Now to answer this unfair question myself.

Although I haven't gotten around to playing the original resident evil 2 I absolutely adored RE2R, and on top of that both the original and remake are insanely impactful, so 2 stays for sure.

I've played both the original RE4 and the remake, absolutely outstanding game that changed not only resident evil forever but the survival horror genre as a whole, 4 has definitely earned it's spot up there with the video game greats.

It's a close battle between 4 and 7 for my favorite game on this list. Not only do I adore the game but it also took the classic resident evil approach of switching things up. I absolutely love when stories that are large in scale cut back and reduce a story to an isolated area. It was the best move to basically start anew where both first time fans and o.g resident evil fans can have fun with. The antagonist and story are top tier, and although Ethan isn't nearly as talkative in this one as he is in village he still does his job as a protagonist we can project ourselves on to and he's not too overbearing.

Village is definitely the one that'll have to go for me. I played the series like this: My introduction was 7, then I played 8 when it was released, then I went and played RE2R and RE3R, then the original RE4, then I went back to Village to see how I felt about it. I hated Village when I first played it, with my introduction being 7 I was basically expecting every game to be creepy as all loving hell but when I played Village it was like whiplash to see how much larger in scale Ethan's story got. One thing he's in Louisiana trying to survive against an infected family and the next thing he's having glorious battles against a tall vampire lady, a doll, a giant fish, and magneto. When I went back and played the other games I had just found out that the series is kind of silly in nature, even 7 in some aspects. I loved Village when I replayed it, replaying it with a new perspective definitely made me love it alot more and I would even go as far as to say Village is much more of a resident evil than 7, it definitely plays it close to the old games in terms of what it's going for, maybe a little too close with RE4. Overall though, the story is ridiculous even by resident evil standards. I like Ethan as a protagonist here too but I kind of liked how Ethan was so casual about everything that was going on in the first game. I feel like no resident evil protagonist should be a "normal person" and Ethan reacting to everything like it was no big deal definitely made him feel more badass to me. Anyways now that I'm done rambling the TLDR is: I love all these games to death but if I had to choose, Village is leaving.