Resident Evil 2 is perhaps one of the best examples of a "good sequel." Where other companies may have been tempted to do the exact same shit as the original
Resident Evil [バイオハザード], but in a police station rather than a mansion, Hideki Kamiya and crew built upon the foundations of the original, creating something evocative of the first game, but still distinctly fresh and different.
The game's structural beats expect you to have played its predecessor. You already know about the T-virus and the basic zombies, but also the Hunters, Chimeras, and T-002 Tyrant. These latter creatures hit you much later into Chris and Jill's exploration of the Spencer grounds. So you would not expect Leon to run into a new
Licker as early as it happens. There are further "twists," such as the fight against
G2 having considerably less fanfare before it than the first game's Tyrant fights, on top of occurring earlier in this game (we do have the fight foreshadowed with previous information). Especially new for this game, but which will become a series staple from here on:
the G3 morphs into G4 immediately upon its defeat, and you are thrust into a tougher boss fight with no time to rest. And perhaps the game's biggest spin on a past mechanic: the game handles its two playable characters by
filling the "B" route with loads of different shit from the "A" route, including entirely different boss fights. You also get to play as the buddy characters for a brief time, expanding on the brief Rebecca role from
RE1.
The zombies function more or less the same as in the past game, just with perhaps denser numbers. They come in a small handful of varieties: cop zombie, regular dude zombie, regular chick zombie (whom I've always half-jokingly saw as "arrested hooker zombie"), then the nude fellas in the lab at the end (but I've never been able to tell if they regenerate like in the first game). We soon meet the Licker, who functions in a similar role as the Hunter of the previous game: these guys can fuck you up
hard. The trick is that they're blind, and seek you by sound, so you have to walk slowly around them (I can't recall if they're drawn to gunfire, since I always immediately open fire when they're in close enough range). Off the top of my head, I don't recall a File in the game explaining that the Lickers are blind, and I actually never knew that until the remade
Resident Evil 2 came out, but they still definitely play like they
are blind. The lore behind the Lickers is that they've begun mutating from the T-virus, with their musculature expanding and ripping through their skin, and their finger bones growing into powerful claws. The later
Resident Evil [バイオハザード] remake would introduce "Crimson Heads" as the "missing link" between regular zombies and Lickers. The first
Resident Evil film explains its Licker as a human injected directly with the T-virus, which kinda-sorta "works" with the lore, as we mostly see zombies created indirectly by viral spread, and the dudes actively experimented upon with the virus were Tyrants. Lickers have Tyrant-like claws. It checks out. Anyway, the next new critter we see is the G-embryo, a spin on the
Alien "Chestburster," who soon grows into the G-adult boss, who can then vomit more G-embryos (which it's assumed you kill before they grow). The concept behind this creature is pretty neat, as it shows the major difference between T- and G-viruses, with the latter's purpose being the birth of a more overt monstrosity than the comparatively simpler T monsters (who are mostly "zombie dog," "angry crow," "hungry shark," "giant snake," "giant spider"). Unfortunately, the G-virus's application is quite limited in this game: we often run into someone who's been directly injected with the virus, and we fight the aforementioned G-adult earlier, but we do not see as many G-monsters as we might like to (the remake
Resident Evil 2 gives us more G-adults in place of the boss fight, but they all act the same as one another). In the obligatory lab area, we meet Lickers who have evolved a step further (though they play largely the same), which is pretty neat, though it's mostly just an extension of the regenerating naked zombos from the first game. We get a new monster-plant, Plant 43, but we don't get to fight it; instead, we have some humanoid plant guys, the new Ivy monster, who are inferred to have spawned from the big plant covering the majority of the lab. In a neat twist, you can hit a switch to release anti-B.O.W. gas to prevent the regular Ivies from spawning, which causes
Poison Ivies to spawn in the B route. There's also a giant moth, building on the giant snake and spiders of the last game. In a minor twist, its "boss fight" is incredibly easy, as the moth is only mildly territorial, and basically just attacks you to protect itself and its babies, unlike literally every other monster that wants to fucking kill you for fun. And perhaps the most fun thing, the sewer is inhabited by a
giant alligator, making for a pretty tense little fight/setpiece, though the consequence is that it kinda-sorta raises one's expectations upon encountering the moth later. For more significant bosses, we have the ever-evolving
G, who has
five (5!) different forms, as well as the not-very-mutated
T-103 Tyrant (dubbed "Mr. X" by fans), who
follows us in the B route in a series of scripted encounters before
the final encounter has him transform (and grow claws!), putting him on a level more vicious than the original Tyrant, if not a little less elaborate than
G.
At the end of the day, my belief is that the primary element that
could make this the #1 greatest survival-horror game of all time is the variety between all four possible routes, as well as the twelve Extreme Battles (three difficulties times four load-outs), and the two other bonus modes. There's just so much replayability.
RE1 is still my personal favorite of the series, and the first
Silent Hill my favorite in the genre overall, but it would be
too contrarian to undermine this game's brilliance.
Claire: 8.25/10
Leon: 9.75/10
Average: 9/10
i played leon a claire b and ended up preferring claire, soooo