When Capcom revealed Resident Evil 2‘s remake would feature a third-person camera rather than the original’s fixed camera angles, some fans worried it would ruin the tension of the original’s design. But unlike other third-person RE games, which leaned more towards action, Resident Evil 2 delivered true survival horror – and it may owe some of that success to an obscure Game Boy Color spin-off game called Resident Evil Gaiden.
The fixed-camera Resident Evil games carefully framed on-screen action to scare players. Along with this, their so-called “tank controls” and scarce supplies made every enemy encounter tense, since players had to wrestle with awkward movement to secure good positioning. While Resident Evil 2 maintained the classic inventory management, its third-person gameplay removed the camera framing and tank controls. This could have given players too much of an advantage over the slow-moving enemies, but Capcom smartly maintained the scares by challenging players’ accuracy and timing rather than positioning and movement.
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This combat system resembles no Resident Evil game more than Resident Evil Gaiden, a little-known release late in the Game Boy Color’s life, after the Game Boy Advance had already launched. Its story may be non-canon, and some of its art may be laughably bad, but it’s impressive how similar it feels to the 2019 masterpiece.
How Resident Evil Gaiden’s Combat Predicted RE2’s Third-Person Redesign
After a failed attempt to port the original Resident Evil to Game Boy Color, Capcom opted to produce an entirely original game for the system. Resident Evil Gaiden takes GBC players on a top-down journey through a zombie-infested naval ship, where they’ll need to collect keys and conserve ammo to make it out alive, just like a traditional RE game. Since standard top-down shooting wouldn’t have provided ample tension, the game’s developers went with a first-person combat system instead. Players have to hit an attack button in time with a cursor moving back and forth across the screen, lining it up with enemy damage zones in the cursor’s path.
As multiple enemies slowly move towards the player, they’ll have to make decisions like which weapon to use, how much ammo to conserve, and whether to go for a headshot or frantically hit an enemy with body shots. It’s not as strategic as the Resident Evil 2 remake’s limb-dismembering or head-exploding, but it still feels remarkably similar to attempting to shoot zombies in the head as they shamble towards Leon in his R.P.D. office.
Of course, several Resident Evil games had actual third-person combat systems before Resident Evil 2‘s remake. But even the beloved RE4 leaned more towards action (with its cartoonish roundhouse kicks and suplexes) than survival horror, and the series only got more action-y from there. Of all the RE games before it, the combat system of Resident Evil 2‘s remake – one of the most acclaimed games of 2019 – feels most akin to Resident Evil Gaiden‘s. Not too shabby, for a non-canon, 2001 Game Boy Color game.
Resident Evil 2 released for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on January 25, 2019.
