Why you’re all wrong about Resident Evil 3

Yes, it’s true: I prefer Resident Evil 3 to Resident Evil 2. Which, in video game circles, is a very unpopular opinion, akin to stating you think the Godfather Part III is better than its predecessor, or professing a love of farm animals, and not just because some of them produce delicious dairy.

It’s just not the done thing, putting Resident Evil 3 – which, like Zero, like Code Veronica (in both vanilla and X forms) is to be looked back on with wry scorn, perhaps a little loathing – over its illustrious predecessor. The deification of Hideki Kamiya’s directorial debut had begun even before it was out, and the following 18 years have seen no reversal of fortune, hence the clamour for a full-blown remake.

There’s a lot to love about Resident Evil 2, of course. It’s a fine game, and a f***ing massive one to boot. Two characters, four scenarios, two mini-games, two sub-characters to play as: this was how you did a sequel. Its troubled development is legend, which only adds to Kamiya’s achievement, especially when you consider he fought against Mikami’s meddling – he was kicked upstairs after the original game, and wasn’t happy about it – and other problems to deliver a sequel that was different yet still resolutely Resident Evil.

I was so excited about Resi 2 that on the run up to release, when I was 13 years old, I seriously considered the dread scenario that I might die in some accident before it came out, some car crash or freak fox hunting mishap, maybe, and the thought of that – the legitimate weighing up of the odds that I would or would not survive until May 8th, 1998 – chilled me, not just because I’d be dead, but because that meant I would miss out on Resident Evil 2, the sequel to my all-time favourite game and that would f***ing suck.

And then it arrived and I thought it was good, maybe even great in places, but not quite the game I wanted it to be. It took me a while to figure it out: the game was much better than the original in a lot of ways, but also lacking in many others. The pre-release hype – which was white hot, salivating, even by the standards of 90s game journalism – had me thinking I’d get to see more of Raccoon City itself. And I did, for about a ten minutes: that opening was the most exciting thing in the world. After that: another mansion, sorry – police station – another lab, another countdown.

The RPD was initially very different of course; all cool, James Cameron blues and modern architecture and design, as opposed to the Gothic haunted house that it ended up being after the original version was scrapped. There’s an in-universe reason for its ostentatious design – it used to be a museum – but it didn’t stop it being, whisper it, a little boring. A little safe. The Spencer Mansion’s various tricks and traps work because you can imagine it being custom built by a madman to form a giant deathtrap. The police station, Brian Irons’ issues aside, just felt exactly like what it was: an attempt to shoehorn the familiar Resi appeals into an unfamiliar location. Now, this is a Resident Evil, so attempting to rationalise any of it is tantamount to treason of the brain, but still. It wasn’t quite as elegant and appealing as the original.

I dreamed of seeing more of Raccoon, and in Resident Evil 3 I got it. It starts in the streets with an exploding building and goes from there, a breathless sprint through a collapsing city. Architecturally, it makes little sense, but it didn’t matter: you were on the run from the very first second, the star in your own disaster movie. There’s so much detail in the pre-rendered backgrounds it can be difficult to take in: if the first games took place in (somewhat) neatly ordered environments, then Resi 3 was you wading through the detritus of humanity: smashed up fire engines, buses piled on top of crushed cars, broken glass everywhere, raging fires. Those backgrounds sold the horror superbly, telling a familiar story: Raccoon was Totally F***ed, and so were you.

Part of what drives my admiration for Resi 3 is this ever-changing urban backdrop, as Jill and Carlos battle through restaurants and graveyards and petrol stations and newspaper offices and other places you’d expect encounter in a bid for freedom in a condemned city. But a large part of it is how the introduction of Nemesis really makes those places feel a lot more dangerous than they already did. If Resi 2 was Aliens: bigger, more action-orientated (the shotgun/magnum parts, automatic weapons), some nonsense about rescuing a little girl, and set somewhere not of this earth then Resident Evil 3 was The Terminator, a chase movie set on the streets.

What’s remarkable about Resi 3 is that the player is constantly being hurried up, not just by Nemesis (who we’ll get to in a moment) but by the environments themselves. There’s a beautiful sense of place with the original Resident Evil: after a while you kind of get used to it and it begins to feel like home; a comfortable, clockwork puzzle to be solved at your leisure, albeit one where giant spiders might decide to totally ruin your s***. In Resident Evil 3 you’re constantly ambushed (thanks to an increase in the amount of z’s on screen) and not in any one location for that long, and your entry and exit to new environments is usually punctuated by an explosion: windows are jumped out of, cable cars are crashed into the sides of buildings, floors collapse, gas stations are incinerated, and hospitals are reduced to rubble with the speed and malice of a Tory government. In Resi 2 and 3 a building-leveling self-destruct sequence meant the end of the game. Here it’s your queue to get running again.

Running, of course, being something you’ll be doing a lot, given Resident Evil 3’s primary antagonist. Nemesis is an evolution of the Mr X idea from Resi 2’s ‘B’ scenarios, and gives the game an urgency not present in any other game in the series. Intelligent and cunning, Nemesis (as the name suggests) spends the whole game hunting the player down. Fast, aggressive, and capable of opening doors and following players between rooms, he helps drive the game’s manic energy, his many unexpected appearances punctuated with a slam of a door, a dread-inducing theme, and his just human-enough cry of ‘STARS….’

Nemesis is a great villain, more powerful than the player and, in the early going, much better armed. He’s constantly on the front foot, but as the game goes on and your arsenal and confidence grows, the dynamic shifts slightly, like in any good slasher film where the hero is being stalked by a seemingly unkillable enemy. Choosing to stand and fight Nemesis is risky, but the rewards are there: otherwise unobtainable weapons and health items drop when you send him for a little nap. There’s no better enemy character in any Resident Evil game, and by the time you put six Magnum rounds in him (along with an excellent kiss-off line) you’ll feel you’ve f***ing earned it.

Resident Evil 3 innovated elsewhere, with branching routes, ‘live selection’ choices (often made under pressure) and the ability to make your own ammo. There was even a rudimentary timing-based dodge feature, perhaps because the game began life as a sidequel (known at points as Resi 1.9 and Resi 2.1 before being promoted to full-fledged status by Capcom bossman Yoshiki Okamoto and, allegedly, Code Veronica being delayed/going to Dreamcast) Capcom felt it could toy with series conventions.

It worked. Yet Resi 3 is still one of the most overlooked games in the series, perhaps because it was promoted badly, released too close to Resi 2, and unfairly compared to the also-in-development, graphically superior Code Veronica. Perhaps, also, because of its incessant forward motion. People often say they can’t really remember the game, and that may be because you’re not in any one place for enough time for it to all really sink in: there are no hours spent padding around evidence rooms or vast dining chambers: just a relentless dash from one place to the next, where stopping to catch a breath may mean it’s your last. It’s razor close, but for these reasons I’d take Resi 3 over 2. In that game, I felt in some way I knew the beats already. In Nemesis, I never had a clue.

F*** me, though, Jill’s outfit. Well done lads.