The Resident Evil series has always had an interesting relationship with speedrunning. The games give players a letter grade when they finish the story based on how quickly they completed it and how many times they’ve manually saved, which invites them to give the game another shot to see if they can get a higher grade.
Normally, I don’t really care about grades in video games. In games like Sonic or Hitman or even most Resident Evil titles, I tend to receive a poor grade, not think much of it, and move on. This week, however, I replayed the Resident Evil 3 remake to celebrate its fifth birthday, but when I finished it and saw my relatively low score, I did something very unlike me: I restarted the game to try again.
While all Resident Evil games do this, there’s something specific about Resident Evil 3 that enticed me to give it another shot. Maybe this was the first warning sign that I’ve been bit by the speedrun bug.
The Pros And Cons Of Short Games
Despite its shortcomings, I like the Resident Evil 3 remake. It’s not as terrifying as the Resident Evil 2 remake, and its combat leaves something to be desired when compared to the Resident Evil 4 remake, sure. But one of its biggest problems is actually an interesting point in the game’s favor when it comes to replayability: Resident Evil 3 is short.
Like, really short.
On average, it takes most players a little over 6 hours to complete the game’s campaign when playing casually. That number gets drastically smaller on replays, meaning that players might be able to knock out a full playthrough of the story in just a few sittings without even trying to go super fast.
This wasn’t my first rodeo with Jill and Nemesis, so I beat the game on Standard difficulty in 4 hours and 18 minutes, netting me a B rank. As soon as I finished, I flashed back to all the mistakes I made that put my time over the four-hour mark. The handful of deaths in the Nemesis boss fights, the unnecessary backtracking in the hospital–I could do it faster.
Gotta’ Go Fast
What makes Resident Evil 3, specifically, so good for getting into speedrunning is that its completion time when playing casually is so low. That means that, with just a few optimization strategies, players might be able to finish a speedy playthrough of the game in a single sitting.
While that’s possible for other Resident Evil games, because they tend to be longer, the list of speedrun optimization tactics for each game is going to be significantly longer, and players might not be able to come up with a path for running the game on their own. Thanks to Resident Evil 3’s quick runtime, it’s easy for players to think back to the more open-ended sections of the game and come up with a path themselves.
Routing is an essential part of speedrunning and, although it’s perfectly fine to look up routes for popular games online, creating your own route before looking up how the pros are doing it can help you understand its nuances better. Given how easy it is to finish Resident Evil 3 quickly, making your own route becomes another game in itself.
The Resident Evil 3 remake is the weakest of the three recent remakes in the series we’ve gotten over the last several years. However, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth playing. While the game is lacking a little bit in length, it’s not about how long a game is, it’s what you do with it.
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Horror Systems OpenCritic Reviews Top Critic Avg: 79/100 Critics Rec: 73% Released April 3, 2020 ESRB M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language Developer(s) Capcom Publisher(s) CapcomWHERE TO PLAY
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