Board 8 > Rate the VG Story Day 445: Resident Evil 0

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Todays game is Resident Evil 0. How would you rate the story on a scale from 1-10?

You can still rate previous days games if you want or change your score, just post the name of the game and the score. If you want to know which games you have rated or what score you gave a game, just ask me. If you want to know what you rated a previous game just let me know. Nominations for future days are welcome.

Previous Results:
Clannad - 9.75 (4 votes)
Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers - 9.68 (11 votes)
Outer Wilds - 9.61 (22 votes)
Silent Hill 2 - 9.5 (20 votes)
Planescape: Torment - 9.5 (13 votes)
Higurashi When They Cry - 9.5 (9 votes)
Eternal Darkness: Sanitys Requiem 9.38 - (13 votes)
Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker - 9.33 (10 votes)
428: Shibuya Scramble - 9.27 (9 votes)
Nier Automata - 9.25 (31 votes)
The Forgotten City - 9.2 (4 votes)
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC - 9.2 (20 votes)
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations - 9.19 (35 votes)
Judgment - 9.17 (6 votes)
Last Window: The Secret of Cape West - 9.15 (10 votes)
Deus Ex - 9.14 (13 votes)
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim - 9.1 (14 votes)
The House in Fata Morgana - 9.06 (11 votes)
The Witcher III: Wild Hunt - 9.04 (8 votes)
Yakuza 0 - 9.03 (13 votes)
Red Dead Redemption 2 - 9 (8 votes)
Final Fantasy XIV (overall) - 8.98 (11 votes)
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater - 8.95 (31 votes)
Steins;Gate - 8.94 (9 votes)
Mother 3 - 8.91 (15 votes)
Umineko When They Cry - 8.89 (14 votes)
Zero Escape: Virtues Last Reward - 8.88 (21 votes)
Return of the Obra Dinn - 8.85 (10 votes)
Silent Hill 4: The Room - 8.83 (6 votes)
Suikoden II - 8.8 (11 votes)
Persona 3 - 8.76 (22 votes)
Nier - 8.75 (18 votes)
Omori - 8.75 (8 votes)
Grim Fandango - 8.75 (14 votes)
Xenogears - 8.73 (24 votes)
Tales of Berseria - 8.71 (15 votes)
Metal Gear Solid - 8.68 (28 votes)
Final Fantasy Tactics - 8.67 (27 votes)
Shadow Hearts: Covenant - 8.67 (6 votes)
Pyre - 8.64 (7 votes)
Portal 2 - 8.64 (19 votes)
Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward - 8.64 (11 votes)
Bastion - 8.63 (12 votes)
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty 8.63 (32 votes)
AI: The Somnium Files - 8.59 (13 votes)
Yakuza: Like a Dragon - 8.58 (6 votes)
The Legend of Zelda: Majoras Mask - 8.57 (28 votes)
Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together - 8.56 (8 votes)
Persona 4 - 8.56 (32 votes)
Disco Elysium - 8.56 (17 votes)
Marvels Guardians of the Galaxy - 8.55 (4 votes)
Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance - 8.53 (18 votes)
SOMA - 8.5 (6 votes)
The Great Ace Attorney: Resolve - 8.48 (11 votes)
Fate/Stay Night - 8.48 (12 votes)
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic - 8.47 (16 votes)
Undertale - 8.45 (42 votes)
Dragon Quest V - 8.44 (16 votes)
Mass Effect 2 - 8.44 (29 votes)
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd - 8.43 (12 votes)
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice - 8.42 (17 votes)
What Remains of Edith Finch - 8.41 (19 votes)
Chrono Trigger - 8.4 (41 votes)
Shadow Hearts - 8.38 (8 votes)
Blasphemous - 8.38 (4 votes)
Shenmue II - 8.38 (4 votes)
Snatcher - 8.33 (6 votes)
Final Fantasy X - 8.31 (56 votes)
Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door - 8.31 (17 votes)
Final Fantasy VII - 8.29 (38 votes)
South Park: The Stick of Truth - 8.25 (18 votes)
Dead Space - 8.25 (8 votes)
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus - 8.23 (6 votes)
Fallout: New Vegas - 8.23 (13 votes)
Lunar: Silver Star Story - 8.22 (9 votes)
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective - 8.21 (19 votes)
Parasite Eve - 8.19 (9 votes)
Dragon Quest XI - 8.19 (17 votes)
Final Fantasy VI - 8.19 (43 votes)
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - 8.19 (43 votes)
The Walking Dead Season 1 - 8.16 (22 votes)
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies - 8.15 (17 votes)
Wolfenstein: The New Order - 8.14 (7 votes)
The Last of Us - 8.13 (35 votes)
The Witcher - 8.13 (7 votes)
Fire Emblem: Three Houses - 8.12 (14 votes)
Tales From the Borderlands - 8.12 (7 votes)
Conkers Bad Fur Day - 8.11 (9 votes)
Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals - 8.11 (9 votes)
The Wolf Among Us - 8.11 (15 votes)
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance - 8.11 (17 votes)
Hellblade: Senuas Sacrifice - 8.1 (5 votes)
Horizon: Zero Dawn - 8.06 (18 votes)
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky - 8 (18 votes)
Portal - 8 (26 votes)
Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna: The Golden Country - 7.98 (5 votes)
Xenoblade Chronicles - 7.98 (28 votes)
Uncharted 4: A Thiefs End - 7.97 (16 votes)
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel - 7.96 (14 votes)
Hades - 7.96 (22 votes)
Tsukihime - 7.94 (7 votes)
Inscryption - 7.93 (10 votes)
God of War (2018) - 7.93 (14 votes)
Ace Attorney Investigations 2 - 7.92 (13 votes)
Persona 5 - 7.92 (27 votes)
Life is Strange - 7.92 (32 votes)
Alan Wake - 7.91 (8 votes)
Spec Ops: The Line - 7.9 (17 votes)
Cyberpunk 2077 - 7.9 (7 votes)
Bloodborne - 7.88 (20 votes)
Kid Icarus: Uprising - 7.86 (13 votes)
Killer7 - 7.85 (10 votes)
Night in the Woods - 7.8 (15 votes)
Silent Hill - 7.8 (15 votes)
Psychonauts - 7.79 (7 votes)
Deadly Premonition - 7.77 (11 votes)
Final Fantasy IX - 7.77 (26 votes)
Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn - 7.75 (14 votes)
Mario & Luigi: Bowsers Inside Story - 7.75 (10 votes)
Silent Hill 3 - 7.75 (8 votes)
Professor Layton and the Unwound Future - 7.75 (6 votes)
Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain - 7.75 (4 votes)
NEO: The World Ends With You - 7.75 (4 votes)
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind - 7.75 (4 votes)
Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors - 7.73 (32 votes)
The Last of Us: Left Behind - 7.73 (11 votes)
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor - 7.73 (11 votes)
Mega Man Zero - 7.71 (7 votes)
Kentucky Route Zero - 7.7 (10 votes)
The Sexy Brutale - 7.75 (6 votes)
Vagrant Story - 7.67 (6 votes)
Bioshock - 7.65 (24 votes)
Skies of Arcadia - 7.63 (15 votes)
Suikoden - 7.63 (15 votes)
Paper Mario: The Origami King - 7.63 (6 votes)
Saints Row 2 - 7.63 (4 votes)
Radiant Historia - 7.62 (13 votes)
Doki Doki Literature Club - 7.61 (28 votes)
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver - 7.6 (5 votes)
Final Fantasy VII Remake - 7.58 (20 votes)
Ys IX: Monstrum Nox - 7.57 (6 votes)
Celeste - 7.56 (26 votes)
Half-Life 2 - 7.55 (10 votes)
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake - 7.54 (12 votes)
Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair - 7.51 (31 votes)
Policenauts - 7.5 (5 votes)
Erica - 7.5 (4 votes)

6

I still like Rebecca & Billy's dynamic. The bad guys' plot is pretty dumb, though I like the leeches idea, it just could have been done better.

3/10

I'll probably expand later but for now I'll just say it's a good idea gone to waste.

pjbasis posted...

6

I still like Rebecca & Billy's dynamic. The bad guys' plot is pretty dumb, though I like the leeches idea, it just could have been done better.

This but a 5 instead for me.

1.5

Absolute misfire on so many fronts. This game adds nothing of value to the series' already weak story.

Definitely a lot of missed opportunities.

4

7

Mostly because it stars Rebecca and she's my favorite RE character. RE0 was the only one I really played as a kid and I have lots of fond memories

0

Oh wait I can't do that

1

Unnecessary. Adds barely anything and is easily the worst mainline game if you consider it one. Yeah 6 is better than this crap.

Retro vote for

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

9.5

After hearing all the buzz about how incredible the story of 13 Sentinels is, I'm surprised it ended up living up to the hype if not even exceeding it. This might be the best story I have experienced in any medium in quite a while.

In retrospect, the overall plot, characters and method of storytelling was structured in a way to make it compelling for a sci-fi, mystery, anime sucker like me so it was a baffling that I overlooked such an entry till now.

Shu Amiguchi > Tomi Kisaragi > Nenji Ogata > Natsuno Minami > Yuki Takamiya > Keitaro Miura > Takatoshi Hijiyama > Renya Gouto > Megumi Yakushiji > Ei Sekigahara > Ryoko Shinonome > Juro Kurabe > Iori Fuyusaka

Nominate Metal Gear 2: Snake's Revenge

On the surface, a game detailing the origins of both the Umbrella Corporation and STARS Bravo Team could've been a slam dunk. After all, we get tons of juicy information about Umbrella pieced together through files in RE1, and full fledged character backgrounds for each Bravo member too. There's actually a ton to work with. Resident Evil Zero manages to be a game about neither however; it's a confused sham that muddies more lore and events and even locations than actually revealing any secrets as it so boldly claims in the game's opening narration. In fact, the game makes very little sense as a whole.

So the story starts with the Ecliptic Express being attacked by a mysterious man and his leeches. It's a cool and horrific scene, even if the man looks like a Final Fantasy reject and doesn't really fit the tone at all (though at that point RE was already destined to head pretty far off the rails anyway.) Cut to Rebecca, flying with STARS Bravo Team on her first mission. Their helicopter is sabotaged (as Rebecca states in RE1) and they crash. Unfortunately after this, Bravo Team is a total non-entity. Only Rebecca, Edward, and Enrico even get any lines, and one of those dies in the first minutes of the game and the other only appears over radio and one random scene which contributes nothing. It's a TOTAL disappointment. We never get to see how Rebecca interacts and works with her team, we never get to see their personalities, no they're immediately written out of the story. Now, I do argue that part of the allure of RE1 is finding your Bravo Team comrades scattered dead around the mansion, leaving it up to you to piece together what happened to them. If you're already doing a prequel though, why not just go full on and show what did happen! It would've been so much fun to see Forest get attacked by crows or see more of what led up to Kenneth's demise. Instead, we get one of the most hilariously confusing and badly-directed scenes in the series, with Enrico coming down an elevator in Birkin's lab from RE2 (how he got there we'll never know), meeting up with Rebecca, they have a super stilted conversation about Bravo Team and Billy, and then Enrico fucks off to god knows where after that. This scene baffles me to this day. It's so pointless and the logistics of the location and character placement hurt my head probably more than it should.

That all sucks on its own - but here's some other stuff that bugs me. So, Bravo is supposed to be investigating the cannibalistic murders in the Arklay Mountains, and they crash, and IMMEDIATELY drop what they came there for when they just luckily stumble upon this overturned MP vehicle to hunt down an escaped convict. Like that becomes the mission right away. It's so forced and only serves to get Rebecca on to the train.

Rebecca bumps into the convict, Billy; now I think Billy & Rebecca are a great pair together. I can accept a little RE cheese and a little bit of the unrealistic nature on how Rebecca reacts upon seeing him, though it always bugged me that they stay on the Ecliptic Express for no real reason even after seeing all the monsters aboard it. Still, I like Rebecca in this game - she's unsure of herself but at the same time shows moments of assertiveness, even disobeying orders to put her trust in this possible murderer, who has saved her time and again. Her portrayal however is very inconsistent with REmake, and you can argue there's some trauma there or something between the two games, but it's a little too night and day for me. Rebecca not being able to handle a hunter for example in REmake but slaying them left and right (and a Tyrant ON HER OWN!) with ease in RE0 is a hard bullet to swallow. Just judging on this game alone though, Rebecca's great in Zero, a likable protagonist for sure who rightfully gets most of the screen time.

And so is Billy for that matter. His cool allure and mysterious past has made him a rightful fan favorite of the series that people chomp at the bit for a return or at least a hint of, myself included. Scrutinizing more closely however, Billy ends up feeling actually under baked. His PTSD is merely hinted at, he gets separated from Rebecca for large swaths of the game giving us less time for us to enjoy their dynamic, and unfortunately nothing about his character ever really gets resolved in a satisfying way. I still like Billy a lot despite these gripes - which really goes to show Capcom had a pretty cool character here they unfortunately let rot away and how character design and gameplay can really go a long in developing a personality.

On to the other half of the game - Umbrella. The admittedly stronger half, though not really by much. Look, I'm an RE diehard, I love Umbrella lore and reading up on the back story and stuff. It's just inherently interesting to me. Marcus' leech experiments are creepy; still, there's some diminishing returns with how this stuff is handled here. Sometimes files read as if Umbrella employees were just writing their first drafts of the better RE1 files. Marcus himself is an inherently unnecessary edition to the franchise, and learning how the T-Virus spread in the mansion adds... basically nothing. Wesker and Birkin are involved, though their role mostly consists of sitting around and pointlessly expounding on every action they're about to do to get to the real plot starting in RE1. It's actually kind of hilarious how disconnected everything is. Rebecca and Billy have no real stake in the plot, just their survival; Marcus gets revenge on Umbrella but we only see Birkin and Wesker's reactions and they don't seem overly concerned about it; and Wesker and Birkin themselves are so remote from the main action that they may as well not been included in the story at all. This really speaks to how disjointed Resident Evil Zero is as a whole. It feels like a Frankenstein's monster with totally disparate elements that each got a little lost in itself along the way.

Umbrella Chronicles' Nightmare scenario ended up being a better prequel than this. Hell, that game even did the Zero scenario better itself because we get more dialogue between Billy and Rebecca! Like, how do you let a light gun shooter outdo a main series entry? There's of course some good in Zero; the environmental storytelling here is extraordinary with the most beautiful pre-renders I think the series has ever produced. Rebecca and Billy manage to be a fun pair despite the game's best efforts to destroy that. Everything else however, was a total nonsensical drag and I really think overall this was a story better off not being told to begin with.

Whilst I could never be as eloquent as snake. I agree whole heartedly with his analysis. The most jarring thing for me has always been the fact that Bravo helicopter crashes at night, and the game ends at dawn. Rebecca then spots (and presumably goes to) the Spencer Mansion, so does she spend the entire day in the store room with a can of insect repellent? As it is night time again when alpha team investigate.

For that matter why did it take Alpha team 24 hours to react to the Bravo helicopter crash. Now I could be crossing wires between original RE, REmake and the books but I thought they responded instantly

5/10. Not especially remarkable. It is middling for both Resident Evil and games in general.

Cavedweller2000 posted...

Whilst I could never be as eloquent as snake. I agree whole heartedly with his analysis. The most jarring thing for me has always been the fact that Bravo helicopter crashes at night, and the game ends at dawn. Rebecca then spots (and presumably goes to) the Spencer Mansion, so does she spend the entire day in the store room with a can of insect repellent? As it is night time again when alpha team investigate.

For that matter why did it take Alpha team 24 hours to react to the Bravo helicopter crash. Now I could be crossing wires between original RE, REmake and the books but I thought they responded instantly

According to Nightmare in Umbrella Chronicles, Rebecca passes out from exhaustion in the residence of the mansion. The original game does make it seem like it was instantaneous, but I don't think it was ever the case. Remember, STARS and the RPD are corrupt, run by Wesker and Irons respectively, so they probably delayed the investigation as long as they could on purpose.