Resident Evil Retrospective Review

PlayStation Top 10

After the announcement of the PlayStation Classic I decided to look back at my personal Top 10 PlayStation games to see if they hold up. Each gets a minimum of 3 hours of game play before I compare how I remember the game and how it plays now.

The rest of my Top 10 games are:

• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
• Motoracer
• Grandia
• Crash Warped
• Quake 2
• Metal Gear Solid
• Final Fantasy VII
• Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete
• Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete

Resident Evil – Then (1996)

I sucked at Resident Evil. The tank controls took me forever to adapt to…and I never mastered them. Exploring Spencer mansion required the help of guidebooks, friends and my sister offering advice. I’ve beaten the game once and it took hours upon hours of game play to accomplish. Seems odd to place a game you’re terrible at on a top ten list, but it speaks to the impact Resident Evil had on me. I loved the game, despite being garbage at it. Fighting through the mansion was my Dark Souls in the 90s.

Resident Evil was the first scary video game I, and many gamers, experienced. That first Zombie chomping on a body and turning to attack legitimately made me jump. I screamed in terror more than a few times, even while using a guide that told me what to expect. Giant spiders, snakes and lizard monsters all had their moments. Dogs jumping through windows has become a classic moment in the game.

Beyond the jump scares, there’s limited inventory to ramp up tension. Running out of ammo, health and save ribbons quickly became a real possibility, especially when you suck at the game. The worse you do, the more inventory you consume. It ramps the difficulty up quickly. Resident Evil doesn’t just throw out jump scares. It made you feel helpless.

I’ve played the REmake twice and never made it very far. I always got bored with the new version, despite it being “better” in every way. Now it’s time to discover if I’ll feel the same way about the PlayStation original.

Resident Evil – Now (2018)

I set a three hour minimum for these replays. It’s enough time sunk into a game to get a feel for it.  If you’re not enjoying yourself by the third hour, you’re likely never going to enjoy it. I sunk five hours into Resident Evil before the second battle with the giant snake killed me. Not having saved in the last hour, I decided against starting the game back up…but only because I have so many others to play. Damn, that was a ton of fun. Resident Evil remains a great game.

Let’s get the bad out of the way. The voice acting is horrible and the dialogue ridiculous. When the game was new, even as kids, we understood it was bad, but they’ve gotten worse with age. It’s beyond B-movie bad. Anybody playing Resident Evil for the first time, do not come for the acting, but don’t run because of it either. There’s so little story, your ears will only bleed a little.

Podcast Wizard & Bruiser, supplied an interesting history lesson about the English voice acting for Resident Evil. Directed by the Japanese development team with cheap Canadian voice actors. They had no context for their dialogue scenes or what was being spoken by other characters. Recorded in a vacuum, the actors did multiple takes and shipped them off to Japan. The non-English speaking team then chose takes based on how they felt listening to them. It’s insane, but it explains why the tone and emotions are so incoherent.

Tank controls aren’t as bad now that I have a basic level of coordination. Navigating the 2D backdrops isn’t intuitive, or fun, but it’s not terrible. Okay is the best you can hope for with RE’s controls. There’s never a point where I felt perfectly in control of Jill. Aiming at enemies is loose, but the targeting is generous. You never need perfect aim. Being close to target is enough to land a hit. This compensates for the clumsy controls and weird camera angles.

Added to the list of annoying aspects of Resident Evil is the limited inventory system. When you’re better with the controls running out of items is less a concern. Instead, the problem becomes backtracking to storage rooms to swap out items. It’s a total time sink and complete nuisance. Adding an extra two spaces would have gone a long way toward making the game flow much better, and that’s with me playing as Jill. She has two more slots than Chris! I can’t recall if they changed anything for the Remake, but they should have if they didn’t.

Why did I play for five hours if the game controls poorly and the acting is terrible? The environment is amazing. The Spencer mansion is fun to explore. The puzzles require thought, but are not cryptic on the level of Myst. Navigating the rooms, searching through items, none of it makes sense as a real place but creates a fun videogame space. You’ll want to explore the whole mansion, unlocking every room and mining every section for hidden items.

Speaking of items, there are a few interesting journals and notes scattered throughout the mansion. Provide insight into the people living there when the T-virus broke out. Unlike the spoken dialogue, these are fun to go over. They’re not award winning short stories, but they help flesh out the world. Games like Bioshock expanded on this concept. Building lore through natural discovery, instead of exposition dumps.

This is a PlayStation game. The graphics are nothing special anymore. The REmake looks much better, but there’s nothing wrong with the original. The backgrounds are cool, and well rendered. 3D elements blend nicely into the backgrounds, but stand out just enough you’ll find them during your search. There was never a moment where I was unsure what I was seeing because of the retro-look of the game. Some older titles have aged so poorly they’ve become difficult to play, so dark and pixelated you might as well be looking at a magic eye poster. Resident Evil’s attention to detail avoids this problem.

Resident Evil’s character models hold up too. The zombies look like shambling corpses. I won’t lie and say they scare me, but the zombies are the scariest monsters in the game. Low polygon count and blurred textures create the illusion of shambling bodies of rotting flesh. Spider, snakes sharks and the hunters look okay. The humans are well detailed for the time, but the zombies are where it’s at.

REmake 2 is coming soon, and RE7 was a massive seller. Resident Evil shows no signs of stopping as a franchise. Going back to the original shows the series hit the ground running. Resident Evil has come a long way, but going back to the start is a trip everyone should make. You won’t be disappointed.