Survival of Horror: Resident Evil 3 (2020)
Hooooo boy. Where to even start with this one? I get the sense that I need to tread carefully, because this particular entry is going to be a sore spot for many people. It’s our last stop on the journey through the main titles thus far, which means it’s the most recent entry to release. For some, that means that it’s still a fresh wound. I know that I’m being a bit vague, so let’s begin and you’ll understand.
Hot off the heels of Resident Evil 2’s incredible success in 2019, there were some people wondering if they would bother doing a Resident Evil 3 remake to complete the PS1 trilogy. Any hopes were far off, as games take a long time to make nowadays. Even Resident Evil 2 released two years after Resident Evil 7, so obviously there’s no way they could release another game so soon. Thus, people basked in the hype of Resident Evil 2 for much of the year, with sales and critical praise showered upon it.
Later on in the year, however, there were some stirrings of a new title. This wasn’t unusual for the series to get some sort of announcement at Tokyo Game Show in September. A bit before that, however, something strange happened: on Capcom’s YouTube page, there were some thumbnails in the channel data for an upcoming video. They showed several very realistic-looking characters in their 20s or so, one of which was holding a shotgun. At least on a Discord server I’m on, we were immediately trying to parse every single possible detail we could.
Thankfully, we wouldn’t have to wait long to figure out what we were looking at. A week ahead of TGS, Capcom revealed Project Resistance with the reveal teaser, which was the trailer from which those thumbnails had leaked. It was interesting, with two men and two women in normal clothes walking through a lab area armed with weapons like baseball bats, pistols and the aforementioned shotgun. They fend off some zombies, a licker and then we see Mr. X show up. However, there’s a shadowy figure sitting around a bunch of monitors, watching the survivors. We see him slide on some fancy gloves and Mr. X’s eyes turn red, indicating that the person behind the camera has taken control. From there, the trailer ends and tells us we’ll see more at TGS.
The reaction was… mixed. People were either on board with the idea of a 4v1 multiplayer game or vehemently against it, with little in-between. There was plenty of discussion to be had, and the official reveal did little to quell concerns, as it didn’t really show much other than some small gameplay snippets with no real context to how the game worked. It seemed interesting, but there was little to go off of besides that. After the blazing hot trail left by Resident Evil 2, people were cooler on a small side game like Project Resistance.
That’s how things stood for several months, and yours truly even joked on Discord that they couldn’t reveal the name of the game yet, Resident Evil: Last Escape, until they announced its single player campaign, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. You uh… You can see where this is going.
I remember the morning of December 3rd, 2019. I had the day off from work, and I had stayed up pretty late the night before. I woke up to use the bathroom around 9AM, glanced at my phone, and nearly jumped out of bed when I read a mention to everyone on the BiohazardERA Discord server. Icons for a Resident Evil 3 remake had leaked online. I was immediately awake and hurried to my computer to see what I had missed while I was asleep. When my boyfriend was starting to wake up, I told him the news and he was up in an instant as well.
The icons had leaked from a data tracker called GameStat, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Jill and Carlos, right there. Nemesis, looming over them in the background. Big, bold letters spelling out RESIDENT EVIL 3 and BIOHAZARD RE:3, just like with Resident Evil 2. Instead of an icon for Project Resistance, there was an icon leaked with just Resident Evil Resistance instead. I was over the moon, realizing that this meant a reveal had to be soon. Everyone was brimming with hype for days, most of us unable to contain our excitement. Perhaps a reveal at The Game Awards the next week?
However, not too many days after, Sony announced one of their State of Play streams for December 12th, ahead of The Game Awards. Excitement was higher than ever. The day came, with all of us eagerly anticipating the reveal. Like most State of Play videos, it started with a sound effect from a game. One little menu sound, one little “blip” from a certain PS1 title, and everyone in the Discord was losing their minds. Cue the most arduous 20 minutes of the year as we all sat through, barely discussing anything else shown while we awaited what we knew was coming.
Sure enough, the State of Play mentioned that they were excited to announce “the campaign portion of Project Resistance”. The trailer that followed was simply awesome. In a first-person perspective, we hear a woman breathing as she runs through some sort of apartment building, with a quick glance revealing a hulking, shadowy figure chasing her. After an exhilarating chase through the burning building, we see none other than Jill Valentine, and when she showed up, I was freaking out. The leak was real, the hype was real and perhaps most shocking of all, Resident Evil 3 was slated for release on April 3rd, 2020. Yes, these crazy fools at Capcom planned to release the game less than four months after announcing it. That, my friends, is some big dick energy in the AAA space.
It turns out, through developer videos and interviews, that they had been developing Resident Evil 3 almost concurrently with Resident Evil 2. In fact, in one amusing anecdote, some of the developers stated that they would be working with people in their office like normal, not realizing that they were working on two different games when doing so. There wasn’t a huge blowout of information like Resident Evil 2, but there were some magazine interviews and eventually a demo released a few weeks ahead of launch, focusing on a small portion of downtown Raccoon City.
When it came to review time, however, the hype took a sudden and grave turn. The moment the Resident Evil 2 embargo lifted, it was inundated with 8s, 9s and 10s almost across the board. With Resident Evil 3, there were some 8s and 9s… and 6s… and even some 5s. What in the hell happened?! Some reviews praised the game’s visuals and gameplay, while others complained about the short length and linear progression. Some people like the more cinematic feel, others hate it. I could list just about every opinion you can think of for this game, and there’s a good chance someone has published a review stating it.
Now the dust has settled, and Resident Evil 3 sits at an 80 on OpenCritic, with 3.6 million copies sold as of the end of 2020. These numbers, when taken on their own, are good. Not great, but good. 3.6 million copies is more than the original Resident Evil 3 sold, for instance. However, this isn’t a vacuum. Compared to its older brother, Resident Evil 3 is a big drop in OpenCritic score and an even more surprising drop in sales in the same time frame. How did this happen? What is this game even like to cause such disparities? There are such a wide range of scores that it should make for an interesting look at the game. So, without further ado, let’s sidestep and roll our way into Raccoon City one last time to investigate what’s going on in the city of the dead.
Resident Evil 3 — April 3rd, 2020 (PS4, X1, PC)
Version used for review: PC version, April 2020
Warning: this review will spoil the entirety of Resident Evil 3!
Story
“Carlos, that thing is still alive! It’s after me!”
Now, the last time I played Resident Evil 3 was April 15th, 2020 according to Steam, prior to this review. It released on April 3rd, right as things were starting to get really bad with Covid but before other events. I’ve mostly avoided discussing the pandemic and politics throughout this retrospective, but it’s so on-the-nose with this entry’s intro that it’d be comical if it weren’t so emotionally exhausting. 2020 has been the most hellish nightmare year of our lifetime, and it’s not over yet without a vaccine. Coronavirus spread worldwide, killing countless people and infecting countless more. It seems everyone knows someone who has been infected or died. My dad and grandma both got infected and recovered. I lost my grandfather to it just two months ago. Please wear a mask, please social distance, and please try to protect others. Don’t put people through what my family has gone through.
However, 2020 was more than just Covid. There were plenty of horrible things over the course of the year, including the murder of a black man named George Floyd. A Minneapolis police officer detained Mr. Floyd and sat on his neck for nearly nine minutes, suffocating him despite recorded video showing that people were shouting at the officer that he was killing George. There was already unrest that had been building for years, and this sparked an unprecedented pushback against police brutality. Protests erupted all around the world, despite a pandemic currently in the process of ramping up at the same time.
When it looked like the officer in question would not be charged, protests escalated to riots, with people smashing windows and burning buildings, causing chaos until the officer was finally arrested and charged. Protests continued throughout the summer, as more and more people became victims of unchecked police brutality. Why am I bringing this all up now, in a review about a zombie apocalypse video game? Well, upon watching the live-action intro cutscene of Resident Evil 3, it caused me to reminisce on what an awful year we’ve endured due to its content.
Yes, that’s right. We’re beginning where we ended; the remake of Resident Evil 3 is the first game since… well, the first game, to use a live action cutscene for its intro. In it are images of police cars and ambulances rushing into the city, reporters discussing the worst outbreak in history, people smashing into windows and cars, buildings on fire, the CDC discussing quarantines, rioters and officers clashing in the streets… it affected me much more a year later than it had when things were still just getting started. It hit harder than expected.
However, aside from that intro, Resident Evil 3 doesn’t really touch too much on real life. We begin the game in a first-person dream sequence, where Jill starts to turn into a zombie and pulls the trigger on herself, waking up at her desk. Through files in her apartment, we discover that she’s been investigating Umbrella, just like the original. However, Brian Irons has put her under house arrest, with officers watching her apartment. She has plans to escape after gathering a little more information, but her investigation is cut short by a phone call from fellow S.T.A.R.S. member Brad Vickers. In a panic, he tells her to get out of there.
As if on cue, Jill’s apartment wall explodes open, revealing a gigantic figure in a large coat with its head covered. After being kicked so hard her ribs should’ve exploded out of her back, Jill goes on the run through the apartment, in the section from the reveal trailer. She manages to escape after an explosion separates her from the beast, and she reconvenes with Brad, who tells her that the monster is hunting S.T.A.R.S. members. However, almost immediately, zombies overrun the street and Brad is bitten. He pushes Jill and tells her to run. That’s right, the first major divergence from the original is that Brad dies almost immediately. I’m going to warn you right now: the story of Resident Evil 3 is going to be extremely different from the original, so just be prepared.
Jill heads for the parking garage rooftop, where a helicopter has announced it will be waiting for survivors. As she reaches the top, the monster appears again, destroying the helicopter and Jill’s chance of escape. She responds very naturally, by jumping into a nearby car and ramming him with it, sending both of them careening over the rooftop. Somehow still alive despite not wearing a seatbelt, Jill crawls out of the wreckage, while the monster gets back up and looms over her, about to finish her off before a voice calls out to get its attention. We see a man in military gear launch a rocket at the creature, downing it and saving Jill.
Carlos Oliveira leads her toward the subway, where he and his team, headed by Mikhail Victor, are attempting to rescue survivors and get power running to the train to cart people to safety. Despite her misgivings with Umbrella, she agrees to help them because it’s helping innocent people. After a trek through the city streets, she runs into one of Carlos’s team members, Murphy Seeker. He’s beaten and battered, but swears he’s not infected. As Jill starts to administer first aid, another of the teammates walks up and mercilessly caps Murphy in the head. This shitheel is none other than Nicholai Ginovaef, whose ice-cold demeanor chills me to the bone in this game. Spouting off about how Jill is weak and he was going to turn into a zombie, Nicholai dips out of the area, leaving a stunned Jill behind with Murphy’s corpse.
Jill manages to restore power at a substation before the hulking beast from before, Nemesis, shows up to terrorize her again. She’s terrified of it and runs, but refuses to retreat to the subway without setting the subway route at the train company office in town. After dodging Nemesis, Jill manages to reach the office, then get back to safety. Sadly, it’s short-lived, as the creature follows them down. Understanding that it’s only hunting S.T.A.R.S. members, Jill runs off as bait to lure it away from the innocent survivors in the train.
Escaping into the sewers, Jill tries to find a way out after avoiding some horrifying frog-like monstrosities created by Umbrella. After avoiding them and climbing a ladder out of the sewers, she’s met with Nemesis yet again, who has come prepared with a giant flamethrower. It chases Jill through a building under construction, setting the entire place ablaze up to the rooftop where she decides to stand her ground and fight. One boss fight later, Nemesis explodes and falls over, definitely dead. Deeefinitely dead. For sure.
As she leaves the burning building, she speaks with Carlos and begins to head back to the subway. On the way, Nemesis immediately shows up again, this time with a rocket launcher. He chases Jill all the way back to the subway, but cuts Jill off and Carlos leads her toward the gas station beside the station. They use the gas tanks to blow Nemesis up yet again, incapacitating him and allowing them to escape to the train below. Carlos and one of the teammates, Tyrell, are tasked by Mikhail to go back into the city and find one Dr. Nathaniel Bard. They set off toward a very familiar building while Jill joins Mikhail and Nicholai on the first train ride to lead people to safety.
It’s not long before things go horribly wrong for the train crew. The lights go dim in the train cars, and there’s some noise from the next car where they see Nemesis, once again, among a pile of bodies that used to be innocent civilians. Mikhail tells Jill to run, and she attempts to do so, but Nicholai has already locked the train car, grinning and taunting Jill before running away. This leaves her to deal with Nemesis, but it pierces Mikahil with a tentacle and pulls him close. Unfortunately for the hulking beast, Mikhail brings a large bundle of explosives with him and sacrifices himself, derailing the train and leaving Jill’s fate unknown.
Meanwhile, Carlos and Tyrell make their way to the RPD, where they immediately hear a man’s voice shout “Brad, stop!” and see an officer under duress from a zombie. Tyrell attempts to pry off some wooden boards blocking the doorway while we see it’s none other than Marvin Branagh, one evening before Resident Evil 2, and a zombified Brad in front of the doors to the police station. After shooting him a few times in the leg, Marvin laments what he’ll have to do and we hear Brad groan out one chilling word: “Sorryyyyy…” Marvin looks about as stunned as I was at the implications of what just occurred, leaving enough time for his coworker to lurch forward and give him his fatal bite wound that we saw in Resident Evil 2, before he escapes into the RPD hall and locks it.
After dispatching Brad once and for all while Tyrell picks the lock to the station, the two make it to the main hall and notice Marvin is gone. They decide that Nathaniel Bard must be in the S.T.A.R.S. office after Tyrell links up to a laptop in the hall, leaving Carlos to search. Several hallways, zombies, and lickers later, Carlos and Tyrell reach the office and notice that Bard is video chatting from a hospital in the city. He was attempting to reach someone at the RPD, but nobody answered. They decide to head for the hospital… until Carlos gets a call from Jill on his radio. In a panic, he tells Tyrell he’ll meet him at the hospital and runs off to her aid.
Somehow still alive after the wreckage, Jill escapes the subway tunnel and finds herself across the river from a clock tower. She begins to walk across, noticing Nemesis staggering into the river as it tries to put itself out from being on fire. Assuming it’s dead, Jill radios Carlos and informs him of everything. Everyone is dead and Nicholai escaped after betraying them. Sadly, their call is cut short when Nemesis erupts from the river again, mutated into a gigantic four-legged beast form. It chases Jill to the tower plaza and they fight it out, with Jill being victorious. As she walks into the clock tower, Nemesis rears up again and hits her with a spike in the shoulder, infecting her with the T-Virus and causing her to collapse as it finally falls over, suuuuper definitely dead this time.
Carlos finds Jill on the ground and carries her to the hospital, where he decides to search for a cure. In his adventures, he comes across a very dead Dr. Nathaniel Bard, one bullet in his skull. Nicholai was here for sure. Carlos relays this to Tyrell and eventually uncovers a video of Nathaniel admitting to horrible things that Umbrella has done, making Carlos realize why Jill was so hesitant to help the U.B.C.S. in the first place. Understanding how evil his employer is, Carlos finally finds the cure and hurries to Jill, administering it before it’s too late.
A day later, the evening of September 30th, Jill finally awakens, seemingly cured of the virus, only to hear a broadcast on the TV that the city is going to be bombed to ashes by the US government the next morning at daylight. Obviously perturbed, she exits the visitor’s room to find Tyrell, who explains the only way they can stop the bombing raid is to contact the government with a sample of the vaccine. Carlos has already run off to look for a vaccine, and she does so as well, finding a hidden elevator in the hospital truck loading bay. She descends into a factory area and sees Nicholai in an observation room above. He taunts her and she finds a way to power the elevator up. By the time she gets up, he’s gone.
Tyrell meets up with her and they head into a secret lab, where Nemesis shows up yet again and kills Tyrell. Jill escapes into the lab, protected from Nemesis by an enormous blast door. After exploring NEST 2 a bit, she finally finds the necessary components to make the vaccine and does so, grabbing the vial before Nemesis shows up again, attempting to grab her with a tentacle. She escapes, blowing up some more gas tanks to escape as she makes her way forward, eventually coming across a waste disposal room.
Nicholai shows up once the scaffolding Jill is on crumbles and she clings for her life. He takes the vaccine and tells her that if she fights Nemesis so he can collect combat data to sell, he may consider giving her the vial. He kicks her down into the arena, where Nemesis shows up and they must face off again. Carlos shows up in another observation room, using his sight and a crane to help stop the monster. After the two incapacitate it, Jill uses the crane to escape the pool and Carlos initiates the disposal process, filling the entire arena with acid to melt down the monster.
Jill confronts Nicholai, who is unwilling to give up the vaccine. After that, the wall ruptures, separating them as Jill falls into a weapons testing area and a horrific, fleshy mass of bone and sinew floods into the room. Nicholai escapes yet again, and Carlos finds his way over from the observation room. Jill tells him to give chase to Nicholai and she faces down Nemesis one final time. Now dealing with a gigantic wall of general awfulness, Jill realizes she needs something with a lot more punch to finish off this monster. Thankfully, Umbrella has been testing a freaking rail cannon in the testing area and she makes good use of it to deliver one of the most badass moments of the series, just like she did back in 1999.
After blowing a giant hole in Nemesis (and about three solid steel walls behind it), Jill escapes toward the elevator leading to the helipad, with mere minutes to spare to call off the missile strike. She reaches the rooftop, only to be confronted by Nicholai, who continues to be a soulless monster as he shoots the vial containing the only vaccine, killing Raccoon City with a single shot. Carlos shows up and the two incapacitate Nicholai, leaving him behind as they take the helicopter and escape. We don’t see what happens to Nicholai, who looks defeated as they fly off, but I think it’s safe to say he survives. Just saying.
Anyway, we know what happens next. The doomed city sees the sun peeking over the horizon as a missile launches over and detonates, obliterating a hundred thousand souls in an instant. It’s a horrifying, sobering end to a journey of survival, and it seems like a fitting place to end our retrospective. We began around Raccoon City, and we end by leaving it behind for good (again).
In terms of story, the original Resident Evil 3 had very little to do with the overall series lore. It makes sense, seeing as for a lot of its life it existed as an arcade-style spinoff starring a random person to whom we had yet to be introduced. By contrast, though the story is mostly similar and follows the same beats in the remake, there are several additions and changes that help ground the story more firmly in the series lore and elevate its importance to earn the numbered title.
There are elements littered throughout, such as the fact that Nicholai’s employer this time around is implied to be none other than Albert Wesker. In a blog post, the developers even linked the strange new parasite zombies that Nemesis can create to Las Plagas from Resident Evil 4. Certainly can’t have anything to do with what the next rumored remake is, no siree. Aside from that, Resident Evil 3 entwines itself more closely to Resident Evil 2 than anything. This is most notably found with the quick scene of Marvin and Brad in the RPD front yard, but can also be seen in spots such as when Jill encounters her friend Robert Kendo for a scene. This is prior to him confronting Leon and Ada a day later in Resident Evil 2, but we see him starting to unravel even now as he clearly is hiding some secret that we learn about in the previous title.
Various files throughout the game flesh out the story enough that it starts to feel far more like a main title and less like a sidestory about escaping the city. That’s still the main goal, but Jill and Carlos try to do a lot more in the meantime. Between uncovering Umbrella’s crimes, trying to save civilians and attempting to stop the missile launch, the two are always trying to do something while trapped in the city. In terms of a remake, this is one area I think Resident Evil 3 does some good expansion. Keep that in mind, because I regret to inform you that as a remake, you will not see that sentence very often elsewhere in this game.
Overall, however, I think Resident Evil 3’s story is elevated from its original. It connects more strongly to several games, most notably Resident Evil 2, feeling much more like two parts of one whole than the original 2 and 3 did. I enjoyed the additions of scenes like Marvin and Brad’s fight where we gain context from one game to another, and I wish more games in the series would dabble with stuff like this. Here’s hoping for the future, but for now, Resident Evil 3 does a great job in earning its number in the series.
Graphics
“Something nasty? Alright. I’ll take a look with the cameras. Watch your six.”
As the RE Engine continues to improve with each release, we’re lucky that we get to see such improvements in each game. While Resident Evil 3 doesn’t look markedly improved over Resident Evil 2, there are still subtle changes here and there that add up to a mostly better experience overall. There are one or two areas where we can see it stumble, but we’ll get to that.
To begin, though, the character models are great as always. Jill has never looked better and both Mikhail and Nicholai look fantastic, but it’s Carlos that gets by far the biggest glow-up. I have never really liked the way Carlos looks in the original Resident Evil 3, and his depiction in The Umbrella Chronicles retelling of the story looks downright horrendous. Here, however, they almost completely rework him so that he doesn’t have the doofiest hair on Earth, with some facial hair to match. It’s a great look for a rugged mercenary type.
The enemies also look fantastic. The Drain Deimos are horrific giant flea-like monstrosities, the Hunter Gammas are gigantic and look grotesque in how slimy they are, and the Hunter Betas are just as imposing and freakish as I imagined them looking back when I first played the early games in the series. Of course, the star of the show is Nemesis, and man does he look awesome. His face is a twisted mess of stapled and folded flesh just like before, with razor-like teeth to complete the awful body horror look. He looks like an experiment gone horribly wrong, which makes sense as they rushed him out to kill S.T.A.R.S. members without being able to mess with his appearance beforehand.
There is one little hiccup here. In the original Resident Evil 3, they had tons of zombie models. You’d be hard-pressed to find hardly any of them reused from Resident Evil 2. This time around, however, it’s quite the opposite. I had trouble finding zombie models that weren’t from the previous entry. They must not have had enough time or money to scan in new people, but it’s an obvious oversight on an otherwise gorgeous game.
Perhaps the bigger bad surprise, then, is actually an overall gore reduction when it comes to zombies and other monsters. In Resident Evil 2, they devised a whole new gore system in order to craft monsters that would disgust a player. Resident Evil 3 eschews this for some reason, the only one of which I can think of being that with the larger areas and the drastically increased on-screen enemy count of the game, they had to cut back on some visual effects to keep things running smoothly.
Resident Evil 3 is still plenty gory and disgusting, of course. There are exploded stomachs galore, and several of the ways Jill can die are brutal. Anything from being folded in half like a piece of paper, to getting her head stomped in by Nemesis. The way that bugs can get shoved down her throat by a Drain Deimos proboscis is horrendous. However, it loses that extra wetness and weight of a zombie’s flopping head once you blow it off. It still blows apart with a satisfying blast and more of a “critical hit” sound, but it’s still not as satisfying as the gut-churning splatter and flopping flesh from Resident Evil 2. Sacrifices may need to be made to have more enemies on-screen, but it’s sad to lose such effects nonetheless.
Thankfully, it seems those sacrifices did their job. Resident Evil 3 takes only a little more horsepower to run smoothly than Resident Evil 2, even when you have four or five enemies hounding Jill at a time. Sadly, the case with this game is just the same as the last: if you play on base PS4 or Xbox One, you’re going to have a bad time with a middling framerate. Playing on PS4 Pro, Xbox One X or a mid-range PC, however, will afford you excellent framerate stability throughout the entire experience. Of course, this applies to PS5 and Xbox Series X|S as well, ensuring you get the best possible performance stability when playing. Nearly any way you play it, Resident Evil 3 is bound to look and play great!
Despite some setbacks, Resident Evil 3 still manages to be a looker. It’s much brighter than its predecessor, with lots of neon bringing the dying city to life in the downtown area, giving it a unique flavor compared to Resident Evil 2 despite the two looking markedly similar in terms of raw technical performance. Losing the extreme gore was sad, but we gained higher enemy counts while still maintaining a decent gore level, so it’s not all bad. In the end, I think Resident Evil 3 is a beautiful game that runs like a dream, which shouldn’t come as a surprise when you look at the history of RE Engine games. To that end, this is just par for the course!
Sound
“Good work. Your reputation is well deserved.”
Please, please do not let go of Nicole Thompkins and Jeff Schine, Capcom. I know this is going to sound strange, so bear with me, but I think the strongest aspects of Resident Evil 3 concern the acting and the soundtrack. No, I’m not joking. Let’s get right into it and you’ll see why I’m so excited to discuss it.
Jill Valentine makes her grand re-debut as portrayed by Nicole Thompkins, and she owns the role in a way that even Nick Apostolides and Stephanie Panisello couldn’t for Leon and Claire. She oozes talent whenever she delivers a line, whether it’s a terrified and exasperated exclamation of “Carlos? Are you there? Carlos?! …Shit!” or it’s a smooth-talking rebuttal to a man she very clearly does not trust when they first meet. It’s a joy whenever she’s talking.
Jeff Schine, in similar fashion, grabs the role of Carlos Oliveira by the horns and rides off into the sunset with it. With his excellent portrayal, he turns a forgettable side character into, in my eyes, a core member of the RE team. Even if he never shows up in another game, Carlos instantly became “one of the guys” with his roles in Resident Evil 3, alongside Chris, Leon, Claire, Jill, Ada, etc. He’s affable and tries to keep the peace between Jill and the other members of the U.B.C.S. and plays off of them well.
Speaking of the U.B.C.S., Neil Newbon delivers a great performance as the almost comically sadistic Nicholai Ginovaef. Slick, and so easy to hate, Nicholai is always talking a mean game and he’s slick enough to often have a way out at every opportunity. He has no problem stepping on others, figuratively or literally, to get what he wants, and his sick obsession with the almighty dollar shines through with Neil’s voice work.
As good as the performances are in Resident Evil 3, that’s not what got me excited to write this section, though. My fear going into the game was that we would get more of what we got in Resident Evil 2 in terms of soundtrack. Yes, I think that it had decent music, but it lost so much of the identity of the original game’s soundtrack in the process. This time around, however, Capcom had an ace in the hole. As he had recently quit Platinum Games to go freelance, the company hired none other than… Masami Ueda. As we began in this series, so do we end with the original composer of the franchise.
What a job to end on, by the way. The music in Resident Evil 3 is phenomenal. Leave it to the composer of the original to do the remake justice; Ueda learned a lot in the 20 or so years since 1999, and that experience shines through brilliantly. He composed new tracks to better fit in spots where tracks in the original wouldn’t mesh well, but he made sure to take the original OST and give it all sorts of TLC to make an updated soundtrack that is stunning for any fan of his work on the original.
To start off, I must say I was not expecting to hear so much of the original game in Resident Evil 3. After coming off the totally new OST from Resident Evil 2, I was shocked that one of the first returning tracks I heard was “The City of Ruin”. The original is a mournful, quiet, moody track to set the atmosphere of a dead city. Ueda’s rearrangement keeps the same vibe while adding a little extra melody to it, using what almost sounds like a heartbeat and some extra strings to create a sense of mystery and unease amidst the sorrowful ambience of the original. It’s a great update, and one of many to come in this discussion!
This is one of the new tracks Ueda composed. Much like the original game, he made a leitmotif for whenever Nemesis arrives. You can hear it often throughout Resident Evil 3 with different tracks, such as this one. “Invincible Nemesis” does a great job incorporating the same synth from the original game, while transforming it into a menacing new track that even has hints in it of another theme that may sound familiar to fans. Don’t worry, though, we’re gonna get to that in a second. As for this though, the track is great in using pounding percussion and synth to give off the sense that Nemesis is an imposing nightmare for the player, putting you on edge as you square off against him.
When you begin the final fight with Nemesis at the end of the game, I thought I heard those undertones from the start of “Final Metamorphosis”. The beginning only kicks in when you first fire the railgun, and it’s no exaggeration that whatever problems I had with the game, no matter what I was feeling, good or bad, for a moment it felt like time had stopped. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck and I felt a chill down my spine. I didn’t play the original until 2005 or so, but even then I felt for a moment that I had traveled back in time to 1999 and I was seven years old, experiencing the game for the very first time. Ueda’s masterful reworking of the intense track is heightened and sharpened with 20 years of experience, delivering a climactic theme to a leitmotif that rears its head every time Nemesis shows up. It’s chilling, exciting and just… just listen to it.
Another update from the original game, the credits theme makes its return! It’s a softer and more chilled version of an already-relaxing song, allowing the player to decompress after the nightmare they’ve just survived. Is it a cheesy late-90s soft rock ballad? Yes. Is it awesome? Of course it is. The piano takes the forefront this time, just as it did before, but they take a little more precedence over the percussion and guitar unlike the original. It’s a soothing way to finish off Resident Evil 3, and handled with such care as you’d expect from the creator himself.
I could talk about the sound work of Resident Evil 3 all day, but I’ll try to curtail it here. The acting is phenomenal this time around, a real cut above even the decent acting recently found in Resident Evil 7 or Resident Evil 2. I adore everyone’s new portrayals of old characters, so much so that they’ve easily become the de facto versions of said characters that I think of. Mix that with Masami Ueda’s grand return to the franchise as a composer, and you have yourself a recipe for excellence. Resident Evil 3 is music to my ears.
Gameplay
“Oh come on. You’re gonna crap out on me NOW? Goddamn it!”
Here we are. We’ve arrived at perhaps the biggest minefield of this entire article, an endless horizon of eggshells upon which I will now tread. I said before that the Resident Evil 3 that released last year bears little resemblance to the 1999 original, and I stand by that assessment. For better or worse, the two are different games sharing the same name, even more so than Resident Evil 2 and its remake.
For starters, the biggest sin of the remake is that it is missing so much from the original. This is the hardest pill to swallow, so I figure we should get it out of the way first. Resident Evil 2 was missing several things from the original, but it managed to expand and add new things to make up for it. That said, not only are bigger things missing from Resident Evil 3, but they’re simply not replaced with anything to remedy the situation. There’s no clock tower to explore. No park. No Grave Digger. For a fan of the original, stuff like this is brutal to behold your first time through.
As an almost painful middle finger, you do fight Nemesis in front of the clock tower, but you never enter it. There is no park whatsoever, and even the Dead Factory is swapped out for NEST 2, another lab environment. Your mileage may vary on that last bit (I prefer the lab from the remake), but it’s no secret that any fan of the original will be sorely disappointed if they expected even most of what made Resident Evil 3 unique to return. Some of you may have caught on, but what I’m getting at is that the cuts don’t stop there.
The multiple choice Live Selection system is totally missing as well. There is little variation in how encounters will play out, which also hurts. Not only that, but the choice of where Nemesis spawns in the city is also missing. While Nemesis always showed up at set times, often there were multiple options of where he could spawn depending on how you went through the city. This is dropped in favor of him being in the same places every time, and this may even lead to a worse sin than the cut content. Feeling like I lied to you before? Good. I imagine you’re starting to understand what fans were feeling.
2019’s Resident Evil 2 put an intense, white-hot spotlight on Mr. X, elevating him as the series’ most terrifying stalker enemy in terms of gameplay. It was such an obvious blueprint for how to make Nemesis even scarier in the Resident Evil 3 remake, and what we got was something else entirely. When he’s actually stalking you in the city, it is exhilarating. He’s insanely fast, hits like a truck, and has several sneaky tricks up his sleeve to try and stop Jill. The problem is that Nemesis only gets two of these segments in the entire game.
Don’t misunderstand me, though; Nemesis shows up perhaps more often than he does in the original. Unfortunately, every single appearance besides those two segments is either a scripted encounter, a cutscene, or a boss battle. You almost never get a chance to engage with his stalking mechanics, and it’s upsetting even to me, someone without a major attachment to the original game. It’s all there, but the campaign design simply doesn’t allow for it to get used hardly at all.
That’s another thing: Resident Evil 3 is so linear it’s unreal. The original has you follow a fairly linear critical path as well, but the level design is such that you actually feel like you’re running through back alleys of a city, taking different paths and often able to trigger different events by choosing which parts of a critical path to do in different orders. With the remake, it is constantly about moving forward. There is nearly no variation in the level design, with maybe two areas that I can think of being even remotely “open” with two paths leading to the same place and creating a nice loop.
You may hear all of what I’ve said so far and assume that this game is trash. It sounds so negative, after all! However, while I perfectly understand why one might think that and in fact I don’t fault them for being pissed at this remake actually being very little of a remake, I found that I enjoyed Resident Evil 3 as a separate entity altogether from the original. It’s hard to overlook all the stuff listed above, but it’s not all bad!
At the very least, one neat mechanic returning from the original is the perfect dodge. Much of Resident Evil 3 was developed by former Capcom and Platinum developers, so these are the kinds of people I’d expect to know good action game mechanics, including perfect dodges. Thankfully unlike in 1999, we have much better control over our dodges this time around. You have a dedicated dodge button and can do a regular dodge three times in a row before there’s a short cooldown. However, if you dodge right before an attack or grab would connect, Jill will perform a sick roll in whatever direction you’re choosing. This resets your three-dodge cooldown and keeps you running. However, you can also aim after this and it’ll auto-aim at the enemy in bullet time for a moment, allowing you to fire off a few rounds into your foe. It feels great to pull off, and you can even perfect dodge by aiming at the right time just like in the original Resident Evil 3. It’s incredibly satisfying to style on enemies in this fashion!
Generally, movement feels snappy and the combat feels satisfying. Jill and Carlos get a variety of fun weapons and upgrades to said weapons to make them feel truly powerful. With how often you’ll be encountering enemies of all varieties, it’s important to ensure you have the right weapon for the job to make things easier on yourself as you attempt to escape Raccoon City.
One thing I think Resident Evil 3 does great (for the most part) is the pacing. Now, there’s no beating around the bush here: this game is short. I beat it my first time through, cutscenes and all, in about 6 or 7 hours. I’m not going to defend its length, because there’s nothing to defend. They cut a lot of stuff from the original and had nothing to replace it with. However, I feel good on replays of the game because the pacing is such that you’re always doing something new, fighting something new, constantly moving forward. There’s scant time to breathe in your desperate escape of the city, but in the short time you’re running around you will be bombarded with something different all the time. It certainly keeps things interesting.
I enjoy playing Resident Evil 3, but it does feel anemic at times. Its campaign is comprised of some undeniably poor choices, but it plays great! This is why I have to separate it from the original when discussing its gameplay. It’s so dissimilar that it’s almost offensive to the average fan of the original, but as its own entity it’s a fun, short campaign. What is there is often quite fun, there just simply needs to be more of it.
Extras/Replay Value
“This isn’t the last ride out of town, right?”
There is another holdover from the original Resident Evil 3 here too… at the cost of missing something. The Mercenaries: Operation Mad Jackal is completely missing from the remake. I was never fond of this mode, but the chance to make it better or even more like modern Mercenaries games is a missed opportunity. However, the shop from this mode stayed behind, and is accessible upon beating the game once. By completing records and achievements, you earn points to spend in the shop as well as various models for the model viewer.
If there’s anything that actually does have content, it’s the bonus shop. There are all sorts of things to buy here, from bonus weapons and items, to… one… single… bonus costume. That’s right: despite Jill having tons of potential costumes from Resident Evil Resistance which comes with every copy of Resident Evil 3, the only costume she can unlock in this game is her S.T.A.R.S. uniform. Now, that’s not to say it isn’t an awesome outfit, because it is. However, not only did the original have tons of outfits for Jill, but they have all those extra costumes in Resistance! It should not be difficult to update Resident Evil 3 with those outfits!
That said, you can also buy classic outfits at the very least. Jill gets her classic tube top outfit from the original Resident Evil 3, while Carlos gets his classic… hair style. Not a new outfit, but new hair and a cleaned-up face to look more like his 1999 iteration. It’s actually pretty unsettling, so I kept his normal. Speaking of 1999, Remember when I said last month that the ’98 PS1 models for Leon and Claire were amazing and it would suck if later remakes didn’t add this feature? Well… guess what? There is nary a ’99 in sight this time around. Come on, man!
At least the weapons are awesome. The RAI-DEN is an electrically-charged magnum that feels so good to pop heads with. The HOT DOGGER is a knife that ignites enemies when Jill carves into them. You can also unlock both an infinite ammo handgun and Jill’s personal Samurai Edge, as well as an infinite ammo assault rifle and naturally, the Infinite Rocket Launcher! It’s fun to unload on enemies with some of these insanely powerful weapons, so be sure to try them out!
In addition to bonus weapons, you can unlock items such as the crafting tool from the original. Mixing powders for ammo makes its return, and this item nets you more ammo per mix. You can get different coins that increase attack and defense, and even health recovery if they’re in your inventory. You can get an item that increases the window for a perfect dodge, as well as bonus inventory pouches and even early key items to get a few things early in the campaign. They don’t change things drastically, but they’re still nice to have for a little variety.
There’s variety to be had in the difficulty modes, too. Resident Evil 3 starts with the same difficulties as Resident Evil 2: Assisted, Standard, and Hardcore. I played my first time on Hardcore and felt that the game was just right for a normal mode, rather than a hard mode. I soon found out why: upon beating the game, I unlocked Nightmare mode. This shuffles around some enemy and item placements while making enemies do more damage. It was a really fun way to remix the game, and I felt like it was a proper hard mode. It wasn’t unfairly difficult, and that’s all you can ask for in a hard mode. I thought I was done after that, but Resident Evil 3 had one last nasty surprise for me after beating Nightmare difficulty: Inferno.
Y’all, I try to be professional when writing these retrospectives, but fuck Inferno mode. Oh. My. God. I know enough about Resident Evil 3’s difficulty adjustments it makes throughout the game, and the truth is that Inferno mode can get up to twice as hard as Nightmare mode depending on how good you are. There are no autosaves, enemies are insanely aggressive and Nemesis is a pain in my ass to a degree that borders on absolute cheating AI bullshit.
The final boss fight feels untested in how ridiculously hard it is. Nightmare mode makes it so that you have to master the perfect dodge in order to beat the final boss, which I think is awesome! It forces you to master a game mechanic, and once you do you feel like a god. With Inferno, even having mastered the dodge, there’s a high chance you will still die over and over for an hour because of pure bad luck when “random” acid bursts stun you, leaving you open to a killing blow which is sure to come instantly with how fast Nemesis is on Inferno difficulty. Holy crap, man, fuck Inferno. Fuck Inferno mode. God. I need to take a step outside for a second.
Okay, one walk outside later, I’m feeling a little better. At the end of the day, Resident Evil 3 has plenty of unlockables and most of them are either inoffensive or good additions! It’s just sad, because there is so much more they could put in without much effort. The pack-in game that comes with Resident Evil 3 has so many outfits that could be in the game whose original is famous for having… many outfits for Jill. It’s mind-boggling. The bonus weapons are fun, and the extra Nightmare difficulty mode is a welcome challenge. And that’s the only welcome extra difficulty mode in this house!
Conclusion
“Not even close. But at least it’s over.”
I don’t hate Resident Evil 3. In fact, I quite enjoy it! I think it’s a competently-made game, albeit one with several inexcusable flaws. It’s incredibly short for a modern Resident Evil game, and makes vast cuts to content without replacing those missing pieces. Nemesis being almost entirely relegated to setpieces and boss fights without proper stalking most of the time is legitimately upsetting, and there are smaller issues like the lack of costumes when the pack-in game has the same Jill model and is stuffed with bonus outfits for her, in a remake of a game known for having tons of costumes.
That said, the gameplay is solid and I like the pacing. Though the game is short, there is always something new coming at you, keeping your game fresh through the campaign. The story is improved to give Resident Evil 3 more importance in the lore, and the acting is great. Perhaps the biggest surprise is Masami Ueda’s masterful OST, where he goes all-out in both adding new tracks and rearranging classics. I still have trouble properly describing the feelings I had when “Final Metamorphosis” kicked into gear at the end.
At the end of the day, it should be no surprise that Resident Evil 3 upset many fans. Who am I to tell them they’re wrong? They’re angry that they got a piss-poor remake, and they’re right. Resident Evil 3 is attached to the original practically by name alone. It might as well be a new game altogether. When taken as such, I find it much easier to swallow. It’s a good game with some major flaws that hold it back from being great, but if anyone hates this game for disrespecting the original title, I can scarcely find myself disagreeing. It’s a hard spot to be in and at the end of the day, your enjoyment of Resident Evil 3 will be dependent on your ability to uncouple it from the original and enjoy it by its own merits. For my part, I have no issue with this, but I will never fault someone for being unable to do so. It is, after all, supposed to be a remake of a classic. And in that respect… well, there simply is no respect.
