woolydrool wrote: ↑Mon Feb 19, 2024 10:36 pmwhere would you recommend a newcomer start? never played a RE game in my life but its always been on my list. I'm assuming the first one but idk where people land on the OG vs remaster debate on that one
Tbqh the games are kinda separated into three different 'eras', the Survival Horror era, the Action Horror era, and the Survival Horror 2: Electric Boogaloo era (which is still heavily influenced by the Action Horror era but to be fair Resident Evil was also literally about super cops that blow up a giant monster with a rocket launcher at the end of the game, a trope nearly every mainline game continues and which the most recent CGI movie even outright makes fun of so some action is to be expected); so really it depends on your taste.
The OG trilogy and some of its spinoffs like Code Veronica fall under Survival Horror, as does the Resident Evil 1 Remake. The Resident Evil 1 Remake is IMO the best way to start if you like the idea of proper classic survival horror but also want a game where the enemies are not 3 shapes and a .wav file slowly heading towards you. The RE1 Remake is a gold standard of not only keeping everything great about the original, it adds more things to the original for the better, it's basically just The First Game But Better.
The more recent remakes this is hard to say the same for. RE2make and RE3make are basically very different games from OG RE2 and RE3, keeping overall the same setting, plot, and characters but 'modernizing' the gameplay and also changing a lot - notably removing a LOT of monsters that added fun flavor to the game's worlds in Resident Evil's current weird trend of "it has to be realistic!!!! the monsters have to be grey and brown and we CAN'T say the virus ACTUALLY reanimates the dead that's way too silly!!!" (made even weirder by their overreliance on Wizards) so you won't see stuff like giant worms or set pieces from the OG games like zombies rising from the grave and notable monsters like the Ivy's from RE2 just became a new form of zombie instead of 50s monster movie style actual walking plants. They are very good despite my whinging, I will say, but I'd say play both the originals and the remakes here. I have not played RE4make but it seems more faithful to the original.
The action horror era starts with RE4 and technically ends with RE6. I'd say you can just play RE4 if you want to experience this, RE5 is just RE4 but everything is Incredibly Insanely Fuckwildly Racist. RE6 is... a game, and I won't call it a BAD game actually I think it has very fun segments but it's very blatantly For The Fans (which it fucks up, it tries to be Action Horror, Survival Horror, Both, and then a Fourth Thing in ONE game) and is also incomprehensible to anyone not already invested in the series' blorbos. Honestly it's incomprehensible even then. Probably the best candidate for the series to play high.
RE7 and RE8, alongside the newer remakes, are part of the new era ofc. I honestly don't really consider RE7 and 8 to be proper Resident Evil titles, they're basically new IPs that just have the Umbrella logo and Chris Redfield shows up. But they're good! You could easily start with those (and obviously do 7 first) but I personally would not consider it Resident Evil in the same way as the other games. There's also a fuckton of spinoffs including rail shooters and whatnot but among those are games like Resident Evil Revelations 1 and 2, which are closer to the mainline games and pretty good, I say play them if you get the chance.
