Resident Evil: Director's Cut

"Not worthy of its legendary status"

After years of using my PS1 as an RPG-only gaming platform, I have recently begun to buy and play my way through its back catalog. The first non-RPG title I have purchased and played in this pseudo-retro gaming quest is Resident Evil: Director's Cut. Given the household-name status of the franchise, the hype and fanfare in its name that are presented by nearly every message board, gaming site, game retailer, or fellow gamer I know, I figured that RE was a must-have – a quintessential piece of the PS1, if not gaming in general, experience. After all, how could the numbers be wrong? The game and its sequels have sold millions, and the series has now even branched into the world of Massively Multiplayer Online. Capcom has been a fairly consistent hitmaker for years, on multiple platforms, and they wouldn't back a bad franchise repeatedly.

Well, so I thought….

I will dismiss the naysayers' likely first objection now – my opinion is in no way based on the fact that I have come to this game late. I, to this day, enjoy playing NES, SNES, and PS1 games, discovering titles for which I'd never had the time in the past, and which I can now buy for next-to-nothing prices. Simple controls, “bad” graphics and sound, and anything else that an XBox/PS2/Gamecube-era gamer might cite with bias, judging games of old against current technological standards, they simply do not affect my opinion on a game. I judge everything on its own terms, based on where it stands among its contemporaries; hence, this game I judge based on other games that were coming out in 96-97, not against the games of 2004 (the year in which I am writing this review).

That said, I find that this game is sub-par in terms of graphics and sound compared to other games of its time. Everything is highly grainy and pixilated, from characters which are simply atrocious and blocky, to the cloudy and blurred backgrounds on which they almost seem blue-screened or superimposed. Final Fantasy VII, to name just one example, contained much clearer characters and backgrounds, and the two blended better. With the exception of some zoomed-in shots, as when you are looking mainly at one particular item, the graphics are nowhere near as crisp or smooth as other PS1 or N64 titles – even most Saturn titles, to be honest. It looks, often times, like a 32X game.

The camera in the game is also a nightmare. It is fixed in one position at all times, usually a bad one at that. You are not given a clear view of the room you are in, or one that is advantageous to exploring or moving your character about. Instead of a fluid camera, the shot will change multiple times as you move within one room, focusing on different things, and always with a bit of a lag. I find that this shifting mid-room causes a bit of control confusion until you become acclimated to the general control of the game and the constant shifts and changes, and learn to adjust accordingly. Sometimes the camera will adjust so that it is right in your character's face, and you must walk towards it, and at other times it will be above, behind, or beside you – but never, it seems, is the camera where you want it.

The camera issue also extends to the map screen, as the map is also fixed. You cannot rotate the map, and there is no pointed arrow showing where you are facing in the room – the room you are in merely blinks. Hence, in a room which consists of 5 or 6 different camera angles, in essence making it seem like 5 or 6 rooms, trying to figure out which door or room you are facing on the map in near-impossible. I found the map to be useless except for letting me know whether or not there were more areas to explore – unexplored areas remain uncolored, and change to green once you have stepped into them.

Control in the game is basic, and requires only a small amount of time to master. My main gripe is that some buttons are left unused, while others are used for multiple tasks. This is most clear in the action/use-weapon button (X). As the same button is used for both, you must hold down R1 to draw and hold the weapon, and continue to hold R1 while pressing X to use it. Assigning another L or R button to the “fire” task would have been simple, and I fail to see why this was not done.

Many complaints I hear about this game are based on the limited number of items you can carry (6 or 8 depending on what character you use), and the save function, with both of which I have no issue. As the items slots on your character are limited, you must make use of item drop boxes in certain locations to store extra materials. You can access these stored materials from any box – if you put a gun in Box A, it will be there when you go to Box B or C in a totally different room. At some points, backtracking to a box to drop or take an item is tedious, but I can overlook this. As far as saving, it can only be done at certain locations, and only with an item, but I do not see this as a problem. The fact that your “score” for the game is based not only on your time to complete it, but the number of saves you used, is also not an issue for me, because once you've played through the first time and know how to solve all the puzzles, you shouldn't need many saves (if any) to go through it again to get a higher score ranking.

I have big complaints about the tedious and confusing nature of the maps. I spend most of my time searching for rooms I've already been to, because I know that's where a drop box or unsolved puzzle is. Again, the near-useless maps make this the biggest challenge of the game, and unless you draw your own map as you play through, and label what's in each room as you go, you are bound to become lost. In a console adventure, I find this ridiculous. I've come to expect it from some PC RPGs and adventures, but that's not what console gaming is about. Also, I'd like to think that solving puzzles and killing zombies would comprise more time than trying not to be lost, but that is not the case.

As far as zombies and puzzles, both were big let-downs. Normally, the prospect of killing zombies is enough to keep me with a game, if only for cheap thrills and laughs, but here it was unrewarding and, as it seems is a recurring theme in this review, tedious. The monsters were neither scary nor fun nor challenging to kill – they were merely an annoyance and a minor roadblock to getting to the next puzzle. As the monsters were clearly then not the true focus of the game, one might expect difficult puzzles to pick up the slack, but they do not. All puzzles are beyond simple, require next to no thought, and are basically spelled out for you. I found myself picking off uninteresting zombies to make my way to puzzles I had solved before I'd seen them – essentially, I was just trying to make it to the end of a game that did not stimulate me in any way, as fast as possible. Ironically, the ranking system is based on this principle – it's as if Capcom is rewarding you based on how much you despised the game.

The story, the video scenes, the cut scenes, and the voice acting were all a disaster. I hear many defend these aspects of the game by saying that this preserved the authenticity of the game's B-movie aesthetic. However, the poor level of acting and production value here falls short of average middle-school production of Our Town. The script, voice acting, and movie shots all reflect a budget of seemingly less than $1000 – like grade school kids with a camcorder making a movie project for class. I would not be surprised if the script and acting were created and performed by a few random programmers that were grabbed at the last minute. Though the zombie plot is definitely B-movie grade, the horrendous acting and shabby cut scenes degrade it to an F (maybe a D- if you're in a particularly giving mood). I didn't care how the story went because it was predictable – again, I only finished the game for the sake of finishing it, not to find out what happened.

Load times are another contributing factor to the frustration of this game. Tiny lags as the camera angle changes become huge lags as you actually go into another room via a doorway or staircase. Unnecessarily long load times are masked by 16-bit quality close-ups of doors squeaking open or stairs being creakily traversed. None of this is “scary,” as it isn't like things jump out at you on the other side of the doors – these are merely facades for the game's lag time which would only disrupt the flow of gameplay if such a flow existed in the first place.

As far as “scary,” which at this point one might assume was the point of the game since every other aspect failed, RE still does not deliver. Zombies creep towards you so slowly that they might as well remain stationary, and present no challenge or threat. Other faster monsters may occasionally burst through a window only to run circles in front of you until you blow them away, all the time being so poorly animated that you laugh instead of recoil in fear.

So what is there to this game? Nothing that I can see. I have no idea why there was so much fuss about the game. The action is essentially non-action, the puzzles are essentially non-puzzling, and the fear factor is not a factor at all. Shooting monsters seems to act only as a temporary diversion from puzzle solving, which as I said, is not a challenge either. The only inspiration to replay would be to unlock costumes and unlimited weapons, which are only useable on a third play-through, and I can't imaging why you'd want to play it more than once in the first place. Perhaps this succeeded because it was the first of its type on consoles, but there were titles in the past that did it better – “it” being anything and everything this game intended to do. For a puzzle challenge on PS1 or PC, pick up Myst or Riven (just to name two). For survival-horror, try any Alone in the Dark or Silent Hill game. For zombie killing…well, take your pick from the hundreds of games out there where killing zombies is the primary goal.

Unless you want it for the sake of owning this much-talked-about game, I'd say to avoid Resident Evil: Director's Cut at all costs.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 05/26/04