This month has brought us the announcement of a remastered Resident Evil REmake, which may be followed up with a sequel to Resident Evil: Revelations and possibly even an Arklay TV series based on the franchise. All this news has heightened speculation over the direction of the canonical seventh game in the series.
Resident Evil 6 was a critical and commercial disappointment. Sales eventually topped five million, though Capcom had originally projected a gargantuan seven million copies sold. Combine that with the fact that critics mostly disliked it and fans were ambivalent toward its more action-oriented gameplay, and you have a series that is in desperate need of change.
The problem is, how do you reimagine a series that is always in flux? Think about the changes that have taken place over the course of the last seventeen years. What began as an eerie survival horror series slowly morphed into a horror-action epic of Bay-esque proportions. Resident Evil is not a franchise that stands still, so a single answer to the question of “How do we fix it?” cannot be had in this discussion.
However, given the overall direction of the last few games — ignoring, perhaps, all of the secondary, non-numbered titles bearing the Resident Evil logo — it might be possible to compile a list of ideas for Capcom to incorporate in order to bring the franchise back to a place where both fans and the company can be happy with Resident Evil 7.
