I compared the quality of the FMV cutscenes in Resident Evil 2 on this GOG version with the Dreamcast version (Redream emulator). The cutscenes in the Dreamcast version are of MUCH better quality! The cutscenes on the GOG version are much more pixelated and the black bars at the top and bottom are much bigger (I have tried different resolutions, such as "Set by application"). How is this possible? Was the PC version really inferior to the Dreamcast version? GOG says "Improved cutscenes" on the store page. I don't get it.

The GOG version uses the PlayStation 1 FMVs. The Dreamcast version used higher resolution ones, which were also in the Sourcenext PC ports of 2 and 3. To get those in this version, read the thread about converting to Sourcenext, installing Classic ReBirth, and look for the HD videos mod. I'm not sure if those mods use the Dreamcast/Sourcenext videos or upscaled versions of the original videos, but they look pretty much the same as the Dreamcast version's videos to me, so I assume they use those.

Not sure why GOG advertises it as having improved cutscenes when they're not. It took me a lot of tinkering and comparing to figure all this out. It does seem to have all the other graphical/gameplay features of the Dreamcast version.

Thank you for the reply! I don't know what is more disappointing: That GOG delivers a RE2 version with low-quality cutscenes and falsely advertises it as "improved". Or that the majority of players don't notice or don't care, nobody else replied.

A problem with a lot of old games is that the cutscenes look worse nowadays on a modern monitor with high resolution than it looked on the old monitors at that time. So I'm sure that the cutscenes of this GOG version looked better 25 years ago than now.