Awesome / Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

It's a given, considering it's a Resident Evil game.

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Demos

• Peter Walken's death is firmly established in the main game, but the circumstances are only seen in the Kitchen VR demo. The guy could have easily headed for the window and tried to save himself, but instead he picks up a machete and attempts to free Clancy from the chair he's been tied to, leading to a possessed Mia impaling him from the back. Despite this fatal injury, Peter uses the last of his strength to tackle Mia away from Clancy one more time, and is gruesomely stabbed to death and beheaded for his trouble. Sadly, his efforts to save Clancy prove to be All for Nothing (in fact, they may well have prolonged his suffering considerably), but there's no question that, in the end, Pete died a hero.

Clancy

• Clancy's entire tenure through the Banned Footage DLC tapes bears mentioning, as the unlucky cameraman goes through tribulations worthy of any prior Resident Evil protagonist. From escaping Marguerite's twisted care right under her nose in Bedroom, to surviving a grueling five hours against the Molded and Jack (twice!) in Nightmare, and even turning the tables on Lucas in the life-or-death game of 21.
• In a bit of a scripted sequence at the tail-end of 21, Lucas decides to do what he does best; cheat. Giving Clancy the worst possible cards, himself the perfect hand, and a trump card that not only keeps you from calling for new cards, but will guarantee instant death to the loser regardless of the blade's positioning. Though if you kept the seemingly useless Love Your Enemy trump card and drop it down, the utter bafflement in Lucas' voice, and Clancy's tone showing he's absolutely done with Lucas' bullshit is a nice bit of catharsis that only Ethan would match later on. If Lucas then didn't decide to drop Clancy into his Unwinnable by Design Happy Birthday trap, the cameraman would have plenty of achievements to brag about.

Ethan

• Think about the premise for a minute: You are playing Ethan Winters, a random guy who has no martial connections of any sort. Not to the police, military, or the B.S.A.A. You are just a regular guy with no firearm or combat training, unlike his wife, who you are trying to save. You risk life and limb hiding and fighting superpowered cannibals and their army of mutant moldy freaks, to the point you defeat them. Eventually, you scrape together enough firepower to fight off hordes of enemies and eventually the Big Bad herself, and Chris Redfield himself is impressed by those feats. And that's just the heavy lifting compared to tracking Lucas that Chris has to do. Not bad for a normal guy.
• Remember: Chris, who has military training and experience to boot, survived the Spencer mansion way back in the beginning of the series. To him, Ethan—a civilian with no training—doing the same thing and surviving it genuinely is something impressive. Probably reminds him of him, to a degree. The fact that he saw a normal man defeat a B.O.W speaks volumes.
  Victoria: Chris, did we lose him?
  Chris: No no. Ethan Winters has been secured. He's alive and well, considering.
• One of the boss fights against Jack Baker is a chainsaw duel with your normal chainsaw against his shears. And not just normal shears. Oh, no... These are CHAINSAW SHEARS! And yes, it's as awesome as it sounds. And also terrifying! And how do you reveal his weak spot during the fight? Simple. You saw his head in half vertically with the chainsaw. Even better, you finish the fight off by jamming the chainsaw into the bulbous mass and tear it up so much that Jack's entire upper body explodes.
• Late in the game, you fight a One-Winged Angel Jack, who is out to kill you while mutating beyond recognition. You finally put him down by injecting a serum meant for Mia and Zoe to cure them. Also in the very same fight, after being repeatedly chased by Jack and defeated him in numerous battles, looks like Ethan just had enough of the old man's bullshit. When the mutated Jack attacks him:
  Ethan: This is getting old, Jack!
• Near the very end, Ethan terrifies the smugness right out of Eveline by showing her the necrotoxin he intends to kill her with, causing her to finally drop that shit-eating smirk of hers and go into full panic mode.
  Eveline: You're gonna be one of us. Then maybe you'll play nicely.
  Ethan: I'm not playing.
• Then at the very end, when fighting the mutated Eveline, whom is bigger than the entire house, Blue Umbrella arrives and drops the Albert-01 right next to Ethan, complete with the classic line: "Use it!" When he picks it up, he has one last line before he lays a well deserved ass kicking on Eveline.
  Ethan: Playtime's over!
• Even before he gets the gun, despite facing a gigantic monstrosity that wants him dead, does he give up? HELL NO. He keeps on shooting at Eveline with everything he has, even after the beast picks him up and holds him up by one leg, he still keeps on shooting! And when the beast drops him, despite falling from pretty damn high up, he still is able to grab the Albert-01 and ultimately kill Eveline once and for all.

Mia

• Let's not forget about Mia. She fought several Molded just trying appease Eveline, all while armed to the teeth before her amnesia relapses. That kind of ordeal would kill a normal person. It turned out the Yandere Damsel in Distress from the main story was actually an Action Girl Corporate Samurai working for a Nebulous Evil Organization that wanted her to be Eveline's handler. When Eveline goes rogue, she IMMEDIATELY picks up an SMG, tracks Eveline down through the increasingly-infested ship, and slaughters a score of Molded before finding out it's too late to stop her. Mia is basically a typical Resident Evil Badass Normal action hero stuck in the wrong game.
• The fact Mia manages to hold onto her sanity, mostly, for three years is impressive by itself.
• Mia gives a Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu? moment when she tells Eveline that not only will they never be a family but they never were a family or could be. She then goes on to rescue Ethan from his fungus imprisonment and resists Eveline right up until the time she says to "go kill that little bitch."

Jack

• It's kind of hilarious but Jack actually gets quite a few Moment of Awesome events just for being an Implacable Man in a video game against a protagonist who is throwing out all the stops to take him down. Jack can end up being run down by car repeatedly, only to rip off the roof and drive it into a bunch of steel girders to impale himself. Jack shot himself in the head just to show he was immortal and came back to attack Ethan again in the bathroom. He also got in a chainsaw fight with Ethan only to get slaughtered again. Finally, he went through a One-Winged Angel transformation into something like a Necromorph, only dying when Ethan revealed he had a way to kill him permanently. Albert Wesker is possibly the only other character in video games to take as much punishment yet still come back swinging.
  "Huh-ho, boy! Look what you done now, motherfucker!"
• When Ethan goes to put him down for good with the serum, Jack is obviously trying to kill him and prevent that from happening. However, once Zoe states what the serum does out loud, Jack actually stops and waits. In retrospect, it becomes clear that, in that moment, Jack managed to overcome Eveline's desires and let Ethan kill him, dying on his own terms before he returns as the Swamp Man.
• Jack manages to come back on his own after Eveline was destroyed, and he has to be killed twice in the events of End of Zoe before he goes down for good.
• There's a moment near the end where you meet the real Jack Baker inside Eveline's Hive Mind. He talks to you for a while and tells you what's been going on, but despite everything Eveline has put him and his family through, he has the clarity to understand that she really is just a scared, lonely little girl who wants a family. And while he knows she has to be stopped, even then he doesn't seem to truly blame her for everything that happened the way Ethan had. He's not interested in revenge, either—he only wants his family to be freed from her control so they can truly die. Even after everything, and in stark contrast to what Evie made him act like in the real world, this is a man who has no desire to bring harm to anyone, and it's visibly apparent that he hates killing Evie is the only solution. It's a quiet moment, but extremely awesome.
• Jack gets one in Daughters when we find out his reaction to a ship being wrecked near his home is to go rescue as many survivors as possible while also taking care of the little girl as well as adult woman he found. It's a quietly human but incredibly moving act of decency that, unfortunately, has horrific consequences.
• In End Of Zoe: As their fights escalate and Joe begins taunting him about how he was always the better fighter, Jack seems to momentarily stir out of his mindless rampage enough for his normal reflexes to go on full display, going from swinging around massive tentacles to using more deliberate, leaping overhead swings and flurries of punches.
• During the final battle against him in "End of Zoe", Jack can sometimes shout something that sounds vaguely like "She's MINE!", heavily implying that, after having well and truly died three separate times at this point and no longer being even remotely human, Jack is still conscious enough to recognize his daughter.

Marguerite

• Though she doesn't have as much prominence in the main story as her husband and son do, especially when in the Daughters DLC where she is the first to succumb to Eveline's power, she is notably the only infected family member able to temporarily fight off Eveline's power. She spends her last lucid moments to try and save her uninfected daughter Zoe by giving her a key and telling her to save herself. Not even Jack, the strongest of the family, was able to try and regain control of himself again once it was his turn to be infected.

Zoe

• Zoe is a normal teenager who had to live for three years at the fringes of a family of twisted murderers, presumably scavenging food and avoiding the rest of the family for that whole time. Despite knowing Eveline's power she still takes the first opportunity she can to get away, fixing up Ethan's arm, providing him information and making the cure that saves his life in the Mutated Jack battle. While this does serve her own interests, she also shows no real hatred toward Mia despite her being involved in bringing Eveline to the Bakers, makes a cure for both of them, and doesn't lash out when Ethan chooses Mia over her, seemingly costing Zoe her one chance of rescue.

Joe

• Despite being Jack's older brother, the man has survived for three years on the outskirts of the Baker estate without getting infected. Oh, and did we mention he apparently hunts alligators for a living?
• The first thing that Joe does in End of Zoe is to beat down two Blue Umbrella soldiers that he thinks are going to hurt Zoe. Then he drags one back to his house and forces him to confess that there's a cure by beating him up and threatening him with a machete.
• Ethan, Chris Redfield, and most other characters need guns or other weapons to fight and defeat the Molded. What weapon does Joe Baker need? His bare fists.
• At one point, Joe ends a boss fight against a particularly horrible and powerful Molded Jack Baker by ripping his goddamned head off. With his bare hands. Even Jack has an incredulous look on his face when Joe lifts him over his shoulder and slams him into the ground before the killing blow. Even a mindless beast thinks Joe is impossible.
• Just to give a testament of how awesome Joe is, when Jack tries to sneak attack him by baiting him out with Zoe in the swamp, Joe turns around and catches his punch, then engages him in a Brawler Lock and is actually getting the upper hand, before overpowering him altogether and ripping his Mold mask off. The only reason why he didn't beat down Jack again was because seeing Jack's face underneath all that insect-filled grime threw him off guard and allowed him to knock Joe out.
• At one point, the revived Mutant Jack locks him in a casket and throws him into the bayou to drown. Joe punches his way out of it.
• During your second fight against Swamp Man AKA Jack, you are given a prompt that allows you to straight-up powerbomb him.
• At the end of his story, Joe finally puts Jack down for good by Megaton Punching his face so hard his entire upper half explodes. Admittedly with the aid of a Power Fist, but still, goddamn. This is what he says when the fight starts:
  Joe: You're just a rabid dog now. And I'm gonna put you outta your misery. Bring it on!
  • Joe's Pre-Mortem One-Liner is an epic Call-Back to Jack's "Welcome to the family, son." line:
    Joe: This is a farewell from the family, brother!
  • To further highlight the awesomeness here: A file found near the final save point reveals the reason Jack revived as the Swamp Man was because Jack's Healing Factor was insane even by the Mold's standards. Effectively, none of the guns or explosives in the main game, or even a serum that explicitly attacks the Mold, could outpace it. Joe Baker's raw strength amplified with the Power Fist, on the other hand, can and does outpace it. Under the right circumstances, Joe isn't just as powerful as firearms; he's many times stronger.

Eveline

• She may be a completely psychotic Creepy Child but Eveline's take over of the ship is actually pretty awesome. The Connections wanted nothing more than a Child Soldier Tyke Bomb but they got something much more formidable. Depending on your sympathies for Eveline, she may have been a monster or not but either way, she deserved her revenge on the people who'd been exploiting her.^note On the other hand, notes you find from the crew indicate that they had no idea of who or what their young passenger really was, meaning everyone aside from Alan, Mia, and possibly the ship's Captain were innocent collateral damage to her lethal temper tantrum.

Chris Redfield

• In a game that seemed to have little to no connection with the previous Resident Evil lore and was speculated to be a Continuity Reboot, seeing that Chris Redfield helps you in the final boss battle is not only an awesome moment in and of itself, but also one to longtime Resident Evil fans. Nothing says awesome as much as a powerful weapon being dropped mid-boss fight from a helicopter, accompanied by the traditional line: "Use it!"
• In Not A Hero, Chris in general is a vastly more powerful protagonist than Ethan, carrying better weapons, being more adept with a knife, and retaining the ability to Megaton Punch BOWs into next week. He also gets props for being the one to finally put down Lucas.
  • Chris has to deal with some of Lucas's really dickish traps. One of them involves trapping Chris in a chamber with no way out and setting it to incinerate everything. Lucas, being Lucas, just can't help but gloat. Chris, being Chris, has the perfect rebuttal that absolutely infuriates his opponent.
    Chris: If you're going to kill me, kill me, but for the love of God, shut the fuck up.
• Not Chris himself, but related. The reformed Umbrella Corporation, while arguably absurd in retaining its name, is legitimately heroic and has developed several successful counter-BOW weapons and other useful gadgets. Of note is that the bullets fired by Ethan against Eveline, and which Chris can pick up later ingame, were specifically anti-mutamyce rounds, suggesting that this isn't the first time they've had to deal with the E-series. And the reason the reformed Umbrella Corporation retained its name despite the Heel–Face Turn? To make amends for the company's horrible acts, all without trying to run away from its responsibilities.

Gameplay Mechanics

• As far as detailed boss battles go, RE7 is top notch. From the big things like the first fight with Jack Baker going two different ways based on who manages to get in the car with the key first to tiny details like seeing Marguerite slowly reach a hand through a doorway to grab it before walking through while chasing you, the bosses all tend to be very creative.
• Also, being able to non-verbally pull off a Shut Up, Hannibal! on bosses, cutting them off before they can finish another Deep South swamp rat insult at you. It's been done in other Survival Horror games and outside of that genre, but for some reason it's rarely felt quite this satisfying to issue the "shut your trap" with a boomstick directly into a tumorous organ or knock a mutant abomination off the ceiling and tumbling towards the deck with an incendiary grenade. And especially so in VR.
• The game has some of the best sound design ever which really goes over in VR perfectly. You can tilt your head and track ambient sound effects inside a 3D virtual audio realm pretty much exactly the way your ears do in Real Life. And this plays into surviving, stealth and action gameplay mechanics both realistically and compellingly.

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