I hope Resident Evil 8's speedrunning is as good as the Resident Evil 2 REmake

Ethan Sprinters

The Resident Evil 2 REmake was released in January of 2019 and I played it for the first time a few months after release. Very quickly, I fell in love with the game with its concisely designed map, tense horror gameplay, and the true feeling of survival horror the game provided. However, what really drew me in was the way the game ranks your performance in playthroughs as it's all based around how quickly you can get through the game, with the top grades requiring the game be beat under a time limit.

It was thanks to these speedruns that I played the game through around twenty times across the standard and hardcore difficulties, perfecting my runs to get the highest rank, the esteemed S+ rank, awarded for completing the game in under three and a half hours or two and a half hours on the standard and hardcore difficulties respectively, with 3 or fewer saves and no cheesing it with the infinite weapons.

Resident Evil Village's castle seems ripe for exploration and speedrunning opportunities (image courtesy of Capcom)

Part of what made Resident Evil 2 so suited for speedrunning was the layout of the police station, with its non-linearity and the way all the rooms and corridors loop back into each other providing a veritable playground for exploration, or a dense maze to get lost in depending on how you look at it. Learning the map was incredibly fun, as I steadily became intensely familiar with the location of every key item and resource I would need while memorizing codes to further shave off the time finding them out in game again.

Tying all this together was now-infamous Mr X, or Tyrant, whose presence puts your knowledge of the map to the test as he effectively acts as a brick wall should he decide to make an appearance and force you to quickly figure out the fastest way around him, be that temporarily stunning him with a flash grenade, hot-footing it through the shortest alternative route to your destination or, if you're really desperate, keep getting thrown back as you try to juuust squeeze past him because you swear you can fit through the gap between the hulking behemoth and the wall.

This pesky tyrant was a dense hurdle in learning how to dash through Resi 2 Remake's police station

All these elements coming together is what has made Resident Evil 2 my favourite game in the series as it all encourages on-the-fly decision making to get the fastest times, a decision which hooked me far more than I expected it to as I went from not believing I could beat the game in even under 6 hours, to beating it in under 3 on standard difficulty, swearing I couldn't touch hardcore, to finally getting the S+ ranks on the hardcore campaigns and having a swell time with my shiny new infinite ammo rocket launcher. While I'm not headed for any leaderboards any time soon (because that would require me to figure out how to shave another hour or so off my time) the sense of satisfaction I got from all this was immense, and I would love to see it again in Resident Evil 8.

A minigun with endless ammo? Don't mind if I do

With what we've seen of the upcoming Resident Evil 8, it looks to be a perfect parallel to everything Resident Evil 2 did right with its design; a big spooky castle and village to explore, interconnected pathways, and big, ever-present threats to block that perfect route you had planned, and while none of this is confirmed I hope Capcom learned from how they designed Resi 2 and carry that forward into their newest installment.

My concerns that they haven't learned come from last year's Resident Evil 3 Remake, which just didn't hook me in the same way with how linearly the game was designed. I still did a few playthroughs to get the speedrun times, but I lost interest far quicker than I did with the previous remake as it quickly became a case of simply going through motions without much variation at all; I wasn't so much learning the map and where items were as I was memorizing a direct route to take through it all and while that might be preferable to some people, I much prefer exploration and getting familiar with a place over simply trying to do one path better each time.

Devs at Capcom have cited Resident Evil 4 as an inspiration for 8, but I hope they've injected some of Resi 2's blood into it too (Image courtesy of Capcom)

While it's still to early to say how Resident Evil 8 will turn out, I'm still holding out hope for it to draw me in and make me love it as much as, if not more than 2's remake when it releases next week on May 7th.