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Last year; The Best of Horror Gaming started the Halloween season with a critical look at the game that created the horror survival genre, Resident Evil. Now with a new season of fear upon gamers, its time to look back at the sequel to this great classic.
It’s been two months since the events of the last game, S.T.A.R.S. has been disbanded and the surviving members have begun their own investigation into the Umbrella Corporation. However the horror did not end after the Mansion Incident.
Resident Evil 2 begins with Leon Kennedy (a rookie cop) and Clair Redfield (Chris Redfield’s sister) arriving to a dark and quit Raccoon City. Everything seems a little to eerie until an encounter with a group of infected resident’s leads to our heroes racing to the police station until they are separated in an accident. Depending on the character the player selects; you will race to the police station in the hopes of finding salvation.
However the police station has been overrun with zombies and there are only a few survivors. Kennedy will find a mysterious woman named Ada Wong while Redfield finds a little girl named Sherry Burkin who is being pursued by her father, William Burkin.
Leon’s story will be the basic horror scenario as it focus on his efforts to work with Wong to find a way to escape Raccoon City.
Claire’s story may feel like homage to Aliens by presenting a character who has been put into a dangerous situation while having to act as a guardian to a defenseless child. However it would be unfair to brush Clair off as a video game rendition of Ellen Ripley; like Jill Valentine and Rebecca Chambers, she is actually a real character and not the “useless chick” that is present in Hollywood horror.
Upon its release, Resident Evil 2 became the fastest-selling video game in North America, grossing $19 millionduring its debut weekend. It would go on to sell over 4.96 million copies for the PlayStation and its success allowed it to be ported to the PC, Dreamcast, GameCube and N64.
The game may be a classic but its story progression has not aged well as the series expanded. The story has been repackaged and retold multiple times in spin-offs while Resident Evil 3: Nemesis opens up a lot of plot holes.
Looking back gamers could really see so many plot holes and anomalies within the progression of the story. Most notably how Leon and Clair got passed a military quarantine upon their arrival to Raccoon City or how dose some one misses piles of bodies in a city infected by a zombie virus.
Despite its now obvious plot holes and anomalies; Resident Evil 2 still remains a classic example of good horror game and a sequel that successfully improved over its predecessor.