The Haunted Hoard: Resident Evil Gaiden (Game Boy Color)

The Resident Evil series has had an odd relationship with Nintendo handhelds, from the odd remake Resident Evil: Deadly Silence that added touch controls and multiplayer to the first game to the 3DS getting Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D that only provided the short side modes from Resident Evil 4 and 5, it’s always been an odd way to experience the survival horror series. Resident Evil Gaiden on the Game Boy Color though feels like a legitimate attempt was made to provide a unique adventure while keeping in mind the limits of the hardware, and while its cruise ship setting would funnily enough be copied by Resident Evil Relations on the 3DS which also essentially had the same approach, it does feel more impressive that Capcom first tried to bring the zombie shooter to a much weaker handheld.

 

Resident Evil Gaiden takes place aboard the ocean liner known as the Starlight where reports of a new bioweapon draw the attention of a special task force aiming to prevent the spread of them following the zombie outbreak in Raccoon City. Leon Kennedy is initially sent to deal with it, but communication with the hero of Raccoon City is lost, so Barry Burton sets out to learn what happened and hopefully finish the job. When he arrives though, he quickly discovers most of the passengers have been turned into the living dead, Barry needing to fight his way around the damaged ship to learn the truth of what was going on aboard the ocean liner. The few other survivors do lead to a touch of intrigue as you explore though, the game introducing the mysterious little girl Lucia who seems to have a sixth sense for when monsters are nearby, but you also start to wonder if you can even trust the playable characters you encounter as the game starts hinting at ulterior motives and potential betrayals. While this story would ultimately remain separate from the broader series’s timeline, this also means the game isn’t afraid to hint Leon or Barry might not be the trustworthy and stalwart figures the other games portray them as and thus the mystery can feel a little harder to predict the path of.

Unfortunately, the way the story progresses doesn’t always feel the cleanest. The player will spend a lot of time exploring the four floors of the ship and if you pop open your map, your destination will usually be highlighted in red just in case the scenes didn’t lay it out well or just expected you to know the identity of a room. There are multiple places that could be called a computer room for example, but at other times the game will tell you to head in a direction without first guiding you towards the necessary keys or equipment required, so if there’s a fire blocking your path, you would have to head out and scour the rest of the Starlight in hopes of finding the fire extinguisher to help you through. Despite them being on the walls though, an item like a fire extinguisher has a particular place it will appear, but this gets a little rougher with things like identification cards where the shambling undead might be holding onto them with no indicator they have such a useful necessary item. There’s little visual variation in the types of zombies you encounter so it’s not like you can identify a VIP either, and with this being a survival horror game, there are legitimate reasons to avoid killing zombies since they can waste your limited ammo or put you in a bind as there is a finite amount of healing across the entire adventure.

 

While ship exploration happens with low-detail character sprites, when you bump into a zombie, the game shifts to a first person battle screen where the zombies and monsters you face are rendered in pretty impressive detail. The walking dead will appear at different distances and often need to get in fairly close to start clawing at you or smacking you about with a crowbar, and when they are up close, you can see a fair bit of detail and bloody touches that can make them look a bit grotesque despite the Game Boy Color’s humble display capabilities. They do have some limits on how fast they can move when attacking and sometimes it is hard to know if an attack will damage you or not, but it is not very apparent which corners were cut to pull the look off save perhaps for the fact the bottom of the screen has far less detailed visuals to present. During the course of Resident Evil Gaiden you can eventually reach three characters traveling together at a time, each one of them having a separate health bar and able to have one weapon equipped that will be displayed in the battle screen’s lower half. During a battle, you can swap between the characters not just to have them use their weapon, but they can take hits to help spread the damage a bit. You can equip new items and heal up with herbs in the middle of a battle even though it involves pulling open a different screen and leaving yourself vulnerable, but it feels like there could have been some strategy involved in trying to shuffle things around to keep your group healthy while having a range of weapons available in case you don’t want to use up your shotgun too quickly or find the handgun is too weak for the monster you’re facing.

Sadly, the way you actually fire your weapon does the game no favors. While exploring the ship you can’t actually attack the zombies you see, but you can initiate battle mode and have a small advantage if you are the one to initiate by pointing your gun at them. When in the fight, to fire your weapon or swing your knife you will need to play a timing minigame involving a meter that appears just below the zombies. An indicator moves left and right, its speed often determined by the strength of your weapon so something like the assault rifle will bounce around rather rapidly. Press the attack button to fire, but you’ll want to fire when the indicator is in the right section of the meter to actually damage zombies. Far away zombies have smaller sections of the meter and there’s a precise spot to hit if you want to deal serious damage, but many monsters will really waste your ammo if you keep getting within their spot on the meter but not on that pinpoint high damage marker. You can only fire so quickly in this system and while you do have an option for retreating, the game almost guarantees you’ll be hurt some for doing so. Including some inevitable misses, Resident Evil Gaiden feels like it will drain your ammo reserves far too quickly if you fight every battle, and since your knife can’t even reach some zombies at times, it starts to feel like almost no battle is worth fighting. Zombies can drop ammunition on death but not reliably, and while there are times you can slip past a zombie while exploring to avoid these aggravating resource wasting fights, it’s not reliable either as you’re sometimes not given the space to really maneuver. Even worse, if you do elect to fight a zombie who is blocking your path, they can sometimes get additional assistance from zombies that weren’t there before, meaning strategic fighting can sometimes be undermined by the hidden threat level of some conflicts.

 

It does make some sense why this system was implemented. There’s meant to be tension in knowing you can’t fire as rapidly as you want and the inaccuracy is meant to be a skill test the keeps the skirmishes from being quick and easy. With so little control over these battles though they end up being nuisances that impede your ability to travel around and solve the plain puzzles where you just usually need to locate the right items around the Starlight. There is some hope for a player trying to push their way through Resident Evil Gaiden though thanks to a surprisingly friendly save and continue system. Resident Evil Gaiden will almost always prompt you shortly after an action of note or import to save your game, it even offering four separate save slots. More helpful though might be the continue system, where after dying in battle, the game will usually let you come back to life fairly close to the fatal fight. This does mean you can sometimes brute force necessary dodges of zombies to avoid wasteful ammo use, but considering bumping into them will guarantee you going into the battle screen, it’s not a fast process and still irritating to try and have to bait around an enemy just to avoid wasteful conflict. The music will at least usually alert you to how close enemies are so you can often expect danger a bit instead of running into it blindly, but it’s not enough to offset how you’ll come to dread encounters not because they are scary, but because they are tedious.

THE VERDICT: Resident Evil Gaiden concocts a pretty decent story with the right amount of twists to keep you guessing on its final direction and who can be trusted, but while the cruise ship setting is an intriguing one, it becomes a place you tire of exploring as you hunt down items and face down zombies through a battle system that strains your resources while offering little to accommodate the inevitable toll. The continue system softens things somewhat, but Resident Evil Gaiden wants you to avoid unnecessary conflict while making it rough to pull it off, and once a battle does kick off you’re almost always going to walk away with some deficit in a game where you can’t afford it. The battles can certainly look pretty impressive for a Game Boy Color title, but it’s not going to make you love this survival horror title enough to make the meter combat forgivable.

 

And so, I give Resident Evil Gaiden for Game Boy Color…

A BAD rating. While the zombie designs in the battle mode are perhaps the game’s most striking visual in a game that does want to provide horror with its action, Resident Evil Gaiden might have been better served by never straying from its usual less detailed look.  Outside the few boss fights, zombies here are more an obstacle and yet the fighting system is so demanding in how much attention is required and how much ammunition and health will gradually be whittled down by it. If you could at least fire at a zombie to stun it while exploring you could maybe slip by some of them better and avoid the tedium of these skirmishes, but having the continuing be as kind as it is definitely keeps this game from being outright grueling. Zombies will stay dead in an area for quite a while too, but the real issue has to be with the meter combat. Even a shaky reticle you move around like a mouse cursor would be a better fit for this fighting system since the meter’s movement ends up being an annoying hindrance. Even getting the knack for it over time won’t guarantee quick and low cost fights since often zombies can take some punishment from the weaker weapons if you aren’t hitting that sweet spot perfectly and pulling out the heavy stuff might leave you high and dry come boss battle time. You do at least consider your own vulnerability and there is some tension in making low reserves work and relief when you find a zombie with some goodies on them, but the emotion it evokes feels more like weariness than terror.

 

If the zombies were more aggressive perhaps Resident Evil Gaiden would start to feel really insurmountable, but you can squeeze your away around the corridors of the Starlight cruise liner and see a sufficiently interesting story if you have the commitment and can tolerate leaning on the continues to overcome the rough parts of the game’s design. It still hardly feels worth checking out though, the novelty of it being on the Game Boy Color the main draw for a series that usually feels like it’s pushing the envelope over on home console hardware. Resident Evil Gaiden is sadly another handheld entry in the series that feels more a curiosity than a must-play experience despite it being an original adventure with a fair bit of ambition.