Original RE2 Director Hideki Kamiya Gives His Thoughts On The Remake In Final Discussion Video

In the final video of the series of post-release discussion videos (Part 1, Part 2) for the Resident Evil 2 remake, Directors Yasuhiro Anpo and Kazunori Kadoi, as well as Executive Producer Jun Takeuchi invited the director of the original Resident Evil 2, Hideki Kamiya, to chat about the both games.

Here are the highlights:

• • All four sitting at the table were people who have been involved with the series since the first Resident Evil.

Kamiya’s Thoughts on the Remake

• Kamiya is actually scared of horror games, and found the remake really scary, despite directing the original. However, he pressed on as he was interested in the remake. Kamiya began to describe how scary the zombies were, like how they were alive within the program and not just a bunch of data put together, which got the other three laughing and saying, “Hold on, we’re working in the same industry, right?”

• Kamiya was actually messaging Kadoi through LINE throughout his playthrough, pestering him with messages of, “There’s not enough bullets…” and that Kadoi was a miser. Of course, Kamiya ended up with enough bullets by the end, but Kamiya retorted that it’s not because the staff provided enough, it’s because he hoarded them.

Cut Ideas in Development

• When asked if he found anything missing from the original, Kamiya said that actually, he had completely forgotten about designing the chess piece puzzle himself. He completed the puzzle by drawing out the solution on paper.

• The ‘Ivy’ enemies from the original were considered for the remake, but were deemed to comedic-looking in their original incarnation. Kamiya felt that the team did a brilliant job at transposing the idea for a similar enemy in the greenhouse area.

• Speaking of missing enemies, Kamiya noted that spiders were missing in the remake. He revealed that director Kadoi had done all the animations for the spiders that were used in Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 himself, without the heed of the director. As for why there are missing, it’s because they were replaced by G-Birkin Form 2.

• The timing of when Leon and Ada kiss was made to be earlier in the remake at the suggestion of Takeuchi, and Kamiya feels that it works out because it makes Ada feel more manipulative of Leon.

Stories from the Original Director

• In the manual for Resident Evil 2 (original), the reason Leon is stated to be late for work is because of a spat with his girlfriend over leaving his hometown, which led to them splitting. During an overnight stay at a motel on the way to Raccoon City, Leon drinks too much and goes wild, gets a hangover, and ends up even later. (The remake changes it to Leon getting a call to stay away.) Kamiya reveals that this backstory was influenced by real events happening to him at the time.

• The full story is that Kamiya took Christmas off, and was dumped right before heading back to work. Because he kept boasting about his girlfriend at work, he couldn’t face his colleagues and faked being sick.

• In another incident (not faking) where Kamiya took half the day off, he came in after lunch to find the staff working out the details over an extra mode he didn’t know about. It was decided without him, and when he asked then-producer Shinji Mikami, he was pressured to accept the decision since he was absent. The extra mode ended up being ‘The 4th Survivor’.

• Originally, the staff didn’t know how to fit ‘The 4th Survivor’ with the main narrative, and so they pulled some unused voice clips from the Umbrella Special Ops recordings for HUNK, they found a way to make it an extra game mode.

• Katsutoshi Karatsuma voiced Tofu with his Kansai accent back in the original RE2, and while the four couldn’t remember who asked him to do the voice, they concluded it was probably one of Mikami-san’s whims. They re-recorded Karatsuma’s voice for Tofu in the remake, but it was so similar to the original it didn’t make a difference.

Questions for the Remake Director

• Kamiya brought up the topic about how Kadoi focused on charge attacks for the combat knife, which Takeuchi did in the original Resident Evil before getting NG’d by Mikami. Kamiya recalls an episode during the bugchecking for Resident Evil where Kadoi was sitting silently in a corner, and when Kamiya went to check on him, it turned out he was trying to do a knife-only run.

• Takeuchi and Anpo talked about how they put a lot of effort into making knives retrievable in the remake, such as leaving it nearby if it was used on bosses that disappear after the fight.

• Zombies keep their HP values throughout the game, which is different from the original, where the data was saved by rooms. The dead bodies of zombies also stay around after killing them in the remake, which was an idea that Kamiya had to scrap due to hardware limitations in Resident Evil 1.5.

• Kadoi put a lot of effort into Marvin’s scenes, such as keeping his iconic, “Just go!” line. Kamiya doesn’t remember coming up with the line at all. Takeuchi also doesn’t remember Ben the journalist at all, despite doing the event animations back then.

Stories about RE2

• Kamiya was talking with Mikami about something one day when Anpo walked in with a smile and a cheery demeanor, saying, “Oh, we can’t store all the data on one disc.” Mikami froze up for a while out of the implications, and kept talking about how Anpo was a freak for being able to say such scary things unflinchingly.

• Kamiya argued that original RE2 story writer Sugimura probably had a deeper love for the series, coming in from being a regular player of the original game, and thus came up with things like the S.T.A.R.S. office with a message from Chris. Kadoi brought up the point that it was the same for the development staff of RE2 Remake, who grew up with the original game.

Check out the full video below:

Resident Evil 2 is available for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.