Resident Evil Remake
Resident Evil 2 Remake: In with the old and in with the new
Inmany ways, the Resident Evil 2 Remake represents the past, present and future of the popular survival horror franchise. The recently announced remake features a familiar sense of isolating paranoia and series iconography - like inventory management and limited resources - and is set in the ruined Raccoon City, but with modern gameplay and visuals. Resident Evil 2’s Re-creators, producers Tsuyoshi Kanda (Resident Evil 7) and Yoshiaki Hirabayashi (Resident Evil 5 and Resident Evil 7), are drawing on their experience as fans of the series, as well as their skill as developers, adding elements from the games in the series that people love.
As a result, Resident Evil 2’s gameplay is more akin to Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 7: the tank controls and fixed camera angles are now replaced with a more accessible over-the-shoulder third person perspective; the visuals and HUD display are similar to Resident Evil 7, and it’s made in the same engine. As Kanda tells IGN, the change from a fixed fly-on-the-wall camera angle allows for a greater sense of tension and immersion in combat situations as the team can close in on Leon struggling to push away an undead or zombie dog.
“We know it’s a big change to have gone to over the should,” Kanda admitted, “but we think it’s perfect for the experience we want to portray. We didn’t want it turning into a shooter. It’s about having this tiny frame, about the claustrophobia.”
“The original three games had fixed camera perspectives, and it seems like every three games or so there’s a sea change in perspective and style,” Kanda further explained to Variety. “We always consider as we move through the series, what is “Resident Evil,” and what is the essence of the experience we want players to have? As time moves forward and technology advances and new graphical capabilities become possible, we’re always able to challenge ourselves as to what “Resident Evil” really is - a camera system or a gameplay system - but I think the ongoing change is a constant, ongoing reexamination and reinterpretation of the essence of “Resident Evil” as a series.”
In this way, the team decided to change the way the story and certain iconic moments were told to add a further sense of tension to players familiar with the game. In the original Resident Evil 2, you first encounter the licker in a small corridor: you spot the headless remains of its prey and a pool of blood like violently coded breadcrumbs before it drops down and attacks. Yet in the remake, he doesn’t appear till later. Bodies hanging from the ceiling, claw marks against the walls, and a body ripped apart by its claws hint that it’s near, but you never know when it’ll appear.
“We’re trying to bring back all the classic memories you have of Resident Evil 2, but we also want to not just meet, but exceed your expectations of what we can do,” Hirabayashi told IGN. “So we’re taking that moment and reimagining it for you, so you’re even tenser, [worrying,] “well, when’s he gonna come out? I don’t know.””
Set two months after the events of the original Resident Evil, Resident Evil 2 follows the characters of rookie police officer Leon S. Kennedy and survivor Claire Redfield as they try to escape the zombie-ridden Raccoon City. The build I played - at E3 earlier in the year - followed the first 20 minutes of Resident Evil 2 as Leon investigates the fallen city’s police station. Shortly after witnessing security footage of a police officer telling me
We always consider as we move through the series, what is “Resident Evil,”?
to his location, as he fended off a crawling undead, the lights went out. There I was, walking through darkened hallways with only a flashlight and twelve bullets. As I made my way further into the station, I could hear the squishing of my feet against the wet floor echo down the hallway, hollow sounds of the wind against the barred windows, shuffling empty cans and boxes, the rattling of chains, and the echoing gurgles and grunts of undead nearby. Within my first ten mins, Resident Evil 2 captured the uncomfortable eeriness and isolated loneliness of exploring an abandoned and overrun facility alone.
The original game was told through four different campaigns - from the perspectives of Leon and Claire - and had you revisit several locations four times to uncover the true ending. According to Hirabayashi, this has been streamlined to just a Leon and Claire story for simplicity.
“One of the great things about the original was this sort of two character system where you could get a different perspective on events,” Hirabayashi told Rely on Horror. “There was A and B parts to each character. We still want to replicate that feeling of seeing two sides to the same story through both character’s perspective in their own way.”
“I think players today, they want these sort of deep[ly] intense experiences with the story, and by stretching it across four scenarios the story gets spread a little thin and creates a sense of repetition by going through the game multiple times to see everything. So for that reason, we went with two campaigns that still show all the events of each character’s story rather than have it all split up.” While I’d argue that with the commercial success of Nier Automata, a game that requires you to play it at least four different times to experience the true ending, fans wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with playing a game a few times if the environments and experience are interestingly different enough. Even then, the actions you make in one playthrough will supposedly have an impact on the other: barricading a window in a hallway will make less zombies appear when you revisit that location as another character.
It’s been two decades since the release of Resident Evil 2 and this remake is exactly what a modern retelling of one of the most memorable survival horror experiences should be. Thanks to 4K HD support and the graphical and CPU capabilities of the Resident Evil engine, specifically when compared to what was available to Capcom in the late 1990s, Resident Evil 2 not only looks better than how you remember it, but it plays better, too.