So I recently finally got around to the RE2 remake (mostly, as Claire, I was very tired in the lab and the game crashed, I'll come back to it) and... hmm. I knew going in this wasn't going to be as good as original RE2, just because RE2 is genuinely like, in my top 5 games of all time and all, and taking it as its own thing yeah, it's pretty good, but the more I think about it, the more frustrated I am with how every little story twist it throws in just kinda... makes a blatantly bad call to axe something from the original in trade.
The most obvious example is Marvin, the cop you meet in the police station early on who originally gives you a little exposition then dies while you're off getting some key. They expanded his character! A lot! He's a real guy you kinda keep checking in with the whole first half of the game and such. That's great! ... except in order to give him all these extra scenes, they cut out basically every single interaction between Leon and Claire in the game? Like yeah, it's cool this one guy gets to be more of a guy, but we're giving up on two characters with some fun chemistry who both seem to be going on simultaneous adventures in this same location and doing a bad job of explaining kind of important stuff to each other. Nobody listens to Leon and all. The game feels much lesser without that.
Then we've got Chief Irons. Arch, scenery-chewing, "EVERYONE'S GONNA DIE!" Chief Irons. The remake decides to make him a more realistic scuzzier sweatier guy. You don't meet him in his office waxing poetic over a corpse, you meet him in the garage just pulling a gun on you to kidnap Sherry. And like, OK, I appreciate change for change's sake, but damn what a wonderfully memorable character the original has and this is just... some guy. Again, the game feels lesser for it. Plus we replace Sherry's solo adventure finding stuff to toss through a vent with this really toothless stealth bit in an orphanage which has really just no tension at all, a fail state that doesn't really make narrative sense (oh no, I failed so Sherry is trapped here until her dad comes to attack her, as opposed to if I get through it at which point her entrapment ends because... her dad shows up to attack her). There's also a kind of ambiguous goal at one point potentially leading to multiple restarts with a long cutscene just after the one save point, but I'm criticizing story decisions.
But yeah, so Sherry's dad. I feel like the transformations just really do not work without that low poly, just moving vertices around by hand thing, and he's too damn shiny, but also, this remake is VERY against the bombastic musical stings that usually accompany all his scenes (and Mr. X's. and various other moments). So just as a baseline, he lacks gravitas here. And then we've got the big surprised twist that after he implants the chief with a chestburster who ends up in the sewers, rather than one big boss fight you just kinda lay into on a bridge, we get like half a dozen of these big blobby Birkin babies popping out of pipes or deep water. And OK, I like that, that's a good little surprise... but we have these instead of the alligator. Also instead of spiders for that matter, which are just completely cut along with crows. Also they're visually close enough to Birkin's final form and kinda wimpy so, this just further weakens his whole presence.
The one twist on things I DID like was getting down to the police basement, where the morgue is actually a very subdued dread-building experience instead of a bit of chaos, and the conspicuous lack of dogs (they aren't COMPLETELY cut from the game, but damn nearly) is explained when you reach the kennel where two lickers just kinda completely went to own on them. Which works because mechanically lickers are as big of a threat here as they should be. They're basically hunters, but presenting a smaller profile and favoring the ceiling as a place to hang out... that said I don't think I've seen one get all tongue-lashy.
Oh and also this remake just completely fails to convey the feeling that there's hundreds or thousands of zombies threatening to get inside.
And this isn't a plot thing but like, literally EVERY puzzle (with one exception notable exception I'm pretty sure I managed to softlock) has been replaced with a 3-character combination lock? WTF is up with that?
