i've never played any of these before. i'm not sure i've even watched one for more than like ten minutes at a time. but i've gotten a bit more interested in the series over time, so i decided i would play resident evil 1 on ps1 this october (and i was hoping 2, though i'm starting to think that's going to go over the end of the month). even right before i started i was like "i feel like i know nothing about what i'm getting into, but if this is anything like devil may cry 1 it's going to be awesome." (i keep imagining the item pick up sound from those games every time i see the twirling animation in this game.) i defeated the plant last night before ending my stream
my first impression, of course, is how tremendously 90s this is, both really obvious stuff with actors costumed like a tv show for the intro to try and get you to imagine the characters looking like that and the quality of the voice direction, but the art direction of the mansion has a distinctive mixture of the decade's aesthetics which are even more emphasized (just like in myst or something) by the slightly uncanny feel of early cd-era pre-rendered backgrounds. it's awesome.
i'm coming into this right off of king's field, and kishi mentioned as i was finishing that game and starting this one that at one point the game was prototyped as a first-person adventure, of which the controls seem to be something of a holdover. i actually think the effect of that is super sick; i've gotten pretty adjusted to them and can easily move smoothly a lot of the time, especially during the safe, repeated treks through hallways that have happened a lot as i get stumped on puzzles, but that tends to go out of the window quickly when i'm under pressure. the sense of panic quickly makes me feel distant from jill, and suddenly i realize i'm pressing up to run directly into an enemy instead of turning or walking away. and it's interesting going from kf to this game because they have a similar sense that many aspects of the game feel simple in terms of design or mechanics now, with a lot of the complexity and tension that exists arising directly from the sense that you have to overcome the limitations of the game itself. it's very compelling...at this point i almost consider it the essence of what's appealing to me about retro games in general
that said, i've long had at least a slight awareness that this, like FF, was one of the first japanese game series to really break through as an international AAA kind of thing, and i'm a bit surprised by how much that shows even in this game. the production values are cool and all, but there are also a lot of interesting and sort of esoteric details in this game i keep encountering. last night i learned there's an animation for kicking a zombie's head off when it's crawling on the floor. the way you can rotate and examine items like they later put in the ace attorney games is fun, and there are some other little animation touches that the game really didn't "need" but add a ton of charm. i got to the sokoban puzzle in the wet basement last night and was fascinated by the way that the boxes aren't rigged up as static objects like they often are in this sort of thing, but have a special interaction of the upper one pushing down on the lower one, causing it to get forced forward by the water's upward force...it's clearly not "physics" but a bespoke setup for this one little scene (i'm assuming that won't happen again. maybe it will). somebody thought it was important enough to spend all that time rigging the animation, and i love that. what a cool game
