#Also where's our fucking HD devs???

[rachelkaser]

Resident Evil 3 Remake Review: Where’s the love gone?

The 2020 game release glut is underway, and given the state of the world, it didn’t come a moment too soon. Among the heavy hitters like Doom Eternal, Animal Crossing New Horizons, and the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Capcom slipped in their remake of Resident Evil 3.

REmake 3 bears the weight of having to follow the superb remakes of both Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2. Both remakes, though made years apart, managed to take the raw material of the original games and make them into almost completely original experiences. REmake 2, in particular, was one of the highlights of last year -- I listed it as my Horror Game of the Year on TNW.

So how’d it do? Well you probably don’t need me to tell you it didn’t exactly hold up. Just about every review on the planet has waxed acidic about the game since it came out, and for the most part I agree with every complaint I’ve seen. However, I do want to address at least one, that being the game’s length. Because that’s not in and of itself a problem -- it’s the stuff the devs did to get it to that length that are the problem.

Let me start by saying the game’s atmosphere and character are great. Raccoon City has never felt more like a real place -- and I mean a place that actually made sense, as opposed to the bizarre, somewhat eldritch behemoth it’s resembled in every game from RE2 to RE Outbreak. The game doesn’t squeeze you within the confines of the city’s oddly convoluted police station, if nothing else.

I may not be a fan of Jill’s more caustic personality in this game, but I respect her for it -- goodness knows I couldn’t have gone through the things she’s gone through with a smile on my face. I do like what they did with Carlos’s character -- namely, that he actually has one, his amiability and competence contrasting his original cringey doofiness. And this Nicholai’s more obvious sliminess is much more entertaining than the original.

That said, let’s address the elephant in the room: the game’s length.

If you aren’t caught up, you might think I’m talking about the game being too long. That would raise familiar complaints about padding and filler content, which are some of my biggest pet peeves in games such as this. But actually, it’s the opposite. The game can actually be completed in just a few hours -- less than three if you really hustle.

I’ve seen any number of complaints about that.

Gamespot: “ ...disappointingly, RE3's story reaches its conclusion after a brisk six-hour campaign”

PC Gamer: “...the pacing here feels off, like it's hurriedly shoving you to the next location just as you're starting to get comfortable...”

Eurogamer: “All this - the pacing, the progression, the action and Nemesis' design, contributes to the feeling the Resident Evil 3 remake is over too soon.”

As each of these reviews implies, the length is a symptom, rather than the disease. The problem isn’t that the game is short. At the risk of sounding suggestive, it’s not the length that counts, but what you do with it.

No, the issue with the REmake 3 is that it rejiggers several key events in the original game, presumably in the interest of keeping the game tight (and cheap), and undermines the tension and storytelling. In doing so, it also basically neuters Nemesis, one of the series’ all-time best villains -- and that’s just fucking sad.

Seeing STARS

The earliest, and probably most damning example to me is the death of Brad Vickers. In the original, Brad, being the only remaining STARS member in the city besides Jill, is desperately fleeing the Nemesis when she first meets him. He’s our first indication that something very bad is in the city, something we didn’t see in RE2.

Here, Brad is instead taken out by a group of ordinary zombies -- not a very illustrious end for a STARS operative. While he does call Jill to warn her about Nemesis -- meaning he’s presumably had a run-in with the beast himself -- he’s strangely blase about this eight-foot-tall nightmare monster that’s trying to kill him, specifically.

Later, the player encounters Brad again, but as a zombie outside the police station, where you find out he’s the one who bit and infected Marvin Branagh. He’s able to apologize to Marvin --- there’s no explanation for how he can do that despite being fully zombified, and frankly the whole thing has “Pathos Moment, Please Be Moved” stamped on it in gold ink. And it might actually be emotional, if the person who encountered him and had to put him down was Jill.

But instead, it’s Carlos. Who says “I’ve got this fucker!” guns Brad down, and nicks a keycard off his body. He finds the STARS poster featuring Brad a few moments later and scornfully says, “Sorry, poster boy.” I never thought I’d be chastising someone for not paying the proper respect to Brad Fucking Vickers, but here we are.

Brad served as a way of introducing Nemesis and how dangerous he is. For all his chickenheartedness, Brad was a fully-fledged member of STARS and the only survivor of the Spencer Mansion incident in town other than Jill. So seeing Brad so afraid of Nemesis, and then seeing the monster casually dispose of him actually proved Nemmy could walk the walk as well as talk the “STAAAAAAARS.”

In the original game, he’s constantly getting in Jill’s way, and the player never knows where and when he’ll show up next. When Jill summons an escape helicopter, he shoots it down just when she starts celebrating. When she thinks she’s put him down, he infects her with T-Virus and knocks her out for almost two days. He may not actually kill Jill, but he sure as hell makes certain she doesn’t get away from him.

In the remake, Nemmy never once succeeds in the entire course of the game. He doesn’t kill Brad. He shoots down a helicopter, but at the start of the game. The clock tower level where he’s pursuing Jill through close quarters and ruining her escape plans doesn’t happen. Every part of this just defangs him.

All we see him do is try and fail to kill Jill, and get his ass kicked over and over and over again. Sure, he still infects her with the T-Virus. But there are several moments in the game where he has her completely dead to rights and just fails to finish her off, which makes him look like a giant mutated goober.

I’m not a purist who needs a remake to be an exact 1:1 duplicate of the original, but something about the downright soullessness of this remake -- the way it just doesn’t seem to get what was so great about the original -- leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I’m reminded of that moment in DMC: Devil May Cry when Dante In Name Only looks at himself in a white wig and scoffs. I do not appreciate this level of disdain for the source material.

Ticking the Boxes

Nemesis’s appearance in the game invites (nay, begs for) comparison to his predecessor, REmake 2′s Mr. X. You could tell, when playing the latter game, how excited the developers were to turn what was a one-note Tyrant boss into the game’s most memorable enemy. Nemmy, by comparison, makes you feel the developer’s beleaguered sigh at checking him off the Things To Include list -- like a great, gusty, “Well if I must” wheeze you could see from the stratosphere.

Part of the issue is that they gave lots of Nemmy’s qualities to Mr. X when they were beefing up his role in REmake 2. Mr. X was also the relentless pursuer type who could ruin your day if he caught you, and he was damn near impossible to put down in a straight fight. That’s basically Nemesis in a nutshell. The difference between the two was that, unlike Mr. X, who maintained a brisk walking pace and could be evaded, Nemmy could sprint from place to place and could pass through doors.

What Nemmy lacked that he should have had was unpredictability. In the original game, you were never quite sure where and when he was going to turn up, so even when he doesn’t show up at all, his potential presence is a constant pressure on the player. Mr. X was kind of the same, in that he patrolled the station and you could hear him stomping around. But considering REmake 3 is much more linear and deals with a smaller chunk of the city, Nemesis should have sprung up in odd places and at odd times. As it is, his inclusion feels so scripted as to be token. In fact, he’s more like the original RE2′s Mr. X than the original Nemesis.

Here’s another example: The original final encounter with Nemesis, in which Jill put him down for good, was the only time in the game Jill had the advantage over the monster. Nemmy has basically become a puddle of goo, having been decimated with the rail gun. All he can do is feebly try and waddle towards Jill, who picks up a magnum and proceeds to put several rounds into the monster. The game milks every last drop of catharsis from this moment, culminating in that famous line “You want STARS? I’ll give you STARS” before executing the motherfucker. It. Was. Awesome!

All the game needed to do was give us this moment in HD. That was all it needed to do. If it wanted to up the ante by maybe having a proper final boss fight, I’d have been okay with that. But instead it ends with Jill picking up the rail gun -- which is easily bigger than she is, I might add -- shoving it down Nemmy’s throat, and shouting “Next time, take the fucking hint!” before shooting him to oblivion.

Surely I don’t need to be the one to tell you why the latter is just not as good as the former, right? It honestly feels like a puerile attempt to make the scene more “badass.” But all I could think while it was happening was “Surely that gun’s recoil would put Jill somewhere in the next county?” Even if they’d just left the famous line in, I’d have accepted it, railgun deepthroating and all (put that on the list of sentences I’d never thought I’d write). As it is, it just feels like Jill smacking down an unruly dog, not putting down her borderline-immortal mutant stalker for good.

And Jill’s energy in this scene, her just-so-done-with-it attitude and lack of real reaction to the actual gravity of her situation, feels like it’s representing the attitude of the people who made this wreck. Whereas REmake 2 felt like a labor of love, something with genuine pleasure and devotion put into it, you get the impression while playing REmake 3 that the developers really didn’t want to be making it. Not didn’t care, I mean actively resented the project.

I’m not saying the original was perfect, or that this remake needed to be faithful -- REmake 2 remixed vast parts of RE2 and that worked out in its favor. But that’s what this needed to be: a remix, something that respected and built upon the original material. But to do that, they needed to put real passion and interest in, and it seemed like they ran out of that as soon as REmake 2 hit the figurative shelves -- and all the developers of REmake 3 could do was pull out a great big “Things to Include in the Inevitable RE3 Remake” checklist and start forlornly ticking boxes.

And that lack of interest is why the game feels so desperately anemic. Jill, Carlos, and especially Nemesis, deserved better.

#resident evil 3 #jill valentine #nemesis #re3 remake #resident evil 3 remake #resident evil 2 #resident evil #game review