Also yeah I can't believe I blanked out on how fucked up 5 was
I still remember the part where you go from
Somalia as viewed by a white man from Boise, IDtoAfrica as viewed by a 19th century Englishmanwith straw skirts and spears and magic templesEven as a teenage boy, I was agog
Especially when you find that journal entry that states that the enhanced parasite they infected these people with, increased their jumping power
Literally the
black people have an extra leg muscle, that's why they're more athletic than the otherwise superior white manshitYeah at first I felt the game was just tone deaf in depicting a roid raged white man punching out meek africans but the village temples scene made me think this shit was intentional and goes beyond cultural myopia.
At least the discourse around 5 is better today than it was in 2008 wherein anyone calling this racist shit out was belittled. And it sucks because I'm a big Biohazard fan but even when I was a lib playing 5 for the first time it raised my eyebrow and go "well shit".
anyone calling this racist shit out was belittled.
I gotta say, I was dumbfounded even back then. It's "Rules of Engagement" levels of racist. Like, it's so racist you assume they know what they're doing and are making some kind of high brow comment on racism but then the heel turn is that they get Even More Racist.
Pre-9/11 movie that managed to be more racist towards Arabs than most post-9/11 media
For real, my reaction was initially "holy shit, dude" and I believe I was still in my little hogglet phase
Stormfront, the literal actual site, not reddit, praised 5 and Capcom for their racism.
Yeah even as very uncritical youths, playing it coop after school we were still like “are we really doing this?!” I expected some plot point that challenged these themes, even if not as strongly as say Spec Ops The Line. I thought we’d get something, but it never came.
At least the discourse around 5 is better today than it was in 2008 wherein anyone calling this racist shit out was belittled.
I have unfortunate news...
I played the hell out of 5 back in the day and was blessed to do so with people laughing in disbelief at the way the racism got more and more ambitious over the course of the game
Like it starts with a familiar "hostile hordes" trope that can hide its racism beneath the broader class paranoia of modern zombie media
But then you have the tribal African zombies showing how dark it truly gets in the rural hideaways of the Dark Continent
And to top it all off you have the final sections filled with ridiculously stereotyped "African militants" wearing camo pants and red berets with mini guns
It's all totally problematic but at least it was energetic in its derangement, Japan especially at the time was so behind the curve when it came to matters of race
Yeah it's funny because the stuff in the demo and first act looks downright tame compared to what comes after....
Japan: does the remake and turns all the bad guys into variations of Mister Popo
Can't they just remake Resident Evil Outbreak instead
Like make it a Left4Dead clone, people would eat that shit up
Not to mention Code Veronica remains:
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Lore important
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Not good
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Us Outbreak fans need to stick together even if Capcom disowned it.
"What if we made RE4 but with co-op!"
Should have been a giant no-issues money printer. But then somebody at the studio twisted the racism dial until it broke off.
I have been playing through all the re games with a friend, if you haven't played it's fucking wild how racist it is, even for the time it sticks out. All the controversy was centered on the first act which is fuckin bad but it gets so much worse anyone saying it's not that bad because "there were Spanish zombies and these are african zombies" either hasn't played it or cannot be trusted it's fuckin wild. The tribal shit after the first act is 1930's cartoon level racist.
I was on the 'well, it takes place in this locale and the bad guys are a western company exploiting the region, so there's a good critique, so the imagery is pretty bad but it'd combined with an anti colonial message, which if all of this was less ham fisted the juxtaposition could be really interesting, so ehhhh, attempt at anti racism comes off as racist category." And then the tribal dudes showed up. Also the game turned out to be dumber than mist resident evils story wise so the commentary I thought was there at first wasn't.
Edit: main
Yeah any benefit of the doubt I was tempted to give the game disappeared when I saw that one unlockable costume for the female lead...
can they just make a sequel to village please, that shit was gas, stop making remakes of games that sucked then and will suck now
lmao why would you want a resident evil 5 remake anyways? What's next? Umbrella Corps remake? Resident Evil pachi-slot machine remake?
Yeah, even if the somehow removed all the racism it would still be a genuinely bad game
It was like someone at capcom knew the RE4 was a good game but had no idea what made it good
Pretty much follows the trend of the "triple A" corpo-gaming industry has set itself on in its continual gluttonous path of starvation
I want to see Chris punch the boulder in 4k and I won't apologize for it.
I think they can and will ultimately remake it. The trick I think is mostly just to shift the story focus on to Sheva, have Chris as more of the partner character, and just take out the whole swamp / grass skirts section. The issue would be the story angle between Chris and Wesker, but I think that could still play out fine with Chris as secondary.
What if the Resident Evil was the short-sighted bigotry we carried in our hearts all along?
