This isn't a New Game+ where I'm a master at everything I'm like a newborn rolled into a harder introductory area of the game I played before. That's really the source of why the B playthrough is so surprising: it imbues you with a feeling of inadequacy, as if everything I learned in Leon's campaign doesn't matter anymore. If you're an average player (and most of us will be), you'll find yourself in far more danger than youвЂ™ll ever see in a Leon playthrough.' 'If you're accurate with every shot, you're made to feel much more powerful. 'The experience of playing as Claire derives tension from player imperfection rather than weapon weakness,' he writes in the article. When I complained about this annoyance in a Discord server ('I honestly don't know if I can finish it,' I whined like a baby), my friend and colleague Joshua Calixto shared an article he wrote for the blog Bullet Points Monthly, where he tackled this very topic. I couldn't even pick up most of the things I come across, instead staring at my map and wondering if I would ever get back to the items knowing a sound-sensitive Licker was in my path between me and the door. My inventory was itty bitty compared to what it was by the end of my Leon run. (Which sucks.) It's somehow even more tense than the long stretch of Leon's playthrough where I had no ammo, due in part to being a fool and wasting it early on. You see the ghost of Leon's past journey throughout it in the zombie bodies on the ground, in the crawling torso in the police office, in a zombified Marvin, in your good ol' pal Mr. Resident Evil 2, the game itself knowing that you know what to expect at this point, instead does the unexpected. Early on, I entered a room I remember being safe in my first playthrough, only for it to no longer have a typewriter to save my progress. It's terrifying from the start as your new guns are unfamiliar and a little unwieldy. Zombies have overrun the police station again, even now that Leon's long gone. While the environments are familiar, there is something immediately disconcerting about it. Like Nier: Automata, it both masterfully utilizes repetition and twists the refreshed experience into something surprising with new weapons, different routes through areas, and so on. In the first Resident Evil, the differences between Jill and Chris are almost negligible, with weapons and story beats being different, but not much else.Д«ut Resident Evil 2 does something rarely enacted successfully in games. I won't lie, I was worried about the Resident Evil 2 remake's second route, knowing I would be trotting through the same areas over again: the police station, the sewers ( ugh), and the laboratory. The third playthrough is basically like a sequel to the first two parts as you're even treated with a dramatic trailer upon finishing 9S' own route. Yet, Nier: Automata is perhaps the biggest example of the opposite: a game worth playing through multiple times from alternate perspectives, unlocking a third playthrough upon the second's completion. Long Live the Queen is a game built to be played time and time again. In most cases, your playthroughs end tragically, with her own death. In it, you guide a young queen through her studies and political choices after the death of her mother. I remember my time with Long Live the Queen, the Princess Maker 2 inspired visual novel-life sim, fondly. Visual novels do the latter the most often.

Some games, memorably, use repetition as a strength in encouraging repeat playthroughs, and build upon what came before it with finesse others spit in the face of repetition. They often aren't worth the time invested, especially now that you can quickly go on YouTube to catch whatever ending you missed, even if you are intrigued by the promise of a new outcome and different character interactions. In most cases, multiple playthroughs shift the dialogue and ending, a boss or so, and not much else.

It's hard to make a second playthrough of a video game feel worth it. This past week, I took a break from Resident Evil 2 before diving into what I knew was said by many to be essential: the second playthrough, now as Claire. Last weekend, I finally wrapped up my first run through of it as Leon. With that new rule in place, I'm especially late in playing one big game of 2019: Resident Evil 2.ДЄnd oh, how I love it. But this year, I made a New Year's resolution to not force myself to play every game that passes by. I'm always moving on from new game to new game, with little time to dive back into my backlog. See more articles like this in our Starting Screen archive.

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