Resident Evil Revelations 2: Five Things

How do you stop a haemorrhaging franchise losing any more fans? If you’re Capcom, you launch a 3DS game that’s actually quite far removed from the main series… but in doing so accidentally create a critically-acclaimed splinter that out performs the last few core releases of your game. The episodic Revelations 2 looks set to follow the pattern its prequel set up and perhaps get Capcom’s flagship series back on track. We spoke to Revelations 2’s producer, Michiteru Okabe, about what the game is hoping to achieve…

It brings a few familiar faces back to the series…
“In the initial planning stages of the project, it was a very natural decision for the next main character after Jill (in Revelations) to be Claire. She hasn’t appeared in the series for some time, and the writer, Dai Saito, is a confirmed Claire fan, so all the stars really aligned for her to make a comeback. The game also features Barry Burton, who has come to the island to rescue his daughter Moira, and Natalia, a little girl who Barry meets when he arrives on the island and joins him on his mission. There are of course more characters who come into play during the course of the storyline, so you can look forward to meeting themtoo!”

It wants to be more psychologically intense than the more recent Resident Evil games…
“I don’t want to explain the [island] in too much detail and spoil the game for you, but the game is set somewhere unspeakable. Unimaginable acts have taken place. One of the themes of the game is madness, and that theme permeates the game down to even the smallest, insignificant-seeming objects. In the course of the storyline you will meet the Afflicted, the Rotten and the Revenant, each having a place in the setting of the game. The Afflicted represent the wildness and insanity of the island, while the Revenant, which you meet while playing as Barry, are a tough challenge even from a combat veteran like him. You’ll have to work out the best strategy for taking those things down.”

It’s learnt from the lacklustre reception of recent Resident Evil releases…
“With a series as long-running as Resident Evil,I feel it’s normal that we should get some negative critical reactions sometimes. After all, players want many different things. But we are trying to take the views of the fans on board and challenging ourselves to develop games that they will love to play. We got a great reaction from many people saying that we had returned to the survival horror roots of the series [in the first Revelations game]. Revelations 2 is of course based on the same concept and is therefore influenced by the first game, but really the first game showed us a new path for the whole series to go down.”

It builds on existing lore…
“This organisation, of which Claire is a member, was formed after the Raccoon Incident of 1998, and dedicates itself to the eradication of global bioterrorism and chemical weaponry. They carry out relief activities for victims, educational programs for the public, and whistleblowing on governments and industries with secret bioterrorism programmes. I really don’t want to say too much, but I will say we aren’t straying from the traditional Resident Evil worldview.”

It takes advantage of current-gen tech…
“I’ve definitely experienced the hard work that comes with adapting game development to each new generation of consoles. As the hardware power increases, what we can express visually gets richer. With the older generations of hardware it was almost a fun challenge to try my best to create realistic graphics on hardware that wasn’t really capable of it. The new consoles allow us to use new rendering technology, and better effects, filters and shadow rendering, all of which adds up to produce more realistic graphics and a more immersive experience for players.”