So this entry is a bit late to the submission date, and I apologize for that— I wanted to shoot you an email before Friday came and, well, ultimately it took way too long to formulate my thoughts and create what I believe my definitive opinion is about this. Now, that being said, this will be an opinion piece that talks a lot about the core concepts and values of remaking games— so there will be plenty of both opinion and technical talk to go around, so I promise I’m not submitting just and opinion piece for this one. But let’s start with that and end with that so the juicy stuff is in the middle, yeah?
April 3rd, 2020 – Daylight – “Somehow… I’m still alive.”
I believe I mentioned in GAME 220 with you that I’m a hardcore, ride-or-die Resident Evil series fan. From chagrined titles like Operation Raccoon City, to beloved titles like Resident Evil 4, I love and have played them all. Yes, even the shitty GameBoy Color one, there’s some charm to how bad that one is. But, above all, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (1999) will always be my favorite due to a combination of how it improved on the mechanics found in Resident Evil 2 (1998), the reintroduction of Jill Valentine to the story, and the badass Nemesis pursuer who was a massive improvement in every regard to the “Mr. X” Tyrant pursuer who appeared in the B scenarios just a year prior. Not to mention the childhood memories of eating a ridiculous amount of Butterfingers, playing the game with my cousin on a ratty CRT, and being terrified to my core. Memories that, to this day, I cherish and will never forget.
Firstly, let me start by saying from this point on I’ll be abbreviating names to help keep track of stuff. Mainly, RE3 being the 1999 release and RE3R being the 2020 remake, and the rest will follow similar conventions.
April 3rd, 2020 – Night – “It was Raccoon City’s last chance and my last chance… My last escape.”
RE3 is a survival horror game that released on the PS1 in 1999 to great reviews. Many traditional fans were a bit concerned by the turn toward action that the series had taken with this entry, but many enjoyed the mechanics (such as the “Live Choice” mechanics) and action (such as the Mercenaries minigame) that were brought to the table. The story revolves around Jill Valentine and her escape from a collapsing Raccoon City that is riddled with T-Virus infected individuals, animals, and more. Many environments (both familiar and new) are introduced and used, each one of them being remembered (for better or worse) to this very day. Now, let’s talk about remakes.
In remaking a game, there are a few things that are considered: what, in regards to the original story, do you want to keep; what fat can be trimmed and replaced with something else; and what elements do the fans legitimately care about that should be retained? From there, how does the remake need to be done? There are so many logistical questions to be asked about a remake that there is no real way to consider all of them in just writing. Taking an old game and remaking it takes a level of love and consideration in regard to the original content, and from there it takes a decent level of prowess with your tool set to actually be able to make a competent and respectful remake of the original content.
But, that line of thought has another coin to consider that I brought up earlier: fan desires. Now, being a consumer of the medium and only having worked on a few very minor projects, I fully recognize that I have no real room to talk about this particular aspect. But humor me for a minute, you’ve made it this far. When doing a remake, it is imperative that the target audience at least covers a majority of the fan base— slapping a title on something and releasing it as a remake of a game doesn’t work, that’s abhorrent disregard for the source content and the fan base and that mixture is as safe as crude oil and fire. The appeal of remakes such as RE2R, RE3R, and Battle for Bikini Bottom Rehydrated ultimately lies in the nostalgia people have for those games, and for whatever reason they have that nostalgia— whether that be childhood memories of playing the game or it being a popular speedrun game. To shorten the point I’m trying to make here: It is imperative that developers consider a myriad of factors, related to both creating new content and adapting the original content, in order to create a successful remake that is commercially successful. Oh and making it enjoyable to both old fans and new attendees is a pretty solid development decision, too.
April 5th, 2020 – Night – “You want S.T.A.R.S.? I’ll give you S.T.A.R.S.!”
Now we get back to the opinion stuff.
RE3R is a survival horror game that released on PS4, Xbox One, and PC in 2020 to less than admirable reviews. Since then, the reviews have gone up slightly but still average around 80/100 overall.
Here’s where we start talking spoilers, so you’ve been warned.
I have a less than favorable opinion about this remake of my favorite game. Hear me out.
So RE3R is a decent enough game on its own, but in regards to the original content of RE3? It’s kind of— well, a joke. RE3 had the original campaign, which was admittedly short but contained a lot of things to promote replayability such as the “Live Choice” mechanic mentioned earlier, Mercenaries mode, a point shop to buy items for use in the campaign, as well as multiple rankings and bonuses for specific clear ratings on specific difficulties. RE3R has a campaign that ignores the first two to four hours of RE3 and makes everything in those two to four hours happen in a 10-25 minute cutscene, a point shop to buy items for use in the campaign, and multiple rankings depending on your completion stats such as deaths, saves, and time. Oh, but it came bundled with a completely different multiplayer only game from a completely different development studio, so I guess that’s nice.
Jokes aside, RE3R feels a lot like a “Greatest Hits” album of moments from RE3 that left out over half the greatest moments and mechanics of the original— like Queen’s Greatest Hits but they leave out anything that came before 1981. For example, the Clocktower and Final Lab are two of the most memorable sections of RE3. In RE3R, the Clocktower is cut entirely and the outside becomes the stage for a boss fight against Nemesis, and the Final Lab is dumbed down into a section with little to no puzzles.
On that note, the puzzles in this game are whack. They are exceedingly easy, with most of them being “get an item, maybe get another item, combine the two items and place them in position X.” The logic puzzles are completely lost— the pharmacy puzzle (which is no longer a requirement) is delegated to a single throwaway reference to the original game rather than a legitimate puzzle.
Ultimately, I guess what I’m trying to say is that:
- The game focuses too hard on trying to tell an interpretation of the original RE3 story while leaving out some of the most memorable parts
- The focus on action, just like the original game, is nice but you can tell that there was little to no regard to the survival horror origins of the game outside of a few cheap scares
- The cut content feels like it’s missing, and little to nothing was given in return, which completely cuts down on the amount of playtime there is in a casual playthrough (personally, my first playthrough took 4 hours, 20 minutes, and some odd seconds IGT— which was only about 5 hours and 31 minutes RTA, which is almost pathetically short considering the very slight amount of additional/replay-encouraging content present within the game)
- It really felt like the priority was Project REsistance, but Capcom couldn’t market that on its own
- Look at Nemesis, that is a cool design and move set. But look at his utilization in game, look at how they massacred my boy
- “Dude, where’s my S+ rank?” – It doesn’t exist in RE3R, despite existing in RE2R.
- I feel like SammyClassicSonicFan after this one.
C. B. Irby 