RESIDENT EVIL 3
poor nemesis fans. first they had to deal with code veronica truthers telling them their game was RE3 in name only. then they got a remake that barely resembled the source material. and now there's a very real chance code veronica gets the luxury treatment they wish they got. it's hard not to feel a little bad for them, even if that feeling quickly disappears anytime they start talking about how RE3R's responsible for their arid farmland, financial problems, and troubled love life
but it makes sense that nemesis would inspire intense reactions. unlike RE2, this is a much messier, swampier game that never saw an idea it didn't want to frankenstein onto itself. there's extensive ammo crafting; randomized encounters, items, and puzzle solutions; branching choices; heavy scripting; environmental hazards; and a reactive dodge. the attempt to cram more and more action into the series turned it into a bit of a chimera, and tho the spirit of adventure is still in here somewhere, it's been fully absorbed by the bloated mass
even just choosing to build the entire game around perpetual forward motion means sacrificing the hub structure integral to the prior games in a way you'd think was too risky to gamble on. there's no mansion here. not even a rockfort island or village. you get a fraction of the police department, now closer to a 100 meter dash than any kind of dungeon, and then you're back to bounding thru the streets. the uptown/downtown intro does a clever job transplanting the series' standard mapping onto city blocks, but due to the linearity of the hub&spoke layout, very little of the routing came with it
regardless, the scrappy ephemeral turn works reasonably well at first; enemies move quicker and in greater numbers, gunpowder gives the player an opportunity to self-sabotage, and the scale of the city's just disorienting enough to distract from how relentlessly prescriptive it all is. you're still neck deep in ammo, and ink ribbons are still a non-issue, but if you can adapt to the premise it's easy enough to roll with the punches
sooner than later you run into nemesis. and not the sideways nosed, piano toothed, melted version from that remake that burned down all those orphanages either. this one's the chatterer, but buff, and fast, and he's got a rocket launcher, and tentacles. if mikami, aoyama, and matsushita kept cooking they probably would've had him get the prom queen and win the high school football game too. as a mechanical function designed to throw your shit into disarray, he starts off strong, benefiting from both his ambiguous omnipresence and your arsenal being ill-suited for taking him on, but the more he shows up, the less successful it is
for all RE2's bombast it understood that Mr. X was best used sparingly as an elemental force, and while RE3 successfully evolves that largely gestural presence into something more materially dangerous and intrusive, the trade-off is that nemesis relies far more on being credibly imposing in each and every encounter, which only lasts so long. how long will vary from person to person, but it's unlikely to be any later than when you discover that freeze grenades make that burly bitch say uncle in five seconds flat. by the time he's demoted to falling off railings in goofy setpieces the whole thing's already overplayed its hand.. and then it just keeps going
every resident evil's top heavy, but this one's legs are fucking noodles. lacking the elaborate centerpiece or cinematic flourish of its respective predecessors, its impressive mechanical refinements have little to prop up, functioning as an end unto themselves as you go thru the motions in increasingly unengaging environments, layouts, and encounters. before long it can no longer bank on its setting or antagonist, and starts spinning its wheels as early as the clocktower's premature climax. (three safe rooms in there by the way. what the fuck.) you'd think you'd at least get a few good bosses out of it all, but, uh... hope you like gravedigger?
i'm inclined to feel that the experiment doesn't really work within this specific framework; that removing any sense of intimacy or context-building in favour of anonymous rapid-fire scripting shows no great benefit beyond novelty. without allowing the player to develop a relationship with a given space, all attempts at subverting that relationship fall flat. without maintaining a sense of permanence, the sudden ruptures have nothing to act as counterpoint to. for a game that randomizes everything to the point where even logic puzzles can have nonsensical solutions, its most surprising misstep is the absence of dynamic range. this is loudness war software; infinite dogs crashing thru infinite windows
in this light it's abundantly clear that the remake's most grievous and unforgivable crime was crushing a most beautiful dream forever: resident evil 3 finally living up to its potential