This will take more of the form of a journal entry (like a traditional "blog", if you will) than any proper criticism of Resident Evil: Director's Cut for the PS1. I've been playing it lately, and completed a playthrough with Jill (with a bad ending! I didn't wait for the second rope), and I plan to continue with a Chris playthrough since I'm curious about "Advanced Mode."
It's been a very long time since I last played the original -- I usually reach for REMake -- so I was coming into this very fresh, in a lot of ways. I had remembered some, but not all, of the differences from REMake -- no crimsonheads and no graveyard or forest are the big ones, but also the early Helipad shot is a big place where the original is superior, and pathing through the mansion is very different than in REMake, with a lot of rooms that require keys in REMake being available earlier in the original. What I didn't remember is how much more effective the boss presentation is in the original. If you've only played REMake and not the original, the original's takes on the boss fights alone is worth going back and seeing the originals. The overall take on pacing is also interesting -- while REMake generally wants to be more oppressive, an effect created with both more backtracking (I was surprised at how little I found myself going back and forth between rooms in the original!) and crimsonheads, the original is very "up and down" with its difficulty but in a deliberate, calculated way. It very much wants you to become overconfident and to overspend resources only to dry them up more later while also throwing more enemies (and, sometimes, camera dick moves) at you. Interestingly, the genesis for crimsonheads kinda appears with those faster, stronger zombies in that one room in the lab that also respawn every time you re-enter the room, so the idea wasn't unknown to them; they chose a pacing that lets the player make much more of the game world safe intentionally, it seems.
The original is also a lot less linear, with a lot more story branching points -- this is well known. What is a bit more surprising is that it branches more than just the story -- there's entire areas of the game that will become on or off limits depending on your choices. The path to Jill's good ending mostly cuts out the mansion basement, for instance, and there's rooms Underground that are tied to particular story decisions. It's a decision that really seems to follow the zeitgeists of their eras -- REMake follows a more modern "don't make content that a lot of players aren't going to see" philosophy, while the original follows a more old-school of thought.
Another interesting tweak is that item boxes, typewriters, and ink ribbons aren't tied as tightly together in the original as they are in REMake (or, indeed, RE2 and RE3). They *usually* go together... but not always. There are typewriters without item boxes, item boxes without typewriters, and typewriters without ink ribbons scattered throughout the game, and this is used to interesting effect in a few ways -- at the guard house, you get a with no ribbons, and suddenly saves feel a lot more potentially scarce, even though you probably have tons of them sitting in your item box (and there's also a pack of ribbons just a couple of rooms away, but you don't know that yet!) In the basement segment of the game, the layout of the mansion combined with the lack of an item box for the "main" mansion typewriter means that it's tough to get to a "full" safe room from that section, so blowing an inventory slot on ribbons becomes a remarkably reasonable idea. In the lab, the opposite is true, with item boxes being far more available than a typewriter, which really pushes the tension of that section without making the key item juggling there (especially with the [in]famous MO Disks) unfeasible. In general, it feels like the original likes to play on your inventory limits more than it likes to play on overall resource availability -- you'll basically always have a ton of crap sitting in your box, so once you're past the early game (which is surprisingly stingy and tough!), the idea of completely running out of supplies is laughable... but how much of it is practical to take with you? Not a lot! Yes, that's typical Resident Evil, but it does seem less convenient to get to boxes here than in other RE games (including REMake!), which really adds some sting to this.
Overall, it's easy to see why this became an instant classic on release in 1996. Is it as good as its remake? No, but even if you have access to the remake, you should still go back to play the original, it diverges enough to have its own identity and is better in a few ways.
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