Resident Evil 4’s Original Director Reveals Impact of Camera Decision

If you were to try and rank all the games in the Resident Evil saga, yes, including the bad titles and the remakes, we’d bet you’d put the original Resident Evil 4 high up on the list. The game has just about everything people love from the franchise. Great main characters like Leon S. Kennedy and Ada Wong, no one thinks Ashley is an excellent character to be clear, over-the-top story, fabulous look for its time, intense action, and so on. It’s so beloved that even though it was meant to be a Nintendo Gamecube exclusive, it eventually got ported to just about every console possible. Plus, it’s getting a remake in the style of the other Resident Evil early titles.

While it remains to be seen if that one holds up, the original team interviewed about the game and revealed some key insights into how one of the game’s best features was actually not intended to be that. For example, the director of the original Resident Evil 4, Shinji Mikami, noted that for the team, the camera was not something they felt “needed to be changed to innovate the game.” Instead, they changed the standard camera style to a third-person camera angle because they thought it looked better. It’s the little things that make all the difference, right?

But here’s the fun twist, when they started to show it off, one of the first people to praise it was not who you would think. It was legendary Super Smash Bros creator Masahiro Sakurai!

“He came to check out the game in development and asked, ‘who came up with this camera system?’ ‘Hey, yeah, that was me.’ ‘This is great,’ he said.”

Mikami was shocked by that, but Sakurai knows what it takes to make great games. He’s even started a YouTube channel about that, so him giving praise for the camera is a big deal. But wait, it didn’t end there.

Jun Takeuchi was another developer of the game. During an E3 event, the development team from Gears of War approached him. Why? Because they wanted to note that the camera system they used for their hit game was based on the one from Resident Evil 4! Showing very clearly how much influence that camera had in the game and the game industry.

Mikami noted that they didn’t expect it to be such a hit when they were making the game. Instead, they were just trying to “make things work,” yet here it is, still iconic and about to get a full-on remake.

Sometimes it’s the little things that can make the biggest of impacts.

Source: YouTube