There is actually a sad story behind how Resident Evil 5 evolved. Originally it was meant to be a single-player game with a rather tight and neat story: Basically it would follow a more survival-horror, less action (pretty much like 4) with Chris being more on his own receiving help from Sheva, who was part of a local militia instead of being his partner. Wesker was researching the development of the virus, all its branches, alongside the Las Plagas to simply make an army of Tyrants that were under his complete control. After all, how can you make sure that a super-bio-abomination that was the strongest of the T-virus branches were under his control? Simple, infect it with Las Plagas and get yourself to be the hive-master. He\'d be full human before infecting himself, doing what he does best: Being a \'pawn\' till he kills the tricell CEO and takes his place. He was also supposed to die in a less over-the-top, but equally badass manner: Sheva shots him through the eye. Jill was meant to be kept for research purposes (after all they need to know how the hell she could be so tough and resist so many strains of the virus also how to make Jill Sandwich) and speaking of which, Barry would appear to help Chris.
It would also involve a research of the origin of the virus in a sunken African city with a twisted, warped environment nearing Cthulhu levels of architecture from the extinct civilization with enemies that evolved from the \'proto-virus\'.
What went wrong? Well, as you said yourself, the controversy, the NEED to put co-op... and of course the fact that they fired Shinji Mikami, the creator of the franchise. There is a lot of material scattered showing what could have been, but sadly the main page with the \'bible\' was taken down. [1]![](\"https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/external_link.gif\")
[2] [3]
Yeah, I thought controlling the unreliable viral mutants with plagas was a natural evolution of the concept. Was kind of surprised we saw it in one of the films rather than here.
sigh... yet again, I only had to wait, come back, and re-read to catch obvious errors. Stupid temptation to indiscipline.
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Makes Historical Sense, But Still Lacking
Resident Evil 5 has got a lot of things wrong with it that probably seemed like good ideas at the time. Insta-kill cutscenes loaded with quicktime events that can't be turned off. A dour brown color pallet with a dull po-faced serious tone, often at odds with the silly and ludicrous nature of the story. A co-op partner that, while not completely inept, is clearly just a lame-duck substitute for another player sitting next to you on the couch, or on a stable internet connection, and whom you have to beat the game to start as. Traditional Resident Evil inventory design which combines horribly with the otherwise Resident Evil 4-style gameplay. An increased focus on story that a young Spec who was only watching videos on the Internet rather liked, but which really doesn't work in context, since unlike 4, all the context is in files you can't even read during the game.
And, well... many of those things were trendy in the now-far-off year of 2009. Resident Evil 4 was a bona-fide smash hit, so incorporating all its ideas into the new game made sense, but many new fans were put off by the drastic changes to gameplay and story, so tying it more tightly to the series narrative and traditional gameplay made sense. And dour, brown games were all the rage in that dark period where many gamers would unironically defend "realism" to the hilt, at the expense of fun.
But, it's not an irredeemable experience? There's a fun little sequence set in an inexplicable lost city partway through the game, for instance, which carries some of the better parts of 4's adventure movie tone. And for all that Capcom kinda dropped the ball in some very specific places (you all know what I'm talking about), I am comfortable defending their good intentions, if not the execution. The story actually opens with Chris sourly criticizing the post-colonial world he lives in, where Africa is used to test bioweapons on large populations with minimal attention from the developed world, and even that very specific thing I keep mentioning is, in context, openly anti-colonial, a proud, ancient people with storied traditions unjustly mistreated by capitalist greed. Finally, in terms of serious storytelling, I actually rather like the boat scene that connects the first and second acts of the game, where Chris and Sheva take a moment to just talk, bond, and generally do all that quiet action movie scene stuff in a way that, for once, doesn't come across as bleak and forced.
But tone is an issue throughout. Chris's sour misery makes sense in the context of having lost his partner at the start of the game, but stands at odds with some of the ridiculous things he sees and silly discoveries he makes during the course of the title. It's hard to take his angst seriously when Wesker is teleporting around like a Dragon Ball Z villain. Speaking of which, Wesker is teleporting around like a Dragon Ball Z villain. Even in the context of having become a transhuman viral monstrosity... huh? Super-speed has its limits.
The gameplay is fine when it's just doing what Resident Evil 4 did, and struggles whenever it tries to do its own thing. Almost all of its changes were for the worse, and I already went into why in that first paragraph. The insta-kill moments in the last boss fight, and the penultimate boss fight against two machine-gun guys, stick out most in my memory, but the buggy turret section in the first chapter also wasn't great, even if the boss fight itself was the easiest part there.
And while I understand why they felt they needed to put a black woman into a story that otherwise had many troubling overtones (and while I appreciate that the other major black character in the story is a super-cool guy who doesn't even die to show how serious the situation is), frankly the story needed Jill for a grand-finale that struggles without her. Especially since she's somehow turned blonde, has an inexplicable natural immunity to the series' various diseases that really would've come in handy in previous games, and then gets turned into a henchperson with a method that raises the obvious question of why the villains didn't do that to other heroes in the past.
Despite it all, Resident Evil 5 isn't awful. I picked it up cheap on Steam, with access to hacking tools so I could cheat past some of the more irritating parts, and got more than my money's worth. But as an historical artifact, there's a lot of bad decisions embedded in the title's fossil record.