THE EVIL WITHIN - PART ONE (PRELUDE TO THE REVIEW)

For those of you do read these reviews, welcome back and welcome back to me. I haven’t done this in a while so I’m a bit rusty, in other words be patient with what I’m trying to get across here. 

So, I’ve had the pleasure of playing and completing The Evil Within or Psycho-Break as it is known in Japan. This is a game created by the so-called father of survival horror who brought us the original Resident Evil back in 1996 and then Resident Evil 4 in 2004. In other words this man is a genius, or is meant to be. Personally I think Shinji Mikami is an overrated hack who likes to complain more than actually stand his ground and give people something new and better but instead makes a carbon-copy of games that were better in everyway.

To understand The Evil Within and why it’s a game I find to be very lackluster and only decent at best is to understand the hypocritical mindset of its director. This is the man who kicked off the survival horror genre with Resident Evil, which originally believe it or not actually started off as an action game. Whether it was indeed meant to be a first person shooter with co-op implemented isn’t well known. 

What is known instead is Shinji Mikami was a Producer on Resident Evil 4, which went through several different versions that would later become known as the Beta Versions or Resident Evil 3.5 that included supernatural elements and hallucinations before he finally decided the game just wasn’t scary or Resident Evil enough for such a concept, a concept he was so fast to dismiss and one that he ends up using for this newest creation.

So he was given a choice. Either end the franchise with the last game and have it go out with a bang while finally concluding all the storylines and plots that were being built up since the sequels or reinvent the gameplay and attract new audiences to the franchise while pissing off the current ones. 

And thus Resident Evil 4 was born and the series itself was reinvented into what would become a series of Survival Action. Not Survival Horror but Survival Action. And gaming in general was reinvented thanks to what Resident Evil 4 brought to the industry.

It was a good game, a great one in fact but it wasn’t Resident Evil. Certain elements of it might have remained but the game took every opportunity to serve as a Side-Story instead of continuing the plot-threads that had already been established but left on a cliffhanger. Fans would understandably be pissed but Shinji Mikami obviously didn’t care as long as he was bringing in the green. And let’s not forget the decision of making it a Nintendo Gamecube Exclusive when the series started on the Sony Playstation originally, a decision that Shinji Mikami had insisted upon supposedly. 

In fact one of the main reasons the action route was taken in the first place was because of the lackluster sells with the Resident Evil Remake and Resident Evil Zero, but that is because of the decision to exclusively have those games on the Gamecube resulting in less sells if it had been multi-console instead. Thank the great Shinji for this arrangement, proving that his business decisions were on a whole other level of stupidity then the ones Capcom have been performing for years now.

This is the man responsible for reinventing gaming for years to come but sacrificing his franchise and loyal fans to ensure that. But it wouldn’t have mattered because after all, with the sequel he could improve things and give us what we really wanted right? No. 

What happened next after was that Capcom decided to port the Gamecube Exclusive to the Playstation 2 with exclusive content included, a decision Shinji Mikami didn’t agree on and it is for this reason he decided to quit from the company that he had invested so much time in and instead of staying and attempting to fix the problem he had obviously left his baby in he abandoned it like a coward who wanted nothing to do with the responsibility given to him considering they were his choices that led to these consequences. 

So why am I bringing this stuff up? What importance does it play you may ask? Everything. It has to do with everything including why my thoughts on The Evil Within are the way they are.

With its creator gone the Resident Evil Franchise for better or worse was in trouble. But considering this was a series whose sequels were pretty much glorified remakes and remodels of the original game in everyway it simply meant that the next sequel would just have to be a carbon copy of its predecessor with slight improvements and features. 

And thus Resident Evil 5 was born and it included developers of the original game working on it, the team who originally wanted to create an action co-op game. And since Shinji Mikami had reinvented Resident Evil with the creation of the Survival Action Genre it only made sense that Resident Evil 5 would continue in that route and in spirit the game would indeed go back to its roots as the series did as mentioned before start off as a action game and with the direction that Shinji Mikami had now set it on this vision would finally come be realized and come to pass. That and a few comments about Racism from the press pushed the game into a more complicated direction then it started off on sadly.

Resident Evil was never meant to be what it had started of as. It was an accident because of the limits of the technology that was available at the time but it was an accident that had great benefits and rewards. But in truth the term Survival Horror never really existed. Playing the older games now doesn’t deliver the same results that many Players, myself included, experienced when we were children. 

But we’re not children anymore and Resident Evil 4, even though it had moments that caused us panic and fear, in the end we had more fun with it then we did had fun playing the older games because the idea of horror had been so strongly implanted into our fragile minds that we automatically were afraid with the games before they even started. 

But in reality, playing the games now offers no real scares. A few Jump Scares here and there sure but other than that the older games were nothing more than Puzzle games and Fetch Quests with enough ammo and health scattered about that one could shoot and kill anything that dared take our heads off.

The only real possible reason one could even attempt to call those games Horror is because they were hard and they were hard and challenging because of the terrible, now outdated controls system and the dodgy placed cameras that helped to create a sense of the unknown and not knowing what to expect at every turn and corner. But if those elements were not there then I imagine the games wouldn’t have the atmosphere and challenge that they came with in the end. 

But what does this have to do with Shinji Mikami and The Evil Within? 

Because quiet simply The Evil Within is NOT a Survival Horror Game even though Shinji Mikami has advertised it as such but in truth it is not. The game is another Survival Action game that relies on predictable elements and clichés seen in old so-called horror games and other action games that did them better and Shinji Mikami knows it. So what is my problem with it then you wonder?

Resident Evil 5 became the Best-Selling and Highest Grossing Resident Evil game and even today it is still selling. One cannot deny that the game did something right. Was it a Resident Evil game? Not really. Did it fill like a Resident Evil? For me personally it did and that’s mostly because it didn’t ignore the established mythology and characters and did its best to reconnect to the past games and serve as a sequel and conclusion to some plot threads.

That to me made it a better Resident Evil game than its predecessor was but I won’t deny that when it came to gameplay, atmosphere and just the feel and look that Resident Evil 4 delivered on that more and for the most part The Evil Within retains that exact atmosphere and feel and that to me is a positive outlook for the game. But it isn’t what annoys me. It isn’t what makes me want to hate it and look down on what Shinji Mikami has made.

It’s the fact that Shinji Mikami, since his departure from Capcom has spoke ill of the company and its actions, expressing during Resident Evil 5’s release that he wouldn’t play the game and that he’d had done things differently. There’s also the fact that Capcom like to release their games with Content Locked that would be unlocked by buying the DLC that comes with it, actions that every game company has actually been doing for a while but ones that many, including myself aren’t particular happy with. But if you hate games that do this because the majority of the plot is actually explained through them when the main game doesn’t bother with it then you will be pleased to know that The Evil Within suffers with this exact problem.

The Evil Within is not a Survival Horror Game. It is a game that reuses old ideas and gameplay elements but worst of all it is a game that uses modern elements found in the recent titles of Resident Evil including Resident Evil 6. For someone who says he would’ve done things differently, Shinji Mikami has simply remodeled Resident Evil 4 and combined it with elements from the Silent Hill Franchise while including gameplay elements from the recent Resident Evil titles that so many ‘Fans’ complained about and refurbished into a product that while decent is nothing more than, well, a glorified remake for the current gen consoles. 

In other words Shinji Mikami is a hypocrite and a liar to top it off. While many would complain about Capcom’s actions with recent titles, in the end of the day the games are at least different and try to offer variety and different gameplay elements. But Shinji Mikami in his attempt to ‘rebirth’ Survival Horror while bad mouthing Capcom has done nothing but sunk himself into the same boat. And this act of behavior and attitude coming from him has made the experience of playing The Evil Within feel like a boring chore that at times offers some surprising things but in the end is just a frustration to play in the first place. 

What really gets me is that Capcom has been using this kind of development with the past and present games for years but what’s worse is that people would proceed to say that they are ripping of better games. But The Evil Within is a product of the same sort and it infuriates me to no end that people will complain about one but not the other and this idea of fanboyism so to speak is what will blind people to what they’re actually playing.

But with that said how is The Evil Within as a game as an overall whole? Does it offer improvements? Does it play better than the recent titles that Capcom have dished out and does it show that perhaps Shinji Mikami should have stuck with Capcom to deliver quality games that they can’t seem to do anymore or is Shinji having left a godsend that shows that for all intents and purposes that Capcom is actually better off without him? Well lets read on shall we, if you are still willing too.