12 Days of Monsters: Day 4
12 Days of Monsters is a series exploring the visual design of different monsters - looking at what makes them successful (or not), what trends they represent, and what they mean to me personally.
The Monster
Reapers
from the 2009 video game RESIDENT EVIL 5
Personal Context
I'd been a "fan" of Resident Evil as a series for years before I ever touched a Resident Evil game. I found websites and guides that showcased all the monsters, and I loved them. I was hugely into zombies at the time (before the oversaturation of bad zombie media like THE WALKING DEAD made that kind of an embarrassing admission), and these games were all about zombies and mutating zombies into big weird things with animal parts and too many eyes and teeth and all sorts of shenanigans. These were zombie games that weren't just about dead things, but also about monsters.
I didn't actually play a Resident Evil game until RESIDENT EVIL 4, sometime after it came out in 2005, when I bought a GameCube and a copy of the game secondhand from a friend. It was a good game to get into the series with, as it was a huge success, game of the year everywhere, etc. etc. etc. I loved it.
So I was pretty stoked for RESIDENT EVIL 5, and bought it pretty close to launch on my brand new XBox 360. And lemme tell you...RESIDENT EVIL 5 is kind of a mess.
It was fun as shit, but it was also all over the place. It clearly wanted to be "RESIDENT EVIL 4, but like, more" - and a lot of that "more" was bad. What stands out to me, though, was the way some of that stuff ended up feeling very incongruous with the rest of the game - or with my idea of what the rest of the game should've been, at least.
Unfortunately, RESIDENT EVIL 5 became Capcom's best-selling game (only un-seated about a decade later), so RESIDENT EVIL 6 doubled down on everything that made 5 bad, which made 6 absolutely garbage, and enough so that Capcom changed course in a substantial way for RESIDENT EVIL 7.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's talk monsters.
The Game
Get Hype for the Reaper
This creature pops up pretty late in the game. You're in a missile silo, i.e. an area filled with huge and deadly weapons, so the overall setting is suggesting that you're going to encounter stronger and more powerful enemies here. (This fits a trend we see in level design from RESIDENT EVIL 4, too - the late-game areas are places like military bases, and enemies start using heavy weapons like miniguns and rocket launchers - so being surrounded by missiles cues you into the fact that this is a late-game area with strong enemies.)
In this area, you find a note left by a researcher. They describe finding some new organism, created accidentally as a result of experiments done in that facility. (I guess the wet labs are right next to the rocket silos in this place.) This note plays up how badass and scary this new monster is - particularly with this bit:
“I sent a lightly armed team to investigate the sightings of this strange creature. Unfortunately, another team had to be deployed to retrieve the corpses of the first team, which had been dismembered by something extremely sharp. There were also multiple stab wounds that appeared to be made by a giant spear.”
Brutal. The note ends with the researcher naming this creature "Reaper", in case you thought the game was being too subtle so far. But you don't actually see a reaper yet. In fact, the area around this note is kinda quiet for a little while, which sets up tension: You know something bad is coming, and you're waiting for it. You also pass by some eggs that you just know are going to hatch into this super-monster - this ultra badass nightmare covered in scythes or whatever, that single-handedly butchers whole teams of armed mercenaries.
Then you do see the Reaper...and it's just a guy in a bug suit.
Don’t fear the reaper. Official artwork from RESIDENT EVIL 5
The Visual Design
This Monster Kinda Sucks
Let's break down why this design is terrible.
First, it's visually uninteresting. Yes, it's a big mean-looking bug - but that's it. There are no unexpected elements here. The main design components read like a 10-year-old's checklist of what makes something look like a bug (antennae, 6 limbs, segmented shell, round eyes, mandibles). Even though it's a fictional monster, the body plan is completely conventional.
Official render of Verdugo from RESIDENT EVIL 4
Compare this with the Verdugo from RESIDENT EVIL 4 - another insectoid enemy that walks on two legs. This one has a blend of different features: It has a human-like face around the small glowing eyes, but insect-like mandibles in the mouth area. Its arms end in distinct fingers (human-like), but too few of them and arranged weirdly (very not-human-like). It also has a long prehensile tail with a spike at the end that it uses as a weapon, which combined with its black coloration makes the overall design evocative of H.R. Giger's design for the xenomorph from ALIEN and its sequels (itself already a mix of different types of human and non-human anatomy).
Second, it's unimposing. This is a problem, as it's one of the last new enemy types introduced in a game that almost strictly introduces enemies with increasing difficulty (or at least, increasing threat, even if that threat is meant to be matched by the player's own increased competency and gear). It just doesn't look more threatening than anything else you've seen. Just about the only menacing part of its design is the sharp bits on the end of its arm, but everything in the game has sharp bits to hurt you with. It's not substantially bigger than you; it doesn't move in some eerie or unconventional way (it mostly just walks at you like a guy in a bug costume); it doesn't have a scary sound that signals it. It's just a bug.
A novistador, as you might “see” it in RESIDENT EVIL 4
Compare this with the Novistadores - another bug enemy from RESIDENT EVIL 4. These enemies are, like the Reaper, mostly just conventional-looking bugs. They're also much less deadly than the Reapers and encountered much earlier in the game. But the first time you meet them, they're much more imposing, for one simple reason: They can turn invisible. In fact, they start out invisible. Your first encounter with them is hearing their chittering without knowing where it's coming from or what the source of it even looks like - then hearing the sudden, rapid thudding of footsteps of something unseen running towards you. This does a lot to make them much scarier and more menacing even though they are ultimately not very dangerous enemies.
Third, it's not mechanically distinctive. The Reaper has a bunch of health, is hard to damage, and has an instant-kill attack - so you'd think this would be a scary enemy to encounter. But it only has one other attack (where it just sort of scratches you). The result is that this enemy is pretty simple, and combined with the fact that it's so unimposing, it takes it from "scary" to "boring". The one-hit-kill attack is also not scary, which is weird to say, but it's true - the Reaper just walks at you with its arms open like it's asking for a hug. It doesn't make any loud or threatening sound or anything.
Compare this with yet another enemy from RESIDENT EVIL 4: the chainsaw-wielding ganados. Like the Reaper, these slasher-movie-cosplayers have an instant-kill attack (they'll chainsaw your head off). They also basically only have that one attack. But where the Reapers are boring, these are effective and memorable. They have an extremely distinctive presence - because when they activate, they rev their chainsaw, and the whole time they are chasing you, you can hear the growling of the engine of a machine that is thirsting for your neck. It gets louder as they get closer, of course, for added tension. You also mostly encounter them early in the game, when you have fewer ways to deal with enemies and are less comfortable with basic game skills like crowd management - so even though they are mechanically simple, you encounter them early enough that they're still a handful. And then you basically just don't see them again. RESIDENT EVIL 4 apparently realized that a mechanically simple one-hit-kill enemy was much more effective early in the game, rather than later on.
Fourth, it doesn't feel like it fits with the rest of the game - especially for the part of the game where it shows up. Like I said earlier, the Resident Evil series is fundamentally about zombies and monsters - or, more generally: mutant humans and monsters (technically, the main human-like baddies in 4 and 5 are not literal zombies). Sometimes the monsters are just big versions of normal animals, but that's not what the series is really most known for - the monsters that people remember about the series, the ones that made me a fan of the series before I ever even played a game in it, are some kind of mutated/malformed/hybridized creatures. Additionally, like I mentioned recently, RESIDENT EVIL 5 is an action game where the enemies generally intensify as the game progresses - they hit harder, they take more work to kill, they move faster, they look scarier, and they even shout louder. In RESIDENT EVIL 4, you go from villagers with dad bods and farm tools to musclebound commandoes with miniguns; likewise, in RESIDENT EVIL 5 you go from locals in sweaty tees to soldiers in body armor. There's a clear sense of escalation evident in enemy designs.
Now, you can have a monster show up with a design that's a big departure from the other enemies you've seen so far - but you likely still want it to feel like it fits within the game, and fits within the patterns and expectations you've established in the player.
I know I've hit this drum a lot, but to me, a lot of the core identity of the Resident Evil games as it relates to monster design is this concept of mutated humans. The most iconic monsters from the series all exemplify this: the Tyrant (an 8-foot-tall zombie with an exposed heart and swords for fingers), William Birkin (who grows eyes and teeth in the middle of his muscles as he gets more swole and less human), the Licker (a skinless, eyeless human that crawls on all fours, with giant claws, an exposed brain, and a several-foot-long prehensile tongue), the Nemesis (a Tyrant-like brute with a distinctive stitched-together partially-flayed face and biological tubes weaving in and out of it), etc.
When you introduce a new enemy type this late in the game, in a late entry in your franchise that's following the most successful one so far, players will be expecting a creature that fits with the "brand" or fits with the general progression of enemy design over the course of the series - ideally both. But the Reaper does neither. The design isn't continuous with any enemy designs elsewhere in the game (i.e. it's not a bigger/scarier version of an earlier enemy). The design doesn't look like "Resident Evil's take on a bug". It doesn't even fit with the level in which it's introduced. On every axis, the Reaper feels out of place.
Being out of place is not necessarily a terrible thing - but it does call extra attention, which magnifies the strengths and failings of the thing it's calling attention to. In the Reaper's case, it shines a bright light on a lot of failings - and at a time when the game wants to be building momentum toward its conclusion, too.
Reflections
Success Sickness
The Reaper ends up feeling like an overall lazy design, ultimately - and its inclusion feels careless. And the Reaper isn't the only thing in this game that makes it feel wayward. Resident Evil as a series started out with smaller-scale horror settings, but has been gradually building towards bigger action-movie scenarios. The first game all took place in a single creepy mansion where a small group of people went missing, but by RESIDENT EVIL 4 you are rescuing the president's daughter from a cult that wants to use mutant mind-control monsters to take over the United States and the world. RESIDENT EVIL 4 absolutely does get to some ridiculous action-movie excesses where you're gunning down baddies by the bucketload and fighting alongside an attack helicopter. But it also has big chunks where it centers itself in more confined, atmospheric, "classic Resident Evil" settings, even in the final act - for instance, an abandoned mad science lab where you fight just one enemy at a time (and that enemy is really creepy). For all the blockbuster stylings of the game’s last third, the final battle is still just you and a monster on rain-slick arena at night.
In the finale of RESIDENT EVIL 5 (which happens after you beat a monster half the size of an aircraft carrier by using a satellite laser) you have a fistfight with Agent Smith from THE MATRIX aboard his stealth jet, then crash the jet into the crater of an active volcano - where you fight the final boss, during a thunderstorm, while he punches you with an arm made out of a living biological weapon and a missile. You kill him by stabbing him in the heart, knocking him into lava, and then shooting him in the face with two rocket launchers.
That should be the end of a Mission Impossible movie, not a Resident Evil game.
But the gameplay was fun enough, and it capitalized on the attention that 4 earned, so RESIDENT EVIL 5 made infinite money. And then we got RESIDENT EVIL 6 - which makes the excesses of 5 look restrained by comparison. (To give you an idea: One of the four storylines in RESIDENT EVIL 6 begins with you shooting the president in the face. The last third of that storyline is just repeated boss fights against the same person, who turns into a centaur with a biological machine gun that shoots bullets made of bones, a dinosaur that throws cars at you, and a mutant fly the size of a house.)
To me, the Reaper is emblematic of these errant tendencies. It doesn't have a good reason for being there, it doesn't lead to interesting gameplay, and it's set up to be this scary and distinctive late-game threat that ends up being utterly unmemorable. Everything about it, from the cheesy edgelord name to its reliance on insta-kill attacks to be scary, just reeks of a thoughtless attempt at escalation.
These games in the Resident Evil series suffer from success sickness. Success breeds repetition, but a sudden surplus of funding and resources can come at the expense of focus - especially in design. This isn’t to say that RESIDENT EVIL 5 was just trying to blindly copy its predecessor (though it sure felt like that at times) - they did refine some things. But I think they may have misidentified what they ultimately chose to emphasize.
Despite all that, the game still has moments that really shine - and, unsurprisingly, they shine in a way that the series has historically shined: in enclosed spaces, with strong atmosphere and palpable tension, and with memorable enemies. One of the best parts of RESIDENT EVIL 5 is an area built entirely around the Licker, one of the iconic monsters from RESIDENT EVIL 2. There's not that many of them, but there’s tons of tension, and the environment is wonderfully crafted to build them up before you even see any.
But most of RESIDENT EVIL 5 isn't like that.
And almost none of RESIDENT EVIL 6 is like that.
The thing with success sickness is that eventually it will cost you actual success. RESIDENT EVIL 6 did well enough, but nowhere near what its developers expected, and certainly not enough to justify the amount of resources they put into making it the most bombastic Resident Evil title yet.
RESIDENT EVIL 7 was made with a renewed focus. The scenario was scaled down back to a single home, the enemy roster was tightened back to a short list that centers on mutated humans, and the environments are crafted with an emphasis on horror over action.
Now, I’m not saying that RESIDENT EVIL 7 was great just because “they gave the fans what they wanted” (in fact, the fanservice that does appear in 7 makes for some of its low points). But it represent the creative energies behind Resident Evil recouping some of the focus that bled away when the only mandate they had was “more”, and it was a stronger game for it.
People have criticized the game for its short enemy roster, as the vast majority of creatures you fight are variations on the same, single monster.
But at least that monster was better designed for its game than a dude in a bug suit.
