The story told in these cutscenes, which has since been canonised in Resident Evil 0, goes like this: the big evil corporation of the franchise – Umbrella – has its own little township in a place called Sheena Island. The story is told purely through cutscenes using in-game graphics, eschewing that fancy CG from other Resident Evil games, but for some reason the development team decided to heavily compress these cutscenes into a lower resolution. It’s an inauspicious start, and the words “Raccoon City wasn’t the only place an outbreak occurred…” makes the whole thing feel like bad fan-fiction. The opening recap is a little lacking, too, with just a black screen and a disembodied voice giving us a summary of the Racoon City incident, along with a text crawl that can’t quite keep up.
Gone is the introduction montage that was standard for the franchise by that point, presumably due to a lower budget.
Related: Seven Resident Evil Games You Might Have MissedĪs soon as you start the game, you know you’re in spin-off territory. Released for the original PlayStation in the year 2000, Resident Evil: Survivor is a first-person spin-off acting as a last hurrah for the franchise’s presence on the console – but the results are something of a mixed herb. The first Resident Evil alone was originally planned to be a first-person game ( following its Sweet Home inspirations) before technical limitations forced Capcom to adopt a third-person approach.
It’s the standard for the franchise now, and we even saw some on-rails shooters released for the Wii in the form of The Umbrella Chronicles and The Darkside Chronicles back in the late 2000s. The concept of Resident Evil in the first-person may not be anything new these days. With the imminent release of Resident Evil Village upon us, it only seems fitting to take a look back at Capcom’s first attempt at translating survival horror to the first-person. Various games, spin-offs and other media all bear the brand. As video game franchises go, Resident Evil has quite the legacy.
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