Developer(s): Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Platform: Playstation 4, Xbox One. PC
Hours played: 15 hours each
When last year’s incredible Resident Evil 2 Remake dropped, dazzling us with its claustrophobic atmosphere, perfect blend of action and survival horror gameplay, and bewitching sound design, there was one element that divided YouTubers, critics, modders, and memelords: the fedora-wearing hall monitor from Hell, Mr. X. On the one hand, you had the Mr Xtruditers who hated the seeming randomness of his appearances and how he would force you to turn your ass around to lose him or expend a flash grenade or precious ammo to momentarily down him. On the other, there was a group of survival horror masochists (myself included) who found Mr. X to be an incredibly refreshing shake-up of the genre Capcom pioneered and which played to the series’ core strengths. Whatever side of the fence you fell on, one thing was abundantly clear: Capcom needed to remake Resident Evil 3: Nemesis in a similar way.
The original Nemesis practically patented the idea of a persistent enemy who stalks you throughout a game; a lot of the assets needed to remake Resident Evil 3 already existed in RE2R! At this point, it would be criminal not to, right? Capcom heard our pleas and revealed in December last year that they were indeed remaking RE3 and that it would release in April 2020. As the release got closer and closer… I was busy playing DOOM Eternal, but I still had RE3R in the back of my mind. I could still see the claims Capcom was making, that Nemesis was going to be this constant threat, true to the original RE3, with AI far more advanced than Mr. X. This was going to be awesome. Nemesis was going to be Mr. X on steroids.
Resident Evil 3 Remake is disappointing. The core mechanics and presentation of RE2R still make for an objectively very playable game, but everywhere I look I see missed potential. It could have been so much more after RE2R got on its soapbox and made the best case for shorter but infinitely replayable single-player experiences for years. The more I replay RE3R, the more I realise that most of my problems with it are typified by the implementation of Nemesis himself. It seems Capcom misinterpreted what a lot of people liked about Mr. X and what they wanted to see from Nemesis. The result is a Resident Evil 3 Remake which is underwhelming as both a survival horror and a full-on action game. Now that the rubble of Raccoon City has settled, it’s time to analyse these two goliaths side-by-side and examine how their implementations are reflective of their respective games’ design philosophies.
Big punches and even bigger decisions
On the face of it, Mr. X is quite simple in comparison to Nemesis. He has a few punches, moves pretty slowly, and can be exploited pretty easily once you figure out what makes him tick. What is genius about Mr. X isn’t that he is necessarily a massive threat on his own. The best thing about him is how his presence makes all the game’s other enemies scarier at the moment when you think you have got them figured out. When X is on the prowl, you no longer have the luxury of baiting a zombie to attack you and quickly running around them (to save ammo) or carefully dismembering them until they’re a torso flopping on the ground. With the Blue Man Group stomping behind you, the only option is to get that undead sucker out of the way by any means necessary (probably by expending ammo). In a corridor full of lickers, an enemy that forces you to walk slowly and creep past them? Forget about it. Mr. X says it’s time to do your morning bleep test. Either blow those lickers’ exposed brains out or run and pray. If Mr. X catches you in a quiet part of the police station, then the challenge becomes plotting a route to shake him off in a relatively safe room before going towards your objective guarded by lickers and zombies.
Add to this the myriad of obligatory and optional doodads scattered across the police station and cluttering your limited inventory, and you’ve got yourselves a multi-layered decision-making experience right there. Mr. X walking around re-contextualises your exploration of the police station up to this point and tests your knowledge of its layout. You start to question whether you should have boarded up that window in the left wing corridor half an hour ago, whether you should have killed that licker when you had the chance and weren’t being stalked by the walking advertisement for Burberry trench coats. Will you now take damage that could have been avoided? Was sparing the ammo worth it? You could always go the safer, longer way round but that’s more chances for Mr. X to jump you. You’ve got what you need to leave the police station but you haven’t unlocked all the heart key doors yet. Do you go back and risk getting chomped (or worse) because there could be some mad upgrade you’ve missed? You left the S.T.A.R.S. USB drive in the computer in the S.T.A.R.S. office but now you’ve found a display case in the underground stairwell that requires it, too. Do you trek back up there to grab it? In the multiple steps required to complete a single puzzle, you’ll stumble across several optional puzzles in notes and secret rooms, receive glimpses of future puzzles, run across the station’s two wings multiple times, and risk having X giving it to ya. Even the later, comparably linear sewer and lab levels force players to make interesting choices by making them go through areas multiple times with limited ammo. You can go back to the RPD all the way up until you get on that cable car to the laboratory. In fact, doing so is encouraged, with film rolls found in the sewers that can only be developed in the RPD dark room. Once developed, the photos reveal the locations of weapon upgrades in the police station but players will have to recognise the locations from the pictures alone – there are no waymarkers highlighted on your map. It’s these tempting decisions, resource management, and the need to adapt when Mr. X says so that makes RE2R not only thrilling to play, but makes it feel like the survival horror core of the Resident Evil franchise revitalised for the modern age. Mr. X works in tandem with every other element of the game’s level and puzzle design, elevating an already compelling gameplay loop to the stuff of legend.
Mechanically, while Nemesis has more ways of dealing damage to you, I don’t think it would be controversial to say that he is criminally underutilised and rarely forces you to make interesting decisions. Capcom made it sound like he would be stalking us for the entire game, that we wouldn’t get a break from the guy, but the only time he’s lurking in the environment and feels like an unstoppable force is in the opening hour of the game. Even those moments can be broken down into three segments where you run from point A to point B: when he breaks through a wall outside the substation and chases you down one alleyway to the garage, from the garage to the railway office, and two streets later when he infects a zombie in the food court and chases you until the train station. The former two are straight lines – not many game-changing decisions to be made there. The latter is closer to what I wanted from Nemesis, as you may decide to open the safe in the drugstore storage room if you forgot to on your first lap of the city, and there are some shops on Main Avenue that you can unlock with the bolt cutters and lockpick. The problem here is that you most likely will open the safe (which only contains the rather useless dot sight for the standard handgun anyway) before Nemesis appears and that he can’t enter the shops on Main Avenue, so there’s no risk to looting them – in fact, you can just run from shop to shop because Nemesis has to go through his long entry animation every time you go back out into the street. In both the alleyway and the food court there are generators that you can shoot to stun Nemesis for a few seconds, trivialising the chase even more. The only real choices to be made, then, are whether to down Nemesis when you run from Main Avenue to the station, blast through the zombies in front of you, or try to dodge them altogether. To cut Nemesis some slack here, a lot of these issues are compounded by RE3R’s more linear level design, but the result is that I never have to adapt to Nemesis – I just need to know how many times to press the dodge button on my straight line to the next objective.
How about that more varied movepool, though? Again, I’m not a huge fan. I love how Nemesis will Super-Metroid-shinespark and leap in front of you to block your path and running away with your back turned to him, only hearing his footsteps as he sprints up to you, is delightfully terrifying stuff. On the other hand, moves like the tentacle whip that routinely stops you in your tracks and pulls you back toward Nemesis, and the one-hit kill grabs he gains on nightmare difficulty and above, just feel cheap. There are also a lot of attacks that arbitrarily stagger you and leave you open to getting comboed. Sometimes, Nemesis will just choose to roar and suddenly it’s time to play musical statues. You can mash buttons (my faaaaaaavourite mechanic) to get out of this sooner, but I hardly think breaking my controller to avoid one attack is worth it. Jill does have a dodge move to offset this frustration, and timing a perfect dodge and unloading on a foe’s weak point is satisfying, but it’s pretty useless against the groups of enemies you’ll find in the first area. On higher difficulties, Capcom decides that ‘challenge’ means making the zombies with the long tentacle parasites rain from the sky, so you’ll perfectly dodge Nemesis just to be whipped from 10 feet away by one of them and end up getting stun-locked to death anyway. I get that a lot of these issues are only present at higher difficulties, but standard and hardcore mode are an absolute joke: there’s no middle ground here. I also understand that there are coins you can carry in your inventory to lessen damage, increase your attack, and so on, but if I have to use cheat items just to have a remotely fun time, then I feel like something has gone wrong with how the challenge is balanced. None of this mashing, getting comboed to death, was in RE2R because of the ability to use up a sub-weapon to avoid taking damage – again, a way more interesting gameplay decision than choosing button mashing or death.
Considering how he was touted as the game’s biggest selling point, first-form Nemesis is either underwhelming or infuriating depending on the difficulty selected. Whereas Mr. X works in tandem with every other element in RE2R to increase tension and force tantalising decisions, Nemesis feels like he’s in the wrong game: on nightmare difficulty and higher it’s like he walked straight over from Marvel VS Capcom after dunking on noobs with 100-hit combos, and on hardcore and lower you’ll outrun him before he’s even got out of bed. I’d still much rather play with the former, but that won’t stop me raging at a ruined S-rank runthrough because of getting stun-locked by Nemesis and his backup dancers.
“You want S.T.A.R.S.? I’ll give you S.T.A.R.S. (Simply Tedious Asinine Running Segments)”
Just like the shift in tone from the original Resident Evil 2 to Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, Resident Evil 3 Remake represents a move towards a more action-oriented experience, with more ammo and enemies across the board. From a purely artistic standpoint, the pitch-black corridors of RE2R’s RPD alone will tell you that a shift in priority has occurred. Unfortunately, I don’t think RE3R made this transition very gracefully.
The first time Mr. X shows up in gameplay, he shifts the wreckage of a helicopter blocking the hallway you need to go through and just begins marching towards you. The game doesn’t wrestle control away from the player during this interaction – it keeps chugging along and you need to react. Also, the fact that most players’ first instinct will be to run back into the open courtyard where they will learn that they can circumvent Mr. X quite easily if they bait him into throwing a punch in a big area, is a stroke of design genius. This remains consistent for all future encounters barring his final fight with Leon, where he works completely differently anyway. When you play as Ada Wong, Mr. X casually strolls past a window announcing that he’s coming to wreck your shit. In the laboratory, you pick up the level 3 wristband only to look up and see that Mr. X is about to jump through the window above. RE2R’s commitment to keeping you in gameplay whenever it can conveys the idea that you are never safe. My only gripe here is that it would have been great to have an option to make the map and inventory real-time too, because I often found myself using the menus as a crutch whenever things got a little dicey and I needed to rethink my strategy. A feature like that would truly test players’ knowledge of the environments and ability to keep their cool in a pinch.
In contrast, Nemesis nearly always shows up with some fanfare, whether it be with him superhero-landing in the middle of the street or playing a cutscene to announce “here he comes, it’s Nemmy”. The whole time I was playing, I was waiting to hear “STAAAAAAARRRRSS!” off in the distance, for Nemesis to casually pop his head around the corner and begin pursuit. The only time he comes close to doing this is after exiting the substation, where he smashes through a wall in an alleyway that is so obviously lit up there might as well be graffiti reading, “Nemesis woz ‘ere”.
The real kicker, however, is RE3R’s fetish for throwing Nemesis into scripted events. Over half his appearances are like this, reducing him to a device for getting Jill between environments and story beats rather than a formidable creature that forces you to adapt how you approach a given situation. I have no problem with a Resident Evil game being linear, but one where so many of the big bad biohazard’s appearances are presented in the most uninteractive way possible is going to have a hard time impressing me. Nemesis shows up in these really cool action set-pieces, torching a construction site with a flamethrower or firing at you with a rocket launcher but these moments lose their initial magic when you realise that they are merely scripted segments that play the same on every playthrough – and that higher difficulties do little to change things up. Some of these events try to trick you by being unskippable, such as when the camera pulls back over Nemesis’ shoulder in the burning apartment and Jill is running down the hall, but that doesn’t mask the fact these are glorified quick-time events. Ah, quick-time events. They suck at the best of times, but at least in the more action-heavy Resident Evils 4-6 we were doing them to punch boulders or run away from giant Napoleon statue mechs. Here, we get to crawl away from Nemesis by holding up. To RE3R’s credit, walking up to Final Nemesis with a railgun, shoving it in his mouth, then blowing a hole clean through him is beyond awesome, but it loses marks for shoving prompts on the screen when it didn’t need to and for not allowing Nicole Thompkins to deliver Jill’s legendary “You want S.T.A.R.S.? I’ll give you S.T.A.R.S.!” line here. Also, the rocket launcher you use to deliver the final blow to Mr. X in RE2R isn’t a cutscene-only weapon – they even let you use it to clear a hallway of zombies (and Final G, if you’re playing the B scenario) after the final boss. I also had a funny flashback to Resident Evil 7 three years prior upon pressing the R2 button to run Nemesis over in a car, when in RE7 you not only had to grab the car key while a boss chased you, but then you could actually control the car yourself! There was even the chance that the boss could pull you out of the car and use it against you instead.
It’s a shame that RE3R feels the need to resort to such shallow means of telling its story, because I think its characters are great. Nicole Thompkins’ Jill Valentine is probably my favourite portrayal of the OG survival horror heroine yet and her interactions with Carlos are golden. Yes, the story insinuates that Jill is suffering from some kind of trauma as a result of the events of the original Resident Evil and then proceeds to do nothing with it. Yes, Nikolai is a pretty generic villain even if he is effectively hateable, but this is where Nemesis should have picked up the slack. I just can’t help but feel disappointed when the monster on the front of the box, my supposed ‘Nemesis’ is absent for most of the game, literally and metaphorically (in mindless scripted sequences).
Woooooaaah, we’re halfway there, Woah Ohhhh, the game ran out of scares
So this is the part of the analysis where I have to address the fact that Nemesis is relegated to rather mindless bossfights after only the first hour of the game and that said bossfights are paced very strangely. After Jill leaves on the train, we play a quick stint in a quarter of the Raccoon City Police Department ripped straight from RE2R as Carlos Oliveira, after which we switch back to Jill. We run through one corridor and across one empty bridge and Nemesis has adopted his second form, a giant quadrupedal monstrosity. This is presented as a horrifying evolution, but in practice it instantly reduces the ways Nemesis can interact with the player to swiping and jumping at them. We dispatch Nemesis and walk towards the clock tower, where we have some intricate puzzles in a condensed area. Oh wait, no. That isn’t right.Sorry, Jill walks towards the clock tower and is then infected by Nemesis, meaning we switch back to Carlos, after only playing as him five minutes ago. The hospital level that follows is actually my favourite part of RE3R: it’s got a spooky atmosphere, it’s got that classic RE rhythm of finding a sequence of items, and you even get the opportunity to run around it as Jill to score some optional goodies with her lockpick once she has been cured (hooray! Interesting choices). However, Nemesis is MIA for all of this and for the linear romps through the warehouse and laboratory that follow. Finally, at the very end, he appears, still in four-legged Nemesis the Angry Dog mode, and… we do the clock tower boss fight again. If you weren’t convinced that RE2R and RE3R’s gameplay wasn’t designed for hectic bossfights up until this point, reusing Nemesis’ mid-game fight in the final act will do it. After putting Nemesis down again and overcoming our deja vu, we run down an empty corridor and what do we have? Another Nemesis fight. Now an amorphous mass of flesh and bone, the only thing that will damage Nemesis is a railgun at the back of the room. The challenge is to shoot Nemesis’ weakpoints and stun him long enough to slot in the power capsules charging the railgun. I think this is a neat idea for a boss in this gameplay style, less about unloading your accrued ammo into one last foe and more about carefully dodging his attacks and hitting the weak points when you see an opening. Again, though, this is where the odd difficulty settings butt in. Below nightmare mode, you only need to charge the railgun once by pushing in three capsules and you only need to knock Nemesis out twice to do that. Each of his glowing boils only takes a couple of handgun bullets to pop and the fight is consequently very anticlimactic, especially following Dog Nemesis 2.0. On nightmare level and above, this boss is busted. He swings his arms so quickly one after the other that you essentially need to perfect dodge every one or you will get comboed to death. Equipping the defence up coins does nothing to alleviate this problem and what was once a pathetically underwhelming final confrontation now feels like a frustrating roadblock at the end of a campaign you just want to be over.
I’m not going to pretend that RE2R had stellar bossfights either. In fact, it’s pretty much universally agreed that they are the low points of its campaigns. While it doesn’t blatantly reuse bosses like RE3R, they all follow the same strategy of back into a corner, unload some bullets, run away again when the boss gets too close for comfort – at least it’s faithful to the PS1 games? Both games cut bosses from their original 90’s versions, the giant worm in RE3 and the mutant alligator in RE2, which now requires you to run towards the camera alternating between the left and right side three times like we’re playing Crash Bandicoot. That said, the alligator sequence is more stimulating than just holding up to run away from Nemesis in a cutscene and the game doesn’t feel the need to flash a prompt above the gas pipe you need to shoot to finish the gator – even if it is painfully obvious.
I think the dodge in RE3R and the lack of one in RE2R balance each other out and fit their respective tones. RE3R’s trained special forces officer Jill Valentine can get up in bosses’ faces then perfect dodge to promote further aggression, whereas rookie Leon Kennedy and civilian Claire Redfield have to rely on baiting slow attacks or stopping enemies with flash grenades, and learning how a boss’ hitboxes work. I think where RE2R slightly wins out in the boss department is how it contextualises its bossfights. 2nd form Burkin locks you in a room that slowly catches on fire. He shoves his claw through the ceiling, forcing you to listen to his footsteps above and keep moving away. The following fight requires you to stun him at just the right place on a platform so a crane can swing round and knock him into the abyss. Neither Leon nor Claire’s final bosses are amazing, but there’s something about being chased through a collapsing facility by Mr. X, a 90’s self-destruct sequence blaring, and then being stuck with him on that elevator to freedom.This guy has followed you throughout the game, and up until now he’s been nigh indestructible, but now naive Leon Kennedy has no choice but to go toe-to-toe with the sucker and take him down for good.
Whereas RE2R feels like it’s doing its best to hide the fact that its combat system was not designed for boss encounters with some nice contextual gameplay sequences, the reuse of bosses, unbalanced final fight, and the awkward mid-game pacing in RE3R put those deficiencies front and centre. Capcom needed to do more than add a dodge move and make ammo more plentiful to convert RE2R into a brilliant action game. It’s just a shame to see that Nemesis was the victim of most of these decisions.
A Jill worth dying on?
Many times over the course of analysing these two monsters, these two embodiments of challenge, I’ve been confronted with the thorny issue of difficulty, and while Capcom’s difficulty settings are way above the industry standard of just upping the enemies’ health and damage output, there’s still more that could be done for these infinitely replayable titles. Both RE2R and RE3R will change item placements on different difficulty levels, reduce the prevalence of ammo, and alter how saving works. RE2R adopts the classic RE save system of limited ink ribbons that you have to find and making these precious saves your only checkpoints. RE3R’s inferno difficulty outright removes some typewriters in addition to checkpoints but doesn’t force you to use an ink ribbon item to save. Gold stars for both of you! The problem is that when you sign up to these tailored difficulty modes, you have to accept all of Capcom’s terms. In RE2R, you either play with limited saves, less ammo, and taking more damage or you play with none of those things. There’s no way that a more casual player can choose to, say, play with limited saves but with standard damage and ammunition, just to ease them into hardcore mode. In RE3R, this problem is multiplied tenfold as you choose between having the game be way too easy or flooding the streets with fodder and making the final boss combo you to death with one hit. If time, money, and resources were no object, a dream survival horror game would let players tweak individual settings to their liking: do you want limited saving? How aggressive do you like your enemies? How difficult do you like your puzzles? How do you like your eggs in the morning? RE fans have long been creating self-imposed challenges for these games so having these settings in-game would be a nice way to acknowledge individual playstyles. These options would go some way to rectifying my issues with both games, allowing troglodytes like me to create an experience closer to survival horror, more casual players to dip their toes in certain mechanics, and masochists to make the sky rain with Nemeses. Well, I guess that’s what mods are for.
Conclusion
The irony of this kills me, but Capcom managed to make the goofy, fedora-wearing memelord Mr. X scarier and more omnipresent than the genuinely threatening Nemesis, whose 1999 appearance was so well received precisely because of his persistence. I’ve spent far too long analysing the tiniest parts of these games, but when dealing with two campaigns this compact, it’s the little details that really make them feel rich, dynamic, and masterfully crafted. Resident Evil 2 Remake is all of these things and Resident Evil 3 Remake would be so frustratingly close to matching it were it not for some microscopic decisions that add up to a really deflating sequel.
In truth, I don’t enjoy dunking on Resident Evil 3 Remake. If I had my way, I wouldn’t be writing this at all, but I care deeply about this series and can’t hide my disappointment at seeing one of the most refreshing-feeling remakes of all time receive such an unoriginal follow-up. I understand that a lot of my analyses are subjective, especially when it comes to talking about style and difficulty. If Capcom neutered Nemesis in response to player complaints about Mr. X, then I’m perfectly aware that I’m in a vocal minority in loving the guy. That said, I genuinely believe that, regardless of what I wanted from it, RE3R doesn’t play to the strengths of its mechanics, a trait that defines some of the lowest points in this franchise. RE3R was also outsourced to , a business practice that defines some of the lowest points in this company’s history. It’s not like outsourcing, say, Devil May Cry to a British development team called Ninja Theory (that would be silly) but some in-house consistency may be nice when remaking old titles. We’re not back in the dark ages of Resident Evil 5 and 6 yet (although let the record show that I think Resident Evil 6 is a better action game than RE3R), but it does feel like Capcom have designed themselves into a corner again. Resident Evil 7 threw up so many questions about the future of the franchise, but three years on Capcom is triumphantly announcing that they’re remaking Resident Evil 4, probably the game in existence that needs a remake the least. Slow down, big C! I think moving on to new concepts would be good for this series, relieving the pressure of disappointing fans of the originals while having time to reflect on what people liked about these remakes and take it to new levels. Whatever the future holds, if Capcom attempts to create another pursuer enemy, I hope they look back and remember the notoriety of Mr. X and say a little prayer for poor Nemesis.
Some shoutouts to great RE content. The Sphere Hunter has impeccable taste in games and delves deeply into the development and gameplay of the entire RE series – Resident Evil 3: Nemesis is also her second-favourite game of all time so her look at the remake carries a lot of weight. She also more recently did a commentary on Resident Evil 2 Remake with Nick Apostolides, the voice and motion capture actor for Leon in RE2R which an absolute treat for those interested in the motion capture process. The GamingBrit also has an ongoing series called ‘Road to the Rocket Launcher’ in which he breaks down the design of every game in the Resident Evil series. Us gaming Brits have got to stick together, after all.