Resident Evil (2002)

Beat my very first Resident Evil! Was cool to finally see the origin point of so many survival horror conventions, and finally understand why people love that save room music so so much. I especially dug seeing the constant evolution of the player's relationship to the mansion, where my hard-won and comforting knowledge of each twisty hall was subverted and turned against me to keep the adrenaline flowing.

The Crimson Head system felt like a really novel way to let folks pick and choose their own safe zones, and the resource squeeze was delightfully tense in the early hours. Unfortunately, by the halfway point I was swamped with so much ammo and healing that any sense of dread sorta faded into the background. But it was still a fantastic experience, all told, and I'm glad the millennium challenge pushed me to check it out.

Now that I have beaten both Jill's and Chris's campaigns, I will say that RE1 Remake is a better game than RE1 OG, but I'm a bit more fond of the original.

Remake expands upon the West Wing in general which is great for routing. It fleshes out the shark room setpiece to actually be well paced and tense. It makes Umbrella more detestable due to the story of the Trevors. It becomes less cheeseable due to the East Wing door breaking down (though if you play your cards right by deleting every zombie on the East Wing 2F hallways, then this is a non-issue). It throws in a lot of surprises for those who played the original first. The balance gap between Jill and Chris isn't as wide.

I respect a lot of these changes wholeheartedly that I think they make Remake better than the original game. Remake is survival horror to a tee. But despite how easy the original is, I'm more likely to replay it because of how quick it is to beat compared to the remake. How straight forward it is. (And also I don't have to go into the room with the spiders even though I have the no spiders mod on, the feeling that they'd pop out still lingers. Also the lack of a no spiders mod in RE0 is the reason why I won't be playing it until then. Black Tiger in the OG is fine because I can just knock it out with 3 magnum shots). Maybe my opinion will change as I replay these games, but that is my stance for now. For now, that makes 4 out of 4 games where I prefer the original over their remakes.

That's Jill's game down. I'm a little rusty so time is a touch slower than I'd expect, but overall I'm never prepared for how easy coming back to this game is—partially because I've beaten it a good 20 times now—but wow, by the end, I had literally about 15 full heals, a ludicrous pile of ammo, and only a single death to Lisa's stupid knock you off a cliff thing when I hadn't saved for a good half hour. A good 75% or so of those healing items used were really just to dump them to free up inventory space, lol. Ah well, was fun, onto Chris' game!

Resident Evil Franchise Retrospective

With Village complete, I've finished my playthrough of the Resident Evil franchise as it exists on Steam. Jump to the bottom if you just want to see my ranking on the games overall. I have some rambling to do first.

It's been a long ride, but it had to end eventually of course. I'll definitely miss the campy dialogue, over the top villains, and of course Chris Redfield's iconic boulder-punching.

Yet it's certainly far from a perfect series. There's a number of things I probably won't miss at all. The games time and time again tried to get their plot taken seriously only for glaring holes in the plot, poor character motivation, and the silly dialogue to make it impossible.

Sometimes the absurd script worked in favor of the games, such as in the original, where the poor dialogue has become it's one of the game's highlights, adding unintentional levity when juxtaposed with a serious story about the roots of Umbrella Corp. And other times it only really served to destroy what little tension the game managed to muster up, such as Chris's baffling Pillow Pet reference in the midst of an encounter with a villain in RE6.

Regardless, I can appreciate that this is one of the longest running mainstream horror video game franchises. It outlived its peer, Silent Hill, saw the rise and fall of Dead Space, FEAR, FNaF, as well as many others, and somehow this grandad of the horror genre is still kicking around today. I think Capcom's stubbornness to not let this franchise die has paid off. We're seeing it on another upward swing now, which is refreshing after its frustrating middle era.

I threw together a little spreadsheet to give an overview of my thoughts on each of the games I played. Also decided to rank them on Gameplay, Plot/Characters, and Setting/Atmosphere in addition to the overall ranking to give a better picture of where I feel each stands. Keep reading below the spreadsheet for the Resident Evil Best to Worst Awards Ceremony, where I want to talk a little bit about some highlights and lowlights of the series.

===Resident Evil: Best to Worst Awards===

Best Game: Resident Evil 2 Remake

As you can see above, I felt that the remake of RE2 was the most consistent, enjoyable experience of all of them. There's obviously already a lot of praise for this game floating around, so I'll keep it brief. While it's not the scariest entry in the franchise or the most fun to play, it manages to be by far the most consistent. The sequence with Mr. X is surely up there with the most tense, palm sweating moments in the horror genre. Leon is a great protagonist, and experiencing his first encounter with Umbrella's bioweapon research is a joy. Claire is a strong protagonist in her own right. I found myself interested enough in her side of the story to play through the game a second time right after the first to experience it.

Worst Game: Resident Evil 0

I already talked a good deal about this in my review posted not too long ago on here, but this game was just agony to get through. It looks decent, but that's where the praise ends. The inventory system is the only truly horrific thing in this one. What little plot exists totally falls apart from some massive plotholes and the villain being totally absent throughout the majority of the game. I'd only play this if you really intend to play through the whole franchise. It has very little to offer.

Spookiest Game: Resident Evil 7

It had been a good long while since a game truly scared me to the point where I needed a break, but the atmosphere in the Baker house is truly incredible. Later on, the game loses its focus, but the first 3/4 of the game are the best the franchise has to offer when it comes to scares, atmosphere, and character development.

Biggest Slog: Resident Evil 6

I feel like it should have been a massive red flag during development that they were trying to include 4 different campaigns, each going for a starkly different tone while all aiming to progress the same central plot. By the time I finished the first I had the overall picture of the story but the game requires you to play through 3 more campaigns to really understand what is going on, and even then I still had questions left unanswered.

Favorite Protagonist: Leon

This man strikes the perfect balance between Chris's action movie hero one liners and Jill's dead serious approach to things. Really excited to see how they handle him in RE4 Remake.

Favorite Villain: Wesker

To think this dude would go from being stabbed by his own science experiment to trying to become a literal god. I have a lot of love for his ridiculous dialogue and over the top behavior. He really embodies the franchise as a whole in a way. I look forward to the next time they decide to retcon his death or announce another secret relative of his ready to pick up his life's work.

And that's that. Thanks for sticking through all this if you read it all. Here's looking forward to the remake of 4, hopefully next year.

So, time to admit that I've never played the OG Resident Evil. In fact, I actually haven't played many of the Resident Evil games at all. I played through 6 with a friend years ago, and it was pretty mediocre. I tried to play 5 when it came out but it was god awful. I played Zero as a kid, but I wasn't smart enough to get far. My stepbrother and I played Survivor on the PS1 and we both liked that a lot.

Last night I finally - since it's only 5 bucks right now - bought the REmake on the Xbox store, and...honestly...I think my viewpoint still is that it's just a very mediocre franchise in terms of gaming. Silent Hill is eons better. I'm gonna really try and get through this, but boy is it rough, and not because it's an old game that's slightly updated, but because it just isn't very good to begin with.

But who knows, maybe if I manage to suffer through enough of it it'll start to give and I'll warm up to what essentially is Scary Item Management Game.

Literally minutes away from beating the game before I realize I soft locked myself out of the magnum. 100% my fault and not bizarre/poor game design, unlike the previous game in the franchise, Code Veronica.

This has been absolutely positively one of the best remakes of any game I've ever played and the first Resident Evil to actually be more than just tense so far. It's been creepy and unsettling and even a lil spooky. The older ones were very tense at times but any actual spookiness has been lost to the march of time and progression of production value.

Excellent excellent game, I highly recommend it to anyone looking to get into the series. Despite being 20 years old at this point it is still gorgeous.

Enough talk gotta finish the job.

So quick question to any folks who are more up to date with their RE games than I am. Should I skip Zero after I finish REmake and go straight to 4? REmake is the fond goodbye the classic style deserves, and I hear rather... Mixed... Things about Zero. Code Veronica was pretty controversial among the REddit crowd, you either love it or hate it and I did not like it at all, but with RE0 I hear almost overwhelmingly meh opinions about. I'd much rather just watch the cutscenes or a longplay on YouTube than end my stint with Classic RE on a sour note.

On a side note I love how you can just shove the abbreviation RE into absolutely anything.