Remember the Resident Evil 5 video interview that was Famitsu Magazine we posted a few weeks ago? It was all in Japanese so most of us couldn’t understand what the developers were saying about the game. Worry no further, the same video has been released but with English subtitles!
Head over to GameVideos and take a look at it once more.
1UP have took some vital points out of the translated video, mentioning:
“We settled on the fact that we really wanted to show the origins of the virus. So for the setting, we thought ‘How about using the place where human kind was born?’ Well, I’m not a scientist so I don’t know how things might change in the future, but we thought we would use Africa, which is now called the birthplace of humanity, as the model. That’s how we came to use a place in Africa as the setting for [Resident Evil 5].”
and also mentioned:
“I looked at the Resident Evil 5 trailer and I was like, ‘Wow, clearly no one black worked on this game,’” said Croal. “…The point isn’t that you can’t have black zombies. There was a lot of imagery in that trailer that dovetailed with classic racist imagery [...] There was stuff like even before the point in the trailer where the crowd turned into zombies. They’re sort of being, in sort of post-modern parlance, they’re sort of ‘othered.’ They’re hidden in shadows, you can barely see their eyes, and the perspective of the trailer is not even someone who’s coming to help the people. It’s like they’re all dangerous; they all need to be killed [...] And given the history, given the not so distant post-colonial history [in Africa], you would say to yourself, why would you uncritically put up those images?”
Check out 1UP’s article about the translated video.
