Resident Evil 6 Debut Trailer Analysis
Resident Evil 6 has finally been announced and Capcom has unveiled a juicy trailer to get us all hyped. On the surface, the game looks great. Chris Redfield and Leon Kennedy are coming back, both with their own unique stories and zombie-related outbreaks to handle. However, if you look deeper, you’ll find that this trailer gives us some hints about what the game will play like. Combine a night of obsessively watching the trailer frame by frame with the information revealed by Capcom’s official press release and you have a speculation smorgasbord.
Feel free to post your own theories in the comments section after viewing the trailer for yourself.
Leon S. Kennedy and Helena Harper
Leon Kennedy and the President—presumably the same President whose daughter he saved in Resident Evil 4—are talking about the threat that Bio Organic Weapons pose to the American people. The President has decided that he will come clean to the world about all of the events of the Resident Evil series. This means spilling the beans about Raccoon City, Las Plagas, and more, so hopefully mankind can come together globally and fight the menace.
According to Capcom’s press release, this very attitude is what made the president a target for a B.O.W. attack. When the camera pans over to him, we see that he has been zombified in the more traditional Resident Evil sense—grey skin, decomposing flesh, and so on, rather than Las Plagas-style—and Leon has to take him down. This would seem to allude to the fact that the T- and G-viruses are coming back in this game.
The zombie President shuffles toward a brunette whom Capcom is calling Helena Harper. One can assume that this means the partner-centric gameplay of Resident Evil 5 is returning. In addition, Helena seems to blame herself for the zombie outbreak. Why? We don’t really know. It’s possible that she was deceived by umbrella or some other organization.
Moving on, we see a brief shot of Leon walking through some sort of dark hallway before the trailer cuts to Tall Oaks. 70,000 people in this town are infected with “the virus” (once again assumed to be the T- or G-virus here). It’s an outbreak on the scale of Raccoon City. We aren’t sure how Leon got from D.C. to Tall Oaks, but the rest of the trailer seems to allude to the game taking place on a global scale, so there will probably be quite a bit of traveling along the way. Ingrid Hunnigan, Leon’s radio contact from Resident Evil 4, delivers this message, signifying that she will be returning as well.
We then get to see a few glimpses of gameplay. Leon seems to play exactly as he did in Resident Evil 4. He has to stop to aim, center his laser sight on an enemy, and fire. He seems to be fighting classic grey-skinned zombies once more among the fiery wreckage of Tall Oaks. Context-sensitive commands return, as we see Leon wrestle off a zombie that gets too close before roundhouse kicking another group away. As an interesting note, the kicking scene takes place on what appears to be the steps of a mansion. Perhaps we will end up going through another zombie-infested house for old time’s sake?
Chris Redfield and the BSAA
Chris Redfield is flying over China in a helicopter with the rest of his BSAA anti-terrorism team. Sheva and Jill don’t seem to be around, which is a little disappointing. Chris and his team drop down into the middle of what appears to be a riot. We are immediately taken to gameplay scenes showing Chris and a whole squad of BSAA agents running into the panicked city. Chris’s squad seems to obey his orders and move independently of him, and in most of the cutscenes we see them together in groups of four. Might this be alluding to squad-based gameplay, similar to Gears of War or Ghost Recon?
Speaking of Gears of War, the gameplay seems to have changed drastically for Chris to a more Gears of War-style cover-based shooter. Unlike Leon, who seems to stop and shoot in a traditional RE sense, Chris can move while shooting, duck behind cover, and even roadie run.
Unlike the traditional zombies that Leon is fighting, Chris is fighting our old friends, Las Plagas. Intelligent enemies line up to use firearms and melee weapons against him. When shot, their heads and arms explode into tentacled monstrosities. We also get to see shots of Chris riding a tank and other vehicles through the streets. It all seems like an action game or a shooter rather than survival horror. After a few more scenes of some mutated spider people and a quote from Chris that “they’re regenerating” (perhaps a throwback to the regenerators of Resident Evil 4), we switch over to another group of protagonists.
Maybe Alex Wesker and Maybe Ashley Graham?
A scarred guy with a buzz cut and a bad attitude takes center stage. The first words out of his mouth are negotiations for his fee when all of this is over. Later it’s revealed that he is an ex-mercenary of some sort. Strangely enough, his gameplay doesn’t seem to involve firearms at all. Instead, he seems to let his fists do the talking. He is shown taking out groups of assailants one by one. There is even some gameplay footage of him going toe-to-toe with what appear to be other human, non-zombie opponents. Interestingly, he appears to be able to move much faster than normal and be able to perform high-flying feats of acrobatics. This has already led many fans to speculate that he is Alex Wesker, Albert Wesker’s brother and a survivor of the same experimentation that gave Wesker his superhuman abilities. He wears a similar black trench coat.
The rest of the gameplay shown appears to be very partner-centric. We see our nameless buzz-cut protagonist running through dilapidated city streets and jumping from rooftop to rooftop with a blonde companion who looks and sounds mysteriously like Ashley Graham, the President’s daughter from Resident Evil 4. At one point, she injects our protagonist with adrenaline in the same way Sheva would inject Chris when his life was low in Resident Evil 5. Later, this protagonist injects himself while talking about how “the world needs his blood.” Perhaps he has produced some zombie antibodies? Either way, this guy plans on selling his miracle cure blood to the highest bidder. The several scenes of injection have lead many fans to believe that there will be some sort of infection mechanic that you will have to deal with to prevent him from becoming a zombie.
The enemy that these two seem to be facing is rather impressive. It appears to be some sort of Tyrant/Nemesis or El Gigante decked out in steampunk machinery. It has a robotic hand, a muzzled face, and open wounds and sores all over its body. I’m going to bet on the Nemesis option, as we get to see his lower body in one scene and it is covered in the familiar leather buckled pants that the Nemesis T-Type has. At no point do our two protagonists decide to fight it. Instead, a majority of their gameplay footage shows them running away (possibly similar to Resident Evil 5’s “Lost in Nightmares” DLC). The final scene shows our new protagonist getting captured by the thing’s whirring robotic hand.
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