Resident Evil 4 and What We Leave Behind

the rise and fall of the KBash show

“Seven years.”

It’s one of the subtitles of some segment of the Super Smash Bros. Melee guidebook I read years back. Apparently it’s the period of time dividing “young” and “adult” Link, and it’s been stuck with me since. I’ve lived through seven years four times and I’m partway through a fifth.

It’s completely, irreparably insane that we’re so incapable of viewing other people complexly. Who hasn’t flattened whole people to a palmful of traits? She’s an awful person. He’s entitled. Funny, stupid, good at Street Fighter. Makes good party snacks, but gets a little weird about politics. I’ll cop to that.

It’s probably an evolutionary necessity - I can barely remember half my friends’ birthdays: fat chance I’ll remember all their little changes through the years, how they liked something and let it slide or changed their mind on a social issue. Reduction is a survival strategy.

But seven years is surely enough time for devastation, path-altering, and possibly joy. I’ve been on YouTube for about as long.

I’ve long touted Resident Evil 4 as my favorite video game, but I also haven’t stopped to inquire into that claim in years. The last time I played it was via the PC port in my small apartment on the west coast of South Korea, nestled beside a bar with walls thin enough to obliterate my sleep schedule anytime someone decided to cause a scene. 씨발 indeed.

I’ve wanted to make a tackily titled update video - The Rise and Fall of the KBash Show - for some time, but haven’t made the effort. People click what they want to see, not update videos. Those are reserved for Patreon talks and boring stuff. They universally fail to find an audience. I’ve wanted to make this video for about a year, in lieu of a typical Q&A vlog, to consolidate information - talk about where the show was years ago, how it’s changed, and where it’s going. You can’t make videos for 8 years without mutating, at least if you’re serious about improving. 

Games writing and gaming YouTube are pretty inextricably linked, if you have training, anyway. I learned over the course of years that the vision I saw for myself was a mirage, a vague thing I could outline in my mind, but never nail down. I didn’t have the raw charisma or camera presence to be the Bigtime Goober Gamer I thought I could, and so I leaned increasingly into the academic: critiques, analyses, history. And while I found varying levels of success in all kinds of different initiatives, the core principles are roughly the same - entertain and cut deep. 

The obvious Egoraptor blood pulses through my oldest material. I wanted to say worthwhile things, so I went for the throat, but critically not for the sake of incisiveness. Instead, I used the veil of critique as a means to denigrate, disengage, and otherwise maintain a certain distance, an air of superiority over what I played. I don’t like my older material, sometimes even things I made a single year prior, because I’m always changing, always rotating new ideas in my mind to better match a vision of something worth saying on the internet. I don’t mean to demand meaning from my work, but it’s easy to see pitfalls and errors in retrospect.

Seven years is a long time. It’s enough time to run through a series of jobs, explode an entire career opportunity, face practical, substanceless ego death, it’s enough time to get married, become a proper adult, take on responsibilities, learn to cook, gain and lose hobbies, gain and lose friends, and most importantly, think in many different ways about video games. The younger me would not appreciate Monster Hunter because the younger me was too busy holding fast to the things he thought he knew at the exclusion of the novel.

I don’t know what my career will look like in five years. I’ve already gone a shorter and further distance than I ever imagined, and I only have open road ahead of me. 

I played Resident Evil 4 over seven years ago, and before that a good few more. I don’t believe in the prestigification of video games, I rail against AAA initiatives, and in light of titles like Knights in the Nightmare, Monster Hunter, Steambot Chronicles, and Little Goody Two Shoes, believe that a little cruft makes an experience memorable, and arguably more worthwhile than something made for clean consumption.

Resident Evil 4 is a flashy game, and a memorable run, but a profoundly smooth experience. Every challenge, every stage a mere novacaine tooth pull, a measured leap into a ball pit. For something that scared me stiff when I was 9, you’re handed an awful lot of power. One single headshot, a well-placed round, and you’ve greenlit a roundhouse hitbox that would make Soulcalibur characters blush. Resident Evil 4 is a lying bastard of a power fantasy. 

The real terror is the possibility that me, the one who went through all that change we’ll flatten to “he likes weird games,” won’t see what I did before.

I can’t imagine that’s completely true - favorites exist for a reason. They dig their claws in, and some memories can’t be erased. Resident Evil 4 was the first horror game I ever played, and when I finally gritted my teeth and powered through it, felt genuinely accomplished on the other end. Like I actually overcame something. That’s the real reason I like Resident Evil 4. Smooth run or not, beautiful graphics and chunky gunshots and brutal blood splatters notwithstanding, I had a tiny personal arc with the game, and that means more than any amount of litigating the Brilliant Design of Resident Evil 4.

I haven’t even glanced sideways at the remake. You know the story. I’ll have to run them all because that’s how the channel originally got views and you’re supposed to do what got you views in the first place. If I only do a few, people won’t stop asking when the next set’s coming. Noah Gervais did them all, and other people did them all, and man do I really need to turn my engagement into repeat gaming binges? Will I ever find anything truly valuable to say that way? The strategy helped me speedrun games critique - I wouldn’t have advanced nearly as quickly without shotgunning as much as I did, but the price is having more to say and less time to say it. Full series retrospectives aren’t cutting it for me. I’m looking for a story.

There’s a story in there already - comparing the original and the remake - but even that’s been done to death on YouTube, so we’re left with the personal, and that feels entirely humiliating having gone through another arc with games as a medium, significantly later than the one predicating this RE4 comparison concept, that’s turned me off from AAA titles, prestige gaming, and anything that would see me use my platform in support of the already supported. Not a lot of people get chances like I do. Not everyone gets to blare Knights in the Nightmare at folks.

I doubt RE4, its remake, or any other Resident Evil game will ever blow me away. I’ll like ‘em just fine, but they’re never going to change how I think about games. Maybe the older ones, but even then, I know what to expect. Novel experiences are incredibly rare, and you don’t go out of your way to find them. You stumble onto them, sometimes you bounce off them, but that feeling is irreplaceable. There are so, so many good games. Great games, even. I want the games that make me fall in love with the medium in new ways.

So I don’t need to tell people in a neat little video how I’ve changed or where I’m going. They’re either along for the ride or they took off a ways back. Some day I’ll be the thing someone else won’t want to look back on. Some day I’ll be the person someone else is hoping to find. The KBash Show as it was is already gone, but another is always surfacing.