Ha ha, thanks for popping by. C: I'll be glad to pass along any piece of advice that I can;

Personally, I always think that it's best to be able to play all of the games, so that you can actually keep up with the whole storyline for what is going on. But it isn't exactly necessary.

There are a LOT of Resident Evil games out there, but the MAIN titles go:
-RE 0
-RE (original/director's cut, Deadly Silence, the re-make, or the wii-make, they all have the same exact story, just with minor tweaks)
-RE 2
-RE: "Nemisis" (3)
-RE: Code Veronica X
-RE 4
-and then (sadly) RE5 (which I hate).

I would agree with your friend that 2 and 4 are probably two of the best titles of the series, though I'm also very partial to Code Veronica (it's my personal favorite) and the original/remake, Resident Evil 1.

To be honest, you could probably scrape by playing only 2 & 4 if you're interested in ONLY Leon's arc of the story, but you'll be missing out on a LOT. Especially with the jump from 2 to 4. There are a lot of critical events that happen in RE1 that spur on everything happening in RE2, and then there are some pretty important things that transpire between 2 and 4 (two game's worth). There will just be a lot of pieces of the puzzle missing is all.

My take on the matter is that if you know next to nothing about the series, I would definitely try to get RE1 at the very least. Capcom JUST released the Wii-make of Resident Evil 1, and you can get it off the shelf for $30 at almost any game store. I'm sure if you wait for a little bit, you'll be able to find used copies for about half that. Then after playing through 1 RE2 would make a lot more sense, and you could skip to 4 because you would understand the majority of what was going on up until that point.

If you can't be troubled to get RE wii-make though, I would suggest looking for a copy of Umbrella Chronicles; UC is a "synopsis" of the series, essentially. It briefly covers the events of RE0, RE1, RE3, and other stuff in the series that was left sort of fuzzy and blank. Though it doesn't cover EVERYTHING, and it will probably move much too fast and you might end up confused. Still, you can pick up a copy of UC used for about $10-15. I saw a copy for $10.50 just the other day.

This isn't CRITICAL though, as I said before; you can probably get away with JUST playing RE2 and RE4, but you'll certainly be missing out on a lot.

Hope that helped~!

~R.E.S.

--
_{"I don't know where you get your confidence from, Chris." ~ Albert Wesker (RE: Code Veronica)}

howdeh c:

--
_{"I don't know where you get your confidence from, Chris." ~ Albert Wesker (RE: Code Veronica)}