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     I TOLD you Chris was ripped! 
  • Are Chris Redfield's muscles at all realistic? This is a really weird question to ask given it's a game involving mutating super zombie soldiers, but something about Chris seemed REALLY off. Ironically, Wesker felt more natural to me despite the aforementioned super soldier-ness.
    • Well, Chris' muscles are within the realm of possibility. Pro football players can put on that kind of muscle mass. But they train their whole lives to do it, and Chris was not nearly that big as of Code Veronica 11 canon years before. I would speculate that the Umbrella research into super drugs probably led to some lesser benefits, like advanced steroids. And that Chris, who knows his arch enemy is a superhuman monster, would be highly motivated to take them to try to even the fight. Couple an intense weight-training regimen with some chemical enhancement and maybe. Roid rage would even explain the boulder-punching ridiculousness.
    • Yikes, thanks for that. Makes Chris seem realistic, if a bit of a nut, but still... his body scares me regardless.
    • I have this bodybuilding magazine where they had these freaks, these absolute freaks that made the Governator look tiny. Here's one of them.
      [1]
      Here's a good shot of Chris for comparison.
      [2]
      From personal experience I bulk out quite a bit just from light weights, so assuming Chris threw everything he had into becoming a peak physical specimen then I'd say it's possible.
    • Ignoring whether or not it's plausible, wouldn't you want to beef up if you had your ass handed to you the last time you saw your "rival"? Considering how badly Wesker beat the crap out of Chris, he probably wanted to try to be on equal footing, or at least strong enough to beat the hell out of him if he could hit him.
    • As ridiculous as it was for Chris to move a boulder via punches, this has been shown to be possible. You just have to be really, REALLY desperate.
    • Like the story of the mother lifting a tractor off her crushed son?
    • I can't remember where I heard this from, but apparently some boulders aren't completely solid and have a lot of space in them, reducing the weight. If that's true, then the boulder wouldn't be as heavy as it looked, and combine that with desperation and adrenaline, then Chris could have knocked it over.
    • He tried to push and found it ineffective and resorted to punching it instead. I seriously don't think punching a rock (with a stance that obviously wouldn't utilize your whole body) would have been more effective than pushing it. If so, they should really hire some boxers for moving companies.
    • As I understand it, volcanic rock in particular is very porous, and lighter than most other types of rock.
    • I'm sticking with my theory: Chris politely asked the boulder to move in the language of Punch; the only language giant rocks understand.
    • Well, that was nice of the boulder to cooperate then.
    • Chris punching and headbutting the boulder in this game is just Plot Armor, just like all the ridiculous situations he found himself in in Resident Evil – Code: Veronica (I don't know why people are so surprised really; the amount of Plot Armor moments he had in that game is more ridiculous compared to him punching a boulder in this one); no need to overthink it really. As for his muscles; it is possible for him to gain them from 1998 to 2009 without any use of steroids. With lots of exercising, lifting along with a good diet etc; it's a piece of cake. Umbrella Chronicles is kinda off in showing him around Umbrella's undoing (this also applies to Jill and Wesker). One doesn't look that young after 4 years not to mention him not having his muscles unlike what he had in Resident Evil: Revelations.

     Flower Power? 
  • Can viruses like the Progenitor virus actually come from a flower? I know they have viruses, but do they actually have ones that could affect a human that badly?
    • Considering what else viruses can do in this setting, the idea of a rare virus being able to cross-infect species like that seems perfectly plausible.
      • We are forgetting that they engineer this virus. The base virus may come from the plant, and, through modification of the coding, TAH-DAH! Progenitor Virus samples.

     Stop being so stereotypical! 
  • Are there really people still in Africa who live in tribal huts, wear grass skirts, and use spears?
    • They were an isolated group who had been routinely trodden on and kept hidden away by corporations abusing the tribe. It's told in-game how they were slowly being brought out of this by Tricell, but... well. Tricell's own intentions weren't exactly noble.
    • Yes to the grass huts and spears, no to the clothes (except for ceremonial reasons). There are still some groups who do the hunter/rancher thing, and use spears when guns are too difficult to keep clean and operable. But western clothes are pretty common. In fact, a lot of those groups wind up with the T-Shirts made for teams that lose championship sports games.
    • You can find a diary from a boy who was a member of the African tribe who mentions that the Plagas they were infected with was causing the tribesmen to revert to traditional ways, as well. That actually makes sense, when you consider how the Ganados were also affected in RE4, and almost all of them reverted as well. Plagas victims seem to revert to more primitive and traditional states as one of the side-effects of the infection.

     Chris vs Locked Door! Chris uses Punch! It's not very effective. 
  • Punching a boulder is apparently easier than, oh say, opening a locked door you need to hunt down a key card to open?
    • It's because punching open the door would attract more attention than needed.
    • When in this game did Chris or Sheva ever care about stealth or subtlety?
    • Punching the boulder doesn't really get Chris anywhere. If anything, it looks like he was punching it because of sheer frustration.
    • He could have been punching the rock to dislodge it off of anything it may have been stuck on.
    • Yes. Because the door is locked.
    • Yes, because as we all know, locked doors can't be opened with brute force.
    • It's just a gameplay mechanic; no need to overreact. The same can also apply in Resident Evil – Code: Veronica. He needs to find a door knob to open a door instead of I don't know tackle it up? And no the door he was tackling at the end of that game was electronically locked unlike the door that's missing its door knob.
    • Making a sarcastic quip in response to a weak argument is not overreacting, and I have no idea what the rest of your response even means.

     Where's Spencer? Certainly not in this giant mansion on this cliff, no sir! 
  • Why did it take 8 years for anyone to find Ozwell E. Spencer? It's one thing if he was hiding in Siberia or in the middle of a desert, but the guy was wheelchair bound and living in a giant cliffside mansion. Plus, when someone did rat out his location, why would the BSAA send two lightly-armed operatives who would most likely be violating international law instead of notifying the United States government that the man who forced the purging of Raccoon City has just been found?
    • WRT to the mansion; just because he was in a giant mansion doesn't mean he's visible. If he never comes out of the mansion or tightly controls information coming out of the mansion, no one would know he was there. I mean, for heavens' sakes, they hid the fact that Alexia wasn't in her mansion for fifteen years, to the point that even Wesker didn't know she wasn't there.
    • Except this wasn't just any old mansion, this was the Spencer family estate, which had been around since at least when Ozwell Spencer was born. There would certainly be records of where and when the estate was built. These records would need to be destroyed, as well anyone who had ever viewed them would have to be killed. On top of that a house that old would need repair and maintenance, which means more records and people to track down. And to top that all off, you would need to track and down and either silence or kill anyone who had ever been to the house. That's way too many loose ends to tie up, and all you need is one to blow everything wide open.
    • Alfred did make a damn convincing woman for a while, and Rockfort also had a lab that Alexia could have been in. Perhaps Wesker was simply doing a sweep of old Umbrella haunts looking for her.
    • WRT the BSAA: the BSAA sent their agents there because they were allowed to pick Spencer up without violating international law in the first place. American agents would have violated international law. And keep in mind, they were being sent to arrest a wheelchair-bound old man; they weren't being sent to fight Wesker. Two agents with pistols is almost overkill.
    • International law is a great concept, but Ozwell Spencer is responsible for 30x as many American deaths as Osama bin Laden. If there was even the slightest hope of catching him, the 82nd Airborne would be landing on his doorstep and the UN can send a bill later. However, given the abysmal track record of Red Shirt Armies in the Resident Evil universe, it's possible that they *did* send more than Jill and Chris, but they were the only ones who survived.
    • And the 82nd Airborne would have been shot down for violating the national sovereignty of (insert country here). Which is especially pointless when there already exists an organization specifically tasked with capturing him and has international mandate to do so. Sending in American soldiers without the permission of the country in question is an invasion. BSAA agents can enter the country without causing a massive international incident that results in a war.
    • Sending in American soldiers without the permission of the country in question is an invasion. Yes, perhaps you noticed when the United States did that twice in the past 8 years, to catch men with substantially less American blood on their hands than Spencer.
    • Yes, and in both cases those men had armies backing them up. Spencer doesn't. And one of those instances resulted in a political and military quagmire that's still ongoing eight years after said invasion was finished. If OIF still happened in this timeline (which is questionable, considering there's a completely different Presidency this time around), the USA would be even more hesitant to commit troops to an invasion and war when they could let the people who have the international mandate and legal jurisdiction take care of it instead with vastly less bloodshed and political fallout.
    • When Osama bin Laden was actually assassinated by American special forces, they did so in violation of international law. And no one gave a shit, because it was Osama bin Laden. Spencer is far worse.
    • No one said that it had to be soldiers, and American investigators could still have tried to obtain information without physically going to arrest Spencer. Hell, Umbrella did so much damage to the world (i.e. Rockfort and Sheena Islands, the Spencer Rain, that base in Siberia) that any industrialised nation he was hiding in or near would have at least tried to do SOMETHING. Plus, it isn't made exactly clear when the BSAA was reformed by the UN, making Chris and Jill's operation a violation of international law anyway.
    • "No one said it had to be soldiers" - um, what was that part about "If there was even the slightest hope of catching him, the 82nd Airborne would be landing on his doorstep"? And who said they didn't try to obtain said information in the first place? And we don't know what country he was hiding in. Spencer could have easily been paying off a government - especially a third world one - to cover up his presence.
    • "Plus, it isn't made exactly clear when the BSAA was reformed by the UN, making Chris and Jill's operation a violation of international law anyway." No. Doing some quick fact-checking (Jill's entry in the library files), prior to the fight with Wesker, Jill and Chris were both part of the BSAA and conducted a number of operations across the globe, including "arresting smugglers in Europe." They wouldn't be able to conduct arrests without the UN policing mandate, which means that the BSAA was under UN control prior to the fight at Spencer's estate. They were operating legally when they went to arrest Spencer.
    • WRT Rockfort, Sheena, Spencer Rain, Siberia: both Dead Aim and Survivor are non-canon. Ignoring non-canon games, that brings us down to Rockfort and Siberia. Umbrella owns Rockfort, so no one would care if Umbrella shat in its own backyard. The Russians would be pissed at Umbrella, so that makes the USA and Russia pissed at Spencer. Too bad he's got pretty much the rest of the world to hide in, his own personal army, and every third-world country, paramilitary organization, and terrorist group in the world champing at the bit to get their hands on his products and thus would have a vested interest in keeping him safe. And even with all that, he managed to hide out a grand total of less than a few years before the BSAA found him and came knocking.
    • Just FYI, and as much as it pains me, Sheena Island is canon, as it was cited in the prologue of the very canon RE 0. With that in mind, Sheena is still just Rockfort bis.
    • What is "bis"?
    • Ignoring the small amount of places that Umbrella destroyed, the company was a cover for ILLEGAL BIO-WEAPON MANUFACTURING! That would be guaranteed to piss many countries off. Also, if you read Sheva Alomar's Personnel file, you would find that her parents were killed because they knew vital information about a B.O.W. test. Now, Umbrella was paying off the government, but as soon as this information was known to the public, that would piss off a LOT MORE PEOPLE!
    • Yes, which is why there is an international special forces/police organization dedicated to bringing down bio-organic-weapon-related threats in the first place. Umbrella pissed a lot of folks off, which is why the BSAA was created - to hunt down people just like them.
    • But why send 2 pistol equipped agents to capture a guy who might have a DOZEN TYRANTS in his freezer? For Christ's sake, seeing how much experience they have with bioweapons, they could have at least brought shotguns!
    • Because they had dozens of heavily armed soldiers as backup? Did you somehow miss the fact that there were two entire platoon-sized teams of BSAA soldiers operating in the same area at the same time as Chris and Sheva?
    • In Africa they did. Not when they went after Spencer. They just send Chris and Jill with handguns. If they had whole platoons backing them up, there would have at least been a perimeter to prevent people from escaping. Plus, more than two people would have entered the creepy mansion (considering every single other Umbrella building in the world seems to be filled with hundreds of deadly monsters or dozens of gun toting soldiers, or both).
    • We don't actually get to see very much of the mansion itself during that scene. For all we know, there were dozens of BSAA agents moving through the mansion hunting for Spencer.
    • It's also possible they were in the general area on a previous mission and just received the new intel from Mission Control. Having already been through these disasters, they would possibly feel confident enough to make themselves a strike force and gain a foothold while backup is flown in. Could also account for being lightly armed. Maybe members of their team died on the previous mission and they wanted to take only what they needed, giving them a surplus of ammo at least, seeing as advanced bio-weapons can easily wreck weapons with brute strength. Their bird returns their fallen comrades and comes back fully loaded to kick ass.
    • It's freaking Chris and Jill. Sending in the 82nd would have been a waste. Spencer could have easily had a dozen Tyrants, so they sent someone really badass.
    • The DLC 'Lost in Nightmares' shows what happens in the mansion. Turns out, Spencer really had monsters in there.
    • Whether they had BSAA (as they did) or not, whether the operation was technically legal (as it was) or extralegal, it didn't really matter. Assuming no BSAA and it was a totally extralegal black op, they'd just do what many governments do in reality. Deploy special forces. So, send in the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, or if it's particularly important for America to deny responsibility for some reason, then the CIA's Special Activities Division. Whatever happens, the good guys will find a way to make it happen. And such events happen in real life (probably not involving bioweapon monsters, though) and usually go very hush, but even if the nation which gets "invaded" becomes aware of that, they usually don't automatically treat it as a de facto invasion. The "invading" nation may be able to explain the rationale for the mission, and to let them know that it was an action against terrorists, rather than an actual international invasion to provoke war.

     Uroboros, or Ouroboros? 
  • It's spelt "ouroboros". The just bugged the living hell out of me.
    • Uroboros is an alternative spelling. Similar to honor/honour, etc.
      • And unless they are literally naming it after the legendary ouroboros directly, they can name it however they like to "hip" it up. Ala turning S's to Z's and such.

     Wesker's Plan: Cover the Earth in Worms + ?????? = Select Few Inherit the Earth! 
  • I feel like I missed a part of Wesker's plan. He was planning on covering the entire world in a biological agent that turned everyone except a select few into a writhing mass of worms. And the select few would inherit the Earth. While that is all well and good, what was he planning to do about the hundreds of millions of worm monsters that would cover the planet? There are only so many Kill Sats in the world.
    • Wesker's insane. His plan probably didn't extend past that point.
    • I assumed the 'select few' would be powerful enough to deal with/control the failures. Wesker was damn near invincible after his fusion, don't forget.
    • It's also possible that the Urobouros tentacle monsters break down and die after a short time. All the ones you fight are just after they turn.
    • Word of God is that his plan was doomed from the start.

     I've got to spread this agent that could possibly kill me! 
  • Why did Wesker try to spread Uroburos even though he didn't know if it would kill him? Since it turned him into a horrible mutant, you've got to assume he would be "rejected" just like the other people you saw it used on. Just doesn't seem like Wesker, he always covers his own ass.
    • Uh, no. Wesker wasn't rejected by Uroburos. This much is obvious from the fact that he wasn't turned into a horrible mindless monster like all the other Uroboros victims. Also, Wesker is insane.
    • He is not crazy. He is just very, very angry. And also pretty high. The virus Birkin gave Albert is unstable. He has to take PG 67 A/W every 24 hours (DR2 references that with Zombrex, btw) to keep it in check. He was injected by Excella, and then Chris with Sheva drugged him two more times in the same day. After all that he CONTROLLED the Uroboros, not the other way around, he allowed it to feed on his flesh in order to compensate for being severely weakened.
    • So you're saying he DIDN'T become a horrible, wormy, tentacled monster that lost all of its faculties by the end and wanted to kill everything it saw? I figured he didn't look the same as the others because he wasn't human (and because it'd make a terrible final boss). If he had his faculties, he would have just thrown them into the lava, I figure.
    • So you're saying he DIDN'T become a horrible, wormy, tentacled monster that lost all of its faculties by the end and wanted to kill everything it saw? No, he became a horrible, wormy, tentacled monster that still seemed very intelligent. And considering "everything he saw" was "Chris and Sheva," whom he was already very intent on killing previously, that doesn't change much.
    • If he had his faculties he would have just thrown them into the lava, I figure. Yes, he would. Which he does do, if he gets the opportunity. I've been hurled into the lava multiple times by Wesker during that fight.
    • Wesker had gone completely batshit insane prior to dosing up with Uroburos. His mental state, his capabilities... everything had been diminished by a mixture of the counter-virus Chris had slammed into him, and the sheer humiliation he felt at having his plans ruined at that stage. He lost his faculties due to stress, not due to the virus.
    • Wasn't the counter-virus really more of the same virus that Wesker had in his body, but too much of that virus weakens the host?
    • It wasn't a counter-virus at all. It was JUST more of his super-serum. The point of it was to do to Wesker what tends to happen naturally to Tyrants when they mutate; pumping him full of so much of it that while he DOES become bigger, nastier, and stronger, he also becomes more mindlessly aggressive and, and this is the important part, SLOWER.
    • In actuality, Uroboros probably DIDN'T work the way it was intended for Wesker. Wesker's "superior DNA" and Progenitor virus enhancement allowed him to resist its consumption ability, and was able to exert control over the actions of the parasites so he could use them to his advantage, but he didn't bond with them to create a new, higher organism. What most people seem to forget is that such an organism as Wesker was proposing actually DID appear in RE5. You know those goddamned nearly impossible to kill Reapers you fight a few times? One of the files in the game explicitly states that they were created as a byproduct of accidentally exposing cockroaches infesting the Tricell facility to the Uroboros virus. The fact that they were not only NOT consumed by it (which every other being that completely rejects Uroboros was), but actually grew into a higher level organism that is arguably one of the strongest B.O.W.'s in the entire series suggests that this was actually how Uroboros was intended to work, making a common cockroach superior to Wesker. Of course, it then bugs me that Capcom will probably never go any further with that particular plot line.
    • Additionally the reason Wesker kept Jill alive was so he could use her antibodies (a result of the cure administered to her when she was infected by the B.O.W Nemesis back in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis) to allow the select few infected by the virus to fight it off and become the promised superhumans he will rule over rather than get killed outright. Judging from the information provided from the wiki site, Wesker considered infecting Jill with the virus once she outlived her usefulness. However, at that point Jill had so many antibodies permeating her body that she was already highly resistant to infection from the virus. The promised evolved human that Wesker wanted from his new world was right in front of his eyes, but since she was his greatest enemy second to Chris Redfield she just became another remote controlled puppet instead.
    • Again, Word of God has since cleared it up; it would have killed him too and caused a Global Extinction Event.

     Rocket Man? 
  • The solution to Wesker's Puzzle Boss in this game really bugged me (solution: fire an RPG at him, he catches the warhead, you shoot it and it explodes in his face). It's a clever idea, but this mechanic combined with a Nanomachines Hand Wave for his superpowers, derails Wesker's main gimmick as a Super-Soldier Neo. Even though he is Nerfed when you fight him compared to his glorious cutscene choreography, Gameplay!Wesker can still kick ass, dodging every weapon you throw at him, up to and including buckshot. So why then does he catch RPG warheads instead of dodging them? They move much slower than any bullet I've ever seen. It's not a case of Boss-Arena Idiocy either, because he does the same thing when you fight both him and Jill in an earlier chapter. Maybe a warhead killed his family and he wants revenge?
    • RPG rounds are significantly larger. Twisting aside to dodge a bullet is quite a bit easier than twisting aside to dodge a large, spinning missile warhead. That and even if he dodges the rocket, he's got to deal with the backblast, which in the RPG-7's case, can incinerate humans.
    • And plus, it's a lot harder to catch bullets going at the speed of sound than it is to catch a RPG round, even if you can dodge them both.
    • In addition, it's said multiple times throughout the series that the one thing that can stop anyone who's infected in their tracks is extreme heat. So incineration associated with bombs/rockets/grenades/volcanoes/what have you is sort of a big deal for Wesker.
    • Wesker does dodge the RPG if you shoot at him in the light. It's only when you extinguish the lights and shoot the RPG through darkness that he catches the thing. Presumably he's unable to see the grenade through the darkness (and his sunglasses) until it's nearly on him; he only manages to catch it because of his awesome virareflexes.
    • He also likes to show off how smart he is. Hell, you could catch a bullet with your hand, messy as it would be. Holding off a rocket? It takes a damn near invincible metahuman to do that. Wesker is bragging when he does this.
    • Catching a rocket also raises the possibility that he can weaponise it right back against those who shot him with it. I can't remember if he actually does this, but Steppenwolf does in the DCEU, so that may be effective than merely rushing to dodge it.

     Men are just better? 
  • Why do so many people seem to think that Chris's AI in Resident Evil 5 is better than Sheva's? The only time where there is any difference between the way the two act is when you're forced to split up with them due to assist jumps or things like that.
    • Mostly because Chris isn't controlled by the AI as often, so isn't as obvious - you only get to play as Sheva after completing the game after all, and there probably isn't enough of an offline/single player replay crowd to get Chris' AI into the spotlight.
    • It's mainly because Sheva's AI seems to be programmed to conserve ammo whenever possible to make it easier on first-time players (which may explain why she only uses her pistol, no matter how much ammunition she has for her better guns), whereas Chris' AI doesn't have that restriction and will use different weapons depending on the situation.
  • It's possible to circumvent her pistol preference by simply taking it off her, forcing her to rely on heavier guns.

     Fly free, my tentacles! I said FLY FREE! FLY YOU STUPID TENTACLES! FLY! FLYYYYYYY! ...perhaps I need a catapult? 
  • How was Uroboros supposed to spread through the air, much less the entire world? Tentacles can't fly!
    • It develops into tentacles, it doesn't start out like that.
    • Tentacles popping straight out of a missile labelled UROBOROS disagree.
    • Uroboros consumes biomatter. Fire the missile at a continent, watch it spread and consume biomatter. Maybe forty or so dead bodies was enough for Uroboros to expand into a boat-sized abomination; imagine how big and fast it would be if you dropped it on a city or rain forest. There's a reason why there were multiple Uroboros-loaded missiles on Wesker's bomber.
    • Seriously, have you forgotten this little quote from Wesker.
    Albert Wesker: Uroboros will be released into the atmosphere, ensuring complete, global, saturation.

     Sorry Jill, you don't get your S.T.A.R.S. uniform just because! 
  • So wait. Resident Evil 5. Chris gets his STARS outfit. Wesker gets his STARS outfit. Rebecca and Barry return in their STARS outfit. But Jill doesn't get her STARS outfit? Why!?
    • Well, if you want a fanwank explanation, Jill was the only one to properly resign from the RPD and presumably turned in her uniform. Barry, Rebecca, and Chris apparently all just skipped town and started investigating Umbrella on their own.

     Thank Heaven for convenient volcanoes! 
  • I know there are actually a number of active volcanoes in Africa currently but what are the odds that Wesker's stealth bomber would crash into one? It just seems terribly contrived that it just so happened to crash into one, seemingly almost for the sole purpose of making the final battle with Wesker more dramatic and the lava to act as something for him to fall into, which comes off as rather pointless as the lava didn't instantly disintegrate him and it was two RPGS RIPPING HIS HEAD OFF and the resulting explosion that ultimately finished him off. What makes it even worse is that you would think that Wesker would have the thing set on auto-pilot which should have stopped it from crashing, unless it hit some sort of turbulence.
    • He didn't expect Chris and Sheva to survive so long. Also, the extra dose of that syringe messed his mind, so he wasn't thinking clearly.

     Here, have infinite ammo! What? Game's over? TOO BAD! 
  • Why would infinite ammo be available AFTER beating Resident Evil 5?
    • New Game Plus.
    • Yeah, it's a reward for beating the game and grinding up a weapon to its max stat level(s). Makes getting the higher ranks on higher difficulties much easier, rather than a horrible slog.

     *Gasp* Wesker! You're alive! Even though I saw you survive so much crap thrown at you! 
  • Why's Chris so surprised that Wesker's alive, yet claims that Jill's alive? Wesker is the one with the regenerative virus, not Jill, so it'd make more sense if Chris thought Jill was dead and Wesker was alive (I mean, the man survived being gored by a Tyrant, so a cliff fall probably wouldn't be that bad for him. And Jill is weaker than Chris with health in the Remake...).
    • So surprised Wesker's alive? He discovers Wesker is alive when he hears a conversation between him and Excella on the radio, and his reaction can best be summed up as "too much to hope the fall killed him huh?" Meanwhile at the start of the game he does think Jill is dead, it's only when he sees the photo of Jill that he thinks she might be alive. I don't know how you got that impression since the game is rather clear on the matter.
    • It's very possible that Jill could have landed on Wesker, thus cushioning the fall and making it non-lethal to her but not to Wesker. With that said, it would still be wishful thinking that Wesker didn't die, even putting that into consideration.

     THANK GOD that this isn't the FATAL lava! 
  • This applies to a lot of games (and movies, comics, cartoons...), but molten lava is extremely hot. Chris and Sheva, and possibly even Wesker, should all have been cooked thoroughly before that final battle was over, just from being that close to so much of it.

     Las Plagas has... SOMETHING to do with this plot... I think... maybe... 
  • What exactly did Las Plagas have to do with anything when the plot basically revolved around Uroboros? Las Plagas was barely mentioned in game, yet it seems that Wesker amassed himself a pretty sizable militia of mind-controlled drones, the likes of which Saddler would've killed for, so it's not like it wasn't significant. So was Las Plagas a legitimate plan-B? Was it used in Uroboros research? Was Las Plagas itself infected with Uroboros? Or was Wesker just hedging his bets by infecting all of Kijuju, just in case his arch-nemesis Chris decided to poke his nose around?
    • If I'm not mistaken, Uroboros is Las Plagas, only more refined. Or something like that.
    • Uroboros is a highly modified form of Progenitor, not Las Plagas. Las Plagas are important because Tricell is developing them as a biological weapon for sale, and testing them on the local population. It's this, and not Uroboros, which brings Chris and Sheva to investigate in the first place; they only learn about Uroboros later. However, as far as Wesker is concerned, the Las Plagas project only exists to make funding and scientific resources available for his Uroboros plan.
    • Given that he needs a standing defence force to protect his research into Uroboros, and the contracting of mercenaries and PMC's would attract attention, and given that Las Plagas has some nifty mind control properties, it would make sense for Wesker to use the Plagas to build his army, since Majini/Ganados are pretty indistinguishable from normal people... until they try and bash your brains in, of course.
    • Also, you don't even have to pay Las Plagas-infectees.

     Chris, I brainwashed Jill, turned her against you and... DYED HER HAIR! 
  • When we see Jill again, she's blonde for some reason. So Wesker brainwashed her, turned her against her former partner, used her body for bioweapon research, and... dyed her hair?
    • Maybe Wesker just likes blondes.
    • There's an allusion to this in the novelisation of Resident Evil.
    • In Chapter 5-2, examine one of the monitors on the elevator platform to find the Test Subject Data file. It explains that a side effect of the drugs Wesker used to put Jill into stasis was that she lost a lot of her natural pigmentation.
    • It isn't just her hair, though. Compare Jill in the previous games and brainwashed Jill in RE5. Her skin is much, much paler, probably because of the drugs she was injected with and the fact she's been wearing a hooded jacket and mask for months.
    • The same file says exactly that.
    • Likewise, in the Lost in Nightmares DLC she looks a lot more like her old, brunette self.

     Swahili: the Universal Language of Africa. 
  • So Sheva is from the western part of Africa and Kijuju is in the northwest region of Africa. So how can either Sheva or the natives of Kijuju know the Swahili language, which is dominant only in eastern Africa?
    • So it's impossible for someone to know a language they didn't grow up speaking?
    • Of course not. But Swahili is usually spoken mostly in the eastern parts of African, while this game takes place in the west. Odds are, Swahili shouldn't be their native tongue.
    • Translation Convention in full effect. If you want to muck about with the in-universe reasons, it could be that Las Plagas (at least, the controller plaga) is able to dictate the followers' spoken tongue. For example, all it takes is one controller-host to be able to speak Swahili in order to force the lesser-Majini to speak the same. Sheva is excusable for being a BSAA agent, thus she would have probably learned how to speak Swahili in order to better cooperate with the locals.
    • There are plenty of places where dialects and languages show up nowhere near their origin.

     Shoot Chris? I'll just gloat for fifteen minutes or so instead! 
  • At the end of the game, Wesker is using his Flash Step to dodge every shot Chris and Sheva fire at him inside his viral bomber aircraft. He then puts his gun up against Chris' forehead, and has time enough to gloat about how he's going to be a God for about fifteen minutes (I exaggerate, but only slightly) before Chris can get away. This is a serious case of Why Don't You Just Shoot Him? at best, and outright Bond Villain Stupidity at worst. I can accept a certain degree of this because it's Wesker we're talking about here, and he rants so much on that particular topic throughout the rest of the game I'm surprised his voice actor didn't end every recording session with bleeding tonsils, but still... you'd think a guy with a supposedly genius-level intellect would save that for after he's killed the only two threats to his plan for world domination, no?
    • Well, the guy is ranting about how he is going to be a god and is already pretty tough to begin with. It's within reason that even though they might stop him, he doesn't think they can.
    • Wesker is a gloating, hammy villain. His single biggest, most glaring and destructive flaw is that he is so overwhelmingly arrogant and self-absorbed that he can't help but gloat even when it is actively detrimental to his success.
    • In the example at hand, though, it's justified, since he's just been injected with too much serum and is not thinking clearly and just shot Chris in the back as he's holding a hand out to Sheva to pull her into the plane.

     Disregard the corpses lying around? Good idea! 
  • As far as I understand, the Uroboros noodle-esque monstrosity can absorb corpses and living matter alike to increase its size and power. So, why has the very first one you fight near the beginning left all those corpses all over the place instead of, you know, absorbing them into itself? That doesn't sound very logical....
    • It was an inferior version, and ignored all the other bodies. It probably didn't have the mental capacity to realise that "lots of bodies = bigger me."

     This game is RACIST!!! Even though all the main villains are white and the only good guys who die are black and the black guy survives and saves your butt twice and... 
  • What was up with the racism cries aimed at this game? There wasn't a peep when Resident Evil 4 featured a white man gunning down rural Spanish peasants.
    • There's a lot of attached subtext and imagery to a white guy gunning down African peasants that, for better or for worse, doesn't come into play in a scenario where a white guy's gunning down Spanish people. It has a lot to do with the history of both Africa and black-white relations in the United States.
    • Plus, in Resident Evil 4, it was a white guy shooting other white people. As the troper above me stated, given the context and history of Africa and how the whites treated them over the centuries, a game where a white man mows through dozens of Africans nonstop, and the Unfortunate Implications that they need a strong white man to come save them from the big bad virus is going to raise a lot of heat.
    • Who says the Ganados are white? Not everyone who lives in Europe is white, you know. And "white" is a pretty subjective racial designation anyway. A lot of people in Latin America are extremely fair-skinned. Are you saying that if they rewrote RE4 so that it was set in an unnamed Latin American country instead of an unnamed European country, without changing anything else about the game, then it would magically become racist because Latinos are arbitrarily considered "non-white"? And why should the race of the shooter vs. the shootees matter? It's not like white people haven't murdered and oppressed each other over the centuries. And it's not like the people killed in those white-on-white conflicts are any less dead. Do you think all the white people killed by other white people would be gratified to know that they may be dead, but at least their killers didn't have racist motivations? And there's plenty of subtext and imagery that could be attached to RE4. As the OP said, it's a game where the protagonist (a soldier from an apparently middle-to-upper-class background) goes around slaughtering peasant farmers. Why was this not condemned as class-ism? And, it's a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (probably) who rolls into a foreign country and starts slaughtering people and stealing their valuables. Sounds like an undercurrent of imperialism to me. My point (and I'm not the OP here, just to be clear) is that people saw what they wanted to see in RE5.
    • While it's true there are non-whites in Europe, European Spanish are generally Caucasian.
    • IIRC, plenty of Spaniards actually DID take issue with their culture being bastardised in RE 4 (though from what I can gather from various forum searches, some of them— and quite a lot of Latin American players— found the bad Spanish dialogue hilarious). Whether or not the Ganados are "white" is not particularly relevant to the game nor this discussion. People have different sensitivities depending on where they live and how they're raised; that's all.
    • People also totally ignore the fact that you're fighting black guys because they're being controlled by Puppeter Parasites, and they're in fact victims of the Big Bad Albert Wesker, who is explicitly revealed to be a product of a Master Race project by Umbrella in the game, and you, the player, is supposed to STOP it. Not to mention the fact your partner in the game is also black, as well as Josh Stone, and both save your ass in the game, so there's no Mighty Whitey at play. Unfortunately, you can't help the Majini because the Las Plagas has already taken full control of them, so all you can do is Mercy Kill them and make Wesker pay. At no moment in the game is killing Africans portrayed as a good thing; their predicament is portrayed as very tragic, and the game itself has a subtle critique about corporations and governments using Africa and its people as a guinea pigs for biochemical weapons. Of course, that's assuming the Holier Than Thou Moral Guardians even know what the fucking plot is about. And like the post above says, there is so much hypocrisy in the complaints that it's not even funny.
    • They're just people trying to get video games banned, just ignore them.
    • Your partner is "black" in the sense that Halle Barry is black. Sure they have darker skin and some features but they're clearly not completely black and often lack the really dark skin or more traditional African features. The problem is that your partner is supposed to be black Affrican not mixed American, and then they went and got the regional language wrong on top of it. Plus these games aren't made or marketed in a void where history and other media doesn't exist, just because other forms of media have made the same mistake doesn't make them immune from criticism. And I've never heard of a game being banned just because it got a few criticisms thrown at it...
    • Then what was the goal of all the complaining? Making sure everyone knew how upset critics were? Trust us, we got that message, loud and clear; we also enjoyed the game anyway, in spite of it.
    • In my experience, the only kinds of people who legitimately argue that any game should be outright banned are those who think violent video games cause real-world violence... and generally, those people have never played a video game before in their lives. All video game critics do is give their thoughts about a game based on their own experiences with it, positive or negative. This lets potential players know what to expect from a game so they can decide whether or not they want to try it, and lets developers know how their audience is reacting to their product, which they can use to make better games in the future. The only reason anyone points out the racist implications of any game is because, to many kinds of people, encountering those tropes in mid-game turns what should be a fun experience into a legitimately painful one. You might not find these things personally offensive, and that's fine, but you can't ask other people to just keep quiet about the things that bother them; I venture to say several of you weighed in here because you can't do the same yourselves. It's not a lot to ask game developers to be more considerate of everyone in the audience.
    • This kind of bleeds over from a major inspiration of the game, Black Hawk Down. This was of course based on a famous Real Life conflict in Somalia, 1993. The film depicts mainly white (and perhaps some "mildly"-Latino) American soldiers in bitter, pitched conflict with black (and some Arabic) soldiers. That's how it went down in reality (although the movie takes some liberties with other story details). But it wasn't that white soldiers were ordered to gun down black militia "because they (or their commanders) were racist", no, their mission was to try and fix the famine conditions brought on by a local warlord, and upon arresting his lieutenants, the extraction operation was compromised and they were forced to dig in and eventually improvise an evac/rescue procedure. And the only way to survive was as with any other gunfight - take cover, try to kill more of the enemy than they can kill you, and hope for aerial fire support/resupply and the eventual ground evacuation. Anyway, the fact that there was at least one minor black soldier character fighting on America's side (not to mention Pakistani and Malaysians as part of the multinational UN task force sent to rescue the Americans) depicted in the movie often does not go mentioned by those who accuse it as racist. It doesn't mean that people who hold those beliefs don't have a valid basis for forming such an opinion, even if others disagree with them. Sometimes people just get triggered by certain imagery even without considering the justification (often, coming from real life events) behind it. As far as this game goes, it took the militia-in-plain-clothes from the film, added white Africans (arguably lessening the racist interpretation of the movie even further, although granted white militia fighting on the Somali side seems very unlikely) and used one of the main clan leaders to form the basis of the Agitator Majini (sharing as they do the iconic megaphone imagery). So the interpretations of such imagery are quite similar there. It also added the tribal wetlands Manjini, which on the face of it may look bad, but it's also justified to an extent by the explanation that the parasites revert those people to their more primitive/bestial roots, which also applied to the white Ganados in RE 4. On the other hand, it elevated a black protagonist from the extremely-minor black soldier character, into an important and powerful deuteragonist and even made her a Native African to boot (which isn't to say they "adapted" that character into Sheva but still, it's a step in the right direction), and added Josh as a tritagonist (and co-lead of the Desperate Escape DLC. You can complain that Sheva is lightskinned, but most certainly he is not. Also, even Africa does have a lot of skin tone variation in it's own right.).
    • Also in all fairness, I don't think we can really make any definitive statements about either Leon's class background or his religion, besides that obviously now that he's working as an agent on behalf of the POTUS, he earns a hefty pay packet. He could just as easily be an atheist as some flavour of Christian... also, he doesn't need to steal anything from them besides perhaps ammo (if we presume that they do have some guns, by taking the bullets from them, he's prolonging the life of himself and others by doing so). He can get through the game with only the weapons he starts with and/or the ones he finds via On Site Procurement. But I think I'm elaborating on the point you were making, which is that people can read whatever they want into art.

     Maybe Josh can teleport? 
  • It's been a long time, maybe it was answered somewhere, but something always bugged me about Josh Stone showing up in the oil fields. The most explanation he gives was "I just remember I was where you last saw me, then I got here somehow." It seemed like a way to set him up as a traitor, but he was genuinely helpful the entire time. Almost a What Happened to the Mouse?? moment.
    • Not really? In every RE game, non-player allies move around independently of you and you don't get a good explanation of where they were, some of them even getting through locked doors and barred passageways. Josh going to the Oil Fields makes sense since his job was to hunt Irving, who is at least indirectly responsible for the loss of his entire team. He also leaves for the Oil Fields before you arrive at the massacre site, hence how he arrives there before you do. He doesn't need to give you a play-by-play of what happened because it's irrelevant to the mission, you're currently being assaulted, and he's nice enough not to ask you for how you got there.

     The override lever does what? 
  • So the override lever causes the plane's rear hatch to open, and causes the plane to lose altitude how exactly? And how did Chris know that that's what the lever was for?
    • Chris is explicitly an ex-fighter pilot. He can be expected to have a working knowledge of things like aircraft safety features.
    • Being a fighter pilot does not make you an expert in all aircraft, particularly when it's a one of a kind aircraft you've never seen before.
    • It's not a one-of-a-kind aircraft. It's visibly at least heavily based on the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, which means it's been made by a company that's been producing military aircraft for the US for 70 years. Chris can be expected to be reasonably familiar with any standardised features it might have.

     Did the game get censored? 
  • For a long time I noticed that whenever a character gets their head cut off it cuts to their body with little blood being shown. Compared to Resident Evil 4 where they show everything blood and all.
    • Parts of RE 4 had to be censored for release in Japan, where they've always been more squeamish about showing the violent deaths of humans (monsters are fine). Capcom probably toned down all the deaths in general for 5 so they wouldn't have to go back and censor it later.
    • Also the German version of RE 4 suffered from censorship.

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