https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Is8EOl18qk
I’ve never gotten into the Resident Evil games, so I really don’t know anything about the series beyond the most barebones basics. After watching this weird Resident Evil Village advertisement from Japan, I feel like I know even less than I did when I started: Like what little knowledge I did possess was all wrong, and now I have to start all over again.
The ad features a nearly-three-minute performance by Yoshi Ikuzo, who a quick trip to Wikipedia tells me is a famous enka singer-songwriter in Japan. From there, a different Wiki page explains enka as a popular genre of music that’s considered to be stylistically similar to traditional Japanese music. Modern enka, a form of “sentimental ballad,” was developed in the postwar years, while a revival is dated to 1969 with the debut of singer Keiko Fuji.
We’re getting down a rabbit hole here.
Back to the matter at hand: For some reason, Capcom decided that this would be an ideal aural backdrop for a Resident Evil Village ad, and further, that Ikuzo himself should appear in it, with clips of him looking like your three-beers-deep dad singing karaoke stitched between gameplay cuts of horrific beasts, monsters, death traps, and of course the very large, oddly attractive vampire lady. Is “incongruous” the word I’m looking for here? I think so! Ikuzo sure seems to be having a good time, though. At least until the end, which goes about as you’d expect.
The ad actually came out a couple weeks ago in Japan but we didn’t see it until today, and I think it’s a fine way to send us all off into the weekend. Resident Evil Village did come out today, by the way, and it’s very good: We called it “the scariest Resident Evil yet” in our 85% review.