Headscratchers / Resident Evil 2 (Remake)

Irons wanting Sherry's locket

In the original Irons had no interest in Sherry. She was just another person. The only one after her locket was Mr. X, and he only cared because of the G-virus sample hidden in it. In the remake the locket doesn't have a sample. It only acts as a key to open the vaccine case for the G-virus. Why would Irons know that, or care about it? The remake does show that Irons and the Birkins were a little closer than the original, what with the orphanage and providing them with kids to use as test subjects, so perhaps he was aware of it's use, but again what does he care? Assuming he got ahold of the locket what would he have even done with it? He claims that if Sherry didn't have the locket he'd have no interest in her and would have let her go, but if that was his only interest in her then why kidnap her in the first place? Why not just demand the locket and use Claire's life as leverage when he found them?

• Perhaps he'd sell the G-Virus to the highest bidder like Ada planned.
• Also, it's not entirely illogical that Irons could've possibly intended on doing...awful things to Sherry. He already has a history of brutally raping or murdering females for kicks (especially blondes), plus the Game Over screen says "you are trapped" instead of "you are dead" after he makes it perfectly clear that he intends to hurt her in some way after she escapes and throws acid in his face. Also, if you remember a file in the original game, he points out that he purposely let the mayor's daughter escape just so he could enjoy hunting her down later, and considering how she turned out...

Self destruct for unauthorized removal, but enough time to escape?

William fearing spies stealing his work is understandable, considering the note saying they've found out about quite a few. But the failsafe for stopping someone from escaping with it is both an overkill and a bit useless for the same reason, namely that it would have been more effective to have the room automtically locked down. Leon had more than enough time to get to the bottom level with the stolen virus and escape, so it already fails as a way to stop someone running off with a sample. Granted, if there wasn't a horde of T-virus monsters around there may have been security in place, but it doesn't negate the main issue. Even if you stopped the thief you'd still run into the issue that you just blew your lab sky high and there goes all your research. And maybe the Birkins had a way to stop a self-destruct if they got the thief in time, but the thief still has full freedom of movement until they find him. So all in all a very inefficient system.

Why didn't Annette treat Sherry with the anti-virus before Claire had to?

• Did she simply forget, or did she not care at first?
  • That's the point of the scene in the disposal room: Annette has already written Sherry off as dead, because she's monomaniacally focused on trying to contain William. I believe she even says it at one point, that she regards William being loose in the world as a bigger threat than the T-Virus outbreak.

How did they eat him so fast!?

• This is about the One Shot Demo of the remake. (I think. I watched it on Maximilian_Dood's YouTube channel and haven’t played it myself yet.) Specifically, that one part where Leon helps the officer out from the barricade only for his lower half to be missing. He wasn't under there for that long and yet the Zombies managed to eat about half of him. Are the Zombies part piranha!? Is it really possible that they... “ate” him that fast? Did something else happen like they just chewed through his midsection and pulled his lower half away? Or maybe Leon accidentally pulled him away from his Lower section when he went to help the man? Ugh. I'm getting chills from thinking this deeply about it.
  • They didn't eat the guy, the zombie horde basically ripped the guy's lower half off. Depending on the size of the group, it wouldn't take that much effort.
    • ^This. The average human being is actually a LOT stronger than you think, they're only held back by a pain reflex because pushing your muscles to their absolute limit pretty much destroys them (see as an example, the famous story of the woman who lifted a car to rescue her child). The zombies don't have that pain reflex, so their muscles are running at full burn all the time.
    • In fact, you do find the remains of his lower half in the full game when coming from the other side.

Miscellaneous

• So in RE 2 Remake, after saving Leon from a zombie by decapitating it using the shutter, Leon asks Marvin " Does anyone know what started this? " . And Marvin's response is " Not a clue. " . Am I the only one who found this line weird? Like, this line makes him sounds like he forgot that he wrote a diary in Outbreak File 2 Desperate Times scenario ( Hell, even Rita is mentioned and given a surname. ) plus this diary connects well with og RE 2, in that game he mentions to Leon or Claire how Raccoon City incident is related to the events of RE 1 and how none believed STARS. Btw ı dont think Claire is the one who met him cause her reply to Marvin ( That's great news. ) makes her sound like she doesnt care about searching Chris anymore and this defeats the purpose of Resident Evil Code Veronica. Not saying ı dislike this Marvin btw, ı really liked him and see him as an improvement over the OG marvin even with his weird reply.
  • It's possible Marvin is referring specifically to what the hell is going on in Raccoon and how THAT got started. He doesn't know how the virus got unleashed on a major population center. It's also possible that he's glossing it over for an outsider — now's not really the time to get into the whole mansion incident and what transpired.
  • With Claire I think it was supposed to be interpreted as her trying to stay positive and not freak out over the fact she came all the way to Raccoon city for nothing. Or "That's great" could be interpreted as "That's great that my brother is safe from this mess."
  • It's a retcon. The remake is a new canon that overwrites the old canon that comes before it. The best way to look at this is that anything that contradicts the remake, like the diary, should now be treat as non-canon, while anything that doesn't should be left alone.
  • Word of God is that it's a "reimagining", much like Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and not necessarily meant to supplant the 1998 original the same way REmake overrides the first game. Since none of the new and/or contradictory stuff extends into any later sequels, it's best to go with what Capcom normally does and just treat it all as Broad Strokes.
  • Outbreak is weird; it is both canon, and non-canon. Certain elements (the depiction of Raccoon City's destruction) are non-canon (RE 3's ending is the official version of that), while other elements (the characters reappearing in other media, like Alyssa Ashford) are canon.
• How did the zombie at the beginning of the remake get back up to bite the trucker? I know the T-Virus is supposed to burn out the part of your nervous system that responds to pain, but undead or not, an 18-wheeler going fast enough would turn anyone in front of it into jelly.
  • He activates his brake, that's why the zombie managed to get up and bite him. Also zombies might have different health from each other, for example sometimes it takes less headshot to kill a zombie in RE 2 remake, sometimes it takes more.
• Another question about RE 2 remake. So during the sewer section, after jumping down to the area where plugs are used; Claire sees Sherry talking to Annette. Annette says " Why didn't you stay in the house? It was safe there. " to Sherry followed by more conversation between the 2 followed by Sherry collapsing due to her infection. Am I the only one who found this line weird? Like, in Darkside Chronicles, you can unlock 3 files that are phone conversations between Annette and Sherry. One of the conversations has Annette wanting Sherry to leave her school, grab the pendant in their house and hide in RPD while staying away from everyone. Due to this file, ı found Annette's this line in RE 2 remake weird.
  • Possibly retconned along with other things?
    • I dont think retconning that makes sense. Annette wanting Sherry to take shelter in RPD without contacting anyone makes more sense and fits better into RE 2's story. ( Plus at the start of RE 2 Remake, you can hear the RPD announcer telling people to take shelter at RPD, something that was used from Darkside Chronicles. ) I know that Annette isnt the best mother to Sherry since she focuses on her work just like her husband but still. I guess ı'll just accept that dialogue non-canon and accept some small plot features of OG RE 2 and those 3 phone calls more canon now. ( The canon events of RE 2 are a combination of all 8 scenarios along with some scenes / events from Memories Of A Lost City. So the story still works fine enough. )
  • Given that both Annette and William were high up in Umbrella's research labs, and if we take the amounts of money William was funneling to Irons, I think it's safe to say that if you combine both of their incomes, they're making big bucks, so it's probably that they have a house in a gated community outside the city proper with lots of security measures. Either that, or there was a fortified panic room in their house in the city. Both of which would be well within their characters, given their (justified) paranoia that Umbrella wants to take the G-Virus.

Why is Mr. X fighting HUNK?

• They are both supposed to be on the same side. Couldn't the programmers at Umbrella just program the damn thing to recognize and cooperate with a friendly? They can make it follow an order as complex as recognizing a specific virus and retrieving it, how hard can recognizing uniform possibly be?
  • Given how Umbrella seems to operate, it wouldn't be unexpected if there were rival factions in the company responsible for the deployment of the security squad sent after Birkin and later the Tyrants; they may also not want to consider compensation for HUNK after he escapes from Raccoon City post-viral outbreak. Umbrella is, after all, the company who said 'OK' when Birkin and Wesker murdered Marcus and took his job.
  • If I remember right, one of the games (I think darkside chronicles) states that the BO Ws weren't responding correctly to Umbrella's commands and given how badly things go shit, its likely that Mr. X, while not rogue, is being rather broad with its directive.
  • Tyrants are not that smart. In the original, it was implied to be after the G-virus sample carried by either Ada in Leon B or Sherry in Claire B, so going after HUNK, who had such a sample, made sense. However, it’s heavily implied in the remake that Mr.X mission is simply there to kill anyone who might make it out of the city alive with intel on Umbrella. From there, it’s easy to imagine anyone that’s not currently a zombie is fair game.

Who is delivering the pizzas?!

• Over in NEST, in the security office you may find an open pizza box (with half of what looks like a pepperoni in there). Now, considering that NEST is supposed to be Umbrella's secret lab that nobody is supposed to know exists, one must ask the question: who is delivering the pizzas?
  • Probably a pizzaria on Umbrellas payroll.
  • Given how many businesses Umbrella has branched out into ^note keep in mind umbrella corporations are a parent company with multiple subordinate companies it's not too much of a stretch to believe Umbrella OWNS a pizza company that answers to them. Though it is somewhat amusing to think that there's either A) a pizza delivery man with enough security clearance to go into Umbrella's top secret research facility, or B) Umbrella has some security guard with high level security clearance that doubles as a pizza delivery man (one can only imagine how much this pains his dignity). The more mundane answer might be that Umbrella orders the pizza, tells the delivery guy to meet them out in the middle of nowhere, and then the scientists/security staff walk it in. Sorry Umbrella scientists, our secrecy requires you to microwave that pizza if it gets cold, is probably what Umbrella told them.
  • Here's an even easier answer: did you forget there's a cafeteria that you go into this time?
    • Yeah, I've been in a lot of corporate cafeterias that have pizza day, complete with a cardboard box.
  • Or one of the lab workers bought it at a pizzeria and brought it down with them, no delivery needed.
    • Someone must have really been craving a pie to tote one all the way down through a foul-smelling sewer system.
    • To be fair, it's heavily implied that the sewer entrance was just the quickest route from the RPD, not the actual, full-time use entrance, most maps of Raccoon tend to put NEST almost directly below Umbrellas Head office building, or the hospital, remember in-game they have to take a relatively long tram ride to get there.

Who is Claire talking to on the payphone in the remake?

• This bothered me, in Claire's opening in the RE 2 remake she's shown talking to someone on the payphone outside the gas station. She even says "I'll be there as soon as I find Chris", but it's never revealed who she's talking to. We know both their parents are dead (as revealed later in the game by Claire herself later in the game). So who is she talking to? I know it's a small and unimportant question in the grand scheme of things but it bothered this troper to no end.
  • Most likely a friend of hers, or her roommate. Claire is a college student, and she took time off from university to search for her brother, so she most likely let said person know what she was up to.
    • Don't need to look. It starts in her inventory, same with Leon and the note that says to stay away from Raccoon City.
  • Supported by the detail that Claire starts with a note from her friend as a file.
  • Thank you! I was not aware of this note, I'll look for it on my next Claire playthrough (just speed ran it)

Ada's Hacking Tool

• If Ada's hacking tool can unlock the NEST elevator, why didn't she use it unlock the RPD garage?
  • You'll notice that Leon's never around when she uses the hacking tool. She probably didn't want to pull it out in his presence to avoid him asking uncomfortable questions that would lead to her cover being blown. As for why she'd bother waiting for him to track down the card and return, she apparently wants to keep him handy because he's better armed than her and she could use the extra firepower.

Stationary Fire

• Why doesn't the fire from the wrecked helicopter spread and burn down the whole station?
  • It hit an exterior wall and punched through, which is letting in the torrential rain from outside. Most of the area it's in is also wood, which contrary to popular belief, tends to scorch instead of burn, at least right away. Between the rain, the area it struck, and the relative speed with which it was put out, it's probably enough to assume that the fire didn't have the chance to really spread, and that the gas tank was either nearly empty or got ruptured in the crash.

Where'd That Axe Come From?

• Okay, it's obviously a quick Shout-Out to The Shining, but where did Irons get the axe he uses on that one door, and where did it go immediately afterward? He never has one on him before or after that single moment.
  • It was likely lying around somewhere on the ground floor, hidden and he grabbed it to get through the door.

Incendiary Rounds

• When would police ever need 40mm incendiary grenades?
  • I was assuming they were non-lethal rounds that had been repacked with improvised napalm.
  • It's possible that those are confiscated from terrorists. The reason why S.T.A.R.S exists in the first place is that Raccoon has a terrorism problem prior to the event of the series. It's not a stretch to assume that the incendiary rounds were procured by the terrorists and later taken by the RPD as evidence.
  • Could also be Umbrella and Irons wanting something more damaging in case of a BOW being released on accident.

Lethal Weapons For A Capture Mission

• If the USS team's mission was to detain Dr. Birkin and retrieve the G-Virus, why were they armed with lethal weapons only?
  • For everyone who *wasn't* Dr. Birkin. You can find an email from Birkin to Irons on Irons's desk as Claire that suggests Birkin had started keeping his own private security at the NEST, most of whom were likely corrupt cops on Irons's payroll.
  • Umbrella knows that William is contacting the US government. The USS may be packing heat in case the government deploys some special force unit to stop them, which actually happens in canon.

Leon's Unbreakable Spine

• Shouldn't Leon's spine be a broken, mangled mess after being repeatedly slammed into a steel grating with enough force to bend and break it?
  • Seems like the frame on the grate gave way before Leon did. He's also got a weird habit of not dying when things slam him into other things, though.
    • It's just plot armor. Resident Evil franchise relies to them a lot, especially the later titles. ( I dont see this as a bad thing though. ) Although ı must mention that Claire is the one who canonically fought Birkin's 1st form instead of Leon. It's confirmed in Degeneration CGI movie.

"The Forgotten Soldier" is canon?

• Some fans keep referring to his Ghost Survivors campaign as if it's canon, but there are a couple of issues with that: First, Ada canonically fails to retrieve a G-Virus sample —from Ghost or otherwise— and goes home empty-handed after the events of RE2, while Wesker ended up obtaining his own specimens from William Birkin's remains according the yes-it's-canon Wesker's Report. Second, you find a microcassette recorder that has a brief exchange between Ghost and another operative, and you take it off a dead U.S.S. member in the central shaft just outside the NEST lobby, as opposed to on the lower platform where Ghost wakes up in "The Forgotten Soldier" (and no dead U.S.S. guys are down there at all in the main campaign). If that's not supposed to be his corpse, what's it doing with his tape recorder?
  • Actually, it was shown that Ada got a G-Virus sample in her solo level in Umbrella Chronicles, which last time I checked was still canon.
    • Still didn't come from Ghost.

Unauthorized removal?

• How was Leon's removal of the G-Virus unauthorized? He had the security clearance to enter the room and the virus storage was already open, what could be more authorized?
  • Actual approval by William Birkin (in form of a second security line that have to be shut-off by the doctor upon the removal) before leaving the room?
    • That's how I saw it. Birkin's creation, so only Birkin could remove it. Wouldn't surprise me if he tied it to the facility's self-destruct as another "fuck you" to Umbrella.

The orphanage doors

• When Sherry is trying to escape the orphanage, she unlocks the front doors only to find them additionally chained from the outside. However, when Claire reaches the orphanage, the chains are gone. Maybe I wasn't paying attention, but where and when did they go? Did G-Birkin tear them off and then gently open and close the doors?
  • There were claw marks on the door, so yes, Birkin did tear them off, and doors open and close by themselves in this game.
  • Facilities for young children, like the orphanage, nearly always have arrangements that automatically pull the doors shut. It helps prevent some goofball leaving the door open and letting a toddler wander out.

No Warning For Claire

• Why did Chris not contact Claire about where he was and warning her to stay out of Raccoon City?
  • Chris seemed to be unaware of the outbreak as it was happening, but his letter included a message for Jill to let Claire know, if she called, that he was fine and she shouldn't worry about him. He presumably didn't want to give Claire any means to track him down directly, while she never thought to try calling Jill to find out what was up.
  • We can probably assume Jill never had a chance to contact Claire either given what happens with her during then.
  • While the assumption that Chris didn't know about the Raccoon City outbreak is valid (if Jill's Diary from the original RE 3 is still canon, then Chris had already left for Europe earlier in the month, before the outbreak really kicked in), Claire was convinced that it wasn't Chris who actually wrote that note.

Opening Radio Show

• Given the state the city was shown to be in during this game and the RE 3 remake, how was the radio show caller able to go out drinking and be surprised by seeing a zombie?
  • There were infections throughout the region after Marcus' little temper tantrum, and the outbreak had been going on for months by the time Birkin was attacked. The caller might have been referring to an earlier incident ("last Friday night" could have meant the 18th rather than the 25th depending on how you interpret it), or potentially an isolated case outside of the city itself.

Who's pooping?

• Why are Racoon City's sewers still... busy when the majority of the population is deceased?
  • Upon exploring the sewers of Racoon City, we see literal torrents of effluence. But whence is it coming from? Who is flushing toilets given this stage in the infection? Surely the sewers should have "run dry" given most people capable of using a toilet are dead.
    • It's raining. Just because there are torrents of effluent doesn't automatically mean it's all human waste, although what's happening at ground level probably does mean the rain's washing some really unwholesome stuff off the streets.