Resident Evil Retrospective: The Beginning

Gyuri’s diary

January 22th, 2009.
Less than seven weeks till the release of Resident Evil 5. I haven’t been out of this building for a week. I don’t think I’ll be able to get that game anymore. Something has gone horribly wrong. The entire city appears to be overrun by these monsters…these zombies. There’s also something else out there…Something much larger than any of those zombies. I don’t know what it is, but I saw it. I’m unsure of what to do. I wanted to finish this article, but I don’t think I will be able to.

January 27th, 2009.
I’m going to finish this if it’s the last thing I do. Those monsters may be everywhere, they may have my apartment building surrounded, but I’m going to finish my RE retrospective no matter what. I don’t like leaving things unfinished. I should have enough food to survive and the barricade is holding up well. I still have time.

Welcome readers to part one of MonsterVine’s Resident Evil Retrospective. I’m Gyuri, your guide into the realm of Resident Evil or as it is known in Japan, Biohazard. A note before we begin: I will only be covering the main series. Maybe after RE5 is released I will cover the side stories and spin-offs, but for now the main series is the priority.

Resident Evil is – as many of you know – considered the father of the survival horror genre. It wasn’t the first game of it’s kind, however it was the game that managed to do everything in a way it appealed to a lot of people. It popularized the genre, while also giving it the name “survival horror”.

The first game in the series, Resident Evil, came out in 1996 for the Playstation, and was ported to the Sega Saturn and the PC about a year later. The original game is known for being the Resident Evil game that has received the highest number of enhanced versions following the game’s original release. The original Playstation and PC versions only contained the basic game, with only minimal differences between them. The Saturn version featured an exclusive battle mode, new costumes and new monsters that can only be encountered in that version. Later a Director’s Cut version was released for the Playstation featuring the original game and an “Arranged” mode, a mode that was significantly harder and featured many changes compared to the original. In 2006, an enhanced port was released for the Nintendo DS, titled Resident Evil: Deadly Silence, which also had two gameplay modes, “Classic” and “Rebirth”. The most prominent release of Resident Evil however had to be the 2002 GameCube remake, where everything was updated and the plot was extended. I will talk more about the last three versions later on.

Resident Evil’s basic plot was similar to a horror movie. Strange murders have been occurring in the Arklay Mountains, located in the outskirt of the mid-western town, Raccoon City. The local police force mobilizes their special forces unit, STARS (Special Tactics And Rescue Service), sending out the unit’s Bravo Team to investigate the murders on July 23rd, 1998. The members of Bravo Team – Richard Aiken, Forest Speyer, Kenneth Sullivan, pilot Edward Dewey, rookie medical officer Rebecca Chambers and team leader Enrico Marini – however don’t report back and soon all contact is lost with the team’s members. Thus, the Raccoon Police Department on July 24th calls the Alpha Team into action, consisting of Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, Barry Burton, Joseph Frost, helicopter pilot Brad “Chickenheart” Vickers, and their leader, Albert Wesker. Their mission is to search for their missing compatriots.

Their mission does not go well however. As soon as they land, they find the wreckage of Bravo Team’s helicopter, along with a severed hand in it. Shortly after, the team is attacked by zombie dogs and Joseph is killed in the encounter. The remaining members retreat to a nearby mansion, hoping it is safe from dangers. Little do they know they’ve made the biggest mistake of their lives, as the mansion turns out to be infested with zombies and mutant creatures. Soon, Alpha Team’s goal becomes survival and they begin exploring the mansion looking for a way out.

When Capcom released Resident Evil in 1996, it was met with both praise and criticism from gamers. The game was different from what people were used to. It wasn’t like shooters nor like platform games, if anything, it bore the most resemblance toward point and click games, only difference being that it had more action and the player actually controlled the character. The game focused on exploration and prompted the player to avoid fighting – something that was very rarely encountered in action games. Despite there being many enemies, ammunition and health recovery items were scarce, making the player think twice before engaging an enemy in combat. There was always the option of using the knife if the player ran out of ammo, but that was about as effective against the zombies as throwing a pencil at them. These features gave a new experience to gamers, however not everyone liked it. Resident Evil was a game for only a certain demographic. Granted, it was famous for being new, different and being one of the only scary games on the market, but most people didn’t enjoy it due to the difficulty or because they found it too troublesome. Still, these didn’t stop critics from praising the game and survival horror became a fully accepted genre, known for mixing the elements of action games with the puzzles of point and click games. The bag was full of good ideas and although it had a few small holes here and there the contents made up for it greatly. Sure the voice acting and the live-action intro were terrible, the game was hard and it could become tedious for some people, but it still managed to pull off one of the best concepts in gaming history that would inspire many developers. The atmosphere, the ability to be in an interactive horror situation where your decisions shape the game’s ending, the gameplay and many other smaller factor sold the game for critics and gamers.

What makes Resident Evil unique till this day, is that it is one of the few horror series that use a scientific plot and environments, often seeming almost realistic. It didn’t have cults or demons in it, all it had was a virus that turned people into zombies. It was a game that felt real, as if you really were in there. The environments were all creepy, dark and full of traps and puzzles, but in a way that the player could still find it realistic. It was similar to how the real world would be like if it was suddenly infested with monsters – creepy and empty, but still normal, no weird torture devices or anything. Umbrella, the faceless corporation behind the virus seemed like a normal company, with normal people, only they made a virus and did some morally questionable deeds. They didn’t seem crazy, you could easily imagine them leading normal lives outside of work. All these added to the feeling of realism, there weren’t any villains or madmen to fight, the player was just trying to survive somehow, avoiding the monsters created by accident.

Despite being cops, the main characters also felt realistic. They had limitations: they couldn’t jump or duck or strafe or break open doors…but it worked. Having limited options increased the fear factor. Making a 100% realistic game would have only made this worse. Yes, we can jump in real life and we could just break open most doors, but the game needed this to feal scary. You needed to feel like a vulnerable person, not like Superman. A horror game can only be scary two ways: one, if the atmosphere is scare and two, if the player has limited options and is not in control of the situation. Resident Evil – while trying to do both – ultimately succeeded with the second option, because while the atmosphere was creepy, it’s level of scariness could only be compared to walking home alone at night, while hearing someones footsteps behind you.

Indeed, Resident Evil succeeded by pushing the player into a situation that was behind his control. The game relied on uncertainty to make the player scared and to raise his adrenaline. If you never played the game let me tell you what it is like.

You are armed with a lousy knife and a handgun with only 15 bullets, with each zombie taking about 7-9 bullets on average.
You are alone and separated from your team.
You don’t know when or where you’ll encounter an enemy or even worse, a boss.
You don’t know when or where you’ll find ammo or healing items.
You can only take six or eight items with you depending on who you play as, thus you were never prepared for every situation, you could even encounter a boss while having no weapons with you.
You can only save at typewrites, at the expense of using an ink ribbon, which were just as rare as other items, around 30 were available in total.
If you die, you’ll have to restart from the last time you saved.
You don’t know which paths are safe and which are not, and you don’t know where you can find the key needed to move on to other areas.
You don’t know where you can find weapons to protect yourself from stronger enemies.
You don’t know who to battle, and who to not battle, for all you know there might be more, unavoidable enemies right behind the next door and who knows when you’ll get more ammo.
You really don’t know anything helpful.

Your only hope is to use your brain as much as possible and avoid enemies as much as you can. It’s up to you to find the best routes, and it’s up to you to decide what to do and where to go. Resident Evil is all about being a little bit tactical and experimenting in order to make your life easier. If you can’t seem to make it through a path, you can turn back and try another. Choosing the best methods to overcome various obstacles were key to survival in Resident Evil. Starting to see why it was scary and adrenaline pumping don’t you? Yes, Resident Evil was specifically made to scare people and creating fear and tension were the developers’ top priority – so much that the initial idea of making the game an FPS was abandoned early on as the developers considered it not scary enough. Kind of ironic when you look at the direction the series took with Resident Evil 4, but that’s a story for another time.

Resident Evil was awfully cinematic. There was nothing on the screen except your character and the environment around him. No hud, no life bar, nothing. The only way you could check how much ammo and health you had left was to access the menu. The 3D characters were moving on a pre-rendered 2D background that looked very realistic at the time and the camera angles were fixed, allowing the use of cinematic camera angles, which also made it harder to find enemies and greatly increased the fear factor. After all, hearing footsteps in front of himself, but not seeing the zombie directly tempted the player to move forward, however for all he knew, the enemy may have been close enough to grab him once the camera angle changed.

So, how did this story of viruses and monsters unfold? Let’s take a look.

First off the player chose a character, either Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine. Their games were similar, having some significant differences. Chris was stronger and faster, while Jill could carry more items, had the handgun from the start (Chris only had the knife) and got one extra weapon. Chris’ support character was Rebecca Chambers, who would heal Chris during certain times if the player requested her and was controllable for small portions of the game, depending on the player’s actions. Jill’s support characters was Barry Burton, who sometimes brought her ammo and saved her life if Jill was in trouble. The two games were pretty balanced, but Chris’ game was generally thought to be harder. Officially, the canon story involves Chris and Jill working together and meeting both Barry and Rebecca, a scenario that is a mix of both storylines and has never been playable. Because of this, the story you’re about to read is not necessarily 100%, canon as we don’t know what exact roles Chris, Jill, Rebecca and Barry play in the canon storyline. However I put the story together in a way that’s exciting, makes sense and doesn’t contradict the games canon.

After entering the mansion, Chris and Jill are ordered by Albert Wesker to investigate a gunshot the team heard. Soon find their teammate Kenneth Sullivan eaten by a zombie past the dining room. They return to tell Wesker what happened, but he has disappeared. They decide to look for their teammates and find a way out. On their way they find most of the other team’s members dead – Forest Speyer is pecked to death by crows, Edward Dewey is nowhere to be found and Richard Aiken passes away after an encounter with a giant snake. Richard gives his radio to Chris before dying, however they can’t contact anyone from inside the mansion. Chris and Jill tell Rebecca – who has been trying to treat Richard’s wound – to keep her guard up as they look for a way out. They find a way out of the mansion and also manage to hook up with Barry along the way and also encounter the snake that caused Richard’s death, but fail to kill it.

The battle does not go very well. While the combined efforts of the four do manage to keep the Tyrant back and confuse it enough to have a hard time deciding who to hit, their bullets just don’t seem to hurt it. As they are running out of bullets, Brad gathers up his courage and goes close enough to throw a rocket launcher down to the group. With only about a minute left before the entire building explodes, Chris makes his way to the weapon while his teammates distract the monster. Upon reaching it, he shoots a rocket straight at the Tyrant – utterly destroying it. Brad quickly picks the up the four survivors and fly off into the rising sun as the team rest in the helicopter, too tired to think or to say anything to each other. They enjoy the moment of peace as the Arklay Laboratory goes up in flames behind them. However, little do they know that their battle is far from over…

That concludes part one of the retrospective, join me next week when I’ll be taking a look at Resident Evil Director’s Cut and Resident Evil 2.

Hope you had fun reading this,
Gyuri

Gyuri’s diary
January 28th, 2009.
Part one is done and uploaded but…the zombies are getting in. I have to escape. Time to abandon this building and look for a safer place.