Archived Discussion Franchise / ResidentEvil

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Averted in the Resident Evil films. The Red Queen is doing exactly what she's meant to do, and is willing to entertain other options presented to her, so long as they make sense.
  • And yet she didn't feel the need to tell Umbrella what had actually happened, so their commandos were sent in under the impression she'd just gone loopy.

• Armor Is Useless: Averted in RE5. Armor is very useful in mitigating damage done to the player. Only hang up is that you got to be wearing armor designed to defend against that type of attack. A Bullet proof vest won't help you if you get stabbed and melee armor won't help if you get shot. But you can combine them for full effect. Also, wearing one or both suits of armor fills up inventory slots, which really puts extra strain on your supplies.
  • Later in the game, you'll run into soldier Majini, some of whom will wear varying combinations of armor pieces on their bodies, including frontal foot leggings, vests and masked helmets. This armor is completely impervious to anything short of explosives or high penetration weapons. Fortunately, very few of the Majini wear full body armor.
    • Higher-end Mooks in 4 had armored masks, making them immune to headshots (unless you use a Magnum weapon). Standard mooks may also have helmets or wooden tower shields. One type of Elite Mook even wears full chest armor and foot leggings. Head or groinshots.
  • The biggest aversion is in RE 4, where you can unlock a full suit of medieval armor for Ashley, which renders her Nigh-Invulnerable and too heavy for enemies to abduct. The only real downside is the annoying clanging sound she makes while walking.
    • This troper would like to know how you unlock that since he can't remember anything like that on his copy.
    • It's only on PS 2 and Wii.

• Fridge Logic: Why does the Umbrella Corporation devote so much of its resources to presumably profitless zombie manufacture?
  • The zombies weren't their intentions, it's the bio-weapons, since the pharmaceutical company is just a cover and they were into the virus research from the start.
  • In later games in the series, Umbrella starts to develop Super-Soldier drugs. Wesker and Alexia both have variants of them. The T-Virus was just the first attempt.

• Joker Immunity - Majority subverted in the end of Resident Evil 5 where, after more than 10 years, you finally get to fight and kill series Big Bad Albert Wesker.
  • There are a handful in RE4: three types of chainsaw wielders (Dr. Salvador, The Bella Sisters, and Super Salvador), an armored claw berserker, and a gatling gun wielding mercenary

the South-American accent and the 3rd-world town style used depicting Spain Not-Spain in Resident Evil 4.

• You can... sorta... forgive the town; it's intentionally supposed to be a small, crappy cult town far away from anything resembling civilization, so it can be forgiven for not looking like a genuine Spanish town. Those accents, on the other hand...
  • According to Word of God (see here), its not supposed to be Spain anyway, but some small European country that just happen to be speaking Spanish.
  • Despite the opening FMV to Separate Ways clearly marking Not-Spain on the Weskers giant monitor.

• Officially, the only 100% confirmed non-canon game is Gaiden; the Gun Survivors and Outbreak titles fall under the ambiguous "side story" label.

• Dead Aim also allows you to walk and shoot at the same time.
  • Ironically averted in Resident Evil's sister series Dino Crisis.

• In the original. In Outbreak, they're crushed pills when mixed, and in Resident Evil 4, they're in a spray container, as with Resident Evil 5.

• Despite the fact that the next time we see Monica, she suffers from an Alien style chestburster death, which only William is known to do? How can it not be Dr. Birkin?
  • Because Monica is holding the chestburster in the Attache Case. The case is broken open when she staggers back into the turntable and dies. It infected her after the Moth kidnapped her (if the moth kidnaps a player, it cocoons them against the wall, which would be the perfect time for that thing to strike).
• It's theorized that a Tyrant shown harassing people in File Number Two showed up in RE2.

• Averted in Resident Evil 5, though, as your AI partner is generally as heavily armed as you are.

• Hey Its That Voice: I swear to god, Nergal and Wesker are related.
  • Do Jill, Claire and Annette sound kind of familiar? What if I was to throw the names Jean Grey, Jubilee and Mystique at you?

• Mood Whiplash: The fourth and fifth games are more action-thriller than survival horror.
  • As Ben Croshaw so eloquently put it, "the series officially kicked 'survival horror' in the head around the time Resident Evil 4 was letting you mow down your first legion of unruly Spanish peasants."

• Slipknot Ponytail: Averted by Wesker in RE5. Despite numerous occasions of hand-to-hand combat with the heroes, being shot or stabbed multiple times by said heroes, falling hundreds of feet to the ground from a flying aircraft, having his body mutated by a parasitic virus, and burning alive in a lake of volcanic lava, not one single hair on his slicked back do is EVER out of place.
  • I'm beginning to think that his hair is industructible. Either that or it is his only weak spot.
  • OBJECTION! When Wesker is holding onto Sheva's leg for dear life after Chris catches her, you can clearly see some locks of his indestructible hair have come loose. Thankfully he rectifies this in time for the final boss.

• Wesker is intentional, though, as their entire goal was cause that. It's an aversion, however.

• Mr. X is a noticeable inversion, as his human-like form is rather slow and relatively easy to bring down with a handful of shotgun blasts, whereas his full-out Tyrant form is wicked fast and completely bulletproof.
• Nemesis's middle form is also an aversion; although he no longer has a rocket launcher, he's faster and has longer Combat Tentacles which he uses to toss you around like a ragdoll.

• And Alice in the third film. The evil corporate executive murders dozens of Alice clones trying to find one as tough as she is. Then the real Alice finds the open pit of dead bodies...
  • It's All There in the Manual, for reading the files in Resident Evil 5 reveals that Wesker was actually one of, oh, THOUSANDS of children kidnapped from around the world, brainwashed, and sent back out in the world with close survelliance. In fact, one file reveals that Wesker's "death" brought the success rate of project Wesker down to 18%.

• Family-Man Birkin and Crazily Co-Dependant Ashford are... but Wesker isn't?
  • Wesker is too much of a Magnificent Bastard to be hated like a Complete Monster.
  • That's certainly open to interpretation... S.D. Perry, author of several novelizations of RE games, paints him as a sociopathic rapist, so your mileage will very much vary.
  • To be fair, "Family-Man" Birkin did rape his daughter and kill his wife.
  • After turning into a monster with none of his original human personality, memory, or mindset, of course.
  • Well, he did give Sherry that sample of G BEFORE he turned into a monster, so he was still kinda a fucker.

• Wesker is a bit smarter the second time you fight him. He doesn't waste time popping his knuckles, he just starts shooting.

• It was trying to research how to use viruses as weapons and as immortality drugs. The fact that the researchers were crazy didn't help.
  • Zombies aren't an intentional product of Umbrella's research - they happen when an ordinary person catches the T-virus. If you have the right (extremely rare) genetic makeup and catch the virus, you become a Tyrant instead. Since these people are so rare, Umbrella just resorts to using clones of one of their executives who happened to have the right genes.
• Lampshaded in the novels. As Jill said, they're 100% grade A jacked up bat shit. Other characters comment on this.
• It's All There in the Manual. Umbrella was about bio-enhancers and bio-weapons from the start, the pharmaceutical company thing was just a cover.

• I'm pretty sure that the AI Sheva/Chris is dumbed down in the Professional difficulty. It just gets sad how many times you can die because: the computer just stands next to you not helping while you in the Dying status or decides not to take cover in a room with about 6 machine gun enemies and several grenade tossers. It is almost impossible to play some levels on this difficulty without a human player thanks to the computer.
  • Claire could be theoretically justified - growing up with Chris Redfield for an older brother would almost certainly mean learning how to defend yourself to a stronger degree than most.

, like Ashley's in 4.

• Ahem... are we forgetting Claire's outfit in Code: Veronica?
  • And Rebecca's leather outfit in RE0.

  • Pro mode on RE5 is hard with infinite ammo magnums. This troper was actually happy with this, because RE4's Pro mode really wasn't that hard, while something like a No Merchant Run on the other hand...

• Flamethrower + Man-Eating Plant = pwnage.
  • Also in 0, where the preferred method of killing leech zombies is to chuck a Molotov cocktail at them.

• Averted exactly once with Linda in the second Outbreak game, who seems to be a fairly decent person trying to escape the city with a cure for the virus.

• Leon B has Ada being really hurt, but survives to aid Leon (or Claire) by giving them a rocket launcher. Umbrella Chronicles shows just how bad the damage she took is.
• Most of the cast, really, since the most common enemy attack involves zombies chewing through your jugular vein. RE4 and RE5 are a bit better about this, because most attacks don't involve that anymore. There's still a few, and the game generally obeys the Chunky Salsa Rule.
  • Wesker wander into the Nigh-Invulnerable territory by RE5.

• This actually becomes relevant during one of his boss fights. The fight is outside at night, and in order to have a chance the player must turn off several spotlights to keep Wesker from seeing them and dodging their attacks.

• Wesker is the less problematic "Captain America" type, along with Krauser in RE4, and apparently Jill Valentine in RE5. Fanon has Ada being one of these also after she comes Back from the Dead, although RE4 doesn't really support this.
  • Since when Caps can survive getting blasted in the head with a sniper rifle ?...Yeah, I know... Anyways, if anything, Wesker is even more ridiculous than the Tyrants.

• The power of love and Wesker manliness make people stupid.
• Two fine examples come from Degeneration: first is the aforementioned Greg (what part of "shoot them in the head" did you miss?), and then there's that stupid reporter from the opening zombie siege (when your cameraman looks past you and flees in terror, don't ask him why he stopped filming, just run with him, you idiot!).

• Considering that in the previous instance he was a humble police rookie more close to a Badass Normal, the change, that makes him behave as the usual Action Hero, may be seen also as something else. Arguably, though, you're allowed to get a chip on your shoulder after surviving a Zombie Apocalypse.
  • It ALSO helps that he, you know, has spent the interim being trained into a government Specials Ops Agent? There isn't any derailment here, he didn't exactly have a job to go back to at the end of the events of RE 2 and, in one of the ending snippets from RE 3 his accepting of a job as a government agent is revealed.
• Albert Wesker also got one after his first Xanatos Gambit due to Super Serum, but as we discovered in Umbrella Chronicles, he didn't actually need one.
  • Claire Redfield in Resident Evil: Degeneration. She kicks a zombie IN THE FACE.

• Oh yes he did. They retconned it so he died and then "got better" in Code: Veronica.
  • And it was a huge retcon, no less. Then, in Umbrella Chronicles, where you unlock the scenario to play as Wesker, you see a giant hole in his shirt, his bare chest, and blood stains around the hole, revealing that he was stabbed, and the Super Serum he had injected himself with a few minutes before whoever comes in to confront him healed the hole where the tyrant had stabbed him.
  • Ironically, that's also discounted. Loading screen of RE5 says a prototype virus in his body activated moments after his death.
• In point of fact, it's the original where Wesker always dies, either skewered by the Tyrant he releases or decapitated by a Chimera after he sets off the self-destruct sequence. In one ending of the Remake, the Tyrant merely knocks him unconscious, but his body mysteriously disappears in the confusion of the ensuing fight.

• Funnily enough, in RE3, you don't finish Nemesis with a rocket launcher (that's what the railgun is for), but you do get one to fight him with for the final boss battle.
  • And he's US Secret Service agents in foreign country; he's not there for waging war or fighting some biological horror, but to search for president's daughter. Although being US Presidents, it won't hurt if they give him something like assault rifles....

• What happened to Barry Burton?
  • He got an epilouge in Resident Evil 3. Even though main character Carlos doesn't, nor does Rebecca.
  • Speaking of which, Sherry Birkin is 23 at this point in time, meaning that her epilouge means she was either taken back by Umbrella, or working for an international organization like the rest of the characters are, but she hasn't been heard of since.
• Averted in Code: Veronica, because we find out exactly what happened to the mouse (known as D.I.J.) through his diary, located in Battle Game.

• Just for reference, it's still easy to look up her skirt through your rifle scope, no less without her noticing... just back off from the ladder a bit.
  • And Chris is from the BSAA's North American division, but lo, he was in both Russia and Africa. I mean, judging from the fact that there are white guys and Arab guys, and you can go from reasonable modern towns to hut villages, I'm going to have to take a guess that it's in Mozambique or somewhere in that area (that'd actually be southeastern Africa). Plus, the developers even said they tried to base it on Somalia, but just added in the extra people to make it 'less racist' when if it were in somewhere like Somalia.. It really wouldn't be. The whole idea of killing hordes of cannibalistic tribesmen with grass skirts and fancy shields and spears, though.. But yeah, my best guess goes to Mozambique since there are enough whites around from former Rhodesia and some Arabs from up north, but predominantly black people.

• Given a bit of justification in the novelization. He apparently knew he was a goner but wanted to be of some use and continue to try and help the group out until it was too late. He had the best of intentions. Just the slight problem that he never bothered to let anyone know he was infected! Kinda defeats the whole purpose if no one knows to watch out for the zombie in their midst.