Resident Evil 2

(35 hours total on Steam, seen the credits roll 5 times. Latest playthrough on the Deck being Leon first through in Japanese, 6 hours 23 minutes and 13 seconds to get the “kill screen”.)

“They sure die hard” is a line uttered by Ada Wong when she shot a zombie as the player character in 2019’s Resident Evil 2 remake, or at least that’s how yours truly choose to translate that line from Japanese into English. Which got me thinking, Resident Evil 2, both the 1998 original and the 2019 remake, is like Die Hard. The action is mostly confined into a police station, its basement, the sewer under and an underground lab even deeper down. Maybe minus some hostage situation especially in Leon’s bit.

I decided to play Resident Evil 4 remake in Japanese, so it’s only reasonable to play through “Leon Kennedy Chapter One” in Japanese for the first time. It had been a rough time between yours truly and them polygonal extravaganzas in the years since 2019, so I are quite surprised to find out that I can still have a good time with this game.

Back in the very early aughts, when 1998’s Resident Evil 2 could still be considered as a “new game”, it was considered a direct sequel to the original Resident Evil compared to Silent Hill’s thus far anthology approach. The original’s house of the walking dead became a city of the living dead as the viral plague spread. Leon S Kennedy, just reporting for duty police officer, and Claire Redfield, younger sister of a police commando, are 2 poor sods heading into this city together. On their separate ways, they would uncover a big conspiracy and try to live to tell that tale.

The confined space of Resident Evil 2 might sound “small” or even “cheap” compared to them Sixty-dollar Club’s norms of open world or global trotting adventures, but it shows the bell and whistle of high-octane action rather early. The explosive “car accident” that separates the player characters is something that can put most of today’s action cinema to shame.

Leon and Claire would inevitably go through some same bits. With the police station being an intriguing puzzle box, they simply could not resist to let people go through it more than once. But there are differences in the arsenal they wield and the company they keep.

Both started with your standard 9 mil pistol then things went into branches as the fire power escalates. At near ends of both “tech trees”, Leon has a steampunk look flamethrower while Claire wields something more futuristic looking. The Second playthroughs of both also give them a higher caliber of pistols, ones they shoot with some “Cinematic Cool” rather than the usual three-eyes stands.

The 2019 remake has the orthodoxy over-shoulder shooting, left trigger then right trigger norm for more a decade and half. Then there is left bumper then right trigger affair the game calls sub weapons. Sub weapons start with breakable knives then upgrades to grenades, fragment or flashbangs. Those are not just for offends, as the player character got grabbed, a pull of the left bumper is a way to get out relatively unharmed.

Leon would meet the mysterious feme fatale, Ada Wong. She has a brief playable segment in the game featuring a gun like hacking tool to get around the environment. On the other hand, Shirley in Claire’s campaign is defenseless little girl who has to play hide and seek in her parts.

Resident Evil 4 remake’s Chainsaw Demo had shown that the new game has a graphic option to keep the dead body around, while Resident Evil 2 remake does have its bodies lying around. Partially because them “die hard” type would raise again and getting in the way of player character, partially, I think, since there are not a lot of them to keep around even for the Xbox One and PS4 level of hardware.

While an action-adventure game, Resident Evil 2 does lays more towards that second A. The satisfaction player gets is more than solving a puzzle box than molding down the enemies, like how John McClane is just happy to get out one pickle after another in original Die Hard.