Resident Evil 2 ruined the series.
1. It moved the game out of a mansion and into a convoluted unrealistic police department.
2. It added too many characters, reducing the spookiness the loneliness in the first game brought. In RE you barely have contact with any of the other characters (unless you play easy mode as Jill.)
3. It had too much ammo, lowering the difficulty quite a bit, and placed the burden of said ammo on its many forced boss fights instead of the enemies.
4. Puzzles were esoteric shit like pushing statues to collect gems, instead of just having keys, passwords, chemical formulas, or rarely pushing a crate.
5. Dropped the purposeful cheesiness of B horror films for a more serious plot.
6. Retconned the good ending of RE where Umbrella was exposed just so they could have a cashin sequel.
7. Focused the story on a newbie cop literally nobody liked until RE4 and Chris' untrained little sister (what a poor trade for Jill's hot ass.)
8. Too many magic boxes/magic boxes at all. The magic storage boxes (aside from teleporting items) made more sense in an old mansion. Why would a police station have giant trunks every four rooms?
9. Replaced powerful deadly Hunters with blind retarded Lickers.
10. Too many weapons. What's the point in having a magnum when I can have an upgraded shotgun with a shitload of ammo? What's the point in preserving handgun ammo when I know I will pick up an uzi? In RE each weapon served a specific role, and some like the flamethrower, had a tradeoff preventing you from taking them with you.
11. Bosses are easy. Even putting aside the abundance of ammo problem, bosses are too easy on their own. The alligator can be killed via a cutscene. Mr. X and the G monster both are easier in any of their encounters than Plant 42 or Yawn.
12. The whole two scenario disc swapping was just because of all the CGI on each disc instead of more content. RE had both scenarios on the same disc and instead of just shitty late 90s CGI had awesome FMVs with real actors.
13. Too many save ribbons. First time playing through RE you could legitimately be in danger of running out of ribbons from saving too often. In RE2 the game shits ribbons at you everywhere.
14. Both characters inherited Jill's easy mode inventory with 8 blocks and both characters can optionally carry up to 10 items. Playing RE with Chris meant deciding between carrying even one health item or backtracking, which rewarded good players, and punished bad players with back tracking/item juggling
15. Despite being bigger RE2 is far more linear than RE.
16. Added Ate-a Wong to the series as more than a brief mention by an already dead NPC.
17. Despite having its two scenarios more fleshed out than RE's, RE2's scenarios have continuity errors between each other no matter the order you play them in.
18. Shipped RE's characters into even worse sequels despite the game taking place in their stomping grounds. How convenient they all happened to be away for various reasons. This was nothing more than laziness as they could come up with whatever they wanted for the new characters without much effort.
19. Fake climaxes. In RE you bring the Tyrant down and then have him show up again once a few minutes later. In RE2 both Mr. X and G are presumably dead several times, but just keep coming back. This cancerous approach to boss monsters was repeated more egregiously with Nemesis, who is completely overrated.
20. So Umbrella's remote lab in RE got blown up, and Capcom just makes up a new bigger badder variant right under the city without anyone ever knowing it was built there, or wondering why their sewer system has strange facilities built into it.
21. Umbrella became a corporation that could pretty much do anything. Instead of like in RE where they did shit secretly and had one mole in the police force, in RE2 the damn police chief is involved with them and able to cover up the existence of a giant underground facility linked to the city's sewers.
22. The police chief is psychotic and somehow managed to keep his position despite how obviously psychotic he was.
23. No Wesker.