After my wildly successful run of Resident Evil 2’s remake back in early 2019, I couldn’t possibly pass up the opportunity to go do a similar playthrough for Resident Evil 3.
Thankfully, my friends David Phillips and Andre Doucet were in agreement, and together The Spooky Bois are back in town.
Special thanks to Sam Callahan for working on this thumbnail for me as well.
Before we proceed, I should make it clear that unlike the Resident Evil 2 playthrough, this is not a blind run. I had intended to make it a blind run, but eventually curiosity as I kept eyeing the copy I purchased for this Let’s Play. Not to mention that I was between games at the time, waiting for the Final Fantasy 7 remake to come out.
The thing that immediately stands out to me in this game, compared to the Resident Evil 2 remake, is just how much less scary it is overall. It’s difficult to parse exactly how much of it is improved controls/responsiveness versus my retaining skill from the last time I played a Resident Evil game (which was that RE2 Let’s Play), but I rarely felt like I was in any genuine danger even at my least powerful.
You might even to start to notice that in the way I play. Resident Evil 2 had me making tactical choices over which zombies I would even bother trying to kill rather than just leave them knowing I could easily juke them. Here, I assassinate pretty much every infected and/or undead thing that I am capable of, barely ever running low on bullets or healing items (even if I forget to take them out of the item box). By the time I had wrapped up that first section, I could have sprinted across the zone because all of the zombies were just dead.
This also extends to the Nemesis. Unlike Mr. X, who was a constant looming presence over everything we did in the Raccoon City police station, Nemesis feels like he’s barely around for most of the game. When he does deign to make an appearance, it’s usually short and heavily scripted, making him feel more like a quick-time event than an organic threat. While he’s still a persistent pursuer in the game’s story, we don’t get the same impression of him mechanically. In terms of gameplay, he punctuates individual sections, serving more as a marker of progress than a threat to be feared.
While I don’t have the window into what the original Resident Evil 3: Nemesis was like, David has played that version of the game, and I find his commentary on the way the remake handles translating it into a modern day game fascinating. Sounds like a ton of work went into adapting the beats of the story into something a modern presentation, especially in how they removed the elements of choice affecting the campaign and adapted characters like Carlos to be less stereotypical than they were in their original incarnations.
Hopefully, I remember to keep picking his brain about that as we proceed.
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