Persona 4: Not Much To Say, It Turns Out

Well, that last thing didn't turn out so great. Let's hope for something a little less... grotesquely malformed this time around. Persona 4 is what prompted me to return to very bad games writing, after all, yet here I see nothing about Persona 4 yet posted on the blog. Don't think it has been a lack of trying on my part -- well, it has largely been due to a lack of trying, but half a dozen attempts have been made to untangle this particularly unwieldy ball of twine. Sadly, the inexorable passage of time has somewhat dulled and fuzzed  any perceptive insights I might've once had on the product, and there is little chance I can contrast those illusive insights into something that is not a fever dream.

So this is what I have to say about Persona 4:

Persona 4 is a lot of things, but before anything else, it is a staggeringly competent product. In a world run by a kind and just God, this wouldn't be such a big deal. However, considering the state of the Japanese RPG in the world of 2011, seeing a JRPG that:

1. Has a sure sense of itself, of what it is attempting to do, of pace and plotting, of basic gameplay mechanics - in short, a raison d'etre 
2. Was released on time and on budget
3. Is mostly (...mostly) lacking in the kind of abhorrent moe fan service plaguing the Japanese development scene 

...well, that's just short of a miracle.  

One day, I'll get back to it. (No I won't).

"Bully!" - Theodore Roosevelt

- THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN EDITED SLIGHTLY SINCE ITS INAUGURAL POSTING.

Bully, the 2006 Rockstar Vancouver PS2 game, is so very close to an unqualified success. At the time of its release, no Rockstar product was even close to Bully in those nebulous and subjective categories at the bottom of, like, an IGN review. It looked better, sounded better, played better, felt more cohesive. It was less self-congratulatory. Yet the experience of playing the thing can be - nay, must be - extraordinarily infuriating, because an open-world game, by definition, is one wherein the game's narrative and the player narrative's can diverge grotesquely, with no consequences. The ludo-narrative dissonance has only grown more pronounced in the aftermath of Grand Theft Auto III, and this, I cannot cotton to.

Bully is set in this idyllic little resort town, one built over the dilapidated remnants of some bustling 19th Century factory town or iron works. The school itself is both highly exclusive academy that caters to the inbred sons and daughters of business tycoons and Senators and reform school for 50's greasers unstuck in time.

Searching for consistency at Bullworth Academy is a lot like looking for a bus stop in a city where you aren't sure if there's a bus line.

So this is kind of where everything begins to crumble. Like, Groton does not share a campus with some Hardass Military Reform School. For every articulate line of dialogue or genuinely moving storytelling beat, there are five incest jokes that are not funny, not original, and not well delivered. For all the refined and clever twists on familiar open world bullshit story mission tropes, there's still all those mandatory races these damn games cram awkwardly between more interesting moments. Each gem of an idea is isolated in a barren, somewhat disjointed simulacrum of adolescence. There is no firmament to bind this place together, to bind all the disparate gamey bits, all the cut scenes, all the absolutely immaculate Danny Elfman-esque soundtrack cues, all the interminable bike races, all the dodgeball games, all that is interesting about it together. Instead, there's a Qix minigame one must master to improve their ability to woo young women. Or there's the sub-Contender (Contender being a little remembered and very awful PS1 boxing game released in 1999) boxing minigame one must master to progress beyond the first quarter of the game's narrative.

While no one has any genuine use for A Separate Peace made manifest in a world of video games, I would have liked to see it woven throughout Bully. If Bully had been A Separate Peace without all that gay subtext and crew team stuff I feel confident I would hate the game much more. Let's face it. That's a horrible idea. Even so, at least A Separate Peace would have generated an active, interested kind of hate. Instead, it's all so "meh"  Bully has a lot of genuine things to say about adolescence, about what is just in an environment that respects violence above all, and there's a genuinely unexpected and resonant twist near the end of the story.

The road traveled to that conclusion, all thirty-five hours of it, is largely filled with bike riding and savage beatings -- beatings Jimmy is only tangentially involved in starting, but once shit gets real, there's a lot of knees to the balls and cricket-bat whackings. Jimmy is presented as a bit of a simpleton, willing to go along with almost any preposterous scheme if it involves vandalism or protecting his staggeringly incompetent, drunken English Teacher from a deserved firing. All high school problems can be solved with violence. Girl problems are a little different, and even easier to solve. Flatter, give flowers, and prepare for make-out central. If a girl you've made out with sees you making out with another girl, they'll fight, but they'll forget all about it the next time the roses get broken out.

There's no memory here. Everything is ephemeral, and pointless. Unlike the other high school game I'm going to contrast this with one of these days, swear to God, Persona 4, each day's event's are isolated little vignettes that build a larger narrative like a late period Godard film, or if everyone in Groundhog Day retained some kind of Jungian collective unconscious.

You know what? Go read Tom Bissel's piece on LA Noire at Grantland.com. That's my problem with barely keeping a blog about videogames, a topic I'm not sure I much enjoy right now anyway. Tom Bissel and Chris Dahen and Michael Abbot are just super good at it, and they don't need to make lame jokes like I do.

and for no reason, here's a picture of God Hand.

You know what? Just go play God Hand. That needs to be placed into the western canon, alongside Paradise Lost and Joyce's Ulysses.

Fuck, that didn't turn out at all how I hoped it would. Tough cookies, all 12 of you who read this.   

Bully, Persona 4, High School, & The Perils of the Open World: Introduction

Consider the high school. While the advent of the institution as we think of it today is less than a century old, its tendrils have burrowed so completely into our consciousness it seems to have existed forever, outside of time. It is something mandatory, something we view with a mixture of contempt, romance, and bewilderment in our adulthoods. Everything was the most important thing to ever have happened for about 20 minutes, replaced by the next greatest event. After Jimmy Stewart and Robert Michum died, every movie was either set in a high school or calibrated to appear as though everyone in it was in the arrested emotional state of a 10th grader.

High school was a thing that did not exist for most of the medium's history. River City had one, of course. It even organized sporting events. The Garden in Final Fantasy VIII was kind of like high school, for orphaned killing machines. Otherwise, nothing. 

Nothing, save Atlus's Persona series. An offshoot of the Shin Megami Tensi franchise, Persona has overtaken its parent and straddles the Japanese RPG world like a colossus. 

I started playing Persona 4 shortly after it came out Winter ‘08, smugly assuming I would discover all of its mysteries and defeat the major antagonists well before April 11th, 2011. That was some crazy future-day. A special one, to be sure, the day this sickly, bespectacled teenager (I named him Chris, because that is my name) from the big city was to arrive in a quaint little resort town for the school year, knowing not what terror lay ahead for he to thwart.



Well, I beat Persona 4 a handful of days ago - I do wish I'd have done it on April 10th 2011, because of my largely fictional OCD. The game clock reads 103 hours. That’s, let’s see, about 9 minutes a day of linking my socials and fusing my Jack Frosts with other Jack Frosts. It wasn’t a perfect game - Pac Man Championship Edition CX is the only perfect game - but it brought  all the things I adore in the frequently maligned Japanese Role-Playing Game genre into a high school setting.

Persona 4 is not the only game set in a high school that I've randomly played recently. There is also Rockstar Vancouver’s Bully. Released in 2006 for the PS2, this game must have sold well, because I don’t think any secondary marketplace - your Gamestops, your pawn shops - has fewer than 90 copies of it lying around. Like, there’s more copies of Bully than all the Madden games put together.

Let me be upfront: I have huge, irrational problems with Rockstar and their games. I’ve hated their sophomoric jokey tone and their functionally broken camera and aiming mechanics. I've hated the dissonance between the open world, let’s fuck around sandbox aspects and the mainline story missions. I’ve hated the number of those story missions that are simply janky races on ill-defined courses. I’ve hated the half dozen or so impossible roadblock objectives where you have to pilot a goddamn remote control helicopter or whatever that no reasonable person can be expected to satisfactorily complete, but which must be finished to unlock more of the entertaining sandbox stuff, and I’ve hated how smug their entire enterprise reads to a guy who mostly just wants to see dudes with anime haircuts hit each other with swords, be it an RPG, a fighting game, or that dubious moniker “character action”: the Devil May Crys, the Bayonettas, and the like.

Rockstar has started to win me over - Red Dead Redemption told a story worth telling, although in typical Rockstar fashion, our protagonist was required to sometimes act heinously on the behalf of some vile yokel in direct violation of his redeemed character. The wild west setting kept that ludo-narrative dissonance from bothering me as much as it does in Grand Theft Auto. LA Noire sounds pretty neat, and Ken Cosgrove and Peter Bishop are in it.



These Rockstar games are all open world games, promising you the freedom to do all sorts of fun things. Because games should be fun. Fun fun fun free fun. Persona 4 comes from different stock - the dreaded “linear” “Japanese” school of game design. In this case, “freedom” is the hobgoblin of small minds. Outside of Nethack, the games designed by Yasumi Matsuno, Clint Hocking, and that fellow what made Minecraft, Persona 4 gave the illusion that there were more opportunities to push the limits of a game’s systems and mechanics than the stereotypical JRPG, and invested me in its world more successfully than I can readily recall. Bully... well...

NEXT: A LOOK AT BULLY

Holding Pattern

We are coming up on a year since words have appeared here at A New Sku, an ostensible resource for C.P. Ervin themed commentary on games and their intersection with video, design, and alarmingly ill-conceived meta humor.

Is this most marginal of blogs offline forever? Not at all. In fact, I hope to have a few pretty neat things posting here in the next three months, assuming I can wrangle my mess of notes, asides, jokes and silly ideas into a coherent argument. It can be rough to extract cogent thought from a 15,000 word Google Doc about high schools in videogames, I've learned.

Now the promise is out there. I can't welsh on the 2 of you who still have this in your RSS readers.

Goodnight, Sweet Prince: Cavia's 10 Year Run

I somehow missed a sad bit of news last week: cavia [sic] ceased to be a going concern. Happily, most of the developers are still employed, as it sounds like the majority of the studio's employees were absorbed into parent company AQ Interactive. While this isn't the most shocking studio closure in history, considering cavia's uneven (to put it kindly) track record and general profitability, this is one that hits close to home.

Cavia took a lot of contract work, pumping out Playstation 2 games with suspect anime licenses. This kept the lights on and the capital flowing into their original intellectual properties - not entirely unlike WayForward, a studio whose profile rose significantly after Scribblenauts' surprising sales. Cavia, alas, had no surprising successes, critically or commercially. I guess Neir seems to have attracted a cult following - deservedly so, considering how wildly ambitious and varied it is - but no developer can survive on cult hits when the HD console space's cost of entry is stratospheric.

So why mourn the passing of this studio? Why should those responsible for Bullet Witch and Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance get any postmortem respect?

A lot of my feelings are divorced from reason, I'll admit. They stem from a simpler time in my life, when all a game needed to impress me was a sweet dragon. As a child, I just loved dragons. I no longer carry such passion in my everyday life for the mythical creatures, but if I see a $4 copy of some game I'd never heard of that obviously is about dragons, I'm buying it. Cavia developed exactly that kind of stupid impulse purchase dragon game, and it was called Drakengard here in America. Maybe I got it in 2005? In any event, to me this PS2 game was an unknown, mysterious thing, dangerous and enchanting. I had no idea what kind of game I was to be playing before I slammed it into my system, and I still don't know what I had gotten myself into.

Seeing the SquareEnix logo cheered me immediately - there's a company that releases high quality games, usually. Formulaic, yes, but quality. And then the cavia logo found its' way onto my television. I liked the name of the studio - even a usually infuriating affect of a company not capitalizing their title, flying in the face of how I expect proper nouns to be presented to me - and I liked the logo: clean, with a stark black/white/red color scheme.   

"This augers well!" I thought.

The game is a Dynasty Warriors knock-off. I say this with no enmity - Dynasty Warriors is hugely popular in Japan, and any sane company would try as hard as it could to exploit the market. No matter how much we clamor for innovation, a well made knock-off is what we will spend our money on. This Dynasty Warriors knock-off takes place in some fantastical world with dragons and civil wars and faeries and boulders and lute playing ninnies. There's a princess, who might be a god, or something, and you control her brother (I think he's her brother, but they also imply something incestuous between them, or maybe they're related by marriage... it was all very confusing). About ten minutes into the game, Caim (our protagonist and playable character) merges his soul with that of a dragon. This costs him the use of his voice, further complicating matters of exposition and plot development. The dragon talks to Caim using some kind of telepathy, but everyone hanging around the dude can also hear what the dragon's saying, so maybe sounds are being produced though the magical markings on Caim's tongue, maybe? Oh, and once the dragon starts talking, it sure doesn't shut up. Much of the conversation is philosophical in nature: the dragon asks Caim 900 times why he is such a murderous bastard. Because Caim cannot answer, the discussion grows tiresome. Very, very tiresome.


Drakengard tries to spice up the hack-and-slash-and-hack-some-more repetition common in all Dynasty Warriors clones by inserting a motherfucking dragon into the fray. At nearly any moment, hitting select will summon your flying friend. Caim can mount the dragon (heh) and fly across these preposterously large maps to another area lousy with evil, just incinerating legions of enemies ill-equipped to handle a goddamn dragon. Later in the game, magicians and trebuchets will provide overpowered countermeasures to this death from above, ruining a lot of the braindead fun.

Breaking up these large scale battles, some flying sequences happen. These are reminiscent of those open boss battle levels in Star Fox 64, filtered though Panzer Dragoon's lock-on mechanic and general love of dragon riding. The game, surreal enough as it was, achieves a sort of transcendent nonsensical atmosphere here. My personal favorite moment: when the dragon is attacked by what appear to be flying dressers or silverware cabinets.

I would have loved Drakengard had it not been for one absolutely crippling flaw: the game is sloooooooooow. This fantasy universe must have tremendously heavy air molecules. Caim, a fit young warrior by any standard, is not much of a runner. The glacial pace of this game, a game that absolutely requires some serious manic energy to work, slaughters much of the potential fun.

Which is a shame, because -- dragons! And magic! And a story so confusing it entertains on a basic, campy level! Also: it was clear an insane amount of work went into constructing this bleak, nihilistic fantasy world.

There's something like 80 weapons Caim can acquire, each with a lengthy backstory you can read in between missions. If there's a thing you can do in the game, chances are experience can be earned by doing it. The RPG elements are laid on inelegantly, but with such enthusiasm it doesn't matter. Caim levels up. The dragon levels up. Each individual weapon levels up. The spells associated with each weapon level up. It's impossible to keep track of all this, and ultimately futile - the default sword is about the only thing to use, because by the time the rad lances and maces are acquired, these new, sexier weapons are too underpowered to be of much use. Momentum is the utmost concern during the Dynasty Warriors bits - chaining a few hits together will grant Caim the ability to unleash a powerful thrust capable of knocking to the ground foes nearby. The default sword, having been in use for more of the game than any other weapon, will inevitably be the most momentous weapon available.

Drakengard 2 significantly sped things up - yay! - whilst gutting much of the intriguing story elements - boo! Crucially, the game engine and graphics were not updated or improved up one iota in the intervening 3 years between the games. While the budget for the first game must have been at least moderately large (there's quite a few impressive CG cut scenes), it's pretty clear almost no money was spent making the sequel.

So Drakengard (called Drag-on Dragoon in Japan, which is a much more amusing name if nothing else) holds a weird place in my heart. So does Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, a fully functional PS2 third person shooter from Japan that most definitively does not hold up today, but had wonderful pacing and some neat mechanics for the time.

The greatest product cavia produced, however, wasn't exactly a game - it was a tool, a fairly powerful and affordable tool, for the Nintendo DS.

The KORG DS-10 is a fully functional synthesizer modeled after the MS-10, complete with four different emulated drum machines and the ability to use the touch screen to simulate the KAOSS Pad, all for $30 bucks. There's some serious limitations to the software: the step sequencer is basically Fruity Loops, only not as good; while the program emulates two synthesizers, each one is monophonic, so chords are out of the question; because the DS is not a multi-touch screen, the KAOSS Pad is not fully functional; the interface, while classy and modeled after the MS-10, can prove slightly more cumbersome than one may desire; you can't change sequences while they're playing, which is a huge bummer... it's still just $30, one tenth of the price of an entry-level KAOSS Pad. And the emulation of the MS-10 is unreal, coming from a DS cart. While I haven't personally found much use for it in my own musical compositions, mostly because I don't know how to properly deploy flanger effects on the busted ass drum programs I hesitate to say I "compose," it's still a lot of fun to play around with.  

So yeah, cavia. I have more things to say about both Bullet Witch and Neir, but those need their own posts, written at a time when I'm less tired.

The Worst Piece of "Jetpack Goonies II" Fiction You'll Ever Read.

This is quite possibly the stupidest thing I've ever written. Wait, it's worse than that. This is empirically the stupidest, most ill-conceived thing written in the history of man. I can take a kind of pride in creating such a foul block of verbiage, actually.

How do I even set this up? Well, I'd been reading Don DeLillo's gargantuan novel Underworld. It's a solid entry in the "Great American Novel" style: overambitious, unwieldy, oppressive, stunning and wonderfully obtuse. Anyway, DeLillo is famous for his weird, hyper stylized writing style, one of the most immediately identifiable traits in the whole of creation. Maybe I could more readily identify a passage from David Mamet or Henry James - but that'd be about it. It is also a blast to mimic his terse, elliptical writings.

So, while in a state of extreme boredom, I tried to fashion the story of one man's dream to make The Goonies II NES game better with jetpacks in the style of the preeminent wordsmith of the Cold War era.

This was the hideous result.

A kid skips his computer science class. Goes and plays Goonies in the Aladdin's Castle. Says to himself this is the life for me. To entertain, though the medium of computer science.

To make for others what has been made for him, to kill the inchoate nature of being alive and being a teenager.

Goonies ain't perfect, fuck no. Lacking in verisimilitude. Worse. Lacking jetpacks.

His parents laugh in unison, laugh so hard they start coughing on their menthol cigarettes. But they humor him, lend him enough to start something small. Never expect to see that money again.

What doe he do?

This guy, maybe he's a popular fellow, maybe he's not. He's not known, but he strikes something in others. He meets them attending conventions, conferences, tells them what he's got on his mind without overplaying his hand. Mostly, he meets them without seeing them. They are names on the screen. Maybe they're popular men like himself. He's not done so but he would add "or insane." Helps if they're driven. Always men.

Always men at first, but later women. Who share something of his vision. Or lack vision but do not lack perseverance.

Astoria.

This guy has his men. Some women, now. But needs are greater now. He needs to take care of this, his friends and backers and workers. He'll run their lodes best he can, but he's not a businessman. Not now.

Shit. Business.

Business is something else. The money and the greed to generate more money. He and his men have the idea, but the idea is not a Business, man. The idea is the world.

There are layers, here. This guy, he's a popular fellow. That's what everyone says, now, although not him, not aloud. What he is - he's known without being famous, you see, and the clout that comes with that? Nothing like it. He's not compromised. How can you work when you're famous?

How could you live totally unknown?

Working working, always working. Always with his friends, backers, some are calling themselves workers now, just like him - what they've joined to do is make the world.

But they are miles under it now. No matter. The world is there.

He's max on his Visa, his AmEx. Takes mortgages after mortgages on the dead parent's home. Thank God he inherited only this from the dearly departed - not the bad habits. Could have been much worse. Thank God.

Remolded the downstairs and garage and now it looks just like any other office. Computers. Render farms. Prototype is not done but it's proof of concept, and no one has ever seen a better proof. You can work it the other way but nobody does. The video shows you what you need to see.

The coffeepot's always empty and no one ever cleans and brews the next batch when they're done.

How can you readjust Jetpack Goonies before seeing your vision manifested? And now? We can see the basics. The underworld stabilizing what's above. Mechanics are still theory, but sound theory. We've checked them. Against themselves and against the projections. The philosophy behind it is solid. Theoretical still, but look at what we've got. We can see it. There's proof here, now.

Meanwhile, in the foulest depths of the Internet...

I wrote a decade wrap-up over on my tumblr. I want to make it as difficult as possible for people to find my writing, in any case.

"I Hope That's Not Chris's Blood"

Here's some thoughts on Resident Evil 4. They're pretty much identical to my feelings re: Resident Evil 5, actually. Why is this series so frustrating to me, and yet still so endearing? One of life's mysteries, I guess. Also, this essay is a goddamn mess. I don't know why I'm posting it.

Resident Evil 4 is winning the lottery a few hours before getting diagnosed with terminal cancer. Resident Evil 4 is a reunion with your childhood sweetheart, now mired in drug addiction and madness. Resident Evil 4 is the affordable, rustic old house with a shockingly low rent and 

a wonderful view of the city; Resident Evil 4 is also the roommate who never does the fucking dishes. Resident Evil 4 is large; it contains multitudes.

Resident Evil 4 calls itself a "survival horror" game. You may not understand what a "survival horror" game is; that's okay. Capcom has no idea what the "survival horror genre" is, either (so is it horror to survive?). As the abecedarians [it seems like the most accurate word to use, douche-y as it makes me feel] behind this weirdly compelling marketing-speak nonsense branding, Capcom was the moral compass to all the other developers of "survival horror"-esque games. No, they were more than a compass, they were a role model, like Sandy Kofaux. Just as Kofaux's famous decision to sit out the first game of the 1965 World Series because it coincited with Yom Kippur inspired countless Jewish sportswriters to write identical columns about how brave and inspirational Kofaux was every Yom Kippur, so does Capcom's brave embrace of anachronisms inspire others to embrace anachronism. When one sets out to make gobs of money with a spooky videogame, one must examine the Resident Evil franchise intently. How stingy should one be with ammuntition in the game if one expects a player to survive the horror? How many rubies must one pry from the eye sockets of marble statues? And should there be marble things other than statues, with emeralds instead of rubies crammed into various places? What is the optimal ratio of marble statues to other gem-hiding objects ? How often should these rubies and emeralds be inserted into hidden mantelpieces behind trick bookshelves before a horror can truly be survived?

Nevermind how much the Resident Evil series borrowed from Alone in the Dark. Alone in the Dark never owned these conventions as Resident Evil owns them. Alone in the Dark was so awkward to control, and so ugly, I could never get past the first 20 minutes or thereabouts. If I wanted to survive horror whilst playing Alone in the Dark - hell, if I wanted to tell my friends what happens after advancing past the first couple of spectral encounters - I would have needed serious commitment. I imagine "solving" Alone in the Dark was similar to entering an empyrean realm of joy and enlightenment. I'll never know. I'd get bored watching someone else play Alone in the Dark. I'd rather go off to buy a cheeseburger and some Magic: The Gathering cards or whatever. No, without Capcom's help, the "survival horror" tropes might simply have disappeared, and we'd live in a world where Konami might have implemented something like, oh, let's say functional controls to Silent Hill 2, the undisputed masterpiece of this whole silly genre, and what a tragedy that would have been! Defenders of the tank controls tell us a 'widely believed fact' that busting a player's ability to interact simply with his game "increases the tension and makes the game scary." These mouthbreathers also find the incredibly limited resources scattered obliquely thoughout the game something of a turn-on; the very idea that you cannot save your game without ink ribbons is enough to excite them.

No more! With a simple shift of the camera and a creepy guy willing to sell you massive amounts of weaponry, Resident Evil 4 not "survival horror." It is something else entirely.

It's fair, for one thing.

Every failure to survive the horror is instructive -- and, due to some smart planning on the part of the developers, most scenarios allow for quite a bit of freedom, depending on how adept you are at improvisation and the availability of ammunition, This breadth of options is the best thing about Resident Evil 4, and it's a wonderful consequence of the obstinate, fixed camera's demise.

The change from the pre-rendered backgrounds and frustrating camerawork of RE's past to the more traditional third-person camera found in this game once prompted some internet commentators to declare this a complete break from the bad old Resident Evil ways. Their enthusiam is only partially warranted. Due to the extreme emphasis on shooting gooey things in this iteration of the franchise, that old, German Expressionist-influenced series of pre-rendered rooms would have crippled the game. Seriously, though, this is kind of a clunky and unintuitive half-solution to the problem, not a revelatory departure from the old style.

The function of the Resident Evil camera is to generate a mood -- claustrophobia, creeping dread. Fear, in short. I'd hate to see Shinji Mikami's (now Jun Takoishi's) team of developers allow anyone to program some full, freely adjustable camera, because the shlock horror style shocks of the series depend greatly on shlock horror tactics borrowed from films as old as "The Cabinet of Dr. Calgari," or Bela Lugosi's "Dracula," and as new as, um, "Resident Evil: Apocalypse."

The still-clunky controls also fit the game better than they probably should, because it's clear a lot of thought went into pacing and designing your typical LAS PLAGAS encounters so the specific limitations of the control scheme are moot. This elicits a confabulation of excitement, tension, dread, exhilaration, and an increased sensation of personal self-worth when playing.

It's clear just as much thought went into the first third of the game as did the control scheme. While the game is rigidly linear, each major location where killing's gonna be going down is filled with dozens of options as to how said killing will actually go down. Never are you stuck in a linear corridor with tenticle-headed monsters blocking your forward momentum -- at least, not during those crucial first hours.

Resident Evil games have always cultivated a sense of desperation, but prior to RE4, the balance between the "I don't have enough ammo or herbs and I've got to run though this hallway and GOD I hope I have an ink cartridge so I can save my game," moments, and the "I just got me a big, new gun, and I got plenty of ammo, time for vengeance!" moments was never quite right. Here, again, things are different.

RE4 - which is much, MUCH more action packed than previous games in the series - gives us opportunities to experience genuine power uncommon in this made up genre. Fairly early on, we're treated to a set piece that illustrates what amounts to a philosophical change in "survival horror" perfectly. While riding down a ski lift, or industrial crate transport, or something, I had trouble arriving at my destination until I equipped a bolt-action sniper rifle -- a weapon I had used not once the first 4 or so hours of the game, because, hey, I like to look my kills in the eye as they die. Imagine my delight when a handful of well-aimed shots -- three dead zombies per round, when they were queued single-file --ended the ambush on the little train-car-thing before it started. Not a single injury to myself or my traveling companion during the entire gondola trip -- and around 14 corpses re-corpse'd to my credit. Never were there killing sprees like this in Resident Evils past.

Also, goddamn. This game looks great, and it isn't just flash for the sake of flash; the technical proficiency is married with a perspicacity to the overall atmosphere. Nothing is done just becuase some whiz at tech whipped up a rockin' new shader. It's not showy or gaudy in the way something like Devil May Cry is. It's atmospheric.

Sadly, as I write this review, I admit waning interest in the game. Moving out of the village and into a more traditional RE setting -- a musty castle -- gives me the feeling that, before the adventure is over, I'm bound to see some abandoned laboratories where mad scientists devise unspeakable chemicals. The plot is going to continue along it's convoluted, half-retarded path, and it is likely that I will murder, if that is the word, hundreds more of these quasi-zombies.

So. If a AAA Capcom production of one of their flagship franchises, intelligently updated to both revive a staid product without fundamentally changing it's cadence can lose my interest with an almost admirable, if shocking, legerity -- well, there is a fundamental problem at the core. I think that problem might just be me and my interests. It also might be a problem with the game being too padded with nonsense to extend that length.

But -- there must be a middle path between the mental anguish and pain the Silent Hill protagonists face and the cheesy scenarios our friends from Resident Evil endure. A videogame that manages to be both thrillingly creepy and populist without suffering from Stupid Plot Syndrome is going to be huge. Fatal Frame? Siren? Maybes. I'm pinning my hopes on Heavy Rain, which is unlikely to be a survival horror game per se but will at least have serial killers and stuff in it.

Well. Maybe it's not that. It's just - the Resident Evil formula doesn't feel like homage any longer. It feels like self-plagurization. I've read elsewhere that this is a 20+ hour video game. I'm already starting to sense that the game doesn't have many more tricks up it's sleeves, after that phenomenal first 3 or 4 hours. I'll finish the game if I can find time, because I have faith that there will be a few more bright spots along the way. That I feel obligated to complete it rather than compelled to see the conclusion saddens me.