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The second nightmare has been remade, you must survive once again.

"This is not how I imagined my first day."
Leon S. Kennedy

Resident Evil 2 (Biohazard RE:2 in Japan) is a Survival Horror game by Capcom. It was released for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on January 25, 2019.

A remake of the original Resident Evil 2, the game was built on the RE Engine used by Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, and features a similar photorealistic graphic style and user interface, but with a third-person camera similar to Resident Evil 4. It is mostly faithful to the original game, but alters the environments, puzzles and lore in many different ways. The A and B scenarios system was dropped, with each character instead having a singular campaign that amalgamates lore from that character's A and B scenarios. A new "2nd Run" game mode was included; unlike the B scenario of the original, this mode has no story differences to a character's default campaign, but instead shortens the playthrough time required and adjusts the presence of items and the answers to various puzzles.

After the massive success of the remake, Capcom released a free DLC campaign on February 15, 2019, called the Ghost Survivors where you take control of Robert Kendo, Katherine Warren, and an USS soldier codenamed Ghost with their own What If? scenarios, with an unlockable mode for playing as Sheriff Daniel Cortini attempting to hold out against the zombies besieging a gas station.

On March 2, 2022, it was announced that the game would be brought to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, with existing owners of previous generation versions eligible to upgrade for free. The PC version would be updated as well to take advantage of newer graphics hardware. The new versions and the PC update were released on June 13, 2022. A Cloud Gaming version for the Nintendo Switch was announced in a Nintendo Direct on September 13, 2022.

Not to be confused with the former fan remake that eventually became Daymare 1998 following a Cease and Desist order. Has a 2020 sequel/remake of the original third entry in the series, Resident Evil 3 (Remake), and 2023 sequel/remake of the original fourth entry that continues Leon's story, Resident Evil 4 (Remake).


The remake provides its own unique examples of:

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    Main Game Tropes # - A 
  • 11th-Hour Superpower: The anti-tank rocket launcher returns with Leon. Claire gets a minigun that just seems to be lying around.
  • A.K.A.-47: Leon's signature Heckler & Koch VP70 handgun is named Matilda again, while the original Remington 870 shotgun shows up as the W-870, and the Desert Eagle returns as the Lightning Hawk. On Claire's side of the armory, her old Browning Hi-Power Mark III is renamed JMB Hp3, her grenade launcher is named the GM 79, and her starting Smith & Wesson Model 38/49 is named the SLS 60. The MAC-11 also reappears, but with the moniker of MQ 11. Their 2nd Run exclusive weapons are an M1911A1 (M19) and a Ruger Blackhawk (Quickdraw Army), respectively. HUNK's gear beyond the Remington 870 and Desert Eagle are both Heckler & Koch made: an MP5A3 submachine gun (LE 5) and a USP9 handgun (MUP). Ada's only sidearm is a Mauser HSc (Broom Hc).
  • Ability Required to Proceed: When the 1st Run protagonist first enters the RPD, the switch to one of the sealed gates in the lobby is taped shut, and they can't open it without the combat knife Marvin gives them. This is almost identical to how it played out in Resident Evil 7. The player cannot sequence break this part if the Infinite Knife is available from the Item Box; the game doesn't recognize it as a valid knife to cut the tape, the player must explore the East Wing beforehand.
  • Absurdly Sharp Claws: William can tear a Tyrant apart with his claws. For comparison, another Tyrant of that same model can withstand point-blank explosions short of an anti-tank missile.
  • Ace Custom: The three customized Beretta 92FS Brigadier, or "Samurai Edge", pistols that players could obtain by pre-ordering various editions of the game.note  They are noted to have been personally modified by their respective owners to enhance their performance in certain ways, and as such boast uniquely-enhanced traits compared to the bog-standard handguns used by Leon or Claire.note 
  • Acid Attack: Acid rounds are an option for the grenade launcher in Claire's scenario. They're easier to find since unlike the flame rounds, they can be crafted. However, their corrosive effect doesn't quite deal as much damage as the flame rounds, although some enemies are weaker to them, and the splash of acid has a smaller radius. They are tremendously effective against one of the bosses, though as each acid splash effectively stun-locks it while continually dealing heavy damage.
  • Actionized Sequel: Zigzagged, as the remake combines the actionized sequel aspect with a greater emphasis on survival horror of Resident Evil 7. The "over-the-shoulder" style of Resident Evil 4 is used as opposed to a static camera; this would normally contribute to the "Action" aspect, as it would make scoring headshots easier, but the zombies have had a corresponding resilience upgrade.
  • Adaptation Deviation: Has its own page.
  • Adaptation Expansion:
    • Like the remake of the first game, this remake greatly expands upon and changes up the storyline quite a bit.
    • Raccoon City has been updated in its design, and glimpses of a skyline with high-rise buildings can be seen, giving the city a more urban vibe; Raccoon City in previous games more or less resembled a large town, with little to suggest it was a city other than its large population.
    • In the original Tofu Survivor, you could only play as the one Tofu, who is armed with a single knife. Here, you can unlock up to four more varieties to play as, each of which have a unique starting loadout, voice, and backstory. For example, Konjac is armed with an enormous swath of incendiary equipment, while Flan is armed with some of the most powerful weapons in the game but no healing items.
    • The original Mr. X only stalks Leon and Claire in their B scenario, where his goal is to obtain the sample hidden in Sherry Birkin's pendant. The remake instead integrated him into both A and B, along with giving him a new directive to destroy incriminating evidence and eliminate RPD survivors.
  • Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole:
    • The truck driver hitting the female zombie at the speed he does should reduce to her to a fine paste, rendering her unable to get up and bite him, the fact that there are already zombies all the way out past the city limits means that the nuke that is later used on Raccoon City would actually be ineffective.
    • The RPD SWAT van in the parking garage that Ada uses to ram Mr. X in Leon's campaign after he retrieves the shutter keycard is not there prior to the cutscene where he exits the jail and is accosted by the Tyrant; there are only two SWAT vans in the garage before entering the jail cells; one is located near the entrance to the shooting range and is obstructed by cars, the other is parked in the corner directly across from the jail entrance, while the cutscene shows another van somehow appears next to the first van, with a clear line of sight to ram Mr. X.
    • The plan to escape the RPD is rife with inconsistency. In the original game, the few surviving police admit in a memo that there is no telling what is in the sewers, but it would beat waiting for death in the station. Here, the idea is to escape out of the zombie infested precinct, by going out into the zombie infested streets.
    • Not actually a new plot hole, per se, but a different, worse one than the original game. We know from other games, particularly the Outbreak series, that Raccoon City had been under a military quarantine for nearly a week by the time Leon and Claire arrived. Now with his new backstory, how did Leon get into the city and not notice the quarantine given the warning he received to stay away? Also, how many hours has he been driving prior to his arrival to the gas station in the beginning? In the original game, he overslept while drunk. According to the director of Resident Evil 3, the reason why Leon and Claire can get past the quarantine is because they coincidentally go through a part of the quarantine that has been abandoned due to zombie attacks. Whether this explanation is still canon to this game is unknown.
    • Many of the boss fights with Birkin occur in both A and B scenarios in spite of the fact that the stories run concurrently. One of the biggest and jarring cases of this is with G-3, which has Annette: show up to assist the A scenario character and get knocked down by him. Followed by dying differently depending on the A scenario's character. Then show up again apparently minutes sooner to assist the B scenario character, rinse and repeat but with the B scenario character. What makes this even more jarring is in both cases, you witness Birkin mutate from G-2 to G-3.
    • Annette's double death. While she does die the same way, the locations are different. Leon's scenario shows her on the other side of a destroyed bridge, dying after shooting Ada. In Claire's scenario, she's in the security room where Sherry is being kept, and dies not long after you meet back up with her. It's especially jarring if you play the B scenario which more or less "supposed to" run concurrently with the A scenario.
    • The storage shed containing the Club Key is a minor case of this, as it's completely barricaded during Claire's routes, yet when Leon drops by during his, it's magically accessible again. This is especially strange since the original A and B routes are supposed to be taking place at the same time.
    • The weapon placements in the game make no sense, since their locations are the same for either Leon or Claire, and are always found in the same spots regardless of whether you're playing the A or B scenario. This is despite the two scenarios are supposed to be running concurrently to each other:
      • The Grenade Launcher and Shotgun are both located in the same armory locker regardless of scenario. Same goes for the MQ 11 and Lightning Hawk.
      • Both the Spark Shot and Chemical Flamethrower are found in the same location in the sewers, and on the same plaque, no less.
      • Even the mods for some of these weapons are located in roughly the same containers, that magically restock with a different item and lock themselves back up when Leon or Claire visit them during a 2nd Run.
    • How Ada manages to survive her Disney Villain Death is a mystery. She obviously didn't have her signature hookshot yet, since it was given to her by Wesker after managing to escape from the labs as shown in The Umbrella Chronicles. Even assuming that she did have it all this time due to changes made to the narrative, the game makes no indication of this being the case, as there were several points during her short playable segment that could have benefited greatly from just using it, therefore making the theory highly unlikely to be true. So how did she survive the plunge into the deep elevator shaft to come to Leon's aid later on? Of note is the fact that this was already unexplained in the original game, but in Wesker's Report, he explains that he saved her, as she was working for him at the time. The difference being that the original game had two different ways for Ada to "die", and the other one looked more survivable.
  • Adaptational Angst Upgrade:
    • The remake drops Leon's original "Stop or I'll shoot!" attitude when facing hostiles, while depicting him as more of an actual inexperienced rookie cop. Whereas horror turned into indifferent blasé after figuring out headshots worked very well in the original, Leon in the remake actually shows fear when fighting zombies, and occasionally has to calm himself down during or after a kill.
    • Unlike the original game, which has no dialogue during combat, Claire frantically pleads for G-Birkin to stop during his boss fight. Claire would have fought enough monsters by that point to know that begging them is useless, so it's clear that she's pleading as a desperate coping mechanism.
    • In the original game, Claire's last encounter with Irons saw her trying to talk Irons down out of his madness. Here, Claire makes it clear she intends to kill Irons when she makes her way towards the orphanage, though he dies before she gets the chance.
    • Depending who you choose in the beginning, Leon and Claire will try to save Elliot before he gets mauled in half. Claire tearfully and quietly apologizes, while Leon gives out a depressed sigh.
    • Rather than immediately going to bat for Ada when Annette warns him of who she really is, Leon now considers the whole thing fishy enough to actually question Ada directly about her cover story. And he's not happy about being lied to.
    • Robert Kendo, of all people, is given this treatment in spades. In the original game, he's a pretty upbeat guy despite being in a city overrun with zombies. Here, he's a nervous wreck when he first appears, and that's before we learn he's a father with a daughter in the late stages of infection and that he previously had to put down his wife. His last appearance in the story is him taking his daughter inside, begging Leon to leave them alone and shutting the door, before a gunshot is heard.
    • There is very little interaction between the protagonists. In the original game, they met face to face and exchanged radios to keep on touch. Here, they meet across a fence and don't have radios, making the feeling of isolation that much more deeper. Even more egregious is that both characters more or less take the same path through the game, with minor location deviations, yet they never run into each other. Vexingly enough, both characters definitely get a radio in the Claire A/Leon B path (she receives one from Marvin and Leon's came with his uniform), yet it never crosses either of their minds to tune both handsets to the same band so they can keep in touch.
  • Adaptational Backstory Change:
    • In the original game, Leon was late for his first day because he broke up with his girlfriend and drank so much that he overslept. In the remake, this has been changed to him receiving a phone call to stay away from Raccoon City and wait for further orders. After a week of complete silence, Leon enters the city by himself to investigate.
    • Robert Kendo is now shown to be a father who has to make the painful choice to shoot his infected daughter right after killing his zombified wife.
    • William and Annette Birkin were questionable people due to their line of work with Umbrella, but they still loved each other. The remake has Annette admit that she and her husband grew a bit distant with each other due to their work.
  • Adaptational Badass:
    • Zombies in the classic games are fairly standard shamblers that can be killed with a direct headshot. Here, zombies are bullet-spongy undead monsters that need their brain thoroughly splattered to die. Watch as they get half of their face blown off and are no worse for wear.
    • While Mr. X is dangerous in the original game, he would go down after being pumped full of lead. In this game, however, he'll shrug off bullets like they're milk duds being thrown at him, and will not be significantly hurt short of nailing him in the head with several magnum shots or using explosives. Even then, he could still give Nemesis a run for his money, as he can only be temporarily stunned, not defeated, and will quickly recover from any damage you've dealt to him, allowing him to relentlessly pursue you throughout the precinct until you get rid of him via scripted sequences.
    • Sherry receives this upgrade in the remake. Whereas she could only run and hide from enemies in the original, this time she's able to fight back against the much bigger Chief Irons and is able to give him some nasty facial scarring to remember her by, if only in a cutscene and not actual gameplay.
    • Lickers have become much tougher than they were in the original game, easily shrugging off multiple shotgun shells, grenades or even magnum rounds.
    • The Ivy B.O.W.s have been replaced by the Ivy Zombies, which have gone from slow, lumbering creatures with sporadic, easily dodged attacks to being quick-moving, only possible to down if burned or precise spots are targeted, and armed with a One-Hit Kill attack. They're also much harder to kill, because they continually regenerate unless the body is completely burned with a flamethrower or incendiary grenade.
    • Several of the weapons got one compared to the original game:
      • The knife is the most obvious, as it was completely useless and at its very worst back in 1998, taking dozens of swipes and stabs to kill just one zombie. Here, it's vital to have one on you, as it will keep any monster grappling with Leon or Claire from taking a chunk out of them, and can be reused unlike the grenades. It's also needed to even beat the game, as you can't access the western half of the station without one.
      • The Spark Shot was a Lethal Joke Weapon originally, not being very effective against normal enemies, but absolutely wrecking Birkin's G2 and G3 forms. Now, it is a One-Hit Kill on anything short of the Ivy zombies, and can be reloaded.
      • The flamethrower was the epitome of Video Game Flamethrowers Suck, having terrible range, fuel, and inability to kill anything except the Ivies. Now it comes with decent range, a ton of fuel, plus a regulator to lower consumption, and destroys everything short of bosses.
      • The Colt SAA was a weak replacement for Leon's burst fire VP-70, its low ammo capacity and long reloading negating it's rapid fire. Now, while it still takes a while to reload, it's the most powerful handgun in the game, short of the Magnum, routinely capable of downing zombies in only 4-5 shots.
      • Claire's Browning Hi-Power was your standard starting pistol in the original, and couldn't be upgraded unlike Leon's VP-70. Now it comes with a laser pointer which gives it an edge over every other gun in the game that requires a pause to get an accurate shot, and it can be given an extended magazine, doubling it's 13 round capacity.
      • The flame rounds for the grenade launcher were already powerful, but the acid rounds were even more so. Now they are the most powerful type in the game, capable of continuing to burn enemies long after you have shot them.
    • In this version, Birkin's second form can't be taken down through firepower alone, requiring the player to use a crate suspended from a crane to knock him into an abyss. His final form is now powerful enough to rip the entire roof off of the train car it's in.
  • Adaptational Context Change: In the original, Umbrella's soldiers were specifically sent to kill Birkin and retrieve the virus, so Birkin takes the virus to fight back. Here, the soldiers were sent to apprehend him and shot him in self-defense when he reached for his own gun, forcing him to infect himself in order to survive.
  • Adaptational Early Appearance: In the original game, Birkin was only glimpsed early on, with your first battle with him being on the cable car (A scenario) or the sewers beneath RPD (B scenario). Here, both players encounter and battle him for the first time under the RPD.
  • Adaptational Explanation: The original never explained why Birkin never attempted to trick the U.S.S. by giving them a different viral container than the G-sample, beyond him being stressed and holding the Idiot Ball. Here, HUNK explicitly states that Birkin was to be brought in alive with his samples, meaning that deceiving them was pointless.
  • Adaptational Heroism: In the original game, Annette was blindingly loyal to William and had held the protagonists at gunpoint when she thought they had killed him. In this game, while she's still not a half decent individual, as evidenced by the orphanage's true purpose, she is fully aware of how dangerous William had became, to the point of shooting the anti-virus serum at him. Not only that, but she is actively working to destroy all remaining samples of the G-Virus.
  • Adaptational Jerkass: While Chief Irons was already an unpleasant person, he's even moreso in the remake. In the original, he at least attempted to come off as a sophisticated gentlemen before showing off his true colors. The remake, on the other hand, has him more verbally and violently abusive, completely devoid of any nonsense, and even experimented on and killed hundreds of innocent children.
  • Adaptational Modesty:
    • Downplayed in that while Claire's outfit wasn't exactly Stripperiffic, it still showed off a little bit of skin. Claire's new outfit changes her classic vest, cutoffs and short body glove into a full jacket and jeans, to better reflect the kind of thing a motorcyclist would realistically wear. Her tank top underneath it is significantly smaller though so her jacketless look is a bit more revealing to the point her bra is visible. As an olive branch to the longtime fans, the classic outfit does come back as an unlockable. It even receives a few changes in order to up the fanservice.
    • Subverted with Ada. After Leon takes a bullet for her, she does end up shedding the trench coat, revealing that her red halter dress, leggings and flats from the original have been replaced with an even slinkier cocktail dress with nylons and high-heels.
  • Adaptational Nice Guy:
    • In HUNK's RE3 epilogue file, the pilot was quite caustic and bitter, displeased that HUNK was once again the Sole Survivor of his team. From his lines here, the pilot sounds more like an excited fanboy getting to meet his hero.
    • The USS is sent to steal the G-Virus and deal with William as they see fit in the original game. When William is shot, the shooter only stops because his captain is worried he may hit the samples. In the remake, they are sent to apprehend William with no intention of killing him. His death comes as a result of an USS soldier shooting him in self-defense. When G-William goes on a rampage, a soldier can be heard begging the monster not to hurt his comrade.
    • HUNK himself is far less of a sociopath in his mini campaign then he was in the original game. The context of his iconic "Survival is your responsibility" quote is delivered at the expense of himself, telling his pilot to leave him behind and save himself, who refuses, and in general is a good deal more personable, to the point that he actually lies to Umbrella about what exactly happened with William so that one of his men won't get in trouble with the higher-ups.
  • Adaptational Ugliness:
    • Ben Bertolucci appears older and scruffier compared to his young, dashing look in the original.
    • Downplayed with Annette. While not too bad looking, she appears to be quite a bit older compared to her somewhat younger looking self in the original. Her hair is also longer and somewhat unkempt compared to her original's shorter and more groomed hair.
    • William's human form appears older than he was formerly portrayed as.
  • Adaptational Villainy: The Raccoon Orphanage introduces an extra element of this to both Chief Irons, who was already plenty loathsome to begin with, and to the Birkins, as they were deliberately running the facility as a way to secure live test subjects —as in, children— for their G-Virus research. This also casts a darker pall over Annette's otherwise more sympathetic portrayal.
  • Adaptational Wimp:
    • The T-Virus infected cockroaches get hit by this hard. Whereas in the original they were physically frail, but quite huge insects that preyed on rats for sustenance, attacked in large swarms and possessed a One-Hit Kill against Ada or Sherry if not shaken off, the remake reduces them to just a wee bit larger than your common household critter and are completely harmless. In fact, just getting near them or shining a flashlight at them causes them to scatter.
    • The zombie dogs too. In most of the series, short of a lucky head shot, they take several rounds of handgun ammo, and can on occasion take more than one shotgun blast. Here, they can go down in as little as two shots from a handgun. It's not unusual for Leon to kill the majority he runs into with a single burst from his upgraded Matillda.
    • Downplayed with Mr. X's mutated form. While still hard to take down (and possessing a one-hit-kill move), he only has one claw compared to the two possessed by his final form in the original game, and isn't quite as fast. He can also be temporarily stunned by a shot to his exposed heart, a weakness the original didn't have.
  • Adapted Out:
    • Claire's bowgun is nowhere to be found, likely due to the fact that it was one of the least popular weapons in the original game. The sub-machine gun, which was a common weapon for Leon and Claire in the original game, takes its place as one of Claire's exclusive weapons.
    • The zombie crows, spiders, the Giant Moth, and Evolved Lickers don't appear in this game.
    • Due to Ada's cover story being changed, there's no mention of her "boyfriend" John this time around.
    • The protagonists can no longer examine background items or environments like in the original.
    • Birkin's original fourth form, the six-legged dog-like creature, does not appear as it was in the original. Leon's A scenario sees G-3 as Birkin's final appearance, and the G-4 form in Claire's run is primarily bipedal and only occasionally runs on all limbs like an animal.
    • Extreme Battle mode doesn't return, not even as a post-release DLC. Given that it was added content introduced in the DualShock Ver. of the original RE2, the developers of the remake likely didn't prioritize its inclusion that much. However, the Ghost Survivors mode, which was added to the remake via a free update, serves a similar purpose.
    • The entire "scenario zapping" system. The second scenarios for each character still exists, but what the player does in the first scenario no longer affects the second.
  • All for Nothing: Claire realizes this when Marvin tells her Chris is in Europe, meaning she came all the way to Raccoon City and trapped herself in a highly dangerous, zombie-infested hellscape for no reason.
  • Alternate Timeline: The way the scenarios are handled in the remake veers more in this direction than they did in the original. Whereas before, the A and B scenarios run concurrently to each other, and actions of the A route character will affect the B route, the remake changes this so that only the scenario being played is canonically relevant, while the other protagonist will just move on somehow. As in, "what if only Claire/Leon actually explores the precinct and encounter Mr. X", and so on.
  • Always a Bigger Fish: Mr. X gets disemboweled from behind by Birkin while he's trying to attack Claire and Sherry.
  • Ammunition Conservation: Due to scarcity of ammunition, coupled with increased invulnerability on the part of enemies, the player character is required to spare ammunition whenever possible.
  • Anachronism Stew: Though most of it can be somewhat explained Umbrella having access to cutting-edge technology of all kinds:
    • This game is set in September 1998. However, Chief Irons is seen using a Smith & Wesson Model 329PD, which wasn't invented until sometime during the 2000s.
    • The USS is seen with combat shirt-type BDUs with pockets on the sleeves with velcro on it. That style was not widely seen with police/military units until the early-to-mid 2000s.
    • Leon's personal vehicle, while slightly modified to avoid trademark, is clearly based on a JK-series Jeep Wrangler, which didn't become available until 2007.
    • The long barrel upgrade for the Desert Eagle features a Picatinny Rail under the barrel, which didn't become commonplace until well into the 2000s. Inspecting the barrel reveals that it has "prototype model" engraved on it.
    • Several cars abandoned around Raccoon City, are clearly based on models from the early 2000s. One white sedan littered around the city is clearly based on a 2004-2011 Audi A6 sedan.
    • The e-mail inbox messages you can read are based on a more modern look of 2010s Hotmail.
    • One key item is a USB dongle disguised inside a S.T.A.R.S. badge. The first device of the sort was patented in the United States around 2000. Dongles in general did exist before this, but not as using the USB port.
    • Ada's EMF visualizer and its remote hacking capabilities are far beyond what should be possible in 1998, especially since equipment such as ventilation fans wouldn't be computer controlled to the level a device could remotely access and alter its speed.
  • Anachronistic Orphanage: There is a subplot involving an orphanage, even though the story takes place in 1998, well after orphanages were supplanted in the United States by the foster care system. Umbrella built the orphanage in Raccoon City as a deliberate PR move, and they eventually started using the children there as guinea pigs for their bioweapons research.
  • And Now for Someone Completely Different: As in the original game, you take over as another character for a bit. Ada in Leon's route and Sherry in Claire's. However, this version gives them their own unique scenarios. For Ada, she has to contend with Annette's traps and uses some of her spy gadgets for a bit (and deal with Mr. X). For Sherry, she gets a stealth section against Chief Irons.
  • And Your Reward Is Clothes:
    • Beating the game once on any difficulty with either Leon or Claire unlocks recreations of their '98 costumes for you to switch to. Not only does this replace Leon and Claire's costumes, but Sherry's as well. While Ada's outfit does change, it just forgoes the trench coat and switches her to her new dress right off the bat, instead of giving her a recreation of her old one.
    • Beating the game once with specifically Leon or Claire on any difficulty will unlock "custom" versions of their new outfits, while beating the game with specifically Leon or Claire on Hardcore difficulty will unlock "custom" versions of their classic outfits. Said "custom" versions just set their costumes to that the entire game.
  • An Arm and a Leg: You can sever a zombie's limbs by carefully aiming for the elbows and knees, with the latter instantly and unsurprisingly reducing them to crawling after you. Considering headshots are no longer instant-kills, this is likely the better course of action to allow you to bypass zombies and avoid being grabbed. There's even an in-game achievement for maiming all four limbs of a zombie.
  • Anger Born of Worry: A justified example on Claire's part: After going through G-Spawn-infested rooms to get to Sherry, she calls out on Annette's negligence due to Sherry's G-Embryo infection, while all she does is sit in the security room, having written off Sherry as a lost cause:
    Claire: "Are you fucking kidding me?! You're her mother! Get IN here!"
  • Animals Lack Attributes: Averted. Those zombie dogs aren't missing their balls this time around.
  • Anti-Frustration Feature:
    • If you take any damage in the gas station segment, your health will be fully restored when you arrive at the city, since you have to dodge some more zombies on the way to the police station and you don't get any healing items until you make it inside.
    • Much like in the first game's remake, the map will have each room color coded based on whether you've finished everything to do in them. If you've picked up every item and completed every puzzle, the room will be blue. If there's still something to do, the room will be red and there will be icons for every item/puzzle/POI that you find.
    • Much like Resident Evil 4, typewriters don't require ink ribbons to save your progress, unless you choose to play the Hardcore difficulty.
    • For speed runners or those attempting the S+ rank, the timer doesn't run during cutscenes or in the pause menu (the inventory and map still have the timer run) so you can still take pauses every once in a while to avoid burnout.
    • Key items that no longer have a use will have a check mark at the bottom of their menu option, which helps with item management and means you can now safely discard or store them with no issue. And to keep you from discarding them early by accident, the option is grayed out until the check mark appears. It also gives a hint to players for what items they should keep around.
    • After saving Leon from Mr. X in the RPD garage, Ada will wait in said garage for Leon to continue. At the same time, Mr. X vanishes for a while, meaning the player can now "safely" go back and explore the RPD for items or previously missed areas they might want to get before they leave. The same applies in Claire's scenario, where Mr. X is gone for good after being impaled by William Birkin.
    • While playing as Ada, Mr. X will chase you as her until you escape from him. After her segment, Leon can "safely" return to the RPD without him chasing you all over again.
    • The ID Wristband. Leon/Claire receives this key item from Ada/Sherry to access the laboratory area. The player can reject getting the wristband after the cutscene without sacrificing any items from their inventory if all slots are full. The wristband will spawn on the table next to the storage box opposite the cable car if playing as Leon and it will spawn on the bed where Sherry is resting in the Security Room if playing as Claire.
    • There is no need to "babysit" Sherry in the few segments where she accompanies Claire, as even if she falls behind, she can catch up to the player just fine on her own.
    • If one were to be attempting to get an S+ rank on Hardcore mode, using the Infinite Knife or any of the pre-order DLC Samurai Edge handguns won't lower your score to a normal S, making it easier to get by in the first section of the game.
    • While Mr. X will stalk you throughout your trek in the police station, there are a few rooms he is programmed to not follow you into: the Clock Tower, the Darkroom, the S.T.A.R.S. Office, the hidden room under the statue in the lobby (2nd Run only), the Break Room, and Chief Irons's office (Claire only). This gives the player some time to breathe and let Mr. X go past them, even if he sees you going into one of those rooms.
    • While Mr. X does start dogging you much earlier in the 2nd Run, the .45 ACP pistols you receive do appreciably more damage than your 9mm starting guns, and the earlier sections are less stingy with the high-grade gunpowder. This translates into more shotgun shells or acid grenades available at your disposal, making it a bit easier to clear out areas you'll need to revisit often and increases the odds that zombies you have to put down will actually stay down.
    • Many bosses have a decent resistances to the mid level guns like the shotgun and grenade launcher. This means if you are reduced to your handgun your chances aren't terrible, while conversely you are decently rewarded for saving high level firepower for them. Also, every encounter with a boss has the area littered with ammo, so you're not completely helpless.
    • When Mr. X spawns in the hallway with the helicopter, the zombies that come from the crash despawn to ensure you can get away from him without having to deal with them.
    • When Claire is carrying Sherry to the cable car, she will always be running at full speed regardless of how much health she has left. The zombie near the safe will also despawn if you hadn't already dispatched it.
    • If you get grabbed by an Ivy Zombie from behind, it will flip you over so you are facing it so you do have an opportunity to break free from the grab.
    • If you die during a boss fight and retry, the game will give you hints and tips for that boss on the loading screen to help make your next attempt smoother.
    • When exchanging items between your inventory and the item chests, you can combine items in your inventory without having to back out of the chest menu to do so. Likewise, if you get an item that takes up two slots, the game will automatically sort your inventory to make room for it if you have the space.
    • Once the player takes the cable car, there's no way to come back. Unlike most examples of this scenario, though, the game has the characters vocalize this fact, ensuring the player doesn't accidentally take the cable car if there's still any exploring they want to do.
    • If the player somehow reaches the final area (passing a Point of No Return in the process) without the grenade launcher/shotgun, there will be one waiting for them to find.
    • If a player is having trouble making their shots count during the fight against Birkin-3, the game will automatically make him pick up an explosive canister and drop it on himself, giving himself enough bodily damage to even the odds a little.
    • When a player goes to use an item on something (like the electricity ports in the NEST), the inventory will allow you to examine the items you have in case you forgot to activate the item you needed to use. This is especially useful for the previously mentioned puzzles that require the Signal Modulator.
    • Due to the implementation of the Adaptive Difficulty system, the game will automatically adjust itself so that enemies are weaker if you're having a tough time. By contrast, should you be blazing through without much trouble, then it will make even the basic zombie that much tougher.
    • During the 4th Survivor scenario, HUNK doesn't get any item pick-ups just like the original version of the mode. However, he is made more durable to compensate, needing around two to three zombie bites just to reduce him to Caution then another two to three to send him to Danger.
    • If you stab G1 or G2 in the eye with a knife during their boss fights, the knife will appear near where they fell at the end of those fights. This is likely to prevent you from losing the Infinite Knife.
    • For the directionally challenged or those with PTSD from school lockers, the combination locks on the safes will open no matter which direction you start in, even if wherever you found the code specifies direction.
    • To compensate for the Checkpoint Starvation of Hardcore difficulty, there are usually spare Ink Ribbons lying about near a typewriter. While this isn't always the case, the Ribbons themselves are actually quite abundant if you know where to look, and one pickup is usually good for about two to three saves.
    • Any Mr. Raccoon you destroy will stay destroyed on that save file for all future replays. This allows you to focus on finding the Mr. Raccoons you've missed rather than trying to get them all in one shot.
    • Weapon mods are typically permanent once attached to your firearm with exception of the ones that increase a single block weapon to a two-block one. In such a case, there is the option to unequip those mods to free up space if you so desire.
    • In the second Birkin fight, when his grapple becomes a One-Hit Kill, the arena you fight him in spawns secondary weapons all around it to ensure you're not completely screwed if he grabs you.
    • In case you somehow don't have a single piece of ammunition to finish off the Giant Alligator, a grenade spawns just off to the side for you to use instead.
  • Apocalyptic Log:
    • In keeping with the series tradition, the environment is littered with the frantic scribbles of victims. Some of them are even scarier than the infamous Keeper's Diary from the original Resident Evil:
      helq
      theyre komming
      helq me mommy
    • Elliot wrote "Operation Report 2", which details the remaining officers plan to escape the police station after losing several people.
  • Artifact Title: The "fourth" in 4th Survivor made sense in the original game, where resident Badass Normal HUNK is the fourth known survivor of the game's events, next to Leon, Claire, and Sherry. However, as Ada's survival was confirmed in literally every sequel, remake or spin-off set in Raccoon City released after this, it's lost most of its original meaning. Although HUNK was the fourth survivor of the game to escape Raccoon City, on September 30th, Ada escaped just before the city's destruction.
  • Artificial Stupidity:
    • Mr. X doesn't know how to handle the player standing behind an obstacle. He will try to go around the obstacle to reach the player, but if you move around the obstacle in the opposite direction fast enough, Mr. X will stop to change his direction to reach you faster, which gives you time to move around the opposite direction again and repeat this behavior. Amusingly, just like you in certain places, he's also susceptible to Insurmountable Waist-Height Fences, like the bench in the 2nd floor locker room that barely goes up to your knee.
    • Lickers can't go through doors.note  There is one in the hallway right outside the West Office in Leon's run (shortly before he starts encountering Mr. X), that you can easily kill by using the "doorway peek" method. Draw your shotgun, open the door just enough to see the licker, shoot it in the head, back through the door. Repeat until it's dead. If done right it can't retaliate. As long as you don't actually step into the room, the licker will act like you're not even there. It will just stay right where it is and let you kill it.
  • Artistic License – Explosives: In the original game, William survives the destruction of the lab to continue his pursuit of Sherry on the emergency train. He's finally stopped, miles from ground zero, when the separate explosion of the train's own self-destruct mechanism upon detecting a biological outbreak, takes him out near the outskirts of the city. The remake blunders with this though, showing its lab facilities' inexplicable endless blast chasing the train that consumes him, despite being considerable distance away from the site.
  • Artistic License – Gun Safety: A very rare aversion for a game like this in one instance: most weapons are fully loaded when you find them, but the gun found in the weapon locker in the police armory is empty, and the ammunition is instead a separate pickup stored alongside it.
  • Ascended Extra: Marvin Branagh and Annette Birkin have their roles greatly expanded in the story, while Robert Kendo gets a major dramatic set piece that wasn't even hinted at in the original game.
  • Asshole Victim: Chief Irons is just as monstrous as he was as the original game, if not even more so. While he retains his history of sexual violence against women, as well as his murder and taxidermy of the Mayor's daughter, he also ran an "orphanage" alongside the Birkins that was a cover for Umbrella to do viral experiments on children (whose history ended when one escaped and Irons killed all of the children to cover it up). In his introduction, he throws out all semblance of morality and ties up Claire, beats her, threatens to kill her, and kidnaps Sherry. In the end, he dies when a G-spawn bursts out of his chest which, while graphic and horrifying, couldn't have happened to a more deserving person.
  • Attack Its Weak Point: Due to the change to third-person gameplay, the player can now target an enemy's specific area to deal major damage on them such as Lickers' exposed brain, Birkin and G-Spawn's eyes, Ivy Zombie's yellow pods and the Super Tyrant's exposed heart.
  • Awesome, but Impractical:
    • The three pre-order bonus Samurai Edge pistols come to mind. While they each has a unique trait that makes them superior to the starting pistols of Leon and Claire (Wesker's is slightly more powerful, Chris' has reduced focus time, and Jill's draws faster) on top of having bigger magazines, they cannot be upgraded at all, and so become overshadowed very quickly after modifications for your more Boring, but Practical guns are found. Chris' and Jill's SE models are overshadowed from the start in the damage department at 90 and 80 base damage, respectively. Wesker's SE model deals 110 damage by default, but Claire's SLS 60 barely outshines it (115 damage) from the get-go and her JMB Hp3 does more damage (150) and can be upgraded with a high capacity magazine, while Leon's Matilda has a standard 100 base damage and the stock upgrade boosts it up to 110 base damage. And that's during their 1st Run campaigns. They're nigh useless in the 2nd Run campaigns due to 9mm ammo being craft-only, all the field ammo being changed to .45 ACP, and the 2nd Run exclusive guns being more powerful in general.
    • One Samurai Edge, in particular, the original model that you can get by beating any campaign with an S ranking on Standard or Hardcore, has infinite ammo. Sounds awesome, but its base firepower is 90 (the same as Chris' SE model), which is lower than even your starting pistol without upgrades. Also, using it disqualifies you from an S+ ranking on Hardcore difficulty.
    • The Spark Shot is absolutely devastating against single targets, able to kill almost any non-boss enemy in one max charge, aside from the G-Spawn (they'll need two, if you haven't blown off the cover over their eye already) and Ivy Zombies (who need to be burned to stop them regenerating). It also has an extremely limited range, ammo for it is incredibly scarce, it takes a solid few seconds to charge up, and many things can interrupt the attack and waste your ammo, including simply moving too far away. Naturally, Birkin's G forms are not stunned in place by the weapon and will come at you while you're charging it up, making it something of a bad idea to save the Spark Shot for him - though it can make a good weapon in his G-5 form.
  • Awful Wedded Life: Implied with the truck driver, who while listening to his truck radio hears a talk show guest describe a zombie, remarks that the zombie sounds like it looks like his wife.
  • Axe Before Entering: During the brief episode with Sherry, she tries to escape Irons by stealing his keys and locking him out of a hallway, only for him to grab a fire ax and hack his way in to continue his pursuit.

    Main Game Tropes B - E 
  • Badass and Child Duo: Just like the original, Claire Redfield and Sherry Birkin. While not the typical gender or age layout, as the badass in question is a nineteen year old girl, they still fit the trope well.
  • Barrier-Busting Blow:
    • Mr. X kills the reporter Ben by grabbing him through the back wall of his cell before lifting him into the air still through the wall before finally killing him by crushing his skull with one hand.
    • Mr. X also has the chance to break through the wall between the hallway and the briefing room, after using either the club (Leon) or heart (Claire) key to enter the locked interrogation rooms.
    • In Leon's route, after grabbing the parking pass from the jail cells and making his way back to the garage, Mr. X bursts through the wall to strangle him.
  • Bayonet Ya: Played with. While actual rifles with fixed blades aren't usable nor even featured in the game, the model for the default combat knife is a M9 Bayonet.
  • Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted. Claire and Leon, probably the prettiest protagonists in the series, get progressively more and more beat up as the game goes on. By the end of it, they both look like they've been through the wringer. Ada also gets noticeably dirty and roughed up during her section.
  • Being Watched: After battling phase one G in Leon's route, the ladder will apparently drop down on its own. Leon notes this and comments that somebody is watching him. That "somebody" turns out to be Ada.
  • Berserk Board Barricade: Wooden barricades are still present on a number of the windows of the RPD. Additionally, Leon and Claire can now find lumber bundles as item pick-ups and do this themselves on any first floor windows that aren't boarded up, which helps cut down on the number of zombies that can make it into the building. That said, there isn't enough to board up every window that allows it, so you need to choose which ones you board up accordingly.
  • Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
    • Played with. In this version of the story, Ada is portrayed as a covert FBI agent out to expose Umbrella's crimes, but in the end is revealed to be a callous mercenary who wants to pocket the G-Virus and sell it to the highest bidder. Ultimately, this is subverted because she does come through for Leon in the end.note 
    • Annette as well. The remake tries to give her a My God, What Have I Done? attitude after William infects himself with the G-Virus, but she still experimented on orphans to help William create the virus in the first place.
  • Bittersweet Ending: Just as in the original game, Leon, Claire, and Sherry all escape together. But both of Sherry's parents are dead, making her an orphan, and while Leon and Ada have developed feelings for one another, she has to fake her death to save his life. Annette's efforts to keep the G-Virus from leaving the city are All for Nothing; samples of it still make it out thanks to Ada and HUNK, and the vaccine she gave Sherry didn't cure her, only suppressing its negative effects. And she and Leon will eventually be taken into government custody, with her well-being used to coerce Leon into his future as a government agent.
  • Blackout Basement: Several areas throughout the game have no lights at all, either because of broken lamps or general power failure. As both characters get an Infinite Flashlight before entering even the first one, it doesn't affect gameplay much: mostly it serves as Mood Lighting to increase the feeling of claustrophobia and to show that the outbreak has compromised the city's infrastructure. The parking lot area in general makes for a literal blackout basement, especially the K9 kennel and morgue, until Leon fiddles with the main power switch to turn the lights back on.
  • Bland-Name Product: There's a PC in the S.T.A.R.S. room of the "ThankCenter" brand, a play on IBM/Lenovo's "ThinkCenter" line of desktop computers.
  • Blinded by the Light: The bright light of a flashbang stuns pretty much every enemy, including Mr. X and G, and the *bang* sound they make deafens the blind Lickers, stunning them as well.
  • Bloodier and Gorier: The remake seems to be the most graphic game in the series due to the RE Engine, even topping Resident Evil 7 in some ways. Gunshots wounds are shown on zombies, very gruesome deaths befall NPCs, and wounds show scars after healing.
  • Book Ends: A fuel truck is seen driving towards Raccoon City in the beginning and ending of the game. The credits song for the 2nd Run, "Saudade" by Cody Matthew Johnson, is also the song Leon is listening to on the radio in the intro of his 1st Run.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • A single headshot may not be able to kill a zombie, but it can stun it momentarily in the Standard difficulty. A good tactic is to simply headshot the zombies in your way and run past them.
    • Kneecapping. Outright killing a zombie may be better for your peace of mind, but with how tanky most enemies are, it can quickly eat away at your resources even if you're getting consistently perfect headshots. For the majority of encounters where you cannot just go around the zombies, you'll be better off shooting off their legs. Legs take considerably less bullets, are much easier targets, and once they're gone, confine that enemy to that room due to their inability to go through doors and make them a slower and easily avoidable threat.
    • The shotgun in the late game. While early on, the scarcity of ammunition makes it Too Awesome to Use, late game supplies the player with gunpowder in abundance. Fully upgraded, it can kill most zombies with a single shot even on Hardcore, making it far more lethal than the more flashy Flamethrower, with the added boon of letting you conserve the latter to use against the Ivy Zombies. It's also far easier to obtain ammo for than its closest rival, the Lightning Hawk.
    • Flash grenades. While they lack the destructive power of other equipment available to the player, they could stun a sizable group of enemies for quite some time, allowing one to quickly slip past them without bloodshed. Lickers are particularly vulnerable against flash grenades, and even the dreaded Mr. X himself is only mildly resistant to their stunning effects, though the reworked Ivy Zombies are immune.
    • Knives can be surprisingly potent against zombies if you slash at them after knocking them down. Sure, it does take a bit to kill a zombie with a knife, but it'll help you save on ammo in the long run.
    • Compared to the other two pre-order exclusive Samurai Edges, Wesker's model simply deals more damage per shot and has no flashy additional enhancements. This makes it an unusually interesting case, since without taking Adaptive Difficulty into account, raw damage cannot be enhanced by player skill or without using specific modifications, whereas focus aiming is compensated for with enough practice or a laser sight, and draw time is borderline Dump Stat.
  • Boss Tease: Mr. X is shown on a video monitor as early as the player arriving at the police station for the first time. Mr. X would next show up again punching through a jail cell and killing Ben Bertolucci, but the player doesn't actually start their adversarial encounters with Mr. X until they return to the police station after the initial parking garage encounter.
  • Bottomless Magazines: Played straight with the unlockable Minigun and ATM-4, and in a sense with the unbreakable Combat Knife, which has the infinity symbol in place of the usual durability meter.
  • Bowdlerise:
    • As usual with the Japanese versions, the more intense gory content is completely censored for the Japanese release, such as the cop Leon tried to save had his lower half eaten in the international release, but in Japan, he has his wounds blacked out.
    • The naked, partially-skinless zombies in the lab area are no longer present. Given the high level of graphical detail on display, this was most likely to spare the player from a rather serious case of Fan Disservice.
  • Bragging Rights Reward: The ATM-4 launcher for Leon and the Minigun for Claire are this. Both have infinite reserve ammunition, and can be used with reckless abandon. However unlocking them demands an S+ ranking on either of Leon or Claire's campaigns, on Hardcore difficulty. As such, the player will already have surmounted the greatest challenge possible by the time they are allowed access to these, making their ridiculous power and infinite ammunition somewhat pointless. Now, clearing the other sides of the campaigns, on the other hand...
  • Breakable Weapons: Your regular combat knife will eventually wear out and break from use. To keep it fair, you can retrieve a knife from an enemy's corpse after you've stabbed them with it to get out of a bind and you can also find replacements. Destroying all 15 hidden Mr. Raccoon miniatures in the game awards one with a single unbreakable knife.
  • Bribing Your Way to Victory: For those who don't have the time and patience to attain an S+ Rank on Hardcore or simply hate speedrunning, a DLC was released on April 5, 2019 that unlocks all in-game rewards straight away.
  • Brutal Bonus Level: The 4th Survivor extra mode from the original game is back and it's even more difficult than ever before. Given the game's harder difficulty, the fact that zombies take a lot of ammo just to get them on their knees and their ability to follow you in adjacent rooms, you're practically forced to memorize the entire level and the enemy patterns so you can safely outmaneuver them and use as little ammo as possible. While most of the zombies are easy to outrun due to them waking up the moment you enter their respective rooms, things escalate when you enter the Police Station for the first time with now Mr. X breathing down your neck until the very end. Good luck surviving the last row of enemies tailing you because by that point, the first-timers are guaranteed to have only a nick of health left.
  • Call-Forward:
    • Chris Redfield's note to the others about being in Europe "under an umbrella" and warning Barry not to come "or else he'll make cute girls cry" is Spy Speak referencing him investigating Umbrella's Europe office, and how Barry's family was being used as leverage against him.
    • Rebecca's film reel returns, though with a different pose, and you don't have to examine Wesker's desk 50 times to get it.
    • Brad Vickers has a poster only viewable in the 2nd Run. Fittingly, it's right by where you found him in the original.
    • The original S.T.A.R.S. team photo can be seen in the dark room and behind Wesker's desk.
    • After Resident Evil 3 (Remake) was announced, Capcom patched the demo to add an Easter Egg where one can hear Nemesis give his trademark "S.T.A.R.S." near the police station's entrance.
  • Casual Danger Dialogue: Leon and Claire have a rather casual conversation in the east courtyard gate as if they're flirting with each other. Even after a helicopter explodes on the roof and setting off the alarm, their tone of voice doesn't change. Granted, they're trying not to freak out at the zombie apocalypse they're right in the middle of.
  • Cap: Compared to the original, ammunition have a fairly low capacity per inventory slot,examples  demanding more careful rationing of supplies per item box visit.
  • Changing Gameplay Priorities: When you return to the police station, after the first boss, Mr. X will appear and will chase you relentlessly. When's he around, it's no longer possible to explore the area at your own pace. Knowing what triggers Mr. X's arrival beforehand can help you hold off on dealing with him, so you can clear the area of all possible resources and any enemies that may give you grief when Mr. X is after you. It helps to know on the 2nd Run that Mr. X will arrive much earlier than in the 1st Run.
  • Checkpoint Starvation: On Hardcore mode, the game gives the player one autosave at the very start of a run, when Leon or Claire arrive at the gas station during route A, and at the RPD precinct side gate on route B. Past these points, this feature is disabled, and your actual saves are limited to how many ink ribbons you've got.
  • The Chew Toy: Comparing Leon and Claire's paths shows a horrendous lack of luck on his end. The fire escape ladder breaks under his weight, G-Birkin uses him to break the floor grating while Claire only falls through, the Tyrant never stops following him, he gets shot, nearly becomes gator chow, and the escape door blows up in his face.
  • Coming of Age Story:
    • Resident Evil 2 is essentially Leon's Hero's Journey: He starts the game as an idealistic rookie cop, then is suddenly thrust into a horrifying scenario, forced to throw away his idealism, falls in love and loses said love, and then comes out of the experience a true hero forever changed.
    • This can also be applied to Claire, as she is forced to step up as a parental/caretaker figure for a girl after she's abandoned by her parents.
  • Continuity Nod:
    • Rita Philips is credited as the person who comes up with the idea of escaping through the tunnel, a clear nod to her doing just that in Resident Evil Outbreak: File #2.note 
    • Umbrella secretly using orphaned children in its experiments is also a plot point in the much maligned Resident Evil: Gun Survivor.
    • Chris' note in the S.T.A.R.S. office subtly references the backstory of Resident Evil – Code: Veronica, chronologically the next game in the series, with his "vacation" in Europe being a thin cover for him trying to dig up more dirt on Umbrella.
    • The idea that Umbrella sent a hit squad after Birkin because he was planning to sell "G" to the U.S. military was first mentioned in the non-canonical Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City. In the original game, no motive was given for Birkin turning on Umbrella and wanting to keep "G" for himself other than him being a megalomaniac.
  • Continuity Snarl: The 2nd Run campaigns unfortunately do not perfectly gel with the initial campaigns, even ignoring the instances of Already Undone for You. William will be fought by both Claire and Leon and the same exact places even though him returning to those places is improbable. Also Annette will get mortally wounded and die twice, dying on opposite sides of the NEST facility. And that's not even getting into whether there is more than 1 Mr. X out there due to him getting cut in half in Claire's campaign before the sewers yet being Leon's final boss chronologically later.
  • Continuing is Painful: Dying can be very frustrating when playing on Hardcore difficulty where Checkpoint Starvation is applied. Attempting to get an S+ ranking on that difficulty takes this to new heights, since on top of forcing you to reload to one of your only three allotted saves, the play timer will keep counting up. Dying at 2:19:10 of play time will start the player back at the last save with that same timer, regardless of whether that last save was just made or was logged hours agonote .
  • Cool Big Sis: Claire alternates between being that and Mama Bear to Sherry.
  • Creator Cameo: According to a post on Reddit, the list of names written and crossed out on the chalkboard in the RPD's Conference Room are all members of Capcom's localization team.
  • Cruel and Unusual Death:
    • Elliot is mauled by zombies and bisected as he tries to crawl through the Watchman's room shutter with Leon or Claire's help. He later turns into a zombie himself.
    • Ben has his skull crushed by Mr. X.
  • Cutscene Incompetence: When Mr. X grabs the player during normal gameplay, they can use a defensive item (like a knife) to break free. But whenever Mr. X grabs Leon during cutscenes, Leon never attempts to employ that option. Instead, he just struggles fruitlessly, only surviving thanks to outside circumstances (like Ada driving a truck right into Mr. X).
  • Cutting Off the Branches: In a way. Contrary to earlier reports, Leon and Claire each still have two scenarios apiece, despite the original's "zapping" system (where choices made in Game A affected Game B) being removed. Since certain events from the "Claire A/Leon B" path are firmly established to have taken place in subsequent games, the outcome of both A and B scenarios has been hybridized somewhat to better gel with what happens later in canon. To wit, several things that only happened in one prior sequence of events now happen in both of them (e.g. Sherry being infected with the G-Virus and getting the vaccine), while other things that previously happened to both characters now only happen to one of them (e.g. Ada throwing Leon a rocket launcher to finish off Mr. X).
  • Cycle of Hurting: Many enemies in the remake can infinitely stunlock Leon or Claire if given the chance, due to the lengthy recovery animations:
    • The zombies in particular are quite nasty about this if faced in mobs, as they could just grapple the player one after another, causing extreme wastes of sub-weapons, and a lot of damage after the knives and grenades are gone. And shaking one off just means that another in queue can come right up to the player and repeat the process.
    • Mr. X's punches has a lot of power behind them, usually sending the player flying across the room. To make matters worse, he could just casually stroll up to them while they're struggling to stand up and do that again, ad infinitum. And if you try to run past him, sometimes he'll grab you by the waist and toss you back.
    • On the other hand, you could just easily do this to those same enemies by attacking them with the knife. While they only deal minimal damage, knives have a large strike zone, stuns easily, and have very fast swing speeds, allowing a competent knife user to effectively stun-lock a Licker or zombie by repeatedly slashing at them, and some bosses can be made ridiculously easy if the player is nimble enough to dodge around their attacks.
  • Damn You, Muscle Memory!:
    • Many Resident Evil 4 fans will instinctively shoot the zombies in the legs and close in to suplex them, only to realize that Leon has not become a highly trained government agent yet.
    • Most Resident Evil games would inform you when a key item was no longer needed and asked if you wished to discard it. In the remake, you aren't outright told this.note  Instead, there's only a tiny red check mark on the item in the inventory. Keys also have to be manually used from the inventory to unlock a door, though you're prompted to use an item when trying the door, unlike in the classic games where they're used automatically.
    • Enemies grappling you, such as the zombies, could previously be shoved off quickly to minimize damage by Button Mashing. The remake doesn't allow this, and you're forced to use a defensive item to break free or else take considerable damage, or worse. As such, veterans of the classic games may find themselves instinctively mashing the buttons to escape an enemy's hold and be flabbergasted when it does nothing.
    • While it's not a bad idea to let a crawler grab your leg so you can paste its head without using ammo in exchange for a bit of damage in the classic games, here all the character does is kick the zombie off without dealing any damage to it, making the tactic useless.
    • Knives are breakable, so seasoned players slashing at objects and downed zombies on instinct will find themselves one blade shorter very quickly. They are also put into the same category as grenades, so players expecting to use a knife may pull out a frag grenade by mistake and blow themselves up by accident.
    • The remake allows you to mix red and blue herbs together without needing a green herb, which gives you boosted defense for a while. This mixture was never allowed in the classic games, which can lead many veteran players to not bother mixing the two herbs. Thankfully, you also get the bonus in the big RGB mix.
    • Veterans would use up all ammo in a gun before upgrading to get the most of the old ammo. Here, extended magazines only carry the amount of ammo that they upgrade, so carrying the mag just takes up inventory space (e.g. empty Matilda + extended mag = 12 rounds loaded, not 24). The upside is that you're free to apply the upgrade immediately.
    • Obtaining items was as simple as "Will you take X?" and the item would go straight into your inventory. The remake doesn't give a "yes/no" option when picking up items and relies on a "confirm/cancel" command instead without any prompts. This can easily trip players up when they accidentally press the button corresponding to "cancel/return" and leave the item behind without realizing it.
    • The option to use an herb or spray when picked up is also removed. This leaves some veterans screaming when they find a Green Herb while desperately low on health, and can't use it because they haven't got any inventory space for it.
    • In a minor way, the layout of the game differs quite a bit from the original. Veterans of the old game that believe they know exactly what to expect when entering a particular room or trying to solve a particular puzzle will be presented with the terrifying certainty that this game isn't merely a graphical upgrade with a new camera style.
    • Zombies can now open doors. While not necessarily a complete novelty, as later games in the series gave enemies this ability, expecting similar behavior to the original can make a player confidently think they've evaded them until it's too late. Significantly, enemies can now invade certain save rooms, which were historically sacred.
    • Fans of the original will be left wondering if there's any normal/explosive ammo for Claire's grenade launcher. The remake omits them and relies on just flame and acid rounds instead.
    • The Easter Egg with Wesker's desk containing a photo of Rebecca in her basketball uniform doesn't require the player to search the desk 50 times, which can trip up fans of the original game where it was the only way to get the photo.
    • If you've played the Resident Evil 3 remake before this one, you will find yourself attempting to dodge at least once before finding out that you can't in this game.
  • Dangerous Windows: Zombies will smash through windows and climb in. You have the option to seal the windows using loose boards to block off windows, making them safe for the rest of the game, but there's limited resources so not all windows can be boarded up.
  • Darker and Edgier: The original game was an Actionized Sequel while maintaining its Survival Horror roots. This remake is both literally and figuratively darker than the original, and actually focuses on the "horror" side of survival horror by decreasing the player's ability to fight with harsher ammunition caps, less self-defense melee options and other such vulnerabilities.
  • Dead Foot Leadfoot: The truck driver succumbs to his wounds behind the wheel of his big rig. The truck then keeps going until it crashes.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Both Claire and Leon will start quipping their current situation, such as fighting zombies, or when they pick up specific items such as posters, letters, and a VHS tape.
  • Death of a Thousand Cuts:
    • Defeating Mr. X and the various G-Birkin forms with Claire's MQ 11 can be considered this, as the power level for individual shots from that gun is pitifully low bordering on Cherry Tapping, but it more than makes up for this by sheer volume of fire, especially after obtaining the Extended Mag.
    • A more literal version consists of defeating G-1 with just the knife, which is entirely possible if you're quick on your feet to avoid his attacks. Using the unbreakable knife gets you much better mileage.
  • Devoured by the Horde: The 1st Run protagonist attempts to save Elliot from underneath a barricade. But as they attempt to pull him out, the zombies eat his lower half. By the time they actually pull Elliot through, his lower half is gone, and his intestines are spilling out of what's left of him. This can also happen to you on low health if you're not careful.
  • Demoted to Extra:
    • Katherine Warren's already short appearance in the original has been reduced to a barely glimpsed corpse. However, she got A Day in the Limelight as one of the protagonists of the non-canon Ghost Survivors DLC.
    • The same happens with Ben, whose first appearance and death scene from the original are combined.
  • Desperation Attack: Blinding Mr. X and Lickers with flash grenades will cause them to thrash about wildly until the effects wear off, potentially damaging the player if they stray close enough.
  • Deus ex machina: Sherry escapes from Chief Irons because a monster shows up when he's about to recapture her, in a previously monster-free location.
  • Developer's Foresight:
    • The fuse box that gets cut open with the knife only recognizes the combat knife Marvin gives you, not the Infinite Knife, meaning the player can't sequence break and must go into the East Hall.
    • When Claire picks up the brochure that talks about the RPD being an ex-art museum, she will make a comment on why anyone would do that. Leon won't, since he has visited the RPD at least once in the past. He will also be sans a comment about the letter Chris left behind, since he has yet to meet him.
    • The JMB Hp3 comes with a laser sight, and whenever Claire gets into a ready position while armed with it, the targeting reticule that every other gun has (even Leon's Lightning Hawk modded with a red dot sight) disappears. This is because she is no longer aiming down the sights, rather she is shooting at where the laser is pointing.
  • Dies Differently in Adaptation: In the original game, Robert is eaten alive by a throng of zombies that break through his store's windows. In the remake, he commits suicide off-screen after being forced to kill his infected daughter. Maybe.
  • Difficult, but Awesome:
    • The knife is probably the most secretly awesome weapon in the remake. While it's fragile, easily lost and awkward to use, it rewards those who take the time to master it with incredible stunning power combined with quick slashing animations, allowing it to effectively stun-lock the likes of Lickers, dogs, and some zombies depending on timing and where you hit. Many bosses like the different forms of G-Birkin are especially vulnerable to knife slashes, since one swing can strike multiple areas on their bodies, dealing more damage than hitting a regular enemy. Unlocking the unbreakable knife just makes it all the more appealing, since one will never need a replacement unless they don't retrieve it after shaking out of a grapple then killing the enemy it was used on.
    • Dodging a zombie's grapple requires very careful positioning to pull off, but will allow a skillful player to avoid taking unnecessary damage or losing sub-weapons. To elaborate: if Leon or Claire try to sprint past a zombie, not at it, they will be able to just brush it off without triggering the grapple break animation. One has to be sprinting to avoid being grabbed, and must be running off to the side of their target, as a zombie directly in front of or behind them will still be able to catch them as usual.
    • It takes some practice to get down, but you can effectively juke Mr. X by running at him and then quickly doubling back before his punch can connect. He takes enough time to ready another blow that the player can then safely weave their way around him.
  • Disc-One Nuke: The grenade launcher is found early in Claire's campaign, and makes short work of several tough enemy types. Ammunition is not plentiful, but you'll make a lot of one hit kills, so it balances out.
  • Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: Mr. X can't follow you into certain rooms, but that doesn't mean you're safe. If you open the door while he's next to it, he can drag you out.
  • Double Entendre: Chris' letter in the S.T.A.R.S. armory is laden with these. This is justified in that he had to tell his allies to stay both for their friends and family's safety and for their own protection without tipping off Umbrella and Chief Irons, so he applied it as a variation of Spy Speak. Claire notes that it sounds quite uncharacteristic of her brother.
  • Double Tap: It may be wise to pop another round in a downed zombie, just to verify a kill. Or one more. Or two. It's never enough for some, as they'll just keep getting up unless the head is completely pulverized. If you're lucky, the head might explode and confirm your kill.
  • Downloadable Content:
    • Chris and Jill's Samurai Edges, which were initially bundled with the game as a digital pre-order bonus, were released as separate buys on March 21, 2019.
    • Buying the Deluxe Edition grants (relatively) cheaper access to the Extra DLC bundle, with it containing: additional costume packs for Leon and Claire to change up their appearances during play (Leon gets an "Arklay Sheriff" uniform and a "Noir" suit, while Claire gets S.T.A.R.S.-themed "Military" fatigues, her own "Noir" outfit, and a motorcycle racing suit based on her "Elza Walker" incarnation from RE 1.5), the original soundtrack to switch between, and Wesker's Samurai Edge model. And for those who like to pick and choose, each item is also available to individually buy.
    • The free Ghost Survivors mode, which has three non-canon mini-campaigns starring Robert Kendo, Katherine Warren, and a USS soldier with the codename of "Ghost". Alongside the new mode, a pair of "'98 Classic" costumes were released, one for Leon and one for Claire.
    • The last piece of released DLC was an "unlock" key that instantly unlocks the 4th Survivor and Tofu Survivor modes, all the infinite ammo/use bonus weapons, all the models in the model viewer, all the concept art, and the Classic recreation costumes.
  • Dynamic Difficulty: Referred to as "Adaptive Difficulty", the game adjusts the difficulty based on your performance. The better you do, the less ammo you'll find and the more zombies you'll run into. If you die frequently, on the other hand, ammo will become more plentiful, and zombies less numerous.
  • Easter Egg: After the announcement of Resident Evil 3 (Remake), the game and the demo received updates to include Easter eggs of the new remake. In the demo, exploring the right side of the police station near the front door on the outside has a voice clip of Nemesis play. In the main game, a letter from Jill to Kendo can be found in Kendo's gun shop.
  • Early Game Hell: Zombies take much more punishment this time around, and most of your ammo pickups for the first couple hours will be between 3-10 rounds instead of the set amounts from the original. And on top of that, if you're super aggressive about killing everything, it's easy to render the game Unintentionally Unwinnable by being completely out of ammo, and thus no way to defend yourself. This is especially true once Mr. X comes calling; since he can't be killed, trying to fight him just wastes precious bullets.
  • Easy Logistics: Like Resident Evil 7, ammo crafting in the remake only calls for certain combinations of gunpowder, while completely leaving out the other, actual things that compose real bullets in reality such as brass cases, primers, or the round itself.
  • Eaten Alive: Failing to dodge the Giant Alligator's bite while running away from it results in Leon getting chomped. This is turned into an officially tracked stat on residentevil.net, complete with humorous flavor text that suggests he's still alive and crying inside the thing's stomach, and you could hear it if you listen closely.
  • Elevator Action Sequence: Leon and Claire both get one for their scenarios when fighting Mr. X and G-4, respectively, at the end of the game.
  • Equipment Upgrade: The original kits were broken down into multiple individual upgrades. Not only that, but Claire's weapons can also be upgraded this time around. However, certain upgrades like an added stock will make a weapon large enough to take an extra slot on the Grid Inventory, meaning less space for other items. That said, the upgrades that do so can be added and removed at will, and can even put away in the Item Box to free up space again.
  • Eye Scream: As ever, this is the only practical way to deal any meaningful damage to G mutants. The remake also provides the player with much more flexibility in doing it:
    • The adult G-Spawns can be killed more easily by targeting the large, yellow eye in their left shoulder, though the player will need to blow through a protective shell first. They go down most quickly when the eye is zapped with the Spark Shot.
    • Defeating the many stages of G-Birkin with the exception of G-2 requires multiple applications of this, as the eyes are his only true weak points, which stagger him when destroyed. One particular challenge even requires the player to stab G-1 in the eye with a knife in self-defense.
    • Downplayed with Sherry, whose eye becomes discolored and surrounded by lesions when she becomes infected with the G-Virus.
    • On a 2nd Run, Leon or Claire will deal the coup de grâce to G-5 by jamming a broken pipe into its large eye, before unhooking the railcar it's on and letting the fireball finish it off.
  • Evil Is Not Well-Lit: Unlike the original game, the remake has most of its levels in the dark, with the zombie apocalypse having caused local power failures and the characters navigating environments that aren't well lit by nature. Zombies may lurk in a dark corner waiting, and of course in a dark environment, Nothing Is Scarier comes in play as you will most likely hear the enemies coming at you first instead of seeing them. Well-lit rooms can be counted on one hand and most are save rooms, highlighting their status as havens.
  • Eyes Do Not Belong There: Anything exposed to the G-Virus exhibits this; sometimes they pop up in clusters. Those same eyes are universal weak points.

    Main Game Tropes F - N 
  • Facepalm of Doom: The Tyrant gains an attack where he grabs Leon or Claire by the head and lifts them up, crushing them if they don't counter with a sub weapon.
  • Failed a Spot Check:
    • When Ben hears something coming into the jail block area, he desperately demands that Leon let him out in exchange for the parking garage keycard. Somehow he failed to notice the power was out in the rest of the block despite being there for a while, and that there was no way Leon could even let him out in the first place without an electronic wiring puzzle. Or a master key, which Chief Irons has, and used by Katherine to free him in the non-canonical Runaway scenario.
    • Annette isn't aware of the fact that the G-Virus remains in Sherry's body even after the vaccine is administered, which renders her effort to destroy all remaining G samples even more of a failure than it already is. Admittedly, she's already mortally wounded and dies a minute later so it's not hard to understand why she might have only focused on averting the worst of the problem.
    • Sherry's escape from Chief Irons in the nap room would have been foiled completely had he decided to look around for another second before rushing to the washroom.
  • Feed It a Bomb: Grenades can be used as a counter defensive weapons on enemies such as Lickers, G-Spawns and zombies as long as they are equipped. Doing so for the first time nets the player an achievement and an in-game record entry.
  • Foreshadowing:
    • The fact that the woman which the truck driver encountered in the intro remained completely intact after getting hit by a truck, speak volumes about how much sturdier the zombies are this time around.
    • When Sherry is introduced in Claire's scenarios, her wristband quite clearly has a glowing green rectangle on it. Late in the game you find out that this is a visitor access wristband for NEST, so it doubles as both Five-Second Foreshadowing for her being related to Umbrella (which comes up in conversation in her next scene after G1 interrupts) and more long-term foreshadowing for how Claire and Sherry will get into the securely locked transport to NEST.
  • Funny Background Event: The 1-Shot Demo released on January 11, 2019 ends with a cork-board covered with "photos" (stills of the game), newspaper clippings, and post-it notes. The post-its can be read if zoomed in, and most of them are pretty funny: one admonishes the people in the department for eating the potted plants ("I don't care if they make you feel better, those herbs cost money!"), another has an officer complaining about the police dog being on edge and remarking that he has two days until retirement, and a third seems to be written by a zombie trying to resist the Horror Hunger but still tempted to take just one bite of human flesh.
  • Game-Favored Gender: Done differently here:
    • Leon's shotgun and Lightning Hawk have great burst damage and crowd control. Claire's grenade launcher and spark shot can do great specialized damage against certain types and her silenced SMG can fire without alerting lickers. As such, Leon works better against regular zombies and destroying boss weak points, while Claire deals with Elite Mooks better and creates bigger openings.
    • A couple of areas are in Leon's favor: he doesn't have near as many lickers in his campaign, as the basement is instead filled with dogs, and the one licker that bursts through the two-way mirror isn't there. He also has a much easier time navigating through the station, as the crank allows him to access the stairwell outside the Chief's Office straight from the second floor, where as Claire has to take a rather serpentine route, going up to the fourth floor and circling around there.
    • Claire has it easier when choosing to board up open windows. There are eight open windows in her campaign and she can board up to seven of them; Leon, on the other hand, will pass by twelve open windows, which means he must determine which five windows are the lowest priority. Although, you do end up with fewer to actually board up during their 2nd Run campaigns due to a combination of not having to backtrack as much as during their 1st Runs and gaining access to certain shortcuts earlier on.
    • Claire's handguns are more powerful than Leon's. Her SLS 60 (loaded with 9mm ammo) and JMB Hp3 do 115 and 150 base damage compared to the 100 base damage that Leon's Matilda does. Even her Quickdraw Army does more base damage than Leon's M19 (180 vs. 140, respectively) and fires much faster, but it does come with one big drawback: it has to be reloaded one round at a time.
  • Gameplay and Story Integration: The classic games gradually downplayed the zombie threats by having a somewhat consistent amount of damage take them down, basic AI that could be kited and never went beyond single rooms without a scripted sequence, on top of always hearing if zombies were in a room. This time around, a single zombie can take way more headshots than you might expect, and even a shotgun may not consistently kill them, as well as the zombies being more of a threat and able to break into rooms and even potentially sneak up on you if you're not paying attention. Now it makes sense why everyone in the cutscenes can't handle them efficiently and why the RPD couldn't contain the threat and got overwhelmed so easily - these things were too inconsistently durable to kill with limited ammo and too persistent to keep away, and now the player gets to survive this firsthand.
    • Ada's section has no healing items. As such, she has no way to tend to her leg injury at the end of it. She also doesn't get a knife so Leon's advice in Resident Evil 4 is consistent.
    • HUNK has more health than Leon and/or Claire during his scenario. This makes sense considering he's decked out in full combat armor, also averting Armor Is Useless.
    • There will be occasions, such as the police garage gate and the NEST lab, where you interact with something to find out there's nothing in your inventory to unlock it. You might think "Did I miss something on the way here?" Once you exit the inventory menu, a short cutscene will play where your character has the same reaction.
    • In the cutscene preceding the boss fight against G3, Annette fires multiple acid-filled cartridges into the monster, each of which tranquilize it. If Claire shoots it with acid grenades in the ensuing battle, G3 will similarly be stunned.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation:
    • Leon can run out of ammunition in the game's first (very brief) playable segment. However, when he and Claire have their Crash-Into Hello, he still has a round in the chamber with which to kill the zombie behind her.
    • The protagonists have little problem breaking free from a zombie's grapple in cutscenes, but doing so is only possible if the zombie is attacking from the side, and you have to be very quick in pushing the direction stick.
    • Zigzagged with NPCs being bitten, the ones at the gas station tend to get turned into zombies pretty fast, but everyone else takes awhile. Claire, Leon, Ada, and HUNK on the other hand can get bitten frequently in gameplay and never turn.
    • An early puzzle involves unlocking Leon's desk as part of a planned Initiation Ceremony. Successfully opening the desk rewards you with an upgrade for your starting gun, regardless of which character you're playing as. While this makes sense for Leon, it's rather odd that in Claire's version, a present for a police officer consists of an upgrade for a gun he probably doesn't have.
    • In a 2nd Run playthrough of the game, your character will have to unlock all the same doors, solve all the same puzzles, and fight all the same bosses that the 1st run character did, despite the second campaign taking place slightly after the first. Logically, everything should already have been done for you by the first character, but it is all reset for gameplay's sake.
    • All of the cutscenes where Leon uses a gun will have him use an un-upgraded Matilda even if he either upgraded it or put it in the item box.
    • Just like in the original game, Leon being shot by Annette doesn't seem to have any ill effects on his health or his ability to do something physical like moving a locker. There are times where Leon falls right on top of the shoulder that he was shot at, but comes out no worse for wear.
    • Leon will throw away the chip bracelet, regardless of whether or not he actually has it on him.
  • Gatling Good: Claire gets to enjoy this in two ways: a Minigun with 400 rounds loaded is found just before the fight against G-Birkin during her escape segment, and the other being a bonus unlockable with Bottomless Magazines for clearing either of her scenarios with an S+ ranking on Hardcore.
  • Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: In the original game, Mr. X is airdropped in from an Umbrella helicopter and there's plenty of information about him in-game, making it clear who he is, who sent him, and what he's there to do. Here, he simply appears with no foreshadowing or explanation except for a single note from Ben that only Leon can find, so while fans of the series will know who he is, newcomers will probably be left scratching their heads.
  • Goomba Stomp: It's entirely possible for Leon or Claire to be on the receiving end of this from Mr. X, if he is on a ledge above them.
  • Gorn: Plenty. Thanks to its graphical upgrade with the RE Engine, there are tons of detailed gore. The developers didn't skimp out on the smaller details, too, going the full mile for enemies to spill their guts if blown apart or for a rather gruesome aftermath of what a Licker can do to a victim.
  • Gray Rain of Depression: It is constantly raining in both Leon and Claire's scenarios, and doesn't let up for the entire game.
  • Grid Inventory: Carried over wholesale from Resident Evil 7, where instead of a limited number of generic item slots that can fit anything, you now have a grid where items may take up more than one slot like in the original game. Inventory expansions in the form of hip pouches can be found as well, and enough can be found to boost your inventory from 8 slots to 20. Hardcore difficulty cuts the number of hip pouches you can find from 6 to 3, making your max inventory on that difficulty 14 slots. Better hope you've got your item box and key item routes planned alongside whatever health or ammo you'll need for the trip.
  • Guide Dang It!:
    • Destroying all 15 of the Mr. Raccoon toys will reward you with the Infinite Knife. However, destroying them is easier than actually finding them; while several of the Mr. Raccoons are in plain sight, a few of them are in locations you'd never think to look, three are exclusive to Leon and Claire each, while the last one is 2nd Run exclusive. And if that wasn't bad enough, a handful are in one-shot areas you need to start a new playthrough to get to if you miss them the first time. The only saving grace is that the toys are accumulative, meaning any you hit are gone for good on all future playthroughs. Also, they make a very distinctive rattling sound when you're near them, especially audible when wearing headphones.
    • There's an entire mechanic for dodging a zombie's grapple attack: when a zombie attacks you from the side, point the cursor in the exact opposite direction that the zombie is attacking from and the character will shove the zombie off and keep going. The game tells you exactly none of this.
    • The bookshelves in the Library are a particular hell spot mostly because of how time-consuming it can be if you're speedrunning or have Mr. X on your heels. However, you can bypass much of the pain altogether if/when you realize that you can move more than one shelf at a time if multiple are next to each other. A player with this knowledge can complete the puzzle in three pulls altogether, with only one of them needed after using the jack. Also, you only need three out of the four bookshelves to cross over.
  • Guns Do Not Work That Way: Looking at the Matilda's extended magazine makes it unclear just how it's supposed to stay in the pistol. The VP-70 it's based on has a European style heel-mounted magazine release (which in the game can be seen inexplicably attached to the base of the extended mag), but even assuming the "Matilda" is fictionalized to have a button-press mag release (what looks like one on the real pistol is actually the safety), there are also no cutouts anywhere on the body for a magazine catch to lock into.
  • Half the Man He Used to Be:
    • Leon/Claire tries to help Elliot, a police survivor from underneath a barricade. But the man is grabbed by zombies coming after him as they go to pull him to safety and only pulls out the man's torso.
    • All that's left of Mr. X after Leon blew him up with a rocket launcher is his lower torso from the waist down.
    • Blasting at a zombie's legs with a shotgun may occasionally produce this result. Not that they mind, however, they would still try to get at your throat all the same.
    • Shelling a zombie with an acid grenade may not kill them outright, but it can easily take their limbs off, or make them weak enough for Claire's other guns to blow off.
  • Hand Cannon:
    • The Lightning Hawk returns yet again as a weapon Leon can use. It is powerful enough to One-Hit Kill many lesser enemies with a well-aimed shot, and also the only firearm that's (semi-)practical against the dreaded Mr. X, though ammo scarcity can make it Too Awesome to Use.
    • Claire gets an upgrade for her SLS 60, which allows her to use High-Powered Handgun rounds (.357 Magnum rounds, according to the item box). It does a ton of damage, but is very, very rare, and unlike Leon's magnum ammo, Claire cannot craft new rounds.
  • Harder Than Hard:
    • Getting the coveted S+ rank on Hardcore difficulty to unlock the ATM-4 and Minigun is a very daunting task. The means of doing so are a special feat anyway: it requires the player to clear a scenario within the S-ranked time limit, while also restricting them to three manual saves and bonus/unlockable weaponry are not allowed. Violating either of the latter two conditions immediately drops it down to a normal S rank, although the weaponry restriction doesn't cover the DLC Samurai Edges or the Infinite Knife.
    • The 4th Survivor is quite challenging, requiring perfect aim and excellent rationing of your supplies, since there isn't a single ammo or health pickup in the entire thing. This is even worse in The Tofu Survivor, since you now need to do HUNK's hellish death march with just an inventory full of knives.
    • The Ghost Survivor stories are optional bonus modes akin to The 4th Survivor that force the player into highly scripted sequences, designed to push you to your limits. Each one is a straight run with numerous difficult factors. Each of the three modes contains a unique zombie type: Kendo's has a zombie type that will release a poison gas cloud if you kill it, Katherine's has a series of zombies that can only be killed by a shot to the head with a magnum round and will regenerate indefinitely if shot with anything else, and Ghost has some of his zombies equipped with gear that makes it impossible for them to take damage from bullets in the protected areas.
  • He Knows Too Much: Leon finds a tape recorder on Ben's body containing an interview with Annette Birkin, whom he attempts to grill for info on the G-Virus and Umbrella's underground lab. Leon also finds a note expressing that he also knows about Mr. X and how it's been ordered to kill anyone who knows about Umbrella's involvement in the outbreak. People like Ben.
  • Hell Is That Noise:
    • You can hear Mr. X's footsteps two rooms away from your current location. It's not a sound you want to hear while you're frantically trying to clear a room from other threats, or searching for hidden items. He also has a theme song that plays when he finds and starts pursuing you. When you hear his theme kick in, be prepared to run.
    • The mature G-spawns produce a very audible humming noise in the remake, so better keep an ear out for them or they'll give you a face full of noxious vomit.
    • Just hearing the sound of raspy, throaty croaking of the Ivy Zombies is enough to know something bad is going to happen. Better hope you've packed enough incendiary weaponry to take them on, or else they'll be the death of you.
  • Hate Sink: Chief Irons. He is a corrupt cop who takes bribes from Umbrella and helps run an orphanage that uses children for lethal bioweapon experiments. He kidnaps Sherry and beats Claire when she tries to stop him. He also murdered the mayor's daughter, and older lore implies that he is a serial rapist and murderer fixated on young blonde women such as her.
  • Head Crushing: Mr. X punches his way through a wall to grab Ben Bertolucci by his head, and then crushes it in his hand. He can do the same to the player if he grabs them and they have no way to free themselves.
  • Helpless Kicking: Whenever Mr. X grabs the player character (either Leon, Claire, and Ada) on the head, they desperately kick their legs until Mr. X crushes their head. The player can prevent this from happening by pulling a knife to stab Mr. X in the arm or throwing a flashbang to knock him out.
  • Heroism Motive Speech: After failing to help the owner of the Gun Shop Kendo and his zombie-bitten daughter, Leon rants to Ada that he wants to find out whatever caused the virus outbreak in Raccoon City to satisfy his motive for becoming a policeman in the first place:
    Leon: I want to find out what's happening here. And stop whoever's behind it. Helping people like them... that's why I joined the force.
    Ada: My mission is to take down Umbrella's entire operation. We may not make it out.
    Leon: Whatever it takes to save this city... count me in.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard: There are many silly ways to kick the bucket in the game, but perhaps the most ridiculous one is accidentally smashing oneself with the container attached to the crane used to fight Stage 2 G-Birkin. According to the official global stats on residentevil.net, a staggering 65% of all players in the world hit themselves with it on the first go instead of the intended target.
  • Hollywood Silencer: Fitting the Suppressor onto Claire's MQ 11 makes its report completely silent to everything in the game, even the hypersensitive Lickers and Mr. X. This despite the gun itself still making a lot of mechanical noises as it fires, not to mention the sounds of bullets hitting a surface or object. This is made even less believable by how she mostly fires it indoors, such as in the tight halls of the RPD, the enclosed sewers, or the metallic corridors of NEST, where echoing is a thing.
  • Horrible Judge of Character: In spite of Marvin's warnings and all the evidence Leon has seen that the RPD's chain of command has completely broken down, he still insists on following protocol and refuses to release Ben until he's spoken with Chief Irons, who he has no way of knowing is even still around anymore and despite Ben telling him Irons is rotten to the core. And despite already knowing that Mr. X is hunting him, Ben seals his fate by yelling at Leon, drawing Mr. X's attention so he can bust through the wall and crush poor Ben's head like a grape.
  • Hotter and Sexier: Claire's classic outfit has a tighter vest and replaces the undershirt with a tank top, baring her cleavage and shoulders.
  • I Should Have Done This Years Ago: After shooting William in his mutated form, Annette says she should've killed him when he first injected himself with the G-Virus.
  • Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The game has three difficulty settings - Assisted, Standard, and Hardcore:
    • Assisted: There's aim assist active, enemies have less health and do less damage, you have limited health regeneration (from Danger to Caution), and gunpowder crafts way more ammo than on other difficulties.
    • Standard: Essentially the normal mode, no aim assist, no limited health regeneration.
    • Hardcore: Auto-saving is completely disabled except for one at the gas station when you start the game, manual saving requires ink ribbons like in the original game, enemies have more health and can kill you in one or two attacks, and the number of inventory expansions you can get is halved.
  • Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Mr. X's Super Tyrant form will finish off Leon by impaling him on its claws in a charged-up One-Hit Kill.
  • Implacable Man: Mr. X is even more implacable than he was in the original game as he is always pursuing you no matter where you are.
  • Incredibly Durable Enemies: The basic zombies in this game are tanks, capable of eating three to six handgun shots to the head before falling over and then they'll get right back up again. It's not unheard of to expend an average of twelve to fifteen rounds to ensure that zombies are killed for good, and sometimes more, based on how the Adaptive Difficulty is penalizing the player's damage output.
  • Infinity -1 Sword: The DLC Samurai Edges can be seen as this. While they do have their perks that make them more useful than Leon and Claire's starting guns (Wesker's has higher base firepower, Chris's has the aiming reticle focus faster, Jill's draws faster), they start falling behind as you find upgrade parts. In a 2nd Run, they're nigh useless unless you spend your precious gunpowder to craft handgun ammo, as all the item pickups for 9mm ammo have been switched to .45 ACP ammo.
  • Initiation Ceremony: One of the puzzles shows that Leon's coworkers were gonna put him through one: his rolltop desk has two specialty made multi-dial locks on it, with his first task on the force being to learn his coworkers' names and set the locks to the initials of their first names to unlock it. Which character you play as gets a different gun part: Leon gets an extended magazine for his starting handgun, while Claire gets a speed loader for hers.
  • Instant-Win Condition: In The 4th/Tofu Survivor, it doesn't matter if you're down to your last sliver of health, being swarmed by dozens of zombies and Lickers, and Mr. X is practically breathing down your neck, the instant you open the RPD precinct gates, you're good.
  • Interface Screw:
    • Being poisoned does far more than deal steady damage. Your character will randomly have a coughing fit, during which they slow down to less than their movement speed when their health is in the red, and they cannot attack by any means. Poisoning also makes it extremely difficult to aim.
    • Whether by design or coincidence, the blocky design of Tofu and his friends is this. While they use the same camera angle as Leon and Claire, their huge shapes and wobbly movement actually obstruct a lot of the player's vision, making it hard to spot anything at all to the left of the characters, especially while aiming or using a sub-weapon.
  • Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: When pushed to the decision of either jumping over these bookshelves or solving an annoying puzzle to walk through them, your character chooses the puzzle. Likewise, the weapons locker room has a control panel with two missing buttons. Rather than just pressing the exposed switches to get the same effect as pressing a button, the characters would rather hunt down spare key caps for a replacement so they can use the buttons properly.
  • It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: The game begins with our heroes driving into town in the middle of the night through a pounding rainstorm.
  • Item Crafting: Ammo crafting makes a return, functioning more like it did in RE3 than in RE7, with combinations of different grades of gunpowder making different types of ammo: two batches of normal gunpowder for handgun rounds, normal plus high-grade for shotgun shells (Leon) or acid rounds (Claire), or two high-grade batches for magnum rounds (Leon) or SMG rounds (Claire). The high-grade gunpowder also comes in two separate colors: yellow for Leon, white for Claire. Although like Ethan, Leon and Claire don't need a reloading tool like Jill did to do so.
  • Jawbreaker:
    • A corpse you can find in the police station has half of his face so visibly damaged that his jaw is hanging by just a few loose strands of muscle.
    • After taking some damage in an explosion, Mr. X's Tyrant form is missing his lower jaw during Leon's final encounter with him.
  • Jiggle Physics: Tofu, being a giant block of tofu, has this applied to his entire body. According to producer of the game, Tsuyoshi Kanda, the team over at Capcom scanned the jiggly movement and texture of real-life tofu in order to make the character as realistic as possible.
  • Jump Scare:
    • Ordinarily, this would be redundant, but thanks to the new gameplay system (zombies don't make noise unless they see you) and heavy use of Clown-Car Grave, there's plenty of possibilities for unscripted jump scares, as the various YouTube compilation videos can attest. It's not uncommon for new players to sprint around a corner only to blunder into a zombie, or a licker, or Mr. X.
    • One of the furnaces in the morgue only contains cockroaches, and it's where they're first seen. Leon/Claire's audible disgust and surprise indicate they'll attack...but they don't, and never do when passed by later.
  • Kill It with Fire: Ivies are particularly weak to fire attacks, so Leon's flamethrower and Claire's fire grenades are the best weapons to use against them. Fire is also the only way to actually kill them for good.
  • Leet Lingo: The license plates on Leon's and Claire's vehicles read "M4T-ILD4" ("Matilda") and "MD3-IN-H3VN" ("Made in Heaven"), respectively.
  • Let No Crisis Go to Waste: In Robert Kendo's Ghost Survivors scenario, the Poisonous Zombies are the result of police officers using Umbrella's experimental P-Z gas on ordinary zombies. Apparently, a number of Umbrella researchers are using the Raccoon City outbreak to conduct bioweapon experiments at the cost of civilian lives. For Umbrella, this is a way to achieve two nefarious objectives at the same time: conducting experiments without the need for safety measures and eliminating more outbreak survivors. Since Raccoon City is a Company Town owned by Umbrella, few of the town's citizens would believe that Umbrella is deliberately killing innocent people for selfish gain.
  • Let's Get Dangerous!: Confront Mr. X enough times or blow off his favorite hat, and he drops the Ominous Walk to start running at you instead.
  • Let's Split Up, Gang!: Averted. Leon and Claire are involuntarily separated throughout the game until they reach the train at the end of the game.
  • Life Meter: Goes back to original ECG meter from the games before RE4. Only this time whenever an attack hits, the meter shows on screen to let you know of your condition rather than you having to look in the inventory menu, although it still shows in the inventory like before. The characters still reflect the damage, however, by holding their sides and limping when in critical status. In addition, when playing the PS4 version, the light on the controller changes to reflect your current health.
  • Lodged Blade Removal: After falling in garbage while pursuing Annette Birkin, Ada Wong impales herself on a stick of wood that she attempts to remove from her thigh. It takes Leon's aid to remove it completely.
  • Made of Iron:
    • Zombies are a lot tougher in this game than they have been in any other titles. They will readily tank multiple headshots before going down, and unless the player gets a "critical hit" effect, which blows their head up, it's possible that a seemingly "killed" zombie will actually just be stunned and will get back up in a minute or so. The unique gore effects, which allows players to blow bloody chunks off of a zombie's face without killing it, just make them seem tougher than they already are.
    • While we can rationalize that any time Leon or Claire got bitten by zombie canonically did not happen and that they got through the game without a scratch, there's no way to explain how Leon could survive getting repeatedly slammed to the ground by G1 Birkin, with enough force to break through the metal walkway without at least broken ribs.
  • Magikarp Power: Claire's starting SLS 60 pistol is initially vastly inferior to Leon's Matilda, with less than half the ammo capacity and each bullet needing to be loaded manually. The speed loader helps reduce the time it takes to reload, but even then most first-time players will bench it in the item box once you get the JMB Hp3 thanks to its high accuracy and superior ammo capacity. Once in the sewers though, it isn't hard to come across the Reinforced Frame upgrade parts for the SLS 60, which allow it to use high-powered ammunition, enabling it to serve as a versatile, inventory space-efficient weapon equally useful for basic enemies and bosses alike.
  • Mama Bear: Subverted and then played straight with Annette in regards to her daughter. Claire embodies this unwaveringly from the moment she met Sherry.
  • Man on Fire: Two burning zombies will emerge from the wreckage of the crashed chopper. Presumably, they were infected before boarding the chopper and this played a role in the chopper suddenly crashing. Interestingly enough, these unique burning zombies don't seem to take damage from the flames at all, even though zombies that are normally set aflame will take damage and eventually die.
  • Meaningful Name: The game's ending theme is named "Saudade", titled after a Portuguese word meant to represent a form of melancholic nostalgia, apt in describing a remake of the most beloved entry in the classic Resident Evil trilogy. As something of an unintentional bonus, the remake was released a week before the official day of Saudade in Brazil, on January 30.
  • Meat Moss: Organisms created by the G-Virus are now able to spread this around for unknown reasons, as seen in the sewers. During the final battle with Birkin on the train, he somehow transforms the walls of the car in seconds.
  • Minimalist Run: invoked The game has this as a play challenge and associated achievement. Essentially, a Minimalist run requires the player to clear one scenario without ever touching the item box, which is harder than it sounds considering how one will need to leave room for key items in addition to their own resources. Such runs will therefore involve players only picking up certain items in a strategic manner, and in very specific orders. On Hardcore, the amount of inventory expansions is slashed by half, further ramping up the challenge.
  • Mood Whiplash:
    • The ending is pretty lighthearted for a game that was filled with terror. Leon, Claire, and Sherry escape successfully, and are trying to hitch a ride on the highway. Leon gets flipped off by the driver, who is contentedly listening to radio and blissfully unaware of what he's headed for in Raccoon City. The trio remain in high spirits, assure each other that as long as they're together they can tackle any problem, and then the newly-orphaned Sherry asks if she can be adopted and already wants pets, noting that her mom never let her have any.
    • The 4th Survivor returns after beating the game. While various emotions run high from the main campaign, this short scenario is a pure, adrenaline-filled action shooter. Reinforcing this Genre Shift is the tense music that plays throughout as HUNK guns down dozens of zombies in a fraction of a time that Leon or Claire did (likely lasting no more than 15 minutes). The Tofu Survivor that is unlocked after beating this scenario is even crazier, being about a human sized piece of tofu wearing a beret escaping via the same path with only a knife while blaring rock music plays.
  • Monster Closet: One of the lockers you can open in one of the shower rooms on the West Wing second floor of the precinct has a dead body stashed inside. Opening the locker has it drop out onto the floor, and then rise as a zombie much later. Nothing will come of it should the player decide not to open the locker up, however. A similar scene happens at the morgue if the player searches all the cold chambers for the Diamond Key and leaves them open.
  • More Dakka:
    • Claire's repertoire seems rife with opportunities for this. In place of the Lightning Hawk, she instead gets the MQ 11, which is a fully-automatic submachine gun that can be modified to have a 50-round magazine. The obtainable Quickdraw Army in her 2nd Run is also practically fully-automatic by virtue of her fanning the hammer in a rapid fashion, and her ultimate weapon is a Minigun with 400 rounds loaded.
    • Completing either scenario with an S rank on Hardcore unlocks the LE 5 submachine gun that boasts unlimited reserve ammunition. Getting an S+ Hardcore clear on either of Claire's scenarios unlocks a variant of the Minigun with literal Bottomless Magazines for even more dakka. The MQ11 and LE 5 are (unusually for this franchise) very effective against regular enemies and bosses alike, but they're also incapable of dealing out critical headshots; the Minigun, on the other hand, obliterates anything unlucky enough to be in front of it.
  • Morton's Fork: Implied in-universe with Annette, who is presented with a very nasty decision: save her infected daughter and risk full breach of the virus beyond just Raccoon City, or attempt to stop her husband and lose her only child. Clearly she is distraught at being forced to make either choice, and how much sympathy she garners is up to the player's interpretation, especially when she broken heartedly chooses to try and contain the virus despite forsaking her child. This is ultimately defied as Claire is the third option.
  • Musicalis Interruptus: The final battle against Mr. X has a full blown Orchestral Bombing for the entire fight. The moment Leon blows up the monster with the rocket launcher and the smoke clears, the music just suddenly stops.
  • Mythology Gag: Has its own page.
  • Named by the Adaptation: The remake reveals that the name of the mayor's daughter is Katherine Warren.
  • Neck Snap: If grappled by two zombies, the characters will deal with one of the two with a unique neck snap animation.
  • Nerf: How much ammo that can occupy a single inventory slot was greatly reduced. In the original game, you could have up to 250 handgun bullets in one slot before the excess bullets would be moved to another slot. Other ammo would have either similar limits or no limit at all. The remake only lets you carry up to 60 handgun bullets in one slot before having to use another slot for the extra ammo. Likewise, shotgun shells and magnum ammo cap at 20 in one slot, and grenade ammo caps at 10 rounds. The grenade launcher no longer holds absurdly high ammo (meaning no more 20+ shells loaded) and, like in Resident Evil 7, it now has to be manually reloaded after every shot as Claire no longer pops in a new grenade as part of the firing animation.
  • Nintendo Hard:
    • The entire game, even on Standard difficulty, is extremely challenging. Ammunition and healing items are scarce, forcing the player to carefully weigh when to use them, especially because the zombies can take a myriad of headshots before falling down—and might still get back up again afterwards. This is intensified by the Adaptive Difficulty system, which analyzes how well the player has been doing at evading damage, conserving ammunition and killing enemies vs. time spent and reacts by either decreasing the player's damage, lowering their chance of scoring a critical hit, and decreasing availability of ammunition and healing items if they've been doing well, or increasing all of them if they've been doing poorly.
    • As a Call-Back to the original trilogy, Hardcore Mode is its own level of nightmare. To start, auto-saves are disabled, and the player needs to use Ink Ribbons to save at all, like the original games. The amount of inventory upgrades are reduced, making inventory management far more crucial for survival. Enemies take more bullets to bring down, the player automatically goes to "Danger" status after a single zombie chomp (with a tiny handful of exceptions, which include Mr. X's punches, as well as dog bites). And to top it off, the time window for S Ranks are made an hour shorter for each run.
  • No Fair Cheating: The unlockable Minigun, ATM-4 launcher, LE 5 submachine gun and Samurai Edge pistol all boast some manner of unlimited ammunition, with the former two literally having Bottomless Magazines. They give the player a huge leg up during combat, let the player ignore ammo management, easily make areas safe for backtracking, and put Mr. X squarely in his place without breaking a sweat. However using them will deny the player the coveted S+ ranking. In fact, just having them in one's inventory already voids their eligibility. It's less of a problem than it might seem, considering that S+ is required to unlock most of them in the first place. However, trophies/achievements are not exempt from using them, so you can gain them to compensate the lack of S+ rank.
  • No One Could Survive That!: Ada met her apparent demise by falling down the central NEST shaft this time, instead of being whacked around by Mr. X and seemingly dying. This makes it more "believable" to Leon than the original, though Ada being Ada, and the fact that several sequels to the original have spoiled this twist rotten already years ago, it didn't stick. Although it does raise several questions.
  • No One Gets Left Behind: HUNK's helicopter pilot returns to pick him up, much to HUNK's surprise. He'd expected to be abandoned as this is war, survival is his responsibility.
  • No OSHA Compliance: Unlike in the original's waist-high railings, here the catwalks in NEST's central shaft have rails that barely go up to knee-height. One may be able to Hand Wave this because of how Umbrella is famously Stupid Evil in regards to employee safety, but it's harder to excuse the scaffolding that Leon and Ada cross on the way to the sewers, which has no safety rails or overhead tie-off points of any sort.
  • Non-Standard Game Over: If Sherry is caught by Chief Irons, she gets locked up and it's game over. Rather than the screen saying "You Are Dead", you'll get an animation of a door slamming shut and the screen saying "You Are Trapped".
  • Not His Sled: One of the biggest and more famous set pieces of the original game was the Marshaling Yard and the subsequent fight on the train elevator. Here, the Marshaling Yard never appears and the train elevator fight is moved to Claire's end game boss.
  • Nothing Is Scarier: In pure Resident Evil fashion, you'll be left to your own devices for large spans of time without an enemy in sight. The ambiance may even swell just to put you on edge and yet nothing seems to be roaming around. Even worse, since you don't just magically hear all enemies in the area like in the original, you may not even realize a zombie or even a few are active until they're pounding on the door and you know they'll break into the room in several seconds.

    Main Game Tropes O - Z 
  • Offing the Offspring: Robert Kendo is forced to shoot his young daughter Emma after she begins succumbing to the virus.
  • Offscreen Inertia: Except for a few points where Mr. X teleports to your location for story purposes, such as into the cells after Leon restores the power or into the parking garage when Claire is about to leave, he will always be patrolling the station looking for you and never despawns. Part of what makes him so terrifying is that this means he could be anywhere at any given time, still looking for you.
  • Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Sherrif Cortini managed to subdue a zombie using only his bare hands, seemingly without getting injured or infected, while not even knowing that the dude was a zombie. Unfortunately, the player interrupting him causes enough of a distraction for said zombie to break loose and eat him.
  • Oh, Crap!:
    • Ben tries to bargain the keycard to the garage in exchange for his release from prison when Leon meets him, and grows increasingly distressed when they hear noises in the background with the former realizing who's approaching. Leon is reluctant to release the prisoner without talking to Chief Irons, and Ben finally panics, speaking louder and louder until his screaming attracts the attention of Mr. X, who promptly crushes his skull.
    • Leon and Claire both have one when seeing Mr. X in person for the first time.
    • Leon is all but soiling himself when being chased by the gator.
    • A non-verbal one, but G-5's reaction just before it's consumed by the advancing fireball is clearly this.
  • Ominous Walk: Mr. X is a cross between an Advancing Boss of Doom and a Super-Persistent Predator. He always seems to know exactly where you are. Accompanying his brisk pace is hearing his awful thudding footsteps, meaning he's hot on your heels. Worse, gunshots will alert him to your exact location, which makes getting through zombie hordes a more challenging task.
  • One-Hit Kill:
    • Several enemies gain new moves in the remake that let them do this to the player if not shaken off with a sub-weapon, most notably the Lickers, Ivy Zombies, or Mr. X with his Facepalm of Doom. The Ivy Zombies in particular have this as their only attack.
    • There's no defense against the Alligator if it catches up to the player character.
  • One-Winged Angel:
    • Birkin/G, of course, continues to mutate into increasingly more powerful forms as he suffers damage over the course of the night; first as a big dude with a pipe, then a Tyrant-like form, then his Climax Boss four-armed form, then finally his True Final Boss form, which is a combination of his Climax Boss wolf form and True Final Boss giant blob form from the original game.
    • Downplayed with Mr. X, who instead of going full Super Tyrant for his Final Boss fight, just has his claw mutate; he's faster than normal but his appearance is just his regular form shirtless. This is likely because in the remake instead of being dunked in a vat of molten metal, his arm and trench coat just get set on fire by an explosion instead.
  • Orphanage of Love: Subverted. On the surface, the Raccoon City Orphanage, funded by Umbrella, is an institution where the city's orphans received good food, education and constant medical attention. In reality, the children here secretly served as test subjects for Umbrella's drugs while under constant supervision by Umbrella's scientists. The more unruly or mature children are sent to serve as subjects for horrible viral experiments while any absences are explained away as adoptions. Chief Irons was a major contributor and director for the orphanage while Annette sometimes worked there as a teacher and observer. Ben once investigated events at the orphanage as part of his efforts to reveal Irons's corruption and dirty dealings with Umbrella. During the game, Irons uses the now-abandoned orphanage as a hideaway and confines Sherry in one of its bedrooms after taking her from Claire. The body of the mayor's daughter, Katherine Warren, can be found in orphanage's office.
  • Overt Operative: Ada's new character treatment seems to be based largely on her depictions from Resident Evil 4 onward. The original had her pretending to be an improbably cool-headed but otherwise ordinary civilian looking for her missing boyfriend as a cover, whereas here her Conspicuous Trenchcoat, Sunglasses at Night, and cocky "in the know" attitude make it plain from the get-go that she's up to something, and isn't going to any real bother to hide the fact. This largely due to her pretending to be an FBI agent investigating Umbrella, and unlike in the original, Leon actually does start to suspect she's not being honest with him.
  • Out-of-Character Alert: Claire notices the way Chris wrote his letter to his friends while on his "vacation" to Europe is something he wouldn't say.
  • Papa Wolf: Even after he becomes a monster, William saves his daughter Sherry's life twice. Sadly, he ends up losing his humanity after he mutates a second time and impregnates her with one of the G embryos he's been shedding throughout the sewers.
  • The Password Is Always "Swordfish": One of the safes has its combination written on the side in chalk. Apparently, the office just received the safe from the factory, and hasn't had time to erase the writing or change the combination.
  • Pedal-to-the-Metal Shot: Ada has a close-up shot of her high-heeled foot flooring the gas pedal of a SWAT truck to save Leon from Mr. X.
  • Pet the Dog:
    • It's very slight, but HUNK covers for Ghost, the USS operative who "killed" Birkin by telling his superiors Birkin resisted and they had no choice but to kill him. Birkin did resist, pulling a gun on the squad, but they probably still could have taken him alive were it not for Martinez shooting him.
    • HUNK urges his helicopter pilot to cancel the rescue in the remade "Fourth Survivor" mode, showing a willingness to be trapped in a doomed city in order to avoid risking more of his team.
  • Period Piece: Rather than doing a Setting Update, the remake is set the same year the original version was released - 1998, evidenced by the dated computers around the RPD. A bit of a necessity, since the original version's events also took place in 1998, and moving the setting to modern day would cause a major Continuity Snarl with the two decades of established canon.
  • Permanently Missable Content: Plenty, as per tradition:
    • Many weapons and their mods can be this if the player isn't aware of the methods to acquire them. The attachments for the Lightning Hawk and MQ 11 can be particularly annoying to get ahold of unless one backtracks a rather lengthy distance once in the sewers, which is in itself a Guide Dang It! since the player needs to acquire a key to use on a door they have no other reason to open. Once Leon or Claire boards the cable car leading to NEST, the items can no longer be acquired for that playthrough. This also goes for the unlockable Infinite Knife if you stabbed an enemy with it and ran away; you'd best go reclaim it from whatever baddie it's stuck in before starting the cable car. Thankfully, if you happen to use it against G's 1st or 2nd form, it will respawn on the floor in front of you after you defeat it.
    • The sewers and the Police Station can be backtracked with each other, but certain areas such as the orphanage in Claire's scenario can't, as she'll lock the gate upon entering, and the secret elevator breaks off. If you haven't gotten any items or Mr. Raccoons between the police department and the sewers, tough luck.
    • You have to go out of your way to make it happen, but if Claire triggers the elevator in the NEST without the minigun, she loses it for good and the Birkin-4 boss fight is, for all intents and purposes, impossible.
  • Platonic Co-Parenting: Discussed in the epilogue, where the orphaned Sherry suggests that Leon and Claire adopt her, even after Leon denies any romantic connection between him and Claire.
  • Plot Armor: During the few sections where Sherry accompanies Claire that actually have threats around them, Sherry is completely invulnerable and can't be grabbed, removing the infamous Escort Mission from the original game.
  • Point of No Return: The cable car that takes you down to the NEST is this; the game all but spells out to you that there's no going back once you take it down, making it your last chance to backtrack and find any items you may have missed.
  • Posthumous Character:
    • Katherine Warren leads one of the three Ghost Survivors missions, but is already dead by the time Sherry and Claire stumble across her in the main game.
    • Several messages in the NEST reference a Dr. Wayne Li, an Umbrella scientist who's considered a genius and is one of the leaders of the Plant 43 project. It's heavily implied that he is the corpse Leon/Claire gets the Level 2 clearance chip from, since the lab's computer believes that Dr. Li authorized the dispensing of the solution that killed Plant 43 and his journal is found right next to the corpse.
  • Pragmatic Adaptation:
    • In the original game, Ada's cover identity was as an ordinary woman searching for her boyfriend. In this game, her cover story is that of an FBI agent looking for evidence to shut down Umbrella. While there are still holes in that story if one looks deep enough, it's still much more believable than before. It also makes sense why Leon would believe her so readily, since he is eager to believe that the Feds are about to blow the whistle on Umbrella.
    • In the original game, Sherry constantly makes herself a nuisance by running away from Claire and making boneheaded decisions that force Claire to protect her. In this game, Sherry and Claire are only ever separated by circumstance, such as Chief Irons taking Sherry at gunpoint or Birkin knocking Claire unconscious and forcing Sherry to run away alone.
    • In the original game, Ben was a grumpy reporter who locked himself in a jail cell and refused to come out no matter what, thinking it kept him safe. In this game, he was locked in there by Chief Irons against his will and desperately wants to be let out, only to be killed by Mr. X before that can happen.
  • Pretty Little Headshots: Averted. Shots to the head blow away chunks of flesh and bone, gruesomely mangling the zombie's face as it takes more hits. It's even possible to shear away half of the zombie's face in a vertical line with an improperly aimed shotgun blast; and worse, it'll keep coming.
  • Product Placement: Claire's motorcycle, which was previously just a vaguely looking Harley-Davidson, is now explicitly a Harley-Davidson Night Train.
  • Public Secret Message: In the police station armory, a letter from Chris can be found. It's addressed to the other members of S.T.A.R.S. and it appears to be a casual letter about Chris' vacation in Europe at first glance. If one reads in-between the lines, it becomes apparent that Chris is really writing about the progress of his investigation into Umbrella and telling his comrades to stay safe. When Claire reads this letter, she privately notes that the letter's frivolous tone does not match her brother's serious personality. In the original game, Chris' planned investigation was written quite clearly in his diary in the S.T.A.R.S. office.
  • Pun-Based Title: The Japanese title for the game is Biohazard RE:2, which continues the theme naming of Biohazard 7 in having Resident Evil as the subtitle. However, the "RE" in the title alludes to the game being a remake, as RE is another way of saying "reply" to someone's email- in a sense, the game is a "response" to the original Resident Evil 2, and serves as Capcom's way of updating that game's core concepts for a modern audience.
  • Punch-Clock Villain: The USS are less sociopathic than they were in the original game. In this game, they are more humanized and Ghost is one of them. HUNK himself is more professional and would rather avoid unnecessary violence if able, and would let important members such as helicopter pilots survive if he can't.
  • Punched Across the Room: Mr. X's attacks can knock the player a couple feet back if they get within reach.
  • Puzzle Boss: Birkin's second form fought in the sewers can theoretically be defeated without firing a single shot by baiting him into being hit by the swinging crane, though getting him to stay put while the thing is coming back around without gunfire can be difficult. Additionally, the player must take care not to fall into their own trap, as it will kill them instantly. The post-death loading screen tip says this outright should you kill yourself with it. note 
  • Rank Inflation: The game goes one step above the usual S rank with S+. Getting S+, however, is Harder Than Hard — you have to not only beat the game within the S Rank time limit, but you can only make up to three manual saves period, and can't use any infinite ammo unlockable guns at all, though the pre-order DLC Samurai Edge pistols and the Infinite Knife are still fair game.
  • Reconstruction:
    • This game is essentially Capcom's attempt to update classic survival horror mechanics to modern times. As such, they've made it so that several conveniences people have been asking for in older-style survival horror games actually work against you. Hate the static camera angles? Say goodbye to auto aim, and zombies are now much tougher to kill to compensate for your ability to give headshots. Hate the loading screen doors? Now every door can be easily opened, but just about every single enemy can now follow you through them, and so on. This is in addition to remixing the content of the game to spook even veterans of the franchise.
    • Zombies have been heavily reconstructed to make them serious threats again. For starters, they are quite a bit tougher. They also have a number of new tricks, such as going down from your gunfire only to reanimate within seconds to grab you as you walk by. They can deal quite a bit more damage now, with a single bite being able to drag you down to Caution instantly, and no way to force them off aside from using a valuable escape item. Even when you start acquiring more powerful weapons and better gear they still act as a serious threat, because then Mr. X shows up, and suddenly all those zombies you had plenty of time to take down earlier in the game act as hard-to-dodge roadblocks that you have no time to deal with when he's hunting you down. The result is that what were originally the easiest enemies in the game to deal with are now legitimate threats once again.
  • Redemption Equals Death: Annette manages to administer the G-Virus vaccine to Sherry and apologize for being a bad mother before succumbing to her injuries.
  • Regenerating Health: On the Assisted difficulty, health will recover from Danger to Caution. Recovering from Caution to Fine still requires healing items.
  • Regional Bonus: The free "98 Classic" costume pack for Leon and Claire were initially released only in Japan for the PS4 as a timed exclusive, before being officially made available to other platforms in North America and Europe in late February 2019, and in Asia in March.
  • Renegade Splinter Faction: William has stopped taking orders from Umbrella USA's headquarters entirely, making the NEST a splinter Umbrella faction. The NEST is backed up by Chief Irons, who also runs an Umbrella facility, but Irons is likely unaware of the schism and thinking he is still working for Umbrella proper.
  • Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: Zigzagged. In the lore, this is true, and mechanically it's reinforced by the "Critical Hit" system, where a pistol shot to the head has a random chance, which is modified by the Adaptive Difficulty, to make the target zombie's head explode in a gory mess that is a guaranteed kill. In the game, however, it's essentially defied; zombies can take anywhere between 5-10 pistol shots to the head before they die, and even that isn't guaranteed, as a downed zombie may randomly get back up at full health. Leon's shotgun is usually capable of destroying a zombie's head in one to two shots, but the Adaptive Difficulty means that even it isn't a sure-fire killer like it has been in other games. It is generally much more efficient to either destroy a zombie's leg with 2-3 shots, forcing them to crawl and generally be much easier to avoid, or else shoot them once in the head to stagger them, then simply run past. Attempting to kill every single zombie you meet will deplete your ammo stores extremely fast.
  • Retirony: The completion screen for the 1-Shot Demo features a note from a K9 Unit Officer stating that he is only a few days away from retirement.
  • Retraux: If the classic soundtrack isn't quite enough to scratch your nostalgia itch on its own, there is also a free DLC that reverts Leon and Claire both to their low-polygon models from the 1998 original.
  • Reusable Lighter Toss: In Leon's route, he and Ada come across Annette Birkin in the sewers, who tosses a zippo on a zombie corpse, burning it as she runs away.
  • Revolvers Are for Amateurs: Claire starts with the "SLS 60" a snub nose 5-shot revolver that she reloads one bullet at a time. This emphasizes how she's really just a 19-year-old college student who just happens to have a bit of training from her brother. That being said, the upgrades to the SLS pushes her into the other trope.
  • Revolvers Are Just Better: Claire has a Smith & Wesson Model 38/49 "Bodyguard" as her starting gun instead of a Browning Hi-Power, although you do find the Browning later. And the weapon upgrades do make it better: the speed loader significantly increases it's reload speed, while the reinforced frame lets it fire .357 Magnum ammo. During her 2nd Run campaign, she gets a .45 ACP Ruger Blackhawk, which is a modern version of the classic "Peacemaker" Colt Single Action Army. And while it's the most powerful non-Magnum handgun in the game, the only drawbacks are that you can't craft ammo for it and its reload speed is very slow because, just like with the real deal, the action requires rounds to go in and come out one at a time.
  • Run or Die: Unlike in the original game or with his successor Nemesis, shooting Mr. X is a horrible idea in this entry: it takes tons of precious ammunition, it incapacitates him for all of 30 seconds, and you don't get any goodies for your trouble. Only when you're completely cornered or during one puzzle that requires pushing several bookcases in the library to make a bridge (which is lengthy and leaves you completely vulnerable) is it a good idea to shoot him.
  • Scary Shadow Fakeout: You're tricked into thinking that a zombie is waiting around the corner on the third floor of the Police Station, only to find out that it's a small statue on a desk with a lamp behind it. Then in the 2nd Run, there really is a zombie there.
  • Schizo Tech: Saving is still done via typewriters. Now, seeing these old school typewriters in a highly advanced underground lab that is NEST?
  • Schmuck Bait:
    • Mr. X really likes his hat. Wouldn't it be funny if you shot it off his head?
    • The first thing you do in the 1st Run is to check the computer in the lobby and see Elliot needing help. In the 2nd Run, he's already dead but the laptop is still on. Checking it causes Mr. X to spawn immediately, as you see him walking through the halls right towards you, a nod to the original game.
  • Sewer Gator: Again, the Giant Alligator can be found in the sewers beneath Raccoon City. Unlike the original game, it has been reduced to an Advancing Boss of Doom requiring perhaps a little more effort than Salazar's giant statue and you only need to shoot a gas pipe to kill it.
  • Ship Tease: A surprising amount between Leon and Claire, considering that the existing canon has firmly established that Leon falls for Ada. But then again, canon has also established Leon as the type of person who would hit on anyone, as Hunnigan and Angela can testify.
  • Shows Damage:
    • Due to the more advanced game engine, heroes and enemies alike show damage more clearly than they did in the original. Leon and Claire's wounds actually appear on their character models, they scar/close after using a healing item, and their clothes get bloody from them. Zombies in particular can get nasty, with each round put into them taking chunks out. You can even get zombies with about half their head left still walking around if you try to put enough handgun rounds into them or don't get a direct shot with the shotgun.
    • Tofu visibly gets chunks removed from him as his health drops.
  • "Shut Up" Kiss: Leon and Ada's kiss on the tram, which comes across as much less genuine than the original version's Last Kiss. When Leon expresses misgivings about Ada asking him to retrieve the G-sample in her stead, she kisses him to silence any further protests.
  • Signature Headgear: This time around, Mr. X wears a fedora that makes him look like Freddy Krueger or The Fisherman. Take care when fighting him: blowing his hat off will make him much more determined to murder you.
  • Silliness Switch: Tofu is a walking block of tofu, wearing a beret, that mutters in Japanese and wields a knife. In the middle of a zombie-infested Survival Horror game.
  • Sir Swears-a-Lot: Both Leon and Claire are very foulmouthed in their adventures in Raccoon City, especially when they're terrified.
  • Skip the Anesthetic: One of the Apocalyptic Logs found in the Umbrella lab details researchers surgically implanting "G" embryos into subjects. Not only were they not given anesthetic, they were intentionally kept lucid for as long as possible.
  • Solve the Soup Cans: Not that the original didn't have a lot of soup cans itself, but the remake really amped up the absurdity of some of these. The worst of these is the chess-themed power plugs puzzle in the sewers. In the original, you just needed to find four plugs, which all slotted into the same lock, and it was done. In the remake? You need six plugs, but each plug needs to be placed in a specific socket, and almost all of the sockets have had their identifying label ripped off. Your only clue is in a single short note on the bulletin board, which gives you some vague hints as to where some of the pieces go. It's even worse in the 2nd Run version, where part of the answer's switch is the fact that one of the two intact labels is wrong.
  • Start to Corpse: The truck driver mows down the game's first zombie entirely on accident. Unfortunately for him, she doesn't stay down very long.
  • Stealth-Based Mission: Since Sherry is still a child, she has to hide from Chief Irons during her gameplay.
  • Story Branching: Since Leon never meets Marvin in his 2nd Run, at least not before he zombifies, he doesn't get his cop uniform from him. Instead, he finds an open locker containing a spare uniform in the guardroom where he gets his M19 and the key to the courtyard gate, and changes there.
  • Stylistic Suck: Equipping the "98 Classic" costumes revert Leon and Claire into their old, 1998-style models in all their low-poly glory.
  • Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
    • Leon was a rookie cop in the original game, but here it shows heavily. He has trouble handling his first zombie because he was unprepared, he nearly has a breakdown when he fails to save a fellow officer and has to be reprimanded by Marvin because his training and heroic mindset will get him killed. This is seen in his route when he meets Ben; he refuses to let him out before checking with Chief Irons, even as Ben tells him that Irons is not to be trusted, simply because he's following protocol, which results in Mr. X breaking through the wall behind Ben and killing him.
    • Leon arrives in Raccoon City in his civilian clothes, instead of his police uniform, which he receives upon arriving at the police station. Uniforms are almost never issued before the first day, so Leon wouldn't have had it with him until he reported for duty. He still has his gun from the beginning, however, because it wasn't issued to him by the department — as was already implied in the original, it's his personal carry gun.
    • Claire was just a regular civilian with some gun training for self-protection. Like Leon, she is unprepared for the threat of zombies, especially because unlike Leon, she was never expecting to run into dangerous situations like this. Like Leon, Marvin has to reprimand her because if she hesitates, she's as good as dead. However, Marvin is noticeably gentler about it than he is with Leon, since she's just a concerned citizen looking for her brother. This can also be seen in how Claire and Leon often react to certain traumatic moments; whereas Leon tends to give a sad sigh or restrain his anger, Claire nearly breaks down in tears, and is more vocal with her frustrations.
    • Leon's fellow officers were planning a welcoming party involving a few puzzles for him to have to figure out to open his desk for the first time, among other things. When the events of the game occurred, many of the puzzles remain because with how chaotic things were removing them was pointless, and nobody is left alive who could even help fix it.
    • Previous games rarely shows children being targets of a B.O.W. attack. Here, children in danger is on full display. Robert Kendo tries to prevent Leon and Ada from coming near his daughter after she got infected after Mercy Killing his own wife, who turned. This causes Leon and Ada to be in Stunned Silence after a gunshot is heard.
    • Unlike almost every single game in the series, the knife can break after being used too many times. Using the knife to break things or stab enemies will naturally have it lose durability.
    • Unlike in the original game where Leon blindly accepts Ada and puts his trust in her, here Leon is rightly skeptical of Ada for a while, and it isn't until she tells him she's going after Umbrella that he even remotely begins trusting her. Ada is being suspicious, knows more than she is letting on, and is skilled enough to where she is able to survive while others aren't. When Annette later warns him about Ada after she's been mortally injured by William, Leon drills Ada for answers. Because what reason would Annette have to lie to him when she's dying?
  • Tactical Door Use:
    • Partially averted. In previous games up to RE7, running through and closing a door was a surefire way to escape zombies, no matter how flimsy it was. However, in this game, zombies will actively chase the player through doors and even try to break them down if possible. The only areas they do not chase the player into are the central chamber, the handful of save rooms scattered around the station, and rooms with puzzles that require the player to explore a single room, such as the clock tower.
    • Partially averted with Mr. X. When he's looking for you, he will chase you everywhere, even in the otherwise safe main hall. However, he won't follow you into save rooms, the clock tower, or the S.T.A.R.S. office.
    • The players can actually "hide" behind certain doors by standing behind them as they open. This trick is particularly useful against Mr. X, as he won't be able to realize he's been had until he's walked a fair distance from the doorway, allowing fleet-footed players to slink past him when being chased. It doesn't work if he's already in the room or opening said door before one could hide, however.
  • Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Certain weapons in the remake are distinctly better against certain enemies. The Spark Shot is excellent against Lickers and G-Types, but not as good against zombies and almost useless against Birkin. Acid grenades are very effective against Lickers but are much less devastating to zombies, Ivy Zombies and G-Type Adults. Incendiary grenades are most effective because they can one-hit kill zombies and burn up Ivy Zombies, but they're also far less common compared to acid rounds and you cannot craft them.
  • Take Your Time: Leon has to find and save Ada, while Claire has to find and save Sherry. You can take as long as you like solving puzzles and backtracking to clear out previously visited areas.
  • Taking You with Me: After a G-Spawn is killed, it will rear up and collapse on whatever happens to be in front of it. Should that happen to be Leon or Claire, they will take some considerable damage, possibly even lethal if they're hurt to begin with or on Hardcore.
  • That's an Order!: Marvin sternly orders Leon to leave him behind and raises his voice after Leon insists to bring him to the hospital.
  • The Three Faces of Eve: The three female characters fall into the molds, which helps the Coming of Age Story that is Leon's plot. This is made far more explicit in this game:
    • Claire has added Ship Tease with Leon and spends most of the game looking after Sherry and trying to protect her. Sherry even thinks Claire and Leon are a couple and suggests in the ending that she and Leon adopt her, fitting her neatly as the Wife.
    • Claire's Adaptational Modesty means that Ada's dress looks more seductive then ever. Also without the John subplot, she is that more available landing her squarely in the Seducer role.
    • Sherry is obviously the Child. Her segment takes place in a new area, an orphanage just to be more clear.
  • Timed Mission:
    • Ada gets one minute to escape from an incinerator.
    • Leon and Claire get ten minutes to escape from the lab and beat the Final Boss. The clock stops when you beat the boss.
  • Too Awesome to Use:
    • The Lightning Hawk can be this, if you cannot scrounge up enough ammo to maintain it and have wasted enough High-grade gunpowder to craft shotgun shells.
    • The .357 rounds for Claire's upgraded revolver. They're about as hard to find as Leon's .50AE ammo, but the crucial difference is that you can't craft more of these, meaning she only gets about fourteen of them in the entire game.
  • Tragic Keepsake: Averted as Leon throws away the chip bracelet he got from Ada. This is consistent with later games as they don't have a bond over items.
  • Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Not a big part of the game, but there are a few examples:
    • You probably won't work out Sherry's escape route from her captor on your first go, and it's game over the second he catches her.
    • Leon's escape from the Sewer Gator sees him running towards the camera. It's hard to plan ahead when you can't see where you're going.
    • Training Mode in The Ghost Survivors is explicitly for learning enemy placement.
  • The Un-Smile: When Marvin tells Claire that Chris left over a month ago, meaning her whole reason for coming to Raccoon City was pointless, she gives an obviously strained smile that is a cross between relief that Chris is safe and trying not to scream at the irony of the situation.
  • Undead Child: Subverted. Robert Kendo's daughter is shown to be gradually succumbing to the virus, but it's unknown whether she fully turns into a zombie when her father shoots her because it happens behind a closed door.
  • Unique Enemy: There are 3 total zombies that are dressed up like HUNK's USS crew, sans helmets.
  • Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The USS operative known as J. Martinez. His shooting of Birkin set off a chain of events that eventually resulted in the deaths of a hundred thousand people, the fall of Umbrella, and the resignation of a U.S. President.
  • Universal Ammunition: The game can be rather confusing about this:
    • All standard handgun ammo is 9mm. Most of the guns in the game do use this ammo in real life, but some don't. Claire's S&W Bodyguard revolver is a .38 Special firearm in real life, note  which doesn't normally chamber and fire 9mm rounds unless used with a moon clip.
    • Ada's pistol is a Mauser HSc, a firearm that is only chambered for either .32 ACP or .380 ACP. While it shares the latter ammo type with Claire's Ingram MAC-11, their ammunition don't interchange in-game.
    • HUNK's MP5A3 is chambered in the same .380 ACP ammo as the MAC-11 Claire obtains: while the caliber is accurate for the MAC-11, no MP5 variant in real life is manufactured to use .380 ACP ammo. That said, while the MP5 can chamber and fire .380 ACP ammo, it usually fails to cycle it due to the .380 round's lower pressure.
    • An aversion with the M1911A1 and the Ruger Blackhawk both using "Large-caliber Handgun Ammo", or .45 ACP.
  • Villainous Rescue: In Claire's scenario, Mr. X corners her and Sherry in an elevator. All seems lost until Birkin suddenly impales Mr. X from behind, killing him. Unfortunately, Birkin then transforms into his second form, and attacks Claire and Sherry himself, sending the elevator down the shaft.
  • Violation of Common Sense:
    • Every instinct compels the player to rush from point A to point B as quickly as possible, yet moving slowly helps you to stay quiet, making it possible to sneak by a lot of enemies without drawing their attention.
    • Testing determined that Claire actually moves faster in her "Caution" state than in her "Fine" state.
  • Wacky Sound Effect: The "walking" noise of Tofu and co. more than qualify, as everyone moves to the sound of wobbly jelly.
  • Was It All a Lie?: Leon confronts Ada after learning that she's been lying about being an FBI agent and is in fact a mercenary paid to acquire the G-Virus. He asks if she was just using him, and her response is of the evasive kind, but she is later unable to shoot him, showing that she came to genuinely care about him:
    Ada: I really hoped it wouldn't end like this.
    Leon: So that's all this was... I was just some pawn to you?
  • We Gotta Stop Meeting Like This: At the end of Claire's 2nd Run in the remake, when the persistent William Birkin/G charges after her and the others at their final battle, we get this exchange:
    Claire: We really got to stop meeting like this.
  • What Measure Is a Mook?: A VHS tape can be found on the body of a dead USS mercenary, A. Kirkpatrick, who desperately pleads G-Birkin to not kill a fellow USS mercenary; G-Birkin ignores him and kills the mercenary.
  • What the Hell, Hero?: Kendo rages at Leon for the police's inability to stop the outbreak, being completely unaware that the police's defense of the city was purposefully crippled by Chief Irons and Leon was also clueless due to it being his first day on the job.
    Robert: You're a cop. You're supposed to know something. How did this happen!? HUH!?
  • Why Won't You Die?:
    • An apparent Running Gag. Claire, Leon, and Ada gets increasingly exasperated when an Implacable Man are after them, and they tend to exclaim among the lines of "Why don't you stay dead!?".
    • Players going into the remake fresh are all but guaranteed to raise this question, due to the greatly enhanced toughness of, well, everything. Even the basic zombie could withstand eating more than one full 15-round magazine of 9mm ammo or even a shotgun blast to the face and still wouldn't die, despite having half of their head sheared off.
  • Would Hurt a Child: Aside from kidnapping and possibly planning to murder Sherry, Chief Irons also moonlights as a director of an orphanage that uses children as guinea pigs for Umbrella's grisly experiments. Odds are that he also probably had a hand in making the call for Umbrella to kill all the children there to prevent a viral outbreak.
  • Would Hit a Girl: Chief Irons hits Claire several times when she tries to stop him from kidnapping Sherry, and going by his methodical killing of the mayor's daughter, is capable of going further than that.
  • You Have Researched Breathing: Apparently, Claire doesn't know how to use the stock on her MQ 11 until she equips it with the Suppressor mod, which fully extends it and allows her to properly shoulder the thing.
  • You Shouldn't Know This Already:
    • Defied with the puzzles, safes, and combo locks. The solutions for plot objective-related puzzles aren't randomized and only differ if are you playing the 1st or 2nd Run, while the combinations for every safe and padlock are the same in every playthrough. This is a boon to speedrunners and means every solution can be put in a cheat-sheet. None of them hold plot relevant equipment so no Sequence Breaking.
    • Played straight with the hidden equipment. Without the film roll revealing their locations, the prompts won't work even if you know where they are.
    • This is played straight with the portable safes, which have the button combination needed to unlock them randomized every new game.
    • The game prevents you from advancing with the Infinite Knife early once you head to the RPD. The knife will be grayed out, and you have to use the one Marvin gives you after he saves you.
  • Your Head A-Splode:
    • After running from it for a bit, the alligator ends up stuck chewing on a gas line. Shooting the pipe blows off its head, killing the thing.
    • Ben's fate in the remake is Mr. X squishing his head until it pops.
  • Zerg Rush: Zombies in this one can come in droves and with the over the shoulder system à la RE4 will likely take you by surprise if you're not careful.

    The Ghost Survivors 
  • Adaptational Badass: In the main game proper, Katherine Warren is a corpse when you see her. In her playable scenario, she becomes a zombie slaying Kicking Ass in All Her Finery with her loadout being a SLS 60 revolver and a flamethrower. Bonus points in that she actually kills Chief Irons with a knife.
  • Alternate Universe: The set of stories all take place in a world where the survivors... survived their initial encounters (Robert doesn't shoot himself, Katherine escapes Irons, Ghost survives Birkin, Sherrif Cortini kills the zombie).
  • And Your Reward Is Clothes: Completing certain Records challenges introduced in the DLC unlocks a multitude of different headgear for the playable characters to wear. They range from mostly goofy stuff like a mascot head to live raccoons hugging your characters' heads à la Ratatouille, to enlarged (and animated) heads of various monsters in the series. These are mostly for show, though the unlockable Cat Ears grant unlimited reserve ammunition when equipped, but getting it is no small feat, and your high score isn't logged as long as it's worn.
  • Anti-Frustration Features:
    • To avoid leaving the player entirely defenseless, No Way Out gives Cortini's Broom Hc infinite reserve ammunition, though it does track the number of rounds you use from it. Granted, to get those coveted Cat Ears, you can only fire it sixty times.
    • In the same scenario, it is possible for zombies in an attack wave to not enter the store properly and remain stuck outside beyond the player's reach. Capcom seemingly anticipated this, as the zombies will eventually collapse and perish on their own after enough time has passed.
  • Bottomless Magazines: Daniel is the only playable character whose handgun has unlimited ammo by default, though he does reload down to the last bullet.
  • Doomed by Canon: Three of the DLC protagonists are this (Katherine Warren, Sheriff Cortini and Ghost). Kendo's fate in the main game is never really confirmed, although it's implied that he did commit suicide after Leon and Ada entered the sewers.
  • Dying as Yourself: In Robert's campaign, he shoots Emma before she can completely succumb to the T-virus infection.
  • Elite Zombie: Each scenario has different enemies depending on the character you play as:
    • Katherine Warren faces Pale Heads, a mutant zombie that looks like a blend of the Regenerators and the White Molded. And they also feel like such a hybrid, since they regenerate from conventional damage, and can only be killed with either the chemical flamethrower or by way of a headshot from the SLS 6 loaded with High-Powered Handgun Rounds.
    • Robert Kendo encounters poisonous zombies that can inflict a Poisoned status effect onto him through bites or the Fog of Doom that they expel on death. Thankfully, the zombies themselves are somewhat squishier than normal, and the cloud dissipates on its own rather quickly and it's pretty short-ranged.
    • Ghost faces armored zombies, meaning you can no longer reliably cheese over kneecapping them. The only silver lining is that most armored zombies aren't completely covered, meaning the exposed flesh are their weakspots, and heavier weaponry like grenades can still harm them.
    • Sheriff Daniel Cortini faces all three. At once, too, during the later waves. And sometimes poisonous armored zombies will spawn.
    • All of the scenarios feature zombies carrying explosive canisters on their backs that act as potential hazards as well as methods of dealing with large groups of zombies. In addition, there are zombies carrying backpacks which are guaranteed to drop items when killed.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation: It took one bite on the neck from a zombie to kill Sheriff Cortini. Yet in his "No Way Out" scenario, depending on his health status, he's no worse for wear when enemy zombies bite him on the neck as a playable character.
  • Gimmick Level: Each of the Ghost Survivors campaigns has a specific gimmick to it — No Time to Mourn has Robert encountering poisonous zombies, Runaway has Katherine encounter a zombie variant that can only be killed with powerful ammo, Forgotten Soldier has Ghost face zombies wearing body armor, and No Way Out has Sheriff Daniel Cortini faces off against all of them, sometimes even combined, in a Mercenaries-style level set entirely in the confines of the gas station.
  • Hold the Line: In "No Way Out", Daniel Cortini fights off a horde of 100 zombies that break into the gas station.
  • Instant-Win Condition: As with The 4th/Tofu Survivor, simply reaching the end of a scenario means an instant victory regardless of how beaten up you are, or how large the mob of zombies mere inches away from you just moments prior were. There's no such luck in the No Way Out scenario, however, since the scenario only ends when you've killed the final, 100th, zombie.
  • Interface Screw: Whether by design or coincidence, the blocky design of Tofu and his friends is this. While they use the same camera angle as Leon and Claire, their huge shapes and wobbly movement actually obstruct a lot of the player's vision, making it hard to spot anything at all to the left of the characters, especially while aiming or using a sub-weapon.
  • Interrupted Suicide: In Robert's scenario, after having to Mercy Kill his daughter, he draws the gun on himself and is about to pull the trigger. The only thing stopping him was his partner calling him on a radio.
  • Jiggle Physics: The various tofu blocks have plenty of wobbly jiggling whenever they move. According to producer of the game, Tsuyoshi Kanda, the team over at Capcom scanned the jiggly movement and texture of real-life tofu in order to make the character as "realistic" as possible.
  • Loose Canon: The entire DLC itself is a collection of What If? scenarios where certain characters survived their canonical deaths and somehow found a way to safety. Bonus points go to the Runaway scenario, where the focus character not only managed to avert her untimely demise, but also killed her would-be murderer in self-defense.
  • No Fair Cheating: Equipping the unlockable Cat Ears trinket grants unlimited reserve ammunition during a run, though it also voids your high score until you take it off.
  • Secret Final Campaign: After completing the three available campaigns, a secret fourth scenario is unlocked, where the player must Hold the Line as Sheriff Daniel Cortini, the officer in the gas station opening sequence, who decided to shoot the zombie, which overpowered him when the Player Character of the main game meets him, instead of restraining it.
  • Series Continuity Error: A minor one, but Robert Kendo's W-870 shotgun lacks the Long Barrel upgrade it had in Leon's campaign.
  • Shows Damage: In the "Tofu Survivor" game, Tofu and co. visibly gets chunks removed as their health drops.
  • Unique Enemy: Mr. X is this in the Forgotten Soldier scenario, dropping by just as Ghost approaches the main entrance to NEST.
  • What If?: Each character's story begins with a film reel showing what might happen had something presented itself that could save them in the main canon: a knife within reach, a radio call precious seconds early, a zombie shot instead of arrested...
  • Yank the Dog's Chain: In Forgotten Soldier, Ghost survived Birkin's ambush for several days in the city's sewers, fought his way back to the NEST, retrieved the G-Virus sample, and fought his way back out to the entrance of the NEST... only for Ada to ambush him and steal his loot. The only thing that prevents this from going full Shoot the Shaggy Dog is that whether he was killed or not is left ambiguous.
  • Wacky Sound Effect: Tofu and co.'s walking sound is wobbly jelly.

 
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Alternative Title(s): Biohazard RE 2, Resident Evil 22019

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Keeping Score

Initially, Ada is annoyed at Leon constantly getting into trouble. When she says how many times she's saved him, Leon's responds that he didn't know she was keeping score. Later, when Leon saves her, Ada is surprised at his willingness to stick with her and reflects his earlier "keeping score" comment back at him.

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