Awesome / Resident Evil 2 (Remake)

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For moments from the 1998 original, see here.

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• After years of rumors, Capcom finally released the trailer for the remake at E3 2018, along with its release date (January 25, 2019).
  • The buildup to the reveal deserves mention: The trailer begins in a dark supply room, and a cop can be heard struggling with someone as another man asks if he needs help, which is all seen from a rat's perspective before the poor thing gets crushed by a falling shelf. There's no indication whatsoever that this is a trailer for a remake... Then the man the cop is struggling with is revealed to be a zombie, who bites out the cop's throat and stares right at the camera before Leon blows its brains out.
• When word got out that the remake would stick closer to the Resi 4–6 mold, some fans worried that the game would backtrack from the emphasis on horror that Resident Evil 7: Biohazard re-introduced and come off as too action-packed. The trailers and the gameplay demos laid those fears to rest — the tone, atmosphere and even the gameplay put a strong emphasis on not just horror, but terror.
• Early demo footage of Claire's game (primarily the fight with G-Birkin) shows Birkin shouting Sherry's name, like he did in Resi 1.5. Hooray for Mythology Gags!
• Claire and Leon’s iconic “DON’T SHOOT!” and “GET DOWN!” first meeting being recreated in HD graphics is truly awesome for long time fans. What makes it more awesome is instead of a Take My Hand! moment like the original, Claire immediately gets up and stands besides Leon shoulder to shoulder pointing her own gun at the advancing zombies. It’s made abundantly clear she’s just as badass as him and together they’re stronger.
• Claire shows no fear when Chief Irons takes her hostage over her involvement with Sherry; she even tells him that he'll have to answer to Chris and herself should he do anything to the little girl. Even after being beaten up for her insubordination, Claire still has enough fire in her to go after Irons and rescue Sherry.
  • As the AV Club pointed out in their review of the game, in the battle with G3, Leon, the veritable face of cheesy action hero badassery, is forced to fight him thanks to Annette lowering the bridge they're on, and is clearly against the idea when she does it. In contrast, Claire lowers the bridge herself and jumps down onto it to fight with the multi-ton, multi-limbed killing machine, all so Annette can get to Sherry with the medicine.
    Annette: You don't know what you're up against!
    Claire: I have a pretty damn good idea.
    Annette: ...whatever you do, don't stop until it's finished.
    Claire: Trust me. This ends now!
  • What makes this moment even more powerful is that, up until this point, G-Birkin was much more erratic and rabid than he was in the original game, where it was implied that he bore rationality behind his blood-lust. Here, as G3, he seems to have regained his calmer demeanor, no longer convulsing wildly and seeming completely dead set on killing its prey. Combined with the bombastic orchestra, it shows how far this monster has evolved - to the point where it's fully stabilized itself and has a clear, single-minded goal; to eliminate the opponent. It isn't a chase between a regular person and a monstrosity anymore: now, it's a mutual duel between that person and the beast.
• Ada ramming Mr. X with a police van to save Leon from his Neck Lift is awesome enough on its own. But when Mr. X starts to emerge from the brickwork pushing the van off him, Ada Crazy-Prepared pulls out a detonator and triggers a explosion in the back of the van stopping the tyrant effectively. Leon’s reaction to this is surprised awe.
• Similar to the original, Leon goes through the more difficult second half of the game with a bullet in his shoulder, and barely flinches when he's trying to hang on to a wounded Ada. His only concession to the existence of his wound?
  Leon: It feels worse than it looks.
• Annette Birkin gets a villainous Moment here, too. In the original, she was quickly overpowered by Ada Wong and thrown to the sewers after a brief scuffle. In the remake, she avoids contact with Ada, knowing that Ada will win a face-to-face fight, and instead opts to make use of a waste disposal machine to knock Ada off the platform and into the sewers. If that wasn’t enough Annette effectively takes Ada out again in the finale, shooting her in the torso and making her fall into a Bottomless Pit.
  • Annette also reveals the truth of Ada's mercenary status to Leon in his scenario, and he believes her this time. Despite having wounded him earlier, albeit by accident, and having undergone her fair share of Sanity Slippage, Annette's villainous role turns around before she dies and helps keep the G-Virus from falling into Ada's hands.
  • In Claire's campaign, Annette actually survives long enough to be the one to personally cure Sherry, compared to helping Claire figure out how to get a vaccine going before expiring in the original. She also was damned determined to fight William one-on-one despite her fatal wounds, gets baffled by Claire opting to step in for her instead, and then follows Claire's demand. It's like in that moment the two immediately had the same goals in mind: kill William, save Sherry. No matter the risks.
• Sherry gets a Moment of her own during her captivity in an abandoned orphanage: During her attempt to escape, she manages to grab a container of sulfuric acid and toss it at Chief Irons' face. The acid scars his face permanently and gives Sherry another opening to run. A brave little girl was able to do serious damage to her captor before Claire had a chance to do so.
  • Capcom also deserves credit for Sherry's brief segment in the orphanage. In the original game, Sherry couldn't use weapons and was relegated to boring puzzles, making her parts the weakest in the game. To shake things up in the remake, they made Sherry's portion into a stealth segment as she engages in a nail-biting cat-and-mouse hunt with Chief Irons (who is human, but only in the most technical sense). What once was the weakest part of the game is now one of its most terrifying parts.
• The Fourth Survivor mini-game shows the return of fan-favorite Umbrella commando Hunk. In this mode, you control Hunk as he heads toward the extraction point while his pilot, Nighthawk, guides him. Standing between you and the extraction point is a compilation of the hardest enemies in the game, with barely more ammo than usual, all while you make a mad dash to the police department's front gate. This mode will definitely prove how good you are with the game's mechanics. Then again, you're playing as HUNK, so it's pretty justified.
  • Hunk's professionalism in the field has him cut down Nighthawk's idle chit-chat before it can start, but one bit of dialogue shows how fearless Hunk really is. Nighthawk claims Umbrella has ordered a "full clean up" of Raccoon City, which implies either a full military deployment or an outright bombing. (The game never clarifies which.) Hunk never loses his cool even as the situation gets increasingly more desperate:
    Nighthawk: Hunk, time's up!
    Hunk: Go, Nighthawk. Get out.
    Nighthawk: I'm not just gonna leave you—
    Hunk: This is war...survival's your responsibility.
    Nighthawk: [dejected] Goddammit...
  • Nighthawk's tone of voice during the scenario makes clear his excitement about working with Hunk. Hunk is famous in Umbrella's mercenary circles for being unkillable; no matter what his mission, even if it wiped out his entire unit, he would always come back alive. Even after Hunk tells Nighthawk to leave, he still meets him at the extraction point. When asked why, Nighthawk's response is both simple and sweet:
    I wanted to meet the Grim Reaper.
  • It's implied that Hunk fought his way through the sewers for days on end. He starts the mode out with slightly more ammo than the average survivor. Let that sink in. It's sort of a Fridge Awesome Moment.
• Leon’s stoic anger and sarcasm to Ada after learning from Annette that she isn't a FBI agent and has been manipulating him the whole time is awesomely satisfying. Especially compared to the original where Leon was canonically completely duped by her true motives, remake Leon isn't nearly as gullible as he admits as much as he wanted to trust her, he didn’t. Also when Ada says “I was just doing my job”, Leon bites back that so is he.
• William Birkin is a total shitbag and the direct cause of the catastrophic outbreak that destroyed Raccoon City but he still gets 2 shining Papa Bear moments: Saving his daughter right as Irons corners her and giving him a well deserved Karmic Death, and killing Mr. X as he cornered her and Claire in an elevator (though immediately after he loses what's left of his humanity to his transformation).
• Claire’s fight with G4 during the Catastrophic Countdown certainly counts as this. Largely due to fact Claire the 116 pound college girl is wielding a massive Minigun like she’s Arnold Schwarzenegger to pump the abomination full of lead.
• The G-Virus is the most powerful virus in the Resident Evil universe (not counting the dubiously-canon "Executer" virus). Even after all the sequels and side stories, that position remains unchallenged. The monsters spawned from other Umbrella viruses can be killed after enough damage has been dealt; monsters spawned by the G-Virus require complete incineration to kill. The virus can infinitely repair the damage done to its host, which violates the law of physics. We even see the power of the virus firsthand when Birkin casually kills a Tyrant, which is designed from the ground up to be a killing machine. Birkin is the result of random mutations—so imagine what would happen if Umbrella could specifically engineer a creature from the G-Virus. Is it any wonder, then, that the canon fate of Raccoon City is nuclear annihilation?
• The Ghost Survivors. Just...them. As the title suggests, the mode focuses on characters that never actually survived the events of Raccoon City, turning them into adaptational badasses in the process. These include:
  • Robert Kendo, who manages to fight his way through a horde of zombies, both regular and mutated by Umbrella's P-Z gas, to a helicopter implied to be the same one Barry Burton uses to save Jill in 3.
  • Katherine Warren, the Mayor's daughter, who outright kills Chief Irons and, despite having almost no combat experience, tears her way to the RPD, even gunning down zombies that regenerate unless shot in the head with magnum rounds or set on fire, to rescue her lover, Ben.
  • Ghost, a rookie USS member who retrieves the G-Virus sample in place of HUNK, and manages to escape the NEST despite a few of the undead being equipped with completely bulletproof armor, though he does end up ambushed by Ada...
  • And Sheriff Daniel Cortini, who fights off the zombie he'd been struggling with (and lost to) in the main game, promptly holding his ground against a onslaught of undead, mixed in with the previous types of Ghost Survivor-exclusive zombies, with nothing but a Broom Hc and a combat knife, before then being rescued by Leon.
• The finale of Leon’s campaign during the Catastrophic Countdown has Super Mr. X aka Super Tyrant emerge from the flames while the awesome track “Last Judgement” plays. Better still when Mr. X lands on the descending platform, Leon’s response isn’t panic but a simple “Alright, come on.” The scared rookie is gone, the monster killing badass seen in the later games has been born. Then an unseen Ada repays her debt by sending down an Anti-tank Rocket for Leon to blow Mr. X into Half the Man He Used to Be.
• Special mention goes to both HUNK and Ghost, who both have to wade through a river of zombies and face ivies, G-adults, Lickers and the Tyrant himself. Not only that, but actually making it out alive usually means casually sprinting past all these threats before they have a chance to hurt you.
• The Second Run finale. It wasn't enough to just detach the train car and leave G5 to go up in the lab's explosion, oh no; your character first goes full-on Captain Ahab and shoves a length of broken pipe deep into its central eye, complete with an enraged "FUCK YOU!" that may lack the poetic defiance of Ahab's final speech, but certainly matches it in venom.

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