Survival Horror-To-Action Ratio

[Becky's Butt]

For Example:

Resident Evil -

100% Survival Horror
0% Action.
It is the pioneer of this genre. And don't give me that crap about Alone in the Dark. That game sucked. RE1 is true daddy of this type of game and it inspired several clones and changed gaming forever.

Resident Evil 3 -

75% Action
25% Survival Horror
The Dodge mechanic, the ability to create your own Ammo, the pseudo-QTEs, the game was clearly oriented more towards combat.

So rate each RE game according to this simple little scale. All opinion of course which is why this is a discussion forum.

[Grem]

Hum, I wouldn't say RE1 was devoid of action. I mean, you kill monsters with firearms afterall. But of course, the survival horror aspect was the dominant one.

Here we have another instance of the difficulty behind defining survival horror. To me, survival horror doesn't necessarily mean "no action".

However, some RE games aren't survival horror at all and are clearly action games (I'm looking at you RE5 and RE6).

So I prefer to rate it this way :

Resident Evil, Resident Evil 0, REmake :
Survival Horror : Dominant

Resident Evil 2, 3, CV :
Survival and action : fifty - fifty

Resident Evil 4, Revelations :
Action : Dominant (they still retain some little Survival Horror aspect)

Resident Evil 5, 6 :
Action games (For RE6, Tall Oaks has a bit of a survival horror vibe to it, but all the rest is 100% action)

[Becky's Butt]

That's a good rating system as well. I agree with the list more or less, especially about Zero. It was certainly one of the most "traditional" RE games in that way.

[Lanzagranadas]

RE0/RE:
90% Survival 10% Action

RE2:
75% Survival 25% Action (Just the right blend if you ask me)

RE3/RECV:
65% Survival 35% Action

Outbreaks:
75% Survival 25% Action (Same as RE2)

RE4/RE5:
10% Survival 90% Action

RER:
40% Survival 60% Action

RE6:
5% Survival 95% Action

[Anders]

RE1 100% survuval horror? Come on. In 1996, Resident Evil was an action game with horror elements, almost as if by accident. RE was always an action games series. Don't you remember how awesome it was to shoot those zombies to pieces?

[News Bot]

RE1 100% survuval horror? Come on. In 1996, Resident Evil was an action game with horror elements, almost as if by accident. RE was always an action games series. Don't you remember how awesome it was to shoot those zombies to pieces?

And it was heavily marketed as an action title, too. There are trailers and commercials where almost every scene involves gunning down a monster. Same for every game in the series, really. Though you could say this is Tarantino-like marketing.

[Grem]

Yeah, I think people have a distorted vision of what RE was at the beginning. It was survival horror, yes, but the action elements were very much present since the first game.

Only REmake and Zero were really slower paced and very focused on survival horror.

[Jimmy_Jazz]

I think there's a misinterpreation of the term survival horror here, at least when it comes to how Shinji Mikami defines it, and that's a phrase his team came up with on the original Resident Evil so it's worth going back to that before proceeding.

He's talked about this alot over the past year in the run up to the release of TEW.

http://www.vg247.com/2014/06/12/the-evil-within-shinji_mikami-survival-horror/

http://uk.ign.com/articles/2013/09/26/resident-evil-4-came-out-of-the-commercial-failure-of-re-remake

It's the to-ing and fro-ing between being weak and vulnerable and being powerful (where the action comes in) that make a title a survival horror in his eyes and not just horror. And one of the ways RE maintains this balance is by rationing empowering items to the player, mainly weapons, ammo and health. To some extend, you could say Pacman is the granddaddy of this approach.

I bring this up because defining RE2&3 in the above scale becomes quite interesting. RE3 does add the dodge mechanic, but it also adds tactical elements in the exploding barrels (even though they were becoming cliche at the time) and the ammo making system which could fall under the survival system. It was also less generaous than the previous 2 games when it came to dishing out heatlh. RE2, on the other hand, was very generous with ammunition compared to 1&3.

[Becky's Butt]

Those are interesting links, thank you for posting them.

Well then how do you think the original Resident Evil factors into "Mikami's vision of survival horror"?

[Jimmy_Jazz]

Considering he made the title he was probably happy with the balance of fear vs empowerment. However it's clear he wasn't a fan of empowerment increasing as 2 & 3 went on. I think the REMake takes more clearly large step towards the fear end of the spectrum, past the first, because the amount of ammo and health across the game doesn't increase over the original as much as the number of enemes, especially when you introduce the Crimson Heads into the mix. You've also got the lighter & lighter fuel to deal with if you want to stop those pesky Crimson Heads and the taser / knife, which puts more of a strain on your inventory, forcing you into carrying less ammo, weapons and / or herbs at a time.

[EDIT] I wonder if 3 also feels like a larger step away from 1 & 2 just because it doesn't have a single, central location of the game. RE1 also repopulates the mansion once you return from the Outhouse whilst Mr X adds a new spin on the return to the upper floors of the Police Station once you've cleared out the basement & parking lot.

[Sly]

Defense items in REmake do not take up any inventory space, though.

[Jimmy_Jazz]

Sorry, I haven't played it for many years (roll on the REMaster!) and forgot they were seperate. Although by then the inventroy system was getting abilt silly. I wish Chris' default / slotless item was the knife.

[Lanzagranadas]

Each one has its own interpretation. To me is simple as this: Survival means the game focusses on survive, the most important thing is the adventure. Enemies are just an obstacle in your way that -in most cases- you decide to either fight or run away from them to save ammo, time or even health. Since you're supposed to have very limited resources to engage battle (In higher difficulties at least), most times it's better to just run.

Action means the game focusses on battle mechanics and fighting monsters, the game encourages you to shoot everything what moves and weapon/ammo supplies are not a problem unless you're a ammo wasteful. The layouts are simple and much more linear, and everything tend to be more scripted and fast-paced, the fun is in fighting tons of enemies and there's nothing much to worry about besides that.

I think about "Horror" as a separate secondary factor which determines whether the game is capable to bring scare and fear to the player or not, which by the way only works on your first playthrough and probably not anymore. Imo a game could be a perfect Survival even if it's not an horror game (Example: Outbreak).

Survival Horror tends to be a misleading expression, since some people think that just because a game is at night with rain and thunders and has few scary jumps then it's already survival horror, when in that case it's just an horror-themed action shooter, but not a survival.

[Kegluneq]

You can't get better examples than these two:

Dino Crisis: Survival Horror
Dino Crisis 2: Action

[Aleff]

Survival Horror is a dumb "genre". I wonder how did the term got so popular, the only place you could see it was in the original PS1 version of Biohazard's cover art as far as I know. And the first game is not as "hard" as people make it to be.