With the upcoming Resident Evil 2 remake, Capcom is performing a balancing act of sorts between preserving what made the original 1998 game so memorable and switching things up enough that the remake still feels like a fresh experience to longtime Resident Evil fans. We won’t know the full extent of that balancing act until the remake launches next January, but in the meantime producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi has confirmed that three familiar elements will be returning, though not in the exact manner that fans may remember them.
The three elements in question are Hunk, Tofu, and the giant alligator boss. In the original Resident Evil 2, Hunk and Tofu were bonus characters that players could unlock by meeting certain criteria, while the giant alligator was a heart-stopping surprise boss fight that proved the T-Virus can affect more than just humans. Speaking with Polygon, Hirabayashi talked about how the Resident evil 2 remake’s design team originally felt that the giant alligator wouldn’t fit within the new vision they had for the remake, but he was eventually able to convince them after the iconic monster’s exact implementation went through a few iterations.
Hirabayashi also said this idea of iteration also applied to other aspects of the remake, allowing the design team to tweak and update other aspects of the original so that they would better fit with the remake’s more modern tone:
“We had to start off with something that doesn’t look like it’s going to fit with how the game looks today, but if you keep having lots of discussions, and get to the crux of what makes each element what it is, you can dig down and find the core idea and find a way to implement that in a new game.”
However, when it comes to Hunk and Tofu, Hirabayashi promised that they would be included in the remake itself and not cordoned off as separate DLC, avoiding one modern trend that tends to benefit company shareholders more than gamers. Hirabayashi didn’t go into detail on how remake players will be able to access Hunk and Tofu, but he made sure to clarify that “they will be on the disc.”
For more on the Resident Evil 2 remake, be sure to check out our coverage of the game’s PC system requirements, and how it sadly won’t be coming to the Nintendo Switch anytime soon.