Resident Evil: Revelations has non-chronological, episodic story

Unlike Mercenaries 3D, Resident Evil: Revelations is shaping up to be a "full" Resident Evil experience. In other words, it's a console game squeezed onto a handheld. But, how do you make an hours-long adventure accessible for on-the-go play? Capcom is taking a page from Alan Wake and Asura's Wrath, and has made Revelations an episodic adventure.

"We were imagining a serial drama, and you play handheld games for relatively short periods of time," game director Koshi Nakanishi said. "We created 12 scenarios that we wanted to end a certain way in a specific situation and had the scriptwriters link them together."

Because the development team was so inspired by serialized dramas, each scenario will end with a cliffhanger, Nakanishi told Nintendo's Satoru Iwata. "That way you get pulled into the world of the story," the director explained.

By transforming Revelations into an episodic game, it allowed Capcom to play around with the story a bit more than usual. "It's structured like a drama, so the events aren't always in chronological order," Nakanishi said, adding, "I think that's a first for the series." By telling the story out-of-sequence, it opens the possibility of exploring more than just the cruise ship in the game.

While a lot of emphasis is being placed on Revelations' story, Capcom admits that the Resident Evil franchise hasn't made the most sense. Capcom's Yoshizumi Hori notes that the stories tend to fall apart. "In the latter half, we tend to be like, 'As long as it's fun, it'll be fine!'" Tsukasa Takenaka added that "Capcom is always like that. We make the main events interesting and then fill in the gaps with forced logic."

Well, that explains the volcanic ending of Resident Evil 5.

Resident Evil: Revelations will be available on 3DS next month.