Wrong Direction (RE6 Rant)

[DragonneRPG Deactivated]

I've been thinking a bit about Resident Evil in general after finishing Village, which is a pretty excellent entry in the series. The series had its highs and lows and sometimes it feels Capcom are pretty misguided. Just think how about they keep trying to make online games nobody want instead of bringing back the Outbreak games, which everybody want. Weird, isn't it? But of all the missteps Capcom ever made with the series, none boiled my blood as hard as Resident Evil 6, the unwanted step-child begging to be locked into the attic and fed with stale bread and dirty water. Capcom tried to go all-out on this one and make it some kind of mega-event reuniting all those classic RE heroes for one big war on bioterrorism. How could it fail? We all wanted to see beloved RE protagonists join forces, like Leon! And Chris! And ... Sherry? Sure, why not. and also ... Helena? Who the fuck is that? Well there's also ... Piers Nivans? Who's this clown? Why should I care?

Anyway, it's safe to say that blockbuster of a gaming event landed with all the impact of a wet fart in the bottom of your shorts, offering multiple awful campaigns rather than just one, long okay-ish one. Personally I thought the game was a slog to get through and I only had enough resilience to focus on the gameplay rather than giving the ridiculous story any space in my poor brain. It's hard to pay attention to a dumb story when the game keeps killing your brain cells with a series of unevenly-paced evens with no scares, much shooty. But then, what if RE6 went in the wrong direction? What if instead of making it a mainline RE title with campaigns, Capcom tried to make it some kind of standalone Mercenaries spin-off, focused on arcadey action and scoring for unlockables?

All Fight, No Frights

See, much as I hate this game, sometimes I go back to it. Not for the campaigns which, as I said before, are a slog to get through, with too many scripted events ranging from cutscenes and QTEs, to just the ground shaking and having the player wait until the protagonists are done trying to keep their balance before they can progress. No non, I come back to it for the Mercenaries mode, the same reason I sometimes go back to RE5 (which I also dislike much). There's the thing: RE6 has great combat for Resident Evil's standards, refined from what was established in 4 and expanded upon in RE5. Characters can slide, do efficient melee moves, dodge, all kinds of action-y gameplay stuff that the campaigns don't really give you a chance to master. In Mercenaries, though, enemies are everywhere and you want to make big combos to get the highest score possible, this is where RE6's combat shines. It shows that the game didn't have the right formula to be anything more ambitious than a balls-to-the-wall action game set in the RE universe, a fact Capcom didn't seem to realize anytime during development. Like in the two previous entries in the long-standing horror series, Mercenaries was just a bonus to keep people playing after they're done with the campaign, although they put some actual efforts in including lots of stages and playables characters, which begs the question: Why wasn't this focused on and expanded upon? RE6 could've been a fine standalone Mercenaries game for consoles and PC but instead, Capcom made The Mercenaries 3D for Nintendo's handheld the 3DS which, by my own experience, was palatable but suffered from the handheld's lack of processing power.

Much sacrifice, Very little returns

Capcom had to sacrifice much to port RE4 & 5's assets for the 3DS standalone games. Animations where more wooden, the models had a lot of aliasing and the graphics were generally pretty poor, with the kind of performance you'd expect from a 3DS game. It just shows that maybe this kind of game wasn't meant for a tiny handheld with limited power? Now it's not from a lack of understanding the system on Capcom's part, as their other wildly popular franchise Monster Hunter fared excellently on the 3DS. Capcom were a little lazy on that one, as they just cobbled together a series of maps using assets from RE4 & 5, with a few more characters and a skill system to at least give the impression that it was more than just a bunch of re-used assets from previous games stitched together for an easy cashgrab on the Nintendo market. The only Mercenaries standalone game we got was this, a simple time-killer worth playing only for the duration of a bus ride. But the idea itsefl was a good one, it's just that the 3DS might not have been the best console to base it on. I think RE6 did a better job of placing foundations for a better action-oriented arcade game, assuming they had made it for consoles and PCs or at least, built specifically for the 3DS' processing power. As I said before, the combat is great and the Mercenaries mode is excellent and it would've made more sense to make a standalone game with that rather than cobble together the previous games' assets for a subpar handheld game. But no, Capcom put all their eggs in the RE6 basket and tried to make it a big thing that ultimately didn't live up to its goals, with mixed reactions and sales that weakened shortly after its release. Still, RE6 sold decently so maybe I'm not the only one who enjoyed Mercenaries mode?

How It Should Be

So how could a RE6's Mercenaries standalone game have been like, had Capcom actually tried to focus on that instead of the "Hollywoodian blockbuster" lemon that was RE6? Who knows, but I have my own ideas on how they could've done it. First of all, if they wanted to include a campaign, it wouldn't have had to be a bunch of straight lines with the odd puzzle-solving like they did in RE6, it could've just been a few cutscenes between arena challenge, a bit like Mortal Kombat or Injustice's story modes, which consisted of cutscenes between fights. such a campaign could've served as the perfect training grounds for more challenging levels to be unlocked as the player progresses through the game's various modes. The story could've reunited the characters from the previous games, teaming up to fight another bioterrorist threat just like in RE6, without the hassle of that game's awful pacing. It didn't need to be something big and with lots of twists like in a mainline RE game, just something simple and straightforward to keep the player busy.

The rest of the game could have had other modes, like an arcade mode in which you go through progressively harder challenges to unlock stages, characters and weapons, maybe even have a currency system with loadouts, a little like Revelations 2's Raid Mode. Add a few challenges for bonus currency like, say, kill X number of enemies with a specific weapon type or get an S rank in a specific number of stages, stuff like that. The game could even have a small shop to unlock characters and abilities using in-game currency. They could also have an Endless Mode, inwhich you'd fight in a single arena, trying to survive for as long as possible through wave after wave of progressively stronger enemies, maybe even with a few special abilities like in Revelations 2, like enemies that can poison you or that don't flinch easily. Again, this could earn the player currency or it could just be something fun to do, to try and break your own records over and over.

As far as characters go, really they could've had any character from previous entries. Those that couldn't be part of the story campaign could've been bonus unlockables, and with RE's long history, the roster could'Ve been enormous, with each character having their own stats, weapon proficiencies and maybe even unlockables costumes and color palettes. Mercenaries 3D had characters like Claire Redfield and Rebecca Chambers playable in it so Capcom could've put anyone from previous games in their standalone arcadey shooting game. Maybe they could've even included some lesser-known characters from other games, like Fong Ling from Dead Aim or Billy Coen from RE0, bolstering the roster even more. Simply unlocking a bunch of characters would keep the player busy for weeks!

Maybe the game could even offer playable monsters with their series of arenas, tailored to their gameplay. Rampaging through zombies with a Tyrant, Nemesis or the Ustanak would've been a blast! Ustanak was already playable in RE6 but only for a single multiplayer mode but here, it could be playable in single-player sessions. Those playable monsters could range from those strong boss-types characters mentioned earlier to fast, more common creatures like the Licker, for example. That would be another way to bump up the game's longevity with more stuff to unlock and new ways to enjoy the game.

As for the combat, just keep RE6's combat as a base and refine it. RE6 had perfectly acceptable combat in my opinion and it's a shame the only time it shone was in the Mercenaries mode. Here, it would have a whole game based on it, something a lot safer and more self-contained than RE6. I would love to see Capcom try something like this someday but they seem too focused on making subpar shooty spin-offs, with the company's more recent multiplayer offerings being Resistance and RE: Verse which don't appeal to me at all. And let's not talk about Umbrella Corps, which had no purpose beyond cashing on the military multiplayer PVP craze, like a very misguided Call of Duty with monsters in it.

But what do you people think? Would a standalone Mercenaries game based on RE6's combat been worth playing? Let me know!