Then and Now: Resident Evil
The world of survival horror has come a long way since Resident Evil first lurched its way onto the PlayStation in 1996. The pre-rendered backgrounds, tank-like controls and hilariously bad voice acting of those first few games have given way to hi-res environments, more action oriented gameplay and…Okay, so the voice acting is still pretty silly, but by now that’s as much a part of the series as the zombies.
The change didn’t happen over night, though, and while Resident Evil 5 — the series’ most recent release — is very different from those earlier games, you can see where elements started if you know where to look.
For now, we’ll be looking back at Resident Evil 0, a sort of prototype for the kind of game Resident Evil 5 would become. Sure, it seems at first glance to have more in common with the traditional installments of the franchise, but its unique elements are a precursor to the defining gameplay of the fifth game, if unrefined.
Just about every Resident Evil game has included two main characters, or at least two playable characters in some form of another. But while most of the games gave them separate paths, 0 was the first one to give you an active partner through nearly the whole campaign.
It was still a single player game, of course, and you got limited control at best of the AI partner when the two characters were together; you could tell them to stop or follow, whether to attack or stand there and watch you be eaten, and that was about it. It certainly wasn’t much, and there are points where it would be a lot easier to just go solo, but it added a new dimension to the survival horror genre and let you take a new approach to puzzles and exploration.
The partner system in the fifth game is a natural extension of this prototype. The game gives you the second character right from the get-go, and they stay together the whole time, making it an even more fundamental part of the gameplay. While the AI is certainly better at controlling the second character than in RE0, the best way to play the game is by replacing that AI with a human partner, either online or in person.
But it still isn’t a perfect system, of course. There are a few things you can do in RE0 that are impossible for RE5 because of the latter’s focus on keeping the characters together. In the previous game, even though you had to alternately operate the characters manually, you could still have them explore and fight entirely independently. In RE5, though, you and the partner are nearly always within visual range of each other, and one can’t leave a room without the other next to him. It works well enough, mostly because the game is more about progression than exploration, but you can’t help but miss having the option.
The storylines of the games also have hints that they were supposed to be related. Billy Coen, the second character in RE0, seems to have some previous connection to Umbrella, and his backstory of being a soldier in Africa couldn’t have been an accident. It’s just a shame that Capcom didn’t properly follow up, though later installments might go into it in more detail.
Resident Evil 0 is one of the less appreciated games in the series – it isn’t seen as a classic like the original or RE2, and it wasn’t as revolutionary as RE4 and RE5. Because of this, it didn’t garner the kind of attention those entries did, but you can see the innovations of the latter games in a raw form. It’s worth taking a look back to see where these play mechanics came from.
Resident Evil 0 is the only one in the franchise I didn’t finish (aside from in Umbrella Chronicles). By that time the series had gotten really stale and has pushed the tank thing to its limits, honestly Code Veronica is by far the highlight of the series pre-4 for me (and even post-4 actually). 0 was just unfortunate that a lot of people was getting bored of the franchise at that point, still it did force Capcom to innovate with 4.