort, all these places suffered viral outbreaks, and the only solution to said outbreak is outright annhilation. “Africa” (Kijuju) wasn’t saved until Revelations 2 with TerraSave (I guess? They never went into length about what they did, but it says a lot when an NGO has to go in and clean up the BSAA’s fuck ups). Kijuju is/was practically a lost cause as the BSAA practically abandoned the mission when most of their teams got their asses kicked. If anything, the BSAA have never been successful at anything outside of Revelations 1. So… what did they save? Well, Chris and Sheva saved the world from annihilation, so yay for them. If anything, that means Kijuju was saved as well. But… we don’t see that happening on-screen, and the implications that the BSAA turned tail and ran after getting the asswhoopin of their lives speaks volumes. Kijuju was never saved until Claire Redfield got involved. But hey, at least they’re consistent with Chris’s character! He’s NEVER been good with keeping anyone alive after Rebecca.

I’ve spoken in length about Sheva Alomar, but it deserves reiterating because some of these niggas tried to use her as a defense against the accusations of racism, which is just sad. Sheva was literally created (or modified from her original conception) to be tacit permission for Chris to shoot black people. Lets be real about it. Sheva doesn’t really do anything special that goes beyond the realm of being Chris’s personal asswiper… and piece of ass. Literally the first thing we see of her introduction is her rump in front of the camera. And it’s like the game for the first couple of chapters tried to find every conceivable excuse to show off her assets. Not even Ashley Graham was sexualized to this extent. Normally, I wouldn’t be complaining about this shit, but the thing with Sheva is that she’s not even dignified as a respectable character while they’re so busy trying to tell you how hot she is. She has no agency as a character. Everything she does is purely motivated by whatever Chris wants. Most egregious example being when she wanted to cut and run after Alpha Team is wiped out by the Gigante fight, but goes along with Chris’s antics… just because. The excuse being “we’re partners”, but Sheva doesn’t even know the guy well enough to care about why he’s going rogue. They try to justify this in the very next scene where she’s talking about her past experience with Umbrella and her desire to “fight for her fallen brothers”  which sounds cute on paper, but everything else that comes out of her mouth really only comes in response to whatever Chris is mulling on about. It’s also telling that she lacks a lot of emotion in regards to finding old ruins of Umbrella’s research facility when they were responsible for the deaths of her fucking parents, and that Excella was using their resources for research.

Now she’s got a file that has an extensive backstory that sounds waaaaay better than everything she gets in the game, but that doesn’t make up for the deficit of actual character that’s present. People talk about how much they love Sheva, and I have to question if they actually do, or if they’re just going out of their way to try and prove they’re not racist. There’s nothing to actually like about her that makes her stand out from the likes Jill, Claire, or even Ada. Hell, Sherry in all 3 versions of RE2 is a fundamentally more likable character. Sheva… is nothing! She’s absolutely nothing! But I guess that doesn’t matter when we can have her prance around in a tribal African bikini complete with highheels. Holy shit, I forgot they put highheels on that costume! What the fuck do people mean this shit isn’t offensive!? Sheva is basically gutter sex until Revelations 1 where there was just no shame, but Sheva’s costumes are probably the most overtly sexualized costumes in the entire series, and they’re all tasteless and tactless. Again, they gave the bitch a “Clubbin” outfit just so they could turn her into a hoodrat hoochie mama with a blonde wig! The lack of self-awareness that black gamers have in regards to Sheva alone, I’d have to stand back in awe! She’s not a character, she is an excuse for Chris to go full blast on Africans. That was, is, and forever will be the extent of her character.

Then you’ve got a fool who acts like he’s so angry and emotional asking “so am I racist for loving Resident Evil 5!?” That’s not even what they were claiming, first of all. This is the extent of why negroes keep going to bat for shit they love, so damn afraid of people telling them that they have to give up those things out of moral obligation. You wanna keep playing RE5, go ahead! No one is saying you have to give up anything! But being ignorant or outright dishonest about what the shit actually has in it only shows a lack of integrity, self-awareness, and in the case of these black gamers, some actual pride in themselves. There is PLENTY of fuckshit going on in RE5 for anyone to consider it racist. But because gamers tend to lack any moral courage these days thanks in no small part to the culture wars overriding everyone’s priorities, you won’t get any honesty about what goes on in these games without actually playing them. They’re so busy trying to argue the validity of it’s content based solely on context that they don’t understand the nuance of unfortunate implications. If it wasn’t as racist or as bad as everyone was saying it is, Capcom would not have made steps to try and curb their own BS. There’s no getting around that.

But alas, it always seems like people don’t want their precious “art” to be criticized for one reason or another. Expression is dandy. People should have that freedom to express themselves regardless of who may be offended. That being said, that’s not an automatic license to be outright inconsiderate and offensive just because you can. Which is unfortunate because a lot people are just looking to start shit just because they enjoy causing strife and misery. They think it’s cute and cheeky to do so while they laugh at all the people who rage against them. They see their ability to offend others as a symbol of power and control over people right before they turn around and mock them for having the temerity to be offended.

Then there’s the people who hold a very pretentious view of offensive material that borders on insanity and/or insincerity.

For example, and some of y’all are gonna be triggered if you hated this shit as much I do, but there was this one character from a cartoon back in 2004 who got done in the most dirty and fucked way you can imagine. So… High School, Sophmore year, still trying to keep up with all the animes coming on Cartoon Network at the time, and could barely stay up late night to watch most of em anymore, I tried to watch this show called “FULL METAL ALCHEMIST”. You know, one of the most popular and likely overrated animes ever? I wouldn’t know because I stopped watching after about 7 episodes. Why? Well because of this girl.

At the time, I thought “Hey, it’s a Black Anime Girl, and she doesn’t have an “othered” face!? I’m in!” Seriously, a lot of anime tends to depict Dark Skin characters with exxagerated facial features to be as “realistic” as possible while all the Asian/White character get “Normalized” anime features that Rose was a breath of fresh air at the time. Unfortunately, it appeared that she was just gonna be a one off minor character, so I honestly stopped watching. The show wasn’t interesting at all to me, and the main character (I can’t remember his name) was a bit of a douche. I tolerated that with Yusuke Urameshi since the supporting cast was far more interesting, and FMA came off like it was gonna be something akin to Gundamn Wing, a show that’s overly dramatic with possibly dull action… except I just didn’t care about anyone.

Then some years later, I read that Rose actually came back. I thought “Oh for real!? What did they do with here at that point?” Oh… nothing much! She was just… abducted and raped repeatedly by nazis, traumatized and turned mute and catatonic, gets impregnated, gets turned into a martyr/political tool for some dickhead’s revolution, then she gets drugged, has some chick sliding her fingers across her tits, has the baby being tossed around like a hot potato, and is stripped of all her agency until she gets some obligatory happy ending being stuck raising other people’s kids.



FUCK… Full Metal Alchemist! I ain’t even watched the damn series in it’s entirety, but that shit!? I don’t give a fuck about FMA anymore. People can go on pumping that shit like it’s one of the greatest animes ever, they’ll just be another fandom lost in a sea of obsessive nerds who believe every anime they’ve seen in their teenage years is the greatest and most life changing BS they’ve ever watched. But that shit!? Yah know, anime has had a lot of fucked up shit in the vast majority of it’s existence, but that right there was a special kind of horrid. They basically dehumanized the character into being a plot device for another character’s development, and I could not be anymore pissed about this. And yeah if I’m being honest, I don’t think I wouldn’t have had this much of an issue if she wasn’t (one of) the black girl on the show. No I don’t give a damn if her nationality is “ishvalen” or whatever made up jargon shit anime typically comes up with, she’s black to me. Cause from what I’ve read, none of this happens in the Manga, she is just a minor character through and through, which is preferrable to being raped back into relevance because the writer of the cartoon just so happened to be the originator of tentacle rape. Also yes, she’s originally white in the Manga… which makes this even worse. So we turn her black, and we rape her into disability, all the while she gets stuck raising a bastard child and being used as a tool for other people’s plots, and it’s weird when I’m reading more of this shit on tvtropes as it’s character page constantly points out that she recovered and she’s happy, like they’re trying to convince you that it’s not all bad news for her (arguing context again), but that ain’t the point! I and many others were pissed that it even happened, and it’s telling that on regular forums and message boards, no one ever brings up her “happiness” in the cinematic conclusion of that series. Probably because they know it’s bullshit and has no actual merit.

But I’d see it all the time when people try to defend it. “Well that’s the point, Baka Gaijin! War is hell! It isn’t pretty, horrible things happen” or the even more pretentious “It’s better because it’s darker and more realistic this way, much more preferrable to the empty feel good happiness of other productions” as if misery in fiction is inherently superior just because it reinforces the horrors of the world. Then these same dipshits wonder why the Brotherhood adaptation is so much more beloved. Because no one has the patience or the stomach for bullshit to the extent of what the 03 series pulled, and this causes them nothing but seething friggin RAGE!

So this got me thinking “why the hell is rape becoming more common in anime!?” That’s one of the reasons I stopped watching hentai, fuck me, rape is fetishized to hell and back in that genre. I remember the last one I watched was something called Word’s Worth, and again, you had a black chick get raped, but she ends up with stockholm syndrome even though the demon told her straight up that he only wants an heir. I can’t even remember how long ago this shit was, but by that point, I had enough. It’s just waaaay to rapey. But now you got that shit creeping into regular old anime, and all I can ask is wtf is wrong with Japan!? I talked about that in regards to SAO amongst all it’s other issues, and I suppose if you wanted to argue in it’s defense via context, at least the prick of an MC tries to stop that shit from happening, but still. Why does that ever have to be a thing!? From what I’ve read, Rape is not a huge taboo in Japan as it is in the west (which is… concerning), but that doesn’t even come close to a defense for the lack of sensitivity in handling the subject, though I’m sure most people will chalk that up to Japan having much worse writers in general. And I’ve seen people use that “different culture” defense to wipe Japan’s hands clean of that nonsense. I’m kinda done with this idea of “how dare people not be well versed in Japanese culture to appreciate the finer details of anime” bullshit that people jerk off to over and over again. People ONLY OVER use that defense for Japan and no other country in the world merely because Japan produces the entertainment they want. Japan is their ultimate form of escapism, their grand addiction. So to be offended by Japanese cultural “norms” in anime is the same thing as kicking a baby. Then the next day they’ll be shitting on Germany just because of the first 2 world wars. Perhaps their brand of chocolate isn’t as addictive as teenage cartoons from the far east.

I was watching this one video of an Asian dude who was “complaining about the complaints” in regards to rape being more prominent in SAO and Goblin Slayer, and made this comment. “Why do we care more about this stuff happening in cartoons and not real life!?” Well gee, idk. Perhaps we run the risk of trivializing the act and desenzitizing people to the act? I don’t see the point in splitting hairs here, the act itself is deplorable no matter the context, but this attitude only encourages people to shrug their shoulders whenever this shit gets brought up. People have a tendency to over indulge in their entertainment, which is certainly no fault of the people who make that entertainment, but the way I see it, over-exposure to certain issues tends to “normalize” those issues, make it seem like it is only natural, happens frequently, and is ultimately inevitable. That it is merely just a part of life. Its the same thing with the News over reporting on atrocity after atrocity giving people mean world syndrome, you constantly use it as a narrative device or for shock value, and people become dull to seeing/hearing about it over and over again. They start hearing rape cases in the news, people are likely not to flinch when it gets brought up. So just saying “why don’t people care more about it happening in real life!?” is more so pandering than it is a legit question, an effort done to de-legitimize any actual concerns as being of less importance because it concerns the fictional rather than the physical.

And a legit question, but when has rape ever made an anime “better”, exactly? So far, no one enjoys it in their favorite shows, thus I’m left wondering why anyone would bother to try and defend it. But as usual, this has nothing to do with actual concerns with the content, this has everything to do with the fear of losing access to a medium. People are going to defend what they love regardless if there are objective concerns to be had with whatever is going on. And anime fans in particular are hypersensitive, volitile, and extremely hostile to any form of criticism for their shows. They have convinced themselves that Anime is the most beautiful form of art in the world, and that any form of criticism is a blasphemy to be crucified by hellfire. Even if that criticism is for an act that they themselves agree is far too excessive for that medium, which is a hilarious bit of irony there.

That’s how I see the overblown response to IGN’s take on RE5. A hostile response out of fear for the potential loss of access to, or outright removal of content. Again, hilariously ironic given that the vast majority of people claim that RE5 is so terrible, but will go to bat for it if anyone calls it racist. Is IGN shit? Yes. Does IGN constantly have bad takes? Absolutely. Which begs the question of why they were given that much attention in the first place. I mean… obviously, I could hazard several guesses as to the real motivations, but where black gamers in particular are concerned, I’d have to wonder. They’re far too eager to show that they are not offended by the game, but at the same time, they misrepresent facts of the game, which is highly suspect. I’m not saying black folks wouldn’t have an issue with the game itself, but give em a camera and an audience, and they’ll make you wonder sometimes. RE5 has never been an innocent little gem devoid of all sorts of fucked imagery in the slightest, and I’m tired of people pretending otherwise. Could a remake rectify all of these issues? Absolutely. But after the last 3 remakes, I don’t trust Capcom to deliver on any front.

And for the record, I’m not saying the games can’t take place in Africa. But seeing how better other games in the series have handled their locales, one can’t help but wonder, yah know?

Sonic Edge Themes

So… I had a bit of an idea recently, though I’m sure discussing that would have peeps bitching me out for being “too old” or something.

You know what? Fuck it.

It’s sort of a meta-commentary on how the franchise had been handled over the last 20 years, how the soul of the franchise had been torn asunder to make way for a vision of the series that is, for better or worse, anti-thetical to Sonic. Or hell, maybe it sounds better in my head.

It’s all a WIP, probably won’t even post what I got in mind as I’ve become a lazy ass in the last couple of years, but who knows?

At the moment, all I’ve got right now are some hypothetical theme songs. I wanted some shit that sounds real oldschool since this… “idea” mostly involves characters from the 90s with some slight exceptions here and there. Mostly songs from Bomb Rush, Genesiskeys, and Scarlet Nexus. Because Youtube is shit, I had to split the vid into 2 parts. Can’t believe these bastards demand a phone number to post a vid over 15 minutes. Google’s on dat good yac.

Sonic: Honestly, this one felt like a no brainer. Just something that sounds hype enough for the character.

Mighty: Something a little more on the chill side to contrast with Sonic.

Ray: Cause I still want him to be a horny idiot. Something silly as hell.

Knowing me, I’d probably just reuse the same personalities from Neo. At least for the first 3 dudes. Everyone else is getting changed.

Sally: Honestly, I couldn’t find anything better and just settled for this. 😛

Ducktales: Ack… what the hell is this thing’s name?! I wanted something that sounds weird and creepy while still being upbeat. I know that makes narry lick of sense. And yeah, I know this bastard came from IDW, that’s kinda the point. I just keep forgetting the asshole’s name…

Chaotix Gang: I don’t know why, but this song sounded perfect for these guys. Straight up corner boys that would totally mug someone if they got the wrong idea. Probably have Vector being less of an idiot this time.

Knuckles: To explain, the idea I got for him is not necessarily on par with what I have in mind for the prior characters thus far, he’s getting something more dramatic.

Fang: Well obviously something that makes him more of a stone cold badass. Not necessarily “gangsta” since he’s supposed to be a ranger in this, but eh..

Bean: Ok I admit, I did not think about this one at all. Watching that live action Yu Yu Hakusho series gave me an idea on how to better utilize Bean. No nuclear farts this time.

Bark: This sounded like something from Street Fighter Alpha 3, and fits Bark too perfectly in my opinion. Kinda want Bark to be a mute/gentle giant type of dude for this.

Babylon Rogues: Didn’t have a full group pic. I may or may not use these guys since I don’t have any spot for them in the shabang, but for them… hell idk, I just thought it sounded appropiate for them. Idk why, I had those terrible Fast and Furious movies on the mind.

Robotnik: Menacing shit, y’all know the drill. Also looking for a better design. Tired of using the 06 one for a visual.

Turning digital consoles into paperweights (PS5)

Well look on the bright side. You get to save even MORE space than ever before!

Sonic Fighting Styles

Yah know, everytime I watch a fight break out between Sonic characters, whether it be in a game, tv show, or them trash movies, the same question keeps popping up in my head.

“Do people have no imagination with Sonic the Hedgehog?”

It’s both awkward and frustrating seeing how these bouts really don’t have much going for them outside of Sonic doing random spin attacks, Knuckles throwing out happy slap slow ass punches, the Chaotix doing the bare minimum, Shadow teleporting everywhere like an asshole, Tails crying like a little bitch, just all around very generic and no effort capabilities all around. Sonic Prime had the closest thing to actual choreography, and it still didn’t hit the mark most of the time (since they were busy making Sonic look weak and incompetent in all categories). Even fan animations online seem to have some difficulty showing what these guys can really do outside of some vague DBZ shit.

The problem stems, once again, from the games themselves as every character’s form of attack was spinning into a ball and leaping into enemies with enough force to destroy them, done so to keep pace with the game’s pinball physics aesthetic. This seems to have limited the perception (or rather the imagination) surrounding Sonic’s fighting capabilities as simply being “ball rolling attack” because in every game where he gets to use his limbs for attacking, Sonic… doesn’t seem to have any actual fighting abilities outside of (again) spinning. At least Knuckles and Shadow use punches and kicks on occassion (even though THEY’VE been reduced to their own gimmicks) while Sonic looks pretty dang silly half the time. Sonic Battle, I think, was the only game that made Sonic seem more competent in battle outside of spamming Blanka’s attacks from Street Fighter. Sonic Championship should’ve been ashamed of itself. The Smash Bros. games once again reduce Sonic to Ball Rolling Attack. Frontiers should’ve been an opportunity to display more fighting prowess from Sonic, but seems to have reduced his abilities to “Punch, Punch, Kick”, circling the wagon, and weird Ki Blasts from his feet. Certainly more than what we’ve gotten in the last decade, but not nearly as satisfying as it could be for a game that egregiously gets compared to Metal Gear Rising (srsly, wtf?!). Ironically, they took my idea and gave Amy magic powers, only more Card Captor Sakura than Dynasty Warriors Da Qiao.

Part of this frustration also comes from seeing Nintendo do the exact opposite when it came to Mario way back in Super Mario 64. Mario’s fighting capabilities were displayed excellently! He had all manner of different techniques at his disposal, and while none of them were necessary for the vast majority of enemies (or even viable for that matter), the mere option of having them available shows more imagination on Nintendo’s part than they ever did for Sonic. Infact, a LOT of Nintendo characters seem to have better fighting capabilities than Sonic characters! Most of which you can see in Smash Bros, but you’ve also got all of Link’s techniques in Wind Waker and Twilight Princess, Fox McCloud’s random Bojutsu fighting style in Star Fox Adventures, and we all know Kirby is a vicious bastard after he finishes his meal. There’s literally no excuse for these characters (especially FUCKING KIRBY) to look far more impressive than the guy who is supposed to be way past cool. But alas, Ball Rolling Attack will always be the order of the day, and Sonic characters look and feel more watered down as the years go on while Nintendo characters become more hardcore years down the line.

I just got a visual of some dude making fan art of various Nintendo characters using a variety of fighting techniques at their disposal, while Sonic does Ball Rolling Attack at enemeis while laughing like Ed from Ed, Edd, and Eddy. 😛

This was a franchise that allowed Knuckles to summon friggin lightning bolts! Forces and Frontiers both displayed pretty pathetic abilities of all the characters with the exception of the villains. These were supposed to be the more action oriented titles. Sonic had actual techniques when he was a Werehog! Frontiers is literally less impressive than Werehog in most cases! I would sooner propose they fix Sonic’s overall fighting style before anything else regarding “gameplay and physics” because the crux of a character’s abilities gives an overall impression of how well they would combat a variety of different threats, and I assure you there will be pushback to this idea thanks in part to the habitual contrarianism of the fandom. The most logical and common argument I can see erupting is the idea that “Sonic already has Superspeed, a power that is literally overpowered. Writers of fiction have never been able to balance this power in a way that makes a fight or 2 seem fair without giving that same power to the opponent”. This is somewhat true. Afterall, if a guy can hit you faster than you can even react, there isn’t much of a fight to be had. But that isn’t to say that villains can never get one over a guy who can move faster than them. Afterall, Deathstroke has shown an ability to bait Flash into attacking him and landing on some mines. And even in SatAM, Robotnik created a device that can track an object going faster than the speed of sound and instantly fires a laser that will always strike it’s target, using his own speed against him (Proving how much this show kicks ass), and forcing him to not rely on his speed to do everything. So in a scenario like that, Sonic would need more than just his raw speed. Imagine if, as it were in the beginning of the series (and as it should be), that every character had about the same speed as Sonic? He would definitely need more than speed then!

But then you’d need a good basis. Like how would Sonic fight if given a more distinctive style? Some would think “well, fighting games would be a good start”. Perhaps. Afterall, plenty of other games use fighting game moves as a basis for certain character attacks. April O’Neal has one of Chun Li’s specials in Shredder’s Revenge, Adam Hunter has Terry’s Power Geyser in the form of “Sword Strike”, and has Ryu’s Hurricane kick, it’s cool. Honestly, I’d look a little close to home. Sega already has Virtua Fighter, that would be the best start. I can truly see Sonic with Jacky Bryant’s fighting style. What with Jeet Kune Do essentially being an amalgamation of different fighting styles, that’s a variety of different techniques at one’s disposal without being restricted to one style of combat, thus fitting with Sonic’s overall theme of “freedom”. Being a jack of all trades who has access to a variety of moves for any given situation while all others would be a one trick pony would work rather well given his nature. Plus, if he wanted, he could do some of Bruce’s mannerisms as well, just to add to his potential awesome. Not to mention that Jacky has a lot of style and flash with his moves, something that would fit Sonic just fine.

Mighty the Armadillo is kind of a no brainer with Akira Yuki’s Baji Quan. Given his armored shell and his “powerful legs” (basing this off the Wall Kick in KC), I can imagine that a bodycheck from Mighty would hurt like hell. Better yet, using his kicks, he could launch himself head first into anyone or anything with the force of a cannon ball, and he’d come out unscathed. Think a head smash from a rampardos but on crack.

Knuckles is also a no brainer even though VF doesn’t have much of a basis for his style. Pretty hard to fuck up Boxing, but doing so that doesn’t make Knuckles seem bland is, for some reason, more difficult for people to imagine. While there are obvious alternative basis like Balrog, Heavy-D, Rick Strowd or even Steve Fox, I’ll kick yah in the nuts and suggest Vanessa from KOF. She is much faster than most boxing characters in fighting games, and has a certain level of finesse in her movements that Knuckles could definitely benefit from rather than turning him into a bruttish thug. That’s what Vector, Bark, and Storm are for.
I also watched one of them Dino Thunder Episodes where the Thunder Rangers were fighting against the Ninja Storm team. Yellow Ninja Ranger was tripped over, but he flipped backward and quickly dove underground. Dude, what if Knuckles pulled that same stunt off, but then he counters by popping out from behind his opponent, grabbing him from behind, then leaping into the air to pull off an Izuna styled Drop!? Shit would be nice!

Speaking of Bears, Bark is already close enough to Jeffry McWild (Curious last name aside) that no further elaboration would be needed. Kinda had the idea of mixing it up with Sasquatch from Darkstalkers with cryomancy being a part of his repitore of moves. I can definitely see him leaping forward and doing Sasquatch’s dash HP. You know, the… the move where he jumps at a fool and does a spinning hammer punch that smashes people’s faces into the pavement? Or maybe even Olaf Tyson from Brawlout. Obscure, yes, but he utilizes more boxing moves which fits Bark a little more than Jeffery. Plus, Sasquatch and Olaf both would take into account of Bark’s short ass legs. He isn’t much of a kicker, it seems.

Shadow, idk what it is, but I’m always thinking Jin Kazama with this guy. Might be the color scheme and hair, but with him already doing karate chops just to start up a computer, he might as well learn a thing or two from the Mishimas. I know VF Final Showdown has that random Karate guy, but I’ve never played FS to know how he works (probably a lot better though). That, and maybe take a few notes from Kilik ala Bojutsu. He can form a Chaos Spear, it just makes sense. Or hell, look at how Ryu Hayabusa handles a Bo-Staff in Ninja Gaiden! Or… maybe not, that’d be too op.

Rouge, why hello there Jenny from bloody Roar! Fancy leg work that could also be attributed to Sarah Bryant, but Jenny is a bit more on the nose and logically sound. Since the character can already turn into a bat, her aerial acrobatics would work well for the Jewel Thief.

Espio, thousands of examples, but lets just say Kagemaru. Basing him on Ryu Hayabusa would probably make him OP. Or hell, we could look to Hotsuma or Joe Musashi for some more prominant examples. Or Bakuryu since he already has them leaf swirls in Primal Fury… Actually yeah, lets go with Bakuryu entirely. Anyone else kinda imagine Espio using his horn to blind people with a flash of light? Like some… “Solar Flare Jutsu” or w/e the fuck?

Vector, I get the feeling he’d work better with Brad’s moves. The only issue is Vector’s legs are too short to do any Muay Thai kicks, and I don’t really know a good way to compensate for that issue. I suppose it’d be better if we used Wolf Hawkfield as a basis, but Vector doesn’t strike me as a grappler. No… actually, crocodiles do have a keen grip with their maws, maybe Wolf IS a better option! Imagine Vector combining a Croc’s death roll with a wrestling move! That’s first degree murder right there! Yeah, lets go for Wolf!

Sticks… Eileen, if that’s her name, from VF5. Idk, it makes sense to me.

That’s off the top of my head. And not just having those styles, mixing them in with their own natural abilities. Sonic transitioning from a somersault into a spin attack (similar to Blanka’s special where he does a back flip into an arcing roll attack). You know, shit like that.

And before some braindead nitwit goes off asking “well WHY do they NEED distinctive, more unique fighting styles!?” Because it’s more fun to watch? Instead of the braindead nonsense we had going on in Forces and Frontiers, Shitshow 2, and Sonic X to some degree, we could get something more entertaining and hype worthy. I shouldn’t be looking at the MARIO MOVIE in envy of it’s fight scenes! That’s right, I said it, and I’ll say it again till the cows come home. Mario is lookin more butch than Sonic these days, and you know damn well that’s noooo good! All the testosterone in this series comes strictly from the soundtrack these days, you can’t find that in the actual games anymore! But that’s another ramble altogether.

REmake 4 is better, and that makes me bitter.

RIP Akira Toriyama. Thanks for the memories of testosterone screams and hair colors that denote power levels.

You’ll have to pardon the following rant for being a bit disorganized and perhaps a bit incoherent. It was made in seething rage.

So she went and got that damn REmake 4. Hoping to rekindle the very nature of which she came to be a fangirl of Leon S. Kennedy. To add to the hilarity of it all, she despises the characterization of Leon, Ashley and Luis in the remake, likening them to the butchering of Wesker in the Raccoon City film (a tad harsh, doncha think?). I would sooner liken Leon’s new “character development” to that of Jake Mueler of RE6 in that he tries too hard to be cool after killing regular mooks with extremely forced quips, WHILE being a dickhead to Luis for the EXACT same thing he’s been doing the whole game! Goddammit, they’ve ruined Leon! They’ve RUINED LEON!!! THEY RUINED FUCKING LEON!!!

Overall though… I’d say the game itself is an improvement over the original… and that makes me pretty damn bitter.

I’ve been pretty harsh when it came to the new direction that is the Resident Evil franchise, which I suppose is an odd thing as it is a franchise that I didn’t technically grow up on unlike Sonic, Pokemon, and many other franchises from the 90s onward. I, like many others, started with RE4 on the Gamecube, and I will be perfectly honest… I hated this game. And I still do to this day. RE4 was one of the worst experiences I’ve had playing any Gamecube game. From terribly awkward controls that made playing the game a complete trainwreck, the game being a glorified escort mission with Ashley getting kidnapped everytime you look around, QTEs that come in unexpectedly making it impossible to relax during cutscenes or even regular gameplay as the game demands you hit 2 random buttons without warning, with writing so apocalyptically bad that I almost came to hate Leon as a character. RE4 felt like a game that tried to be difficult by shoving unconventional and terrible control schemes into an action game which, by the time we had stuff like Timesplitters and Metroid Prime, bordered on insanity.

And yet, it was the single most overrated game of all time. RE4 had received so many accolades over the years that I found myself puzzled and puzzled and puzzled some more. RE4 has been ported to more systems than I can count. It pioneered a generation of QTEs that nobody really wanted, popularizing the genre of Turd Person Shooters, and is often heralded as the game that ultimately saved the franchise from the scrap heep. Also a notion that I found myself puzzled and puzzled and puzzled by.

For the time that followed, I had pegged the message boards of old to see exactly what I was missing as everyone tripped over themselves in a bizarre attempt to mythologize the game as being a masterpiece. Transcedent and timeless. Even critics who are known for being extra harsh with games found themselves enamored with the game. The answer I received was because the old gameplay style was holding the series back, and Resident Evil was going the way of the dodo along with survival horror as a genre.

In other words, it’s like everyone’s take with Bayformers and the Sonic Shitshows. It’s good simply because it’s popular with the mainstream audience, not because they think it’s actually good. More on this piece later, but people were telling me that the older games basically sucked. So of course, I was curious. Not so curious that I went out of my way to find them. I was too jaded by RE4 to bother. Plus, I was a teen with no job or money, so I didn’t exactly have the option if I wanted. Some time later, selling some unneeded college books for a decent sum, the irresponsible little shit in me found a Gamestop and picked up the REmake for the Gamecube just to see how bad it was.

What I got… was possibly one of the best damn games I’ve ever played! REmake 1 was so good, it practically got me into the horror genre as a whole. Before then, I was too much of a pussy to watch films like Species, The Exorcist, and hell… even the Mummy Films with Brenden Fraiser (which technically don’t count as horror after having seen them). REmake changed all that.

Granted, it was a rough start. The tank controls and inability to discard items made them game pretty damn tedious. As a guy who likes to pick up everything, it felt like the game punished you for doing what you’re often encouraged to do in every other game. And I started out on Chris’s story, the “Hardmode” of the game. I fell into the casual trap of Resident Evil games, trying to clear out enemies, wasting precious ammo, and realizing that I have no ammo left to do anything with. I was screwed by the time I made it to Yawn.

So… I restarted the game, and decided to take only what I needed. I didn’t bother trying to kill every enemy since that led to more problems down the road. I started to treat the game more like I treated Metroid. Saving all of my missiles for the boss fights and tickling enemies with regular shots. But instead of that, I took the advice of gamefaqs and tried to lure enemies onto the side of walls so that I could slip passed them. It took me a while to get this right considering I had to fight the tank controls while doing this. After a while, I found myself effortlessly evading zombies like the plague. Preserving all of my shotgun shells for major enemies and bosses, and after realizing I didn’t have to kill the snake when I first met it, I didn’t even bother to fight it. Just went in, got the mask, and bounced. I did get bit and had to rely on Rebecca to save Chris, so that sucked, but fortunately, no zombie got to him, so lucky Chris.

The game felt only as difficult as you made it. There was something about the game that made you feel more intelligent by not wasting ammo on everything that moves. Trying to outrun enemies took more perserverence and restraint as many of them were much faster than you (Hunters and Dogs, at least). Dispatching them was nigh impossible without the shotgun, but the shotgun was needed for bosses, and that’s way before getting access to the magnum, or as I like to call it, “The Ultimate Bitch Maker”.

REmake was incredibly fun for what it was, but it was also incredibly tedious. Thanks in part to Shinji Mikami being a sadist, and Capcom allowing said sadism simply because Capcom was a company of sadists who got off to making hard as balls games that receive all the praise in the world because gamers are all about their egos and bragging rights. But it was because of this experience that I had found myself even more puzzled by the love of RE4. REmake was what I would call near perfection with some exceptions here and there. The characters were more serious but actually likable, not douchey like Leon, nor was the game trying to be too cool for school with characters quipping off weird one-liners, or back flipping over laser grids. The characters seemed like normal people trying to survive a haunted house. Not “Super Kung Fu Agent Men” like Leon.

Then I found myself wanting to play more of those older games. After getting some actual money from parttime shit, I picked up RE0 and RE2 for the Cube. Goddammit, I LOVED RE0! Which became a shock to me as I heard people had really hated RE0 back in the day. But I found the game to have actually improved by not being as tedious as REmake, having better graphics all across the board, a more interesting story and setting, the character zapping system, the ability to drop items, and having a partner overall. It wasn’t as scary as  REmake, but it was honestly more fun to play. You weren’t punished for killing enemies, and it was much easier to do so with enemies having smaller health pools. Plus… Rebecca and Billy were the best characters in the series for me. Billy was basically RE4 Leon… but actually cool and likable. The villain was a tad shit, but not everything was going to be golden. I stuck to my usual strategy of not wasting ammo on everything and made it out just fine. Granted, ammo was PLENTIFUL this time around so I had enough to start clearing rooms without the threat of Crimson Heads. Give Rebecca all the healing items and Billy all the fire power since he was the one dealing with all the bosses. Then I got screwed going into the Umbrella factory with Rebecca having jack shit to fight the Tyrant with. Good times.

RE2 was also amazing. At first I was a bit jaded since the game had N64 graphics and featured Leon, a character that already annoyed me in RE4. But this version of Leon… was actually tolerable! He sounded ike Brock from Pokemon hilariously enough, but he was much like Chris and Jill. Just a guy trying to survive a helltorn city… or rather police station. Claire turned out to be pretty bland despite having the voice of Jubilee from X-Men, and having to babysit a character voiced by someone from the Magic School Bus reminded me too much of Ashley from RE4, making her story far less tolerable. I admit, I was pretty spoiled by RE0, but it wasn’t a fair comparison. RE2 simply built itself off of RE1, and game that was already tedious to begin with, while RE0 actually sought to rectify the tedium that people were getting sick of, so I kept that at the back of my head, and tried to treat the game like REmake.

It didn’t dissapoint. Though I found the game far easier than REmake as I had enough ammo to start clearing rooms with no fear of crimson heads getting me as well. Not that I had a choice as the game immediately throws a licker at me as soon as I reached the first hallway of the police station. Outrunning that fucker was nigh impossible!

I love RE2, but after playing REmake and RE0, it did feel a tad dated. But the game certainly made up for it with a compelling narrative and a bitchin soundtrack. RE2’s music was the chef’s kiss of survival horror. So much so that the music became more terrifying than the game itself. Fuck Capcom for charging you money to have the OG soundtrack in the remake, scumbags that they are.

Because RE3 and Code Veronica cost over a hundred dollars, they remain the 2 classic games that I have never played to this day, which sucked back then. Everyone considered CV to be the holy grail of classic Resident Evil, while RE3 is remembered for having an enemy that you couldn’t outrun just by running through doors. It sucks because RE3 sounds like a lot of fun with that in mind. I envied everyone that was able to play CV for years now, with my only taste of it coming from the railshooters on the Wii. Railshooters that no one played, but all seem to agree suck by virtue of being railshooters on the wii. RE fandom, m i rite?

But with all of that in mind, I was even more puzzled as to why RE4 was heralded as the best game in the series overall. From the 3 classic games I’ve played, RE4 felt like a betrayal. A complete bastardization of everything Resident Evil had achieved. Was it because of the tank controls? The inventory management?

No, I think the real reason was because Mikami put more of his faith into the gamecube, a system that ultimately failed to gather an audience, and even LOST what little audience it had after Windwaker chased them off. Putting mainline Resident Evil titles on a console that didn’t have Resident Evil fans on them wasn’t a smart decision no matter how you slice it. Though I am grateful to have played them, the point still stands that Mikami simply wasn’t using his brain at that point. Resident Evil wasn’t going out of style, it was being put on a console that didn’t have Resident Evil fans on it. Nintendo fans are extremely close minded, buying Nintendo consoles entirely to get Nintendo games. Much of that was due to N64 and Gamecube having terrible 3rd party support, but also because Nintendo games were “good enough” that many fans didn’t need the other games that were coming out, which was a double-edged sword in most cases. If Nintendo games are already good, why would you need anything else? Aside from the fact that Nintendo didn’t have a whole heep of genres under it’s belt. Fighting games were definitely not their forte despite having Smash Bros. and Killer Instinct. But RPGs and puzzle platformers? They had those locked down with Zelda, Mario, and especially Pokemon. Metroid Prime was “horror enough” that people didn’t need to look to Resident Evil to begin with.

So what did the Playstation 2 get? Well they got CVX which many wrote off as a spinoff because it wasn’t a numbered entry. Perhaps Capcom was afraid of Resident Evil being considered another Mega Man, or perhaps they underestimated the pull of Resident Evil and refused to name a Dreamcast exclusive as a mainline entry, causing people to ignore the game altogether (I think). Then the PS2 got the Outbreak series and Dead Aim. More spinoffs. Not actual continuations. Playstation had the Resident Evil audience, but they weren’t getting actual Resident Evil games. Instead, they were getting saddled with spinoffs with cringe writing that would almost put RE4 to shame.

I don’t think it’s any stretch to see the culprit of Resident Evil’s “irrelevence” being the byproduct of Capcom’s and Mikami’s inability to know or care where their audience was at (A bad habit, I would assume). So much so that Mikami quit his job just because Capcom decided to put RE4 on a console where their actual fanbase (and overall market) existed.

In that sense, I can’t in good faith put RE4 on such a pedestal where it “saved the franchise”. The only people that needed convincing of the value of the series were game reviewers and journalists whom we didn’t know were complete morons back in the day.

That said, people still hold this belief that RE4 is sheer perfection and that Resident Evil would be dead without it, and I constantly question why. When it came to RE5, the game that I would argue improved on everything RE4 had (with some spotty racism here and here), people declared the game to be a travesty. Terrible in all regards. What!?

So having relatively better controls, less egregious QTEs, more methodical inventory management reminiscient of RE0, better writing and characters, and a less tedious gameplay loop… makes it inferior to RE4? No. It was the fact that it wasn’t “scary”. Which was bizarre because neither was RE4. Nobody I had communicated with (online and offline) ever declared RE4 to be scary. No one would be crazy enough to suggest RE4 was ever scary outside of 2 possible instances (the Garden Maze and the Regenerators) that make up roughly 2% of the entire game. The regenerators that people love so much were just tedious bullet sponges that could one-shot you if they had enough spikes on them. Once you got the X-Ray scope, the regerators were chumps. The problem with RE4 was that the majority of the time, the scares simply weren’t there. It was an action game through and through. And people loved it.

But RE5!? Nah bruh, it wasn’t scary at all, a single issue that the fandom would focus all of their attention on for years to come, and is the sole reason why they make excuses for RE4… which again boggles my mind. I can’t comment on the AI partner since “sibling rivalry”, but that’s one thing people could agree was terrible. The coop made the experience of the game enjoyable in comparison, and that’s probably the one aspect that people agree is superior to RE4.

That being said, I probably need to stop watching Dartigan…

The love of RE4 sent the “wrong message” to Capcom that this was what people wanted. But… seeing that RE5 and 6 were at the time the “highest selling games in the franchise”, the message got confused. Sales figures showed that people didn’t actually care about how scary the games were, and it was all validated by RE4. Stupidly enough, people never bothered to look to RE4 as the reason we got RE5 and 6, Operation Raccoon City (Guilty Pleasure, I admit) and Umbrella Corp, why we still get multiplayer focused RE games like RE:sistence and REverse. Why RE8 turned out more action oriented than RE7. It ALL started with the love of RE4 that threw caution to the wind and fundamentally changed Resident evil for the late 2000s and early 2010s. It was RE4, RE4, and oh yes… RE4.

People are constantly making excuses for RE4 as to why it was the superior title, but most of the praise I’ve seen for it never once brought up how scary it was. RE4 being “scary” was an unrealistic accolade that would get casual fans written off as pussies UNTIL RE5 came out. So… what then were people actually praising? RE5 for all of it’s faults is a bigger, more expansive, and frankly improved version of what RE4 is. By all accounts, it should’ve been lauded as trumping RE4’s scope and gameplay on all fronts. And yet it didn’t.

Maybe there was too much melanin going around for people to actually enjoy it. I’d use the typical tongue smiley, but thanks to the popularity of anti-wokeness that people can’t even seem to define, that might actually be the case.

The truth, or what I can assume to be the case is that for many people, not the mainline fans, Resident Evil 4 was just a Turd Person Shooter Action game. It was a game lauded for it’s so-called “excellent combat”. That is the crux of everyone’s praise. You’ve got the memes and shit, but as far as I can tell, no one actually cares about the story, the dialog (aside from the memes), or any other details, the game was just a riot for dudebros and douchebags. It was the action game that inspired an entire generation of dudebro Turd Person Shooters.

But that’s the problem. Since you had more games coming out that pretty much improved on everything RE4 did that by the time RE5 came out, it felt “dated”. You’ve got Gears of War where you can move and shoot at the same time, and RE5 still required you to stand still and shoot at enemies? The AI partner is irritatingly moronic? RE5 did nothing new in terms of competing with all the new TPS’s coming out. Capcom only saw “hey, people really loved RE4, so lets give me more of the same, but now with coop!” By the time we get to RE6, the director stated with all the hilarity that they sought to cater the game to the Call of Duty crowd. Because in their minds, Survival Horror was dead. New fans who started with RE4 blatantly declared that the older games sucked by virtue of having tank controls and fixed camera angles. In other words, RE4 brought in legions of… for lack of a better term, “Normies” that didn’t like Resident Evil in the first place, and arrogantly claim that RE4 saved the franchise in a half-hearted effort to spite legacy fans. But those same normies scorned Resident Evil when better action games started coming out. So by the time Capcom bothered to improve the gameplay in RE6 way late into 2012, it was already too late. The Dudebros were leaving in favor of Gears, Call of Duty, Battlefield, and the like. All that were left were the Resident Evil faithful who didn’t like the change to the games after 4 in the first place. Forcing them to course correct for Revelations 2 and onward… until RE8. At least…that’s the common narrative that people peddle…

It is interesting to say the least that as a whole, RE fans enjoy Resident Evil for it’s content, lore, puzzles (*barf*), and horror elements, but fans of RE4 ONLY love it’s gameplay to the extent that they despise the older games for having “terrible gameplay” in comparison. You’d think RE4 fans were glorified Nintards who only think gameplay was the most important aspect…. then again, it WAS a gamecube exclusive, wasn’t it? Hmm… perhaps there’s a connection there…

Another… rather silly theory I had in mind… was that RE4 was amazing for the same reason that Gears of War was amazing, for the same reason that Modern Warfare was amazing. Normie Dudebros put that game on a pedestal. RE4 was a product of the mid 2000s of gaming where dudebro culture was on the rise. Many developers stopped having genuine passion for making games, and started putting in elements that reeked of “look at how cool we are!” Instead of actually being cool, they smudged their games with the image of being cool. Franchises with more sincere roots of wanting to move gaming forward (like Jak and Daxter) had future installments that were hardpressed to convince you of their coolness. Timesplitters Future Perfect comes to mind. A pretty good game and massive improvement over TS2 in many ways, but tries waaay too hard to be funny and silly, like a precursor to the likes of Borderlands or even Bulletstorm. Comic relief, turning characters and franchises into jokes (Rayman 3 also comes to mind even though that game came out pretty early on), or merely uping the ante with weird little camera tricks and cutscenes that spent more time trying to convince you of how cool or quirky they were, gaming had gone from something that was already cool… to something that thought it was cooler than it actually was.

And the dudebros flocked to it like moths to the flame.

This was the dudebro era of gaming. Games of this time period get far more credit than they deserve as a result of dudebro nostalgia and Sony fanboyism, and in many cases is the reason RE4 is the most protected game ever created. Lots of Dudebro Era games were. God of War definitely fits. GTA San Andreas (almost exclusively because of Jack Thompson, the dudebro arch nemesis). Halo most definitely. Tekken greatly. If I were to be generous, Metal Gear Solid 3 also counts (from what I hear, MGS3 had some influence on RE4’s direction, but I can’t confirm it).

It also goes without saying that Capcom was the God of the Dudebros with every game they pumped out being an instant classic from DMC3 to God Hand to Okami to Viewtiful Joe to this farce of a game.

You see, this is the first instance of the gaming industry trying to find a new audience while scaring off the fans they had in the 90s and early 2000s. Gaming was already cool for all ages, but what they wanted were teenagers. The age demographic with uncontrollable hormones and a desire for status amongst their peers. Chips on their shoulders, motivated by violence and sex, and having something to prove. Teenagers are emotionally unstable, thus they tend to heep criticisms to unrelenting extremes. Either something is absolutely perfect, or something is absolutely trash.

These days, the accolades RE4 continues to receive is due primarily to that very nostalgia, and an extreme cult-like culture of people who will protect the sanctity of RE4 from any and all would-be critics, writing them off as haters who are merely jealous of the game’s success, or as people who “just want tank controls to come back”, without realizing that they are telling on themselves. Declaring right then and there that they were never fans of the series before the Dudebro-ish RE4.

It also hasn’t escaped me that RE4 is a game that gets praised for “embracing the campiness of the series”. A notion that only gets accepted by people who never played the games prior to 4 and ONLY see games for their surface level values. As far as I can tell, from all the games I’ve seen and played, the campiness that people so love and hold over the series head… strictly comes from the original RE1. The one with the bad FMV, voice acting, and dialogue. RE1 is the game that gets made fun of over and over again. But much like Sonic 1, people assume the first game speaks for the entire series without recognizing the existence of something called “improvements”. RE2 and 3 lack the camp that people praise so much. You never see memes of either of these 2 games in particular. Code Veronica, a game I would assume to have more camp than the last 2 entries, also doesn’t get this level of ridicule or recognition. Infact, people seem to accept the game and it’s many weird aspects in favor of it’s dramatic story and somewhat epic scale. Though people these days seem to have come to hate Steve Burnside for being annoying, people don’t meme the hell out of Code Veronica… at all, it seems. This campiness that people talk about so often comes strictly from RE1 in most cases. The majority of the series (including RE1) tries to take themselves seriously. The camp is basically newer/younger people who can’t help but poke fun at media that was made before their time as being of lower quality or talent. And… yeah, that might be a flaw of my generation that’s been passed down to the zoomers, Idk. We’ve become addicted to poking out the flaws of entertainment no matter what form it takes because we were raised on a steady diet of “brutally honest” critics like X-Play and AVGN. This isn’t embracing the campiness, it’s reducing the series down to an interpretation of it’s execution, one people just found highly comical. It comes across as rather revisionist to say everything about Resident Evil is just plain dumb. If we take that approach, we can say Final Fantasy 7 is dumb for having a guy who’s corpse is stuck inside the planet who somehow has enough power to pull a single meteor to the planet, but can only be stopped by another dead woman caught in spirit water. We can say Metal Gear Solid is dumb for a military venture to put a whole lot of stock in a bidepal weapon’s nuclear capabilities when such a thing is realistically unfeasible, and more expensive than it is practical as bidedal weaponry would have far more flaws than pros.  There are plenty of franchises with ridiculous plots that could never be taken seriously, but I think we go about pointing out the ridiculous scenarios as a means of ridiculing people who complain about remakes and later installments for going in a certain direction that doesn’t sit well with older fans. Why complain about the ridiculous stuff that happens in RE4 such as Leon flipping over lasers or kooky cultists that rant about hollywood movies and crappy scripts… when RE0 has opera singing leeches, CV has a cross dressing freak, and RE1 had pretty silly dialog with mutated snakes and sharks?

But then those same people go on to complain about Chris punching boulders, Wesker being a stand in for Agent Smith, and absolutely EVERYTHING that happens in RE6!

I would argue that RE4 introduced a legion of idiots into the series who seem to embrace the game due to it’s massive success and popularity, and only seek to throw that in people’s faces as it gives them a sense of superiority over fans of the classic style of gameplay. All this talk of RE4 saving the franchise and redefining Resident Evil and whatnot? All smoke and mirrors to troll the fans. The game that even THEY hate (RE5) was until RE7 the most successful and highest selling game in the franchise, which is funny because RE5 takes itself far more seriously than RE4 ever did. The characters are more mature, the story is more dramatic, the main protagonists are actually likable, and you sort of care what happens to them instead of wishing death upon the president’s daughter. Gee, imagine that. The game that DIDN’T embrace the campiness of the series doing FAR BETTER than the game that preceded it! Sure I’d wager it had more to do with the enemy design, but facts is facts. Lifetime sales of RE5 were around 14 million last time I checked it, while RE4’s was around 12 million. How the hell do you get numbers like that if RE5 is “objectively” the inferior title?

Before anyone goes on asking why I’m talking about numbers when I’m supposedly not trying to do so, this is merely for the sake of argument and not trying to suggest that sales figures are the equivalent of quality. However, RE4 fanboys tend to hang the sales numbers of the series over people’s heads as definitive proof that oldschool Resident Evil is shit, while RE5 is the game they decry as a failure despite all evidence to the contrary. And yet… if you dig a bit deeper, that isn’t even close to the truth. Much of RE4 success around 2007 with 2 additional rereleases on PS2 and Wii respectively… didn’t even come close to RE2’s sales on the PS1! On Gamecube, there was about 1 million. PS2 and Wii both had about 2 million. RE2 on PS1 had 6 million, with the original have around 4 million, and the Dualshock version having about 800K, and the N64 version having around 300K… The fuck!? Idk how well the GC version of RE2 did, so I can’t say, but considering the lack of marketing, you can already imagine not to well.

RE2 on PS1 had (I would assume) the highest initial sales of any Resident Evil until maybe RE7 or RE5. I say initial as many RE titles before the late 2000s had to rely on rereleases to account for their sales boosts. RE2 selling 4 million by itself is pretty damn impressive when you compare it to RE4 which came out to a whimpy 1 million in comparison. Putting it on the PS2 did nothing to help it along with a measily little 2 million boost. Wii, same story with an addition 2 million boost. So that’d be around 5 million? Pretty close, but still not at or above RE2’s. RE4’s lifetime sales came about 8 years later with several more releases on more modern platforms. PS360, Steam, PS4X1, etc. But… here’s the kicker. RE5’s lifetime sales are 2 million than RE4’s. What the fuck!? RE5 has been around in a much shorter time period than RE4, with what I would assume to be less rereleases in comparison to RE4, yet it got 2 million more sales numbers overtime!? Again, sales numbers not an indication of quality, but it is an indication of behavior. More people were gravitating to RE5 than to RE4 overtime. But why? And how?

I would wager that much of the fanfare surrounding RE4’s “majesty” has much less to do with fans of the series outright loving the game, and more to do with the industry loving the game. Journalists were calling it revolutionary, and developers were using the game as a template for their newer brand of Turd Person Shooters. But the general public didn’t care all that much. Sure, they bought the game, but the reception I would assume was a bit more mixed than it’s fanboys would have you believe. Internet gamers are especially guilty of over hyping the game to unrelenting degrees, giving one the impression that it was better than it is. This was (again) especially true of Capcom games in the early-mid 2000s, I constantly have to point out the Okami vs 50 Cent nontroversy that people cried about back in the day. For many people who don’t stay on the internet, RE4 really wasn’t that big of a deal. For some or most, it was a rather tedious action game with poor controls and a progression system that tethered you to an annoying bitch for half the game. I know this to be the case because when REmake 4 came out, people were already dogging the original game for it’s awful controls and had hoped the remake would fix that, and makes Ashley less annoying to deal with. Only the former issue was addressed, apparently.

The truth is RE4 isn’t as fun to play for many people outside of it’s mercenaries mode, with many people merely playing the story campaign once to unlock certain things and then be on their way. The main campaign is tedious with much of it boiling down to scripted events and combat encounters designed only to be a cumbersome obstacle in the way of your true objective. While in RE5, much of the tedium that was in RE4 was cut out entirely for a more linear but relatively enjoyable journey with some mild gimmicks here and there. But the meat of the game’s enjoyability comes in the form of coop. And coop Resident Evil is honestly tits. No one would admit this, but RE4 is honestly more tedious than previous RE games, and more tedious than RE5. I imagine people only rebought the game for the hope that they would have better, more modernized controls ala Wii-Mote or TPS standard controls on HD consoles and up. And yet… they went back to 5. Perhaps that coop brought more to Resident Evil than a different camera perspective.

With all that said, what does any of this have to do with the remake? Well it’s quite simple. RE4 is universally perceived as being perfect. Mostly by people who already hated Resident Evil prior to 4. A remake of the originals in the style of Turd Person Shooter is something these people would desire. It can only make the game better. And yet… in doing so, the remakes of 2 and 3 stripped out content for some reason. The excuses being that they are “remakes”, thus they aren’t beholden to being a 1:1 translation of the original title.

And yet… REmake 4 retains almost everything about RE4. The areas are virtually the same, the boss battles are nearly identical (Salazar withstanding), they kept the dog for El Gigante. You’re mssing the true A and B scenarios for RE2 while they rearranged the sequence of events and butchered most if not all of the characters, and they took out half the game of RE3 while butchering Jill Valentine. But every single area that was in RE4 is still here! The sequence of events are the same (minus Krauser killing Luis in place of Saddler’s wang), the fact that you could literally play both games back to back and see em as 2 different but very similar titles speaks volumes to how much was actually preserved in comparison to 2 and 3. So all I can do is sit here in bewilderment at all the dipshits that made excuses for why RE2 and 3 had content cut out of their remakes while REmake 4 did nothing short of giving it the REmake 1 treatment. We could’ve had it all! But no, RE2 and 3 get jipped while RE4 gets a facelift! All because people for years have made up a great big lie that the original RE titles sucked and no one wanted them anymore, while RE4 was God’s gift to virgins. So no one would care if they completely butchered or removed much of their content, but they had to be extra careful to preserve and improve upon RE4’s. RE4 had little to nothing to do with Resident Evil outside of having Leon as a character with Ada and Wesker playing easter egg fodder. What little it had to do with the rest of the series amounts to a diversionary tactic in RE5 when the real virus was Ouroboros. RE4 was more of a spinoff than Code Veronica, more of a spinoff than the CGI movies, and especially more of a spinoff than the Revelations titles, but it gets all the love and care in the world because of the massive hype surrounding the game.

Even more hilarious, you have fans of the original RE4 hating the remake due to all of it’s changes, and these would be the same fuckers telling OG fans of 2 and 3 to go cry in a river over what they changed in their respective remakes. If anything, REmake 4 shows that Resident Evil fans are very inconsistent, irrational, and maybe even a little dishonest in their opinions regarding anything in the series. They’re more reactionary to other fans in how they respond to certain games (guess Sonic fans still aren’t unique in any category), and are willing to take certain stances as long as it contradicts other people. Now all of a sudden, OG RE4 isn’t the perfect little darling that everyone pretended it was, and that the remake is automatically superior because you can move and shoot at the same time now. Or vice versa, and the stiff ass controls was a masterful decision, yadda yadda yadda. Suddenly we care about the heart and soul of the original title even though we were happy to bulldoze RE2 and 3 in favor of gameplay mechanics. Goddammit, I hate gamers…

I don’t know anymore. When I looked to the endings of the original titles, or even just listening to the end credits music, all prior to 4, I get this vision of a series that increased in scale and scope as bands of survivors go on these journeys to take down Umbrella and their remnants in several different incursions that result in their eventual downfall. Instead, with RE4 and above, we get these games with very weird plots that have little to nothing to do with the evils of Umbrella and instead focus on individuals with delusions of granduer. Granted, Wesker’s plot was the only one that felt meaningful, it still seems out of character for him. Being compared to a comic book villain doesn’t help matters. Just seems that after 2000, the creators of the series wanted Resident Evil to try and be a darker and edgier series. Not that that’s an inherently bad thing, it just feels that… with how the older games presented themselves, they gave you the impression that there is hope to be had in the future. These unlikely people surviving impossible odds and horrible terrors around every corner, by the end of the game, they gave you a sense that the nightmare was over until the next terror comes along. Having everything reduced to this weird summer blockbuster style of action super heroes being fast and furious styled badasses who literally do impossible feats such as flipping over lasers, punching boulders, doing literal John Wick shit, using jet skis to outrun avalanches, surviving several bones being shot into their backsides, and popping off quips. Goddammit, I can’t stand the fuckin quips in this series! Revelations 1 gave me hope that the series was going back to basics and being the Resident Evil I came to love. Then Rev 2 happened and… well, it wasn’t an awful game, but it was the start of it’s new direction, and everything that was wrong with that game came to embody everything I hate about the Simplygon Era of the franchise, from it’s ugly as sin RE Engine aesthetic to it’s tryhard grim atmosphere while having villains spout “ZOEY, GET YO ASS BACK IN THE HOUSE!” with everyone shouting fuck every 10 seconds like it’s going out of style. The remakes and newer games coming out do away with the semblence of “hope” that the older titles present, instead creating an air of hopelessness even in the endings of these games. The badguys are constantly winning, and even if the heroes survive, the badguys are still winning (Raymond and Jessica are still at large, Alex Wesker is in the mind of Natalia, the Connections are still at large, Miranda lives on in the mold, the BSAA are corrupt and are now using Bioweapons, etc). Resident Evil is now just a crapsack world with crapsack people at every corner. So when they remade 2 and 3, they shoved in their crapsack interpretations onto characters that were anything but. Annette Birkin would’ve dropped everything to save Sherry, now she doesn’t lift a finger for her daughter’s life, Leon doesn’t try to save people’s lives in RE2 (poor Ben), Ada Wong acts like a massive cunt for no reason, Jill no longer has compassion for people which is excused by idiots because she’s dealing with Umbrella’s own security service (a detail that did NOT matter to her in the original, mind you). Now Leon’s a dickhead in RE4 who casually jests about people who have died in Salazar’s deathpit, and has less emotion over Luis than he did in the original (Amma, Leon was annoying, but he CRIED over Luis’s death in the original despite having spent LESS time with the guy!). People are crying over REmake 4 losing the heart and soul of the original game… but made excuses for REmakes 2 and 3. Well, hate to break it to you jerks, but that is the nature of the Simplygon era. There is no heart and soul. There is no hope. There is no joy to be had. The series is now being rewritten and rebranded as a more grim and crapsack version of a series to keep pace with all the other grim and crapsack zombie epics like the walking dead, The Last of Us, and maybe even those Korean Zombie shows on netflix (what was it, “All of us are dead” where all the kids were dickheads to each other?). Capcom has a newer, more cynical vision of the series with things such comraderie, hope, and a desire to save every life as possible… all being cut out for a taste of mean world syndrome. As a result, the new main character is killed off, his progeny is a potential future villain, and the heroes of old are too old to do anything to stop em all. The Resident Evil series now takes the “Evil” portion to a literal extreme and makes everyone unlikable creatures of self interest, giving vague speeches of their own self-righteousness while performing actions that show anything but.

All of this is glossed over in favor of modernized gameplay mechanics. Mechanics that had their genesis in RE4. The RE fandom (new age ones, I suppose) are willing to dilute the heart and soul of the series in favor of gameplay mechanics over and over so long as they don’t have to deal with tank controls and fixed camera angles. But now that REmake 4 is out!? Now… NOW they care about the heart and soul of the franchise. Well fanboys, its far too late on that front. That ship has sailed. You’ve told Capcom to dilute the heart and soul of the franchise so long as it pissed off legacy fans and gave you your modern TPS controls and gameplay mechanics. Now you see first hand with your sacred cow exactly what that entails. A diluted RE4 with none of the charm and more of the cynicism that has perverted the franchise beginning with Revelations 2. Only now, you get to enjoy the entire game with this muddy shit slathered all over it. As a guy who wanted Sonic to be relevent again after 3 decades of being the laughing stock of the gaming industry, take it from me, RE fandom. Be… EXTRA careful… of what you wish for!

Youtube vs Chris Stuckmann

Chris Stuckmann, a film critic on youtbe, made a video about the recently released Madam Web film. A movie I had no idea existed, and one that I am extremely confused by. Who the hell cares about Madam Web? This elderly character who’s only real benefit to Spider-Man was telling the future?

Oh… oh she’s young in this movie, and she’s aiding 3 random Spider women (one of which I can only assume is Silk) fight against some South American murderer (Tarantula!?). The premise is… confusing, I have no idea what Sony was trying to do with it, but clearly they’re desperate to hold onto the Spider-Man license and are doing anything they can to retain it by just releasing crap film after crap film. Morbius was crap, Venom 2 was crap, the upcoming Kraven movie is gonna be crap, and well… Madam Web is about as desperate as you can get. With the exception of Venom, the Spider-Man side of the Marvel Universe has never been all that interesting outside of… you know… Spider-Man! So any effort to try and focus on the side characters will be for naught as they only existed as suppliments to developing Spidey’s own story. Besides that, you have the Spider-Verse movies, why the hell do you need to keep pumping out garbage films? To stave off the madness that is Bob Iger? Idk!

But hell, if you want some Spider-Man-Esque stories, maybe do something with Cloak and Dagger, The Runaways, The Slingers, Black Cat, maybe even Prowler. Don’t know if Sony can use them or not, but it would make a lot more sense than making movies about characters literally no one cares about.

“But who cares about the Slingers!? Wait, who the hell ARE the Slingers!?”

Well…. I gaurantee more people would care about them over Madam Friggin Web!

But aside from all that, people… naturally feel that Madam Web deserves all the scorn that people can heep on it.

And if we’re being completely honest, having watched the video, Stuckmann believes it too. He just won’t waste the energy, and instead focused his attention to Sony for pumping out trash movies for no good cause, how the Hollywood machine leads to said trash movies, and that people should vote with their wallets (the usual BS, of course).

What happened with Stuckmann’s vid is that he started off saying “I’m not going to review the movie because I know how hard it is to be a film maker”. And youtube seemed to have seized upon this moment as stuckmann selling out, or sugarcoating his overall opinion of the film. The top comment of the video is “I refuse to criticize my burger for being overcooked because I know how hard it is to be a chef”. Very clever, I’m sure that zinger took more brain meat to process than to actually the point of the video. I suppose the writer/director of Madam Web was involved in some possible SJW thing that’s gotten the griftosphere in a shit stick as usual, and are motivated to trash the movie based on that alone, and the thought of one individual not creating a single video based on that sort of outrage was enough to… cause outrage. So much so that we’ve got vids going around titled “The Fall of Chris Stuckmann” or “The death of film criticism”, and I’m just sitting here thinking “What the hell happened?! I thought we went online to get away from all the sensationalism of television and movies, yet here youtube is with vid titles like this”.

Then you got Angry Joe’s bitch ass commenting “People will question if you are being kind to something for other reasons besides the merits of the media if you refuse to criticize harshly when warranted.” This coming from the mother fucker who, in the same breath, claimed The Witcher 3 was not a perfect game, but turned around and gave that bitch a 10/10 Legendary Status when that asshole had a voice credit in the same goddamn game as if he didn’t have any incentives to suck off CDPR his damn self. Then he cries about not getting paid enough on youtube. Angry Joe is a duplicitious piece of shit, I can’t stand his ass… ahem… sorry…

Not to say there isn’t an issue with the video itself, mind you. What he is saying has some unintentional implications that could be perceived exactly how it was, but… again, a lot of these people didn’t stick around to finish the video to understand where he is coming from.

Now, I haven’t watched a lot of Stuckmann’s videos, but from the few I have watched, the guy seems to have his head on straight. He’s not someone I would immediately write off as a sellout (yet). Whether he stays the course, that remains to be seen, but so far he seems harmless. That being said, I think the outrage is leftover baggage from certain vids like the minor commentary he did for “No Time to Die” where he basically flipped the bird to said griftosphere of youtube. Either that or he praised Flexboy Bebop, allegedly. Sorry, Flixboy Bebop… the Netflix Cowboy Bebop shit piece. “Flexboy Bebop”, sounds like one helluva rapper name. Outside of that, most people’s complaints boil down to “hey, you’re a critic, so just critique it!” And… why? I’m inclined to say “hey, it’s his channel, if he doesn’t want to review the movie, that’s his right”, but I’m more curious to know what these dudes get out of him reviewing the movie. A sense of universal validation that all critics agree the movie is trash? Idk. I can’t shake the feeling this has more to do with that culture war.

Instead, the video in question went on about how Sony has been treating the characters of the Spider-Man universe, the creatives, and the audiences for these movies. He’s not saying anything remotely new. People know that Sony is just pumping out films in order to retain the Spider-Man film license, and their efforts to do so do NOT have the audience’s best interests in mind. Sony is purely producing these films to hold onto a license. That is the crux of the problem. I guess what he’s also saying is that the writers behind the film aren’t entirely to blame, and…. kinda? I get that people have a larger tendency to blame the people that are hired to make the works in question rather the company who chose to hire them since in all candor, the hired help is ultimately at the mercy of the company. Afterall, we’ve had Warner Bros. come out and say they want to hire people for projects and properties that they are NOT fans of. Can we blame the writers for how Space Jam 2 turned out? Or Black Adam?

Speaking of Black Adam, Warner Bros. didn’t have to bend to Dwane Johnson’s ego, they could’ve told him to piss off while they found someone else to do the role, and Black Adam could’ve been an appropiate villain for Shazam a long time ago. At the end of the day, Black Adamn is a WB property. Not the Rock’s. He doesn’t automatically have the right to just come in and make demands of the IP holders (unless they made a deal like that or something. Don’t know why WB would be that stupid, but I’ve seen Space Jam 2 so maybe they are). WB being a movie studio wanted star power over substance, and this is how we got the mess we got. This coming a guy who actually enjoyed Black Adam, I would’ve rather seen the character in the Shazam movies instead of some elderly witches and a chick who hates Snow White so much, she’s been hired as the lead star in the live action remake. Least I think that’s her….

Ultimately, the responsibility lies at the foot of the movie studios. Since they are the ones with all the power, they have all the control. If something goes wrong with the movie, then they are the root cause of the problem. In the case of Sony, they’re making a trash Venom-Verse not out of a genuine desire to make a universe, or even to compete with the MCU, but are making these films to hold onto the right to make them. It’s an act of desperation, they’re showing how terrified they are of losing the license to the jaws of the mouse. These films are purely made out of self-interest, and that the writers or filmmakers are not to be blamed for the results, at least not entirely. They’re given a task for something that’s insane, and if they wanna eat, they just gotta make it.

…. No Shit?

What Stuckmann is saying is that since Sony is making throwaway films with no effort put into them, he himself isn’t going to put any effort into critiquing them. Because the films aren’t made for the consumption of the audience, but rather the maintainence of property. You’d basically be giving the film actual merit by wasting energy on it. That’s how I interpret it, at least.

Honestly, I can see where he’s coming from. Hell, I’m almost tempted to not do reviews of movies or games anymore since they’re produced for the sake of wealth extraction via DLC schemes, microtransactions, and loot boxes. They’re constantly coming out with bugs that ruin the experience, content stripped out of the release to tether you to the internet, and content wise, they’re so sterile these days that there’s honestly so much you can say before you get tired of hearing and seeing the same shit. The only thing of interest coming out of the game industry is seeing the industry melt down everytime a smaller developer sees more success than they do, or the insanity coming out of a publisher’s mouth (ala Ubisoft). The games get worse, the publishers get more bold with how they believe gamers don’t deserve anything but pure dehumanization, rinse and repeat. These problems persist because people get into these industries for their own sake. They do not care about the audiences, and as long as the audiences are too busy beefing with each other over politics, culture wars, and whether or not digital tits are big enough to not be “foke”, they have nothing to worry about in regards to their anti-consumer practices.

And you’ve got people coming out saying that this is the death of criticism! Naw, if the studios and publishers don’t care, why should I?

That… being… said…. the thing that I DO infact disagree with… is the notion that the creatives, in general, are entirely blameless victims.

Now I don’t know how much creative freedom people have when it comes to streaming services, but the impression I get is “a helluva more than what Movie Studios allow”. Now it’s mostly celebrities or people with some weight under their belts, but the creative decisions made by certain individuals have also led to a lot of trash over the last couple of years. Kevin Smith when it came to what he did to He-Man is a perfect example. Not only did he make a mess of a series, he also attacked his critics. Something we have seen across the board. Anytime creatives get a platform to express themselves, they have shown that they cannot handle any sort of criticism of their works. They often chastize others for not understanding, not giving things a chance, being turned off by leaks, yadda yadda. Warren Ellis with what he did to Castlevania which chaps my ass to no end, but people didn’t start hating it until they made Annette Renard Black (rambling). Possibly others, I don’t know. Pretty sure all the anime adaptations are done for similar reasons the Venom-verse is being produced, so I don’t know who’s to blame for Cowboy Bebop (which he allegedly enjoyed… uh… ).

Randy Pitchford is definitely ruining Borderlands for all intents and purposes, he’s clearly lost whatever passion he’s had for the franchise after just the second installment (among all the other vices such as assaulting David Edings and stealing people’s bonuses). Kamiya was showing his ass to people over twitter over a voice actress. The devs of Apex Legends callously referred to their own customers as freeloaders… fuck, that last one still stings as they made Titanfall 2, one of my favorite FPS’s of the previous generation!

Creatives have shown their disdain for audiences as much as studios and publishers have, so this isn’t some trait that’s unique to people who are only motivated by profits. I’m willing to bet that nobody gets into the entertainment industry for the benefit of audiences. Everyone goes in for their own personal gain. Sharing their ideas with the world whether on the big screen or no. These days, it’s pretty unrealistic to expect people to actually care about the audience, and that might just be my own pessimism talking, but… from everything I’ve seen, it’s difficult to not share the same sentiment. Creatives are not angels, they’re not innocent, they are just as culpable, just as callous, and just as easily motivated by self-interest as the studios and publishers are.

And, well… Stuckmann talking about himself being a filmmaker shows a little bit of partiality that might cloud his judgement, so the suspicion is warranted even if the backlash isn’t…. shit, that doesn’t even make sense… 😛

On the other hand… people just need to practice having a good filter. A lot of people have a bad habit of dropping folks if they say or do one thing that might raise a few eyebrows. Pretty sure Jim Sterling becoming a cross dresser cost him tons of support. I remember some people got into a tiff when AVGN didn’t want to review Ghostbusters 2016. Apparently, I can’t be taken seriously because I defended the Mario Movie. I tell yah, it takes a lifetime to build up support, but only a single moment to lose it all. People that you tune into… you don’t have to agree with every thing they say or do. Sean Malstrom is one of the most insightful bloggers in regards to videogames, but I’m not gonna cosign some shit like “the west ruling the world through good business”. Critical Drinker is one of the more entertaining movie critics on youtube, but I tune right the fuck out when he goes on his anti-woke tirades. That doesn’t mean I just stop keeping up with what they have to say. The problem is people are always looking for a particular person that shares their opinions or beliefs, but is able to articulate them in a way that said people could not. Putting their thoughts into words, intellectual or otherwise. Validating their beliefs. So inevitably when that one person says some shit that don’t line up with what the people want him or her to say, they will drop em faster than Biden’s approval ratings. That’s why I get a little nervous sometimes if I get more praise than I personally deserve, cause I know for a fact if I said some shit like…. idk, “Dead Or Alive is what Virtua Fighter should’ve been”, then that would be a wrap! People will be all around denouncing how I’m not who they thought I was, and all other shit you can think of. But again, people just need a good filter. You don’t have to like or approve of everything people do or say. But the hunger for validating one’s beliefs trumps all other forms of logic, and we get a mess of people wanting every single word that comes out of someone’s mouth to line up completely with their beliefs. Too often, if they don’t get that, they’re likely to throw a tantrum because that one person invalidated them. There’s a lot of hypersensitivity online, a lot of fragile egos with all the durability of thin ice. And if not that, you got people ready to cancel anyone at anytime, but… that’s for another topic altogether.

Like I said, I haven’t watched every video Stuckmann has made, so maybe I’m missing something, maybe I’m not getting the full picture of where the outrage is coming from, but for this particular instance, I just see it as being completely overblown and disproportionate. Maybe it has more to do with “towing the line” and such. Perhaps he should’ve framed his argument better and focused entirely on Sony’s current business practices rather than go on about why the writers don’t deserve the shit slinging, idk. I just don’t see why this was ever a big deal in the first place.

You have a right to be unreasonable (Movies, Borderlands)

It’s kinda weird some of the stances people take in a strange bid to remain optimistic for future projects. So you’ve got some people, who are clearly upset with some of the changes made to the Borderlands movie. Whether it be casting decisions, some of the humor being cringe (considering who runs the franchise, it should be par the course), the focus on BL3, the decision to change the roles of certain characters, typical shit Hollywood does.

But then you start running into this slogan of “well it’s a different interpretation” or “it’s an adaptation”, basically saying “Well we shouldn’t expect what we clearly enjoyed about the games to be featured in the film”.

All I have to ask is “if you strongly feel that way, why would you want to see the movie?”

Clearly the Borderlands fandom has no experience in having an adaptation of their favorite franchise, otherwise they wouldn’t be talking crazy. Though it’s possible they’re trying to appear more rational than most fans, not wanting to be seen as “those kinds of people”, ze “toxic” fans, et all, what they advocate for is based on disingenuoius feelings, likely out of a belief that “We’re lucky to be getting a movie in the first place”. Guilt much?

Granted, people are used to the idea that adaptations are just going to change things no matter what reasons they have, no matter how often people bitch about them. Often the changes have nothing to do with practicality or with “limitations of the medium”, but because the people handling said adaptations have a “better idea” of what to do with them rather than having a desire to recreate what people loved about those franchises in the first place. Cases can be made for a vast majority of them, too. X-Men 2 changed a lot from the original story of “God Loves, Man Kills” since that storyline would’ve been pretty extreme for just the second installment of the X-Men film series (what with the religious overtones, Kitty Pride dropping the N-bomb, and Xavier’s nightmare sequence involving a Kano Fatality), Spider-Man having Organic webbing saves time in trying to explain where the webs come from, and… I guess Red Wing being a drone is more grounded than Falcon having a psychic link to birds (even though the latter is FRIGGIN awesome). But then there are the egregious changes done without regard to what made some of these stories iconic to fans in the first place. There is no Spider-Man without Uncle Ben, there is no X-Men without the theme of oppression and marginalization, there is no Superman without the element of hope. So many adaptations in the past 7 years have bulldozed and bastardized stories from the last 30+ years in some vain (and I do mean VAIN) attempt to “make their own mark” on these works without respect to what made said works special. And of course they get away with doing so because you have legions of people these days that have no experience with said works in the past to care about what gets changed.

The latter fact is the tipping point that causes many to gain a cynical and defeatist attitude, of course, with many people resigning their own desires to the whims of commercialism. “Weeeeeeeeeell, people are going to throw money at it anyway!” But no one stops to think “if they’re gonna buy it anyway, why change what made it special in the first place? There’s virtually no incentive in doing so if there is no risk in maintaining it.” I don’t know why that thought never crosses people’s minds. Hell, if something like Gargoyles made fans back in the 90s, then whatever made those fans will more than likely make new fans. But we won’t ever know that because people keep trying to “modernize” shit regardless if it’s necessary or not!

Before I go off again, the point I’m trying to make is, as usual, you are not beholden to anything these companies decide to do with the works you love. If there’s some shit going on with ANY adaptation of fiction you happen to be a fan of, you have every right to be as unreasonable as you wish. The crazy changes people make to works of fiction today are every bit as unreasonable as a fan could be. Cause at the end of the day, you are the one paying for it. You should want to get your money’s worth.

And… lets be real. EVERYONE WANTS A MOVIE ADAPTATION TO BE A 1:1 TRANSLATION OF THE SOURCE MATERIAL! And no one… and I do mean… NO ONE… should be ashamed of such. Because it’s not just some run of the mill adaptation. It is a fucking movie! Movies are treated like events. You’re seeing a feature on the big screen, sharing in a celebration of sorts with hundreds of other people in attendence. All in these stadium-esque seats as you all partake in an audio-visual experience that absolutely assaults the senses from all directions. The thrill of going to a movie with crowds going wild is something that cannot be replicated by reading a comic book, watching a tv show, or listening to some run of the mill radio drama. Movies don’t get the spinoff treatment from people because the experience itself is so much greater than whatever other medium it’s in.

And if the movie is an adaptation of a franchise you’re already a fan of, of course there is significant reason to be excited for it. You get to share in that fandomonium with a stadium full of people, all on the big screen! The experience becomes hyper fanatical, it’s like the best drugs you’ll ever have! Plus, the movie more than not becomes the “definitive” experience for most of these particular franchises. As always, most of the people who watch the movies never read, watched, or played the original source material, so more often than not, the movies inform people to what these franchises are.

Wouldn’t you want it done right?

As it stands with the Borderlands movie, I personally could care less. I’ve only ever enjoyed 2 games in the whole franchise (BL1 and TPS) while the rest are tolerable to terrible. So from what I’ve seen, it DOES seem like the movie is on the right track. It at least looks like the games, the costume design looks fantastic, and it seems like the spirit of the games are kept intact. But it is difficult to ignore the casting decisions which are all out of whack. Lilith and Tannis are played by actresses that are simply too old for the roles. Kevin Hart IS too short to play as Roland. Jack Black’s voice isn’t at a high enough pitch for Claptrap. Those issues are distracting for fans of the series as it breaks the immersion. Everything else “looks” fine, but the casting decisions are the biggest detriment. It’s the same issue that plagues EVERY FUCKING MOVIE these days. The actors that Hollywood gets for these movies NEVER match up. Sure it might not be possible to find actors who actually look close in appearance to the characters they portray, but with shit like Raccoon City and Uncharted, they don’t… even… try. They find any poor schmuck they can find, and call it a day. It makes Fox look like they gave a damn about X-Men and Fantastic Four. Say what you will about the MCU, Fox actually made an effort to find the right actors to portray these people. You weren’t gonna get fantastic nonsense like the Ancient One being a middle aged woman who’s barely ancient, or Aunt May being some vaguely attractive 30 something woman, or Justin Hammer being some pseudo-hip 20 something dude, or a Caucasian to be the “Mandarin”. If they say “Hugh Jackman” is Wolverine, you will look to the screen and actually believe it. As many changes and fuckups Fox has had over the years (Fan4stic), their casting choices were on point (well… at least until the 2010s hit).

The casting decisions for films are based purely on star power and not whether these actors actually fit the characters they’re playing, and that has been a huge issue as of late. But regardless, just because it ain’t the source material doesn’t mean you have to accept it. A different interpretation is subject to the same criticisms as the source material, especially if said interpretation misses the point of said source material.

Gwehehehehe… (Borderlands)

Bwahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!

Oh don’t mind me. Just going through a bit of catharsis once more as the tried and true slogan of “Time heals more than reason” once again plays in my favor!

I’ve noted numerous times that my sister is a fangirl of the Borderlands franchise, beginning with BL2 and going on into a future of wanton rants about how BL3 ruined the world! Twas this franchise that made me realize that I am not alone in obsessing over the ruination of my favorite works! I’m almost terrified at her level of focus on every detail this trailer gets “wrong” about Borderlands in general, from it’s over-arcing focus on BL3 aesthetics, to Roland’s height, the cast’s ages (Hearing LOTS of jokes about retirement homes), the plot itself being waaay too divergent from the games, to all the potty humor (piss wash gully and Claptrap shitting bullets)… wow, she can no longer speak of my hatred of the Sonic films with her level of pessimism at the forefront! OHHHHHH I cannot wait for August when I can once again be a spiteful little turd! This might be a good year afterall!

Then again, all it does is remind me that other fandoms have higher standards and more integrity than Sonic and Marvel fans. 😦

Well at least this movie has the look downpat. Can’t say I care about Krieg. He’s an overrated shitstain of a character who is all but useless in BL2 (Melee in general is terrible for a game based on SHOOTING people), they could’ve gotten the guy who played Jax in the 2021 MK movie to be Roland, my sister kept crying about wanting Jessica Chastine as Lilith (the alien chick from Dark Phoenix!? Seriously!?)… I guess the villain is supposed to be Rhys? Idk, he’s only referred to as “Atlas” because they want to hide his true identity for some reason. General Knoxx is a woman for some reason, Tiny Tina seems to be more obnoxious than she is in the games, Jack Black surprisingly does a poor job as Claptrap (Guess Bowser was lightning in a bottle)…. yeah, it has the look of the games, but it comes across as a polished turd much like the Resident Evil movie that came out just a couple of years ago. Aesthetically pleasing, feels like the games they were adapted from, but the overall portrayel will be completely off. It looks like Suicide Squad if I’m being honest.

Well, I’ll be hearing about this movie for the next… 6 months!? Dammit! But man oh man, I’ll be laughing my butt off as she has a meltdown over this baby!