Hello and welcome to The Back Page, A Video Games Podcast. My name is Matthew Castle, and I am joined, as always, by Matthew Castle. Hello. I’m afraid we do not have a Samuel Roberts today. My podcasting partner in crime is fallen ill. For the first time ever, he’s broken this incredible streak of appearances, which I know he’ll be kicking himself over. But do not worry, because have I got a special guest for you to help carry us through this Shinji Mikami flavoured episode. We are welcoming back the wonderful Richard Stanton. Hey Rich, how you doing? Pretty good. I mean, I’m a bit tuckered out after kidnapping Sam earlier, but more or less recovered now. Oh, I see. This is all a ploy just to get some alone time with me. I just thought I’d add a little extra bit onto your Back Page lore. Oh God, that already heaving, wheezing massive lore doesn’t need any more bullshit. But I’m curious to see how this episode goes. Absolutely certain it’s going to be wonderful because Rich, you are always brilliant on this podcast. But I am quite nervous about people realizing how much heavy lifting Samuel does, how impeccable his planning is and how chaotic I am without said plan and without as much prep. So yeah, let’s see how it goes. I mean, if it’d make you feel better, I could kind of do a Sam impression. Hello and welcome to the Back Pagebot. That was terrible actually. It was bad, but you know. That sounded like one of the guys from Last of the Summer Wine. That had sort of like an elderly Yorkshireman energy. Like, hello there, welcome to Back Pagebot. Yeah, alright, let’s just forget that ever happened. Let’s forget that nonsense and get to the matter at hand. We’re talking today about Shinji Mikami and this is the Shinji Mikami Hall of Fame. I know Sam will be kicking himself that he can’t appear on this. This is a very special developer to this podcast. We love his games. We love what he stands for. He has been involved with or adjacent to so many of our favorite games that repeatedly come up on this podcast. But we have in Rich a similar Shinji Mikami fanatic, so I’m confident that we can have a pretty good stab at this. Yeah, I kind of feel like I should have his poster on my wall or something. I don’t, to be clear, but he’s definitely one of my favorite designers of all time. Someone who I’d say, if you’re interested in games, it’s impossible to ignore. Like, even if he’s not your favorite, he’s had such an outsize influence with his titles. And a fair amount of longevity as well. You know, he’s been making games for over three decades, I would say, in that time. A ton of classic titles, some slightly off-the-wall stuff as well. But I do think there’s certain commonalities when he really hits his stride that his games have. They’re always exciting, they’re always brash. As he becomes more, I guess, accomplished, you’d say, he starts playing around with control systems more. He’s always had an instinct to experiment, and I think he’s never lost that. But, you know, we’ll come to this when we go through the games themselves and the specifics. Absolutely. I wanted to kick off, though, Rich, as we always do, we like to have a little bit of preamble. God, this is so fucking unnatural, me hosting this. I’m going to leave all this in because I know the listeners will get a kick out of hearing me absolutely biffing my way through this. Sam is such a pro. Like, hosting is like an entirely different skill set. You are doing very, very well, Matthew. But Rich, how’s it going? What’s been going on with you? I haven’t been playing much in the way of new games recently apart from, conveniently enough, the Resident Evil 4 remake. I have been playing a lot of Counter-Strike 2 because I got in the beta for that. Yeah, I’m not very good at Counter-Strike. I’ve just played an absolute shitload of it. Although the thing I really liked about what Valve did with that beta, I know you’re not a Counter-Strike guy so you might not have seen this, but… If you’ve played a certain amount, you’ve got a chance of getting selected for the beta. I think it’s like three or four percent of the player base at the moment. The only exception is if you’ve been banned previously for griefing or cheating, then Valve’s just like, nah. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. It’s just you don’t get Counter-Strike 2. Tough luck. You’ve never crossed that line. I play hard but fair to win, Matthew. No, never had anything like that. I did worry whether there was a time in my life where my internet was just absolutely awful, but all I wanted to do was play Counter-Strike. Right. And I dropped out of some games then and I got banned. Like it banned me for a week or something because I dropped out of like two or three competitive matches. But that’s all I’ve ever done. In fact, I was on the side of the law. I used to do Overwatch in it. Do you know what that is? So this, not to be confused with Blizzard’s game, you opt into it and what it does is it sends you a clip of somebody who’s been reported for cheating. And it’ll be like a machine edited two minute highlight reel of their match. And you have to watch it. And then at the end it’ll say, you know, did you think you saw any of these types of cheating? And you tick the boxes. You’re like, you’re sort of on trial by a jury of your peers. Yeah, you’re like the counter counter terrorist. My God, does that make you a narc? Let’s not think about it that way. It makes you an upstanding member of the community. I haven’t done it in years. That’s wild. Have I told you about the time I had to do an hour long presentation about Counter Strike? Wow, I would have loved to have seen that. This was at EGX about four or five years ago, and it was quite chaotically organized. And I can’t remember if it was Graham Smith or John T. But one of them was like, we’ve got a guy coming in who designed the map Dust in Counter Strike. We need someone to host the session and interview him about this map. And like, this is about two hours before the session. So I ended up having to do that. Interviewing a man about a map in a game I haven’t played. I read like an account of the making of that map that he’d written on his blog and just tried to reverse engineer some questions so that he would basically tell me that blog post word for word again live. I’m sure you were a total pro, nobody in the audience even noticed. I could see it in the eyes of the audience though, that they were like, fuck this guy, he has no idea what he’s talking about. Well, I’d be like, oh man, the ramp, the legendary ramp, tell me about it. Yeah, the Counter-Strike 2B is limited at the moment to just Dust 2 actually. Right, is the ramp back? I mean, it’s got a ramp in the middle of the map. I’m not actually sure whether you’re talking about Dust or Dust 2 at the moment. It’s probably Dust 2. They’re very different things, both have areas that can be described as ramps, but it’s much more pronounced than Dust 1, I would say. Well, we’re not here to talk about Dust 2 or Dust 2. Oh, look at you segway out as quickly as you can. This is the Counter-Strike pod now. I need to get the fuck out of this, I think that is basically what I’m saying. You mentioned Resident Evil 4 Remake there. I absolutely, I loved your review of this. I was just so thrilled to see you back on the Resident Evil beat. Always loved your Resident Evil writing. You were like a little cooler on it than most. You still gave it an 80. Do you want to talk us through your thoughts? I mean, I definitely was lower than the vast majority. I didn’t really, I haven’t really read any other reviews of it, but I know that it got, you know, nines and tens pretty much across the board. And you know, it’s a great game. I had a lot of fun with it. Probably the issue I had is that I do think the originals, you know, obviously it’s nonsense to call any game the greatest game of all time. But if I was to pick like the five most important games to me, Resident Evil 4 would probably be in there. It’s actually the game that made me want to be a games journalist when I was in my early twenties when it came out. I got it on GameCube. Well, obviously I got it on GameCube. It was only on GameCube initially. I couldn’t believe how good it was. You know, I’d like, I’ve always been really into games. I’ve always, you know, had consoles, been interested in the latest releases and stuff. I mean, I’ve had it with a few other games, but really nothing has blown me away as much as this did. And I was just obsessed with it for pretty much a month after I got it. All I did was like go to work, come home and play Resident Evil 4. I lived quite near to where I worked, and I used to come home in my lunch hour to play it for half an hour. Just couldn’t get enough of it. Bought it again when it was re-released over the years in various formats. Probably my favourite re-release of it actually was in hindsight the Wii one, because that added so much fun to it. The people who say it, oh it breaks, it makes it way too easy, it kind of does, but also by that time I’d probably finished that game 75 times. I wasn’t really playing it for the challenge anymore. I thought the aim controls in that one were so, so well done. I think the only version I haven’t played actually is the VR one. But to get back to remake, that was probably one of the things I had that is perhaps a flaw in me as a critic for this game. Because, you know, it is a remake. It’s a remake of one of the games that I think is just fantastic and one of the most influential our industry has ever seen. And I thought they did a great job with the opening half of it. And some people will say Resident Evil 4 itself falls off in the second half, which is kind of true. I felt the second half really didn’t stick the landing. And what came to niggle at me more than anything was not that it was missing one or two things towards the end. It felt like it was missing a lot. You know, like when I was going through the castle, there were three things in quick succession that I missed. So there’s the bit where the cage drops down on you and you’re locked in there with one of the Garidors, is it? Anyway, there’s a blind claw dude in there. There’s various Ganados. In that, this is a cut scene. Like you see the cage kind of drop on Leon and he starts firing and then it goes into the Ashley sequence, which I thought in this one the Ashley sequences were very good. And then almost I can’t remember if it’s before or after in the original game, which really speaks to my memory given how many times I played it. It has these two rooms in quick succession. You go in the first one, there’s a load of the little, the little skittery last plague ass, whatever they’re called, the little spider like ones that go around. And in the remake, they’re real bastards. They did a real good job. Oh, they did an amazing job. I couldn’t even remember if they were in the original because they were so difficult in this. They were so sort of elevated. I was like, I cannot remember there being anything as horrible as this. Yeah, they were, but they didn’t act in nearly such a threatening manner. They were like the crap parasite. When one of those appeared, you were like, oh, thank God, I’ll just get my knife out. But anyway, you went into the room, there were those on the floor and then a load of spikes on the roof and the roof starts coming down towards you and it’s got like four jewels and you shoot the jewels and then it stops and you go through. And then immediately afterwards, it’s just like a room where a bulldozer comes through the wall with no explanation. It’s got a giant spike on the front, of course, and it just chases Leon up this tunnel. And you have to, I think you can snipe the driver. Like there’s various ways to deal with it. But it’s the great little quick fire. Like these sequences are like a minute long almost. But it’s just like, here’s an idea for you. Here’s something else. And it’s like, it really made that castle feel like a death trap. In a way that this one felt more like a kind of long windy corridor to me with some enemies and some of the same beats. But it was missing that kind of richness of like, right, here’s this challenge. Oh, you got through that one. How about this? How about this next? It wasn’t the one instant I missed. It was like, I feel like they cut a lot. And maybe it was for tonal reasons. Like, I think this game takes itself a lot more seriously than the original did. Yeah. And that’s not a bad thing. You know, like, I think the script in many ways is an improvement. But it’s also lost a lot of that just sheer schlock factor. That, um, four, I would say, I would say it reveled in it. I think it kind of really enjoyed that kind of B-movie action horror tone. You know, and it removed U3, a boss I really liked, this giant scorpion monster you fight in cages suspended above a pit. And it’s like, why is that there? Capcom’s designers are like, why not? You know, like, get through the cage, Leon. And it pulls back from that stuff. And I feel that was very much a creative decision where they were like, we don’t want our game to have that kind of kaleidoscopic craziness, if you like. We want it to remain a tiny bit more grounded and in keeping with the tone of the other games. Um, because, you know, this remake project is obviously a seriously big thing now and it’s going to continue. They’re going to remake the other ones. And I think they want them all somewhat tonally consistent. And I kind of blame that for it. All of which is a long-winded way of saying, I thought the last bit of remake could be a bit of a slog. And certainly some of the very last fights on the island, I thought were not very imaginative at all in how they were put together. Just a big mass of guys running at you. That’s not what I love about Rezi 4. I definitely think the way they handle the Salazar statue is really pitiful in the remake. That joke’s so good it almost bears repeating twice. I said, it’s a real bust. I did laugh when I saw it on my phone. I was really excited about what that might look like in this age of graphics. And oh, it’s just like a pillar that sort of sprays fire and rotates in a room. That’s such a step away. I’d almost rather they didn’t have it at all. So obviously we got review guidelines for the review embargo. I was reading through them, which I generally just look at what they don’t want me to mention. Because some games companies, I don’t know why, they’ll send you these review guides that are like a walkthrough. And it’s like, well, actually, I’d quite like to enjoy this game for myself. So usually I just look at the spoilers, like what should I not write about? And in there, it was like, don’t mention Salazar’s statue, which I actually did in my review. What a fuck you to that review guide. That kind of got me excited, because I was like, well, I know not everything’s in it. But the amazing bit, and we should say for listeners who haven’t played the original Resident Evil 4, you’re basically at the end of the giant castle sequence. You’re in this huge, like, cathedral-like hall, and there’s a big path with water either side of it. And as you start walking on this path, a gigantic, mechanoid statue of Salazar, the little Napoleon dude antagonist, just starts chasing you. And you’re, I think it’s a QTE, isn’t it? You’re hammering the button. And, you know, just this giant thing’s clomping after you. And yeah, it’s just another of those things that takes a minute, but like really sticks in your mind. Afterwards, you’re like, wow. That one in particular really kind of stung, I thought. I also really disliked that after fighting the lake monster, I think it’s called Dos Logos or something, at the end of the original game, as you’ve killed it and as it’s sinking, your leg gets trapped by a rope. So as this giant thing’s sinking, like it’s going to pull you down and you have to just hack at the rope with your knife. And that’s all it is, just hacking at the rope with your knife. But again, it’s like, you think this fight’s finished, all of a sudden 30 seconds of excitement. And then finally it’s like, now you can breathe. And yeah, I think those things, like in terms of pacing, like each one individually probably isn’t very much. But when you get to the end of the experience, I certainly felt there was like, like I felt the original game didn’t leave anything on the table. Everything that team could think of went in that game. Like everyone who shipped that game must have been like, yes, that is the best product I’m ever going to work on. And I just kind of don’t get the same sense from this, not to disrespect Capcom’s current designers or anything. I just think it’s like, it’s a different era and the original game probably went out to shake up the industry in a way that was never an option for this one. This one was almost kind of trammeled by its own status. Like, I don’t want to be down on it though. Like I had a good experience, a great experience with it. It’s just, yeah, when you have that kind of reverence for the source material, I guess, maybe you’re always kind of on a hiding to nothing and so is the game. It’s a good jumping in point for what we’re talking about this episode. Obviously Resident Evil 4, directed by the mighty Shinji Mikami. And it feels like a series that kind of hangs over him a bit. This is certainly someone who has to like deal with reputation and the games that came before him and has an interesting relationship with those. But we will get to that when we talk about his games. Resident Evil 4 to me is the kind of jewel in the collection. But you look across his games and he’s tried his hands at so many different things. He almost seems sort of restless in his desire to move on to other genres. And did you ever watch the Archipel documentary with him? Oh, I did see. Yeah, I did watch it, but I can’t actually remember much about it. One of the most fascinating segments in it is when he is working with Platinum. Like he’s technically part of the company. Yeah. So he set up with them. I actually interviewed Inaba about this and he said, yeah, it was always the deal. Like basically when they were talking about leaving Capcom and setting up Platinum, you know, there was all this kind of talent from Clover Team, Clover Team itself coming from Production Studio 4, which itself comes from Mikami’s Resident Evil team. So there were a lot of staff that had worked with Mikami, a lot of people whose careers he had an interest in. And basically he agreed to co-found Platinum with them. And the deal was he would, you know, make one game with them, give them, I don’t know what it was, three or four years of his career. And then he was going off to do his own thing. And that’s exactly what he did. What was interesting about this Archipel documentary, he talks about his time at Platinum and pitching games and, you know, the regrets, certain ideas he loved. And that didn’t come to fruition. He talks about an open world game in a Blade Runner type world. He talks about a sort of cell shaded adventure with a sort of Ghibli-esque vibe about a girl who is in a town where at night all the citizens turn into animals and has to solve a mystery about this transformation. And he talks about a Wii U game about a patient in a hospital who is trying to track down a serial killer who could be anyone else in the hospital. So she doesn’t know if it’s another patient, a doctor, a janitor or whatever. And she’s trying to use light telekinetic powers to sort of worm out this mysterious person. The powers that be at the time, Sega, who they were pitching these ideas to, just weren’t interested in any of them. And he ends up making Vanquish, which we’ll talk about in a bit. But I see this guy’s track record and I see all the successful games he made. And I was really struck by all the great Mikami games we haven’t had. And actually, you know, he is clearly full of ideas. You know, not many creators talk about stuff that like didn’t make it or didn’t even get off the page. But you know, he clearly is a game maker at his core, which maybe is a bit of a tri-observation given his career. But not everyone in this industry gives you that impression. Yeah, absolutely. I think they’re nothing alike in any other respect. But I think he and Hideo Kojima share a common frustration, which is that, you know, they want to make big budget games. They want to make the biggest, shiniest, most impressive thing around. But to do that, you have to make the deal with the devil. You know, you are not going to get a hundred million and a development team for four or five years to make your vision. Unless one of these big publishers think they can sell that vision at the end of it. And unfortunately, that means, you know, these brilliant creative minds end up in a situation where it’s like, yeah, you know, Mikami is probably pitching that stuff and some suit from Sega is on the other end. I’m probably being unfair to Sega here. Just like, yeah, what about something like Resident Evil? You know, it’s like, that must be so frustrating to have to deal with. And you don’t even have the outlet of going into the kind of equivalent of indie filmmaking. I mean, you could do it. You know, there are kind of developers who leave the big budget scene and are happier to work on the smaller projects. But, you know, Mikami’s never seemed to be like that. I mean, who knows what he’s going to do next? But yeah, he’s he’s I think that’s what comes out kind of in what we’re talking about when we’re talking about the kind of the almost fizzing creativity of a Resident Evil 4. Like it’s such an incredibly creative game for what it is. And it’s like I always remember somebody describing an Elvis Costello song, just a simple pop song as so much better than it needed to be. Right. You know, like this song could have charted, you know, and it would have still been kind of completely fine. It’s the song is pump it up, by the way. But it’s just fantastic. And that description of it being so much better than it needed to be kind of suits all his games. Like you can you can always tell he’s kind of been thinking about them and thinking about them and thinking about them. And, you know, again, another comparison to Kojima kind of like what might a player do here? What’s a player going to do? If I give them this tool, what will they do with it in this context? And so on. So I do think it kind of like that aspect of his character gets expressed in the games he’s allowed to make. But I can I can only imagine, you know, the frustration of being a guy like that. And yeah, unfortunately, like only certain stuff is going to get greenlit. And it’s like I’m not even picking on Sega particularly. Like look at Capcom, you know, they had him making. He made Resident Evil. It was such a huge success, far more than they ever anticipated. And what do they do? They kind of stick him on Resident Evil and Resident Evil alike for, you know, the next six, seven years. He said that period after Resident Evil was like one of the least fulfilling of his career because he was kind of moved off being creative, you know, which sounds madness, doesn’t it? Like you’ve just had a guy deliver the biggest hit in your company’s history. Well, we don’t want any more games from him. He can manage the division now. I find it hard to be too upset about that because it does lead to the arrival of other great talent. Another strand to Mikami is, you know, you have the games he shepherds, but you also have the careers he shepherds and he is a crucial figure in, you know, definitely the career of Hideki Kamiya. Again, goes on to be a really important person to both of us in the games he makes. For me personally, Shu Takumi, creator of Ace Attorney, is another disciple of Mikami, comes up under him. It’s a theme of his career and now it’s John Johannes, isn’t it, who did The Evil Within 2 and has just done Hi-Fi Rush. This is maybe the moment to mention Takuru Fujiwara. Basically, all you need to know is that he was the kind of the Capcom goat before, you know, the crew that we probably think of as the Capcom Golden Age came along. Right. Probably his best known game is Ghouls and Ghosts, but like designed a lot of the classic hardcore 80s arcade games from Capcom. His games are often like quite brutally hard and this is a strain he keeps throughout his career with whatever he makes. He’s actually still around, but this guy is, I don’t, I can’t remember which word Mikami used, but Mikami basically refers to this guy as his mentor. Right. When he joined Capcom and I think it was quite a like, it was quite a brutal process initially at Capcom. He’s talked about this where it would be like you were left on your own to design something, you know, someone more senior than you would take a look at it and they’d probably just say that’s bad. And that was all the feedback you got. It was just like go off and design something else now. And I think that strain where Fujiwara was obviously quite a tough taskmaster, but obviously took quite an interest in the young Mikami, probably obviously recognized some sort of talent there. And it’s been an absolute strain in Mikami’s career ever since. You know, like when he talked about with Tango, I’m going to direct The Evil Within, which he did. Then it’s time for the younger talent to direct. I’m just going to be a producer. Yeah, it’s kind of the Capcom way and he seems to have internalized it. I mean, it’s a massive tragedy he ever left Capcom, if you ask me, but he was probably never going to stay there. Like, I do think all that Clover stuff was probably bad management because look at the talent Capcom lost. It was probably inevitable he’d leave at some stage, but he’s just going around founding kind of mini Capcoms now, isn’t he? I mean, maybe this is a good point to just very quickly touch on the general trajectory of his career. It feels like with Mikami’s career that there are firm eras to it that we can kind of pinpoint. Joining Capcom, you have the creation of Resident Evil, you have the Capcom 5 era, then Clover and then Tango Gameworks. Vanquish and the Platinum years, as you’ve said, they’re kind of a funny one. They sort of sit in the middle. It’s not really what he intends to do, and it’s harder to kind of see that as a sort of central era. Do we think that’s a sort of useful way of looking at his career? Like, do we still see the sort of sensibilities changing between those eras? Or is it more a case of, you know, can you see like the natural evolution of a director here? Because I personally, I see someone who kind of ping pongs between director and producer. He talks quite openly about stepping into production more at Capcom and how that changes like his mindset maybe as a creator and begins to impact his later directorial work. He is sort of forever changed by that. You know, he is no longer just a pure ideas man. He has like a foot in logistics and that kind of changes his approach. But at the same time, it puts him in a place to like elevate other people and support other directors. So it’s quite very interesting to see someone who has served as director and producer sometimes at the same time on a single project. I guess the only kind of era we slightly missed out is the five or six years he’s at Capcom before Resident Evil. I’m not going to try and reclaim these games or anything, but he worked on three licensed titles. Capcom at that time did a lot of Disney licensed games. They were all very much of a muchness. Apart from Goof Trip actually, Goof Trip is an interesting exception. You know, nice looking 2D platformers. You know exactly the kind of thing. You’ve played one of them before, I’m sure. Disney’s Aladdin is interesting mainly because the Super Nintendo and the Mega Drive versions were completely different games. Usually it was the same game and there might be a couple of differences across the platforms. But yeah, these were just two completely different games. I’m actually ashamed to say I preferred the Mega Drive one when I was a kid. You know, obviously realizing looking back now. Are you saying that Dave Perry at Shiny is a better designer than Shinji Mikami? I don’t mean it Mr. Mikami. This is bold. This is a hot take. But yeah, these games are very much like Capcom makes a lot of them. So it’s obviously where they’re kind of blooding their young directors, so to speak. It’s like they have a formula for these games. So like how wrong can it go in a way? I mean, I’m sure it could go disastrously wrong, but they keep Mikami kind of working on these licensed titles for quite a while. Goof Troop I mentioned, I quite enjoy Goof Troop actually. It’s not bad, it’s like a top down puzzler, you know, with like a Bomberman style layout, when you can pick up pots and chuck them around. But the interesting element of it, I mean, it’s not that interesting, is it’s co-op. You know, you can play as Goofy or God, what’s his nephew called? Max. Max, that’s some good Disney knowledge there, Max. Is it his nephew or is his son? That was my Goofy impression. I don’t know. I think in the Goof Troop lore, I think Goofy might be a single dad. I don’t know what happened to Mrs. Goofy. Wow, that’s some dark shit, Matt. She just got sick of Goofy because he’s the ultimate bad hand. Yes, sir, but this is a Starbucks and all those children are crying now. So yeah, I mean, there’s not really too much to say about these. They’re not undiscovered classics or anything. They are quality titles, as you would expect from a Capcom licensed tie-in in the 90s. Because yeah, Capcom was good at this stuff. That’s why it did so many of them. You can only define it as the apprentice era. And then it’s actually Takuro Fujiwara, who we mentioned earlier. One of the games he designs is Sweet Home in the 80s. Sweet Home is a top-down RPG set in a haunted house where you go in, there’s like a team of playable characters. And depending on how it plays out, they go around and explore the mansion and they can die. It’s a game with branching paths and consequences, basically. And Fujiwara comes up with the concept of doing this in 3D on the PlayStation, and Mikami’s the man to do it, he reckons. And he reckoned right. So Mikami’s kind of assigned to design this game from scratch. And I think he said he spent six months or something just working on his own, designing it, and then pitched what he designed and Capcom gave him the team to build it. And yeah, it’s into the stratosphere from there. It’s an interesting guy to, again, to go back to the Archipel documentary, which I think is a really valuable piece of testimony from him, because he’s not always the most open in like traditional interviews. So to hear him kind of talk quite openly about his like creative process and everything. And actually, I think the thing that struck me about Resident Evil is he’s quite open to the kind of happy accidents that make that game great. He has, you know, certainly good ideas about what the excitement of that game is, is going to kind of stem from the tension of like decision making of like whether you go into a dangerous place, he describes it, which he says he something he gets from watching Dawn of the Dead. He said it’s just a lot of people making good or bad decisions. And that is actually the crux of like what is interesting about the horror film. It’s, you know, the human decision at the heart of it. And, you know, that’s like the big design idea. But, you know, he says quite openly that, you know, the kind of tank controls and the fixed cameras, you know, come about as a result of deciding to go with this pre-rendered background because he wanted it to look a certain way, have a certain visual quality to it. He originally imagines it as a first person game. So he’s thinking like big visual fidelity. He sees those things as a kind of payoff for kind of maintaining those. And he, you know, jokes in the interview that when people come up to him now and sort of celebrate those genre conventions and tell him what a genius he is, he’s like, well, ideally, I didn’t want to do these things. I’m kind of embarrassed that this is the way it kind of handles and looks, which is quite refreshing, considering like I think on this podcast, we’ve probably, you know, said all kinds of wanky things about how clever he is. I mean, I do think, just to go back to what you were saying earlier about the press profiles, I’m not sure Mikami has much time for the press, which, you know, completely fair enough. Like some creators are just like that, you know, and I think he is one of those that, yeah, doesn’t open up too much. And he’s definitely been burdened once or twice in his career by review scores he should never have got, which, you know, probably doesn’t help. With, yeah, with Resident Evil, it’s like, it’s really interesting that kind of trade off, because you lose a lot when it moves away from the fixed perspectives. And, you know, some people will just say, oh, you know, it’s so much better having a 3D free camera. Why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t I be able to look where I want? And, you know, fair enough, like it’s a strong argument. And obviously the industry has moved away from that fixed perspective. But it gives Mikami in that game in particular such control over what you can’t see. He’ll give you an angle where you go through a door and the camera is looking at your avatar as if there’s someone standing in front of them and you’re the camera. So you just get this big view of your avatar’s face. And one of the most brilliant kind of areas of Resident Evil is the sound design. You can very often hear the monsters before you can see them. So it’s this combination of fixed perspective. Do I want to move forward and get a better view? Very often when I was playing this, and you have to take pity on young Rich here. I would only have been like 13 or 14. This game scared the shit out of me. I was scared of stuff that happened in this game. I remember when I saw the very first zombie cut scene where you walk through and you hear the kind of… and you walk up. It’s a pre-rendered thing where the zombie is… you don’t know it’s a zombie. It looks like someone is eating someone. You look down and it gradually turns and you see the side of the face. And then it goes back into the game. Chris takes a couple of steps back or Jill does. And you’ve just got a zombie walking towards you. When that first happened to me, I was so scared. I turned around and I ran out of the room. And I was just like, what else can I do in this game? I just walked around like that big banquet room. I walked around the mansion main hall and I was just like, oh, there’s nothing else I can do. Like, I’ve just got to go back and see that zombie. That’s the decision he wanted you to make. Yeah, yeah, indeed. There were other moments in that game like it. I remember when it introduces the hunters, one of the terrifying things about them is they move so quickly and they can one shot you if you’re relatively low from quite a distance, like they’ll do this jumping attack. And I remember coming back to the mansion the first time I ever saw a hunter. I’ll never have an experience like this in a game again. You come back in through the garden. You’re walking through from the mansion back door into a kind of hallway. And the camera angle shows you your character at the end of the hall. You’re walking towards the camera. And there’s like a corridor next to them they can’t see, which is where you’ve just come from, where the door is. So at this point, the game introduces the hunter with this first-person cutscene of something moving really fast over the path you’ve just taken and jumping and you see it, like this scaly hand reach out for the door knob you’ve just come through. So you’re wondering what the fuck this thing is. And I remember I just got my shotgun up. I was playing as Chris, but I had like orange health. And all I heard was this thing going, and then this fucking like frog gorilla thing with giant claws jumped out of the darkness and took my head off in one swipe. And Chris’s body just slumps to the ground. I mean, incredible. I remember my dad coming into my room when I was playing Resident Evil and laughing at it because the characters were wounded. He was like, oh, look at him. But I find that terrifying. When you see your character actually wounded. And when you die and it’s got that horrible thing of like, you know, you’ll see the zombie begin to get down and eat your character before the kind of, you know, before it completely fades out like that. That horrible suggestion of what might happen afterwards. Yeah, that’s the stuff that really kind of thinking about it kind of sends a freeze on up my spine even now. A lot of his ideas do come down to like, you know, at the core of it, this particular emotion is the thing I’m kind of trying to tap into. And that’s definitely like at the heart of, you know, a lot of his games, I think if there is a through line, I’ve always found them kind of gripping in that way. We’ll obviously talk about his games in more detail in a moment when we assemble our Hall of Fame. But just moving forward to where we’re currently at, obviously Shinji Mikami, he’s just left Tango Gameworks, which is the studio he set up about six, seven years ago. No one knows why. I’m not going to ask you, hey, Rich, why do you think? Like, no one knows what’s going on here. There’s no, like, official statements. But I am interested in, you know, from following his career and following what he says and how he talks about his games, if you have any kind of, like, read on where you think he’s at. You’re not going to believe this, Matt. He founded Tango in 2010. So it was 13 years ago. Really? Yeah. Oh, my God. But, like, I think that says a lot, doesn’t it? We still think of Tango as a relatively young studio. Or I do, anyway. Yeah. But he’s, you know, he’s been there for 13 years. It may have just been time to move on. He always talked about that studio as being one where he would mentor and bring through young developers. I noticed at the end of it as well, there was a very nice statement from Bethesda. Like it was no Konami Kojima situation. You know, they thanked him for being a creative leader and supportive mentor to young developers, wished him well in the future and all that jazz. And I think that’s Mikami’s style other than at Capcom where, you know, who knows what was going on there, but like some of their great talent left under a cloud. He left platinum on very good terms. He still seems to be very good friends with all those people. Seems to have left Tango on a high as well. And who knows, like I personally, I just hope that whatever the future holds, it holds at least one more Mikami game because it feels like he’s too young to retire. You know, like he sold Tango to Zenimax. I can’t remember when, but like I’m sure he’s not short of a bob or two. Maybe he does just want to retire and if he does, good luck to him. Thanks for all the great games. But, you know, if he wants to let the creativity run free, I mean, any publisher with a brain in the world would give him a blank check to do it. And I just hope that whatever it is, we get one at least more Mikami game. I mean, a handful would be incredible. Kickstarter Mikami, it’s right there. Yeah, and my wallet. I guess we’ve touched on it a few times. I’ve struggled to find too much, like, truly great reading material on him. But I know that you have met Mikami. I’m interested, like, how did your encounter go? Did you find him frosty? Because I’ve heard from other friends who have met him that it wasn’t, like, their favourite time. I wouldn’t say he was frosty. I met him at the announcement for Vanquish, which was in Tokyo. Sega had rented out the top floor of this amazing hotel. You know, it wasn’t rooms. It was, like, a big function area with a bar and, you know, a big presentation stage and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Everyone from Platinum was there. A ton of Sega’s top creatives were there as well, including… I met Nogoshi that day. A side note, how did that encounter go? Because, again… He was really nice to me because I was with Christoph Kagatani, who used to be Edge’s man in Tokyo. Right. I was on Edge at the time. Yeah, Christoph knew Nogoshi and I think knew the way to Nogoshi’s heart, which was basically whiskey. And, yeah, Nogoshi was really, really nice to me. I think he may have been pissed up. It was just that kind of vibe, you know, he was kind of sitting, holding court to everyone. But, yeah, the event was vanquished. They showed a trailer. Before the trailer, Mikami said a few words. So Mikami got up on the stage. I knew exactly who he was. You know, I was so excited about just being in the same room as this guy. I don’t know if everyone there did, you know, realize they were kind of in the presence of gaming royalty. Anyway, he got up and the first thing he did, and I feel kind of sorry for the poor journalist who was sent from IGN, he pointed out the IGN person who was in the crowd and he thanked them for their God Hand review. So listeners may know God Hand got like, I can’t remember the score, but it was like two or three, yeah, three out of ten from IGN. The review said the camera doesn’t work, which is like such a disgrace because the camera is probably the best fighting game camera system ever. Really went for the game, really did a number on it. And obviously the tragic coda to the God Hand story is that no matter how good it was, it was a big, big flop commercially. So yeah, he started off by thanking the IGN journalist for the God Hand review, which as you can imagine, kind of like in a room full of journalists, you’re just like, oh, you know, like, is he going after GameSpot next? I hear there’s someone from Edge here. Oh, that would be so good. He just unrolls a little bit of paper and is like, here’s my list of grievances. Have we got anyone from Games Master circa 1998? Yeah, so anyway, he introduces the game, they show the trailer, it’s amazing. There were a couple of group interviews afterwards because Sega had flown a ton of press and everyone was trying to get a one-on-one with them. I didn’t even get a one-on-one with them. I got like an unofficial 10 minutes. So we were doing group interviews. Some of those were a bit frosty. I remember there was this pretty formidable Russian woman who was there and she went straight in on him. Why are the enemies in your games always Russian? And I can’t even remember what Mikami answered. But whatever it was, she wasn’t having it. And she just basically asked him again in a louder voice. And I was like, oh my God, she’s disrespecting Shinji Mikami. And I got to speak to him not about Vanquish, but because Edge was doing top 100 video games as a separate issue. It was something like that. But anyway, our goal was for all the games in the top 10, we’ve got to get one of the top creators on it and just have a sidebar telling the readers, God, we used to go into a lot of effort on magazines, didn’t we? It’s not like the internet, slap up anything. So I got Mikami and got to chat to him for 10 minutes about Resident Evil 4. He wasn’t frosty. I would say it was clear he didn’t necessarily want to be there. But I’d also really forced it. Like I really forced the issue. They turned me down multiple times, but I was just like, if I don’t get Mikami now, I never will. He had a baseball cap on indoors and it was a darkened room. Yeah, but you know, he answered all my questions. He was perfectly polite. Most interesting thing about Resident Evil 4 was, you know, I said the really interesting element of that game is how it completely changed the combat system, you know, from what was quite a slow paced one with the older games. And he said, yeah, this is obviously through a translator. He doesn’t have a Glaswegian accent. He said, yeah, actually, I was just walking about and there were like a huge number of people out, like even more than usual. And while I was in the middle of this crowd, I just had the thought, what of all these people suddenly turn on me? And he said, that was it, basically, that was the idea for the combat system in Resi 4. Well, he’s an ideas guy. Yeah. Then he gave me a green and red herb wrapped up in a piece of paper and sent me on my way. But yeah, I mean, he was perfectly pleasant. It wasn’t frosty. It was, you know, a guy who’s just done a big stage event, which he probably didn’t enjoy. And then, you know, like ultimately you have to say to him, he did agree to meet me. It’s tough when you get to meet someone who’s designed something that’s so important to you, when it’s something that’s really important, like one of the biggies. And I think every journey probably has like one or two things where they’re like, if I could get this, this would be, you know, I’d be, that’d be a big tick off the bucket list. Yeah, for sure. That insane pressure it puts on that encounter to like deliver. I can imagine the stress of like how much you played that game, how well you know that game, and like you got 10 minutes to like talk about something probably closer to 7 with translation. Yeah, exactly. It’s kind of like which three of these 20 questions I have, do I ask? Yeah. I mean, it’s close to like, if you could ask like God a question, you know, it’s, it’s sort of, you know, on a level, in terms of something that you could feasibly do. It’s like, well, what’s the one thing I could ask? It’s why I kind of like almost never want to meet Miyamoto because I just know I’d blow it. I’ll tell you a good one. I did. I did an edge cover story on Miyamoto. I went to meet him in London in a hotel. It was Mr. Managawa. Do you remember him? Did you ever meet him? Yes, he’s sort of the Nintendo of Japan PR and translator to Miyamoto. Yeah, really old school, like properly Hiroshi Yamouchi era Nintendo. Like the guys just immaculately presented the entire time. Perfect English. And yeah, just a really nice guy as well. I always remember him like ordering for a table of games journalists on another occasion in Tokyo and feeling quite sorry for this man that was so clearly so far above us all, but was dutifully doing his job to basically children abroad. Yeah, so I went into the Miyamoto interview. I’d been stressing so much about it because like even at that age I understood you’re probably not going to meet this guy again. You know, like this is your shot to get something interesting. And I went in, I had all my questions. I had my notebook, had about 15 pens, started the interview and five minutes in my dictaphone died. I was just like, what? And obviously those were the days where you had dedicated dictaphone. And immediately I’m just like, oh shit. Like how could the one thing I didn’t think about, you know, my batteries running out, happen? And Mr. Managawa, my hero, swings into action and he’s just like instantly summoning two Nintendo flunkies into the hotel room. Quickfire Japanese, he’s pointing at my dictaphone. One of the flunkies grabs it and opens the back and looks at the batteries and they’re dispatched out the door. And then him and Miyamoto make small talk with me for five minutes and then the flunkie’s gonna rush back in through the door with the right kind of batteries. And he even extended my interview time at the end. What a gent! What small talk with Miyamoto like? He asked me what Nintendo games I’ve been playing recently, what I liked about them. I asked him kind of the same. That was the one bit that was slightly disappointing because he gave me the classic Miyamoto answer. He was like, oh, I don’t really play, you know, what else is out there? Which is utter nonsense. Like, it’s very obvious from Miyamoto’s games that he has a wide and deep knowledge of the competition. But he’s just always pretended he hasn’t for whatever reason. It’s quite a good shtick. We all know he’s got a platinum trophy in Assassin’s Creed Black Flag. So that’s his shtick. But yeah, when I got my chance, yeah, the nightmare almost happened. And God bless Mr. Managawa. Hallowed be his name. Miyamoto and Mikami. I think the one I’ll probably never get now is Kojima. I’d love to do Kojima. Just never quite came up. Like we had a superb guy on edge for Metal Gear when Metal Gear 4 was happening. And I was relatively junior at the time. So obviously like Duncan did all our Metal Gear 4 stuff at the time. And didn’t have an incredible job on it. I don’t know. I think it could happen. Yeah, it depends. I tried to get him when Death Stranding came out on PC. I tried to get him, but nothing doing. But yeah, we’ll see. The problem is these days he doesn’t have to do him. Like I remember, I think Dan’s told this story in your podcast, but I remember him telling me about the E3 he went to for Snake Eater, was it? And he just thought he was getting a demo by a Konami rep. But he went and it’s just Kojima there with a game. It’s like, yeah, those were the days. Well, you know what? I think it’s time for us to assemble. You know what? That sounded so fake. That was the worst fucking segue ever been in this podcast. Listen, I’m going to turn it to you straight. I think it’s time that we put together The Shinji Mikami Hall of Fame. We’re going to play 20 seconds of music to signify a break. And then we’ll be back in a second. So, here you go. HMM Hello, and welcome back to this Samuel Roberts free episode of The Back Page with me, your host, Matthew Castle. And you can tell that I’ve never hosted this before because Sam would never do such a convoluted intro to part two. This is the part of the podcast where we are going to assemble our Hall of Fame. If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you might be familiar with the format. We did this with LucasArts Games and Platinum Games. We’re basically going to be running through all the things Shinji Mikami directed to try and pick out five that we feel truly represent him. I mean, I don’t know, Rich, if there’s a particular characteristic you feel we should be looking for in these games. Yeah, so yeah, I do think there are certain qualities that I would look for in any Hall of Fame of Mikami’s games. Among my favourite things this stuff does is keep on surprising you. I would like every game on here to reflect that element of invention in some ways. Not all of his games, but a lot of them are built around like one brilliant idea and then just wringing what it can out of this idea. And then I guess the other two things is that the main themes of his career are horror and action and that doesn’t really mean that every game on here is going to have horror and action in it, but I think a lot of them will. We’re going to look at the games he’s directed as the main body of this, but we are also going to do a section at the end where we’re going to talk about things that he plays a key part in, whether he’s a producer or a key creative in some way. We didn’t want to just talk about every single one of these games, it’d probably be about 50 games all told, so instead we’re each going to highlight a couple and probably hash out a sixth pick for the Hall of Fame from those. So don’t worry if it feels like we’re glossing over some important stuff. We’re going to do this chronologically. Let’s kick off with 1991’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which is actually a perfect opportunity for me to say that during this exercise we don’t have to weigh in on all these things if we don’t have any huge opinions. I haven’t played Who Framed Roger Rabbit. It definitely isn’t talked about with any kind of reverence that you do hear around his other license fair. Err, oh it’s gotta be on the list Matt. What for the Hall of Fame? I, you know, I just left the pause for dramatic effect. Of the games he’s directed, this is the only one I’ve never touched. I actually briefly looked at a YouTube video on it because I felt ashamed about my lack of knowledge and yeah, I’m sure it was perfectly acceptable fair for the time. I don’t think it’s really in the Hall of Fame discussion with all due respect to Roger Rabbit. Let’s skip and go to Disney’s Aladdin. So as we mentioned earlier, this was the SNES version, not the shiny Mega Drive version. Or literally shiny Mega Drive version. Was it made by shiny? I think it was made by shiny. I’ll just check that out. 2D platformer based on the Disney film. Obviously a gorgeous world and a gorgeous animation style in that film for them to base their game on. I am more familiar with the Mega Drive game, which I do think is the better looking of the two. What I think this does demonstrate is a certain sort of quality bar that he’s trying to hit in his games. There’s an awful lot of license fare which doesn’t really register and doesn’t make an impact. And while this isn’t a great masterpiece, I think, you know, it clearly shows, to Capcom at least, here is someone who has a bit of something, here is someone who can be trusted with these things. You know, I think Capcom, based on interviews with other developers there, have a bit of a habit of throwing planners, which is kind of the role they give to sort of, I think it’s sort of their title for sort of game designer basically, into these directorial roles to kind of test them. A key historic moment, if not truly representative of what you can do. Yeah, I mean, these games were pretty good and the Aladdin ones are remembered as being among the best, with good reason. I think by this stage, visuals were reaching a stage where like, obviously you’re not getting close to the look of the Disney movie, but it looks like Aladdin from the Disney movie. Right. The Mega Drive One, by the way, was developed by the long-defunct Virgin Group. You remember when Virgin made games? Right. I swear Dave Perry of Shiny Entertainment wasn’t there. I think he worked for Virgin Games, so that’s probably where our shiny confusion is coming from. But this episode isn’t about David Perry Hall of Fame, is it? I don’t mean to keep making this about Samuel, but one of his other podcast superpowers is the surreptitious Wikipedia check, which he then casually drops in, which I can’t do because I’ve got an incredibly noisy mechanical keyboard, so it would be super obvious if I’m trying to do anything on this slide. I don’t think it’s going to be threatening the Hall of Fame really just because Mikami goes on to such a storied career, but it’s worth saying that these Disney licensed games were of, I would say, a high to a very high quality at this time, and this is one of the best of them. I had the Mega Drive One when I was young. I did play this one later. As I recall, the Apple throwing is more involved than the Mega Drive version. I don’t know if that’s just some sort of fever dream. I don’t know. Is that sort of a Mikami bias coming through you? There has to be something next level in this, called Apple Physics. When I was playing Goof Troop, I was looking at it through that lens of like, hmm, look at that pop placement. Very interesting, is this an hourly sign of the master that would create the labyrinth of the Spencer Mansion? And of course, it’s just, you know, complete post-facto. Yes. Yeah. I’m not sure justification is the right term, but yeah, you’re looking at it, you know, knowing what that person would go on to create. Yeah. Whereas the truth in both Aladdin and Goof Troop’s case, I think, is that they’re good examples of a pretty common form of the time, which is the license game. Like, these days, license games are, they’re a very different thing. They operate on a different scale, whereas in those days, they were really quite common. And there was a kind of formula to them. But that said, these were very good examples of them. We come to our first obvious contender. This is Resident Evil in 1996, in which we enter the Spencer Mansion, fight zombies, many scary things, discover… I sometimes feel a little false talking about this game, because I come to it much later in the remake. And so it’s kind of a bit of a false memory, this sort of revolutionary moment in survival horror that this is. But I know that, you’ve already said in this podcast, you did play it and were a bit more familiar with it at the time. You can’t overstate how much better this looked than everything else on the PlayStation at the time. The only game that had happened previously that was even comparable to it was Alone in the Dark. And Alone in the Dark was like many years before this. I think it was at least four or five. You know, and it looked, it looked at the details on the textures in particular, that choice to go for the pre-rendered backdrops for visual fidelity. Most other 3D games on the PlayStation at this time, like the visuals weren’t really much more than geometric shapes, you know, it was kind of like the idea of textures hadn’t really caught on in the early stages of 3D. So you were looking at something that had a visual fidelity that nothing else you could get on PlayStation had or would have until I would say Metal Gear Solid, which is like a year later. It also had, and like this is going to seem laughable. You know, everyone mocks like the script of Resident Evil and the production values and stuff now, like it kind of was one of the first examples outside of PC CD-ROM games like Wing Commander, perhaps, where it was trying to tell a story in a cinematic way, albeit ham-fistedly, like it came across as a B-movie, which is what it was. But like, I don’t know if it was necessarily much worse than the kind of stuff you’d get on Channel 4 at midnight on a Saturday. It was like, looking back now, yeah, it’s hilarious, but at the time, I wasn’t thinking that. I wasn’t going around chuckling with my friends about, Jules Sandwich, you were completely taken in by this world. It’s obviously fully voice acted, like it had a cast, like lots of video games at that time didn’t even bother introducing the character beyond maybe a line of biography in the manual. It seemed such a step ahead of all the other stuff on the PlayStation at the time. It looked so amazing. It didn’t play like anything else. And it had that interesting thing where it’s like, it is an action game in some respects, but it is actually more of a horror experience for Resident Evil. You know, that idea that like, I think one of the most brilliant things he does is the zombies take a different amount of bullets. So like the standard zombie, I think the minimum they’ll go down in is three bullets, but they can take up to six. And you know, ammo is always a premium. Obviously resource management is so, so key to this game. And just elements like that, that had never kind of, I mean, I’m sure other games had tried stuff like this before, but I’d never seen so many of these kind of clever ideas put together in one kind of package that just looked, looked so much better, played so much better, and actually felt like something that was a journey. I was blown away by it. I didn’t play it at the time, but reading about it in magazines and just seeing pictures of it, you know, it creates this world that you instantly buy into, you know, you knew the name of the characters, you remembered the name of those characters. And I think that, you know, it just established it, that this is a place where, you know, not specifically these characters, but, you know, where characters can and will exist in the future and you’ll want to return to this particular world. And I’m kind of interested about where we stand on, because there’s Resident Evil and there’s Resident Evil Director’s Cut and I don’t really know what the deal is there. Well, we’re going to come to the real problem with this Hall of Fame, which is, I mean, I think we’ll probably agree that Resident Evil has to be in there, but there’s Resident Evil Original, there’s Resident Evil Director’s Cut and obviously we’ll come back to your jumping on point. I wouldn’t put Director’s Cut over the original even though at the time I thought it was a much better game. I asked for this for my birthday or my Christmas, I can’t remember which. I would have been 15 at the time. Resident Evil was my favourite game on the PlayStation until Metal Gear Solid came out. When I knew there was Director’s Cut in the way, I wanted it because another aspect of Mikami’s games that I should have maybe mentioned with regards to the Hall of Fame, he’s really interested in replayability. He’s interested in how you make a game that somebody can play again and again without getting bored, which I think probably used to be much more important than it is now. With Resident Evil, the genius touch is that they spend all that money building that amazing environment, but then they kind of get two games out of it just by switching between Chris and Jill. When you go through the game like that, it slightly changes where items are and so on. Resident Evil Director’s Cut is a game made for people who played the original a lot. All the little touches in it are things that if you were expecting it to work like the original game, it surprises you. Like I always remember the one that really blew my mind when I first started playing it. There’s a room upstairs with a balcony with a guy who’s been killed by birds. I think his name might be Richard actually, maybe that’s why I remember him. In the original he’s just sitting there and the birds are sitting on his skin pecking away at it. He’s got one of those great Capcom corpses where you’re like, what happened to this poor dude? In the Director’s Cut you go up to him to get a key that’s on him and he comes to life, which he never did in the original. He comes to life, he grabs out at Chris or Jill and it goes back into the game and he stands up and shambles towards you in his stars uniform. It’s full of wonderful little touches like that where if you’ve played the original it’s going to surprise you again and it also included shuffle mode or something. Basically that changed the placement of every item pretty much in the mansion. So if you played the original you played this on shuffle mode and it completely changed the way you navigated the game space, which was just really nice as someone who had played the original a lot and it reflects this kind of mindset Mikami obviously had of like well I have to do this, I know this environment inside out, so how do I make it interesting for a player who also does and might buy this because they like the original so much. So I have a lot of time for Director’s Cut, I loved it when I was younger, I would have probably said it was better than the original but now with the benefit of hindsight it’s like that original game is just so important. The minor tweaks the Director’s Cut make to it, yeah they’re lovely and all but I couldn’t see myself choosing the Director’s Cut over the original in the Hall of Fame, the box just wouldn’t look right. Yes, it would be something like, couldn’t you find the original copy? Yeah. And you’re like, yeah, okay. That’s a yes for Resident Evil then, we may end up with multiple Resident Evils, who knows. I think there’s at least one more. Oh, yeah, of course. I mean, forget God, this might end up a Resident Evil list. Next up is Dino Crisis, obviously very much a post Resident Evil game. I mean, simply put, it’s Resident Evil with dinosaurs, isn’t as far as I understand it. A Mikami original, I believe it starts elsewhere, hits troubled development and kind of lands on his plate. Weirdly, Shootakumi was a director on this at one point, flubs it for various reasons, has taken off it and Mikami steps in, which is why it’s considered a Mikami directed game. But I don’t know if that means sort of how much of it is like what he truly wants to be doing and is it more of a producer role really for him. It’s got a really confusing kind of timeline behind it. A confusing energy as well, I’d say. I don’t think it’s up there with his great games. I think the way he talks about it is kind of like he’s sort of parachuted in a way to sort of fix this and tidy it up in a list which has already got Resident Evil in it. A less good version with Philosoraptors and some slightly difficult puzzles courtesy of Shootakumi. I’m not sure if it makes the cut. I remember kind of quite liking it at the time. I mean it was still like a pretty good Capcom game and God knows most studios never even make one of those in their history. It’s a good fantasy. Well yeah, I mean like everyone else I love Jurassic Park and this is basically what of Jurassic Park but with lots more guns. It had that different visual style to the pre-rendered kind of backdrops of Resident Evil so it was like it seemed kind of super impressive to me at the time anyway that it was doing this in a more you know inverted commas real way. Some of the dinosaurs were great. The combat could be quite exciting. What I would say the difference is that like I find Resident Evil an incredibly memorable experience and when you ask me what are the great moments of Dino Crisis I’m like that bit where T-Rex’s head appears at the window and I’m struggling to think of much else you know it’s like it doesn’t have that kind of I would say you know that the secret ingredient is quality really. Maybe what you’re saying is right because it doesn’t have that feel of something that’s been like honed and perfected. It feels like something that’s been finished. And finished well. Yeah yeah yeah absolutely. It’s by no means a bust but it isn’t like I don’t think he himself is like please play Dino Crisis it’s my best work. I do worry though because people really love this game whether we’ve just lost The Back Page a whole segment of fans. Sam listen to this be like what have you done? We’ve been a bit shaky on Dino Crisis in the past considering the Shooter Cumi link we kind of gloss over it a fair amount. Don’t have really strong opinions either way but let us jump forward to something I do have strong opinions on but it’s kind of an interesting case. This is Resident Evil Remake in 2002 on a really basic level like holy shit unbelievably good looking game and as a kind of stick to beat my like non Nintendo believer friends at the time you know when everyone is kind of like throwing down with different console manufacturers and kind of hedging their bets I thought this was one of the ones which really showed off like look what the game queue can do you’ve never seen a game that looks as good as this like the leap from 1996 to 2002 yeah I mean just six years unbelievable like one of the the biggest glow ups of all time I mean the original obviously looks incredible for the time but I still think this game kind of looks astonishing you know there’s the baseline sort of prettiness of it but it just makes that house feel so evil and so cold so cold it’s a really really scary place really really heightened it for me the kind of ingenious sort of mechanical twist is the addition of crimson heads which are sort of reanimated zombies who the ones you shoot down can get back up even worse than before yeah fucking hate those guys yeah and it creates this you know it takes a scenario which is all very already very stressful which is like do you even have enough bullets to take down. One I think it just adds an extra edge of persistence to that world, and the idea of past decisions coming back to haunt you, which is just a really elegant thing to do with a space that you’re going to be looping back and forth on. Putting that aside, I just couldn’t believe how good this looked. Is this Hey Mikami or Mr. Resident Evil? You have to make it. Is this a game he’s particularly proud of, particularly invested in? It’s really, really fine work. Does that earn it a place in the Hall of Fame? This is what I thought would be the biggest problem with the Hall of Fame, because I couldn’t have a higher opinion of this game. Yeah. And yeah, some people might think, why are these two old geriatrics going on about the graphics from a game from 20 years ago? I couldn’t believe a game could look this good. Right. Like the first time I saw screenshots of this in a mag, I was just like, they can do that? It was really one of those moments. It looks just astonishing even now. And I reviewed, there was a re-release of this. I think it was on Xbox 360 or something. And I was talking about how good it looked. And I think it was for Eurogamer or something. And a couple of people were like, oh, you know, they haven’t done anything. The aspect ratio is fuzzy, dah, dah, dah, dah. And I’m like, you people don’t have eyes. Such a rich, opulent kind of take on the mansion. And it does feel like a kind of personal labour of love. Like, you know, that’s obviously me putting something onto it that may well not be there. Maybe Mikami was just given the job. Yeah, right. But like, I do think it’s interesting that it probably was a choice on his part. Like, he was quite powerful at Capcom by this stage. And it does have that element where like every addition it makes. Yeah, completely agree. Crimson Heads are genius. Also the little stabby knives it adds so that you have a chance to get away from a zombie attack. Like if you’ve got a little pocket knife on you. I mean, these are like very small tweaks, really. I remember the Crimson Heads. Didn’t they mark them on the map so you could see where you’d left the corpse? Or did you just have to remember them? I recall just having to remember, like it really giving you no advantage. I do remember that thing of being like, you know, you’d play for a while and then you’d get an item and you’d be like, in the way that game works, you’d be like, oh, now I need to go back to this wing of the mansion. And you’d be thinking, oh, fuck, I killed a zombie there about half an hour ago. That’d just be it. You’d just be like, and I remember taking these like massively circuitous routes around the mansion because I knew there was like a room with two crimson heads in it. And I was just like, that room no longer exists. It adds the big kind of back area to the mansion as well. The mansion in the original has the gardens, which leads to the outhouse, which eventually ends up in the lab. And in this one it has like that little graveyard area at the back with what’s her name, Lisa. Oh yeah. Because it adds horror as well and this kind of creepy history of the Spencer family. And yeah, everything it adds improves the original game, which I really don’t think is common in remakes at all. Like this is someone who clearly understood the source. Of course he understands the source material intimately, but he understands what makes it work. He understands what he can add that will make it work better without making it different, if that makes sense. One thing I will say is that I once met, and you’ll have to forgive me here because I don’t remember the guy’s name, I met the Capcom programmer who programmed the snake in the original Resident Evil. Oh yeah. I ended up sitting next to him at dinner. I wanted to sit next to him because I loved that snake and I just wanted to talk to him about that fucking snake and he was, sorry I’m swearing a lot. He was clearly sick of the snake. How do you bring that up over dinner? During dinner, I asked him, you know, what was, because he’d worked on every Resident Evil, this guy, and this would have been about the time of Resident Evil 6, I think they were working on at the time. So fairly advanced in the 360 era. And he said, oh, you know, the best Resident Evil we’ve ever made is the GameCube remake. And that was it. Like, that was Snake Man’s opinion. So I, I’m, it’s maybe not wrong. I’m conflicted about this one. It’s okay to have maybes at this point. Yeah. Okay. I mean, this is like a, it’s Oasis. It’s definitely maybe. Next up we have PN3, not PN03 as I’ve been calling it all these years. I can’t imagine why you’d do that, Matthew. For people who don’t know it, it is an action game in which you play as one of the great forgotten Capcom heroes, Vanessa Schneider. I would say not a classic Capcom star. Very unusual shooting game built around dodging and incredibly acrobatic dodging. You can only shoot when you’re standing still, so it’s all about leaping and pirouetting through fire to find a pocket and then shooting into the screen. You don’t really aim in the game. It’s really just about sort of finding a window to fire at the enemy. So the mechanic is dodging rather than aiming in a traditional third person shooter style. I’ve only played a little bit of this, to be fair. I think there’s a copy kicking around Future Tower somewhere, which I managed to steal at the odd lunchtime on. I recall it being very kind of clinical by Capcom standards. Visually, now I sort of think of it almost as a bit of a vanquish precursor. Aesthetically, I don’t know how much of the team, if any, were involved beyond Mikami. It’s sort of a period of time where the rules of third person shooters are kind of being established and people are still feeling their way around it. So there is room for someone to come in with quite a wild take and go, well, maybe the key thing is dodging and darting and hiding rather than aiming and shooting in the traditional sense. I think that’s kind of novel. I don’t particularly like this game, it’s the problem. Yeah, it’s a game where it has an idea. It’s quite a good idea and I think you’re completely right to call it the precursor to Vanquish. Like I think Vanquish is going to take a lot of the ideas that make up PN3 and do them a lot better and a lot more exciting. It can be like, it always felt to me like an attempt to do one of those kind of great treasure schmups as a 3D action game. I think I get that vibe from a lot of Mikami’s games, like this is a 3D attempt to make, you know, insert arcade format here. A lot of the game comes from that, like it has this kind of very austere visual style, which if I had to guess is probably because it’s so focused on the fluidity of the action. And, you know, like, yeah, she’s not one of the great Capcom characters, but like, there are sequences of movement in PN3 that are incredible. That said, I don’t quite think it hangs together, like, I never really, I quite like this game, I thought it was like, I mean, it is original, like, you know, there isn’t really much else you can compare it to, but I don’t think it quite gelled together into, like, what it maybe could have been. I think it’s one of those games where you, like, see what it’s going for, and there was definitely a good idea there. But yeah, frankly, I think he returns to these ideas with much greater success later. Yeah, it’s, you know, it’s a swing and a miss for me, unfortunately. Relatively iconic. Like, you know, when you see a screenshot of this game, it can only really be this game. Like it’s probably a character upside down doing like a weird cartwheel in the air. And you’re like, well, only PN3 looks like that. Sort of fond of it as a thing I used to see in magazines, obviously one of the kind of Capcom 5. So there was this like buzz around, oh my god, these are GameCube things. Only we’re getting these, like the best developers in the world are making them. But really, the main event comes two years later in 2005. We have Resident Evil 4. We talked a fair amount about this game already on this podcast. He’s talked about this as being like action first. He doesn’t really think about it as a horror game, which is obviously like a big shift for the series. Resident Evil has already been like changing hands, like it’s quite the odd thing given that he kind of creates the first one. You know, the second game is directed by Hideki Kamiya. They then, you know, they’re all subsequently directed by different people. He returns to this with this very different vision, wants to turn it into this action game and comes up with this incredible over the shoulder shooting system. He tells a really great story. There’s a Capcom filmed interview about Resident Evil, I think made for like the release of Village where they basically got Mikami in to say some nice words. And he tells a story about Masahiro Sakurai, the creator of Smash Brothers, coming in to meet the development team when they were working on Resident Evil 4. And him just pointing at this over the shoulder perspective and saying, you know, that is going to be the thing now. Like that is going to be what games are. Which is kind of true, like in the third person action space, to try and change the perspective like that and give people this whole new look that basically, to create something instantly becomes the norm. Pretty amazing. I don’t think third person games ever looked back over their shoulder after Resident Evil 4. That kind of insight probably could only come from a creator who had made a lot of 3D games previously. Up until this point, yeah, you were just stuck in the middle of the screen largely or you were dealing with a fixed perspective game. I mean, he’s right with what he says. I mean, obviously, Mr. Mikami is right about everything, but he’s right with what he says about increasing the action focus. I don’t think it loses all of the horror by any means. I just think it replaces it with something different. You know, it becomes much more of a body horror. Like Resident Evil 4 is as much about watching poor old Leon get absolutely mutilated as it is kind of successfully completing the game, because the first time you play that, you’re going to die so many times. When you see what they do to him, it’s like the thing I was talking about with Resident Evil, that those horrible little sequences at the end are so much worse than this. You know, they really rip Leon apart bodily. It was something I’d never seen in a game before. It was just straight up, like I’d never seen a game be this kind of like, I mean it’s just horrible, horrible violence that they inflict on my poor boy Leon Kennedy. So it did have a kind of shock factor, if you like. And it’s also that kind of industry leading thing of like, it doesn’t just introduce, you know, this kind of third person over the shoulder perspective that would become the standard. It also looks better than anything on any other platform. I mean, this game, wow, did it look the part. You know, it plays better than all of them as well. It introduces all these kind of completely new ideas. This isn’t quite where Mercenaries Mode is born, for example, but it kind of perfects it. Again, that’s his little obsession with the mini games. You also get the shooting gallery in this game. It’s a product that’s just, I don’t even want to call it a product, I can’t believe I did that. But it’s so packed with stuff. Even something like So Beloved as the attache case. You know, like he’s thinking about, like the Resident Evil inventory screen had become fixed. Like up until this point it was just like a little grid of blue blocks and every item took up one block apart from I think the grenade launcher and the shotgun movie took up two. And that was the only bit of inventory management in the series. And then Mikami’s like, I’ll just make it Tetris. You know, why not? And it’s so satisfying when you get into it, like the amount of time you spend in that. And it’s so incidental to the game. Again it’s one of those things where like it’s so much better than it needs to be in every single area. I remember looking at, you ever seen the Hooked Man footage of this, the cancelled version? I followed the kind of development of this game in magazines way back when. I remember iterations which had ghosts. Is that the same thing as the Hooked Man? It is, yeah. The what ifs for this game are kind of mad given it’s one of those games that’s so good in its eventual form that it almost seems inevitable. But that so isn’t the case. Yeah, there’s the Hooked Man version and then I think there’s one, this might be a fever dream where they’re thinking about setting it on a blimp or something. But there were at least two versions cancelled of this during the production. They didn’t really know what to do with it. And yeah, in the end what you get is every single third person game since this game owes a massive, massive debt to it. Whether you’re talking about Gears of War, whether you’re talking about Naughty Dog stuff, they all wear their love for Resident Evil 4 on their right shoulder and frankly third person games are all the better for it and that’s really something. You know, like some people say Resident Evil created the survival horror genre and, you know, I kind of buy that in the sense of popularizing it and if you give them the credit for that then like Resident Evil 4 I think just defines an entire genre. Like third person games after this. Yeah, I don’t know if there is another big advance. No, I don’t think so. The crazy thing about this, I love its pacing and that isn’t an original thought when it comes to Resident Evil 4 but the kind of ups and downs of the adventure, the constant kind of like arrival of new ideas and it’s quite interesting because if you look at all the games he’s directed there aren’t many opportunities to like really show off that particular skill. A lot of these games have like quite weird rhythms or structures to them. You know, the original Resident Evil, you know, you kind of left your own devices to find your pace. Even like I wouldn’t say like the magic of Vanquish is like the traditional cinematic action game pacing. Like that isn’t where that game like particularly sings. God Hand, very interesting kind of mechanical offering. But this shows such a gift for that kind of cinematic roller coaster ride that is now the norm. It’s kind of interesting to me that he hasn’t really like done a straight version of that ever again. Like he has a grasp of it. I think most people at Naughty Dog would absolutely kill for and people have been trying to kind of emulate ever since. It’s kind of mad that this is like the one in his lineup, which is that. Yeah, it is kind of curious. It’s like there is an element of, you know, him just making the game he wanted to make with Resident Evil branding. Yeah. And, you know, that was a great thing in the end. It’s funny actually, given one of the things I remember about Dino Crisis is he called it like a horror roller coaster, which I always thought was a much better description of Resident Evil 4 and I think you just used that exact term for it without the horror. Because it does have that sense of incredible, incredible momentum. You know, some games, when they get it right, you can feel towards the end of them, something pulling you, like you want to finish this thing and it’s encouraging, you know, it’s encouraging that and the challenges it’s putting in front of you and you’re so invested in getting to the end. And like by the end of Resident Evil 4, I was like, God damn, am I going to finish this mission? You know, like you’ve been on such a journey. And it’s like, I always felt that kind of, oh, that’s another thing I didn’t like about the remake. I didn’t like what they did with Mike. But I thought it was all right. I thought it was all right. In that section in the original, I remembered going up it and you do get that same thing of Mike just blowing away these emplacements that as Leon would be massive, massive trouble. And this sense of relief and just like walking through the destruction thinking, God, it’s almost over. And thinking about what you’ve been through and like, yeah, I don’t know what his trick is. I don’t think anyone does really, because nobody makes games like this. But he has a knack for upping the ante in unexpected ways. Doing things that are completely tonally dissonant, like I’ve seen that criticism of Resident Evil 4. I think it’s a perfectly fair criticism. I also just think it’s no fun. I don’t particularly care about tonal dissonance in certain contexts. And I don’t think he did here either. I think he was just like, here’s my character, here’s his capabilities. And he makes Leon like an incredibly capable character. One of the things I really liked when you were talking about this versus Resident Evil 2, I know you were talking about the remakes, is the implied character growth in Leon between the two games, which obviously as a series fan, that really struck me quite powerfully. You know, just how capable this guy is now. And there is that thing with Mikami where it’s like, right, well, I’m going to make this guy basically able to take on an army by himself. So, you know, what can we throw at him? And just throwing everything they can think of at him. Right. And that’s the thing. It’s like not holding back. You really don’t feel like they held anything back in this game at all. It’s so what I’m hearing is it’s a maybe, you know, it’s it’s it’s I mean, this isn’t just the Shinji Mikami Hall of Fame. This is this is a video games Hall of Fame pick. Yeah. As far as I’m concerned. Yeah. Same same for me in the video game Hall of Fame. This would have one of those five spots for sure. Well, maybe we will gradually build this ultimate video game Hall of Fame. Samuel would be cross that we’ve already given away one of the five without him being here, but, you know, if you’re going to be sick, that’s what happens. What does this button do, Matt? It says delete archive. Next up in 2006, we have God Hand. Obviously, Resident Evil 4, he couldn’t be riding more high and he basically has the opportunity to make not his dream game, but like anything I want and make it exactly as I want is kind of how he puts it in the Archipel interview. There’s actually a very strange anecdote he tells about how he became fixated on one other member of the team who was like into the game. And he said, for this one project only, I’m going to tailor everything to this one member of the team. If he likes it, then it goes in. If anyone else criticizes it, or if anyone else from the team brings me any suggestions, I’m going to ignore them. I’m literally going to make it for one person because I just want to see A, what that looks like. And B, I felt like I could do that because I just made Resident Evil 4 for Capcom. So like, why can’t I do that? Which is a roundabout way of saying he comes to make an incredibly singular action game, which I am terrible at. So I’m hoping, Rich, that you can explain the magic of this to the listeners. I hope I can. So I love 3D fighting games generally. Capcom are obviously the masters of them. Platinum had a very good start. I actually haven’t played Bayonetta 3, I have to confess. Although I am going to because I’m quite curious about the scale-bound links. But yeah, Capcom were the masters of the 3D action game, Honourable Mention, Team Ninja, this isn’t like any other 3D action game. There’s actually a Mikami anecdote which I’m very glad about because it helps me to explain how I feel about it. That thing I was saying earlier about how he looks at arcade genres and tries to do them in 3D, this feels like an attempt to look at what worked in things like Double Dragon, Final Fight, Streets of Rage and bring some of that into 3D, which I would say 3D action games, the ones we think of, The Devil May Cry, The Bayonetta, they don’t have any relation to those older games really. And I found when I went back to the God Town Wikipedia page the other day, you know, doing my homework for this episode, it turns out Mikami actually Final Fight Revenge, which was a 1999 game they tried to do Final Fight in 3D. And Mikami’s verdict was that Revenge was, quote, shit. And he decided that one day he would do it better. So that’s kind of interesting to me that like it is that kind of straight a line because it was something I’d always felt about it, that this was a game that was kind of in that Final Fight you know, mold trying to do what those games did because the trick to it and what I was talking about with the camera system being so amazing earlier is you’re obviously playing Gene who is the possessor of the eponymous God Hand and you kinda rotate him and you’re always fighting in a straight line ahead of you. So you’re always fighting like you’re surrounded and the enemies will attack you but you’re always fighting in a straight line whereas you know with like the more standard type of 3D action game what they do is you have sweeping attacks like even your sword will hit three enemies at once if you get the arc right etc. In this one you’re literally fist to fist with enemies. I think that’s another thing he said about the game like there are weapons in it but it’s weapons like weapons you get in Streets of Rage like you pick up a pipe, you hit three thugs with it and it’ll absolutely blue to them but then the pipe breaks. Like so the weapons are very simple, very arcadey like that and most of it is hand to hand and it’s about this kind of one-on-one, one-on-two, maybe one-on-three brawling. Probably more important than the combat system in a weird way or the attacks is the dodge system. So it has this remarkable idea which is all the dodges are mapped to the right analogue stick. So you’re Jeanne, you’re planted in place, you’re facing your enemy and the enemy’s attacks can be high, they can be to the side, either side, or they can be low. And if you press up on the right stick, Jeanne will duck and bob his head like a boxer. So if they try and punch you, Jeanne just ducks and weaves and it looks amazing. If they try to attack from the side, you press left or right on the right analogue, Jeanne will dash to that side. If they attack low, you press down, Jeanne does a backflip. The kind of key skill of it, because the other side is the attacks are simplified. So he decides he wants to go back to that simple arcade system of you just mash the button and a combo comes out of the character. So in God’s Hand you acquire all the attacks, but then you go into the options menu and you set up your dream six hit combo. And basically you’re constantly acquiring moves through the game. I don’t know how many there are, but it feels like hundreds. But you just assemble your ideal roster of six and that’s like your main combo. And then you have certain other moves that are useful in any context. But like that’s what the game is. It’s like dodging these enemy attacks from unassailable odds, unleashing your dream combo, which is really easy because you’ve just got to mash the button. Like that’s the thing about God’s Hand. People talk about it as this game with a massive skill ceiling. And it is, it absolutely is. Like the things people can pull off in this is incredible. But it’s also like designed to kind of play more like an arcade brawler than people maybe think. Anyway, that’s what’s so amazing about the combat system. In conjunction with the fact it’s incredibly hard. All the enemies are utterly ludicrous. And like, I think I said this in the previous episode, some of the jokes in this game definitely wouldn’t land these days. I kind of wonder about that guy he designed it for, whether he’s doing well in his work life or… And it definitely has that kind of escalation of, you know, like, the whole thing is ludicrous, you know, but like one of the enemies is like a fat Elvis. Or AKA Elvis. There’s so many stupid enemies in this game. There’s like a man in a gorilla costume. There’s like this hellish circle of like bosses you gradually fight through. And obviously the top of them is a devil hand. It’s like Power Rangers, right? And oh yeah, I mean, again, something that probably wouldn’t land too well these days, it’s Dwarf Power Rangers who have an amazing, amazing theme tune. It’s incredible. And like there’s obviously five of them. And as it starts up, they kind of do their little Power Ranger thing and they charge across the room at you. They’re a nightmare to fight. A little bastard nibble your ankles while you’re fighting the other ones. All the gloves are off. The enemy design is both inspired and absurd. It doesn’t even really have a tone. Like it feels like a joke the whole way through, like a knowing joke. Yeah, it’s just absolutely fantastic to play crammed with jokes, just crammed with jokes. There’s jokes in every corner in this game. There’s hidden enemies, depending on how well you fight. And, oh, this is perhaps the most important bit of the game. It measures how you’re playing, and it’s got a dial. If you’re fighting really, really well, it’ll give you an A, but the enemies will improve. And you can go up. So it’s like, I think like C is just normal. So it’s like C, B, A. And then there’s S, and I can’t quite remember if it goes up to S, S. I think it does go up to S, S. And like you last about 10 seconds in that mode before you get absolutely gutted. So it’s this weird thing where like it does have adaptive difficulty. It can be a bit crude how it works, but it does work, you know, like as you get better at this game and it becomes the kind of the challenge of the game almost is to like you can take out enemies really quickly if you know what you’re doing and you use exactly the right moves. It becomes this kind of self-imposed challenge after a while to kind of keep that meter as high as you can for as long as you can without dying. And finally it has the replayability factor where you unlock a load of missions that are just fighting increasingly ludicrous combinations of the enemies in the game in a boxing ring, which is just the combat system left to sing and they will give you everything they can throw at you in that mode. And I probably spent as much time in that as the main game because I love the combat system so much. But I’ve never played anything like this again and I never will. It’s a bizarre game. I’m so glad it exists. I wonder if now, free from Tango wandering developer looking for a project, if this is the kind of territory we’ll find him, if this is literally him left to his own devices, let me make whatever I want to make. This is kind of what he comes up with. I mean, it’s bananas. The thing that slightly disappoints me about it is that I think Capcom looked at this and thought it was so nuts that they didn’t put much effort into selling it. Which is kind of understandable. I don’t have the same affection for it, but mainly because it’s something I’ve never truly clicked with. It’s a true original. Every idea in it doesn’t really behave like anything else. It’s quite hard to get a foothold to begin with. Quite a difficult game until you do click with it on a basic level. It’s definitely a game I’ve heard people talk about in terms of when you lock in on it and you have it down. It’s quite a transformative experience. Not quite in the same way, but people sometimes say the same things about things like Sekiro or whatever. Once you’ve got the central idea down, you’re off to the races and you can really enjoy it. Maybe it doesn’t do quite enough to help you lock in on it, but then why would it? Because it’s made for one bloke. I kind of agree with that. I wouldn’t say my first couple of hours with this were particularly pleasurable. Something in it I liked. I remember a lot of people were really critical of the graphics at the time because the main characters look great and the enemies look great. That’s clearly where they put all the resource. And the backgrounds are just kind of like, yeah, they’re a bit crappy looking. I mean, they’re fine, you know, it’s just kind of low texture 3D art. But it’s like, why do you care about that stuff, you know? And it has some great kind of environment ideas as well later on. It’s such, such an odd game. It definitely could have done a better job introducing itself to players, but like there really is nothing else like it. And I don’t think there will be again. It’s kind of sad and beautiful. Like I was glad when Capcom put it on PlayStation Network, but that was PS3 era and it’s not kind of available now. And that side of it, I think, is sad. Like I think Capcom owe it to Mikami for the hundreds of millions, if not billions, his creations continue to bring into them. They should keep God Hand alive on a download service. If Ghost Trick can have a second shot at life. I bet Ghost Trick sold 20 times what God Hand did. Oh yeah, as I was saying that, I was like, you don’t actually believe this. So I take it back. Sorry. Sorry, Shootakumi. Takumi’s like, yes, finally got one over on Mikami. Not at all. Mikami is his mentor. Of course, of course. It’s going in. It’s got to go in the Hall of Fame. I think this has to go in is like the most Mikami-Mikami game. Yeah. I mean, this is what this is what he thinks a game should be, you know, in his heart of hearts. So yeah, that’s that’s a great description of it. The other one I always remember, it was the Edge review. It was slightly before I joined the magazine. And I remember thinking the review had underscored it because I think they gave it a seven or maybe a six. Of course, a six is a good score. But the final line of that review is great. It says there’s a lot wrong with this game. I’ve told you some of what that is. But if you overlook this game because of that, you’re missing out on the equivalent of a drunken night out with some of Capcom’s finest minds. And that’s the perfect way of putting it. It is just these genius creatives with their undergarments flying in the wind. What an image to have in our mind as we allow this into our illustrious Hall of Fame. I hope there’s no easily shocked people in the crowd for this ceremony. I mean, that kind of suits God Hand. That’s the God Hand level of humour. I’d like the idea that as it’s going into the Hall of Fame, some people are booing, you know? I think that’s how it should be. The IGN reviewer at the back. That person is not invited to our ceremony. Have you seen the credit sequence to God Hand? Yeah, yeah. If any listeners haven’t, Google the God Hand credit sequence because everyone should see it at least once, even if you won’t play the game. We now jump forward to 2010 for Vanquish. Not the biggest career when you lay it all out. Like, we’re already getting into the, near the end of things he’s actually directed. As mentioned before, this is the game he ends up making at Platinum because Sega don’t want his more interesting ideas. Actually, that’s a bit unfair to Vanquish. Looks like a cover shooter. Isn’t really a cover shooter. Something a lot more dynamic. You play as Sam Gideon, a man with rocket knees and an incredible combat suit that lets him slow time and dart around the battlefield. I think the problem with this game is it arrives at a time where the cover shooting rhythm is so well established and people who try and play this game like that will probably succeed but probably won’t have the best time and certainly won’t click in with this character. Again, a bit like God Hand, I think there is a little bit of a teaching problem in this game about maybe how it’s meant to be fully enjoyed. But if you do click into just this wildly powerful central character who is just so capable in so many ways and capable of so many fantastic moments and ideas that would normally exist in lesser games, cutscenes, here in the battlefield you have this incredible ability to pull off these anime manic feats. It’s very, very hard not to get sucked up in this. We were maybe a little cool on this in our Platinum Hall of Fame on the grounds of we love the feel, we love the ideas, maybe it doesn’t have the kind of sort of as iconic like world or general sort of like thrust of a campaign you would maybe hope for from the maker of Resident Evil 4. I don’t know if you feel that’s unfair. I was thinking earlier when you mentioned the Platinum Hall of Fame, I was thinking there was something I was upset about in that episode. What was it? I mean there was quite a lot I think. This is a game actually where… Don’t you like Anarchy Reigns also? I do like Anarchy Reigns a lot, yeah. But I’m not sure Mikami was involved with that at all. Vanquish, I was a tiny bit cool on it when it came out. I think I reviewed this. It might have been for Eurogamer and gave it an 8. Which I’m actually kind of not ashamed of. But I think it’s definitely a 9. I wouldn’t give it a 10. I’m probably giving the lie to the idea game reviewers don’t think about their review scores. Because over time I’ve come to appreciate just how much it delivers, just how unusual it is, just how different it is from the rest of the pack. When I first played Vanquish, which would have been for the review, the first hour or so I didn’t get it. Like I kind of got it. I was sliding around a little bit. But I was still spending most of my time kind of taking cover and playing it like it was a Gears of War with a robot man or something. And it’s only when you realize why am I sitting here in cover, letting them shoot at me, when I can just zoom over there, shoot them in the back and then zoom over there and do that guy. As soon as you get that in your head, like I can just be anywhere in a couple of seconds and they can’t, it’s such a different game. The best description of it I ever saw, I can’t remember who it was, I think it might even have been a games journalist on Twitter or something. Somebody called it the anti-cover shooter, and that’s exactly what it is, because you think about Gears, and I’ve got a lot of time for the Gears games, they’re fun, but you do kind of slam into a wall as a big man, hide behind it, and then pop out and shoot Locust until they’re dead, and then you go to another wall, and obviously there’s some dynamism within that, but next to what Vanquish is doing, that Ilk of Game just feels completely stationary, whereas Vanquish is like, here’s a giant arena, use absolutely all of it, and once that clicks in your head, you just realise there’s, yeah, again, I’ve ended up saying this twice now, but it’s like, you probably won’t play anything like this ever again. I think elements of it have found its way into other games. Like, I think Warframe has nicked quite a lot of it without being anywhere near as good. I mean, obviously, completely different experiences. The singularity of the vision of that suit and what that suit can do is just incredible. Yeah, I kind of agree with what you’re saying about the characters though, because I kind of liked Sam in that kind of stereotypical jock way. I hated Burns, is it? The big beefy commando dude. I sometimes get the characters in this confused with the characters in Binary Domain. Yeah, well, Binary Domain was actually quite a good story, I thought. Yeah, well, that is the difference. And I’m much more into the world of Binary Domain. I want the world of Binary Domain, but the action of this. Yeah. That’s a ten. Yeah, that is a ten. I think this one has Hillary Clinton as president, doesn’t it? Yeah, it doesn’t quite have the… I think you’re right in what you say about the world building. It’s got this absolutely incredible suit at the center of it. Incredibly capable protagonist. The enemies are fun to fight. Like, it has some great ideas for the boss fights, I think. And of course, you ultimately find out there’s a baddie with his own evil suit, which is classic. That’s how it has to go. But yeah, it doesn’t have that kind of character, I would say, of some of his earlier work. It feels like a slightly blander product in terms of theming. If I was to mark it down for anything, it would be that. But as a game… It was unknown for the Platinum Hall of Fame, but I kind of feel like it probably is a yes for the Mikami Hall of Fame. How many are we on though? How many have we stuck in there? Our yeses are Original Resident Evil, Resident Evil 4 and God Hand. And we’ve got… We’ve got a maybe for Resident Evil remake. It’s so good. Vanquish. I think yes, maybe on the grounds of… I think it should be celebrated that as late as 2010, someone was still challenging what were already norms. Yeah, and I think it should be in there because I don’t think any game has ever given me a better sensation of speed. Yeah, I’m actually like… I’m making the mistake I did in my Eurogamer thing again of like… You know, because it ends on like a bit of a cliffhanger, you know, obviously setting up a Vanquish 2, which would never happen. I was a little bit down in it for that, and I was a little bit down in it because the characters weren’t that great and all that stuff. But actually, when I think back to this game, I just want to play it again. And how many games can you really say that about? Like, this just feels fantastic in the hands. And going back to what we were saying earlier about PN3, like, this is the kind of, you know, ultimate culmination of those ideas. Like, when you look at what PN3, oh, I almost did a PN03 there. When you look at what it’s doing with the bullet patterns and stuff, and then look at what Vanquish does with the bosses, and it gives you that full on bullet hell experience. Because it knows all the player has to do is click the slide button and, you know, move in a direction, and they’ll avoid it all. It doesn’t matter that, you know, half of Russia’s ordnance stock is coming at Sam, because he can move 80 miles an hour over there right away. So, yeah, I think in terms of, like, it does have that thematic link of, like, following through on an idea that he had one previous attempt at realizing and maybe didn’t, you know, get there. And, yeah, whatever you can criticize about Vanquish, it’s an amazing feeling game. Like, the bits where you drop-kick a robot and go into slow-mo as he backflips off them, and you just kind of blow them away with your pistol as you’re landing. Oh, I mean, that is purest video game. Yeah, it’s got to go in. Why was I advertising it? Which leads us to the final Mikami-directed game, 2014’s The Evil Within, which is Mikami returning very much to his Resident Evil 4 roots, albeit in a much grimy and nastier world. Like, there isn’t the kind of popcorn fun of Resident Evil 4, which is set inside the psychological landscape, inside the head of a serial killer, which gives them an opportunity to take you to some truly dire places. I’d say it’s got more of a sore aesthetic. It’s unrelentingly nasty. Almost a bit of Silent Hill in the mix, but still kind of paired to the over-the-shoulder action intensity of Resident Evil 4. Listeners of this podcast know I’m a big fan of Evil Within. It doesn’t rub shoulders quality-wise with Resident Evil 4, but it’s one of the few games which has that flavour, and I just react so positively towards that. I have such affection for Resident Evil 4 that anything that’s even a bit like it is already in my good books. I obviously love that it plays Claire de Lune in the safe houses, which is a classic Mikami touch. Rich, Evil Within, where do you stand on this series? Because, you know, without jumping too far ahead, we can jump a little bit ahead. I notice you’ve got Evil Within 2 down as one of your potential inclusions as a Mikami produced game. I mean, I have the highest opinion on Earth of Evil Within 2. Probably a slightly cracked opinion. I like it much, much more. I think people generally quite like it. I really like Evil Within 2. I think it’s brilliant. Really liked the Evil Within as well. Everything you said about it is right. It does have this element to it where let’s not overdo it because it’s still a game about shooting things in the head. It’s got more of a sense of mental horror than Resident Evil necessarily has. Obviously this thing of it, the whole thing being set in a kind of mental construct of a… Rivik I think is his name. And like… Terrible story this game, I think. There are bits of it that are terrible. They’re like… I kind of think like some of the world building in these games is incredible. And then, you know, when it has to actually be a game and have narrative beats, it loses it somewhat. I was interested to hear you mention Silent Hill because I’ve always wondered if members of Team Silent worked on these games because the visual style of some of the monsters to me, outside of the kind of standard enemy types, which are like, you know, they’re zombies. How much can you do with that? God, imagine how many character designers are tasked with that every day. Outside of those, like the bosses they come up with in these games, and they do still play like Resident Evil games, but they’re much more the kind of thing I’d associate with Silent Hill. And it’s not afraid to give you that thing which Resident Evil kind of moved away from of a big terrifying thing that is definitely going to kill you, and you just have to get away from it. And it’s kind of like, it’s got that great, great sense for putting its protagonist in danger that feels real. I felt scared in a way that like a 3D Resident Evil game hadn’t made me feel for quite a long time. Sorry, third person, I meant to say, not 3D. Because I think Resident Evil only recaptured that when it went back to Village, and even then only for the first half, really. It’s an interesting one. I think it’s like weirdly humorous, The Evil Within by Mikami standards. Like it almost lacks his lighter touch, and his like sort of gamey, sort of fun touch. Like there is some of that stuff, you know, like the safe room area, is this kind of like mental asylum kind of reception you go to. And you collect these keys which let you unlock one of like 50 lockers. And there’s a little bit of a fairground vibe to which of these lockers are you going to open up, and is it going to be something amazing, or is it going to be something shit behind it? And you know, that’s quite a Mikami-ish idea, but it’s quite a bleak game. Apart from collecting brains in jars. There’s brains in jars, but you know what I mean, it’s like a bad hang in the parlance of this podcast. Yeah, there’s definitely stuff I like about it, story-wise I think. I like the fact that Sebastian’s fucked up. It’s very clear that he’s not just the kind of guy in his mid-forties whose life has gone wrong, but he’s probably an alcoholic, he has a terrible relationship with his daughter, he’s kind of conflicted about why he’s here at all, not here in the game world, but still doing this job, etc. And I think he’s better developed, and he feels like a more adult character than any of the Resident Evil lot. The Ruvik stuff comes across as little more than the cackling villain. It’s a game I like a lot, but I kind of agree with everything you’re saying about it. It doesn’t have that wink that you would normally expect from Mikami. And maybe the humour wouldn’t fit here. I think the only bit of humour is the nurse in the mental ward who she says different things to you as you go back. And depending on how much you talk to her over time, she gets kind of warmer to Sebastian and says some funny stuff. But that’s not a strain of comedy. That’s just like an NPC at the same bit. Does the Evil Within 1 make the Hall of Fame? I mean, the thing is, it’s a good game. This got sevens when it came out, didn’t it? I gave it an 8 in her exam. Yeah, I would say that’s about fair. I liked it more than most, I would say. You know, saying that in a lot of his games, he never really returns to that pacing of Resident Evil 4. This is the closest he gets, I’d say. There’s an idea of like, let’s change it up every 20 minutes. Here’s a new mechanic, here’s a new gimmick, here’s a new obstacle. That’s kind of exactly what I liked about it. It basically felt like Capcom didn’t know where to go after Resident Evil 4. Resident Evil 5 is just those mechanics again in a different setting. Resident Evil 6 is just like, even more! It’s the most more any game has ever been. Yeah, indeed. And this did feel in some ways like a kind of mechanical evolution, if nothing else, of Resident Evil 4. I do think, like, I was amazed at how great the shooting felt in this. Wow, when you fire a gun in this game, it really feels it. And like you say, that thing of like, it’s not afraid to rip you out. I do think it uses that conceit of it being set in Ruvik’s mind really nicely. Because it’s got the excuse to do anything. Like it can just pull you out at any moment and say, this is happening now. And it does do that. I think the sequel may even do it more successfully. But yeah, it may not have the humour. But I think it does have that element of surprise. And it’s maybe just that the tone is perhaps a bit too grim. And we can put this up as a maybe as well. So we’ve currently got four yeses. We’ve got Resident Evil, the original, Resident Evil 4, God Hand and Vanquish. Maybe should we talk about some of the things he’s produced? I wonder if there’s a case to be made for one of the games he’s produced. To take the fifth slot, I’m going to rattle through the few I highlighted. I just wanted to point out that Mikami does play a really, really key part in Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney. He’s like in no way the creator of that game. But he does give Shootakumi an opportunity. He identifies Shootakumi as a future talent correctly and gives him the time to just make his dream project. A little bit like what Mikami does with God Hand, I guess. It’s kind of a well done for Dino Crisis 2. Here is six months to make your dream game, which is a detective game, which is Ace Attorney. It would be mad to call this a Mikami game, but I wanted to make the point. The one I think maybe is a bit more interesting is Killer 7, which is obviously a game he produces, directed by Suda51. This is one of the Capcom 5. Everyone was very excited for it. Quite an arty out there game. It’s a sort of on the rail shooter set in a very stylized, cell shaded-ish world where you play as a series of personalities, a family of assassins who are all kind of contained in potentially the schizophrenic mind of another assassin. Quite a baffling story. I’m not going to pretend I fully understand it. Mikami’s role in it as a producer is more about enabling Suda51 to get this game through Capcom’s system. But he does speak about it as quite a partnership and something that he is very fond of and enjoyed the experience so much that he later again works with Suda51 on Shadows of the Damned, which definitely isn’t a Hall of Fame game. Weirdly though, Shadows of the Damned, I think was going to be or was meant to be a killer 7-esque weirdo project. Suda51 had pitched an idea based on a unfinished Kafka story, which is actually what got Mikami on board. And he’s like, yes, absolutely, use my name to get this contract signed. They sign with EA, who allegedly do hear this original pitch, but they basically get munched up by the giant blockbuster system that is EA. And what comes out the other end is a game in which you have a weapon called the Big Bona, which I don’t think was in Kafka. Ugh, Jesus. I don’t mind Shadows of the Damned, but it’s clearly a dark moment in his career. The way he talks about it in the Archipel documentary is quite funny, just to see him be like, we pitched this Kafka project and we made Shadows of the Damned. And yeah, we probably shouldn’t do that again, and I probably wouldn’t make that game again. So let’s not put it in. Just quickly, my favourite story about EA and how they help creatives was when I talked to David Doik, formerly of Free Radical, and they signed up TimeSplitters 3 to EA. EA said, you know, we’re going to help you make this, you know, get this game to the next level, sell millions. So they sent over some consultants to help Free Radical. And Doik says, they turned up and all they had were these boards with big pictures of Vin Diesel on them. There you go. There’s your game design for you. God bless him. Are you a Killer 7 guy? I like it without loving it. I know a lot of people who love it. Like obviously the visual style. I mean, wow, it’s still got that kind of incredible effect even now. I didn’t think the action was great. Like it was okay enough for me to keep on playing for a while. I think the game is completely incomprehensible. And I’m a fan of some of Suda’s stuff. Generally, I like his tone, his sense of fun, the vibes of his games. Killer7, like some people tell me it’s got the greatest story games I’ve ever had. I struggle to find it. So I would say it’s a game I respect, but I don’t love it. Which doesn’t feel like Hall of Fame candidate to me. I am interested, however, to hear about your other kind of directorially adjacent projects from him. You mentioned Evil Within 2 earlier, preferring it to Evil Within 1. What’s the deal with that? It’s more how a couple of his bosses landed with me. I think they were very well developed as characters. Maybe not the eventual fights against them. That’s always the problem with horror games. Ultimately, any interesting character has to turn into a giant toothy blob. It’s a bit of a genre problem. I thought it did an amazing job of a small open world. I’m so sick of open worlds now. I don’t think I’ll ever play a Ubisoft game again. I haven’t played an Assassin’s Creed in five or six years. I know they’re amazing now. But my god, I’m so sick of AAA open world games. I just can’t face them. But I like open worlds. From that perspective, it was very interesting to see a survival horror game done in that kind of setting. I thought it used the conceit of pulling you in and out of the worlds quite nicely. I thought the action was just tremendous. The story was really well paced. I would say it was a smoother experience than the original. This is almost heresy. But I think it does pick up a lot of the ideas of the evil within and do them in a kind of… The only word I can think of is smoother, which is not really a great critical explainer of what it’s doing. I do think the… I believe they call it Wide Linear Open World thing. Here’s a sort of hub area and there are like five things you can take at your own pace and maybe some surprise combat encounters between those things. It’s quite a nice place to kind of aim it. I definitely will take that over, over proper open worlds apart from Zelda Tis the Kingdom, which we’re obviously excited for. I think they sanded off some of the rougher edges of One. And maybe I’m just a little bit contrarian in I think some of the character of Evil Within One that like resonates with me is the unabashed nastiness of it, which… Yeah, I think I still prefer One, but I like your take on Evil Within Two. Yeah, I like it a lot. I think, as with almost all of these games, it slightly tails off at the end, but I think they all do. And I think one of the great tragedies of Evil Within Two is that boss thing I was talking about earlier, because it ends up at the end being about the problems with Sebastian and his wife, and you end up like the final encounter in it. And I’m sorry if I’m spoiling this old game for anyone. You’re like walking up to your old family home and your daughter’s watching you from the window. And then your ex-wife appears. But because it’s a survival horror game, she just becomes a gigantic monster. And you just blast her away with your shotgun. Like it’s kind of like it’s a bit like as a narrative, as a moment of narrative closure, I’m not sure it’s quite doing what it needs to. Yeah, that’s one of those things where it’s like it’s trapped by the nature of what it is. I think these games rub up against that all the time. But yeah, I like this game a lot. I rate it as a strong case for it being a bonus inclusion, perhaps. I’m also interested about your other pig. Would you like to talk us through this? Oh yeah. So this is basically and I think we’ve briefly alluded to this earlier. This is kind of the Kamiya lineage where we’ve referenced various times. This thing about the Kamiya of bringing the younger directors through. Probably the most famous example is Hideki Kamiya. And you know, they’re obviously quite close in age. I’m sure Kamiya would have had a successful career without Mikami. But the fact is Mikami seems to have taken a great interest in what Kamiya does and encouraged them to make some absolutely fantastic games. So Mikami was producer on Resident Evil 2 first of all, which was Kamiya’s directorial debut. Obviously the sequel to Shinji Mikami’s own game. The concept for Resi 2 is Shinji Mikami’s. He thinks that because the series has done a kind of traditional horror setting with the kind of haunted house, he thinks it’s more interesting to take it to a contemporary urban setting. He’s like, okay, well, the first game could have been set anywhere, but like the second game is set in the present day around the police station because that’s going to freak people out. Brilliant, brilliant insight, but he puts Kamiya in charge and I think Kamiya has quite a nightmare on it because they famously cancel it, don’t they? There’s Resident Evil 1.5, which I believe is available in some state on the internet now, which is kind of interesting because that was a game that only existed in two screenshots when I was kind of interested in it. I think Shootakumi also worked on that. Yeah, so that apparently gets cancelled quite a lot when quite a lot has been done on it. Obviously they made the right decision because Resident Evil 2 is fantastic. Kamiya then moves on to… I don’t know if he does anything in between, but Devil May Cry starts as a prototype for Resident Evil 4, or is it Resident Evil 3? Yes, that’s right. Resident Evil 4, I think. They obviously get so far into it. They realise this is like… I mean, if Resident Evil 4 is action-focused, this is very action-focused. They realise it’s too much for the Resident Evil series and it has to be its own thing. The most notable thing about this, I think, when you think about Mikami kind of guiding Kamiya through Kamiya’s kind of first personal creation is of a series or an aesthetic, whatever you want to call it. Have you ever seen that picture of Kamiya with his mum and the leather jacket? Classic. Yeah, that classic, classic picture. You’ve got to stick that in the show notes because that is the Devil May Cry aesthetic right there. I think Devil May Cry is a wonderful game and you can see that’s a director that’s been encouraged to make the game he wants. You’ve got a chance here. Do what you want with it. That’s certainly how it feels to me. One of the things about being a fan of Kami is you get this sense of what he thinks is cool. He has a real idea for what’s cool and what isn’t. And whether he’s wrong or he’s right, I admire his confidence. And yeah, Beautiful Joe is just the end of that. We’re still such an amazing concept, making a game built around time manipulation, but time manipulation as we understand it from VCR players or cinematic techniques. That is just genius. It’s another one where Mikami produces it, Kamiya directs. And I think over that little arc of Resident Evil 2, Devil May Cry, Beautiful Joe, I mean, Kamiya is as big a talent as Mikami in some ways, but this is where the guy who would go on to make Okami and Bayonetta comes from. Yeah, Kamiya is another one where it’s like the real tragedy with Scalebound is that whatever that game was, we’re not getting it. And it was a Kamiya game. And how many has he got left in him? Because I want more. It almost sounds like we’re making the case that inside the Hall of Fame, which is going to be locked up so that the games are safe, we should put Hideki Kamiya himself. I mean, that would be interesting. It would certainly keep him off Twitter, wouldn’t it? I don’t know if there’s good Wi-Fi inside the Hall of Fame. Inside the… Is Hall of Fame a tomb? Did I ever tell you? I gave Kamiya a bottle of whisky once. It was when I went to Platinum to visit them for something. And he posted a picture. I didn’t realize this. He posted a picture of himself with me to some Japanese social media platform just saying, you know, meeting the foreign press. And I didn’t know about this until years later when he blocked me. And I was like, why has Kamiya blocked me? Why has Kamiya blocked me? And like some friendly soul begged Hideki Kamiya to unblock me and pointed to this picture that I didn’t know existed on the internet saying, you’ve met this guy, he’s all right. He gave you a bottle of whiskey. And then Kamiya unblocked me. And so now you just get to enjoy him retweeting pictures of Japanese babes. It does get a bit dodgy sometimes, doesn’t it? You’re like, cool, this is valuable. This man is of a certain generation. Maybe, listen, maybe the best place for him is locked inside a box with a copy of Resident Evil, Resident Evil 4, God Hand and Vanquish. We’ve still got these two maybes. I mean, is it mad to put Resident Evil and Resident Evil Remake inside? This is what I was worried about. I called this right at the start. But then I think if we just put, if we swap Resident Evil Remake out for Evil Within, which those are the two games of contention, it sort of almost feels like the same thing in a way. You know, like they’re both tapping into the same part of him. I have to say in my heart saying Resident Evil GameCube. Rich, you are our guest. You’re my guest. So I’m gonna say it’s so. I feel really bad for the Evil Within there. I think it’s okay. I think we’ve celebrated it enough on this podcast and given it its due. Three Resident Evil games and two of them are the same Resident Evil game. Unless you’d rather put in the collective works of cameo here. I mean, I don’t know. Let’s be serious here. Because he’s produced some amazing, amazing games. I think the Evil Within 2 is great. It’s funnier if we put cameo in the Hall of Fame. I’m not just here for the humour, Matthew. What? Just put Hideki Kamiya in? As one of Mikami’s greatest productions. Yeah, why not? That sounds reasonable to me. I think if we put him in, it helps explain the key, like, mental role he’s served more than anything. It’s not only he produced these games, but he helped produce the great mind behind them. And that is a trait of Mikami we want to enshrine in the Hall of Fame. What if we get, like, an angry letter from, like, Kamiya’s mum? I produced this man. We’ll let him out occasionally. He doesn’t have to be… Just like weekdays 9 to 5. Yeah, I’d be happy with that. I mean, we should caveat it by saying, you know, like, obviously Mikami deserves enormous credit, but he’s not responsible for Kamiya’s games being brilliant. Kamiya is. But yeah, it’s that same… It’s that same relationship, isn’t it, that he had with Fujiwara himself? And it’s nice to see people paying that on in life and it being a success. It may seem one note, but I’m actually quite happy with this Hall of Fame. I’m going to recap it, because that’s what Samuel would do. This is… We’ve got Resident Evil from 1996. We have Resident Evil again from 2002, this time on the GameCube. We have Resident Evil 4, we have God Hand, we have Vanquish, and we have the produced works of Hideki Kamiya. Which is absolutely preposterous, but that’s what happens when the brains of the outfit is ill. Well, I am very, very happy with that Hall of Fame. And it is one of those things where, like, if you were talking to somebody who hadn’t played the games, they just wouldn’t understand why Resident Evil was on there twice. I think if you’ve played the original and if you’ve played the remake, you will have a sense of just how different as well as how similar those experiences are. And I think, like, one of the things the remake really, really shows, and it comes across in some of his other games, but not all, is how much of a perfectionist Mikami can be. And it’s so obvious in that game because he’s working with older material that he loves, and he’s clearly been given all the time and all the budget in the world by Capcom for that game. We called it A Labour of Love earlier. I don’t know Shinji Mikami, but I’m pretty confident in saying I think he was 100% invested in this game. I think he wanted to make it something really special. And he did. And it’s so different from the original game, and part of that is technology. You know, those six years were an incredible six years for players of video games, you know, as the succeeding 21 have been. So yeah, I mean, that’s the only bit of the list that I think might look a bit odd, but I think it’s completely justified. And Resident Evil 4, like we said, that would be in, you know, in my opinion, that would be in any game hall of fame. Godhand, I mean, you know what I feel about Godhand. God bless. God bless that game. And yeah, when I look at Vanquish and the other potentials there, I would take Vanquish over the Evil Within. I like the Evil Within a lot, but Vanquish is just something different. It’s so exciting to play. I don’t think PN3 is at the races or I’m sorry to say Dino Crisis. Or Goof Troop. Goofy dejected in the corner. We have our Hall of Fame. Rich, thank you so much for joining me for this very long podcast. Thank you very much for putting up with my slightly uneven hosting. I’ve really enjoyed kind of helping you through this period of trauma without Sam. This has been a very emotional experience for me. But there is no one in this world I would rather have gone through this with than you, Rich. I hope to get you back on the podcast. You are always welcome here. We have lots of exciting things to talk about. Yeah, I’d love to come back. I’m desperate to do that Battle Royale you mentioned at one stage with me and Dan Dawkins on the PS2. Oh, I’d love it. Yeah, that’s a big dream episode for us. We just need to carve out some time where everyone is available. Yes, we will try and make that happen. Well, Dan’s big and important these days, more big and important than me anyway. He has a ridiculous job title, doesn’t he? I mean, God, I should know this. I work at the same company. He is very important games man. Well, you have that to look forward to listeners at home. Should we ever be able to arrange it? Thank you so much for listening to The Back Page. Get well soon, Samuel. Thank you so much for putting up with my hosting again. Don’t worry. I’m sure Usual Service will resume or will be well in the world. You can, of course… Oh, my God. The hilarious bit is Samuel does this thing, and I do not know, like, any of our podcasts or email address because I normally tune out a little bit during this. He’s got Twitter. Everyone else does. Just put it in the show notes. You can find us on Twitter. You can email us. Listen to the last episode, skip to the end. You can find out where you can email us. You can support us on Patreon. That is also out there on the Internet. Google it. It’s fantastic. We’ve got some great episodes. Jesus Christ, I need to get out of this episode. So I’m going to say goodbye for now. Goodbye, Rich. Thanks for coming on. Watch The God Hand credits. You were very professional, I thought, Matthew. Night night.