Roleplaying

Roleplaying is a reoccurring gameplay element in the Resident Evil franchise. "Roleplaying" in this case is being treated looses as cases where the player's actions affect the story in the form of stage progression and/or which cutscenes play.

History
The first Resident Evil used roleplaying as a prominent gameplay feature and as a means of adding replay value. Situations where the player's actions have an affect on the story and when results are being playing out are not always explicitly communicated to the player. This allowed for different experiences on repeated play-throughs. Resident Evil 2 did away with roleplaying of first game and replaced with the more formal "Zapping" system. Instead of events branching within the scenario being played, the results of the players actions in the "A" scenario would all later be experienced in the "B" scenario.

Roleplaying continued to be used as a stylistic choice to varying degrees of prominence throughout the franchise. The titles developed and released between 1998 and 2004 continued to keep transforming the concept; Resident Evil 3: Nemesis on top of regular roleplaying, added "Live Selection" and Resident Evil Survivor simply had a linear route that splits into three paths paired with their own scenes and events that converge back into one path then repeats. Resident Evil CODE:Veronica and Resident Evil 0 retained roleplaying situations but with very little affect on gameplay or depiction of events.

Resident Evil 4 and onward featured almost no roleplaying or reduced them to a few very specific events. Resident Evil 6 notably only features one event that has an "either A or B" cutscene and Resident Evil 7: Biohazard has one event late in the game that determines the which of the two endings is reached. Resident Evil: Revelations 2 brought back roleplaying as a prominent feature using a system similar to Zapping but with more switching between "A" and "B" phases.