People keep talking about how, with the fact that RE4 Remake sold 3 million copies in the first 2 days, we're likely to get an RE5 Remake and I am trying to figure out how in the fuck that would even work.

I went back and replayed that game like a year and some change ago, and my main thought the whole time was that it has barely any connective tissue..

RE4 has the big setting changes; village to castle to mines to island, sure, but those have at least some sense of continuity. You get to run Leon from place to place and maybe a cutscene fades us out of some of the travel but overall, we get it.

RE5 has a sense of continuity for like, maybe its first quarter and then it just turns into set piece after set piece with handwaved travel between them.

RE6 gets hammered for it way more because it is full globe trotting nonsense but, RE5 absolutely is where it starts.

Also you have some real fucking intensely racist parts. Parts that were side-eye worthy in the late 00's but would not fly in like, IDK, 2027 or whenever this hypothetical remake comes out even a fucking little.

Compounding that is, unfortunately, the absurdly racist village of dudes in loincloths and spears is, mechanically, one of the best parts of the game.

It actually has a balance of action and tension and varies up objectives.

But you spend the whole time going "WHY DID ANYONE THINK THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA"

The problem is that by changing locations and relying on big fight set pieces so often there's not actually a memorable part of RE5 that isn't racist past the opening.

It's like Kijuju Assembly -> City (feat. literal panic over a white woman's chastity) -> Cool boss fight with 20,000 worms in an apartment's furnace room -> Vague industrial zone??? -> RACIST VILLAGE WITH CROCODILES -> ???? -> ????? -> RACIST UNDERGROUND LOST AFRICAN KINGDOM (feat. Wesker) -> WW2 battle ship for some reason? -> Volcano w/ Wesker again???

Literally every game that references RE5 only references the Assembly because it's like the one concrete moment of the game.

And it's a remake of the village assault in RE4. Now granted, it's that flipped on its head and I think personally to great effect, because starting in the fortified location and having said fortifications fail instead so you have to go running out into the mob is actually way more nervewracking.

But seriously I don't know how you'd remake it without redoing the whole game beyond the very beginning and very end.

There's really not much there.

RE5 is purely a game based on vibes and the vibes are rancid by modern standards.

RE6 is more loathed because it saw that 5 had no real staying power so it tried to mix 4 and 5, and its idea was to take all the "your right hand comes off?" campiest moments of 4, make a game of nothing but those moments, then play it unflinchingly straight.

(RE6s plot has like all of 4 or 5 moments that work and weirdly enough with the exception of Leon's thoughts about his dead boss, they're 100% moments where characters get to bounce off of each other semi-organically in a moment without explosions or zombie t-rexes or whatever.)

(The game spends like 6 hours telling you that Chris is a good leader of soldiers, trust us, and then you get a 5 minute scene that actually shows you that he gets how grunts think and it makes his writing retroactively less odious. Wild how that works.)

The problem really is fundamental, now that I've thought on it.

Coop play in the RE fashion kills the feeling of horror.

Rev2 sort of got there with having basically one character and another who had to rely on them while having limited unique mechanics.

But that would necessitate... reducing Sheva to a glorified helper.

Which is problematic, given she's one of about 3 black characters in the whole series.

The options then become make her an invincible NPC buddy like Luis in 4R, which further makes her redundant and ruins horror feelings.

Or remove her which kills a huge selling point of the game and makes this about a white guy singlehandedly shooting through an unnamed African city, not a good look even slightly.

Or make her the playable character which is going to send fans into a shitfit and also highlights the issue that like... RE5's actual few plot beats are all about Chris.

The game is about Chris' disillusionment with himself, the anti-bioterror campaign, his inability to save everyone, and surprisingly if you go off the dialogue, his disillusionment with the idea of western intervention.

Which makes some sense, dude is ex-military, he's worked for federal, state, private, and international organizations with all varying degrees of corruption.

I just wanna see what Capcom can do with a remake of Code Veronica. Out of all the ones in the series, I feel that's the one that needs the most help.