Re-Writing Resident Evil

So with the latest entry in the series, the Resident Evil series has been all but concluded, story-wise (yes, I know Leon is still running around doing god knows with monkey-ears, and honestly, I don't really care.) Wesker is dead, Umbrella has technically been gone for two whole installments of the series, and short of revisiting Raccoon City again in another Outbreak-style installment (not actually a terrible idea, I'll revisit this later) or creating another gaiden installment of minimal relevance like 4 or Dead Aim, the series doesn't have anywhere to go. So as time rolls on, the likelihood of the series receiving a reboot and starting again from the ground up is becoming more and more likely. But I don't think this should be done likely; Resident Evil's story has a lot of potential, but it could be considered, at best, a creamy nougat center of good ideas surrounded by a bitter candy coating of terrible execution and poor choices.

Choice 1 would be, of course, to scrap the entire thing and start from scratch. New story, new characters, ditch the convoluted and contradictory canon the game has built up over the years in favor of a smooth, streamlined one that brings the series back to the original themes and ideas that it started with. My first suggestion, and probably the most controversial, is to get rid of the zombies. While they've been there from the beginning, they've never really been what the series is about. And in all honesty, they are simply boring enemies to face. They stumble around like rotting hobos, only posing a threat to those with slow reflexes or a hyper sensitive nose. And while the fanboys may rant and rave, people are starting to understand this and the genre has been moving away from traditional undead to the quicker, stronger, smarter type seen in 28 Days Later or Left 4 Dead (indeed, even in the newest RE games) or the mutant, zombie in name only types seen in Half-Life and such. Resident Evil was never about zombies; its about bio hazards. Magic viruses that are to wildlife like radiation was to the 1950's, and cause hammy actors to sprout more tentacles than the villain of a Japanese ero game. There is a wealth of potential here that has only been touched on in favor of simply promoting boring undead enemies. Focusing more on a "mutant freak" enemy cast will provide more variety, and if its even necessary to have a humanoid, bullet fodder type enemy the violently deranged like in 4 and 5 will suffice, though if the series wanted to make a serious play to recover its "horror" game credentials it would do well to do less shooting and more running in the first place.

Continued at some point