Episode 599: Resident Evil 5 & 6
Added 2024-03-11 12:00:09 +0000 UTCHi, Diamond Feit here, indulging myself again with a podcast about survival horror—oh wait, no, I'm sorry, this week we're talking about Resident Evil 5 & Resident Evil 6. You know, two mainline installments in Capcom's famous franchise that ramped up the action at the expense of less-sexy elements like "atmosphere" and "tension."
Don't worry though, I didn't gather my friends Richard Eisenbeis and Alex Aniel to spend two hours of our time dumping on games we dislike. Rather, we explain the unusual circumstances that brought about this pair of blockbusters, what we liked about them, and where they fell short of expectations. I laughed a lot during this recording and I hope you'll do the same listening to it!.
Edits by Greg Leahy; Art by Amanda Neipris. Music heard in this episode:
- 07:16 - RE 5: New Fear
- 14:51 - RE: The Umbrella Chronicles: Live Evil
- 23:28 - RE 5: Opening
- 32:47 - RE 5: Majini II
- 42:36 - RE 5: An Emergency
- 49:33 - RE 5: Wind of Madness
- 1:00:19 - RE 5: Burning with Anger
- 1:08:42 - RE 5: Lost in Nightmares: Results
- 1:16:18 - RE 5: Pray (Instrumental) | RE 6: Life or Death
- 1:25:10 - RE 6: At the Ace of Spades
- 1:31:32 - RE 6: Invasion of Darkness (Ada)
- 1:46:15 - RE 6: Ancient Blood
- 1:52:04 - RE 6: Results (Jake)
- 2:00:33 - RE 6: The Last Escape
- Closing - RE 6: Back for More
Comments
I did a double take when I heard the name 'CVXfreak'. Took me back to my days of browsing GameFAQs.
PurpleComet
2024-03-18 06:53:12 +0000 UTCI was prepared to deal with RE5's uncomfortable images of black zombies/majini, but when they started wielding spears and carrying masks it took everything to a whole other level. It's worth emphasizing that wearing a tribal mask and wielding a spear is in a no way an indication of someone's intelligence or a sign that they've 'regressed'. To be honest, I'm surprised the game's controversy never attracted attention from mainstream news outlets. One silver lining to RE5 is Sheva and to a lesser extent Josh. A playable black female character in a AAA game was practically unheard of in 2009 and it's still pretty rare today. Sheva and Josh are shown to be competent, effective and intelligent. Disappointingly, neither has appeared in a Resident Evil game since. They even took Sheva off the cover of RE5 for the PS4/XB1 release!
PurpleComet
2024-03-18 06:31:15 +0000 UTCSome lightly critical feedback: I wish some acknowledgement of the racism of RE5 would've been placed up front, because I spent the first half of the episode not able to fully focus on the actual analysis because I was too focused on the elephant in the room of whether or not the racism was gonna be addressed. Even something as simple as saying "we're going to get to it towards the end" or putting an acknowledgement in the episode description would've done a lot to assuage that concern. It's a great episode overall, though, and I think once you got to the discussion of the racism you did it plenty of justice (imo) (I'm also white) Also: my own take is that RE5 is fundamentally doing something pretty similar with Africa as what RE4 did with various parts of Europe, and failing to understand just how much worse the change of setting makes it. But I don't say that to reflect well on RE5; if anything, it just makes me more wary of the imagery used in RE4.
Lambda
2024-03-13 09:29:57 +0000 UTC
