You might be shocked to hear this, but 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil 4 is not a narrative masterpiece. It never has been and never will be, and large parts of its masterful reputation are owed to its evident campiness and willingness to poke fun at itself. The same goes for its vocal performances, which all lean into what makes the survival hor🍌ror franchise so wonderfully silly in the first place. Fans come to it for th෴is level of excess, yet now some are claiming it falls short of expectations.
This past weekend saw Ada Wong voice actor Lily Gao lock down her🌃 social media accounts after Resident Evil 4 fans bombarded her with negative comments and harassment because they weren’t fond of her performance. I’ve written about it my🎉self through more constructive means, but if your first instinct when not liking something in a video game is to bring harm to people only partially responsible for it then you probably need therapy. Gao did her job, and brought life to Ada Wong♉ in ways that were both true to the original and expected of them by directors, producers, and whoever else was overseeing the game’s production.
Even when you discount the framing of Lily Gao’s performance and the character she plays, it isn’t like the rest of the game is a peerless onslaught of gravitas Leon, Ashley, Luis, The Merchant, Ramon, Salazar, and pretty much every speaking role is imbued with an aura of self-aware camp that makes us fal𝔍l for them so easily. Ada Wong remains a seductive foil to Leon’s obliviousness and a morally grey heroine operating from the shadows. Like everyone else’s, her lines can be clunky. Did fans believe they had a right to voice their displeasure because a woman of colour was behind it? I hear no complaints about Leon or Luis, two characters who are equally wooden in places much more prominent.
You remember Resident Evil for a certain kind of voice acting. Throughout its history I’m not sure the series has ever completely shaken off its melodramatic origins. We expected it to with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, which seemed like an obvious reboot starring new characters, locations, and lore that dared 💎to leave the past behind. But it still revolved around solving ridiculous puzzles while running away from scary goo monsters and rednecks with worms in their brains.
Village was basically a spiritual successor to Resi 4, with its village opening and constantly changing en✤vironments while also relying heavily on action over scares with the help of familiar characters, all of whom totally knew the sort of schlocky nonsense they had signed up for. Ethan Winters gets his limbs cut off repeatedly and somehow reattaches them with magical plant juice. I am not expecting his performance to blow my socks off. But it works, and is great in the context of a cheesy survival horror that is big on scares and even bigger on action. If you hated Ada in Resi 4, I have to ask why it would drive you to outraged complaints more than basically anyone else in these games.
She didn’t fit expectations that probably had no basis in reality to begin with, even more so when almost every single interpretation of Ada’s c⭕haracter in history is similarly guarded and mysterious. I’m continually puzzled as to where the bar was set in the first place for this kind of reaction. Resident Evil established a - perhaps unintentional - reputation with its diabolical acting back in 1996, and has never fully left that identity behind. The series struck a careful balance of schlock and scares that Capcom was determined to build upon, blending iconic Americana with a distinctly Japanese take on traditional horror. Its writing and casting seems fully aware of this, and never really intended to be anything but a parody of its own making.
If each character suddenly had a stubborn awareness in their surroundings and weren’t up for cracking jokes and acknowledging their own history it just wouldn’t be very fun. Capcom tried to introduce new faces and few were as memorable as those who came be🦋fore (Lady Dimitrescu being the obvious exception). It chose to return to a tried-and-tested formula, and we came along for the ride, s✤o we’ve no right to question the performance of characters who are doing all we could have ever asked of them in the first place.
Resident Evi🌄l 4’s Ada Wong more than gets the job done, both inꩵ terms of her narrative role and Lily Gao’s subtle yet impactful rendition.
