Resident Evil 6 isn't a bad game, and 10 years later I'm grateful for it (even if I don't like it).

Welcome to the trailer for Resident Evil 6. I was a kid when I first picked up a copy of Resident Evil 6 from a market stall in an alley in Yorkshire. It was definitely not legal, but I was fascinated by the cover (I didn't know what other people thought about it then) and all the Resident Evil gameplay that I saw thanks to my parents. I was still too young to play Resident Evil 6, but my father still let me buy a copy, and in turn he let me watch him play it. As far as I'm concerned, he just won.

I later tried it on Xbox One after playing Resident Evil 7 and recently on Nintendo Switch - and quit within the first couple of hours. I did this more than once in a row, each time crashing out of the game after a few hours. I found the control scheme more awkward than ever, and if I wanted to get through the constant QTEs, I'd rather play something from the anthology The Dark Pictures. For the most part, playing Resident Evil 6 felt like a chore.

I don't think Resident Evil 6 is a bad game, even though I kept rolling my eyes and sighing while playing. In fact, of all the games in the series, Resident Evil 6 has the most to offer and I admire how Capcom tried to do something new and cater to every type of player by providing four different campaigns - Leon, Chris, Jake and Ada. However, this didn't work in its favor at launch, prompting criticism that it all felt disjointed and over-the-top. I know Leon Kennedy is well trained and all, but does he really need to show off a lot of different fighting styles all the time?

Over time, however, I suppressed my fanboy anger and appreciated Resident Evil 6 despite knowing it wasn't for me. Can we really blame Capcom for trying to do something different than repeating the same formula over and over again? At the end of the day, we have a collective debt to Resident Evil 6... because without it, Resident Evil 7 wouldn't exist. And it's not something to think about.

It's been 10 years since Resident Evil 6 came out, and even though I've tried to play it myself with a positive, open heart, I just can't get past it no matter how hard I try. Even Chris Redfield can't encourage me to stay in the game this time. And I've come to terms with it.

Now I can only respect Capcom for simply trying to combine the Resident Evil recipe with the popular action formula in a new way; it will never be Resident Evil 4, and it will never be amazing. But now I have a newfound gratitude for Capcom and how it continues to try new things. Look at Exoprimal, for goodness sake - we wouldn't have this without Dino Crisis or Lost Planet, would we?

The same thing works in the publisher's series of games - without these less impressive parts of the Resident Evil canon, we wouldn't have the Resident Evil we have now. Overall, Capcom's commitment to keeping its games fresh has allowed Resident Evil to survive. Add in the remakes and the RE engine, and you've got a renaissance for Resi fans that simply wouldn't have happened without Resident Evil 6's missteps and giraffe fellatio.

Too bad the same can't be said for other horror franchises that were at the height of their popularity at the same time as Resident Evil. What happened to Silent Hill, Konami?

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