/vr/ - Retro Games

>>8401513
RE1 is completely dead serious. It's a low budget Japanese take on horror films and at the time was hyped up as a feat. A lot of the silliness is explained by awkward Japanese to English translation and direction, and inexperience on the dev team's part. Note how RE2-3 have way less of the goof and have better production.

It's only with the lens of time and 25 years of jokes do we see it as silly. People on release were blown away by how realistic it was, because most people hadn't seen a 3D game like that was so cinematic, had such great looking photorealistic backgrounds, and 3D models, with voice acting. It was a leap from games like Donkey Kong Country and Chrono Trigger people were playing the year before. A new player can't see how much of a breakthrough it is, and only sees a silly game.

RE4 is when RE got in on the joke and is much more heavily influenced by Mikami. Mikami himself left to his own devices seems to like to make silly non-serious stories with a lot of jokes. He did not have that kind of freedom for RE1. The game was written by someone else, and he was a young director at the time - not a gaming legend.