Horror Fiction Double Feature: A look at Resident Evil Survivor and Resident Evil Gaiden
I’m fairly confident that you: the reader, and I: the writer, have established that the Resident Evil series of games are quite frankly, some of the best, campiest Science Fiction/Horror stories out there in the medium that are videogames. Many try to be like Resident Evil, and many fail. I’ve gone on about times where the series fell from grace but we’ve had a good track record over the last few years with 2&3’s remakes, 7 being a return to form, and 8 serving as a happy medium between the atmospheric horror of 4 and the bombastic set pieces of 5. One could even say the that the series has always been deep in it’s roots because since Capcom loves to rerelease their games there’s always an easy way to play the classics. In the early 00’s you could play RE2,3, and Code Veronica on your Gamecube, your PS3 and PSP could play 1,2, and 3 via the Playstation Classics series, and just about every modern platform has access to RE1’s remake, 0, 4, 5, and 6 via remasters and ports. You can essentially pick a game in the series, and a few dollars later you can be playing a legal version of said game. While every single main game in the series is within reach Capcom has made it clear that they don’t plan on remastering most of the spin off games in the series, possibly due to the fact that they either lost the source code or don’t have the time or effort to go through with a port of a game that people may not purchase in droves. Everyone loves Resident Evil 4 but those same people may not like Resident Evil Outbreak.
Today I want to talk about two spin off games in particular that I’m certain will never get an official remaster or port. One is a first person shooter and the other an amalgamation of an RPG and a…. rhythm game? I say rhythm but in reality it’s more of a timing mini game. Both games are of somewhat debatable quality but i’ll be honest when I say that not a whole lot of fans of the series will entertain the notion of debating whether or not these games are good, and will essentially dismiss them as bad games. I’m here to tell you that these games are in fact good in their own ways, and i’m not just talking about how a game is “so bad it’s good”. If you have to say a game is so bad it’s good then it’s not bad at all. It’s just good. It’s not wrong for something to be good even though everyone else says otherwise. That’s why we got so many sequels to Resident Evil’s film adaptations.
Resident Evil Survivor
JPN Release: 01/27/00
NA Release: 08/30/00
Metacritic Score: 39/100
I was just a little under a month away from my 7th birthday when I read about Resident Evil Survivor. It was a short blurb of a review from Gamepro where they gave it a poor score on nearly all fronts. They said
“The scariest thing about the game is how awful it is”
Let’s ruminate on this for a moment.
First off, poor quality should never frighten you. It should instead either disappoint you or entertain you- especially if it’s just a piece of media. I can absolutely understand if you bought Resident Evil Survivor on the day it came out, played it for a few hours, then decided that the game sucks and that you spent $40 on a game that isn’t even good. Let’s be real here though, I’ve never seen someone actually be angry at Resident Evil Survivor. Yes we have the run of the mill angry YouTube channels prattle on every other year about how much the game sucks, but I can almost guarantee that no one has felt any kind of genuine rage towards this little FPS.
At it’s most innocent you and a friend can play through the game in a night over some pizza and beer and laugh at the dialogue. I won’t compare this game to any films or TV shows of similar quality but in it’s own medium i’d say that playing Resident Evil Survivor is the equivalent of playing a few rounds of Fist of the North Star at your local fighting game tournament. It’s fun, it’s silly, and everyone has a good time.
You ready for a little lesson in videogame subgenre? Let’s talk a bit about kusoge.
Japanese game enthusiasts have a word for the “so bad it’s good” way of thinking that I refused to condone earlier, and it literally means “Shitty Game”.
It’s called kusoge.
Sometimes you don’t know you’re playing kusoge until hours into it. You’re already in too deep so you keep playing. It’s at this point where if you were to stop now it’s like the game wins. It’s the old saying of “well if we don’t do X then the terrorists win” except now it’s “If I stop playing Mister Mosquito now I can’t value this time as ‘well spent’”.
Some developers make their whole brand based on Kusoge, some games start out as just simple projects and then fall off the beaten path into the great kusoge forest- where they end up being attacked by a bear or some kind of large bird.
Kusoge can be argued upon. In fact some of our favorite games can be considered kusoge despite no inherent connection to the “vibe” of kusoge. Take the “Marvel Vs. Capcom” series for instance. They sold millions of copies, they’re beloved by fans of mainstream and niche alike, and the game’s mechanics are broken as hell. You wanna learn how to do an infinite combo? All you had to do is ask:
(Colorful Language Warning)
So we know now that kusoge doesn’t have to just be obscure games about mosquitos. Let’s ask now….
Is Resident Evil Survivor kusoge?
Yeah.
Was it meant to be kusoge from the start?
I don’t think so.
Capcom outsourced a good amount of Survivor’s development to fellow Japanese studio Tose where they were tasked with making a first person shooter using fresh assets and a few models taken directly from Resident Evil 2. In lieu of pre-rendered backdrops they were tasked with making full 3D maps, seeing that the game was going to be played in a first person perspective. 32bit games with mostly 3D geometry have aged the worst out of the games of the time but even at it’s release Resident Evil Survivor’s textures looked rough.
In the sound department you have your staple loud footsteps, gunshots, and zombie moans alongside the usual effects, but instead of the ominous soundtracks from RE2&3 we got whatever the heck this is:
I checked. They didn’t hire the guy pretending to be deaf again. Instead this game’s soundtrack was composed by Shiro Kohmoto. There’s no other information online on this person’s other works so the name is likely a pseudonym. I’d imagine it’s either that or Shiro Kohmoto was the name of the program they used to procedurally generate some kind of sound that almost resembles music.
Resident Evil’s plotlines have always been a little silly but we crank up the clown meter all the way to 11 with Survivor’s story. You play as an amnesiac who spends a good amount of the game being generally confused, just like when I wake up after a night of beer and Street Fighter III. The game itself is maybe 2 hours tops and it’s fairly simple to finish so I don’t want to talk too much about what little story this game has. My favorite part though is when about two thirds into the game the writers try to force this game’s story into the main series’ canon via connecting the main character of this game to another important character in the series. It’s easily forgettable and you don’t necessarily need to think about Survivor when talking about RE’s main story.
Or so we thought…
If Raccoon City is where RE2&3 take place, and Rockfort Island is where Code: Veronica(canonically the fourth game in the series) takes place, then what happened at Sheena Island?
Well…
Sheena Island is where Survivor takes place, meaning that in Resident Evil 0 (a canon prequel to the original game), the writers included Survivor’s events and solidified it as canon, and as of writing it’s never been rewritten in future releases.
Now you don’t have to play Survivor to get the canon experience. As far as I know Sheena Island is never mentioned again and the events of the game are never explored further. Speaking of canon though you do need to play two other spin offs (Umbrella Chronicles and Darkside Chronicles) to experience important moments of the series’ history. Perhaps we’ll explore that another day.
I didn’t play Survivor until it had been out for a long while. I knew a friend who owned the game but I didn’t bother to ask to play it because of my long discussed fear of the series as a child. That being said my first time playing through this kusoge was as a kid though. I was in middle school. My family would take a trip to a rental store the next town over every few months to look at their different selections of movies and games. They had a significantly better selection of things to rent including a dedicated anime section, gameboy games for rent, and despite the PlayStation 2 having been out for several years at this point they still had PlayStation 1, Dreamcast, and N64 games available. It was almost as if this place’s selection had been personally curated instead of some algorithm shipping new movies and games to their door every week. It made sense seeing that the store wasn’t a chain. The only thing resembling a chain was the beaded curtain in the doorway connecting the store from the room my parents forbid me from entering. Despite them carrying adult films however they didn’t realize that hentai is different from anime so you so alongside Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon on shelves I’d see the likes of La Blue Girl, Tokio Private Police, and Wicked City.
I had finally drummed up the courage to ask my parents to rent Resident Evil: Survivor for me. At this point in my adolescence they didn’t care too much about the media I consumed so they agreed to rent the game for me on the condition that I don’t “have any nightmares”. That friday night i’d invite my friend James over to check the game out. I had still remembered that the game was considered “bad” by many outlets but I thrown aside my worries and he and I went through the game in an evening. I didn’t have a PS1 memory card at the time so we didn’t have much of a choice but to blast through the game, and in the short time we spent with it we didn’t hate it. Like I said before some games don’t need to be good by industry standards to be considered fun.
Resident Evil Survivor ended up selling a little over 400,000 copies, so Capcom decided to make the game into it’s own little standalone sub-series with Survivor 2: Code Veronica, Dino Stalker, and Dead Aim.
Survivor 2 was essentially a retelling of CV’s story and I can admit that this game in particular is neither genuinely good or “so bad it’s good”. It’s just bad, and Capcom must’ve known this because it never got a North American release. Strangely enough though it would see an official English version by the way of a European release.
Dino Stalker isn’t even a Resident Evil spin off but an offshoot of Capcom’s “Dino Crisis” series of games. You play as a World War II fighter pilot that gets transported to a world filled with dinosaurs. It’s kusoge in it’s purest form. It’s the salty reduction at the bottom of a pot of soup that boiled off all it’s water.
Dead Aim is easily the most competent of the spin off series. It’s the second of three Resident Evil games to take place on a cruise liner, and instead of being entirely in first person the game switches between third and first person depending on what you’re doing. When exploring the ship you’re in a somewhat behind the camera view almost similar to what RE4 would do 2 years later. When aiming your gun the game switches to first person much like it’s predecessors.
Dead Aim is a great game all around, and you can aim with a USB mouse when connected to your PlayStation 2.
Speaking of peripherals…let’s talk about the Guncon for a bit.
The Original Resident Evil Survivor did in fact have lightgun support in japan via Namco’s Guncon controller. This feature was stripped from the North American version of the game in response to the mass shooting at Columbine Highschool in 1999. Capcom wasn’t comfortable with American players using what resembled a real gun to control their game. I’ve never had the chance to play Survivor with a Guncon but I've heard that it doesn’t do a lot in terms of making the game more enjoyable. Perhaps one day i’ll have a chance to play this game in its’ intended methods.
Last year in preparation for this essay I went ahead and replayed Survivor, except this time in a PlayStation emulator- ePCSXe specifically. It runs great, so if you’re interested in playing this game go ahead and give the old emulator a whirl. Physical copies range in the $50–$70 range so only look into purchasing if you’re dead set on owning the game. I saw someone try to sell a factory sealed copy for $450.
Don’t buy that.
No game in existence will ever be worth that much.
The next game I’ll be talking about today is neither canon nor is it the first in a series of spin offs. Resident Evil Gaiden is it’s own thing, and it’s never been replicated aside from other games in the series possibly taking inspiration from the game’s nautical setting. Released in 2001 RE Gaiden was the second game in the series to come out on a handheld console, the first being a crude version of Resident Evil 2 for Tiger Electronics’ Game.com LCD game device.
Resident Evil Survivor
PAL Release: 12/14/01
JPN Release: 03/29/02
NA Release: 06/03/02
Metacritic Score: N/A
I’m including the PAL release here because this game has some significance within the region, specifically the UK.
Resident Evil Gaiden hit PAL regions first because the game was developed by a British studio by the name of M4, who were known exclusively for budget games based on existing properties. Shortly after Resident Evil Gaiden’s release M4 would put out hits like Mary Kate and Ashley: Winner’s Circle, Antz: World Sportz, and Mission Impossible: Operation Surma.
I kid here but this is a good segue into another debate on whether a “bad” game has value. Take in point this development studio here. Real people worked there for years and developed games that sold well enough to warrant more games. That’s already rudimentary success in it’s own right. I’m not going to dog on their games because they made an honest living out of these licensed games. Do I want to play Mary Kate and Ashley: Winner’s Circle? No. Do I have to spend 20 minutes laughing at it? No. Resident Evil Gaiden is a competent little game, and it holds up fairly well. I played it as a child back in 2001 when it first came out. I played it again as an adult three years ago and a third time late last year when I first thought of writing this essay. It still holds up.
I’m not even a trendsetter when I say that RE Gaiden is good, people are already starting to realize that the game wasn’t bad. Reviewers in 2001 however were more than happy to dismiss the game as a poor attempt to bring a beloved franchise to a new console, and with that also bringing a new style of gameplay- because Resident Evil Gaiden couldn’t be the same old genre of survival horror action.
Resident Evil Gaiden is essentially an RPG without EXP. Ammo and health management carries over from the main games but now you have bulletproof vests to equip for added defense and the ability to play with three characters simultaneously at various points throughout the game. Puzzles in the game are simple enough, with just the right amount of challenge for a game of this small size, and we can already see that the game’s spritework is phenomenal, so that just leaves the story and the music.
In Resident Evil Gaiden you play most of the game as Barry Burton, who we remember from Resident Evil 1 and the tail end of Resident Evil 3. Gaiden takes place a few years after the event of the original RE trilogy, and Barry is now working with an organization tasked with taking down the Umbrella Corporation. His mission in this game is to infiltrate the zombie-infested cruise ship “Starlight” and rescue fellow operative Leon Kennedy- who we all know as one of the two protagonists of Resident Evil 2. My one nitpick with Gaiden is Leon’s physical portrayal in the North American boxart. If you scroll back up a bit you’ll notice that he’s wearing an altered version of his Raccoon City Police Department uniform from RE2. How did he get this new uniform? Raccoon City had been obliterated years prior by a nuclear missile….I know the game’s not canon but this choice of boxart always bothered me, even as a child. The Japanese and European boxart just has a lifebuoy covered in blood.
Years later I would learn that the artwork of Leon with the different RPD uniform was from a collection of concept art for RE2 during it’s initial development stages. There’s a lot of recorded history about RE2’s development so I won’t go into too much detail here.
All that’s left to talk about is the music.
This is the battle theme for when you initiate a fight with a monster in the game. It rules.
Here’s the battle theme for Capcom’s 1989 horror RPG Sweet Home for the NES- based on the 1988 film of the same name. In 1993 Capcom would attempt to remake Sweet Home but the project eventually would turn into a new IP by the name of Biohazard, which would see release in 1996 in the US as
Resident Evil.
Maybe I’m just imagining things but doesn’t Gaiden’s battle theme sound a bit like Sweet Home’s? I asked Gaiden’s composer Sahid Ahmad over twitter and unlike former Atlus USA employee Gail Salamanca he never responded. Can’t win them all…
If you listen closely in this snippet of gameplay you’ll notice that the simple composition of the music in this area get’s more produced as you approach an enemy. Once out of it’s sight the music returns to normal. This dynamic soundtrack is what most games should strive for. When a zombie moans however the music stops completely. This isn’t a creative decision but a necessity due to the game’s hardware. The gameboy only has 5 sound channels, so it can’t play the music and the moan at the same time, so the music abruptly stops, the moan occurs, and the music returns. This always bugged me but now as an adult it almost adds to the momentum of the game. That moan isn’t grating, but the silence does give you a second of reprieve while you attempt to dodge the monster or take it on.
While I said that Gaiden isn’t canon it’s worth it to talk about exactly why it isn’t. I’m honestly surprised they didn’t just roll with it but I suppose given the game’s poor reception they decided not to play into the story. Let’s get into spoiler territory. Scroll down to the epilogue if you want to stay pure on your playthrough of the game.
So as I said earlier RE Gaiden takes place years after the Raccoon City incident, with Barry and Leon joining an organization tasked with eliminating Umbrella. At this point in the timeline Claire Redfield had already experienced the horrors of Rockfort Island in Code Veronica. CV’s intro saw Claire infiltrating an Umbrella facility in France right before being arrested and sent to Rockfort’s prison. Towards the beginning of the game she mentions sending an email about Umbrella’s experiments at Rockfort to Leon. If we were to assume Gaiden was canon that would mean that Leon and possibly even Claire had already started working for this organization. Who wrote Gaiden’s story in the first place but Hiroki Kato…
The director of Code Veronica.
Kato may have wanted Gaiden to connect to Code Veronica in some way before the game was retconned by Resident Evil 4. How did RE4 retcon Gaiden you ask?
Because in RE4 you play as Leon Kennedy well after the Raccoon City incident, not as a underground operative but as a government agent working directly under the President, that and at the end of Resident Evil Gaiden it’s revealed that Leon is killed and is replaced by a monster that takes identical human form- it’s only monstrous tell being bright green blood.
If you know RE4 then you may know that Capcom and director Shinji Mikami had a lengthy development with the game that saw many different forms. The first reported version of RE4 didn’t have any real resemblance to the previous games, so it became it’s own IP: Devil May Cry. For all we know in some separate reality Leon could’ve stayed dead and DMC would be RE4. Kato might’ve been gearing up to make Claire and Dante (from the Devil May Cry series) the flagship heroes of the franchise. We’ll never know.
EPILOGUE
In preparations for writing this essay I went ahead and watched a few video reviews of Survivor and Gaiden. I’m not going to say who’s reviews I watched but I kept hearing things about how they weren’t “real” Resident Evil games. If you were to take a few seconds and read the names of the games then you’d know that they are in fact “real” Resident Evil games. They’re just not the games that most fans hold onto their respective pedestals. You’ve got to understand that being this diehard of a fan means accepting games for what they are. For every Resident Evil 2 Remake there’s a Resident Evil 6. For every Resident Evil 4 there’s Umbrella Corps. This weird internal elitism within a franchise is what makes game enthusiasts look like children. Gaming as a hobby is supposed to be about having fun, and talking shit about supposed “bad” games is fruitless. For every forum post someone makes calling The Last of Us “woke SJW garbage” that same person could be spending their time punching up a game- or better yet… playing one.
Negativity brings the clicks though, and for the foreseeable future you’re always going to see YouTube channels fuel the machine that is manufactured, performative rage. If you really wanted to be negative, start with talking about the exploitative labor practices at various AAA development studios, or about the sexual harassment claims throughout the industry as a whole. When a game comes out though it just doesn’t make sense to scream about how “oh, the fruit in the background of this multiplayer level doesn’t explode when I shoot it” or “this game runs at 40fps on ultra settings on my 5 year old PC” or “Balan Wonderworld is BAD?! CHILDHOOD RUINED!!!!”. You can have genuine concerns about a game, but let’s be honest. We’re just being angry on the internet.
IN CONCLUSION
If you have fun playing a game then it’s good. If developing the game helped put food on the table then it’s good. All videogames are good unless proven otherwise. Resident Evil Survivor is a strange little romp that you and a friend can laugh at for a couple hours, and Resident Evil Gaiden is a 2 hour exploration into what happens when a mix of ideas and overseas influence creates a game unlike anything else in it’s franchise. Play them both. Gaiden and Survivor run fine on emulators and like Survivor Gaiden is selling for far too much on ebay. A loose cartridge is in the triple digits, and a complete box copy is almost $1k. Don’t ever buy these games from these types of people.
-PR
