Elliot's death in the original was a rapid fire tragedy that was both stupidity-induced and unpredictable for the sake of extra drama. In the remake, however, Leon/Claire personally tries to save him from a horde of zombies - and only manages to pull him out from the torso above as the zombies and security shutter tear the rest off. Not only do we see the life fade from Elliot then and there, Leon/Claire does not handle this well and is likely only a step away from a Heroic BSoD before the zombies slamming on the door force them back to their senses.
When Leon first meets Marvin, the first thing he does is remorsefully sputter about how he wasn't able to save Elliot, looking like he's on the verge of a breakdown. It gets even worse when you realize Leon must have known Elliot would have been his future coworker.
Leon: There was another officer...I-I couldn't...I couldn't...
The first meeting with Lieutenant Marvin Branagh, where Leon nearly breaks down when he reports his failure to rescue Officer Elliot. It's already pretty tragic in the original, but the foreshadowing in this version really packs a sting:
Marvin: "...And don't make my mistake. If you see one of those things — uniform or not — you do not hesitate. You either take it out, or you run. Got it?!"
One can't help but feel a bit teary when meeting Marvin since he's a dead man walking as soon as you see him. Any interaction with him is heart-wrenching since the man is well-aware of his impending doom and is just doing whatever he can to save another's life before the inevitable happens.
Later on, while being chased by the Tyrant in a first run, Leon/Claire runs into the zombified Marvin and is heartbroken by his predicament, with the former vowing to avenge him and the latter apologizing to him after killing him.
Sadder still is that in the remake of RE3 we actually SEE how Marvin got bitten - he couldn't bring himself to shoot a zombified Brad Vickers.
When you come across Leon's desk, you see that the RPD officers planned a surprise welcoming party and a little puzzle in order to break the ice. They even left a note for Leon welcoming him and telling him to learn his fellow officers' names as the clues to solve the puzzle. Reading the note now? It's covered in blood and there's an added message saying that they are glad that Leon isn't here to suffer with them.
In addition, one of the zombies is sitting at a desk - he's dressed in a police uniform, so he's presumably the same George whose nameplate is left on the floor, having died at his desk.
Be glad you aren't here, rookie.
After Sherry explains to Claire on trying to look for Annette amidst the outbreak, Claire asks Sherry about her father. Sherry hesitates — unlike her original counterpart, who was blessedly ignorant of the truth, she knows something bad has happened to William.
Sherry: "He... uhm... He's... gone."
When Claire and Sherry get cornered by Mr. X, it all seems like it's over until William, overcoming the G Virus, manages to save his daughter by tearing Mr. X's ribs out. It seems like you'd have an ally, up until the G-Virus, requiring Sherry to propagate itself and sensing William's lack of desire to harm her, takes the choice away from him by giving itself a second head, a process that effectively removes the last traces of humanity left in William and any chance of him being cured.
Leon's encounter at the Kendo Gun Shop is much more tragic than the original. He and Ada encounter Robert Kendo, whose daughter has been infected and it's implied the man had to kill her mother after she turned. Kendo angrily tells Leon and Ada not to kill his daughter, then finally accepts there's no hope. He eviscerates Leon for being a cop and allowing the city to fall. The man tearfully requests Leon and Ada to leave him to himself as he takes his daughter into the backroom to "put her to bed", just like Mommy, and then we hear a single gunshot. This even moves Ada enough to open up to Leon a little. As one Youtube commenter put it;
The shop may be out of guns, but they've still got plenty of feels.
Following the announcement of Resident Evil 3 (Remake), Leon can find a letter written by Jill to Kendo following Jill's brief visit to the store. In the letter, Jill was a little disappointed that Kendo will not be following her but wishes him luck nonetheless, not realizing of what had happened to her friend and his daughter.
You can watch a video tape belonging to a dead USS soldier, and you can see What Measure Is a Mook? is being played here. In his point of view, you can see G-Birkin slaughter his fellow mercenaries (except Hunk, who survives), and is practically begging him to stop killing them.
Raccoon City Orphanage, full stop, when you find out what they've been doing to the children. You find Sally's diary, where she writes about how her new orphanage is much better than her old one. You find the diary of a disillusioned teenager, Tom, who initially wrote about how his best friend Oliver stopped writing to him after being adopted, furious at how his best friend ditched him after being lucky enough to get adopted as a teen. He writes afterward about how sketchy the place is becoming, in addition to the stories of boogie men kidnapping children, culminating in Oliver coming back with skin peeling off his face and begging for help.
We also find a nameless diary.
if ur reebing this
go kall qolice
boogie mans here
eeting every boby
many bark boogie mans here
helq
theyre komming
helq me mommy
Sherry becomes infected with the G-Virus, and thanks to the remake's updated graphics, she is shown to be in agonizing pain. What's even worse is she starts doubting that her own mother even loves her; when Claire offers Sherry her pendant back, she refuses it, stating that it was a birthday gift from her mother, but all Sherry wanted was for her to be home more.
The remake shows Annette's obsession with her work in the worst possible way; Annette actually finds Sherry in the sewers over her surveillance equipment, but scolds her for leaving the police station (where she wasn't any safer, thanks to Irons and the monsters). And when William infects her? Annette writes her own daughter off as a lost cause, leaving again to stop William. Her excuse is millions of lives are on the line, but still, that's just cold. No wonder Sherry is heartbroken on the tram.
A single line from Claire when Sherry asks why she's willing to go to such lengths for her:
Claire: Because I care...
At the end of Claire's storyline, Annette finally does come around to showing she loves her daughter, and helps personally cure Sherry of the G-Virus.. only to succumb to her own wounds in front of Claire and Sherry. Even for all the crap Sherry's been through and her prior doubts, she's so broken up that she can barely get herself together to escape the facility's self-destruct with Claire.
Claire herself has to steel her emotions during this moment and essentially is forced to hurry up Sherry because they needed to escape, but you can still hear in raw emotion in her wavering voice as she tries to get Sherry to say goodbye faster.
Claire:(on the verge of tears) Sherry... Sherry... we gotta say goodbye to your mom. Come on. (voice barely above a whisper)Please say goodbye.
In the few hours that she's known her, Sherry thinks Claire was more of a mother than her actual mother ever was but she still loved her all the same. When she died, Sherry could do nothing except weep over her mother's corpse.
Unlike in the original game, the budding romance between Leon and Ada is downplayed and portrayed more realistically this time around, which arguably makes their "final" parting all the more bittersweet. After learning of her true identity as a treacherous, manipulative spy, the conflicted Leon still trusts Ada enough to appeal to her inner humanity, and is proven correct in his assessment that she cannot bring herself to kill him. This defining moment between them sadly gets cut short when Ada is shot by Annette and then seemingly falls to her "death" afterwards, despite Leon's best efforts to try and save her. While making his escape, Leon later expresses that he cannot believe he still misses Ada in spite of everything that's happened, showing that he really did fall in love with her.
The worst part is that Ada faking her death was the best option in a list of Sadistic Choices; The bridge she and Leon were on was collapsing and he would have died if he tried to save her. And even if Leon did manage to save her, he would have had no choice but to arrest Ada. It was either that, or let her escape and betray his duty as a cop, even if he was the last one left in Raccoon City. There was no version of this where they lived Happily Ever After.
Unlike in the original, where Annette is indifferent to William injecting himself with the virus, here she is clearly anguished to see what her husband has done. Not wanting him to turn, she picks up a pistol but cannot bring herself to fire. The look in her face can only be described as one of hope that the G will somehow fix him instead of mutating him. Alas, her hope is misplaced. The mindless abomination that was once William will cause much chaos and destruction to the city, all because Annette believed her husband was still in there somewhere.
The worst part is she wasn't wrong. William fights against his own monstrous nature for the first two stages and even saves Sherry's life twice. As horrible as he was, the last thing he does before his own body betrays him is to save Sherry and Claire from a Tyrant.
Additionally, just how pained and desperate William sounds upon shouting this particular line in Claire's version of the flashback, as Annette hesitates to shoot him and end his misery:
William: G is my creation!! (grimacing as his transformation begins.)
As this video details, after Leon gets shot and Ada bandages him up, he's left wearing short sleeves. Combined with the dark blue of his outfit, he starts to resemble how he looks in Resident Evil 4 (especially with the similar-looking tactical vest he can obtain in 4). This possibly was a subtle allusion by the developers to hint at who Leon will eventually become - a stoic badass. Leon was barely an adult at the start of Resident Evil 2, and he was a dorky, affable Cowardly Lion and the events during this game is his Coming of Age, for better or worse. He loses that naive idealism and becomes a much more jaded character as the series progresses, which is understandable Character Development, but bittersweet nonetheless.
Right after Ada falls to her death, Leon cries out a pitiful 'no' before managing to bring himself to his feet to escape as the self destruct sequence was still happening. Right as he stands up and looks towards the camera has Leon make one of the darkest looks he's made in the game so far. For most of the game, Leon's face has been lit so you can see most of his face, which highlights his naive nature. With this dramatic dark lighting, Leon looks much more like his Resident Evil 4 self, with the sharp dark shadows right around his eyes, than the perky rookie cop we started with. At this moment, it's easy to realize that has already started down the path of a much more jaded, depressed man who will end up with an eventual drinking problem to cope with his problems.
Despite the Happily Ever After-esque true ending of the game, knowing what's in store for Leon, Claire, and Sherry makes the ending a lot more bittersweet. Unless the new canon says otherwise, somewhere down the road, Claire parts way with Leon and Sherry to go look for her brother, promising to come back to them. Soon after, Leon and Sherry gets apprehended by the government and put in custody. Leon is interrogated and blackmailed into joining the government when they begin to threaten Sherry's life (before they treated his injures in the canon of Darkside Chronicles). Meanwhile, Sherry destined to live out her life in a suffocating household under Simmons until she becomes independent fifteen years later.
To drive the point home that the characters you're playing as did not canonically survive the outbreak, every mission in the Ghost Survivors DLC starts with this somber reminder:
Katherine's fate is made even more tragic here. Her father still abandons her, leaving her in the custody of Irons, but she's also in a relationship with Ben. Irons cruelly uses this against her by claiming that Ben is waiting for her at the orphanage, luring her there alone. However, instead of finding her lover she instead learns of Irons' true nature as he tells her he plans to add her to his collection of stuffed prey. Unfortunately, she's canonically murdered by Irons without ever finding Ben. Indeed, Irons locking up Ben in a cell could be interpreted as a way of getting him out of the way so he could find and butcher Katherine with little trouble. Her love for Ben is so strong that she risks her life to traverse through the treacherous Raccoon streets to free and reunite with him in Ghost Survivors. Which makes it all the more heartbreaking that both of them die in the main game never getting the chance to reunite.
Ghost overcomes Lickers, Ivies, G-Adults, Mr X. and an army of zombies and escapes... only for Ada to show up and render the entire operation moot. And worse still, as he's J. Martinez, the grunt who panic-shot William Birkin, he's responsible for the entire disaster that ruined Raccoon City.
As one YouTube comment puts it, every character had a chance of surviving the night if things had gone slightly different.
Giving these characters backstory just makes it sadder that they’re dead in canon. Kendo in reality, blew his head off a bit too early to be able to hear that radio. Katherine wasn’t able to get the knife in time to defend herself, dying like a doll. The forgotten soldier, not even a name or a face, but I guess that’s the point. Whether he died or survived his first encounter with Birkin, he’s just a nameless grunt, dying to someone who had a much bigger influence on the story. And of course Sheriff Daniel. Just doing his job, with no idea what kind of monsters he was up against. Maybe if he was a bit more prepared, but sadly, Leon didn’t get their in time to save him like what could have been.
, after Leon gets shot and Ada bandages him up, he's left wearing short sleeves. Combined with the dark blue of his outfit, he starts to resemble how he looks in Resident Evil 4 (especially with the similar-looking tactical vest he can obtain in 4). This possibly was a subtle allusion by the developers to hint at who Leon will eventually become - a stoic badass. Leon was barely an adult at the start of Resident Evil 2, and he was a dorky, affable Cowardly Lion and the events during this game is his Coming of Age, for better or worse. He loses that naive idealism and becomes a much more jaded character as the series progresses, which is understandable Character Development, but bittersweet nonetheless.