YMMV / Resident Evil

Click here for YMMV tropes exclusive for the 2002 remake and its HD remasters.

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• Alternate Character Interpretation: Brad Vickers, known humiliatingly as "Chickenheart", is clearly a man in the wrong profession, but he gets a bad rep. Yes, he left his comrades, escaping on the helicopter, but what else could he have done? If he had stayed, he likely would've been killed and the helicopter might have been irreparably damaged, considering he's the least combat-capable member of Alpha Team and the fate of Bravo's pilot Kevin. Even if he had stayed and managed to survive long enough to airlift everyone to safety, Wesker was with them, and his plan was to get the S.T.A.R.S. into the mansion and observe the B.O.W.'s performance against them, plus destroy evidence and gather data. Most likely Wesker would've ordered Brad to set down the helicopter near the mansion, in which case Brad would've died either outside or inside the mansion at the hands of some B.O.W. or Wesker. The fact remains that even though Brad left his comrades, he never left the area and kept flying around trying to find and rescue his friends. He even somehow managed to throw you a Rocket Launcher whilst flying the helicopter, thanks to which you were able to kill the Tyrant. Without Brad, all four of the survivors would've died in the mansion explosion, and if he had stayed he likely would've died and they wouldn't have had any means of escape. His ultimately was the smartest choice and he sadly will forever be known as "Chickenheart" because of it. He even stayed in Raccoon City and warned Jill about Nemesis while both Chris and Barry were long gone.
• Animation Age Ghetto: Or rather, "video game" age ghetto: the original was one of the earliest M-rated titles to be released.^note  For the pedantics in the crowd: while many "mature" games had been released previously, the actual ESRB had only been around for a year and a half at the time Resident Evil came out, so it was one of the first to be actually rated. Naturally, it got a warning label slapped on it for its violence. Alas, the idea of games potentially reaching older players (particularly on a mainstream console, as opposed to story-driven point-and-click games, or violent games on PC or more obscure consoles) didn't quite click with the parental groups and gaming outlets at the time, so it wasn't uncommon to hear of elementary-aged children waltzing into stores and being able to purchase the game, no questions asked. Even the original action figures line by ToyBiz were marketed towards children (ages 4 and up) rather than collectors.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Black Tiger if you either have the flame rounds with Jill or the Flamethrower with Chris.
• Awesome Music: All of the classic soundtrack qualifies, but a few tracks from the Dual Shock Edition stand out as superb amongst the largely-ridiculed replacement score:
  • "Meeting Rebecca" ^note Named "Soave" in the CD release of the soundtrack. was remixed into Resident Evil 0's Save Room theme.
  • The Dual Shock Version's save room music^note  Titled "Placido" in the CD release of the soundtrack is also well received by fans. It's mostly a relaxing lullaby, but it's just off-key enough to sound somewhat ominous and creepy.
  • The song that plays as you explore the first floor, where a genuinely creepy bass violin seems to haunt Chris or Jill's every step.
• Badass Decay: A complaint about Rebecca Chambers, given that she seems much more capable in the prequel Zero. Fanon and eventually The Umbrella Chronicles justifies this by noting that most of her team is dead over the course of the game, Billy Coen is gone, she's nearly out of ammo, and she's been awake for several days.
• Camera Screw: The game uses fixed camera angles, and when the characters move out of shot, the viewpoint changes. This can be disorienting at the best of times, and moves on to annoying if you're trying to dodge enemies in a corner-rich environment.
• Common Knowledge:
  • For a long time, many fans thought the character on the Western box art was either Chris or Richard.^note The reason for the latter was due to the same artwork being used for the cover of the tie-in comic, which focuses on what Richard was doing prior to the events of the game. However, according to Bill Sienkiewicz, the original artist, because the game's concept was still in development, he simply drew someone who was "roughly based on a character from the game".
  • The contentious replacement soundtrack is often referred as the "director's cut" soundtrack, but is in fact exclusive to the DualShock edition of said cut, which is labeled on its alternate box art, featuring a zombie's face. Any copy of the Director's Cut that depicts the above mentioned "not-Chris" cover still has the original music.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Hunters. The remake toned down their raw deadliness by a fair bit, giving you time to react to their One-Hit Kill by first announcing it with a screech, and also taking away their invincibility frames so it's now possible to interrupt their attacks and hit them while they're downed.
  • Chimeras are faster, tougher and more damaging than most of the zombies and infected animals encountered so far. Luckily, they are pretty easy to avoid if you dash right under them and you only encounter them in a few rooms near the very end of the game.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Barry Burton became an especially popular character, largely for his memorably ridiculous lines and tendency to show up at the last second to save Jill throughout her scenario, making him one of the standout characters of the franchise.
• Fan Nickname: "Mansion Basement", an infamously terrible track from the Dual Shock Version of Director's Cut, is often referred to as "Clowns farting in the basement" by the fanbase.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Crows, bees, and adders. Two of the three are only encountered in one area, and have the added bonus of poisoning you. Crows can at least be prevented from attacking by not shooting them, carefully walking by them, or not checking Forest's corpse.
  • Dogs straddle the fence between this and Demonic Spiders, being hard to draw a bead on thanks to their speed — triply so if you're attacked by more than one at a time — but relatively easy to kill once you've knocked them down. They've remained a persistent nuisance in every game since.
• Good Bad Bugs: The original PlayStation version had it so that pausing the game right after you had hit an enemy with the knife would reset the knife animation while the enemy was still stunned resulting in the player being able to have Chris or Jill attack the monster again while they are unable to retaliate.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • By the fifth game, Wesker is a nigh-invincible badass who can take down his foes with ease, dodge bullets, catch rockets with his bare hands, and even survive being dunked in lava. Because of this, it can be quite jarring to see him frantically run away from a few infected dogs in the opening movie.
  • Wesker appears as a special zombie enemy in the Sega Saturn port's "Battle Game". This was long before he reappeared in Code: Veronica.
  • While the series as a whole has a ton of Shout Outs to all sorts of horror movies,^note Such as Jurassic Park, Jaws, Psycho, and of course, Night of the Living Dead (1968). the first game predates one horror movie by a year. It involves a giant, man-eating snake.
  • In Resident Evil 2 (Remake), you can find a letter from Chris about having a great time in Europe, but Claire herself, who knows her own brother better than anyone else, will say "This does not sound like Chris".^note Chris in the modern games is serious and all business. So imagine the modern Claire's reactions to PS1-era Chris who has a tendency to joke around and be a Pungeon Master, exactly the opposite of how she knows her brother.
  • One of the many instant death traps in this game is a boulder that tries to crush you Indy style. A little more than a decade later, Chris ends up becoming very much famous by punching a giant boulder into submission, with his bare hands no less.
• It Was His Sled:
  • Wesker is The Mole. It doubles as a Late-Arrival Spoiler, as later games don't even try hiding his villainous nature. During Jill's scenario in the remake where she listens to Barry talking to Wesker, the game doesn't even try to hide who Barry is talking to, making the spoiler all the more obvious.
  • The game actually implies that the mansion is haunted and the zombies and other monsters are supernatural in origin for quite a while; the fact that they're the result of bioweapon research was originally a twist. Nowadays, Resident Evil is well-known as a Sci-Fi Horror series focusing on the experiments of the Umbrella Corporation, thus anybody going in will already know where the zombies came from.
• Narm:
  • The FMV opening for the original game. The laughably bad acting from the live-action actors makes it even more memorable, which includes the cheesy special effects used to show the helicopter and zombie dogs. Capcom must have hired random people off the street to portray the characters since Jill's actress was in high school at the time and had no acting experience.
  • The game is notorious for having bad voice acting, such as Jill often sounding overly worried and whiny for an elite cop, and having a lot of cheesy dialogue. The two most memorable lines come from Barry — referring to Jill as "the master of unlocking" after giving her the lockpick, then making a wisecrack about "a Jill sandwich" after saving her from the Descending Ceiling trap.
  • The zombie introduction cutscene in the original version. It looks less a monster spotting his next meal and more like a clown surprised someone's wandering into his dressing room. Capcom seemed to notice this too: when they used a still from this scene for the prologue of Resident Evil 2, they made a number of edits to the picture to make the zombie more menacing.
  • The Director's Cut: Dual Shock Version "Mansion Basement" theme. Yes, this is an actual in-game tune. No, it's not the only badly composed song on the track, but it's largely agreed to be the worst.
  • Wesker telling Chris to stop laughing at the Tyrant sounds less like him getting offended and more like him trying to fend off a schoolyard bully.
• Narm Charm:
  • The infamous Keeper's Diary. The wording is a bit goofy (e.g. "Hungry and eat doggie food"), but the idea of a zombie retaining the human intelligence to keep jotting down his thoughts and experiences right up until his brain's higher functions die out is more than creepy enough to make up for that.
  • The cheesy dialogue isn't without its fans, so much so that many fans that felt the rewritten dialogue and less hammy acting of the 2002 remake removed quite a bit of the original version's charm and even "ruined" some of the more memorable (and quotable) moments.
  • For some, the infamous "Mansion Basement" theme in the Dual Shock Version. The Soundtrack Dissonance is unsettling in its own right.
• Never Live It Down: Chris laughing in Wesker's face and Wesker sheepishly asking him to stop. For many fans, this moment forever seals Wesker as a socially awkward insecure nerd who is just trying too hard to be cool. It also re-frames his rivalry with Chris as a petty one where Wesker seeks to kill him simply because he hurt his feeling that one time.
• Newer Than They Think: All mentions of the Arklay mansion being owned by Ozwell E. Spencer or built by George Trevor were added in the 2002 remake of the game; these characters weren't even named in the original canon until Resident Evil – Code: Veronica.
• Nightmare Retardant: The "Mansion Basement" theme from the DualShock version is obviously aiming for the same sense of dread as the original version, but ends up sounding like a drunk person blowing random notes on a trombone.
• Not Badass Enough for Fans: Rebecca gets a lot of flak from some fans who claim she's useless and only serves to be a damsel, including the series' creator himself. But the thing is: she only gets in trouble once, and under very specific circumstances. In contrast, she saves Chris twice and gives him several free complete healings, making up for the lack of free ammo Jill gets. Not to mention that she comes under attack from a Hunter, one of the series' worst Elite Mooks and is downright harrowing for the player to take on with anything that isn't a One-Hit Kill. Despite this, it wouldn't be until the release of Resident Evil 0 that fans were convinced that she was as capable as the other three main characters.
• Older Than They Think: The case of talking zombies didn't originate in Resident Evil 3 (Remake), or Resident Evil 4, or even the pachinko slot machine version of the remake, it was the very first game that showed people slowly turning into zombies were still capable of communicating as evidenced by the Keeper's Diary.
• Once Original, Now Common: "Corporate-sourced zombies" are a common origin for the undead today, as a convenient metaphor about the dangers of capitalism, and Resident Evil itself practically markets itself as "Zombie-political-thriller" fiction. In 1996, however, it was a shocking modernised twist that under all the clichés of the haunted house full of monsters, the cause wasn't one mad scientist, but a whole modern medical company that was actually trying to turn B.O.W.s into marketable products.
• Polished Port:
  • The PC edition of the 1996 original lacks the extra goodies of the Director's Cut re-release, but makes up for them by being completely uncut (which, despite the title, the Director's Cut largely wasn't), with the uncensored intro in full color and severed body parts remaining on-screen rather than instantly disappearing. It also adds in an exclusive new costume for Chris and Jill that no other version has, and includes a fully automatic weapon for both characters — an FN Minimi for Chris and a MAC10 for Jill — that's powerful enough to make it even more of a Game-Breaker than the rocket launcher.^note It's essentially a super-fast, reskinned version of the Beretta, meaning it stunlocks enemies and kills them in a second or two — even Hunters. You could also hit a button to skip the "door opening" loading screens.
  • The Sega Saturn version wasn't exactly more polished, per se, but it did throw in two exclusive costumes of its own and introduced the first-ever "Mercenaries"-style battle mode in the series called "Battle Game" as well as introducing a couple of new enemies, such as the Tick (an altered Hunter), a second Tyrant that would attack you once you seemingly killed the first one (only with Chris, however), and the Battle Game-exclusive zombie Wesker and Golden Tyrant.
  • The Nintendo DS port, subtitled Deadly Silence, updated the character models and animation to bring them in line with the remake's style, threw in another set of exclusive costumes, some tweaks to the controls (adding the quick 180 turn, giving a knife its own button to save inventory space), and a reload button), and added in a new "Rebirth" mode that features new puzzles, 1st-person knife fights, and a few more additions that make use of the DS hardware. Like the PC version, it also allows you to skip the "door opening" screens by hitting the action button. The only drawback is that the graphics and cutscenes are at a lower resolution, making them a little grainy.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Sergio Jones, Brad Vickers' voice actor in the original game, would go on to play recurring character Dr. Inaba on Baywatch.
  • The narrator is voiced by Ward E. Sexton, who would voice the mysterious Ernest Baldwin.
• Sacred Cow: It's considered the progenitor of the Survival Horror genre and is held to utmost reverence. Implying that it isn't perfect somehow will net you an evisceration.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The bazooka's multiple ammo types can become this. In later games, you're able to switch out rounds as you please - for instance, placing acid rounds in the grenade launcher will remove the flame rounds already in it and put them back in your inventory. In this game, you can only load six rounds at a time, and you can't take a set of rounds out once you've put them in. For fights made easier by using specific rounds - i.e. using acid rounds on Yawn - this can mean wasting the rounds the weapon comes pre-loaded with.
  • Simply deleting extra items from your overstuffed inventory to make room for anything plot-relevant or otherwise necessary isn't an option; you have to trek to a Safe Room and dump them in a box. While it makes sense that you shouldn't be able to permanently drop your full stock of shotgun shells or an important key, this is also the only game in the series that won't let you simply use up a healing item to free space if your health is already topped off.
  • The first-person knife fights in Deadly Silence's Rebirth Mode are novel and interesting... at first. They become extremely tedious and aggravating after you've been forced into your 30th or so randomized encounter, hard-to-dodge enemies like Cerberus and Hunters start showing up in them, and — worst of all — they stop leaving you any extra health or ammo for your trouble. By the time you reach the guardhouse, they've quit being a fun twist on an old formula and instead they turn into a contrived way to burn through your supply of healing items.
  • Enemies are given attack priority over you, which already sucks, but because of poor programming, this also gives them the ability to cancel out your gunfire. Hunters, in particular, are very apt at slashing you at the exact moment you try to shoot them, causing you to waste a shotgun shell or precious magnum round as it harmlessly vanishes with a tiny puff... Just in case you needed another reason to hate those sons of bitches. Zombies can also pass you around like a prison cigarette and stunlock you to death if you're caught between two or more of them, because shoving one away will not push back any others that are in close.
  • Not being able to skip the door opening scenes. While it's justified with the original versions using them as load screens, and the PC and DS versions can skip them, it goes from atmospheric to frustrating if you keep having to backtrack in the other ones. Better yet, the improved technology behind the remake allowed the developers to do away with the loading screens completely, but they were left in as a stylistic choice, which would have been a much cooler idea if Capcom hadn't evidently forgotten that they've made them optional before and could've easily done so again.
• The Scrappy: Before the remake came along and reworked her depiction to be far more relatable and better able to tap into the player's protective instinct towards her, a lot of oldschool fans did not care much for Rebecca and found her to be incredibly annoying, thanks to her voice actress going with an inappropriately chipper and very hammy line delivery that made her seem almost oblivious to all the horrors going on around her, unless death happened to be staring her right in the face.
• Scrappy Weapon: The knife, starting a grand tradition of knives being nigh useless Emergency Weapons up until Resident Evil 4. Unless you know what you're doing, using it will result in taking damage, even against basic zombies.
• Signature Scene: There's several; The opening in the main hall which becomes something of a Fountain of Memes because of the narmy dialogue, the initial zombie encounter, and the "L"-shaped hallway with the dogs.
• Special Effect Failure: Deadly Silence does a good job bringing over the original PS1 version, but the already bright and vivid game was made even more so, likely due to the DS having a lower native resolution, making many rooms looking highly saturated and other places looking like a somewhat smudged oil painting.
• That One Boss: Yawn. It's pretty hard to keep your distance from it and you have to hit it with perfect timing if you don't want it to bite you. If you face Yawn without the magnum or lots of ammunition for the bazooka and it manages to encircle you, you're screwed. Even then, Yawn can still tank magnum rounds fairly well, making the fight that much harder for Chris. Yawn was toned down a bit in the remake, where it moves considerably slower, you have cover to keep it at bay and you don't even have to fight it the first time you encounter it— it's technically skippable in the original too, but Yawn can very easily box you in and keep you from escaping.
• That One Level: The return trip to the Mansion as Chris in the original, non-Director's Cut version. Jill has the bazooka she can use to one-shot Hunters if you were prudent in saving your ammo, but Chris has only the shotgun as a viable weapon to defend himself against the worst Demonic Spiders in the game until he can obtain the Colt Python. By that point, you've had to fight your way through over a dozen of these horrible bastards with a gun that takes three shells at close range to kill just one, giving them plenty of opportunities to overwhelm you and deal their brutal One-Hit Kill. The DC's Advanced/Arrange mode mitigates this, since you can find the Python much earlier on, and get at least one reload for it by the time you have to deal with the majority of the Hunters infesting the Mansion.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • The entirely new soundtrack for the Dual Shock Edition. With a few exceptions, such as the music played in the mansion's first floor^note Named "Quietamente" in the CD release of the soundtrack and the "Meeting Rebecca" theme, individual tracks ranged from passable if somewhat inferior to some of the biggest jokes in music composition history. There's a good reason Capcom decided to ignore them all and redo the classic soundtrack for the remake. Some were decent, a few even good, but none of them could really be considered an improvement.
  • Deadly Silence kept all the original voice acting except for Richard, who received a new voice actor for what seems to be one new line of dialogue in regards to the hidden item cache in the dining room's clock. His new voice actor takes the "good" out of So Bad, It's Good by sounding extremely bored and phoning it in.