Resident Evil 4’s Creator Explains What Makes a Good Remake
Video game remakes are everywhere these days. We’ve just had a new version of Silent Hill 2, the Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy is in full swing, and a recreation of Metal Gear Solid 3 is on the horizon. But few people know remakes quite as well as Shinji Mikami. The co-creator of Resident Evil has watched teams craft highly-successful recreations of his own games, and back in 2001 even helmed the remake of the first project he ever headed up - making him the director of both Resident Evil and Resident Evil.
So, if there’s anyone who knows what makes a good remake, it’s Shinji Mikami. “I think the comprehensive and fundamental understanding of what it was that made the original work in the first place is probably the most important point of a good remake,” he tells me.
“Everything from the ground up, basically,” he explains. “There's a few examples of that with certain series that Capcom has put out.” He is, of course, talking about the recent run of Resident Evil remakes, the most recent of which is the almost universally-celebrated Resident Evil 4. Mikami has played it and offers glowing praise for the team at Capcom.
“I thought that it was really well-made,” he says. He’s particularly impressed by how the remake handles the more nuanced details of combat, such as the timing between aiming and shooting, which in the original was finely balanced to ensure mounting pressure and tension. “I thought that they showed a really good understanding of that element,” he tells me.
“Another thing I thought was really well done was the way they took the half-assed scenario that I just wrote up in two weeks and really built up on that and really fleshed it out,” he adds. “They showed that they really understood the characters and their interactions. They showed a good understanding of the backbone of each character. And they took not just the scenario itself, but even the dialogue, and they improved all that stuff so that was really great.”
My conversation with Mikami was part of
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