This Week In Retro: Resident Evil 6 (Patreon)

October 2, 2012: Survival Horror has a Ship of Theseus moment

by Diamond Feit

Ever heard of "Last Blockbuster Syndrome"? It's got nothing to do with a certain bankrupt chain of video stores; instead, it refers to a phenomenon where a company misinterprets a successful product as license to double-down on said product without evaluating its merits or failures. I first heard it used in reference to the popularity of the 3DS blinding Nintendo to the impending rise of smartphones and tablets, leading directly to the disastrous launch of the Wii U.

However, we're not talking about the Wii U or any Nintendo missteps this week, not when an infamous AAA title celebrates its 10th anniversary, particularly one from a series I've already shared thousands of words about in these very pages. October 2012 saw the release of Resident Evil 6, a highly-anticipated horror game which followed in the footsteps of two tremendously successful games, Resident Evil 4 and 5. As those two titles hit it big by favoring firepower over fear, Capcom crafted Resident Evil 6 to appeal to the widest possible audience, shelving some of the series' distinctive features in the name of the most terrifying foe of all, capitalism.

Two words from a Resident Evil loading screen in 1996 would define that game and the genre it would inspire: Survival Horror. That original PlayStation title blew me away by locking me inside a disheveled mansion where carnivorous cannibals walked the hallways. In daring me to find my way out, the first Resident Evil wound me up so tightly that even the door-opening loading screens which separated each room gave me the creeps. I found the experience so frightening that I couldn't play it alone, so I never did, only finishing the game with friends as we took turns playing it over entire nights—sometimes literally until the sun came up.

When Resident Evil proved successful, Capcom worked quickly to develop sequels, spin-offs, and ports for other platforms. On the sixth anniversary of the original game, Capcom released a remake just as a Hollywood movie adaptation debuted in theaters across the United States. In a few short years, Resident Evil had grown from a single experimental title to an internationally renowned brand.

As popular as the franchise was, everything changed when Resident Evil 4 arrived in 2005, abandoning the series' traditional fixed camera perspective for an up-close, over-the-shoulder view. After years of asking players to conserve ammunition and carefully dodge hazards while exploring tight quarters, Resident Evil 4 swapped claustrophobic corridors for spacious arenas filled with hordes of threats, shifting the focus from creeping terror to outright panic. The gamble paid off as Capcom's new take on survival horror moved millions of copies and scores of other developers soon emulated Resident Evil 4's controls and perspective in their own creations. Even though the series already had fans around the world, Resident Evil was suddenly mainstream in ways no one could have predicted.

With strong sales figures for Resident Evil 4 and continuing box office success for the high-octane Resident Evil series of films, Capcom pushed the franchise further down the action tunnel with the release of Resident Evil 5 in 2009. As HD graphics and always-online connectivity had become standard for the latest consoles, Resident Evil 5 invited players to gun down zombies with a friend, as the entire campaign revolved around cooperative action. While a few critics felt this new game didn't measure up to the high standards set by Resident Evil 4, retail figures showed no such failings as Resident Evil 5 became Capcom's highest-selling video game of all time.

To recap the situation even more succinctly, as Resident Evil swung harder and harder towards non-stop zombie-killing action, the sales numbers kept climbing higher and higher. You don't have to be Disco Stu to know where this is going; Capcom heard the gamers loud and clear, and the people demanded more spectacle. Thus, on October 2, 2012, Capcom released Resident Evil 6, the loudest, wildest, runaway train of a video game that the series had ever seen before.

Not since the days of Code Veronica has a Resident Evil game spanned the globe as much as Resident Evil 6 does. Forget exploring a single location; Resident Evil 6 features four separate campaigns with action spread across multiple nations, with everyone meeting up in China at one point or another before splitting up again. As with part 5, every campaign in Resident Evil 6 supports two-player co-op, pairing an established character from a past game with a new face so that no one ever need combat the threat of bio-terrorism alone. Players may select any campaign at any time; the game saves all progress at select checkpoints.

Besides starring different characters, each individual storyline in Resident Evil 6 has a mood and feel all its own. Leon and Helena's quest comes closest to a traditional Resident Evil tale, with the pair spending ample time in underground tombs exploring subterranean chambers filled with shambling corpses. Chris and Piers' mission takes the Call of Duty approach, as the pair play soldiers against armed monsters and military vehicles in urban environments. Sherry and Jake must deal with a recurring foe, a mutated monstrosity who hunts them throughout their travels similar to Nemesis from Resident Evil 3. The fourth story focuses on Ada Wong as she intersects with all of the other protagonists, tying the entire narrative together.

Regardless of who fights where, every Resident Evil 6 campaign pits its protagonists against an overwhelming number of enemies to dispatch, constantly putting them in harm's way and seldom offering even a moment of rest. I'd describe it as an ever-escalating emergency but just a few minutes into the prologue, Leon must navigate a highway packed with cars and zombies, flee onto a rescue helicopter, and then fly said chopper when the pilot is killed. Even when the action shifts to a cinematic scene to advance the plot, Resident Evil 6 makes a habit of abruptly demanding players mash buttons or move the analog sticks or else their characters may suddenly perish. Basically, on an intensity scale of one to ten, Resident Evil 6 starts at an 8 and hits 11 before the end of the tutorial.

A lot of changes had to be made to the franchise formula to pump this much adrenaline into Resident Evil 6. When critics complained in 2009 that the action-first scenario of Resident Evil 5 clashed with the series' traditional stop-and-shoot gameplay, the producers listened and completely overhauled how characters move and fight in this sequel. Leon Kennedy in RE6 can run rings around the man he was in part 4—quite literally—though he can also drop to the ground and roll around, all while firing a weapon if need be. Likewise, Capcom dropped RE5's strict inventory limit of nine pickups regardless of size, giving players in RE6 far more freedom to carry all the weapons they can find.

Dynamic animations, an expanded arsenal, and four different co-op campaigns all sound like unambiguous improvements to any video game, but once so many pieces of an bespoke work of art are replaced with new components, can you still call the resulting work "survival horror"? Capcom didn't think so, and as the company spent most of 2012 getting the word out that Resident Evil 6 would be a show-stopping blockbuster, the producers also distanced themselves from the genre that made the franchise famous.

In January 2012, an official video interview dubbed the upcoming Resident Evil 6 "dramatic horror" in contrast to the recently released Resident Evil Revelations which retained the "survival horror" branding. In February, Capcom producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi repeatedly used the phrase "ultimate horror entertainment" in describing Resident Evil 6. A month later, Revelations producer Masachika Kawata flatly stated that survival horror fans alone could not support a AAA game series, telling Game Developer, "the market is small, compared to the number of units Call of Duty and all those action games sell." Forget subtlety, Kawata just said the quiet part out loud: Capcom executives saw the money Western-developed shooters were hauling in and asked their creative teams why Resident Evil wasn't making the same amount of bank.

When October 2012 finally arrived, things looked good for Resident Evil 6. Famitsu awarded the game a near-perfect 39 out of 40, a score on par with other recent hits like Red Dead Redemption, Gears of War 3, and yes, multiple Call of Duty titles. Initial sales were likewise very strong, with Capcom shipping 4.5 million copies in the first week, a new record for a company with a long history of global successes. I certainly bought my copy on launch day, having strong memories of Resident Evil 5 and looking forward to an even bigger, bolder co-op adventure.

Yet just like the life experiences of every single Resident Evil protagonist, things did not go according to plans. In sharp contrast to the glowing Japanese reception, critics in other countries viewed Resident Evil 6 as a bloated melange of different styles, lacking in a central identity which made the series memorable in the first place. In many writers' eyes, myself included, RE6 deserted horror in its rear-view mirror, parking itself squarely in an action genre that is already expertly served by competing franchises. For 1up.com, Jose Otero wrote "the developers have iterated on a survival horror concept and turned it into an inclusive and competently-made cooperative action game, but the end result feels far removed from the series' roots," scoring the game a C+.

I've had my share of ups and downs with Resident Evil over the years, arriving late to the party on many of the series' more celebrated entries, and shrugging off others as disinteresting without even trying them. Resident Evil 6 was a first for me, however, in that I hotly anticipated its release, started playing right away, and threw in the towel just one week later. I don't know how, but the game smothered me with so many rapid-fire stimuli that it soared past excitement and became boring. I believe managing tension in fiction is an art, especially in interactive fiction, but when every single situation in RE6 attempted to rattle my nerves, I instead grew numb to it all.

The strength of the series' reputation and months of aggressive marketing paid off for Resident Evil 6, as the game ultimately sold more than eight million copies worldwide, but Capcom took the mixed reaction to heart. The company spent the next few years remastering and rereleasing classic Resident Evil games in HD, recentering the brand's association with horror rather than action. When Resident Evil 7 finally arrived in 2017, it completely reversed course by locking players inside a creepy house again, forgoing spectacle for smaller locations and fewer foes. Departing from the blockbuster model of Residents Evils 4 through 6 was hardly a safe strategy, but when it worked, it reset the series' image as Resident Evil stands today both as a success and as scary as it ever was back in the 90s.

Indeed, with indie developers now producing throwback games very much in the style of traditional survival horror, the market for the genre certainly seems big enough to support an abundance of fresh blood—pun intended. Would we have reached this point without Capcom steering Resident Evil on a detour to action-adventure-land? Did we only miss the genre once its best days seemed to lie in its past? Perhaps this revival was inevitable, for no matter how many bullets you pump into a supposedly dead zombie, they have a knack for getting up again.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.