Resident Evil 2′s true innovation, however, lies in its twin scenarios. The game came shipped on two discs, and it's up to you which one to start first. Disc one has you play as Leon Kennedy, a rookie cop who overslept in an out-of-town motel on his first day of work and thankfully missed out on zombie infection. Disc two has you play as biker Claire Redfield, the sister of Chris from RE1. Leon and Claire meet at the very beginning of the game, but then end up separated on opposite sides of an exploding truck, and you have to play through
both of their scenarios - which are happening concurrently, mind you - to get the full ending. Depending on whose scenario you start first, the second character will face very different events when it's their turn, including several encounters by the T-103, a giant wall-breaking Umbrella behemoth who's an improved version of the Tyrant from the first game.
This system isn't entirely perfect, since both Leon and Claire solve some of the same puzzles during their scenarios but receive different rewards, which doesn't make much sense if everything's supposed to be happening on the same night. (I like to think that one of Raccoon City's zombies is actually a self-aware custodian who wanders around the maps and kindly resets puzzles for both characters.) But it's a darn interesting system nonetheless, and a fine way to encourage replay value. While Resident Evil 1 also featured two playable protagonists, both of their narratives were kept separate with no effort made to meld them together into a cohesive whole. Off the top of my head, in fact, I can't really think of
any other game that makes an attempt to do this, which shows how ambitious and forward-thinking RE2′s designers were.
Those designers were, in fact, so forward-thinking that they ended up scrapping a huge amount of stuff from the first version of the game, now dubbed
Resident Evil 1.5, and shifted development in an entirely different direction in 1997.
Footage from that early iteration has now found its way online, and it's a fascinating glimpse into what might have been, with an entirely different female playable character (Elza Walker instead of Claire Redfield), a more modern-looking police station and gameplay mechanics closer to RE1 than what we got in RE2′s finished release in '98.
It's a good thing that Resident Evil 2 was changed, though, since the 1.5 edition seems like a solid but ultimately
incremental update over the first game. The final version of RE2 is much
more than incremental, and along with many quality of life improvements and an interconnected scenario system, it also introduced a sense of
legacy into the franchise, with protagonists related to those who came before (Claire and Chris) and bit players who would eventually grow to become major characters in later installments (Sherry and Ada). Yoshiki Okamoto, who supervised RE2′s plot, actually suggested that Resident Evil be turned into an ongoing
metaseries with this installment, telling tales in the same fictional universe with a rotating cast of characters, kind of like Mobile Suit Gundam.
Two decades later, that suggestion has most certainly been taken to heart. Much of Resident Evil's modern sensibilities and story flow from the template that this pivotal second entry established, which makes RE2 required playing for
anyone interested in the franchise. This was, in other words, definitely a case where Capcom did well by the number two, and it's easy to see why the survival horror crowd easily considers Resident Evil 2 to be one of the best games of all time.