In brief: Resident Evil 4 Remake launches on Friday. Capcom dropped one final marketing trailer/video for it over the weekend to celebrate. It's a mock anime TV show with the cumbersome title, "Resident Evil 4 Anime PV Resident Evil Masterpiece Theater - 'Leon and the Mysterious Village' EP 1."
Update (March 22): Resident Evil 4 Anime PV Resident Evil Masterpiece Theater - 'Leon and the Mysterious Village' was not just a studio Nippon one-off. Capcom Asia has dropped episode 2 of the apparent series of short videos that all end with Leon dying (so far).
You can watch the video at the end of the article. I won't spoil it for you except by saying it mocks how many times you have to save Ashley in RE4. I'll post more episodes here as Capcom releases them.
This inaugural "episode" follows Leon to the village full of infected people in his search for Ashley. The short was created by the famous anime studio Nippon Animation. It is voiced in Japanese, but Capcom was kind enough to release a version with English subtitles.
The clip is less than one minute long, but I feel it sums up the game perfectly---as long as the final product is as frustratingly hard as the recently released demo. I'll spoil it after you watch the video below.
That brief video comedically encapsulates my experience with the RE4 demo. Make your way through a few relatively easy-to-kill or evade zombies only to encounter a horde that you neither have the ammo nor game mechanics to fight. Take an axe to the head, a pitchfork to the gut, or any number of other ways to die, and game over.
Call me a whiney b***h or whatever---I did not find the Resident Evil 4 demo fun. If I had to describe it, it's like Capcom wanted to try its hand at a Souls-like but failed miserably.
The controls are clunky, especially while aiming for a headshot, which is practically required to conserve ammo since dropping an enemy takes two hits to the head. It forces you to use your knife a lot, which is fun when you are one-on-one with an infected but fighting more than one or two---forget about it.
The ammo is either extremely limited or well hidden. I didn't find too much ammo before dying a hundred deaths. So to face the horde of villagers at the end of the demo, you basically shouldn't shoot any infected on your way there, which, let's be honest, is not any fun.
You are supposed to be able to stealth kill enemies if you crouch and sneak up behind them, which I would love. The problem is that I could never get it to trigger a stealth kill. I don't know if the positioning has to be just right, but every time I tried, I just ended up meleeing the villager, alerting all the nearby baddies.
I'm not a big fan of games of the Demon Souls variety. Or maybe I'm just too old and don't have the patience for the learning curve. I quickly grow bored of watching load screens or trekking through areas I've already gone through a dozen times, but maybe the game is different from the demo. It's getting decent early reviews, so perhaps I was playing it wrong. Unfortunately, the demo turned me off, so I'm saving my money for something else.
You can still try the demo on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC before buying it, which I highly recommend. You might want a walkthrough for this one. Resident Evil 4 Remake launches March 24 on all platforms.