Resident Evil 2 Remake - Words That Kill Video Review
Resident Evil 2. A game people are probably going to end up talking about when discussing some of the best survival horror games of all time. Easily one of the best video games of all time as well.
Originally released back on PS1 way back in Janurary of 1998, when this game came out I was only four years old.
My earliest memory of Resident Evil 2 is actually about getting the game. My family went to this flea market kind of thing, but it was in this big building. Kind of like a mall, but it was definitely some kind of vendor type deal where people were able to set up their own stalls and sell their own products.
It had like three floors though and was very big. I was very young around this time, RE2 had probably been out for a year or so, so we'll say maybe five years old.
I'm with my mom and I notice this guy selling video games. And I notice Resident Evil 2. And boy look at that cover art. Even to this day I find it eye catching. It just pulls you in, I mean what even is that supposed to be? A zombie peeking out from behind a wall? The stylized font, especially that two.
I was young but one thing was sure, I wanted it, so I asked my mom if she would buy it for me. But the guy behind the counter pointed out the ESRB sticker on the front indicating that this was a "Mature" game not intended for children, so he would not sell it to my mom if she intended to purchase it for me.
So my mom shoo'd me off, sending me over to my uncle and dad doing something or other and tried to say something or other that, even though I, the child, was the one who pointed it out to buy, she was buying it for the whole family since we all play games. But the guy said no, I know what you're doing, so I'm not letting you buy this game for your child.
We ended up leaving there without a copy of Resident Evil 2, which was disappointing, but I think we made our way to a Funcoland near our house later on that night and bought a copy anyway, and those people certainly didn't care about selling this to kids.
But I was surprised to find that actually, as interested in getting the game as I was, and as dedicated in getting it for me as my family was as well, when I actually got a chance to play the game, my young as shit five year old self was in for a rude awakening.
Over the years my experience with original Resident Evil would be a tumultuous. Of me playing the game, not getting very far before getting absolutely terrified and then shutting it off.
In fact an early memory I have of playing this game is me in the living room playing this game in broad daylight, all of our windows open, my mom doing stuff around the house and my dad sitting on the couch watching me play the game.
Literally the least scary environment you can imagine this game played in, and I made it all of the way to one of the rooms of RPD(Very early in the game mind you) where there's a bunch of police officer zombies walking around.
Except I didn't know that. Instead, I walked into the room, the camera angle is pointing at the wall which is covered in blood, and all I hear is "euueueghghghghgh" coming from like 6 zombies.
I immediately turned around and got the fuck out of that room as fast as my little hands could maneuver that controller and my dad lost his shit.
I had a habit of doing this when playing the game. I would make it only far enough to experience a new scary thing, then freak out and stop, only for my dad to laugh and then comment on how I'm never going to finish it if I just turn around and refuse to progress in any meaningful way. It's a game about zombies, of course there's going to be zombies. Jesus.
But unfortunately with the way I was put together, I had a low tolerance for horror and it just wasn't meant to be. That is, until now.
Resident Evil 2 Remake is interesting. It manages to perfectly capture the feeling of the atmosphere that I have always wanted, I have always craved so desperately in a zombie game for just about my whole life.
The feeling of walking down a dark and dingy hallway that's completely covered in viscera and there they shamble, the hoard of undead, moaning their horrible undead moan as the pain of undeath fills them with rage.
I actually really like how when you start the game for the first time it opens with a setting to adjust the maximum brightness and minimum darkness. This setting is missing in a lot of horror games and so it's either too dark or not dark enough, but with RE2 I was able to perfectly calibrate exactly the look I wanted, where the darkness was just about pitch black. If it wasn't, I couldn't notice.
The feeling of unease you experience as you walk through RPD is actually kind of incredible the first time through the game.
They really nail the atmosphere. It feels right, it's perfect. When you walk by a window and hear a zombie start beating on it, moaning something horrible, it can actually be quite startling.
I think I should reveal here that I didn't find the game to be all that scary. I was having too much fun to be scared, though that does not mean I didn't feel an intense anxiety as I crept around the game, because I absolutely felt the tension of the game, they did an incredibly job setting that up. But gone are the days of me walking into a room, seeing blood on the wall and freaking out. I'm prepared for that life now.
I will say that if there's anything this remake did perfectly it's the atmosphere, the graphical beauty of this game has allowed the developers to truly capture the feeling they was going for. The atmosphere and tone of this game is incredible.
All of the characters get a new interpretation in this game, some of which I think works well and some of which I'm not a fan of.
Mostly I think it boils down to the writing, which is not very good. Interestingly I find the relationship between Leon and Ada to be very interesting and fun.
Ada, as franchise fans will know, will go on to have somewhat of a rivalry with Leon, helping him and challenging him and he's never quite sure if she's there to help him or hurt him.
In this new imagining of their character Ada Wong is playing it up as an FBI Agent there to bust The Umbrella Corporation for their role in the viral outbreak, but she needs Leon's help to do so.
His willingness to help, as both a police officer and someone who is clearly *interested* in Ada is a really fun character trait.
Whenever Leon starts really questioning anything Ada plays up the "Leon I need you" and starts batting those eyelashes at him and suddenly he's dedicated to the cause once again.
Claire Redfield and Leon's relationship however is a bit strange. Claire begins flirting with Leon just about as soon as they come into contact with one another, even though it is literally the worst context imaginable for flirting quite possibly ever.
*DO COMMENTARY ABOUT THAT CLAIRE AND LEON SCENE BECAUSE IT'S STUPID*
This brings up another issue I have with the game, the lack of character interaction. In the original game, Leon and Claire had met up with each other a couple of times throughout the game and it was pretty cool.
You actually got to see the other character and it felt kind of dynamic. Especially since, if you actually PLAY that other character in the B scenario, you get to basically see what they were up to before you meet up with them. But in this game Leon and Claire meet up only once or twice in the near beginning of the game and after that it's just notes being left for each other or communicating through some sort of monitor. Even though the character in the A Scenario has a radio on them, they never play with that at all.
But unfortunately my praise of the game begins to run out and the issues of the remake begin to show through a lot more because of things like this.
This game has one of the weirdest problems I've ever seen with a video game. Like the original Resident Evil 2, the remake features an A scenario, which can be played with either Claire or Leon, and then a subsequent B scenario, which can be played with the other character. In my playthrough, I played Leon A, and then followed that with Claire B.
In the original RE2, this means that there were two scenarios in the game. Each character got to do something unique compared to the other one.
So instead of just "play this game as Leon, then play through the same game again as Claire", you had similarities but it diverged at some point and became their own unique adventures.
And, as pointed out above, by playing both the A and B scenario, you got the larger picture of what really happened during the events of the game. So you saw what Leon was up to, and you saw what Claire was up to.
The problem with the remake is, it got really really really lazy with that approach. You know how I just mentioned that by doing the A and B approach you would get two separate adventures and not have to just play the same game as two characters? Well with the remake that's exactly what happens.
This is where everything gets complicated. This is where my reverence for the remake began to break down as I played it. I got about halfway through the Claire B playthrough before I started to really, really notice something wrong.
Each of the scenarios rewrite the previous stories to fit the current scenario, and ignore the fact that another scenario previously took place. So, what this means, is that I played through the entire game as Leon first. I completed every puzzle, I found just about every item, I did just about everything I could, and I finished the game, got to the credits and everything.
And then I started another playthrough, the "2nd Run" with Claire. This is your opportunity to see what Claire was up to while you were playing as Leon. The second half of the story.
Whereas Leon had to actually get to the police station, Claire basically teleported there, which all 2nd Run characters do. So I felt a little deprived of more Raccoon CITY adventures. But whatever that's not as big of a deal, I guess.
After this, nothing really changes. You will literally find notes written by Leon in areas that he's already completed saying things like "Hey I've already been through here, shit's fucked, hope you're not dead, byeeee" but you get to the puzzle location and it's not even solved.
Like, you have to do the whole fucking thing. Did Leon scramble this before he left? What happened? It makes no sense that this happens and at the very least, there should have been two sets of puzzles so that you can see that "Oh yeah, Leon solved the chess piece key puzzle and this door is open, but now Claire has to solve the cookie monster number guessing game but with bombs" puzzle or something.
But it gets so much worse. Characters that Leon will encounter and experiences cutscenes of, Claire will see the exact same cutscenes of. The cutscenes will not always happen in the exact same way, though they end to end in the same way.
Sometimes they diverge slightly as each character obviously have their own animations and dialog. But that's still a big problem. Leon came through here, fought William Berkin, and saw Annette Berkin die. But Claire came through here, also fought William Berkin, saw the exact same cutscene, but Annette Berkin died somewhere completely different.
And no, it's not possible that they're both "canon", because she assuredly died for real for real in both cutscenes. So the scenario you're playing is actively rewriting the story as if the previous run didn't even matter, which completely nullifies the idea of a 2nd Run entirely, in my opinion.
Claire gets the antiviral agent for Sherry, fights Birkin on the way back to her, and watches Annette die before the NEST self destruct sequence begins. But why does that happen? Because Leon retrieves the G Virus sample... and then fights the very same Birkin battle, and watches Annette die.
But during the timeline of the game, Claire has already watched Annette die because the base is already starting to fall apart. It's just... oh boy.
The only game this actively reminded me of was Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, where if you actually listen to the post game cassette tapes you can listen to all of the plotholes as each cassette contains conflicting information about how Zero got sick, how Skull Face found Zero, etc etc. Except I'm not listening to it, I'm watching it happen, and it's so unbelievably lazy that I have legitimately no idea what to think here.
I wanted to play a 2nd Run, or B scenario because I wanted to see what Claire got up to after Leon finished his awful first day on the job. But Claire literally just played through everything Leon did, with very few exceptions in enemy placement, Mr. X getting killed off halfway through the game, item placement, and weapon difference.
It was very lazy and quite honestly it deeply impacted my enjoyment of the game. It's my gods honest opinion that if they didn't have either the time or the budget or time to do two divergent scenarios like the original, they should have just done one long scenario where you switch between Leon and Claire at occasional points in the story. Because that active plot hole generator of a 2nd Run is just a mess.
One of the things that shocked me right away when I first started the game was the opening.
While I could never bring myself to beat the original resident evil 2 because I was so scared of it in my young age, I could always get through the initial opening and make my way to RPD.
It was then that I got too scared and had to put the game down. And later on I didn't have those games to play anymore.
At some point I just moved on and longed for the days of a remake or something.
And so when the remake got here I salivated at the idea of Raccoon City.
I love urban zombies. I love the idea of you being out on this big city, surrounded by tall buildings and long wide roads, yet you're so isolated and boxed in.
That's that craving I was talking about earlier. The original opening of RE2 sated that craving for me. Even as a kid.
The way that the game just throws the controls to you, with the mangled car and semi truck burning in the background, everything's on fire, everything's destroyed, there are zombies everywhere, it's amazing.
You have to figure out how to play the game and maneuver around these zombies and you have to do it fast.
Eventually you get to Robert Kendo, and it's a brief break in the tension as you're with another human being. But that tension is broken up almost immediately by zombies crashing through the window and Kendo is endo and now you must begindo againdo.
It sets up this incredible sense of the unpredictable and makes you feel like you really can't let your guard down.
But in the remake it's... it's kind of toothless. Every time you are out and about in the actual city itself, there's barely any zombies.
I'm going to wager on this being because the zombies have a double lunge mechanic as well as a magnetic grab that they can grab you from very far away now which means they have to lessen the amount of zombies compared to the original.
Which in my opinion hurts the atmosphere of the game. And let's not forget that zombies can take up to 9 headshots to kill in the remake.
The second you get control of the A Scenario character in the Remake there's not really much of a threat.
And the intro sequence is much, MUCH shorter now too. In the original you actually had quite an adventure to get to the police station, and had to avoid quite a few zombies.
There's actually a really fun encounter in the A scenario near the basketball court where you get cornered by a small group of zombies in a tight corridor and have to fight your way out.
Every single thing you do in the beginning of the original game is building tension and letting you know that these zombies mean business.
In the remake you just... run into an alley, down some stairs, up some stairs, and there's the police station.
There's not very many zombie, some of them are basically set dressing that don't actually do anything, and it doesn't take very long at all.
In fact, there's such a lack of urgency in this new remake, you can literally just stand around almost as soon as you run a few feet away from the initial zombies.
Since zombies have some sort of "binding" keeping them to their "zones", as soon as you walk a few feet away they immediately turn around and stop following you.
It immediately takes all of the tension out of the opening. All of this fire and carnage, the moaning howls of the horde of undead, and it lacks any teeth.
They are just window dressing. "Look how spooky we are", the game tells you. "You sure are in danger".
In fact the only time the zombies managed to grab me is when I, the person who was supposed to be running for their life, went back towards the zombies who had decided to stop chasing me, and bumped into one and got bit.
It was incredibly disappointing. In the original game opening you are hunted from the second you get control of the character, but here the zombies don't seem to really care much about you.
The only thing I can think to compare this to is, imagine if Konami stopped fucking things up with their gaming divison and made a Metal Gear Solid remake.
I'm talking full on FOX Engine beautiful recreation in a similar vein of The RE2 Remake.
Imagine seeing Shadow Moses in the stunning new graphics of whatever new consoles are out.
In this hypothetical future it would probably be next gen, so definitely Playstation 5 and Xbox Woke or whatever the fuck.
Imagine playing as Snake as he steps out into the near blizzard conditions as the cold cuts through him, and as he makes his way towards the nuclear disposal facility, a Gnome soldier somewhere in the blizzard exclaims "WHOSE FOOTPRINTS ARE THOSE? Eh, who cares. Not my job." and nothing happens.
As a lifelong Metal Gear Solid fan that's kind of the same gutpunch I'm feeling with the introduction of RE2 remake. Something so iconic and stunning, but remade without any of its teeth.
I was watching a video on youtube fairly recently about Alien Isolation that felt so relevant to me while playing RE2 that I couldn't help but want to talk about some of it while I discuss one of my biggest issues with the game. Mr. X.
In a video by A.I. In Games, Tommy Thompson says that the developers of Alien Isolation built the game around a simple premise:
"survive an encounter with Ridley Scott's original Alien. Such a feat is pretty difficult to balance, given that you need a strong story to carry the player through but also to establish pacing as such that the tension varies throughout your gameplay". - A.I. in games.
Which may very well be where my problem with Mr. X lies. It may also be an unfair comparison as Resident Evil 2 Remake is no Alien Isolation, it seems wild to me that the Xenomorph fits the bill of what Mr. X is trying to do in Resident Evil 2 better than Mr. X.
He stalks, he chases, he harasses. He cannot be killed. Unlike the Xenomorph though you can easily run from Mr. X and hide from him. Just run to the safe room
Or stay out of his range long enough and go through any series of doors, and he'll eventually lose track of you and you can begin trying to complete whatever you were doing, again.
It's hard to imagine what must have been going through the minds of Umbrella has they were designing him. I mean, he's big, can bust through walls, capable of crushing people to death with one hand... but cannot run. Just a brisk jog, which is actually fast enough to catch the player, but once he reaches them he just... continues his slow walk.
At most all Mr. X does is scare you the first couple of times you encounter him, but then he falls into the role of "Guy that pisses you off while you're trying to do this puzzle".
Really though I guess one of the biggest reasons I wanted to compare the Alien to Mr. X is that Alien Isolation is designed to give the player room to breathe when tensions rise too high. Mr. X on the other hand can be led in circles around the main hall for 25 minutes if you're really bored.
Imagine toying with the Alien like that. It would completely neutralize the tension and horror of such a creature.
Mr. X, while a stubborn inconvenience, is more or less an artificial lengthening to your playtime as you have to run around the police station to get to where you're going, he just comes across as inconsequential more often than not.
Going back to A.I. In Games, which at this point is basically cheating, they reference a presentation from a neucli.ai conference on Alien Isolation. I have looked for this myself but could not find it, so I'll just quote what is said in the A.I. In Games video.
"As explained by Andy Bray at his talk in the 2016 Nucli.Ai Conference: The Player can't be scared shitless all the time. Otherwise they'll just give up. The tension had to vary. But also had to maintain an air of unpredictability in the Xenomorph itself." A.I. In Games - Andy Bray - Michael Scott.
This quote in my own personal opinion sums up my issues with Mr. X just about perfectly. Andry Bray is talking about Alien Isolation with this quote, and explaining what the developers' thought process was behind their design of the Xenomorph.
And so the final product gave us the ultimate hunter, a predator who was fucking terrifying, literally had eyes in the back of its head, was designed with two different systems so that one always knew where the p[ayer was but the Alien didn't, and how that was able to be utilized to mess with the player, and how it also used systems to track when the player was too stressed out and so it would take away the Alien for a while.
Mr. X has no such design philosophy. His A.I. just stomp stomp stomps and follows you and if you get too close, he punches you. There are certain enemies in the game that will one hit kill you, and yet not even Mr. X. can do that. He does a lot of damage, but he can't kill you.
I think that, due to the fact that he follows you constantly (until the story takes him away from time to time), they decided away from any sort of insta-kill abilities, which may very well be a good thing. Though I can't help but wonder if something was lost in the process.
Here I am getting my brains eaten out all at once by plant zombies, but the actual Tyrant himself can only give me a gentle haymaker that, at the very least, makes me rethink my life decisions.
I cannot help but feel my heart racing when I hear him stomping through RPD and I don't know exactly where he is. Is he behind that door? Is he on the floor below me? Above me? Am I about to run into him? And that's when he shines. Mr. X is at his best when you don't know where he is. Or when you see him out of the corner of your eye across the darkness. "Shit, how did I not hear him? Fuck!"
But the magic goes away when he's chasing you down the hallway. Because in the words of Battlestar Galactica, all of this has happened before, and will happen again. It's not very interesting. It's not very exciting. Mr. X does not adapt, he does not evolve. That quote from A.I. in games about varying the tension? Not with Mr. X.
He's a one stomp wonder. If only for one part of the game he ran, or did something new, or learned some kind of new trick, or maybe even threw his hat at Leon or Claire like fucking Oddojob from Goldeneye, that would have been interesting.
In fact, and I apologize for the fan fiction, but I have a theory on where Mr. X could have been best utilized for the ultimate jump scare.
Later on in the game, when you are in the sewers, and have moved on from the Police Station, you actually find a film roll that you can develop. There is an elavator that takes you right back to RPD so it's not very far at all. At this point in the game Mr. X is not chasing you, so there's nothing to worry about.
As the player makes their way all the way across what would in this fanfiction concept now be a mostly empty RPD, they reflect on their journey and the sacrifices they've made, Snake Eater is probably playing somewhere just off-screen.
Maybe Claire or Leon say something poetic like "Man shit is so fucked", but then they finally make it to the dark room. They put the film reel in, develop the film, get the Hiding Places picture so they can go do their awesome new picture hunt side quest thing and find some weapon upgrades, and as they walk into the save room, BAM, Mr. X bursts through the wall with no forewarning and is just **there now**. This plays on a lot of interesting tropes for the game.
One, you're in the save room, that's completely off-limits from baddies, not anymore! Two, you thought Mr. X was gone! But he was only pretending. Three, you thought you knew all of Mr. X's tricks, but it turns out he was just waiting to change the game.
The ultimate benefit here to to really shock the player and catch them offguard in their most private moment, in the safe room, with something they thought was probably stale or boring. By doing so players must now always be cautious because they never truly know when Mr. X is going to burst through that wall. And also, since the players are about to move onto NEST and the final portion of the game, the fact that this safe room has a gaping hole in the wall is not a big deal. They probably won't be coming back here anyway.
Now Mr. X is a threat again because he's unpredictable. The tension has varied. You can never be sure... at least until speedrunners figure out that, nope this is a one time thing you guys are fine in all of the other safe rooms, but yeah there's nothing you can do about that.
Ultimately as I finish up my thoughts on Mr. X in this section, I will say that I was disappointed by him. He's the Tyrant. Sure, he's not Nemesis. Nemesis could run, dude had a Minigun AND a Rocket Launcher. He even said STARS... all menacingly... and was an actual nightmare to deal with. But as far as nightmarishly powerful B.O.W's go, Mr. X. is pretty low on the list for me.
It seems that Capcom is at least trying with Resident Evil again, after 7 and now this it's a step in the right direction.They are back to understanding survival horror after so many years. I mean HUNK and Tofu? Free DLC? Classic Skins which are also free? My god who are these people anymore?
It's my honest to goodness belief that this was a lower budgeted experiment to see how well it would do, which explains the lack of a true B scenario, the rush to get players to the police station, the lack of Raccoon City sequences.
It's satisfying to blow open a zombie's head. It feels right. It's satisfying sneaking through RPD and evading them. It feels good creeping through and hearing their moans and screams coming from the darkness.
They nailed how it should look and feel and I'm completely surprised by that. Unfortunately it's kind of rough around the edges, and unlike a lot of the other critics I'm not sure I'd call this game a "masterpiece".
I think right around the time the 2nd run started invalidating the first run the "masterpiece" qualification went out the window, at least for me, because I still have never seen a game retcon itself in the span of a second playthrough.
They've also said they will look into a RE3make if the fans want it enough. I think considering how well the remake has done that's a given. I just hope to god that they don't treat Nemesis like Mr. X, and boy I sure hope they actually polish the hell out of the game and not retcon the story as it plays out.
It's not a bad game. It does so well in so many ways, but so poorly in so many others. I think that people should definitely buy it and play it, but my goodness does it have a lot of weird issues. It is certainly not a faithful remake of RE2, that is for certain. It's more of a re-imagining than a remake.
I quite enjoyed playing through this game, the gameplay is great. If you can overlook the issues with the storytelling and lack of faithful recreation of the original, this game is fantastic. Unfortunately for me the story changing itself was a big issue for me and that really took me out of the game quite a bit.
To make up for all of the awkward flirting, and constant story retcons between scenarios, you have to wonder why the game started playing the idea of an unreliable narrator. What was the point? The original is 20 years old by now and has spawned a legacy so much so that the remake has been a subject on the lips of fans for a decade, if not longer.
But if you think about the strange inconsistencies, the awkward flirting between Claire and Leon in the Leon A scenario, or the heroic Claire action shot in Claire A, or the fact that Annette dies in two different ways, or how Mr. X dies in two different ways, I actually think there could have been a really fun way to end the remake.
Instead of just pulling some unreliable narrator shit out of its ass for no reason other than to seem like they were lazily trying to pad out the play time for RE 2 remake, how about when Leon, Sherry and Claire are walking off into the sunset during the ending of the game, they drift off and off and off into the horizon and then the camera pans back and there's three people standing back where the other three used to be standing.
As the camera draws close, you can see that it's adult Sherry, an older Claire and Leon. "Oh really, I was "just surviving"?"
"Oh yeah, leaning on the gate and everything. Real casual.". Leon would joke. It'd turn out the awkward and ill-timed flirting on behalf of Claire was actually that of Leon's ego tugging his memory in a different direction which explains the difference between Claire A and Leon A.
"Can't believe it's already been 20 years. All those people. Mom and dad..." Sherry would say, before getting a pat on the shoulder by Leon and Claire.
The remake would be an opportunity to revisit the older characters once again and see what they're up to after seeing the classic story through their eyes. Maybe even a comment about remembering there being more to the story, but that might draw to much attention to the lackluster B scenario in the game.
After returning to the location where their old lives ended and their new lives began, they'd reminisce about old times. Pour one out for Marvin, making Umbrella pay, etc etc.
Then Sherry would say "And I never got my parrot!" BAM. CREDITS.
You've taken the issues of an inconsistent story and instead of reworking a B scenario, all you've done is utilized a tiny bit of fanfiction to iron over any inconsistencies by bringing in the older characters and their faulty memory. A lifetime of fighting B.O.W.'s would do that to you.
Honestly though, I don't think this would make it *better*, but you've got to keep in mind the story is in this state regardless, introducing my dumb fanfiction is just the only way I can see to make light of that.
The Resident Evil series characters age in real time along with the rest of us, so getting to see them again in our modern time as well as a memorial to Raccoon City would be a great deal of fanservice and also story progression.
Because who the fuck knows when we'll actually see these characters again. Seriously, they're almost in their 50's. Come on Capcom. Let's do it already.
I could not include references to other games mentioned in this video because I either do not have them anymore, or cannot record on my very outdated 8 year old laptop. All of this was recorded on Sharefactory on a standard PS4, and took over a month and a half. It was delayed a while because I got sick pretty bad for almost an entire month which set be back quite considerably,.
Apologies to any audio "popping", and uneven audio editing. I am new to this whole thing and used a guide to make my audio sound as good as possible and even though I followed the steps to the letter for each segment in my review, it produced completely different results sometimes. This is my very first video review and I hope that does not deter you.
Thank you so much.