Hello and welcome to Wasted Plotential, where we
discuss the wasted potential of our favourite plotlines.
I have a number of issues with Leon's campaign in Resident Evil 6. I've already covered Chris'
campaign in the Jill episode, so go watch that after you're done here. Unlike that episode,
though, I'll be keeping Leon as the star of his campaign,
which would allow him to actually meet Jill for the first time.
Now, I'm sure a lot of people would expect me to start off by "fixing Leon's character" back
to his quippy Dante-esque Resi 4 self. That would require me to agree that Resi 6 broke
him in the first place. Before you crucify me, allow me to explain... why you're wrong.
My reading of Resi 4 Leon is that it's a façade. After he spent the entirety of his last game not
being taken seriously by anyone - being bossed around and held at gunpoint by Marvin and Kendo,
ignored by Claire, Sherry and Ada when he tries to take charge of the situation - he now tries
to project this air of a cool, suave secret agent like you'd see in an action movie. Unlike fellow
Redgrave derivative Dante, this doesn't come naturally to Leon - he's just good at pretending
it does. But there are times when he tries too hard to force a quip and comes off kinda dumb.
Leon: "Your right hand comes off?"
And notably, he doesn't act this way around Ada and Krauser, the two people in the game who
already know him and would thus see right through his façade, so it's all business with them.
Resi 6 then is Leon dropping act after it really did him no favours at all throughout 4,
and/or because he's matured enough in the nine years since to realise that he doesn't
need the façade. It's one of the reasons why, cool bit of characterisation though it was,
I'm not really upset that he's most likely not going to be that way in REM4KE.
One change I will make to this Leon is how a few early scenes make him come off like
he's the new guy, despite having dealt with two outbreaks in the main series,
and an extra three in spin-offs by now. Him struggling to shoot Adam makes sense,
but the way he pleads with his zombified friend can easily come off less like Leon
is struggling to accept what is happening and more like he doesn't know that Adam
is gone.123 To the point that he almost gets Helena killed through his hesitation.
Second, the scene where Leon sees some guys in danger over security cameras and
wants to go and help despite how fruitless it is and has to be reined in by the more
realistic Helena - presumably to give her some moral ambiguity against Leon's more
heroic traits - even though this would make far more sense to swap the roles and have
the more seasoned Leon have to convince the naïve newbie of how things work. I'd also
have whoever it is try to act long before the zombies reach the guys and start eating them
because obviously it's impossible to save them now. That was pretty dumb. But that's about it.
So then, what am I going to change aside from that? Rather than Leon himself,
it's pretty much everyone around him that I'll be changing instead. See, Resident Evil has a
nasty habit of introducing new characters for one game and then doing little-to-nothing more
with them. One-off characters are not inherently a problem, of course. But when even major recurring
characters only recur occasionally because the series is obsessed with two characters
in particular, this feels like much more of an issue than it does with other series.
And there are plenty of opportunities to have recurring characters, where we have a character
that is functionally the same as an existing character but they're new for some reason.
Parker from Revelations comes to mind immediately. Big burly man who's looking out for Jill. He's
just Barry Burton without the family drama. I've even heard the role was supposed to go
to Barry originally. And Parker's only appearance outside of this game is the Heavenly Island manga
where he teams up with Claire, which is a similar trajectory to Barry anyway. So why
bother making a new character who will have only two appearances instead of giving those
appearances to a beloved, established character who also only has a handful of appearances?
A more relevant example is Helena Harper. She is a government agent with long brown hair,
voiced by Laura Bailey, who is working with Leon, and who is motivated by her sister's
connection to a bioterror plot. Between 4 and 6, Leon appeared in the CGI film, Degeneration,
where he worked with Angela Miller, a Harvardville police officer with long brown hair,
voiced by Laura Bailey, who is motivated by her brother's connection to a bioterror plot. Aside
from Helena having a bit more of an edge to her, they're basically the same character.
Some people might argue against including a character from a movie because "you shouldn't
need to have watched that film to know who she is" but Leon already knows Helena to some
extent by the start of the campaign anyway, and then you have Chris and Piers who have
been working together for years before their campaign starts; so nothing really changes by
taking a character with pre-established history with Leon and making them Leon's partner, aside
from that history being something that you can actually track down and experience for yourself.
Of course, you can't just give Angela Helena's exact role, but not much really needs to change.
Now she's gone from cop to government agent, just like Leon, deepening their connection. This also
creates a greater rift between the two when Leon learns she was part of the bioterror plot that
took the life of his good friend Adam. It's now a deep betrayal for Leon. As for Deborah,
she's not Angela's sister, like she is with Helena, since there is no way Angela and
Curtis having a sister wouldn't come up during Degeneration, given how much the plot revolves
around their family history. Instead, she'd be Angela's best friend, partner or girlfriend.
The latter is unlikely for 2012, but a partner works, given how Leon's campaign sees them both
losing someone close to them due to Simmons' machinations and Leon coming to forgive Helena
for her role in that as they work together to survive and bring Simmons to justice.
I've another change I'd make here. President Adam Benford is Leon's close friend. Presumably, this
relates to Leon saving the president's daughter Ashley in Resi 4- Oh, spoilers for the remake,
I guess. But that is President Graham, not Benford. I wonder if the team wrote the story
under the idea that this was the same president, who became close to Leon for saving his daughter,
only to realise that would be difficult to make work, since a US President can only serve
two four-year terms, and Resi 4 is set nine years before this. But he could have gotten
re-elected in 2012 after losing or even passing on the 2004 election to protect Ashley. That,
or he is now the former president who is speaking on college campuses now that he is out of office.
Turning Adam Benford into Adam Graham does a lot for the audience's investment in Leon's
plight because we have a connection to him through Ashley and the implications
of what our actions as Leon in Resi 4 did to lead to this friendship. As is, Adam's
first scene is his zombified death, and we get a flashback of him calling Leon his friend later.
We can further develop this by replacing the existing tutorial. Instead of a flashforward
to the end of the game that forces the player to do one of the most annoying
sections of the game twice, we instead flesh out Leon's introduction. He's walking through
the campus with Adam and is introduced to Helena/Angela onscreen instead of skipping
over that. The two go to investigate a shady figure and the player learns how to run here
instead of forcing walking on the player every time they replay Leon's first chapter, even
though they could have finished Chris and Jake's entire campaigns by then. They catch the perp,
who is infected by an implant or something to keep them from talking. The two deal with them
and run back as they hear a commotion. Adam has already been bitten by the time they find him
and they rush him to the dean's office, where Adam turns and Leon is forced to shoot him.
Leon: "Adam!"
Maybe we have the two search for Ashley who is on the campus too,
and help her get to a chopper that only has room for her, forcing the two to find another
way while she is evacuated safely. Leon, of course, has to tell her that he couldn't save
her father just to twist the knife and help the player better empathise with Leon, and see if
they can forgive his partner after discovering the circumstances that brought her into this.
So, with these changes, Leon gets to show off his experience to a relative newcomers;
said newcomer now has deeper ties to the setting and to Leon,
making her part in the bioterror attack more impactful for Leon; and the tutorial isn't a
pointless and ultimately non-canon re-tread of one of the worst parts of the game.
And this isn't a change for Resi 6 itself, but Vendetta having Leon become a depressed
alcoholic as a result of some brand new offscreen terror attack he failed to prevent just baffles
me. Make it the result of his experiences in 6 instead - he lost his best friend and over
70,000 people as he himself puts it, so have this state he needs to work himself
out of in this film be a result of events the audience has experienced themselves as
Leon. 123And also don't have him kill innocent people with explosive car crashes during the
dog chase scene. How anyone thought that was a good idea is beyond me.
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Today's recommended video is Why Resident Evil 6 is Awesome by The Gaming brit,
because Resi 6 is a really good game and I'm tired of dumb people who don't understand that.