Resident Evil 4 Narrative Review

 

Resident Evil 4 Narrative Review

Intro/Brief Summary:

The fourth Resident Evil game is centred around Leon S. Kennedy, a Raccoon City police officer now turned US government agent, who is sent on a mission in Spain to rescue the president’s daughter, Ashley Graham, from a village cult known as the Los Illuminados, who plan to infect her with a mind-controlling parasite known as Las Plagas to make her one of them. The villagers themselves also being infected with the same virus.

Full Narrative:

Chapter 1-1:

The game begins with a recap of the events of Resident Evil 2, then followed by Leon being transported to the village by two Spanish police officers in the present. They stop at a wooden house and Leon goes inside to question the man living there, but he picks up an axe and attempts to attack Leon with it, forcing Leon to shoot him. After that, Leon looks outside the window and sees the transport car falling over the cliff, as well as more hostile villagers swarming the area. He escapes, deals with the locals, and continues to head towards the village on foot. Along the way, he notices multiple explosive tripwires tied around the trees and multiple beartraps laid out across the ground. He eventually reaches the gates of the village, and notices one of the two officers’ corpses impaled on a tree spike and burning in the centre of the village. Leon gets spotted by and chased by the villagers into one of their houses where he barricades the doors and windows with cabinets and drawers. A church bell rings out, and all of the villagers suddenly stop what they’re doing and head towards the church. Due to this, Leon is able to escape the village alive, but also having to narrowly avoid giant boulders and TNT-armed locals afterwards. He then searches one of the houses, with the hopes of finding more ammunition and gold petas, instead he finds a man in an armoire, gagged and tied up. When Leon releases him, the man directs attention towards who he refers to as the “big cheese”, a tall, bearded bald man in a trenchcoat. Leon runs up to roundhouse kick him, but he grabs him by the foot, flips him backwards and Leon is knocked unconscious along with the villagers’ captive after crashing through the armoire.

Chapter 1-2:

After being injected with a Las Plagas by a mysterious hooded figure. Leon wakes up and realises he is tied up on the floor next to the man he untied and ungagged before the blackout. He tells Leon he is a police officer from Madrid called Luis Sera and informs Leon that Ashley is being held captive inside the church. During their conversation, one of the villagers suddenly comes walking through the house dragging an axe behind him. The both of them move forward slightly so that the axe breaks their chains. Now free, Leon kicks the villager back against the wall, breaking his neck, while Luis escapes out the door. Leon spots a merchant outside the house, who offers to sell him all kinds of weapons and ammunition. After the deal, Leon continues with his mission. He attempts to search another house for my supplies, but ends up running into the same tall bald foe he encountered earlier. He grasps Leon by the neck to test if he has the same blood as them, he then lets him go and walks away.

Chapter 1-3/Chapter 2-1:

Leon walks through the same door the giant man walked through, only to get attacked yet again by him. Just as he is about to kill Leon, a mysterious woman hanging from outside the window fires two shots at the back of his left shoulder, she grapples herself up onto the roof as the man jumps out the window after her. Leon then heads back into the village after finding the key to the church. He journeys through the cavern inside the church which leads him out into the graveyard where the real church resides. Leon climbs up to the top balcony inside the church where he finds the cell that Ashley is held captive in. As the two go to leave the church, they are confronted by the cult leader, Lord Sadler, who explains how Ashley has also been injected with the same Las Plagas bacteria as Leon. The pair of them jump out the window once Sadler’s henchmen begin to fire at them with crossbows.

Chapter 2-2:

Leon and Ashley encounter a larger horde of enemies out in the graveyard. Leon deals with them all by rolling a cargo of explosive barrels down the hill and shooting the barrels to blow them up. After backtracking through the village yet again, they both cross the bridge only for Leon’s support Hunnigan to inform him over the radio that the escort chopper is down, leaving them no choice but to take refuge in the cabin on the other side of the bridge where Leon reunites with Luis. Just as they begin to talk, and even larger horde of villagers attempt to break into the cabin. Ashley hides in the upstairs closet while Leon and Luis both barricade the doors and windows, preparing to shoot anyone who makes it inside. After a constant barrage of bullets, the horde is down. Luis tells Leon he forgot something and leaves the cabin to fetch it.

Chapter 2-3:

Following the cabin standoff, Leon and Ashley try to find a different way out of their location due to the chopper being shot down. A deadly cable-car ride leads them to an abattoir which Leon heads inside of while Ashley waits outside. While in the abattoir, the village chief shows his face yet again and seals himself in with Leon by twisting the door handles tight. He then mutates into a larger more terrifying form and battles Leon. He is eventually put down and Leon is able to jump out an open passage and reunite with Ashley. A while later, they are both chased into a castle by another large horde of villagers. They raise the drawbridge so that they can’t follow them. The two then begin to explore the inside of the castle.

Chapter 3-1:

Inside the castle, Luis appears yet again. He tells the both of them that there is a drug which can stop the Las Plagas from making them cough up blood. Luis leaves again to try and look for the medicines while Leon and Ashley continue their exploration of the castle. Soon, they come face to face with the Castellan Ramon Salazar who sends his cultist henchmen charging at Leon and Ashley before walking away. After a long and drawn-out battle, Ashley begins to experience the blood-coughing symptoms that Luis warned about and runs off recklessly before suddenly being captured.

Chapter 3-2:

Now that Ashley has been captured a second time, Leon sets out to rescue her again. He attempts to call Hunnigan but Salazar hijacks the line and speaks to Leon through the radio about the various traps he has set up throughout the castle as well as the giant “Novistador” insects that prowl the sewers below.

Chapter 3-3:

While searching one of the bedrooms in the castle, Leon has another run-in with the woman from earlier, who he now recognises as Ada Wong, a rogue agent working for Albert Wesker (the main antagonist from the first game). She leaves yet again and Leon carries on with his mission. He is greeted by Luis once again, who now has the syringes. But before he can hand over them over to Leon, Lord Saddler stabs Luis through the chest with the giant plaga growing from his body. He takes back the samples and leaves Leon with his dying friend. Before Luis dies, he tells Leon the truth. That he was not a cop but a scientist working against Saddler to stop the spread of the Las Plagas, and that Leon needs to retrieve a sample of a Plaga Egg.

Chapter 3-4:

Just as Leon is about to avenge Luis by going after Saddler. He notices Ashley chained to a wall. He shoots the bars off to free her and she flees the room into the study where a few cultists are wandering about. She kills them with fire from throwing a lantern at them. She opens the gates to the storeroom, where she is suddenly ambushed by suits of armour come to life, luckily she is able to make it out of there alive and run back to Leon.

Chapter 4-1:

The two of them have run in with the Novistadors and Ashley is captured for the third time. Advancing down the hallway, Leon gets another call from Salazar, who tells him he has sent his “right hand” to dispose of Leon. Leon finds an elevator, but there is no power. Just as Leon heads to the control room to turn on the power to the elevator shaft, he is attacked by the creature that Salazar sent to kill him with. After about four minutes, the threat is defeated and the elevator is back in operation for Leon to enter.

Chapter 4-2:

The elevator leads Leon to a flight of stairs which lead him down into a mine of villagers. After he dispatches each and every one of them, he grabs a handful of dynamite from of the minecarts and uses it to blow up a giant boulder blocking the path. Leon heads into a room of lava where he is forced to battle two El Gigante monsters. He is able to kill the both of them successfully, even sending one of them melting in the central lava pit. Outside in the caverns, Leon has to deal with more Novistadors as well as cave traps. After narrowly avoiding them, Leon winds up in the midst of a tomblike structure hidden within one of the caves where he goes up to the surface.

Chapter 4-3:

Leon jumps into and rides a minecart down the rails while a whole bunch of villagers swarm him by jumping into the carts attached behind him. After managing to kill all of the villagers behind him, Leon notices an end to the rails and jumps out of the cart and survives a literal cliffhanger. He then proceeds to enter the next elevator.

Chapter 4-4:

Leon reaches the top of the castle, where he comes face to face with Salazar again, who tells Leon his cultists are taking Ashley to an island near the castle. He and his “right hand” monster Verdugo are fused together after being consumed by a plant and the two combine to create a powerful monster that Leon has to fight against. He shoots Salazar to shreds and goes back down in the lift, where Ada is there to give him a ride to the island, and then vanish in a flash once again.

Chapter 5:

On the island, Leon enters the research facility where Ashley is being held. While there, he discovers that one of his former training comrades, Jack Krauser, who was believed to have been killed in a helicopter crash two years prior, is responsible for her kidnapping in an attempt to get close enough to Saddler to steal his new plagas sample. Ada and Krauser, who are both working for Albert Wesker, are there to get a plagas sample. Saddler oders Krauser to kill Leon, believing that no matter which one dies, he will benefit. After defeating Krauser, Leon rescues Ashley, and they are able to finally remove the plagas from their bodies by lying in front of a special radiotherapeutic device. Leon confronts Saddler, and with Ada’s help, manages to kill him. However, Ada takes the sample from Leon at gunpoint before escaping in a helicopter, leaving Leon and Ashley to escape via her jet-ski as the island explodes behind them.

Strengths:

Though the story overall is rather simple, it’s the eventful journey that Leon goes on which makes the story so riveting for them. The game’s grey, murky, washed-out colour palette as well as the abundance of Gothic architecture really add to the atmosphere and show the lack of life and control within the village as everyone there is just a puppet of Lord Saddler’s scheme. It’s obvious that Leon is crossing into more dangerous territory as the story progresses as the threats he has to encounter keep getting larger and more ferocious by each chapter. A few of the threats, such as the Verdugo, are built up through dialogue so as to induce tense anxiety before their reveal.

Weaknesses:

Ashley gets taken away far too many times throughout the game to the point where it’s almost comical, and it’s something that feels like it’s done to pad out the game’s runtime.