I'm playing all the Resident Evils for the first time in release order

• First off, I am happy to report that while RE4's low FOV and rapidly swinging camera made me dizzy to the point where I needed to install an FOV mod, I had no such problems with RE5. I was able to play as is, which was nice! I think this is because Chris and Sheva aren't running on the same tank controls that Leon was and the camera doesn't lurch around as much when they take certain actions. The ultra-low FOV is still not my preferred view but I got used to it quickly and agree that it does create lots of claustrophobia and tension when you're fighting hordes. Interestingly, my friend that I played parts of the game with DIDN'T adjust as much and kept saying that she felt like she was constrained the whole time.

• This leads me to my next point - co-op. All of you who mentioned that RE5 is a better co-op game were correct, though personally I also enjoyed it as a single player experience, for reasons that I'll get into. (I ended up playing the first few chapters of the game with a friend but finished it on my own, since our schedules were hard to align with me moving countries.) Co-op in some ways feels like the ultimate manifestation of all of Resident Evil's hopes and dreams since the very first game, where it was originally planned for Chris and Claire to travel together through Spencer Mansion before the idea got scrapped. You yell instructions at your partner, one of you snipes while the other uses a shotgun and it's all great synergy, with the fear factor acting as the only sacrifice. (Though perhaps this is because I'm more used to the series at this point - my friend hasn't played the other games and I could hear her getting nervous during certain sections, like when Chris and Sheva are approaching the first Majini body before it mutates; she was like: "NO, NO, DON'T GO NEAR IT" while I was like "lollerskates yas these are da zombies lets blow some shits up")

• Solo play, on the other hand, definitely feels "dumbed down" in comparison to Resident Evil 4. I think it has to do with the level design, which - at least in the beginning of the game - isn't really set up like the level design of a single player game where every corner is carefully plotted for the traversal of one player and every item and weapon you stumble upon counts. Here, the levels feel like they were designed for two players, the items and weapons feel kinda disposable, and I occasionally felt like I was running around a deathmatch map in an FPS. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the game chooses to populate these areas mostly with shoot 'em up sections where you're stuck up against wave after wave of Majini. The beginning encounter where the Majini burst through the fence exemplifies this, because its a "STAY ALIVE UNTIL THE CHOPPER COMES" arena where what you do feels like it doesn't necessarily matter too much (even if it actually does), since ultimately you're simply following the computer's rules and trying to survive for a certain amount of time. It's like the Mercenaries Mode infiltrated the main game, and while this sort of thing isn't noticeable at all in multiplayer mode, it is when you're alone.

• This sense of "follow the computer's rules" feels especially evident in the boss battles. Obviously all video game boss battles have you following a certain set of rules - deplete the bosses' HP, hit the right weak points - but compared to the fights against El Gigante in RE4, it feels like your gunplay doesn't matter as much for RE5's bosses as long as you manage to do what the game wants you to do at the right time. Take the first encounter with the Uroboros. You can shoot it, knock down gas canisters and blow up parts of it, etc etc. But if you just lure it into the furnace and have your partner turn it on and cook the bastard two or three times, boom, he's dead. It feels like skill has been generally sacrificed for gimmickry, or rather that sense of "ohhh, HERE's how we beat this guy" that can occur when you are playing with a friend.

• However, I did still get a lot of enjoyment out of playing RE5 solo, even if the main gameplay was a step down from what had come before. Most of this is actually because of the story. I've enjoyed the entire arc of the Resident Evil games way more than I ever expected that I would, and the cheese that has filled the franchise since RE1 truly reached bombastically entertaining levels with the adventures of suplexing Leon Kennedy in RE4. But RE5 offers something that I felt like REmake and Zero dabbled in but didn't really fully explore - a Resident Evil tale that takes itself seriously, which I like. There's still some cheese here, especially when Wesker shows up, but the game plays things relatively straight, and as a result, I really found myself getting invested in Chris and Sheva and enjoying the recurring theme of partnership. I also REALLY liked the detailed log entries you could unlock on the Majini, the new Las Plagas variant, Tricell, Umbrella, etc. I'm a guy who likes lore, reading and playing RPGs so all of this stuff is right up my alley. It's also stuff that I feel is best enjoyed during solo play, since during co-op my friend and I were too busy shouting things to each other and rushing around to stop and smell the roses.
• RE5's story also offers a sense of progression that really appealed to me. If you think back to the very beginning of the series, we started as lone STARS agents stuck in a dangerous manor with unfamiliar enemies. Now, we're bioterrorism agents fighting new variations of those enemies across the globe, and everything feels bigger. Less frightening, perhaps, but I couldn't help but going "wow" when I thought of how the series expanded its lore and raised the stakes. I like the concept of bioweapons evolving from mad scientist experiments into terrorist tools that have infiltrated the world's black markets. I like big-as-a-tank Chris Redfield, whose REmake equivalent looks like a skinny kid in comparison. Most of all, I like how RE5 feels like more of a Resident Evil game, at least story wise, than RE4, which felt divorced from the series' mythology aside from Leon, Ada and a few shoddy connections to Wesker.

• Finally, there's the elephant in the room - RE5's portrayal of Africa. I probably knew the most about this game more than any other in the franchise (aside from RE1) before starting this series playthrough, because I'd followed the controversy via Kotaku articles back in the day. I remember thinking at the time that the imagery of a white guy shooting armies of black and brown enemies in the heart of Africa probably wasn't very good, but that Capcom hadn't paid much attention to history and merely chose the setting because they wanted a cool new place to fight zombies. I feel the same way today - Capcom DEFINITELY was simply looking for a nifty new version of Las Plagas-infected foes, and as a Japanese company they had no idea of the minefield they'd be stepping into.

• That said, I can understand how someone might dislike RE5's setting of Kijuju, since it falls quite close to the Hollywood stereotype of presenting the African continent as one single war-ravaged country filled with primitive peoples. I say "close" because the inclusion of great characters like Josh Stone and Sheva helps Capcom's case, and there are actually some very interesting tidbits in the logs about how Umbrella and Tricell have used and abused Kijuju locals and resources for decades. If you read between the lines, there's perhaps an intriguing moralistic tale to be told there about how white foreign powers have violated Africa for monetary gain for centuries. However, when it comes to the actual in-game stuff, RE5 isn't quite adept enough to tell this tale, because we're too busy shooting Majini, lol. Oh well. I read an article (the actual link escapes me at the moment, apologies) stating that Resident Evil is a franchise that's always wanted to imitate Hollywood movies, and with RE5, Capcom came closer than ever before...but they also picked up fragments of Hollywood's stereotypical version of Africa along the way. I agree, and I might ask my brother, who's spent signifiant time volunteering in Uganda as a physician, what his feelings are on the matter - I imagine he'd probably say the same thing. (He might also comment on how Capcom got one thing right - many smaller African countries still use Comic Sans a lot on their signage, lol.)

Last Jon Standing said:

I still want to see Sheva showing up in more games. She is an awesome character and deserves much more screen time.

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• I thought this bat boss Popokarimu was a cool bioweapon design and much more interesting than the bat in Resident Evil Zero, but I felt like the fight against it was an example of RE5's bosses feeling sorta rigged, even if they actually aren't. The game basically wanted me to use explosives to blow the guy up and expose his weak undershell, yah? I felt like as long as you do that a few times then he goes down for the count, but the fight is essentially unwinnable if you misuse your explosives or run out. Maybe it actually isn't, but Popokarimu is far from the only boss in this game where it feels like I was locked into a certain strategy with no breathing room.

• Irving is a chump and Capcom really succeeded in making him have the most punchable face in human imagination.

• The following parts where Chris and Sheva hop in a turret-equipped jeep and start blowing Majini away were kind of awesome IMO. I basically felt like I was playing a Time Crisis game at this point, which makes sense since this is very much a section that seems like it was designed for multiplayer. I get that it's such a far cry from the haunted house setting that this series originated in but I honestly wouldn't mind some kind of Resident Evil arcade cabinet that features extensive vehicle shooting segments.

• I was happy to see El Gigante return! And once again the Time Crisis vibes are strong - he's essentially one of those Time Crisis final bosses with glowing vulnerable bits that you gotta shoot the shit out of. But I like the continuity of him (and the Las Plagas) appearing in both RE4 and this game.

• After an amusing flashback with Wesker (I'll have more to say about this once I play that Lost in Nightmares DLC) we entered one of my favorite areas in the game - the swamplands. I guess this is one of those parts where the African setting produced some troubling imagery, since you are literally fighting spearchuckers. But controlling that little boat and dodging crocodiles in the water was hella cool. If you've read my posts on the older RE games one of my complaints was that all of the indoor and industrial environments started to feel pretty tired after a while, so if you keep that in mind I think it's understandable why I enjoyed this stuff.

• There's a journal entry that you find in one of the village huts that I found pretty interesting - it's from the perspective of a local and talks about how Umbrella (and other international bioweapon/pharmaceutical corporations) crept into communities and slowly began manipulating the people and using the land for their own means. I mentioned in my previous reflections that RE5 has a lot of potential bubbling under its surface for fine social commentary on how white powers have violated Africa over the centuries, but unfortunately it's mostly limited to background flavor text like this because the main game is too busy ushering you onwards to your next objective to spend much time introspecting.

• I quite like Josh Stone, btw! Wish he played a larger role in the game but the small section where you actually get to fight alongside him, both on land and in a boat, was enjoyable. I think he ranks as one of my favorite nonplayable support characters in the series thus far.

• The fight with Irving is an example where RE5, which has been generally more serious than the other games in the franchise, goes back to the cheese that filled RE4 IMO. The dude essentially transforms into a kaiju and we have another Time Crisis style shooting section. Good riddance to him and his punchable face.

JunkerXseed1013 said:

I just read through all your write-ups, glad you're enjoying the series and can't wait to see what you think of 6. My family is from Hong Kong so I visit there quite a bit and I remember reading those HK comics in the store, absolutely insane comics but so nostalgic!

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• So after beating Irving's kaiju form, Chris and Sheva went underground to this big temple, which I was meh on. I find underground temples to be sort of overdone in video games and to me this is the part of the game that feels the farthest removed from the series' roots, more like a weaker version of Tomb Raider or Uncharted than Resident Evil.

• I also find any sort of "rotate the statues" or "manipulate the lights" puzzles to be standard video game dungeon tropes by this point, so this whole bit with the sunlight was meehhhh. Though I might have found it more fun if I'd been playing with a partner - unfortunately I tackled this part solo and it was annoying that Sheva could only supervise and not help out at all.

• The next section I thought was GREAT though - why? The return of the Lickers! Licker Betas, I guess they're called here. Seeing an updated HD version of them was awesome, like an old friend coming back from the past, and the trek through the underground facility where you have to fight seemingly dozens of them at a time PLUS getting the opportunity to see their tongue attacks up close was excellent fanservice.
• I find the inclusion of the Lickers to be a very nice example of how Resident Evil 5 just *feels* more like a Resident Evil game than 4. As much as I like the Las Plagas and the additional mythology that was brought to the series with that entry (and obviously RE5 emphasized and expounded upon a lot of this lore), there's a certain thrill at seeing old school enemy designs and preserving a sense of continuity. The journal entries talking about how Tricell took Umbrella's original Licker formula and made a variant on it, as well as the clues about the Progenitor virus and odes to the Spencer family in Resident Evil Zero were also appreciated. I feel like RE5 actually does a lot to make RE Zero feel more "relevant" to the series, in my mind. The fact that the Uroboros bears a strong resemblance to the slugmen in Zero is an example of this.

• After entering the big underground nest of clones and learning that Wesker had transformed Jill into Catwoman and made her a blonde (they say it's due to her exposure to the virus but I think we all know that Wesker is the type of dude to have some Aryan fetishes) there was this fight with a big enemy crab which was about on par with all the other boss fights in this game thus far - OKAY, nothing special, but okay.

• The next section had more Lickers and Majini gunmen along with one particularly troublesome obstacle if one is playing this game solo - these conveyor belts. Sheva got stuck behind the boxes a whole mess of times and even though I think the computer is very careful to not have her die by falling into the incinerator behind her, it still isn't quite smart enough to get her to flawlessly navigate her way to safety. I feel like this could have been fixed if RE5 gave solo players the option to switch back and forth between Chris and Sheva during your first playthrough at the push of a button, kind of like what RE Zero had done, but I guess that Capcom wanted to emphasize singleplayer mode through the eyes of Chris first.

• I found the Uroboros Mkono to be very cool looking, but as usual for this game's bosses whenever I was fighting him I felt like my normal attacks weren't really doing shit. Only when I picked up the flamethrower on the wall and roasted him and the orbs on his body (AKA, giving up my freedom of battle and doing what the game specifically wanted me to do) did I feel like any progress was made. Apparently he's susceptible to flame rounds, but I didn't have any of those, and I read that one grenade launcher round would've offed him. Ah well.

• Chris and Sheva get a brief moment of rest in the bad guy's chair! Next time there will a lot of wonderful nonsense with Wesker and I'll finish up my thoughts on the main scenario. I took a (totally coincidental) screenshot where it looks like Chris is blowing Wesker, no lie. I look forward to posting it.

Grisby said:

In one sense I do think the temple is still the weakest section but after a replay a month or so ago I don't think it's as bad as what I used to make it out to be. There's just one too many bits but I did like the part with the sun laser and the final bit with the lickers before you face Jill. Plus, it caps it off with the Jill/Wesker deal which is one of the best fights in the series, from a thematic point of view.

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Correctomundo said:

The temple is one of my favorite parts in 5.

=(

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Al3x1s said:

RE5 still looks so great. What awesome art direction and design Capcom had back then. DMC4, RE5, Lost Planet 2, they all look wonderful (sad about the gameplay in LP2 though).

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• The reveal that the shadowy figure in the dark robes and the plague doctor mask = Jill Valentine did not surprise me in the least and I have a feeling that it didn't surprise anyone else either!
• The following tag team boss battle with Wesker/Jill vs. Chris/Sheva is something that I liked in theory and bet looked really cool on paper, but it seemed kinda clunky in reality, especially if you're playing solo. I liked the parts where Wesker starts stalking you around the corridors of the temple but the other components of the battle felt very disorganized and I never exactly knew what I was doing to trigger Wesker to leave his "dodge all my bullets like the Matrix" phase. I felt this way about pretty much all of the Wesker boss fights for the remainder of the game, which steadily amped up in ridiculousness...but felt very slapdash and poorly communicated to the player as far as mechanics are concerned. (Then again, none of the boss fights in RE5 up to this point were that great, so I guess I shouldn't have expected much.)

• The following ship area was enjoyable (perhaps this means I'll like the setting of RE: Revelations?) but I ran into a very strange glitch in the section where Chris and Sheva get separated by a gate. Enemies start jumping out of shipping containers and you need to kill all of them to get a key to progress, but the last dude got stuck in mid-air and I only figured out that I had to kill him after I saw his shadow just running in circles on the ground. I looked online, saw that this is a common glitch in the PC version and had to do this weird routine where I continuously shot the doors of the nearby shipping container in order to get the guy to slowly sink down to the ground...

• Some interesting revelations in the following cutscene between Wesker and Spencer. So Wesker was kinda programmed from the start to be an Umbrella goon? I find his actions in RE5 more and more ridiculous and reminiscent of Dr. Doom (the game even makes a self-aware reference to him being a comic book villain at one point) but this is kind of a neat means of bringing some more background to his character.

• Don't have too much to say about the Excella boss fight other than the fact that the Quicktime running event before her was annoying. A mis-2000s game, this certainly is...

• Okay, so here we go with Wesker boss fight number two. I didn't know what I was doing for most of this fight and had to look up exactly how do to damage to the guy. I was on the right track with sneaking around in the darkness, but for some reason I just didn't think to shoot the missiles that he picks up to chuck at you. I played this section of the game solo, so maybe it all works better in multiplayer and is designed in such a way so that you and your real-life partner can experience those "hey, maybe we should try THIS to beat him" moments. It's kinda drawn out and unintuitive in single player, and Wesker truly looks like a nutty clone of Agent Smith as he jumps around like a damn jackrabbit dodging those bullets.

• The next scene where you need to press the right button in order to save Sheva from getting sucked outside of the airplane with Wesker was one of those "this is supposed to be dramatic, but it's so OVERLY dramatic that it becomes funny" Resident Evil moments, right up there with Steve shooting his dad in Code Veronica. I failed the Quicktime event the first time, and the part where Jill's life flashes before Chris' eyes right before the worlds YOUR PARTNER DIED appear on screen actually made me crack up.

• And finally we have the grand finale with Wesker in the volcano. For some reason I had run out of all ammo except Magnum rounds when I played this section, and I only had one Magnum available. Had to buy two more damn Magnums for myself in the shop menu and replay this section twice before I managed to beat him. Kinda cheesed it, but what the hell!

• I'd seen a GIF of the boulder punching scene here on ERA a while ago so I was eagerly awaiting the moment when I could witness it in-game in all of its splendor. And it was just as magnificent as I had expect it to be; truly up there with Leon suplexing cultists in the last game. Wasn't there a Reddit post where someone actually measured the weight of the boulder versus the weight of Chris Redfield and calculated the exact force he'd need to be punching in order to actually move this thing? If someone knows what I'm talking about please post

• Lost count of how many times Wesker screamed out "CHRISSSSS!!!" in this ending. Two bazooka shots to the face and Chris rides off with his two hot partners. Game over, man!

• Of the DLC chapters I very much enjoyed Lost in Nightmares. With all the people who complain about how RE5 was mostly set in sunny Africa and lost the horror element entirely, I can't imagine that I was the only one who found Lost in Nightmares to be a great (albeit short) bit of fanservice that intentionally harkened back to the dark hallways of Spencer Mansion in RE1 in order to generate nostalgia. I love the version of REmake that we got but I wouldn't mind seeing all of RE1 re-created using this engine - after playing all of the classic RE games in a row, I do agree that it's a good thing that the series evolved and moved in a different direction, but after two games filled with shoot 'em up action, it is a nice refreshment to see the temporary return of an older style of gameplay.
• Speaking of an older style, I heard that if you examine the mansion door multiple times then the camera switches to an old school fixed camera system. Can anyone confirm?

• Anyway, everything in here from the hallways to the "itchy/tasty" line in the journals to Jill playing the piano to the first-person view of the doors opening up was good fun. Also, how typically RE that you need to jump through a bunch of hoops to open a safe...that has a crank inside.

• I found these axe-carrying blob enemies to be very effective foes because the game pulls off the horror trope of building suspense around them by only having you catch glimpses of their forms from far away (punctuated by eerie music) before finally shoving them in your face.
• The area where there are several of them in the sewers and you're out of ammo and need to bait them into various traps was pretty brilliant. Is it possible to skip the traps and knife these guys to death, I wonder?

• After this trap-filled encounter in the basement, the denouement with Wesker was disappointing mostly because it has the same problems that have plagued all of the other Wesker fights in RE5 thus far. Shoot him a few times, succeed on the ridiculously strict time limit for the Quicktime event and remember to get in that last melee hit to actually do damage... Yeah, Chris died a dozen times in my game just because I kept missing the stupid button press.

• I didn't enjoy Desperate Escape as much as Lost in Nightmares simply because it didn't feel quite as fresh and is more of the same stuff as the main game. It was good to actually play as a female protagonist as the default lead though, with Josh serving as the backup. I've noticed that as the RE games have gotten more and more action-y and less survival horror-y, the main characters seem to have defaulted more towards the men with the ladies serving more as support, which kinda sucks. I heard the Revelations games address this somewhat, which is part of the reason why I'm looking forward to them.

• Fave part of playing as Jill Valentine - just knee dropping dudes with no prejudice. Damn!

• The ending of Desperate Escape was another one of those "survive until the chopper gets here" sections which aren't my favorite. I ended up camping in the small house that dots the map and taking out enemies as they entered the door, which is a cheap way to pass the mission but pretty effective...until Josh got murked by one of the chainsaw dudes and I had to repeat the whole thing over again. Arghhh.

• I played a little bit of both Mercenaries modes and liked them well enough but I've never been that captivated by the Merc gameplay in these games so I can't see myself coming back to 'em too often. I got more of a kick out of rotating and posing the unlockable figures that you can find in the library. Love this type of stuff in games, and the models in RE5 still look really good IMO. Also - I wish Barry and Rebecca made cameos in the main game at some point!

It becomes immediately evident that RE5 is more Black Hawk Down than Night of the Walking Dead. Infected Kijuju locals with splitting heads might still be the enemies coming your way, but most of the game's set pieces are giant shoot 'em up arenas set under the bright African sun where you've got to kill ten, twenty, maybe even thirty guys at once. It's clearly designed to emphasize the series' first foray into fully co-op multiplayer, a beautiful dream that Resident Evil has always harbored since the days of the first game, and it's occasionally clumsy and dull to play through solo, especially after the fantastic single player experience that was RE4. Still, I'm able to forgive this since I'm almost kind of proud that RE finally made it into the "big leagues" of co-op. (These are the sorts of emotions you feel when you play an entire franchise in release date order!)

But the focus on wild gunplay with a buddy is a jarring cry from the dark corridors of spooky solitude that filled previous Resident Evil games, and it's part of the reason why this title is a controversial entry in the franchise. "It's not scary at all!" the detractors cried when RE5 was released a decade ago, and they're kinda right, though the game does have an excellent DLC chapter called Lost in Nightmares which makes up for this by taking place in a creepy European mansion filled with fanservice.

"Not scary" was nothing compared to the other major criticism leveled at this game prior to its release, though. At that time, all the general public had to go by when assessing RE5 were images and short videos of Chris Redfield - a white dude - killing lots of black and brown Africans. The "it's racist!!!" narrative made RE5 blow up on a level like nothing else, and even my survival horror-snubbing weenie self became aware of the controversy back in 2009.

Upon playing the actual game, though, you quickly realize that Capcom kinda just wanted a cool setting for players to shoot zombies in, much like how they chose Spain for Resident Evil 4. As a Japanese company, they were ignorant of the imagery behind a Caucasian man killing dark-skinned locals, and while the game's portrayal of Kijuju is unfortunately stuck in the Hollywood stereotype of depicting most African countries as third world hellholes (a side-effect of RE5 so slavishly imitating that Black Hawk Down template), there are enough solid black characters in the game - like the aforementioned Sheva and the very cool West African BSAA chief Josh Stone - to make it clear that racism was not the intention. There are even some in-game story bits that delve into how Umbrella and other international corporations run by white people have been pillaging the resources of Africa for centuries, which has the potential for very intriguing social commentary. Unfortunately, the game's not quite subtle or skilled enough to expound upon this potential, especially when the plot turns into a 90s comic book in the last few hours as Albert Wesker makes a glorious return and starts throwing missiles and backflipping around like Agent Smith from the Matrix movies. Ah well.

Nevertheless, despite the nosedive into silliness that is the final few hours of Resident Evil 5, the majority of the game's plot plays it straight and offers up a real sense of progression, which is something that I truly enjoyed. After playing all of these games in a row, it's kind of amazing to see how the same characters and threats have evolved. Chris Redfield and his posse started out as lone survivors in a haunted mansion, fighting for their lives and barely able to make it out by the skin of their teeth. Now, they're hardened and experienced members of a tactical SWAT team policing the world for mutated threats. The sense of amplified scale is very, very cool, and the game successfully pulls off the hat trick of feeling bigger and more awe-inspiring than any other entry in the series thus far…even if the gameplay isn't quite up to standard.

Therein lies the complexity of Resident Evil 5…mediocre in some ways, filled with problematic imagery in others…but at the end of the day, still a game that provided a surprising amount of enjoyment by advancing the lore and scope of a series that, by this point in time, has come to mean quite a lot to me.

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This one starts the series, and Perry manages to summarize the Spencer Mansion romp in a highly readable way. If the book does have any flaws, it's that the middle section kinda starts to feel like a walkthrough in a strategy guide, talking about how Chris and Jill turned this way, opened that door or collected shiny crests. There's also a mystery man named Trent who's an original character and serves as an exposition/deus ex machina machine, feeding Jill info on Spencer Mansion and even giving her maps. He shows up in the sequels as a shadowy figure behind the scenes working for "White Umbrella," a subset of Umbrella that Perry created, and he's sort of a lazy plot device, but I guess Perry needed a crutch to help our characters zip past most of the drearier puzzles in the mansion. Putting that aside, there are some clever changes from the game that I like - for instance, Jill is described as the daughter of a famous cat burglar, hence why she's the "master of unlocking," and one of the best parts of the book is the beginning, when the STARS undergo a briefing session. Here, Perry is free of the structure of the game and gets to flesh out each character - from Barry Burton to Brad Vickers - with similar flourishes.

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Perry wrote two original novels in her series which weren't specifically based on any Resident Evil game, and this was the first, intended to bridge the gap between RE1 and RE2. It's also one that I really liked, and probably my favorite out of this entire series. The plot is mostly from the viewpoint of Rebecca Chambers, who goes on a mission with an old friend of Barry Burton's to infiltrate an Umbrella lab in Caliban Cove, which is somewhere in Maine. Along the way we encounter giant mutated fish, specialized zombies that have been trained in the use of firearms, a crazy mad scientist and an excellent scene that actually delves into what happens to a person's mind when they get infected with the T-Virus. It's all fanfiction, to be sure, but it's solid fanfiction, and Perry doesn't fall victim to the walkthrough feeling that the first book had, since this is a story of her own creation. It some ways, Caliban Cove is a more coherent story for Rebecca Chambers than Resident Evil Zero, and it makes me wonder why there aren't more horror games set in creepy lighthouse communities by the sea.

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This is the adaptation of Resident Evil 2, and it's slower than The Umbrella Conspiracy and Caliban Cove but still good. Once again, Perry makes the smart choice of avoiding the "feels like a walkthrough" trap, this time glossing over most of the games' busywork like the block pushing puzzles in the Racoon City Police Department and all the collectible crap that Leon and Claire had to pick up there. She also does a fine job of delving into the minds of Leon - who comes across like a good natured newbie cop just trying to survive, much like how he's being portrayed in the upcoming Resident Evil 2 Remake - and Claire - who's the determined little sister willing to sacrifice all in order to find her brother. Ada Wong and Sherry Birkin also get scenes told from their POV, and Sherry's sections use simpler language to indicate that she's still a kid, while Ada comes across as more well-rounded, like an actual spy rather than the bimbo-ish femme fatale that she kinda seemed like at points in RE2 (and RE4, for that matter).

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Underworld's the second original novel that Perry produced, and it takes a while to get going - I think the first fight with anything resembling a bio-organic weapon happens after two thirds of the book is finished. Also, Underworld recycles the formula that Perry used in Caliban Cove, and instead of having the characters venture to the coast, this time she has them go to an underground Umbrella facility in the Nevada desert, called the "Planet." Once the cast is there, they run afoul of artificial environments ranging from a forest to a city (basically the finale of Parasite Eve 2, if you've ever played that game), and each sector is populated by mostly new creatures from Perry's imagination. The are some nifty ideas for B.O.W.s that I wouldn't mind Capcom stealing, like mutated mountain goats and a variant of Tyrant with a T-Rex head, which I kinda love. The main nitpick I have with this book is that the whole expedition to the Planet is a side-trip keeping the characters from investigating Umbrella's base in Europe.The whole idea of an "Umbrella Europe" was something the games cockteased only to never make good on, and Perry hypes it up in all of her novels, especially this one, which actually has the characters on a plane about to go to Austria…until deus ex machina man Trent shows up and is like, "Nahh, ya'll need to check out Nevada first."

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This is the RE3 adaptation, and also where the series starts dropping in quality. I think the reason for this is because the plot of Resident Evil 3 is really pretty thin, and trying to stretch that skinny amount of story out for 150+ pages just results in a book that is sort of…boring. All the novel really does is showcase a bunch of chapters about Jill and Carlos running from Nemesis, who was a compelling enemy in the game because of the jump scare factor. But since you can't really do jump scares in a novel, there's not much intriguing about him here at all. He's just a slab of bioweapon mass that shows up every few chapters to growl and make Jill wax exposition about how she's in danger, and most of the time, Perry doesn't even focus on him as a major antagonist. Instead she spends too much time delving into the psyche of Nicholai, one of the Umbrella mercenaries hired to clean up the city. The guy was a boring baddie in the game and he's a boring baddie here as well, quickly falling into the psychotic tropes that Perry's used time after time for villains in this series.

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If you've read my other posts then you'll know that Code Veronica is probably my least favorite RE game, and frankly I think the story - with its Wesker Matrix powers, side trip to Antarctica and weird incest sub-themes - was kinda dumb. But a dumb game plot could make for a funny book! Unfortunately, this one's flat in the same way that Nemesis was, and it feels like Perry rushed this script out to make a deadline. Certain scenes, like Claire's capture and imprisonment, are told with little or no description, and Wesker literally returns for like ten pages only to disappear into nothingness, never to be seen from in this series again. It's also too bad that timeline-wise, this is also the final novel in Perry's Resident Evil mythology. All of the little White Umbrella seeds that she's been planting are never fully realized, and deus ex machina man Trent never manages to fulfill his goal of manipulating everything from the shadows for the sake of plot advancement. Ah well.

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Zero Hour is labeled as "0″ on the cover, but it was actually the last book that Perry wrote, so there are manycontinuity inconsistencies if you choose to read this one first. Chief among these is Rebecca's characterization - in The Umbrella Conspiracy and Caliban Cove she's an inexperienced noob who rambles a bit, while here she's mostly serious and good at shotgunning Tyrant prototypes. Other than personality retcons, there's not much here that we haven't seen before, and while the story is more engaging than the slogs that were the RE3 and Code Veronica books, ya just can't help but feel that Perry kinda lost the spark by this point. It's also an odd decision and shame that she chose to adapt RE Zero instead of writing a third original novel that tied all of her threads about White Umbrella together. Perhaps a climatic showdown in Umbrella's European base…THE THING SHE'S BEEN BUILDING UP TO FOR THE LAST SIX BOOKS…might have been a better swansong for this series than a prequel adaption. But at the end of the day, Umbrella Europe ends up being as much of a cocktease in these books as it was in the games. Grrr.

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• It's good that Jill is front and center! One of the things I noticed was that Resident Evil did a great job featuring female protagonists in the older games, but as soon as the series veered into action shoot 'em up territory the guys have kind of taken center stage while the females have been delegated to support roles. This falls into the whole trope of survival horror games featuring women as central characters because male players are more likely to want to "protect" them, while action game protagonists represent power trips and don't need to be protected, hence why they're usually male. Revelations might not be a "main" entry in the series but it's nice to have a woman as the centerpiece in a newer RE for once and a male sidekick. Parker's a good one! He falls into that Barry Burton role nicely.
• The boat is a nice return to something scary after the sunlit plains of Africa in RE5. It hits all the right notes of a Resident Evil setting - confined, dark and featuring sections that are both industrial factory and classical Victorian. I don't like it as much as the Epileptic Express in Resident Evil Zero, but as far as "moving vehicle settings" go in these games, this is a fine one. I thought the beginning was especially effective, with monsters hanging out of the ship's laundry machines, banging about the vents, etc.

• Speaking of monsters, I approve of the more aquatic zombies that are the Oozes. After traditional horror movie zombies in classic RE to more human variants in RE4 and RE5, now we have deep sea versions, which is brilliant because the depths of the ocean are already horrifying. I was hoping that with the new Genesis scanner thingy we'd be able to get Pokedex-style entries when scanning their corpses but no such luck, oh well.
• Speaking of the Genesis, it's not bad and appeals to my OCD once I figured out that I would be able to use it in every room in order to find more health pickups and ammo, which certainly seem more scarce in this game - a feeling that I kind of forgot after RE4 and RE5 where ammo and green herbs were falling out of everyone's ass. What do the scannable handprints unlock?

• One thing that threw me off at first was the chapter structure, the simplified menus and the HUUUUUUGE button prompts that show up on screen. Then I remembered that this was originally a 3DS game and I was like "ohhh yeah, these menus just look like something on the 3DS." I'm playing the HD version on Steam, if you haven't guessed yet, but I imagine this must have been quite a lot of fun on the 3DS and an impressive technical display. How was the 3D?
• Some of the environments and textures also serve as giveaways regarding this game's original handheld nature, but other areas (like the ship's dining hall) are gorgeous. Speaking of the dining hall and the ending of chapter two, I got stuck in a loop where I was close to death and low on ammo, not sure where to go. Turns out I had to progress through a padlocked door by knifing/shooting it, lol. One of those obvious d'oh moments.

• Chapter three with the Parker/Jessica escape from Terragrigia was cool, mostly because I always thought that Resident Evil in an office building with lots of cubicles might be a good idea (nothing more terrifying in this world than cubicles). The whole Terragrigia/terrorist plot of this game actually reminds me a lot of the stories in the Ace Combat series - I haven't substantially played those but the recent trailer for Ace Combat 7 was the first thing I thought of when they started going on about futuristic city-states and solar energy satellites. So far, I like how the plot plays it relatively straight, similar to RE5. Resident Evil cheese is great, but it's nice to feel invested in something that doesn't intentionally make fun of itself.

• I found the final boss fight of chapter three against the mutated radio operator dude to be a good challenge. I barely survived and was running out of ammo the whole time. One thing I was wondering was does Parker actually *help* in these fights? Like, can he kill enemies? I seem to notice that he serves more as a deterrent for pushing Oozes back but I'm not sure if I've ever seen him kill one by himself. There was one variant of the Ooze (believe it was the Pincer version) that I saw him packing bullets into over and over again but the guy didn't die until I knifed him. If Parker's mainly there for show, that's a bit disappointing - everyone goes on about how bad AI-controlled Sheva Alomar was, but she actually killed dudes for me in RE5 when I was playing alone.

• Final battle against Rachel (AKA the ship's thot, which is what I like to call her based on her outfit) in chapter four was a nice example of making backtracking feel fresh.

Menome said:

Oh man, I still have my Resident Evil novels. I only have books 1-5 though as my local bookstore stopped stocking them before they went out of business and I didn't have access to online shopping yet at that point. Glorious rubbish.

As the original Playstation was the 'family console' when we got it back in 1996, it meant that my stepdad playing the first Resident Evil would be an evening's entertainment instead of watching a movie etc. as it was hooked up to the only television we had. One day, my younger sister came home from school with a really good score on her writing assignment, where they were told to come up with a "spooky story". She had written a story called "Vampire Attack", which was a complete rip-off of the bits she'd seen of the game, but with all the enemies replaced with bats and vampires.

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• There are probably people out there who find Keith and Quint annoying but I thought they were kinda fun, mostly because they serve as a nice break from the usual combo of "super attractive male and female partner combo" that has dominated every game in this series so far. Also, aside from a few stints with Josh Stone in RE5, who you couldn't really play as outside of Mercenaries mode, Keith's the first playable black dude in the series, isn't he? Kewl.

• Jessica, on the other hand, lol. The little plot twist involving her unfortunately got spoiled for me because I was reading too much on the RE Wiki, so I'll just talk about her wetsuit design, which is dumb as heck. I guess it makes for good cosplay but I mean, they coulda left the right leg on and it still woulda been sexy! Her fantastically unsubtle thirst for Chris is entertaining though.

• Swimming for the first time in a Resident Evil game! I can't say that the controls are that great and combat options and mobility are pretty limited, but I do like it. It adds another layer of claustrophobia to the ship setting and the hearing the melancholy call of Sea Creepers as you're diving, only to have one creep up behind you, is a great thrill and good evidence that underwater settings are a fine fit for survival horror games, IMO.
• Speaking of which, in my post on the Resident Evil novels I mentioned how I liked the "lighthouse by the sea" setting of the second book, Caliban Cove, and enjoyed seeing the T-Virus' effect on aquatic life. This game's Ghiozzo, Ooze and Scarmiglione enemies (Humans mixed with sharks? Nice) are probably the closest the series has come to showing off the mutations in that book, which probably isn't intentional on Capcom's part (I doubt that they paid much attention to the American spinoff novels of their series) but is cool nonetheless.

• I'm going to spam a few more screenshots of enemies that I took, including a nice line from Parker that kinda summarizes how I feel when I run outta ammo when fighting a boss in this game and need to resort to using the knife and Genesis-ing the environment to see if there's any ammo packs lying around that I missed...

• After more Terragrigia story stuff, we have the ship conveniently getting overrun with Hunters and a timed escape sequence! I feel like it's been forever since we had one of these in a Resident Evil game and it kinda serves to cement how Revelations feels more like a throwback to the older titles. (Part of me wishes I could play this game through with fixed camera angles.) If this were an old school Resident Evil, this would probably be the end of the game... But then we go back to Chris and thirsty Jessica for a Time Crisis shooter sequence that's basically right outta RE5, which I guess is a nice juxtaposition of how Revelations balances old Resident Evil with new Resident Evil.

• Anyway, I made it to the obligatory secret lab that's in every single one of these games. Four more chapters and then I'll wrap this one up.