“You were almost a Jill Sandwich!”

Let’s take our hat off and mourn the death of one of the greatest lines in gaming history. Sure, there was a nod to the infamous line in Capcom’s 2002 remake, but it was kinda lame and didn’t have nearly the same impact.

It’s hard to get a good knock at the REmake, which in a way, is kind of a shame. After experiencing the absolute wackiness of RE0, hopping straight into REmake was a bit of a downer. The game is way too serious. It was obvious they were trying to roll back on the cheese factor of the original RE, but at the same time they managed to take away a bit of its charm. One of the best things about the original Playstation/Saturn version of Resident Evil was the deliciously corny grade-B treatment, even if it wasn’t intentional. The Jill Sandwich one-liner wasn’t the only classic they smoothed over. “I hope it’s not Chris’s blood!” was tweaked, along with the “master of unlocking” dialog that has become gaming legend. The re-writes toss a little something that would make you chuckle if you’re old enough to get the reference. Most kids nowadays probably won’t.

There were a couple of things I noticed while playing through RE Remake that I took note of, for the sake of this little blogging project here.

It was great seeing a green Jill Valentine again. We’ve grown accustomed to Jill being a zombie murdering badass over the years, but going back to the beginning shows us a Jill that hasn’t had all that trauma baked in just yet, and we get to see her stunned and almost catatonic after watching her friend get torn apart by zombie dogs.

She’s still squeezing the trigger several times after the clip is empty. And then here she is again, right after they get into the mansion.

She’s runs and hides behind Barry. Barry does manage to kill the zombie, but he needs to use three shots, point-blank, from his magnum, in order to do it. I think it was after that when Jill was like “damn, I’m better off on my own.”

Why does RE0 look so much better than REmake, even though they were made at the same time? There is a pretty noticeable difference in rendering and graphical quality between the two games. Usually this isn’t a surprise, sequels almost always display a jump in graphical fidelity… except RE0 released only eight months after REmake. So they definitely had to have been working on them concurrently. As a matter of fact, RE0 was originally intended for the N64, so it would have been in the works before REmake. But if you look at the two games side by side, there is so much more going on in RE0’s backgrounds and animations. There’s more detail, more motion, more everything. REmake’s mansion environments actually look a bit bland by comparison. It’s weird. For two projects that probably shared assets, you’d think the games would be a little closer together in terms of quality. Perhaps it’s a combination of familiarity and creative freedom, or lack there-of. RE0 had the luxury of getting to do pretty much whatever the hell they wanted, without being confined to a pre-existing template (and boy did they run with that shit). For the Resident Evil Remake though, the mansion had to look new, but at the same time, retain the iconic imagery that everyone expected. It was also a victim of its own out-dated layout. While they did take a few liberties to rearrange items and rooms, and add some little extras here and there, the mansion is still comprised of a ton of barren hallways connecting all the rooms, and some of them required navigation consistently throughout the game.

RE0’s rooms and hallways were crammed with detail, where RE’s hallways often seemed pretty static. Don’t get me wrong, I still think it was an excellent update and the extras, such as Lisa’s cabin, added a ton of extra depth to an already iconic mansion.

RE0 also introduced some verticality to the mix, where REmake relied almost completely on lateral movement. This is a little bit more understandable, since the developers were limited to the original mansion layout (for the most part).

Is it just me, or are the zombies all 7 feet tall? It was one of the very first things I noticed all the way back in 2002. Every time there was a cutscene involving a zombie, they were towering over Jill. She doesn’t seem much shorter than any of the other STARS members, especially Chris and Barry, but the zombies flat-out dwarf her by comparison. Why is this? Was it a depth of field or optical illusion caused by the in-game camera? Did they make them larger to animate better or show more detail? Or was it intentional by the game artists to make the zombies appear more imposing and dangerous? Whatever the deal is, they always look huge. That said…

The zombies still look excellent. I think it was probably one of the best accomplishments back in the day, but holy shit the zombies look good. Still, to this day, almost 20 years later, even as more recent updates to RE2 and RE3 have re-designed them yet again. Granted, they look less like they used to be actual people and more like Frankenstein’s monster, but still. The gore was on point.

I still hate the Crimson Heads. I get it, it was a cool twist at the time. Zombies you thought you killed came back angrier and more aggressive, and required a bit more to take them down. They can be prevented though, considering you are carrying around a flask of oil and a lighter. The thing was, it was already one thing to spend the resources to actually kill a zombie, but then you had to make sure you set it on fire. For Chris, who only had six item slots, that was asking a lot. It was more prudent to not kill the zombies in the first place, just so you didn’t have to worry about it. There was already enough reason to not kill things due to the lack of ammo, but the addition of the Crimson Heads just doubled down on that philosophy, so you spend the entire game just running around zombies instead of blasting them to juicy bits.

I’m confused about the Wesker scene. They retconned something here, and I’m not sure if they’ve addressed it since (there’s a LOT of Resident Evil lore, so they might have). But, in the original Resident Evil, when Wesker is revealed as the bad guy at the end and he releases the Tyrant, the Tyrant kills him. Or “kills” him, rather. But the Tyrant literally impales Wesker through the gut with his claw and leaves him bleeding out on the floor. At the time, way back in 1996, we all thought that he got his come-uppance and that was that. It’s revealed much later that Wesker lives and was infected with the T-virus when impaled by the Tyrant, and has since become symbiotic with it. This was around the time RE as a whole was jumping the shark, so yeah, okay. We just kinda went with it.

But in the REmake, instead of impaling Wesker, the Tyrant just kinda bitch-slaps him and he falls off to the side. After the fight with the Tyrant, it reveals that Wesker is gone. So they reveal right off the bat that Wesker is alive, but how did he get infected? Surely that little love tap that Tyrant gave him wasn’t enough to injure him that badly, much less infect him with the virus. So at what point does all this happen? Was he already infected? Perhaps when I get to Code Veronica and all is revealed, I’ll learn something that maybe I’ve forgotten over the years. Until then, I’m considering this a loose end.

WAS THE REMAKE NECESSARY?

Simply, yes. This remake is definitely justified. It’s great, and let’s be honest with ourselves here, the original Resident Evil, despite all of its wonderfully epic cheesiness, was not long for this world. The hardware was ancient, and the pre-rendered backgrounds were horribly low resolution. If you really want your mind blown, consider that RE Remake came out only six years after the original Resident Evil. That’s like a PS4 game getting a remake, on the PS4.

DOES THE REMAKE NEED A REMAKE?

I don’t think so. The game, despite its obsolete control-scheme, holds up pretty well. In a perfect world, sure, I’d love to see it get an all 3D remake, but it’s really not necessary. At the time of this writing, there’s a fan project out there making the entire game in full 3D using the Unreal Engine, but the likelihood of Capcom ever letting that reach completion is nil. It’s an interesting project, but in all honesty, there isn’t a single idea from the original RE that hasn’t been injected into subsequent entries. The mansion foyer has been something of a recurring joke, and we’ve already been through more creepy hallways, laboratories, factories, and abandoned Umbrella facilites than we can count.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Resident Evil Remake has been ported a few times, and now that it’s on the Xbox One and Playstation 4, they should be available to enjoy for the forseeable future. They can be found on sale regularly, so if you’ve never experienced the godfather of survival horror, you could definitely do worse than grabbing RE Remake for your favorite console. Just don’t get it on Switch unless you want to pay the Nintendo Tax.