When the August 2004 issue of Nintendo Power came in the mail, I kept it face down.
The bottom quarter of the page didn’t bother me. A screenshot of the new Legend of Zelda game (which was eventually tagged with the subtitle, Twilight Princess, and released over two years later as one of the final titles of the GameCube and the one of the first for the Wii), a picture of Fox McCloud in a flight jacket (suggesting a return to true Redwall-in-Space form after a decidedly grounded first GameCube outing), a shot of combat from Namco’s forthcoming card-based RPG Baten Kaitos (which Nintendo Power would later call “possibly the most beautiful GCN title ever made”) and an original silver DS floating above the screenshots. Spiderman was even crawling 3D style out of the top right corner with “Spidey Sighting” in faint yellow letters next to him.
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But all of that was pushed to the margins by the dark scene bursting out of the center. A giant, rotting, gray monster, roaring; it’s giant head facing a pale man in a black muscle shirt; limp bangs framing his hawkish face. The monster’s mouth is open wide enough that it takes up at least half of its head, like a snake unhinging its jaw to swallow its prey.
But Leon doesn’t look back.
Leon is the impossibly nerdy guy’s idea of a bad boy. He smashes his way through the villages of RE4’s Spanish countryside, shooting locks off doors as he searches for the President’s missing daughter, Ashley, and spouting cheesy one-liners like “Hasta Luego,” when dispatching villain, Mendez, or, when even badder villain, Sadler, tells him that he’s sent his right hand after him, quipping, “Your right hand comes off?” This is not highbrow stuff. But Leon is the kind of dumb guy who’s appealing to the smart guy. The guy who can get girls, but looks enough like your pasty video game playing self that it gives you hope.
I wasn’t hiding the cover because I was scared of it. I just didn’t want my parents to see it. It was rated M, pretty dark, and my dad didn’t like zombies. I was always afraid that one of my parents would walk in on a particularly “I’m going to steal your soul”-ish episode of Yu-Gi-Oh! so RE4 was out of the question.
But, I was drawn in. I read everything in that issue’s preview, and my desire to play it only grew when the perfect 10 review came out a few months later, and then grew some more when it won Nintendo Power’s Game of the Year for 2005.
This year, during a family trip to Virginia to see my sister’s new baby, I brought Resident Evil 4 along with me, and finally, after 11 years of hype, started playing. I even played it with my parents in the room.
I’ve come a long way.
And so have video games since RE4’s release more than a decade ago. The game pioneered the over the shoulder perspective that would come to dominate the modern first person shooter. When you’re exploring the game’s pitch-black world (seriously, “pitch-black” is not an exaggeration; I had the brightness turned all the way up, and the display was still dark), the camera frames Leon from the bottom of his feet to a few feet above the top of his head. But when you take aim at an enemy, the perspective zooms in to a fixed position behind Leon’s right shoulder.
The perspective isn’t the only thing that’s fixed: RE4’s controls won’t allow you to move and shoot at the same time. This is obnoxious at first but, once you get used to it, it adds to the experience. It forces you to be tactical. It’s almost impossible to run and gun your way through any of RE4’s stages the first time. They take strategy. You have to run away and reload as often as you have to stand your ground and fight. The controls also give you the feeling that, like in a nightmare, your legs are frozen still. If an enemy lurches toward you while you’re reloading, you have to watch them attack you until you’re done.
The game doesn’t call them zombies—in fact, Leon even examines the first enemy he dispatches, and concludes, “He’s not a zombie.”—but, they’re zombies. The people in the game’s rural villages are members of a cult called Los Illuminados and have been infected by their leaders with a virus called Las Plagas, which, if left unchecked, will transform them into something monstrous. They lurch at you mindlessly and strangle you or gnaw on your neck until you knock them back with a melee attack.
And, you’re infected. So is Ashley. And since you rescue her a handful of hours into the game’s 20-plus hour story line, your new mission is to find the cure to save both of you. As you search for it you knock out a series of bosses, working your way up the Los Illuminados totem pole, eventually dispatching Sadler, rescuing Ashley again, and, in the last level, escaping on a jet ski.
The voice acting is okay for what the actors have to work with; “Writhe in my cage of torment, my friend” is an actual line uttered by one of the “There’s always a bigger fish” food chain of villains. But, this isn’t considered one of the greatest games of all time because of the dialogue.
It’s regarded as highly as it is, and holds up as well as it does, because of how well the game play is executed. The difficulty level ramps up perfectly; right when you’re getting throw-your-controller frustrated, you break through. This applies to the battles, which are the game’s bread and butter, but it also applies to the handful of puzzles sprinkled throughout RE4’s dungeons. One challenge tasks you with forming a scrambled puzzle by sliding one tile piece at a time. It drove me to sketch the puzzle out in a notebook in desperation, and then, a few minutes later, I cracked it.
Its structure and game play have kept it fresh for over a decade. It’s still a perfect ten, and with versions available on GameCube, PS2, PS3, PC, iOS, Android, Wii, PS4, and Xbox One there’s no excuse not to find out why.
Unless, of course, your parents won’t let you.
