Assisted Living Godzilla
Prophet
- Joined
- Nov 23, 2017
- Messages
- 4,681
Here's the thing, RE2 is a action oriented game, and survival horror isn't really a thing. Survival horror is just a marketing gimmick, it sounds really cool so it's a marketing gimmick that's stayed around, but it's a gimmick none the less. I think it's really easy to tell its a marketing gimmick too as nobody really seems all that sure on what exactly survival horror even is, and what it is seems to change depending on the person. Years later when doing Dino Crisis they tried it again, branding it Panic Horror, but everyone was like: Nah, you can't just make up terms...not again anyways. Original Resident Evil is an adventure game, it's an adventure game with combat encounter, and instead of point-and-click you've got tank controls, but it's still an adventure game. It's like one step away from being Maniac Mansion, and LucasArt was just some enemy encounters away from Resident Evil. It started as a spiritual successor to the Japanese only NES JRPG Sweet Home, which was based on a movie; it's not something Capcom own the rights to so they had to come up with something new. Sweet Home itself is a very adventure game style JRPG, it's kind of like if Maniac Mansion had RPG combat in it. When Resident Evil started development it was going to be even more like Sweet Home than it ended up being, originally it was a Blobber where you had a team of four characters investigating the Mansion, but the PSX couldn't handle the 3D levels and Shinji Mikami was inspired to change the game to what it became after playing Alone in the Dark. That first Resident Evil is the only one of the whole lot I'd say isn't action oriented, the series because more and more action oriented as it does along to the point the first version of RE4 gets spun off into Devil May Cry.
Now you could say RE4 is a big shift away from the previous mainline series games since even though they're action games, and even though the puzzle element become more streamlined, and things like dodge moves are added, they've still got their feet in those adventure games roots. And yeah, maybe. But adventure games are about solving puzzles, and RE4 still has that, it's just that it's folded those puzzles into the action direction it's been going. Take the Crimson Head zombies for Remake. Those guys were a big new puzzle element of remake. Do you kill a zombie or run pass it? If you kill it you have to burn it depending on the location you're at, otherwise you've got this even more powerful zombie that's going to make you use even more ammo to kill it again. RE4 basically takes that, adds more options, and turns it into every combat encounter. Shooting an enemy in different places gives you different melee attacks. Shooting the head could kill it quicker, but it could also turn it into a much stronger enemy, but also it could be advantageous to you if you have flash grenade which can be used for instakills while they're in their power state. It makes the shooting into a puzzle, and even turns your inventory management into more a a puzzle; I think RE4 was the first time I ever heard someone call an inventory system inventory Tetris. And while the shooting is different than the mainline RE game up to that point since it isn't lock-on anymore, and you're in a third person view now, it's still a tank control game; it still controls exactly like the first Resident Evil.
When I played RE2 back when it came out I was like: They turned it into an action game. It may feel like the original when you start it and you're out in the street, but it's not long before you have some pretty powerful weapons in that game and lots of ammo. You gotta remember too, that shit came out back in '98. Free aim was still new then, you had some first person shooters that started doing it a couple years before but they still played like Doom, and the year before you were just getting games that weren't Light Gun shooters where location damage was even a thing...Goldeneye being one of them, and I think that started as a Light Gun style game. '98 is also like the first time I can remember playing something (Outwars) that'd fall into what we now think of as third person shooters. The Japanese also seemed pretty unsure about this whole manual aiming thing, (which seems to be why the modern FPS became so niche there for so long) like I remember WinBack having it and that's '99, but it doesn't seem like they even start embracing this whole aiming yourself thing until the mid 2000s. The fixed camera angles may seem like a non-action oriented kind of thing, but even 3D beat 'em ups (like Zombies Revenge) and stuff like Devil May Cry had those.
