If you enjoyed Capcom’s HD remake of its classic survival horror adventure Resident Evil but miss the original PlayStation version’s famously awful acting, a fan-made mod has merged the best of both worlds, inserting the 1996 Resident Evil‘s voice work into Resident Evil HD Remaster.
The result meshes high-resolution graphics with beloved but badly delivered lines like “You were almost a Jill sandwich!” making for a curiously incongruous mashup.
The mod, available exclusively for the PC version of Resident Evil HD Remaster, deletes the game’s re-recorded voice data and replaces it with lines ripped directly from the 1996 PlayStation version of Resident Evil.
After installing the mod, S.T.A.R.S. member Barry Burton once again refers to his partner Jill Valentine as a “master of unlocking,” among other awkward lines poorly translated from Japanese and delivered by amateur voice actors.
“It took me a long time to finish this mod mainly because there were more than 500 audio files to edit,” creator and Resident Evil Modding Forum member “Bunny” explains. “And the dialogues were already mixed with sound effects like footsteps, gunshots, enemies, etc. So at some point the editing process became tedious and I had to take breaks more often.”
The original Resident Evil was infamous for the jarring shift in quality between its detailed prerendered backdrops and the exceptionally poor delivery of its storyline. While Resident Evil‘s plot centers around the undead horrors that lurk within a mysterious abandoned mansion, the game’s voice work instead makes many tense sequences unintentionally hilarious.
The 1996 Resident Evil also featured cheesy full-motion video cutscenes, leading fans to revere it with the sort of ironic appreciation usually reserved for cult films. A later GameCube remake and subsequent HD-remastered release replaced these cutscenes with CG-rendered movies, and featured re-recorded dialog that lacks the campiness of the 1996 original.
Localization was a major stumbling block for Capcom back in the 1990s, as many of the publisher’s games were saddled with inexplicably low-quality voice acting. Mega Man 8‘s English dialog features several mispronunciations and noticeable actor flubs that linger in retail copies of the game, and Mega Man X4 earned notoriety for the delivery of one line in particular.
