Part of what makes the Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 remakes so good is their reverence for the games on which they're based. Both firmly root you in very familiar locations, with puzzles, enemies, and plot beats being expanded in ways that don't feel inauthentic to the original games. For whatever reason, Capcom decided to deviate heavily with Resident Evil 3, making it barely recognizable as Nemesis. Character relationships are heavily altered, iconic locations are dropped entirely, and Nemesis heself is downright neutered.
This becomes apparent from the start as Raccoon City's opening streets are radically scaled down, becoming more confined and less interesting to explore. You spend very little time here compared to the original, and the few key locations that do carry over are gone in a flash. Take the opening sequence in the warehouse, where Dario Rosso locks himself in a shipping container hoping to just wait out the zombie apocalypse. In the original game there's a whole second floor to explore, and you're able to return later once you've acquired the lockpick, which actually provides some closure to Dario's little substory. In the remake, you just run in here real quick, Dario tells you to get bent, and you leave. You're in there for all of a minute, you never hear from Dario again, and as far as I'm aware you're not able to go back. Locations like the restaurant feel microscopic compared to the original, lacking its basement level or really serving as anything other than a space between two doors that connect different streets. Gone are places like the pharmaceutical company office, and really much of uptown in general. It's just... not here.
Nemesis gets done the most dirty, though. In the original, he occasionally shows up to cut off your route, forcing you to think on your toes and adapt. You could try to take him on, but that meant wasting precious ammunition only to buy yourself a brief respite. No, your best option was to avoid him entirely, and that meant learning the map and taking advantage of its many twisting roads and alleyways. Raccoon City was the culmination of Resident Evil's non-linear design, with Nemesis almost serving as a point of confidence. When you finally lost him, he would actually stay away for a decent amount of time, allowing tension to build as it becomes more probable he'll burst through the next door or swing around the next corner.
In the remake, he shows up after a scripted event and is just kinda always there. You basically endure one long segment where he's constantly on your ass, and this is because the Raccoon City streets are much more linear, with far fewer places to juke or outrun him. Whereas evasion was your best COA (course of action) in Nemesis, in RE3 you actually should just dump ammo into him. Or toss a single grenade, because uh, that's all it takes. He's such a non-threat here, utterly lacking in the qualities that made him frightening, and then after the opening hour of the game he kinda just stops showing up outside of scripted encounters. Mr.X was so well utilized in the RE2 remake, how could they fuck up my boy like this?
Still, I don't think Resident Evil 3 is a bad game, it's just disappointing. In some ways I think it suffers from releasing too soon after Resident Evil 2. It feels like they were in a crunch to get this one out, and as a result you'll often see people saying it feels more like DLC for that game. In that way, it also benefits from some of RE2's strengths. The controls feel great, puzzles are well designed, and it looks purdy. Mostly...
I should note that I played this on the Playstation 5, which has a free upgrade available similar to Resident Evil 2. I decided to play the game with ray tracing enabled, but about halfway through the game all the textures got screwed up. Everything had lines running through it, giving even metalic surfaces a sort of woodgrain texture. A lot of textures also looked blurry as hell. Like, Playstation 2 blurry. I have no idea what caused this, but restarting the game and switching to performance mode did not fix it. Since this game takes like, 3 hours to beat on a blind run, I did not find it worthwhile to reinstall.
You can at least find Resident Evil 3 for a fair price now days. I think initial opinions were a lot more harsh when this game came out because it cost 60 whole American dollars, which is frankly ridiculous for what you get. It's too short, lacking in interesting side features, and fails to properly remake the original game in the way that its predecessors did, opting instead to be more of a departure in ways that are frequently a detriment.
This becomes apparent from the start as Raccoon City's opening streets are radically scaled down, becoming more confined and less interesting to explore. You spend very little time here compared to the original, and the few key locations that do carry over are gone in a flash. Take the opening sequence in the warehouse, where Dario Rosso locks himself in a shipping container hoping to just wait out the zombie apocalypse. In the original game there's a whole second floor to explore, and you're able to return later once you've acquired the lockpick, which actually provides some closure to Dario's little substory. In the remake, you just run in here real quick, Dario tells you to get bent, and you leave. You're in there for all of a minute, you never hear from Dario again, and as far as I'm aware you're not able to go back. Locations like the restaurant feel microscopic compared to the original, lacking its basement level or really serving as anything other than a space between two doors that connect different streets. Gone are places like the pharmaceutical company office, and really much of uptown in general. It's just... not here.
Nemesis gets done the most dirty, though. In the original, he occasionally shows up to cut off your route, forcing you to think on your toes and adapt. You could try to take him on, but that meant wasting precious ammunition only to buy yourself a brief respite. No, your best option was to avoid him entirely, and that meant learning the map and taking advantage of its many twisting roads and alleyways. Raccoon City was the culmination of Resident Evil's non-linear design, with Nemesis almost serving as a point of confidence. When you finally lost him, he would actually stay away for a decent amount of time, allowing tension to build as it becomes more probable he'll burst through the next door or swing around the next corner.
In the remake, he shows up after a scripted event and is just kinda always there. You basically endure one long segment where he's constantly on your ass, and this is because the Raccoon City streets are much more linear, with far fewer places to juke or outrun him. Whereas evasion was your best COA (course of action) in Nemesis, in RE3 you actually should just dump ammo into him. Or toss a single grenade, because uh, that's all it takes. He's such a non-threat here, utterly lacking in the qualities that made him frightening, and then after the opening hour of the game he kinda just stops showing up outside of scripted encounters. Mr.X was so well utilized in the RE2 remake, how could they fuck up my boy like this?
Still, I don't think Resident Evil 3 is a bad game, it's just disappointing. In some ways I think it suffers from releasing too soon after Resident Evil 2. It feels like they were in a crunch to get this one out, and as a result you'll often see people saying it feels more like DLC for that game. In that way, it also benefits from some of RE2's strengths. The controls feel great, puzzles are well designed, and it looks purdy. Mostly...
I should note that I played this on the Playstation 5, which has a free upgrade available similar to Resident Evil 2. I decided to play the game with ray tracing enabled, but about halfway through the game all the textures got screwed up. Everything had lines running through it, giving even metalic surfaces a sort of woodgrain texture. A lot of textures also looked blurry as hell. Like, Playstation 2 blurry. I have no idea what caused this, but restarting the game and switching to performance mode did not fix it. Since this game takes like, 3 hours to beat on a blind run, I did not find it worthwhile to reinstall.
You can at least find Resident Evil 3 for a fair price now days. I think initial opinions were a lot more harsh when this game came out because it cost 60 whole American dollars, which is frankly ridiculous for what you get. It's too short, lacking in interesting side features, and fails to properly remake the original game in the way that its predecessors did, opting instead to be more of a departure in ways that are frequently a detriment.
2 Comments
I'm just glad I'm not the only one who has encountered that. It's especially strange considering Capcom's other ports have been pretty solid, but this one in particular is just screwed up.
Pogiman666
1 year ago