Your Personal RE Game Rankings

[Turo602]

You can stick up for it if you like, but it doesn't make it any less obnoxious. Coming onto a forum built on the classic games just to drivel on about how awful tank controls are, like it isn't the most eye-rolling, unoriginal, and tired opinion amongst this fandom. It's obvious bait, which is why all 3 of this dead forum's active members didn't bother engaging with it in any serious manner. Would it have been better for us to keep the forum a ghost town by just ignoring it? Should we have taken the bait and gone through the motions of arguing over who's right or wrong? At the very least, we made our disagreement known and had fun with it.

 

[Wesker90]

Even Mert's Re6 arguments are more worthwhile than "Hurr Durr I hate tank controls"

 

[leon_hellppp]

Turo602, the most eye-rolling, unoriginal, and tired opinion among the fandom is the opinion that the only real Resident Evil games were those released during the first few years of an almost three decades-long franchise. I don't understand the mindset of immediately characterizing opinions contrary to one's own as "bait", and branding the entire 1 person not laughing at them as obnoxious (or troll fanboys or whatever in Gun Powder's case). If it's so obnoxious to you that 1 single user didn't participate in your point and laugh party, then perhaps you've been living in an e-bubble for too long, and have forgotten that meeting with resistance sometimes is actually just...normal.

Would it have been better for us to keep the forum a ghost town by just ignoring it? Should we have taken the bait and gone through the motions of arguing over who's right or wrong? At the very least, we made our disagreement known and had fun with it.

It would have at least been more productive to ask them to elaborate before deciding how to proceed. You're not keeping the forum active by ridiculing people for posting divergent opinions. You're deliberately driving away users who might make it more active.

 

[Ikawaru]

Personally, if I wanted "resistance" I'd just stay at work. All day everyday I'm met with flak and disagreements from both superiors and subordinates and that alone forces me to hash out strategies and communication skills to "win the debate" so to speak. I'd rather just have a few people around I generally agree with on what is the golden standard is and evolve from that perspective into normal discussions because it is indeed tiring at this point to continuously recycle the same old tired discussions about the series. You like the classic games? Awesome, come here and relax. You think RE4 is the gold standard? Well, can't say I agree with that but there is in fact tons of RE4 communities out there. People's "sources" must be respected.

 

[Springhosen]

I don't think it's fair to say that the forum was "built on the classic games" when Steve graciously offers each main title its own sub forum, even separating remakes from their originals for easier viewing/searching for people who feel the way @Foxtrot94 feels.

And those feelings are valid. We've had users with unpopular opinions in terms of the general forum populace before and have never run them off with pitchforks, why should we start now?

I don't think it's overly hospitable to assume that a moment of frustration over a mechanic which is well and truly obsolete, and has been for about twenty years at this point, is bait. This isn't some random troll who signed up just to rile everyone up before moving on, this profile predates every user jumping on them except for one.

It's an opinion that doesn't match yours and I'm sorry but that's not a reason to **** all over the person and make them never want to come back, especially after half of you were in the forum updates topic just a week ago venting your spleens over the inactivity around here.

Yeah there are RE4 communities out there, including this community where you can discuss any RE game you want to.

 

[Jonipoon]

Turo602, the most eye-rolling, unoriginal, and tired opinion among the fandom is the opinion that the only real Resident Evil games were those released during the first few years of an almost three decades-long franchise. I don't understand the mindset of immediately characterizing opinions contrary to one's own as "bait", and branding the entire 1 person not laughing at them as obnoxious (or troll fanboys or whatever in Gun Powder's case). If it's so obnoxious to you that 1 single user didn't participate in your point and laugh party, then perhaps you've been living in an e-bubble for too long, and have forgotten that meeting with resistance sometimes is actually just...normal.


It would have at least been more productive to ask them to elaborate before deciding how to proceed. You're not keeping the forum active by ridiculing people for posting divergent opinions. You're deliberately driving away users who might make it more active.

Nobody said that the only "real" Resident Evil games were those released in the first few years. So before you jump to conclusions, let's just look at what actually happened: Someone said something stupid without elaborating, and people responded jokingly. I won't respond with serious arguments against someone who clearly isn't serious themselves. There are plenty of people who don't like tank controls and I have nothing against those who feel like they just can't get used to them, but there's a difference in how you choose to present your words. To take another example, I'm not a fan of first person games and will always criticize such games, but I won't be so ignorant as to simply jump into some COD forum and say "FPS is just a dumb genre LOL".

Noticably, he didn't respond and that could've been the end of the story, but then you chose to defend his bait post for some reason. Maybe you were looking for an excuse to turn this into an old games vs new games discussions, which, we've clearly had enough of at this point. I've said many times in the past that everyone's free to enjoy a certain game in any franchise (not just the Resident Evil series), but it becomes a pretty ridiculous discussion if someone claims that a newer game is the "best in the entire series" if they haven't even played the older games.

It's like watching Jurassic World and claiming that it's the best dinosaur movie ever made, but you haven't even bothered watching the original Jurassic Park.

 

[leon_hellppp]

And likewise nobody said they wanted an "excuse to turn this into an old games vs new games discussion" so let's not jump to conclusions there either, eh? Regardless, it doesn't need to be stated explicitly for one to see that this is the unwritten rule the three amigos are trying to enforce around here. If there is a habitual, persistent pattern across threads of mocking people who voice criticism of certain games, and also mocking people who praise aspects of others, you're making the conclusion clear yourselves. Indeed, that is the whole point of the behaviour. It wouldn't be done if one didn't want others to internalise a lesson about what they should and shouldn't express, and you're not fooling anyone by hiding behind the plausible deniability coward's cover of "but nobody said it outright". I mean, at least Gun Powder B is honest about wanting a hugbox and openly declares it ITT.

Also, let's not revise history here. The user you're referring to didn't dump some low-effort five-word bait post signed with a caps lock LOL like in your sensationalized example (although, if you would like me to, I could link you to just such a post by Turo602 written in another thread in which you yourself participated). They prefaced their post by stating their experience with the series, ranked the games they'd beaten as per the topic, and explained why the games they liked least were the games they liked least. Had they written that the controls were "mindnumbingly stupid" in the absence of any other substance, their post would have been more like your example of bait. As is, it was a small portion of a perfectly on-topic reply to a thread, no matter how much you try to spin it.

There are plenty of people who don't like tank controls and I have nothing against those who feel like they just can't get used to them, but there's a difference in how you choose to present your words.

Yes, in general you'll find that people word their thoughts in a more inflammatory, preemptively defensive manner in rigid environments which force consensus. You know, Rage Against the Machine is quite a provocative band name, but asking them to "present their words" more carefully would be rather missing the point, wouldn't it? And for what it's worth, your Jurassic Park analogy presumes that the user hasn't played the classic games. They don't say that anywhere in their post, and you could reasonably infer that they in fact must have played them, or else how did they come to dislike the controls so much?

Anyway, overall I just feel pretty let down, I guess. I remember encountering much more variety of opinion during my time on message boards many years ago. I was hoping for ResidentEvil.org, not ResidentEvilButNotAfter4.org. Conversely, all the other places to discuss RE online are the opposite, where people who prefer the classic games get unduly bashed. I was hoping just to find one place where everybody could be different. I thought I'd found it, and your comment about people being neutral in the site hosting thread convinced me of it. But there's no escaping the polarization of everything at the moment. I suppose it's a sign of the times.

 

[Turo602]

Please link us to it. At least now we know why you're so butthurt about this with your long winded pedantic posts. I mean, how damn bored are we to seriously be arguing over the dismissal of troll bait from someone who's first post in 3 years is "new games good, old games bad?" There's no elaboration needed. It's an ignorant opinion, whether you like tank controls or not. So this notion that we're driving people away who don't agree with us is bullsh*t.

We're not some clique that bullies people away whenever someone goes against the grain. The 3 of us hardly have anything in common and have disagreed and argued in the past, yet we still co-exist. It's called having a spine and having a sense of humor. You don't know sh*t about us, yet you think you got us all pegged because we didn't talk about some stupid video like it was high art or didn't want to engage an ignorant opinion seriously. Sorry to disappoint you.

 

[UniqTeas]

I guess there is a bit of difficulty in people appreciating the older games when they weren't there when they first came out. I personally think that the original RE2 is still the best game in the series, but I would probably not recommend it to someone who wasn't an absolute hardcore fan of the series, just because it is hard and you can lean on the remake for context. But if you were to stack up the two games at times of release, the original RE2 is a superior and more well thought out experience. I suppose there is just some inherent luck that I have played each game as they came out so I can have a more clear view of the games as they release.

I remember the divisiveness over RE4 when it came out - how critics loved the fresh breath of air it had because they felt the games were getting stale and not evolving enough. Some fans loved the changeup, but as we have seen on these boards, some people hated the more action focused gameplay. I loved it honestly, but I appreciate the sentiment that it did remove a lot of the greatness of the original games. The same thing happened with RE7 which turned a lot of people off, but added another slew of fans to the series.

To each his own I suppose, but I would say that the original trilogy of games (and you can include REmake and RE0) are among the best the series has ever had and although the accessibility is not quite there for some people, if you can at least give them a decent chance (2-3 hoursish), maybe you can learn to appreciate the art and storytelling that is a little bit lost today.

 

[Ikawaru]

I remember the divisiveness over RE4 when it came out - how critics loved the fresh breath of air it had because they felt the games were getting stale and not evolving enough. Some fans loved the changeup, but as we have seen on these boards, some people hated the more action focused gameplay. I loved it honestly, but I appreciate the sentiment that it did remove a lot of the greatness of the original games.

Highlighted for emphasis because this now an issue. I also loved RE4's action when it came out and playing it was like crack mixed with heroin, but deep down inside, buried in my subconscious, I knew that this game was gonna hurt the franchise and cause long term damage and it did just that and playing now really reveals what a joke of an RE game it is, and something like RE2R's formula should have been the natural evolution of the franchise and would have kept its consistency intact whilst keeping the older fans whilst attracting newer fans.

As someone who is now in the business world I can tell you that consistency is best, even if you have to make some slight adjustments to certain thing like implementing OTS or defensive weapons like knives that can break, it's always best to keep a consistent archetype and that is why Mario, Metroid, and Zelda are still going strong and has received very little complaints in there almost 40 years of existence.

The problem here is that there are still people who think RE4 did nothing wrong and I can't for the life of me conclude that these people are fans of the series because it butchered both the logistical aspect of the gameplay AND the story, and turned it into some weird Taliban game especially with the Island section and completely butchered its more communistic roots. Yes, a business person who prefers evil corporations villains rather than Spanish Taliban or "Twilight" Miranda, go figure, the 21st century is strange indeed!

But yeah anyway completely trashing the old games but saying you like/love RE4 and RE7 and insinuating that therese games were corrective measures to the franchise is bad, mmmkay? It's all Mikami's fault, really, I mean he did contribute a lot to the franchise like artistic backdrops and save rooms (Mikami could possibly be credited as the first person to coin the term "Safe Space!") but frankly putting him in complete control of where to take the franchise was a big fat mistake just like his Gamecube exclusivity deals.

 

[Turo602]

People can still be fans of the series even if they started with 4, 5, 6, 7, or Village. As long as they're enjoying the series in some capacity, they're fans. But that doesn't mean they can't be ignorant about the series, unreasonable, or stupid. This also applies to some of the diehard fans of the classics who simply refuse to let go of the past and won't tolerate any growth. I think that's when discourse becomes annoying and a chore. No matter what perspective you're coming into the series from, I don't think it's too much to expect people to speak open and honestly about what they love, even if it challenges what they believe. I know my opinions have fluctuated a lot over the years and even though I've been vocal about my dislike over the modern direction the series has gone in, I'll never be so brash as to act like the games themselves are terrible, especially in a place like this where people are expected to have real discussions and not just social media like drive-bys.

 

[Jonipoon]

Well said. You got to give credit where credit's due, and I believe most of us on this forum does that. Like for instance, I played RE4 for the first time in 2020, and I literally PRAISED the game - But I also shared my grievances and explained why and how I felt the way I did.

We're not some uptight a-holes completely trashing everything that's not pre-2005, but to some people it might seem as if criticizing a game like RE7 equals being "afraid of change" or "not getting it" even though there absolutely can be enjoyable aspects of said game. That doesn't mean it's immune to criticism. It also doesn't mean you can't enjoy RE7. At the same time, nobody in their sane mind can object the fact that the Resident Evil brand has rebranded itself countless of times, and that is bound to have its effect on the fanbase. Understanding that is just as important to a classic fan as to a new fan.

At the end of the day we're all just fans wishing for the best for the franchise. With such a broken history of constantly changing direction and style, it's important to show a little respect to each other when discussing these games.

Oh and doing some research before getting into heated debates might just do the trick as well. Play the games.

 

[bSTAR_182]

Generally speaking, I'm one of those who prefer the remakes over the originals, both for gameplay as well as fleshing out the story more and making the series feel more cohesive. That being said, as a long-time fan, I still hold respect for what the original games accomplished and pioneered even in terms of gameplay for many survival-horror games that followed afterward. And while it's not ideal for games today, at the time, tank controls had their benefits.

Regardless of when someone becomes a fan of a series and what game sparks their interest in said series, your approach in a discussion board is everything. The original poster gave a lazy response in terms of why they felt like the older games are "dead last" to their RE ranking but also mentions not having played them all. You get back what you put out. A response with a goofy clip on Youtube was the best approach to someone who clearly doesn't care to elaborate further on an otherwise closeminded remark to the older games.

 

[RipvanX]

In terms of the reimaginings fleshing out the stories more, I can’t see it. RE:2 added the orphanage which was the only real NEW lore to the game. The zapping system of the original is seemingly gone and there are much less Leon and Claire interactions. It was a perfect opportunity to expand on that (like leaving or taking the backpack/sub machine gun in the locker room) but nothing like that was present in the remake.

They made the scenarios more like RE1.. like why? This was a missed opportunity to make a more coherent storyline without having to play 4 scenarios to get the whole picture. Instead, we got half of a story made that can’t coexist for many different reasons. Mr. X dying to Birkin was a cool moment but it felt more like fanfiction and contradicts him stalking Leon later in the lab. Annette dying in 2 separate spots from one another. Recycling the same boss fights for both characters. Imagine playing Claire A then Leon A right after from the original, that’s what the remake felt like.

I still think the game is enjoyable to play but the flaws are there and hold it back from true greatness. The Birkin RE7 style tapes didn’t do those iconic moments justice either. Call it nostalgia but the way the cutscenes played out in the OG were done much better. Honestly, I can see why it turned out the way it did. They probably made it half way through production than realized they would of had to do motion capture for the B scenarios, which would have overblown the budget for the game.

As for RE:3, it’s simply a completely different experience from the OG and should be treated as such. In the meantime, we have RE:4’s potential retcon of the original events of Operation Javier. We are in a strange spot with these newer RE games when it comes to the lore and what Capcoms true intentions are for future stories. They really need a follow up to Rev2 and even RE7’s Connections syndicate before moving in new directions.

 

[Jonipoon]

Alright so I haven't made an updated list since 2020, let's see where some of the latest games ended up. I'm using a new system to rate them now.

=Simply amazing
= Great
= Good
= Okay
= Bad
= Terrible

1. Resident Evil Remake
2. Resident Evil 2 Remake
3. Resident Evil 3: Nemesis
4. Resident Evil: Revelations 2
5. Resident Evil 2
6. Resident Evil - Code: Veronica
7. Resident Evil 4 Remake
8. Resident Evil (1996)
9. Resident Evil Zero
10. Resident Evil 4
11. Resident Evil 7
12. Resident Evil: Outbreak
13. Resident Evil 5
14. Resident Evil: VIllage
15. Resident Evil 3 Remake
16. Resident Evil: Revelations

So the RE4 remake surprised me well enough and ended up getting a good grade, mainly because it managed to be a better "Resident Evil" game. Although I still think the original is a better game overall, this list simply boils down to personal taste and what I consider to be great RE games. To noones surprise, Village ended up in a bottom spot with a terrible rating. Otherwise my list looks pretty much the same as last time with two minor changes: the OG RE3 has climbed past Revelations 2 after a recent replay, and believe it or not - RE7 has climbed past Outbreak.

 

[Ikawaru]

They probably made it half way through production than realized they would of had to do motion capture for the B scenarios, which would have overblown the budget for the game.

Someone mentioned, and I think it's probable, that they split a full budget title between RE2R and RE3R probably because they didn't think they would sell all that great. There's actually perks as well as drawbacks to this, the perks being that it's likely they didn't take RE2R super seriously and just decided to have fun with it and whip up some flashy remake that older fans would dig and the result was sheer fun. The obvious drawbacks being, as I mentioned earlier, that RE2R did feel like it was 85% complete and did need some fine tuning. RE3R being the terrible offender because it's lack of budget and lack of taking it sufficiently seriously feels like it was 50% complete.

If only both of those remakes were taken as seriously as RE4R was, because even though I did not come off of RE4R feeling REjuvenated and despite all of its best efforts to make it a better RE game...it's still RE4 and I have a serious issue with the core experience of that game and this was suiper faithful to it despite it all the cool additions.

I guess, what I'm trying to say is, if they took RE2R and RE3R a bit more seriously but not overtly, and they took RE4R a bit less seriously, the results would have been far superior. Capcom did make it clear though that they consider RE4 the real meat of the franchise so that is the logic behind all of this. Too bad because I'm starting to feel like I'm the only person who still thinks RE1 is the heart and soul of the franchise. Most people who think RE4 is the pillar of the franchise are either younger than me or older than me it looks like, as RE1 was released at the perfect childhood age for gaming and I guess both people younger and older than myself wouldn't get it.

Maybe I myself am just getting too old for this. Someone I knew who is now dead once said that video games are for kids, though that line didn't resonate when I heard it in my early 20's; I enjoyed video games all throughout my 20's, I'm starting to think there might be some truth to it, as I'm starting to lose the spirit and enthusiasm I once had unfortunately.

 

[J-Virus]

Sticking to the mainline entries:

16.) Resident Evil 6
15.) Resident Evil 0
14.) Revelations
13.) Resident Evil 3 Remake
12.) Resident Evil 5
11.) Revelations 2
10.) Resident Evil
09.) Resident Evil 8
08.) Code Veronica
07.) Resident Evil 7
06.) Resident Evil 2
05.) Resident Evil 2 Remake
04.) Resident Evil 3
03.) Resident Evil 4
02.) Resident Evil 4 Remake
01.) Resident Evil Remake

#16 is the only one that I dislike, I enjoy #15-13 and love #12-1. So yeah, I'm a pretty big fan of this franchise.

 

[1995umk3]

#1 RE-Code Veronica X
#2 Resident Evil 3
#3 Resident Evil 1
#4 Resident Evil 4
#5 Resident Evil 2
#6 Resident Evil 1 Remake
#7 Resident Evil 0 (Couldn't Finish)

I didn’t play the others.

 

[meiwow]

Although a lot of people like to deny it, they started the series with re2 and I think that's the reason a lot of people's favorite one is re2. I see that happen often, a great new ip comes out and there's some people that don't give it a shot and then they play the sequel because "they heard the first one was good" and they'll pretend that they played the first one first and the second one still happens to be their favorite. I do not believe that for a second. I think most of the people who's re2 is their favorite jumped in the RE van wagon with re2. I think anyone that fell in love with the resident evil series when they played the original, they would never say re2 is their favorite. I personally do not believe that. Anyways:

Top 3 favorites "real RE games" first. Followed by top 2 "other RE games". Remakes do not count for me.

#1 Resident Evil (1996)
#2 Resident Evil 3 nemesis (1999)
#3 Resident Evil 2 (1998)

#4 Resident Evil 5
#5 Resident Evil 7

Don't really like the other games all that much. I still enjoyed them a little bit I felt they were disappointments. Yes, including Re4.

 

[1995umk3]

I played the first one first (1996 one) and I hated it. Didn’t understand tank controls, kept dying next to Berry checking the blood. RE2 is where it started for me. It changed the way I thought about the games.