Resident Evil: Requiem is blatantly better than The Last of Us Part II

My colleague and friend Stephanie Sterling coined the “blatantly better” farcical-yet-sincere essay series over on Destructoid.com many years ago, and so, it feels right to do a derivative version of her features today, in order to best express my thoughts on Resident Evil: Requiem, a game that is also farcical, sincere, and derivative, but in all the right ways. That’s just the start of why it’s better than The Last of Us Part II, which I am comparing to Resident Evil 9 largely because they are the most recent games in the two biggest AAA third-person zombie horror franchises ever. 

But there’s also a history there. When Resident Evil first released (1996), it stood out as a scary, cinematic, and surprising game, and is often considered the grandfather of the survival horror genre. But it was hard for it to maintain itself and its identity. Flash forward to Resident Evil 6 (2012), and you have a wonky co-op shooter that features monsters that look like they were designed by ’90s comics maven, Rob Liefeld, in a desperate attempt to look “badass” to angry teenage boys. Everything that made Resident Evil good was gone, allowing the first The Last (first the last?!) of Us game to swoop in and steal Resident Evil’s breakfast. It was cinematic in a way that told a story that genuinely resonated with people, and scary in ways that felt believable and surprising in a way that felt fresh in the stale AAA market. It felt like Resident Evil had been ousted, replaced, and relegated to a second-tier status.

Resident Evil couldn’t win in a head-to-head fight with The Last of Us, so it pivoted in new directions. Resident Evil 7 and 8 looked nothing like The Last of Us, or any Resident Evil that came before them. Instead of zombies, we had smiling, psychopathic, super-strong men and women who sadistically fed us gross dinners and/or stalked us through dilapidated shacks or opulent mansions. Everything was shown from first person, with a faceless lead character who was just a regular dude, forced to hide from a bunch of serial killing freaks. And it worked! People respected Resident Evil again, and through remakes of Resident Evil 2, 3, and 4, they also began to hunger for the flavor of the original games as well. 

And so, we have Resident Evil: Requiem, a celebration of the franchise’s 30^th anniversary that works earnestly to give fans a concentrated version of all the things they love about the series, with none of the chaff that bloated Resident Evil 6 into the unrecognizable mess that it was. If this was the game that came out in Resident Evil 6’s place, I’m not sure that The Last of Us would have been able to bump it off the throne as the reigning ruler in the AAA zombie horror space. Here’s why.

LEON AND GRACE ARE BETTER PEOPLE THAN JOEL AND ELLIE

I get that not everyone wants to play the hero. Working out our toxic bullshit through imperfect characters who make human mistakes and aren’t always aspirational can be a wonderful thing. And back in 2014, when The Last of Us first came out, it felt new, even transgressive, to put players in the place of morally frail leads who have tremendous willpower but questionable moral compass. 

The problem is that in, the years since, the minds behind the continuing Last of Us story (or should I say, the minds who have chosen to essentially retell the story of the two games in the series multiple times instead of pushing it forward) have reflected on Joel and Ellie in ways that make them feel like even worse people. Joel, who (spoilers) killed a bunch of people to save Ellie from an experiment that would have killed her but could have saved millions of lives (and the world), was easy enough to empathize with while making wrong, and dare I say evil, choices. But it turns out that Joel’s co-creator Neil Druckmann thinks that Joel was good and right for robbing Ellie of the chance to make the choice to sacrifice herself, and for deciding to lean into his own attachment issues by treating Ellie like his daughter/possession and anyone who might mess with her like a chess piece that needs to be removed from the board. 

Ellie never makes a choice that awful, and by the end of The Last of Us 2, she learns to stop aggressively murdering for the sake of revenge in the same way she used to, but jeez, she’s still not exactly making things much better for anybody. And that’s not her fault, of course. She’s not real. But the fact that this is the kind of character her creators wanted us to deeply empathize with and relate to doesn’t say anything all that great about where their heads are at.

Grace and Leon, on the other hand, are flawed heroes of an entirely different breed. Leon is a textbook example of a middle-aged dude who ignores his own psychological and physical health issues in favor of trying to be productive and helpful. He deals with trauma by jumping into the worst problems imaginable and cracking jokes about it, ready to die at any time. His self-preservation instincts are more numbed and deadened than the flesh of the zombies that are trying to eat him. 

Grace, on the other hand, is constantly weighed down by her fight, flight, or freeze response, with a heavy emphasis on flight or freeze. She’s also haunted by trauma, but she never makes her trauma anyone else’s problem and would rather put herself in harms way than let any human being be hurt or killed. Her survivors’ guilt never turns into the urge for revenge, and instead, it drives her to do more and more for others in the pursuit of hope, as the game goes on.

Immediately after seeing the end of Resident Evil: Requiem, I wanted to keep going, to replay various parts of the game to get better scores and unlock more content. But also, I was excited to play it again to just spend time with Grace and Leon, because they are great people. Replaying The Last of Us 2, on the other hand, feels more like going back to the scene of various crimes and reliving some real bad times. Real life has enough of that as it is, I’m not interested in getting more of it in a video game.

THE REAL EVIL IS BILLIONAIRES, CORPORATIONS, AND OTHER BRAIN KILLERS, AND NOT OTHER TRAUMATIZED SURVIVORS

“But Jonathan!” you might be thinking, “for art to be relevant and meaningful, it has to feel as good, and as bad, as real life! Because art isn’t just an escape! It’s an extension of who we are as human beings!”

Dear reader, I totally agree with you. That’s why I was able to write the sentences above this one. It’s because I have those exact same thoughts. The thing is though, Resident Evil: Requiem also does a better job of reflecting on real life, at least as I experience it, than The Last of Us 2 does, and a lot of that has to do with who you’re fighting against in both games. 

The Last of Us 2 is predicated on the idea that the human race is going to split itself into tribes that are going to want to kill each other because life is so bad for everyone that we’ve all be drained of our empathy and capacity for perspective of the big picture. And you know what? That’s fair. That’s definitely a thing that people do. But what it’s missing is a direct statement about exactly why the human race is in this position, and what continues to drive our cycles of violence. Instead, it just says, “well, mushroom zombies ate all the laws and the governments that keep us in check, so now everyone is going to be as awful as they want and no one can stop them.”

And that’s definitely not the actual problem with the human race. We’re not struggling with a lack of laws and government enforced rules to keep everyone safe and to stop the psychopaths from harming the weak and vulnerable. The actual problem is that the governments and the billionaires (and the governments run by billionaires) treat human beings like subjects of a massive science experiment that’s designed to make them richer and more powerful, and the rest of us weaker, more confused, and unable to fight back. And that’s exactly who’s causing all the problems in Resident Evil: Requiem.

Grace and Leon work for the government, but they are not extensions of the government. In fact, their government bosses both treat them like expendable assets at one point or another and show very little care or support for them. They try to save each other throughout the game, but not because they were told to. It’s because they want to, even if it means going against the rules. And likewise, all the big villains in the game are beholden to larger money and power dictators above them, as they aspire to gain more money and power for themselves, turning people into zombies and other toxic creatures along the way in order to meet their own ends. 

And the zombies here are really just people on auto pilot, the life sucked out of them, left only with repetitive actions that aligned with their identities in their old lives. Some are obsessed with cleaning, despite the fact that there is so much blood everywhere that the idea of the scene ever becoming anything less than dangerously unsanitary is completely impossible. They will even try to clean your face instead of biting it, which would be pitiable if it weren’t so darn dangerous. Others were in the army, and still blindly fire their machine guns in your general direction out of some hard wired need to kill, even though they have no idea who you are or why they should want you to die. 

It’s easy to feel bad for them, and even easier to never want to be like them. When they come after you to kill you, it’s scary and awful, because they’ve been granted the power to do so much physical harm, with none of the brain power to use it in a way that would really benefit them, or anyone else for that matter. The game never goes as far as to give them MAGA hats and smart phones to mindlessly scroll on, searching for dopamine hits while they’re fed misinformation about undocumented immigrants and transgender people by they US government and/or Elon Musk, but that’s because, despite how over-the-top the series is, it’s still more subtle in its messaging than I am 99% of the time. 

THE LAST OF US PART II WANTS YOU TO FORGET IT’S A GAME, RESIDENT EVIL: REQUIEM REVELS IN IT

Resident Evil may be more subtle than me (not a hard bar to clear), but it’s definitely just as weird as I am, and I love it for that. And it runs headfirst into videogame logic that defies the laws of reality. Like in past games in the series, you find herb plants lying around that you can inject into your body to give you health, bullets can be found in the corpses of random monsters, and new for this game, you can even draw the blood from dead enemies and turn them into bullets or health items. The zombies, too, are clearly video game enemies, with preset movement and behavior patterns that both work to sell you on the fact that they are brain-damaged, formerly alive people, and also that you need to use your genuine human intelligence to outsmart their artificial ones. Solving the very videogame-y problems that Resident Evil: Requiem sets up for you makes you meditate on how to be an effective human in an increasingly hostile, inhuman world. It’s a style and the substance couldn’t work any other medium. It needs to be played to be experienced. 

The Last of Us 2 often seems ashamed of its videogame logic, or worse, runs in stark opposition to itself because of it. The game’s story is about learning to be empathetic towards the people you thought of as NPCs, but playing it is about murdering tons of people, infected or otherwise, for fun. And it’s also extremely reluctant to add anything new to the series that you’d normally see in a videogame, like new types of enemies, overpowered weapons, or anything else that might lead you to see the game as anything other than a playable documentary about mold zombies and assholes. They didn’t think you’d want learn about what kind of interesting new mechanics the developers cooked up for you. They thought you were more interested in the story about human atrocities and sad serial killers told largely through linear cutscenes, interspersed with fun “murder your way” gameplay because they thought they had to. Until, of course, they got the opportunity to turn the whole thing into a TV show, which feels like what they wanted in the first place. 

It’s hard to say if they’ll even bother making another game now that they’ve migrated to the medium that they were more enamored with the whole time. Resident Evil: Requiem, on the other hand, had fans immediately clamoring for more game, and its developers are on the exact same page, promising more content via DLC, and even amiibo functionality for the Switch 2 version in the near future. It feels like the water here has finally found its own level. People are excited for Resident Evil 9.5 to come out immediately, and for the most part, have accepted that The Last of Us makes more sense as an ongoing TV series than it did as two video games that get remade every few years.