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TopicFFD Rates/Ranks/Generally talks about all things Resident Evil [thisisthetopic]
FFDragon
01/05/20 12:49:06 PM
#46:


B-Rank:
Resident Evil Zero
Resident Evil: Revelations
Resident Evil 4

This is the point where I consider all the games to be above most others in the medium, so hold your pitchforks. RE4 did a lot of good for reviving the series in the mainstream, has an incredibly satisfying gameplay loop, and is generally fun to play. We all know that. The things that hold it back for me come from the evisceration of the story on both ends. Here are the final lines of the preceding three games:

[RE2] Leon: Its up to us to take out Umbrella!
[RE3] Jill: Thats it. Umbrellas going down.
[RECV] Chris: Yeah, it's pay back time. We gotta destroy Umbrella, now let's finish this once and for all!

Handwaving away Umbrella as dying to the stock market in the intro is basically unforgivable to me and is a pillar of salt I am not over to this day. It basically forced other later games to pick up the scraps at feeling any sort of conclusion to the original games and it was never as satisfying as it could have been. On the other end of things, I've gone in at length about how Separate Ways ended perfectly to set up a Wesker/Ada showdown at some point, but absolutely none of that is ever followed up on. This is a trend for the series as a whole unfortunately, opening up amazing plotlines and then just abandoning them. I'll also reaffirm my statement from earlier that Ada is continually the worst waste of potential in the series, since she's almost always involved in those abandonment. As a self contained entry, RE4 is really good, but once you zoom out and try to chunk it in with the others it doesn't quite stand the test of time for me.

Revelations on the other hand, I think was a return to form for the series when things had been going off the rails for a while. I put well over 100 hours into this thing on my 3DS, to the point where I actually broke my thumbstick. I'm a huge NERD, so I enjoyed the Divine Comedy nonsense. Obligatory mention of cruise ships. A real Chris/Jill tag team again was great, as was seeing the fledgling BSAA, and how things ran right into Lost in Nightmares at the end. There are some really bad characters in this one, like the BSAA C-Team, and the triple/quadruple crosses sort of go off the rails, but it was the first real survival horror experience in a while and I latched onto it hard. I would love to see some of these characters/viruses revisited. Also the flashbacks might be the best part of the game. Also also I wish they would have stuck with some of the things from the original trailer, like actually incorporating HUNK into a real game, but alas.

Zero I think gets a bad rap from a lot of people, I think. My favorite parts of the Resident Evil lore revolve around the corporate espionage that swirls around Spencer/Ashford/Marcus/Wesker/Birkin. And this game hits a lot of those high notes, including the Wekser/Birkin bromance that doesn't get much exposure outside of Umbrella Chronicles and Wesker's Report II (which I lump into Zero for ranking purposes). This is a top tier scene in the entire series

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vriy5uJOxPY

Especially with the reverse-foreshadowing of Birkin going out in nearly the exact same way, since Spencer is a paranoid control freak. As far as the rest, Bravo team needed their moment and this game handles it well. Billy is just there, but Rebecca earns her stripes and I actually enjoyed the zapping system. My only real gripe is the magic elevators that do not connect where they should if you know Arklay geography, but I'll give it a pass for giving us beautiful recreations of NEST. Zero expanded the lore of the series to the point where I'm willing to ignore some of the minor flaws. That means so much to me that I even had this higher for a while before finally pushing it down to the top of this tier.

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