Resident Evil HD: 10 Essential Lessons Capcom Must Relearn
9. Embrace The Camp
The original Resident Evil is infamous for its campy tone and cheesy acting which, while charming in some ways, undermined the games attempt at scaring you. The remake tells the same story but with most of the explicit camp factor removed, and the game is all the more effective for it. But despite this, it still has its fair share of wooden acting and poor dialogue; just enough self-awareness of its B-movie quality premise to compliment the horror without undermining it. At some point Capcom lost sight of this self-awareness, as later games are steeped in self-seriousness that contradicts the campiness that used to make the series so endearing. There is a fine line between being campy and just plain stupid, and the recent games have fully crossed into stupid. Its an admittedly tricky balancing act, but one that Resident Evil used to pull off consistently. The Resident Evil remake has the perfect horror to camp ratio that all Resident Evil games should aspire to. It takes itself serious enough that you buy into the premise while still being inherently silly. That is Resident Evil in a nutshell. Capcom needs to ditch the Michael Bay-esque pretensions and embrace the B-movie heritage that defined it.