Resident Evil : The Darkside Chronicles
System: Wii
Release date: November 17, 2009
Darkside Chronicles is the second and last(so far) game in the Chronicles series that takes you throw the older Resident Evil games as a on-rail shooter game. I’m saying so far because there are rumors floating out there of a new one that would focus on the later games. In any case, Darkside Chronicles takes you through the story of RE 2 and Code Veronica while adding some back story to the character of Jack Krauser that would make an appearance in Re4 as one of the bad guys.
Darkside Chronicles was pretty enjoyable on its own and a superior game to Umbrella Chronicles. The controls and pacing of the game has improved a lot and the game doesn’t have the same tedious part as the previous game had. It’s a bit on the short side of things and the game takes some liberties with established lore but I didn’t mind it much. Overall, it was a fun distraction and I’d recommend the game for RE fans or just people looking for an on rail shooter.
Since the game is so light on story, I’ll take the opportunity to talk about the series switch in style and how it came to be.
The big Resident Evil switch, B.o.w and you
Darkside chronicles doesn’t add much to the overall storyline. In fact it add close to nothing. We do get an extra adventure with Leon and we get an introduction to Jack Krauser, a future bad guy, but in the overall plot it’s more of a side story.
There’s one important theme though that gets hammered on during the game and its the switch from a pure survival horror game featuring zombies to a game about fighting freakish monsters (Bio organic weapons, Bow). And that gives me the opportunity to talk about the genre switch between the early games (RE0 to Veronica) and the later games (RE4 and up).
If you follow the RE fans and the discussions around the series you will come across the big nerd rage that surrounds RE4 and the later games. The reason for this is rather simple. The first few games were all about surviving waves of zombies with a few freakish monsters thrown while the later games switch to fighting Bow (monsters) created by Umbrella. While the issue would seem simple at first, proponents of the later games rightly argue that the Bow theme was present since day one and that the zombie apocalypse was more of a side effect than the main focus.
This change was intentional. The producer of Resident Evil wanted to renew the series that they felt was becoming stale and they saw the Bow angle as the best way to do this and get out of simply zombies with a few monsters thrown in. Since the whole Bow theme was always there as the explanation as to how zombies came to be, they figured they could run away with that without the said zombies and as usual, fanbois raged against any change.
So… were they right?
Yes they were, at least as far as sales number and making money is concerned. The next game I’ll be playing RE4, turned out to be one of the most profitable games of the Gamecube era and won numerous “Best of” awards. So up next is RE4.
