Resident Evil Should Give an Oversaturated Horror Tradition…

Resident Evil of all franchises has gone on long enough now that its traditions and trends are incredibly patternable and formulaic. This has worked in its favor time and time again for Resident Evil, allowing Capcom to reuse assets that have all been infused with personality and also bleed debut mechanics into any entries that immediately follow in order to make the most of them.

Each title’s decided-upon gameplay genre usually helps elicit what formulas Capcom may iterate on for them, such as whether it will be action- or horror-heavy, and one trope from the latter needs to sit the next game on the bench. It is great to see that Resident Evil 4’s remake successfully introduced a parry mechanic, for instance, but it would also do well for Resident Evil 9 to skip having a pursuer enemy unless it has a superb encounter in mind because a pursuer showing up in every new or remade Resident Evil game since the remake of Resident Evil 2 five years ago has become a tired trend.

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By Matt Karoglou

Scary Pursuer Enemies Have Fallen Far from Resident Evil’s Fruitful Tree

To be clear, Resident Evil has always had pursuer or stalker enemies in varying degrees of quality and significance, which is why the trench coat-clad tyrant is such a prominent pursuer in Resident Evil 2’s remake in the first place.

However, Resident Evil 2’s remake seemed to have revitalized and repurposed how substantially anxiety-inducing such an enemy type can be in modern horror games and clearly inspired Resident Evil 3’s remake, Resident Evil 7, Resident Evil Village, and Resident Evil 4’s remake to double down on it in their own ways. Interestingly, even though no pursuer since the Resident Evil 2 remake’s Mr. X has been quite as effective or substantial, the trend has continued relentlessly.

Resident Evil 3: Nemesis’ titular foe was originally a more iconic pursuer in the series—literally being nicknamed the Pursuer—before the Resident Evil 2 remake’s Mr. X, but the heavily scripted Nemesis featured in the Resident Evil 3 remake is arguably not as daunting or intimidating, either. Thus, he’s debatably lost some of the luster he had more than two decades ago.

Resident Evil’s Pursuers Have Lost Their Sheen and Deserve a Break

Castle Dimitrescu’s resident matriarch is never a threat to players’ shoddily devised plans like Mr. X can be and she also isn’t scary from a traditional standpoint. Likewise, Jack and Marguerite Baker are exploitatively circumvented throughout the Baker estate even if their patrol routes are more suspenseful and evocative of persistent pursuers who can intercept players at a narrow hallway or stairwell corner, yet that’s more of a testament to how superbly claustrophobic the estate is than anything.

Resident Evil Village’s Shadows of Rose has one of the franchise’s best and most authentic pursuers as numerous life-sized Mia dolls stalk Rosemary Winters and only shamble their mannequin limbs hastily toward her when players have the game’s camera turned away from them.

The sequence that most resembles a pursuer encounter in the remake of Resident Evil 4 is when players are trapped in a corridor with a Verdugo, but the remake also added a quick, scripted sequence where Mendez pursues players along with a mob of ganados. This suggests that Capcom has tried to replicate its pursuer trend in nearly every Resident Evil entry since Resident Evil 2’s remake. Now, especially with not all of them being executed well, it is a performative enemy type the studio can afford to shelve for a bit while it hopefully explores more unique avenues of gameplay in Resident Evil 9 and onward.

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