Impetus: There’s a new Resident Evil game being released in 2015, Resident Evil: Revelations 2.
And I just don’t care. It even has Claire Redfield as the main protagonist of this game, as I’d been clamoring for over the last few installments of the game that have repeatedly had Chris, Jill, Leon and Ada in them. Yet it changes nothing at all, and I’m just completely unenthused by the announcement that another chapter of RE is coming out.
This means that the franchise as a whole is really sputtering, dying, drying up, or all of the above, OR it means that I’m simply growing up, past caring about the franchise. Perhaps it’s a combination of both, as well as a few other factors, like the fact that I can’t stop playing League of Legends, and that I’m pretty bad when it comes to expanding my horizons beyond a few things at a time, much less spreading out my attention over numerous video games.
But continuing on the former train of thought, the series as a whole has been sputtering, legitimately. RE5 was a fun game, but the storyline was undoubtedly corny, and definitely straying from the notion of RE being a survival horror genre, and transforming into an action/shoot-em up series. The backlash of such a development clearly affected me to the tune of barely paying any attention to when RE6 came out, and it being almost an entire year before I got a hold of the game and began playing it.
And there’s no sugar-coating it, RE6 was pretty weak. Sure, it was great playing as Leon and Ada again, PTSD Chris Redfield was kind of interesting, if not a little bit kind of gay in his relationship with Piers, and playing as the now grown-up, naturally designed to appear attractive Sherry Birkin was a surprisingly fun campaign. But it’s like the creators of the game were stretched too thin making four separate storylines with seven main characters, and it overall led to a weak game. At the moment, I can’t really think of any of final bosses, save for the awesome fight sequence that Wesker’s kid is put into against the super zombie. See? I can’t even remember his name, other than the fact that he was the confused romantic interest for Sherry Birkin.
Anyway, I think what really nuked my interest in the series was when I discovered of the existence of another RE game, that happened to actually release in between RE5 and RE6 – Revelations. I was still on somewhat of an RE high, after dealing with and completing the DLC campaigns of RE5, and would have been more than willing to play more RE, if not for the fact that RE:Revelations was released for exclusively, the Nintendo 3DS. Now I’d already grown exasperated with the fact that I had a GameBoy SP that was quickly made obsolete by the Nintendo DS, which was then made obsolete by the sleeker, more aerodynamic DS: Lite, and I wasn’t willing to plunk down even more money for a 3DS, before that too was rendered useless by the WiiU or whatever the fuck Nintendo is churning out nowadays to print more money.
So, I never played RE:Revelations. Eventually, Capcom wizened up, and realized that releasing a storyline canon game to a sole system is not necessarily a great idea, and re-released the game onto actual consoles, like Xbox 360. But the damage was already done to a gamer like myself, and I never bothered to go back and pick it up.
And now that the chain of RE games has been more or less broken for me, I simply don’t have any care or interest in the upcoming RE:Revelations sequel.
Maybe it’ll be like a blessing in disguise. Maybe someday I’ll go back and get a copy of RE:Revelations dirt cheap when it eventually becomes a bargain bin game, actually enjoy it, and maybe reignite some interest to where maybe I’ll track down a copy of RE:Revelations 2 in the bargain bins and play it then.
But seriously though, I think it’s time, if not past time, for the Resident Evil franchise to be put to bed. They just haven’t been quite the same since Shinji Mikami left them.
