In this new era everything has to be done in such a way that makes everyone happy.

Arrange mode has auto aim go and play that -> Noooo i want the og US release with the harder enemies...

So you want the "harder" enemies but you also want it to be easier....

The OG PC release did not have auto aim in the original mode, i doesn't ruin anything, that's how it was. But hey complaining is free.

Well, the ohgee comupter port was handled poorly, and over twenty years of hindsight should yield better. The lack of auto aim does make the game harder, but it also makes it a considerably awkward and less enjoyable experience. The game was simply not designed to be played without the feature.

Lack of auto-aim doesn't really make the game harder, you have very generous hitscan anyway, but it does make the snappy controls of the classic RE games feel more clunky. When Capcom USA removed the auto-aim for the original international PS1 version of RE1 Mikami fought against this because he thought the game would be less fun to play without it. Hence why every subsequent release restored it, including the PC port that is sold here.

With RE2 they sorta reached a compromise, disabled by default in the international versions but you could enable it.
The exception being the PC port. Now I know that GOG doesn't modify the game's contents and sells it as is, that's fine. But what makes this frustrating is that I'm pretty sure that not being able to enable auto-aim in this version's Original Mode is not an intentional decision but an oversight.

Because the way you enabled auto-aim in all the other versions was to pick a specific button layout in the controller settings that was virtually identical with the default one but had auto-aim enabled. in the PC port they revamed the control settings and let you map each individual button instead of picking from different pre-defined control schemes...and with that change the auto-aim option was lost. But I'm pretty sure this is just a case of carelessness back when they originally made this port.

Also, yeah, you can play Arranged Mode and get auto-aim. (Albeit on the japanese difficulty.) However, 4th survivor, Tofu and EX Battle still play without auto-aim.

The lack of auto aim making it slightly harder is not the problem, it's that it makes the experience more annoying. The game was originally designed with auto aim.

In any case the solution for me was to apply the classic rebirth patch and then play in Arranged Normal mode, with force auto aim on in the classic rebirth settings. So I get the USA layout with auto aim. Just finished Claire A, Leon B and enjoyed it thoroughly

It would be a good addition to this release if GOG team added the feature to force auto aim even if just in a config file, like in the classic rebirth settings.

You have no idea how happy you just made me!
EVERY American version of RE2 other than this one had auto-aim. There's no reason this one shouldn't.

To activate Auto Aim, hex edit you save file. Change the Offsets 0x228 and 0x791 to 00. You maybe have than the easy difficulty though, but this I have to inverstigate further.

I can confirm that doing that does indeed both activate auto-aim and gives you the JP easier zombie placements.

Sorry but it is not a deal breaker, I played this game on the N64 and it has auto-aim disabled by default, so I played aiming manually until i've read on a magazine that it should be turned on. But my experience weren't ruined because of that, heck i felt right at home on this gog version. So don't take it too seriously, take it as a challenge after beaten this game trillions of times...

So, no way to have the auto-aim without ruinning the difficulty?

If it makes you feel any better, the choice isn't between a challenging version without auto-aim and a really easy version with auto-aim, the choice is between a really easy version without auto-aim and a slightly easier version with auto-aim.

You can. Get the SourceNext conversation fan patch to convert it to the Japanese Windows XP release, and get the Classic Rebirth mod to force auto-aim in the game. Select Arrange mode when starting a new game and you will be playing with the Western version's enemy and item placement with auto-aim.

The first RE2 release (non DualShock) had auto aim off by default, but yeah, you could activate it on the settings menu. It's possible to convert the game to the Sourcenext version and use the Gemini patch, so whatever.

That said, the manual aiming is fine after you've beaten the game so many times. I've played every scenario on Original/Hard and it's perfectly doable, but it demands memorization and training.