Risen From The Dead - Resident Evil 2 Retrospective (2/2)
Presumed-dead Remake Becomes The Best-Selling Game In The Series
It was in 2019 when one evening, I came home from college to an unusually quiet house and the sound of something exciting vibrating through the walls. Curious, I took off my jumper, threw it over the back of my door handle and made my way to the living room.
Below the big living room TV was my brother’s newly bought PS4 Slim, my mum was sat practically chewing on her fist, eyes glued to the screen and the room was dimly lit in green by the PS4 controller’s light. “Is this Resi?” I asked in a hushed voice, instantly recognising Leon Kennedy on-screen “It is. Resi 2: the remake.” Answered my brother, pressing on through the rain and into a ransacked petrol station; I’d never seen graphics like it.
A few minutes later, the three of us were letting out a collective gasp at the zombie reveal and the gruesome death of the police officer.
(Timestamp)
It had been years since a Resident Evil game had looked so terrifying, so visceral. None of that Resident Evil 7 mould nonsense or Las Plagas, at last we were back to the real deal: flesh-feasting, bullet tanking, shambling zombies. I was enamoured.
I spent the entire evening ignoring my phone, eyes affixed to the screen, taking part in that initial playthrough by proxy; there’s a magic to watching someone play a game in the same room, a kind of cavemen-at-campfire community spirit, it’s amazing.
My Nintendo fandom not reawakened yet and thoroughly sick of the Xbone, I sold both my original Nintendo Switch and a good chunk of my Xbox One library in order to buy a PS4 Slim with God of War and a copy of Resident Evil 2 shortly after; everyone in my class was on the console and as I mentioned in quite a few previous posts, I was on the cusp of packing gaming in for good at this time and thought I might as well see if the generation dominating PS4 was worth the hype.
RE2 dominated my gaming life for months to come.
Me and a classmate I previously was only on cordial, working terms with bonded over the game and competed every night for weeks to get the best RE2 speed run, gawking at each other’s times and swearing about rooms where we’d died; if memory serves I managed a better time on Hardcore but he platinumed the game whereas I never did.
But, as the years have rolled by, is Resident Evil 2 Remake still the masterpiece it is often hailed as? Or does the original come out on top? Let’s find out.
Background
Resident Evil 2 Remake was one of those games that just had to be coming: a no-brainer remake that was such an obvious cash cow that it was expected for many years… and yet, it took 17 years from the release of REmake on the Gamecube for this to happen.
You see, for as beloved as REmake is and as ambitious as the (much less beloved) Resident Evil 0 was… neither of these games sold particularly well. Gamecube sales for Resident Evil in general were pretty underwhelming, which is why Capcom quickly violated their exclusivity deal with Nintendo once it became clear that RE4 was going to sell better than the AK47. They may have burned bridges, but they built fat stacks off that decision. Furthermore, Shinji Mikami: a constant opponent to his own IP, didn’t want to take resources away from his precious, non-survival horror Resident Evil 4.
Since then, all the way up until 2017’s Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, RE abandoned its survival horror roots to go and revolutionise a different genre instead: third person shooters. After RE6 was essentially the Avengers Endgame of the series with practically every character and plotline tied up in a blood stained bow the decision to remake RE2 was finally made, announced at last in 2015 in a now beloved video message from producer Yoshiaki Hirabyashi.
The gaming landscape and Resident Evil as a whole were much different in 2015 from way back in 2002 when the last zombie-focused survival horror entry had been released.
RE had come to be seen as a CO-OP centric action series with biological monstrosities to shoot instead of people, and zombies, in no small part thanks to the likes of Shaun of the Dead, Capcom’s own Dead Rising and other media had become a ubiquitous pop culture staple and not really a source of horror; in films like 28 Days Later and games like The Last Of Us, zombies are more of a dark human nature enabler than a real focus of the narrative. The apocalypse has happened and zombies are everywhere, they are a fact of life, a force of nature in those IP’s.
The stated development objectives for Resident Evil 2 were no small order: modernise a classic while preserving its spirit, make zombies scary again in a claustrophobic, naturalistic environment and deliver a photorealistic, appealing modern Triple-A horror game in a genre where zero combat was the norm, most people’s experience of it was manchild streamers faking jump scares into their webcam and Resident Evil’s stalker concept had been aped over and over again by Outlast, Alien: Isolation and more.
Fake reactions sometimes 3 seconds after the scare happens, vague disdain for the audience, inane chat, random UI elements ruining my view of the game, yep ladies and gentlemen, this is why I never watch streamers. It’s like being in the cinema with someone who won’t shut the fuck up.
Resident Evil 2 2019 was developed on Resident Evil 7’s RE Engine which would later be adopted by Capcom for their entire suite of titles, powering even Monster Hunter and Street Fighter. The game came out in late January of that year to universal critical acclaim and fan appreciation, it became Capcom’s second-biggest Steam launch after Monster Hunter World and has sold close to 16 million copies: about 3 times the amount of the original, this makes RE2 Remake the best selling game in the entire series. There’s a good chance that you’ve played this game but no other Resident Evil.
On a personal level, while RE7 was great and kicked off the modern, RE Engine era, for me? This was the game that made me truly realise that Resident Evil had returned to the top of Triple-A gaming.
Version Rundown
I’ll be playing the Steam version of Resident Evil 2 since I don’t own a current-gen console with the game.
As far as I know, the differences between current generation versions and previous generation consoles’ versions of Resi 2 are pretty negligible: higher FPS cap, quicker saving and loading times, ray tracing options, that sort of thing; we’re long past the days when platforms had unique hardware quirks and ports now, when did technology get so fucking boring? That being said, the Nintendo Switch version should be avoided since it is cloud-based. A native Switch 2 port has been rumoured for a few months now, wouldn’t be surprised if we see that sometime next year.
If you own a weaker PC I encourage you to still attempt to play RE2 while staying mindful of Steam’s refund window because the settings are highly customisable with a really neat GPU usage bar alongside the options. I have played better PC ports truth be told: my game crashed during this playthrough and I had a few inexplicable FPS drops but the usual standard of Japanese (and especially Capcom) PC ports is so all over the place that I’m willing to count this one as a win anyway.
Resident Evil 2 uses Dolby Atmos and binaural audio options too. Spoiler alert for the presentation section: it has the best sound design I’ve ever experienced in a video game, so if you’re going to play, go and grab a great pair of headphones and stick that binaural mode on, you’ll shit yourself in ASMR-like quality. Unfortunately, I’ve found the default brightness settings to give RE2R a really hazy, high-gamma look so I’d also say don’t hold back on cranking that brightness setting down.
This is my third time playing a Resident Evil 2 scenario this week, Resident Evil 2 2019 is probably my most-played in the series and for reasons I’ll state later, I’m not bothered about RE2 Remake’s B scenario, so for this post I only played the RPD section of Leon A and I did so with a controller.
Raccoon Redux
Let me just get one thing out of the way first: I will be referring to this game as Resident Evil 2 2019, RE2 Remake or simply as RE2; RE2 2019 is not a sequel to REmake on the Gamecube and I am unnecessarily anal about not referring to it as ‘REmake 2’ or ‘2-make.’ This is the beginning of its own series of remakes with their own distinctive DNA, whereas REmake only has one close sibling: Resident Evil 0. If RE2 2019 is a sequel to REmake then New Super Mario Bros. is a sequel to Yoshi’s Island.
With that out of the way, let’s begin properly.
Right off the bat, RE2 Remake makes a pair of very wise decisions I appreciate a lot: firstly, it cuts down on the original game’s decently lengthy intro FMV by having a quick prologue section which the player controls and secondly, it reimagines the events of this FMV to give the player a quick tutorial.
I praised the original game back on the PS1 and Saturn for including the vital ingredients to the gameplay hidden within its live-action opening and RE2 is no different; the initial petrol station zombie eats up pretty much all available ammo before going down, teaching you that ammo is a valuable resource not to be spent recklessly, the hung up key to the door and the locked way back provides a quick little taste of item management and key item usage and finally, when the shambler inevitably rises again, you’re taught that slipping past the undead will be a vital skill in Resident Evil 2. Fantastic.
I’ve mentioned in passing before how most video games are terrible at teaching the player, well, this is how you do it properly: nobody needs to be told to press A to jump or that the right stick moves the camera, in fact, you shouldn’t tell anything because like writing a good story, a great tutorial should show the player how to play your game, not waffle on about it.
I think back to my background in foreign languages a lot when deconstructing video game tutorials, nobody learned to speak well by memorising responses and reading sentences from a book, humans learn by mimicry, environmental cues and by applying knowledge. Think about it, nobody ever told you the Green Herb heals you, you just knew it because green is the healthy colour and the First Aid Spray you start with is also green.
A quick video of the section I’m talking about. Played by, presumably, a new player.
One thing I’ve come to really respect about the Resident Evil remakes (and why remakes in other franchises now leave me wanting more) is that Capcom knows how to use nostalgia and they know what the player needs versus what they think they want.
Sure, it would have been really wholesome to recreate the original intro for RE2 and no doubt at first, all the fans of the classic would have been pointing at the screen like Leonardo DiCaprio and saying “Oh I remember this bit! Oh he’s about to say…” But after the initial playthrough, this kind of recreation loses its appeal; it’s nothing more than a distorted memory. What players actually crave is the feeling of playing that game again for the first time and to be acknowledged without being pandered to.
You see Capcom’s perfect balance in motion when, exiting the petrol station, you get a fleeting little shot of nostalgia with Leon’s rescue of Claire recreated.
From here on the broad strokes are roughly the same: Leon and Claire crash, you get the run through Raccoon City in cutting-edge modern graphics and arrive at the RPD.
You’ll notice in my retrospective reviews I like to use the word ‘naturalistic’ instead of realistic and that’s a very intentional choice.
We know and Capcom knows the futility in trying to make a game about a fedora wearing super zombie, an infected scientist with an eyeball shoulder and elaborate puzzles in a municipal building pass for the real world, instead Resident Evil 2 creates a world that’s close enough to reality for the player to easily be present in the horror without the video game absurdity becoming too insurmountable; this photo-realistic graphical presentation and naturalistic style was a stated goal in development and a strong driver of Resident Evil 2’s scenario.
The puzzles, stately wooden walkways and grand, high ceilings of the RPD would raise eyebrows in the real world but Capcom explains it away as the product of the building being an Art Museum in the past and an Umbrella-funded urban revitalisation project having a lot to do with it, tying nicely into RE2’s corruption narrative.
In classic RE2, once inside the Raccoon Police Department you couldn’t leave… because the game said so.
In modern Resident Evil 2, the roads outside are jammed with cars, a persistent downpour makes the streets waterlogged and zombies hard to spot; even if you could venture back beyond the front door, you wouldn’t want to.
For every situation in which the original game forced the player to suspend their disbelief, RE2R offers an explanation that grounds the setting in a reality closer to ours.
In The Dark… But Never Alone
The original RPD felt like the scarred fields after a climactic battle but the remake’s Raccoon Police Station feels itself undead: an antique building that was the site of a massacre, not a battle; nobody escaped to the sewer like in the original and Marvin Branagh doesn’t dare to suggest you may find anyone else outside the Main Hall.
Resident Evil 2, obviously, looks incredible and a big part of that is because as you play, the lighting and for lack of a better descriptor: in-camera effects are constantly being tweaked.
Hazing effects are surreptitiously layered onto your vision, the edges of the screen are darkened, the field of view pushed just a little closer… with the death of fixed camera angles (and the modern gamer’s inability to play anything that might require more than 5 minutes to learn) it’s difficult for developers to exert the same kind of control as they once did, and yet, Capcom managed it; no longer can Resident Evil 2 control what you see but it can control how you see it.
I will take this brief opportunity to say though that often, these effects aren’t quite added subtly enough, so when entering certain rooms, it’s as if someone just dimmed the switch while you walked in, or smeared vaseline all over your monitor.
The next layer of this bloody, murky, rotten lasagne is the sound design and it is absolutely outstanding.
Feel free to close your eyes for a moment and pick out all the different sounds you hear in the Main Hall alone: the rushing of wind disturbing the barricade, Marvin tapping away, the churning of his laptop, the creaking of the building’s materials, the tick-tocking of an old clock. You can stand in any room and corridor in this entire building and do the same thing.
The soundscapes of Resident Evil 2 are the richest I have ever experienced in a video game and heap spoonfuls of anxiety on top of any situation.
I had the pleasure of introducing a new player to this franchise a couple of years ago with Resident Evil 2 and it was wonderful to be reminded just how terrifying everything is on an initial playthrough. I’ve finished Resident Evil 2 2019 more times than I can count now and can filter out the background ambience from sounds that indicate something worse is coming down the hall but for a new player, this just isn’t possible and every creak of a floorboard, subtle thump in the walls or howl of the wind at the windows becomes a source of panic.
It’s at this point that I’d love to discuss RE2’s soundtrack and its rich suite of reimagined classics… but I can’t.
The original Resident Evil 2 soundtrack: the most iconic score in the franchise, a set of some of the most beloved compositions in the medium, a collection of memory evoking songs for millions of players… is pretty much entirely absent from this remake. It’s a good thing they nailed the sound design because they did fuck all else in the audio department, the guns all sound a bit flimsy too.
To be fair, as rare as it is to hear any, RE2R does have some good pieces of music in it.
The new version of the Main Hall theme barely resembles the original and feels more like a sigh of relief but it’s a nice listen and fits the tone of modern Resident Evil 2 well.
Hunk is a beloved Resident Evil side character and his mode in RE2: The 4th Survivor gets an exciting, high tempo track for you to mow down the undead to.
Any of the William Birkin/G Boss Themes could go here, they don’t stray too far from the original instrumentation and are suitably epic; Claire grabbing a minigun to 1v1 a biological monstrosity is a very Redfield thing to do as well.
I’d be so annoyed if I was this game’s composer, to put all this effort in and Capcom decide the game should have music during 4-5 specific moments and nowhere else.
Beginner’s Luck
Resident Evil 2, like Resident Evil Gamecube, keeps the broad strokes of the game unchanged: you arrive at the RPD, you find a way to escape the station, that escape route takes Leon or Claire through the sewers and into the lab, you escape the lab and then credits. Unlike REmake though, Resident Evil 2 2019 makes some pretty huge changes to the campaign’s structure, not just the opening hour or so.
In the original game, you spent a good 60-70% of the runtime in the RPD where the overarching goal was to gather 3 stones (or 4 plugs as Leon) in order to unlock the way out, after this, you left for good and the design of the Sewers and Lab were highly linear by comparison.
In Resident Evil 2 2019, you actually leave the RPD quite early on: after maybe an hour of play, when you gather 3 medallions to unlock a passage underground in the main hall, this is only a short stint leading to a quick boss fight in an underground boiler room but still, the fact the key collection begins and ends so quickly is a massive departure.
The boss fights themselves are a big change; Claire or Leon, you’ll be having 2 fights before you reach the lab and I would always plan my speed run save spots around these back when I played the game more optimally.
In the original game, the basement Parking Garage area was largely a vehicle to introduce a side-character playing section and to get the Club Key into the player’s hands (as well as offer up the opportunity for a well-needed resupply in the armoury) but in RE2019, the Parking Garage is the way out of the RPD, requiring a pass to open the gate, leading the player on the kind of convoluted quest to obtain the key card that only Resident Evil can get away with.
There are a lot of these changes and they have something of a mixed result.
Resident Evil 2 2019 seems like a shorter game than the original when looking at the RPD but really, the extra 20% of the game you spent in the station on the PS1 has been added to the next 2 areas, bringing the ratio to about half the game spent there and another half spent in the Sewers and Lab.
On paper, it sounds like those areas have been fully realised now but in practice? I just feel that Resident Evil 2 really starts to drag after you leave the station, the lab is enjoyable but every time I reach the sewers in this game I pretty much skip all non-essential items to get it done with as fast as possible; samey, shit covered tunnels, annoying G-mutant enemies… it’s just so boring.
The Lab has its issues too, mainly with the redesigned Plant 42 monsters and the tedium of having to upgrade a wristband.
The ivy sound bone-chilling now and are quite tough to take down but unless you have a knife or grenade on you (which function like REmake’s grab escape weapons in this game) they instantly kill you. Back in 2019-2020 this triggered the one and only rage quit I’ve had playing this game when I needed to restart the entire lab after one of these asparagus fucks killed me when I was on pace to get my best speedrun ever.
I feel this noise in my throat, so eerie.
Zombies in general have undergone a big change in Resident Evil 2 2019, we’ll call it Superior Firepower instead of Mass Assault; there are fewer undead now but each and every one is dangerous.
I talked about how superb the animations for the zombies were in the original and it’s the same here, the undead stagger and stumble enough to make headshots difficult and when they do land, the infected react in a thoroughly satisfying satisfying manner; like the original RE2, they also take a serious beating, which I’ll be discussing more soon.
The biggest improvement though comes with the new gore system. Zombies in Resident Evil 2 take so much punishment that Capcom helps the player out by giving us the ability to deconstruct these things with revolting modularity. Shoot a zombie in the hand and its finger will come off or you’ll see an entrance wound in its palm and an exit wound at the elbow, lay into its elbow some more and the arm will fall right off making it unable to grab, slice off a downed zombie’s arms and legs and it’ll be a useless bloody nugget, only able to harm you if you stand on it. Wounds in this game are absolutely gnarly and I cannot stress enough this is a game not suitable for anyone with a weak stomach or below 18.
Let’s get to the main event: Mr. X, what an addition to the game he was! For those who need a refresher, Mr. X is an upgraded Tyrant model dropped into Raccoon City by Umbrella to hunt down survivors with knowledge of what went on, in the original he mostly just hunted Leon, appearing in a few set sequences but in Resident Evil 2 2019, both characters contend with this stalker.
And I do mean stalker. Apart from the Clock Tower and save rooms, Mr. X can follow the player across the entire building, his thudding footsteps being a noise that is no doubt burned into the brains of millions.
I’ve gone on record before saying that I find the stalker enemies to be overused in Resident Evil and while I stand by this, Mr X was really the peak in quality before, at least to my eye, innovation stopped; Mr X is attracted by sound and never teleports, travelling through the game world organically, he can be stealthed around, tricked and temporarily stopped, he is the peak of stalker design in the series and nothing has matched him since.
Two Sides, Same Coin
Leon and Claire, in keeping with the mature tone of the remake (and Capcom using a localisation company with a preference for non-union voice actors) are voiced by two entirely new actors in Resident Evil 2, a fact that the voice actress for Claire Redfield since 1998: Alyson Court reportedly didn’t take too well, the issue even prompted fan campaigns; it must be great being a voice actor/actress in this industry, Western companies replace you with Skynet and Japanese companies discard you like an empty crisp packet.
I don’t have strong opinions on unionisation or AI.
I think workers deserve to be protected and to be given a decent wage but I’m also from a country with a long history of radical unions and their members holding vital services by the throat and making the average person’s life a misery if they don’t get their way with the government.
I’d be willing to accept AI if I actually saw any benefit in it but the only observable difference I see is its ability to make lazy cunts even lazier and it’s often a poor substitute for the roles it seeks to replace. The steam engine revolutionised travel and industry, elevating living standards and providing never seen before logistics, AI provides… what? The ability to code apps with stolen ideas? A mediocre summary of my Google search?
With that tangent out of the way, what I do have a problem with is companies trying to replace or undervaluing the personnel that made customers so willing to be loyal to the faceless, amorphous money-making mass in the first place. Alyson Court is the voice of Claire.
In Resident Evil 2 2019, Leon is played by Nick Apostolides. Leon has had more voice actors than Taylor Swift has had boyfriends so this is less of a sensitive issue, though since Resident Evil 6 in 2012 he’d been voiced by Paul Mercier, so it was a bit of a shame to see him go. Nick has also played Leon in Resident Evil 4 2023 since this game and in both of these remakes, his performance is excellent and shows some great range.
Replacing Alyson Court as Claire is Stephanie Panisello and while Alyson Court’s shoes are impossible to fill, Stephanie does a great job too; the difference in writing and tone does make it hard to imagine Alyson Court delivering Claire lines that are this sweary and aggressive, so that helps too. In general, Claire is the more altered character in this remake and I really like it, she behaves less like an older sister now and more like Chris Redfield’s sibling with a hard edge; she strikes me as the kind of girl who would beat up Chris’s bullies.
Nick has had his own standalone title in RE4R to win over the fanbase, I’d love to see Code: Veronica 2027 (that’s a little something we call manifesting) be Stephanie’s chance to do the same, this version of Claire on Rockfort Island brings up some interesting situations for the character.
There Is No Plan B
I love Resident Evil 2 2019. As a standalone game, it’s one of the greatest entries in the whole survival-horror genre, unfortunately, as far as remakes go? It’s actually kind of bad.
A pretty tall list of puzzles, most of the side-character playable sections and almost all of the original Lab and Sewer layouts are missing, furthermore, characters like Chief Brian Irons and Claire Redfield are quite far from their original renditions; whether you prefer these changes or not, it’s undeniable that Resident Evil 2 removes at least as much as it adds.
By far the worst casualty though is the B scenario and the differences between our two protagonists… there are almost none! Claire and Leon exit the station the same way, fight the same bosses, collect the same items and do the same puzzles; the zapping system is completely removed, you can smash every window in the RPD, collect every item and cause absolute chaos in Scenario A and have it make zero difference in scenario B; there is no scenario B it’s a second playthrough with a different character, a couple of new weapons and some more enemies.
Speaking of the enemies… I can’t play this game on Hardcore anymore, it’s just a miserable experience.
Resident Evil 2 really needed a custom difficulty option because as a big fan of the series and enjoyer of a fair challenge, I’m not satisfied with either Standard or Hardcore.
On Standard, enemies don’t take half of the US Army’s ammunition stockpile to kill, checkpoints at key points ensure you don’t lose huge chunks of progress when the game decides to crash and certain attacks like a double zombie grab aren’t a death sentence… but Ink Ribbons aren’t needed to save, bosses go down too easily and supplies are much too abundant.
On Hardcore, Ink Ribbons are needed to save the game, just as God intended, supplies aren’t as abundant, boss fights are the true test of skill they should be and rankings are much more strict… but every enemy is an awful bullet sponge and that alone just makes it a chore to play.
A Franchise Reborn
The potent three punch combo of Resident Evil 7, Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 in 2017, 2019 and 2020 were like chest compressions for the ailing franchise, like William Birkin, Resident Evil mutated from then on, growing out of control and surpassing even Monster Hunter, which is a series Japanese players are crazy for.
Ever since the turn of the decade, it seems like the world has gone Resident Evil crazy: the lived experience of a real pandemic, an injection of new fans and top notch remakes (not RE3R) have made this 3 decade old gaming institution feel fresh and exciting again.
I’m a Halo and Metal Gear Solid fan, the idea that a franchise could ever resurface like this to such adoration seemed impossible to me. We’ll call this the Crimson Head era of the franchise, it was put down but now it’s back and faster, sharper and stronger than ever. More than that, Resident Evil 2 is largely responsible for our current remake era and if you ask me, Capcom’s Resident Evil remakes are the best of their kind.
Resident Evil 2 is a game with a very unique type of nostalgia for me, the nostalgia of being 19. Covid hadn’t happened yet, the chaotic, awkward teenage years were over and adulthood seemed full of boundless opportunity with nothing yet set in stone; a new console generation was on the horizon, the world was relatively peaceful and my city was in okay shape.
Those days are long gone.
Thank you very much for reading to the end of this retrospective review, if you enjoyed it then please feel-free to like and subscribe and I’d love to chat with you in the comments.
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I know I'm in the minority on this, but Mr. X just about ruined my enjoyment of the RE2 remake. I barely tolerated him on my initial playthrough, and I couldn't finish my second run because he shows up a lot earlier on the next go around. I did love everything else about this game, though.