/vr/ - Retro Games

>>10698018
That rollcall was cool by 1996 standards. It's still kinda cool, even if the production value feels very low compared to popular games from later decades.

The voice acting is not great, but the Japanese have a poor ear for English, and they have this concept of "Decorative English," where just the use of English phrases and words is seen as 'cool' in a stylistic sense, without necessarily having to have a particularly clear or poignant meaning. This is less popular these days, but it's still around in places.
This is more often used for music, taglines, and that Kabuki theater style of calling out the name of your attacks, places where this is less jarring, but Resident Evil had its spoken dialogue written with a Decorative English kind of mindset. It was insisted on as appropriate and correct when some of the voice actors pointed out that the dialogue sounded very awkward and stilted, it sounded cool and serious to the Japanese and that was all that mattered. The Japs were gonna have it written out in their language anyway.

The original Resident Evil has a good b-movie kind of charm, in large part thanks to the voice acting and some of the visuals in the FMV sequences, but Resident Evil was never not a sincere effort at horror, there was no irony on any of the devs part, they did the most with what they could, which ultimately comes off as a bit cheap, even if it was overall good.
I'll also fully agree that Resident Evil was genuinely considered scary at the time, even in the western world. The voice acting was always recognized as goofy even to ESLs with a decent grasp of English, but beyond that people had no problems with immersing themselves in it as a horror adventure, it still works well that way, and you can find countless anecdotes from people who played it at the time which supports this.

REmake having a more conventional and higher production value is in no way incongruent with the original game or the original developer intentions.