Capcom sale: which Resident Evil and Monster Hunter to buy

Capcom has put most of its modern back catalogue on Steam at once, and the store page on every game we checked carries the same line: offer ends 21 September. That is a fortnight, and it lands in the run-up to Tokyo Game Show, which is when Capcom traditionally discounts hardest. The Capcom sale is the deepest the Resident Evil remakes and the Monster Hunter games have been cut in months.

It is also a sale that punishes browsing. Capcom has roughly a dozen Resident Evil entries on Steam, two full Monster Hunter generations, and a scattering of things nobody remembers it published. Buying the wrong one first is the easiest way to bounce off both series. Here is the order that actually works.

What the Capcom sale actually covers

The discounting is not uniform. The Resident Evil remakes and the older Monster Hunter games are cut hardest; the recent releases — Monster Hunter Wilds, Street Fighter 6 — are cut modestly, as you would expect from games still in their first couple of years. Devil May Cry 5 and Dragon's Dogma 2 are sitting at full price at the time of writing, so if either of those is what you came for, this is not your week.

We are not quoting numbers here on purpose. Publisher sale prices move during the event, the key resellers we track move independently of Steam, and any figure typed into an article is wrong within days. Every game named below links to its Playze page, where the live price across every store we track sits at the top.

The RPD building in Resident Evil 2 is the single best-designed space Capcom has built — a Metroid-style map you unlock in pieces. (Official Steam screenshot)

If you have never played a Resident Evil, start with 2

Resident Evil 2 came out in January 2019 and remains the cleanest possible entry point. It is a remake of a 1998 game, so it carries none of the plot debt of the later entries: you are a rookie cop, the city has gone wrong, and the map is a police station you learn by heart. It runs about ten hours. It holds an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam across more than 220,000 reviews.

The reason to start here rather than with the flashier remake is pacing. Resident Evil 2 is a game about scarcity — of ammunition, of save-room space, of routes that are not blocked. Once you understand why the series makes you think about inventory, everything after it reads properly. Start with 4 and you learn the action game first, and the survival horror never quite lands.

If you only buy one, buy Resident Evil 4

Resident Evil 4 is the best game in this sale and it is not especially close. The 2023 remake rebuilt the 2005 original — the game that invented the over-the-shoulder shooter as everyone now understands it — without sanding off what made it strange. It is roughly sixteen hours, it has a parry, and it is Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 275,000 Steam reviews.

The Resident Evil 4 launch trailer, from Capcom's official Resident Evil channel.

What people underrate is how funny it is. The village chapter is genuinely frightening, and then a man in a purple cloak sells you a rocket launcher and the tone snaps sideways. That tonal range is why it survives twenty years of imitation. If you buy one game from the Capcom sale and never open Steam again, this is the one.

The opening village siege — the sequence every third-person action game has been copying since 2005. (Official Steam screenshot)

Village and 7 are a different series, and worth knowing that first

Resident Evil 7 (January 2017) and Resident Evil Village (May 2021) are first-person, and they tell one continuous story about a character the remakes never mention. They are excellent and they are also the wrong place to start, because Village's back half assumes you played 7.

Buy them as a pair or not at all. If you have played neither and horror in first person is a problem for you, skip both — 7 in particular is the most genuinely unpleasant thing Capcom has made, which is a compliment. Resident Evil 3 is the weakest of the modern remakes: shorter than 2, thinner, and worth buying only once you have finished the other two and want more.

Monster Hunter: World or Rise — the honest answer

Monster Hunter: World (August 2018) is the one to buy. It has 516,000 Steam reviews at Very Positive and it is the entry that finally explained the series to people outside Japan: contiguous maps, a monster ecology you can watch rather than read about, and a difficulty curve that teaches instead of testing.

The Monster Hunter: World announcement trailer, from the official Monster Hunter channel.

Monster Hunter Rise (January 2022) is faster, more forgiving and much lighter on your machine — it was built for the Switch first. If your PC is modest, or if you have bounced off the series before because the first twenty hours felt like homework, Rise is the kinder door. If your PC is fine and you want the version people are still playing in numbers, it is World.

World's monsters wander, feed and fight each other whether or not you are watching — the thing Rise trades away for speed. (Official Steam screenshot)

Do not buy both. They are the same game twice, and whichever you pick will take you sixty hours before you have seen its second act.

The ones nobody mentions

Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is the sleeper. A 2023 port of a Nintendo DS puzzle game by the writer of Ace Attorney, it costs less than anything else here and it is the most original thing Capcom has released this decade — you play a ghost rewinding the last four minutes before someone dies, and it is roughly a dozen hours long with no filler at all.

Ghost Trick's animation is hand-keyed by the Ace Attorney team and looks like nothing else on Steam. (Official Steam screenshot)

Street Fighter 6 (June 2023) is cut less deeply, and the calculation there is different: fighting games are worth what their player count is worth, and SF6 still has one. If you have wanted in, a mid-sale price on a game with a living lobby beats a deeper cut on a dead one.

Check the price before you buy from Steam

One habit worth forming during any publisher sale: Steam's discount is a data point, not the answer. On several of the games above, the cheapest offer on the Playze page today is a key reseller rather than Steam itself, and the gap is not small. That is not automatically the right buy — we have written about where keyshop keys actually come from and why the cheap ones sometimes deserve suspicion — but it is worth thirty seconds before you commit.

If Capcom is your publisher, note also that the Onimusha series is having a moment, and that we have looked at whether Way of the Sword is worth buying at launch. Neither is in this sale — new releases rarely are. For a comparable event with a very different catalogue, the Focus Entertainment sale is running alongside it, and for more of the same genre there is our running list of horror discounts.

The bottom line

Buy Resident Evil 4. If you have already played it, buy Resident Evil 2. If neither series is for you but you want something from the Capcom sale, buy Ghost Trick, which is cheap enough that being wrong about it costs nothing. Skip Resident Evil 3 unless you are completing the set, skip Village until you have played 7, and pick exactly one Monster Hunter.

You have until 21 September, which is long enough to think about it and short enough that a wishlist is not a plan. Check the live price on each game page before you buy — during a publisher sale the cheapest store changes more often than the discount does.