What The Resident Evil 3 Remake Did Right, and How Resident Evil 4 Might Follow

What The Resident Evil 3 Remake Did Right, and How Resident Evil 4 Might Follow

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Josh Wise

The plot of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis is as follows. On September 28th, 1998, Jill Valentine, a former member of the Special Tactics And Rescue Service (S.T.A.R.S.), attempts to leave Raccoon City. Its citizens have been polluted with a touch of the T-Virus, and now prefer to dine on human flesh. Jill heads for the police station, teams up with a soldier trained to combat bio-terrorist activity, fends off a creature that knows no mercy, and escapes in a helicopter just moments before a nuclear missile wipes the city from the map. Here is the plot of the remake, Resident Evil 3. On September 28th, 1998, Jill Valentine, a former member of the Special Tactics And Rescue Service, attempts to leave her apartment. Bang!

The bang is caused by the creature, who barges through Jill’s living-room wall and tries to grind her into paste. It’s as if Capcom’s mission for the remake – hinted at by the sawn-off title – is to cut down on length and go for blunt impact. The studio follows the example set by its leading lump, better known as Nemesis, and makes rubble of any potential obstacles. Hounded by this unkillable pursuer, you spend most of the game’s six-hour run time doing just that. Back at Jill’s a fire stirs, the building starts to crumble, and the plot goes up in smoke. Now and then, it wafts back into view. We get a Russian mercenary called Nikolai, a train car full of survivors, and a scattering of Jill’s ex-colleagues, but mostly we get the Nemesis: a tower of skin and teeth, wrapped in black rubbish bags and programmed to destroy.

I wasn’t ready for Resident Evil 3. Here was survival horror boiled down to its bare essentials – a B-movie version of The Last of Us, with all the sorrow burned away and the characters scarcely more than sketches. No themes, no lessons learned, no real developments. And yet I was a mess. I reached the credits with mangled nerves and a crushing sense of exhaustion, feeling lighter, as if the game had sponged away some patch of spiritual damp. It took the source material and stripped out what it didn’t need. Some fans were ticked off at the loss of locations such as the park and the clock tower, but the result rang true to the original’s thumping sense of desperation and doom.

The remake of Resident Evil 2 was a different beast. Its star was not Leon or Claire but the Raccoon City Police Department building, with its polished clutter, and the game was an act of unclouded homage. Capcom knew that our nostalgia was keyed to its weird locks and stairwells. The hallways were licked with fresh graphical paint, and there were light twists on old favourites – the scenes around Kendo’s gun shop were recalibrated, and Ada rocked up in shades and a chic new raincoat, as befits her super-secret agenda. But on the whole our memories were honoured, rather than fruitfully demolished – despite the best efforts of mega Tyrant, Mr X, a stomping terminator who burst through his fair share of the architecture.

All of which bids us to ask: as Capcom continues to embalm its corpus, which route will it take with the remake of Resident Evil 4? Will it stay utterly reverent to the original, or might it be prepared to gut out sections that slow its panicky flow? Advance word on the game tells of numerous additions, including stealth, new and expanded areas, and the ability to parry a chainsaw with a puny knife. Excellent. But there is still much we don’t know. I would certainly take a perverse joy in seeing every little detail of the original reanimated, so to speak, especially the scene in which our hero outran a giant stone robot. But I wonder if we may end up with something truer to Resident Evil 4 if some of its excesses were strimmed away in the pursuit of revved-up shocks.

Last year, there were reports of a major shake-up during the game’s development. (This, of course, is true to the origin of Resident Evil 4, which began life with ghosts and dolls, morphed into Devil May Cry, and at one point involved an airship, before Shinji Mikami righted the drifting course of development.) Apparently, M-Two, the studio that led development on Resident Evil 3, has been jostled to the side in favour of Capcom Division 1, the team behind Resident Evil 2. But here’s the twist: Capcom made the decision because, according to anonymous sources, the developers at M-Two were being too faithful. Were they cowed by the backlash around Resident Evil 3? Pity, as Resident Evil 4 would do well to exert half the grip as Jill’s fraught race against the clock. Here’s hoping that when it arrives, next year, it takes on a curious shape, and begins with an unfamiliar bang.

Comments
8
  • I mean, we can now parry the good doctor's chainsaw. That's all we need! :D
  • Resident Evil 3 was no Resident Evil 2. Been saying that for 25 years.
    I really liked the remakes though.
  • I just hope we get code Veronica remake after RE4, by far the best RE game in my book though REVII is close second.
  • It would be a shame to see RE4 remake being fucked up just like Capcom did with the remake of RE3. I keep my fingers crossed and I hope to be mistaken.
  • Nah, no way RE4R ends up like RE3R @ Cantinflas.
  • @Hope you are right, bro. RE4 is one of my favorite games of all times. And I expect this remake to be no less than the original.
  • Samuel Jackson in repetitive eagle would gee
  • im really hoping for an outbreak remake with full online coop capabilities
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