RE2 Remake: Garbage Perfected

 I've been wanting to do scripted videos on my gaming channel on Youtube for a while now. This is just the easiest place to share those scripts for proof-reading purposes. This post is a game review. I don't just write theological articles; I just don't write very often anymore.

(Viewer Discretion)

If you ask me what my favorite Legend of Zelda game is, I'd tell you it's Resident Evil 4. So naturally you'll understand when I tell you that the best game in the Resident Evil franchise is Resident Evil 5.

Context

Resident Evil is a series I have an unusual history with. I can’t remember the exact timeline of my experience with this franchise, but judging by release dates I believe I played Resident Evil 4 on the Wii first. I was so impressed with that game that when I saw Resident Evil for the Gamecube on some random store’s shelf, I bought it immediately. In those days before the internet was widely used for everything, I didn’t even know that the copy I bought was a Remake of the original and not the original itself. You may say to yourself “I believe you were dumb enough to believe that if RE5 is your favorite in the series,” but for all intents and purposes Resident Evil Remake is a complete replacement of the original game right down to the title: there was no indication of it being a remake of the original anywhere. Most people find Remake to be a gorgeous reinterpretation of the pixelated Playstation graphics. For me, I thought it was pretty impressive for being such an old game, but it didn't grab me enough to beat it more than once. The original is where my curiosity stopped because I only moderately enjoyed it: the question of whether any other game in the series was good never even occurred to me.

That may seem weird in this post-modern internet age where watching a Resident Evil Requiem video on Youtube will take you down the rabbit trail of Resident Evil through the ages, but as an idiot teenager it really didn’t bother me to know what happened in the gap between a great game I really enjoyed and the classic that spawned the series. It wasn’t until Resident Evil 5 came along that I became interested in the series again, and I don’t even think I bought it. I’m pretty sure it was older brother who got it on 360. Between my older brother and my younger brother we beat that game dozens of times, even to the point of doing an infinite rocket launcher run just as a victory lap for unlocking them.

We enjoyed Resident Evil 5 so much that my little brother and I ran through Resident Evil 6 when it released. We even had a blast doing it, despite that game being unplayable trash that I cannot recommend because of weird, unskippable nudity issues. It’s a bad game even apart from that, but it still has the best movement mechanics of any RE game (prior to Requiem) while allowing co-op, which automatically makes a game better so long as you’re playing with a friend. Sure the level design is atrocious and the story is a complete mess, but that’s not why the game is unplayable trash. The Deborah boss fight is. And for some reason Ada thinks clothes aren’t allowed in a robotic diving suit. Still, it’s convenient that this game is universally hated because the unanimous opinion of the internet is correct concerning it, just not entirely for the reasons commonly listed.

And here’s where my casual interest in Resident Evil takes the forefront: I have absolutely no interest in Resident Evil 7 and 8. Taking the series back to its “survival horror” roots didn’t appeal to me at all. Seeing the main character of those games reattach his hand with an herb in the promotional trailers just had me rolling my eyes. The RE8 lady who’s the size of an average human mother looked like another Deborah waiting to happen. Chris Redfield is the bad guy according to the trailers, which he definitely is not and this story was dumb before it ever released. I didn’t trust Capcom after Resident Evil 6 and I didn’t like the original Resident Evil that much to begin with: I will forever skip those two titles.

Now you may think all this is leading up to the release of the Remake for Resident Evil 2. It’s not: nothing the Resident Evil franchise interested me again until the Resident Evil 4 Remake. When that was announced I picked up Resident Evil 4 on the Switch for cheap to see if it was as good as I remembered before the Remake released. And I really was not enjoying it. So I shrugged the whole series off again thinking nostalgia had just blinded me. It took me about 2 years of occasionally picking up the Switch to play RE4 to realize that the reason I didn’t like the game that much was because of the horrible joystick sensitivity. The Wii edition of the RE4 is so much better than the Gamecube edition because aiming with motion controls is instantaneous and instinctive: RE4 was practically designed with a Wiimote and Nunchuk in mind. I realized this at this spot at the gardens that I clipped while playing in handheld mode on the Switch: look at how long it takes me to aim down to shoot this dog. There was enough time there for me play a whole race on Mario Kart World: enough time, in fact, for me to realize that I hadn’t been factoring in how terribly slow my aiming was when trying to play the game before, which is why I was getting hit so much. I did beat it on Switch, but do yourself a favor if you want to play the original RE4: play the Wii edition or mod the HD remaster with RE4 tweaks if you aren’t fortunate enough to have access to the Wii edition. It boggles my mind that Capcom didn’t port the Wii edition to the Switch: motion controls enhance that game so much.

You might think it's Requiem's launch that has someone like me interested in a Resident Evil video. But no, I’ve just now gotten to the point where I'll finally be attempting RE4 Remake in the near future. I had no intention of buying RE4 Remake until I’d beaten the copy of RE4 I already had. So when I finally was close to the end of the original RE4 and saw that RE4 Remake was on sale, I grabbed RE2 Remake and RE3 Remake for dirt cheap along with it. And instead of jumping straight into RE4 Remake, I decided to tackle RE2 & RE3 first since RE4 Remake is sure to spoil my experience of them.

An Incidental Game

Hardcore fans of the series should pay attention to this, because the best-selling games in this series are the ones that appeal to people with a story like mine. Not everyone who enjoys a Resident Evil game or two is looking to play every other game in the franchise. But then there are some games in the series that appeal to casual and hardcore gamers alike. RE4 is the most popular, RE5 is the best, and RE2 Remake is more popular than that today for some reason. I wanted to find out what that reason was. Is it just because Leon is the main character? Even if that’s all this game has going for it, I like Leon, so it’s already more appealing to me than RE7 or 8.

Now let me be clear from the outset: Resident Evil 2 Remake is a great game. And if I can just praise the thing it does the best for a moment, in terms of replay value, the achievement system is incredible. When I loaded this game up I already knew about the 1^st & 2^nd run system, so I was expecting to play through it maybe 2 to 4 times. I don’t go into these games expecting to play anything more than the standard difficultly, with RE5 being a notable exception because it’s awesome. But the achievements in this game did something amazing: it gave me an incentive to keep replaying the game. The unlockables don’t even matter to me that much: seeing that I have a completed playthrough where I never healed and didn’t open an item box while knowing that less than 10% of players accomplished that makes me feel like a master of this game. These were real challenges that I would have never done without a push from the achievements. And I really enjoyed achieving as many of them as I could on standard difficulty.

That first play through as Leon was incredible, even if the shotgun isn’t up to Resident Evil 4 & 5 standards. My 2^nd playthrough as Claire was great too. Then I did the 2^nd run with Claire and thought the Quickdraw Army was the worst gun in the game, which it is in terms of handguns apart from bosses.

They say a good Resident Evil game is a survival horror experience the first time through that then loses it's horror element on repeated playthroughs. That wasn’t true for me on this game: it wasn’t until my 3^rd and 4^th time playing through that I was fully stressed out. The zombies didn’t frighten me at all. I jumped occasionally at lickers and bosses and Mr. X turning the corner randomly, but I don't consider being frightened here or there with a jumpscare or two to be horror. I was stressed out though. I had run into an existential dread while playing RE2 Remake, the likes of which no game before has never hit me with so hard.

It was that stupid clock.

I was trying to get an S rank. Every little waste of time stressed me out. Then the worst thing ever happened to me: I had to leave some zombies alive. I’ve never deliberately left zombies alive in a Resident Evil game before: this is not the way.

I’ve enjoyed this game enough that I’m close to 10 playthroughs in already, but despite the triumph I felt when getting an S rank, I have never felt so much dread from any game before in my life. I was so terrified that I would reach the end of a run only to find I hadn’t hit the 3-hour mark and would have to do it all over again to get an S rank. And before you ask the question, I was already asking myself why that was terrifying if I was enjoying the game enough to even attempt it in the first place?

You see, I’m an adult. I work a full-time job. I have 8 children that aren’t allowed to watch me play Resident Evil or Phasmophobia yet (which is part of why it took me so long to find time to beat RE4). It is for this reason that I will never beat Pantheon 5 in Hollow Knight. The time I had to dedicate to that game is over: I will never practice it enough to be that good now that I’ve put that game aside. My time is a limited resource: investing 3-hours into something only to fail and try again later simply isn’t something I can afford to do all that often. It would immediately turn a hobby into work. Like most people watching this video, I am not a successful Twitch streamer that can just throw myself at a challenge until I accomplish it because people are paying me to entertain them with that failure for some reason. The thought of a game completely and utterly wasting my time for nothing but stress in return is more terrifying to me than anything else this “survival horror” game could throw at me.

Now I understand that some people would argue all video games are a waste of time. I understand that. I also know I didn’t have to attempt an S rank just for an achievement if I didn't find it enjoyable. I understand that those first couple of playthroughs were fantastic and I would recommend this game to anyone who thinks they might be interested in it.

Still during that playthrough where I was stressed out at the thought of missing an S rank, I started to notice some elements of the game design that I completely hate. My philosphy when it comes to video games as games is that they should be fun first and foremost while also not overstaying their welcome and wasting my time. These were all things I've complained about in both Resident Evil and the Legend of Zelda series for a long time now, but I've been struggling to pin down definitively. They are subtle enough problems that I think this game is close to perfect for what it’s trying to achieve. But that's exactly the problem: I don't like what this game is trying to achieve.

Survival Horror is Terrible

What's in a genre? Ask anyone what makes a "Survival Horror" game and you'll have some variation of the 4 following things: 1) Resource Management, 2) Exploration, 3) Isolation, & 4) an overwhelming evil. So while your weapons break in Breath of the Wild, the emphasis is on exploring, and Link is the only character who can do anything about it, BOTW isn't a survival horror game because Calamity Ganon is a joke that barely qualifies as a threat.

But not every Resident Evil game is survival horror either. People like to throw RE4 & 5 into the camp of "Action Horror." Despite the horror setting of those games, the abundance of ammo and emphasis on fun combat makes your characters into walking armories capable of facing the hordes of undead they fight.

You may have guessed it from my preferences for RE4 & 5, but I don't even like Horror games. This is ironic considering my most played games on Steam right now are REPO, various Resident Evil titles, and Phasmophobia. REPO is a rogue-like physics-based co-op game that barely qualifies as horror. It's not really my favorite type of game apart from the co-op element: I rarely if ever play a single-player rogue-like and would much prefer a beat-em up like a TMNT game for co-op. But REPO is better than the sum of its parts by creating hilarious, unexpected moments, so it's a great game for what it is. Phasmophobia is another game with an emphasis on the co-op experience: it is simply a randomly generated deductive reasoning puzzle. Honestly Phasmo has more in common with Sudoki than it does with "horror" games, but it is jumpscare heavy so I guess it's earned its title as a horror game.

Having said all that, Resident Evil 2 Remake is the best "Survival Horror" game I've ever played. It's just the design traits of a "Survival Horror" game that I hate. I listed 4 pillars above for what makes Survival Horror "Survival Horror" ( 1) Resource Management, 2) Exploration, 3) Isolation, & 4) an overwhelming evil), but I could further summarize the genre down to a single trait. That trait? "Make it terrible."

That's not a joke either. It's not resource management that makes a game "Survival Horror" but rather how terrible that resource management is. Do you know why Resident Evil 4 is considered "Action Horror" rather than the "Survival Horror" that the series was known for up to that point? Because it's combat is fun and it gives you more than enough ammo to engage in it. More than that, the game rewards you for doing what you already want to do. See a zombie? Kill it. Kill a zombie? You get money! Got money? Stronger weapons! Stronger weapons? Kill more zombies! And so the gameplay loop is enjoyable no matter where you're at in the process. The reason Resident Evil 4 is not "Survival Horror" is because the game is fun, and being a fun game is antithetical to what "Survival Horror" is attempting to achieve.

And Resident Evil 5 is just the worst. How am I supposed to have a terrible time in a game where I've got a friend with me on this over-the-top adventure? I can't get scared when I'm dying because my wife blew me up with a grenade: what was Capcom thinking making a fun game instead of a scary one? And on top of that the game has the gaul to have nearly 20 unique levels with hidden collectibles to find rather than reusing the same rooms through the whole game so that I'm exploring one massive, unique map due to hardware limitations?

Now even though I think the essence of "Survival Horror" is "make it terrible," I also believe Resident Evil 2 Remake is a great game while striving to be a "Survival Horror" game at the same time. But it reminds me a lot Breath of the Wild: it's a great game that gets worse the more I see. And while BOTW is that way primarily due to weapons breaking, clunky menus, and obnoxious cooking mechanics (ie terrible resource management), I don't think Resident Evil 2 Remake has terrible resource management. On standard mode. Standard mode is great.

The problem with RE2 Remake is that it not only gets harder the more you play it and strive for greater challenges, it also forces you to engage with less enjoyable mechanics to accomplish those greater challenges. Hardcore mode does this in multiple ways, the most obnoxious of which is removing some of the hip pouches that expand your inventory size. So while on standard difficultly you can easily carry 4 guns and healing item to spare into the last 2 boss fights, less space means less guns. More annoying than that is getting to those bosses as key items take up inventory space until they can be discarded by using them at every possible point on the map. This makes inventory management a complete chore. The chess puzzle in the sewers, for example, requires 5 free slots to pick up a weapon and all key items at a dead end along with a sixth slot taken up by the crank required to get there. In Hardcore, that's half of the maximum inventory you can have at that point, leaving very little room for guns, ammo, knifes, grenades, herbs, or anything else you might want to take along (like another key item you want to take along to reduce backtracking for example).

The other thing Hardcore does to make the game terrible is require ink ribbons to save. I'm fine with ink ribbons in this game because there are plenty for someone who's played through on Standard and already knows what's coming up, but I still hate the concept. There's always at least 1 by a typewriter or an item box where you can get extras in safe rooms, but it's honestly just annoying. It doesn't make the game more challenging, it just wastes time, either by forcing you to do an inventory shuffle or forcing you to replay sections because you ran out of ink ribbons and died. Arbitrary limitations are one of the things I hate most in gaming, which, coincidentally, is why I'll probably never beat TOTK. I know I can fuse things to weapons to make them stronger but man is it just a complete pace-breaker in a game where I already avoid combat because I hate finding decent weapons.

Sorry about that hiatus. Anyway, the other thing that Hardcore does on RE2 Remake is increase the damage enemies can endure. I really hate this, just like I hate it in BOTW Master Quest. And I hate it for the same reason: it breaks the most enjoyable aspect of the game. Combat should be fun. Adding health is the cheapest way to add difficulty. I know I've killed zombies with half as many rounds on Standard. I know a critical hit can cause a zombie's head to explode with a single shot. So why am I having to pour 15 rounds of handgun ammo directly into a zombie's head to take it down all of the sudden? Make the enemies faster. Make them attack more often. Adjust their placement to make their attacks less avoidable or to make them a harder shot. Add armor. Put more enemies on screen. I don't care if the combat is more difficult, it's just that increasing an enemy's health doesn't make combat more difficult. It just makes combat a chore and something you'd rather not do.

Again, take RE4 as an example: what's the funnest thing to do in that game? Shoot zombies. Resident Evil 4 rewards you for it. What does RE2 Remake do when you kill zombies? Well, it does a lot before that happens. First it keeps track of how much ammo and health you've picked up and are holding, then it increases the amount of damage enemies can both take and dish out, and then you have to worry about not having enough ammo for the next upcoming challenge. In the end, you gain nothing but a little bit safer room for the next time you come through. Killing zombies in rooms you have to come through again is a great idea for sure, but in order to beat the game as fast as possible as efficiently as possible, you probably should just never shoot a zombie.

Resident Evil 2 Remake wants you to memorize the whole game and play it like a speed-runner. It rewards you for not engaging with its mechanics more than it rewards you for playing the game like a normal person would (ie, I see a zombie, I shoot it). The new player gets down to 10 rounds in a handgun and dreads not having enough ammo for an unknown challenge. The guy whose played through 10 times beats the bosses with just a knife. And do you know what the worst part about that is? Long time fans of the series who juke every zombie, know every puzzle inside and out, and have never felt an ounce of fear other than failing to beat a clock while playing this game will go online and lecture everyone about how this game is a great Resident Evil title because it's "actually Survival Horror."

And can I just complain about Resident Evil fans for a minute? Standard mode on this game is challenging while giving you enough supplies to kill everything and beat the game twice over: you do not have to listen to the people telling you to shoot out the zombies legs and run from enemies in order to approach any Resident Evil game on Standard difficulty. Obviously you don't have to go guns blazing at every turn either, but as long as you pay attention and approach every encounter with caution most of the mainline Resident Evil games will be more than manageable for a new player. All of the modern ones released after 4 will be. It's that approachability that makes Resident Evil such a consistent series, despite what all the "this game is ACTUALLY Survival Horror" advocates will tell you.

Make no mistake, Resident Evil 2 Remake is a fantastic game, right up there with the best of the series. And I'm not even opposed to playing it as a "Survival Horror" game: if you beat it on Hardcore first, good for you. If you want to run the challenges and see if you can get the highest ranks, go for it. I have. I don't think I'm going for S on Hardcore because I think I've had my fill of the game, but I can understand why someone would enjoy this game enough to try for it. The only point I'm making here is that the harder this game gets, the worse it gets. That's the definition of what "Survival Horror" is.

In that regard, Resident Evil 2 Remake is a perfect "Survival Horror" game. It's fun for those who just want to play on standard difficulty and experience it a few times, and filled with horrible garbage for the masochists who seek out that sort of thing. So, in conclusion, Resident Evil 5 is better. You should definitely play that one no matter what you think about RE2.