YMMV / Resident Evil 2 (Remake)

• Resident Evil 2

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• Adorkable: Leon Kennedy is an idealistic, determined rookie cop prone to making snarky and often dorky comments.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • A Single Action Army model using .45 ACP instead of .45 LC is nothing new, as demonstrated by this fine example of a 1983 SAA with dual cylinders for both calibers. Even then, upon closer inspection of its parts, the "Quickdraw Army" is not a Single Action Army, but a Ruger Blackhawk, a visually-similar pistol designed after the SAA that's capable of comfortably loading and firing .45 ACP ammunition.
  • Claire's Smith & Wesson Bodyguard being able to fire both 9mm and .357 Magnum after an upgrade is actually quite possible in reality. While .357 Magnum rounds are longer and thus won't fit .38 Special cylinders, a revolver chambered in .357 from the start can fit both. Such is the case of the Smith & Wesson 649, a later variant of the Bodyguard that has a longer cylinder, which the Reinforced Parts practically transform it into. It's also possible to load 9mm rounds in a .38 Special/.357 Magnum revolver through the use of moon clips (but it's a borderline case as they can't just drop right in; it requires machining out a little in the chambers and on the cylinder face to make them fit).
  • The desktop computer in the RPD main lobby was replaced with a laptop computer. Laptop computers aren't exactly a recent thing, having existed since the late-1970s in some capacity or another, and anyone who came of age before 1998 can readily confirm their commonality even then. Although both the model of laptop itself and the OS it's using appear to be completely fictional.
  • The MP5 can in fact be chambered in .380ACP, the same caliber the MAC-11 uses; while the MP5 would have trouble cycling effectively due to the .380ACP's lower pressure compared to 9mm, it can still chamber and fire and can fit 32 rounds in the magazine (9 millimeters and 38/100ths of an inch are approximately the same diameter; it's the cartridge length that differentiates 9mm caliber from .380).
• Angst? What Angst?:
  • In the ending, Sherry seems to take the deaths of her father and mother rather easily after a moment of mourning. She even starts talking about Leon and Claire adopting her, and hopes that they'll get her a puppy and a parrot since her mom didn't let her have pets.
  • Claire goes through the trauma of Raccoon City and comes out of it joking with Sherry about how bad she smells (though this can also be interpreted as Claire trying to alleviate the situation, to help her and Sherry keep their minds off things).
  • Leon also goes through the same trauma Claire did - including his heartbreaking interaction with Robert Kendo - and proceeds to wildly veer between modes you could label "justice" and "glib flirting with Ada" (though again, this may be a jading Leon developing his Deadpan Snarker Casanova Wannabe personality he was known for in Resident Evil 4).
• Awesome Music: The 2019 game continues the trend of the original version with several standouts like:
  • Looming Dread, the theme that plays during the Fourth Survivor scenario. It's a fast-paced, adrenaline-packed theme that perfectly captures HUNK's need to quickly escape Raccoon City.
  • Black Impact, the theme that plays whenever Mr. X is chasing the player. It's a tense theme that perfectly captures the dread of being chased around by an Implacable Man and it's quite fitting that many players that listen to it are reminded of The Terminator.
  • Tofu on Fire, a rocking metal track that plays during Tofu Survivor. It adds to the awesomeness and hilarity of the situation due to being associated with a block of living tofu and its variants.
  • Saudade, the ending theme that plays after completing the 2nd Run mode. It's a rock tune and the lyrics are about feeling nostalgia for something, making the song a great tribute to the original version of the game that came out all those years ago. With all that said, it's no wonder that the song won the award for "Original Song - Video Game" at the Hollywood Music in Media Awards.
  • The Rain of Mourning, the theme for the "No Time to Mourn" scenario, is a song where you can feel the emotion in with each step you take, as Kendo fights to live on for his family. The song amps up to carry the same kind of adrenaline that Looming Dread does as you desperately fight past the never ending hordes of zombies to try to get to the LZ.
  • Collapse, which plays during Leon's escape from the self-destructing NEST. The frantic strings and ominous horns create the perfect sense of urgency. To top it off, it gets even more intense when Mr. X appears.
  • Expansion is Claire's escape music. Unlike Leon which sounds more action packed and frantic, this track is more emotional with it's violins and heroic wailing trumpets, though still epic. Since it plays right after Sherry witnesses her mother's death, Claire and Sherry's escape is more about putting aside their sadness and grief to focus on escaping, which this track captures perfectly.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Landing critical headshots on zombies, one of the few surefire signs that a zombie is really dead. Doubly so if you get it on your first or second bullet.
  • Both Leon and Claire get extremely powerful weapons at the eleventh hour: an Anti-Tank missile launcher for Leon and a Minigun for Claire. Killing Mr. X with one shot is nothing short of awesome.
  • Both of Chief Irons' deaths, which he really had coming.
    • Admit it, you felt like cheering when William showed up right as Irons cornered Sherry and went full Papa Wolf on him.
    • Though he canonically dies by G-Embryo injection, you'll be really cheering for Katherine Warren when she offs Irons by killing the bastard with a knife to his neck in her Ghost Survivors campaign's opening negative cutscene.
• Complete Monster: Raccoon City Police Chief Brian Irons is secretly working for Umbrella Corporation. A raping, murderous human taxidermist, Irons prefers killing women and having their bodies converted into stuffed dolls for him to admire. Moonlighting as the city's orphanage director, Irons, under Umbrella's orders, has hundreds of children painfully experimented on for the Birkins' scientific research, with most of the children dying. When one of the children manages to escape, Irons has Umbrella soldiers execute every child at the orphanage to cover the company's tracks.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Lickers are much harder to deal with this time around. In the original, they can be killed by two rounds from the shotgun or grenade launcher, and aren't quick enough to catch the player if they decide to just run away instead. This time around, however, they move very fast, tend to hide around corners (meaning you can't just run everywhere without alerting them), hit hard (just a couple good hits will take you from Fine to near-death), their tongue attack has much greater range than before, and they are a lot more resilient, taking as many as 8 shots from the un-upgraded shotgun. They also start appearing in locations the player will need to backtrack through, and God help you if Mr. X is catching up to you when you're planning on sneaking by one. The only thing worse than a Licker is two; facing a pair of them at the same time is blessedly rare, but it's among the most nerve-wracking moments in the entire game. One hint screen even says that there's no shame in running from them; they're just that dangerous. The only saving grace with the Lickers is they can't follow you through doors.
  • The G-Type Adults, which fortunately are only found in the sewer portion of the game. In the original, it was a boss, but here, it's now a Degraded Boss that can be a pain in the ass to deal with unless you have the chemical flamethrower or spare incendiary grenade ammo. Their attacks pack a pretty good punch, they're able to grab and poison you unless you have a sub-weapon to break out of their grip, and can spawn larva as a form of backup. Not to mention, they're quite bulky in size, and the sewers are tightly spaced, making it difficult to get around one without getting hit or grabbed. They're a bit easier to deal with when playing as Claire since you'll already have prior access to the grenade launcher, but with Leon they are trickier since you have to navigate through a narrowly spaced room filled with them to get the flamethrower.
  • Ivies, having gone from a relatively minor speedbump to one of the most nerve-wracking obstacles in the game: fast, and with their only attack being a One-Hit Kill if you don't have a subweapon on hand to ward them off with. Unless you're using fire weapons, you will need to very quickly and accurately shoot out a number of orange bulbs on the Ivies to drop them, but even if you do they'll regenerate and be back on their feet all too soon. The only way to put them down for good is to Kill It with Fire when they're already on the ground, but that's easier said than done if you haven't been managing your flamethrower fuel or incendiary grenades well enough.
  • The special zombies from the Ghost Survivors DLC are all this. The regenerating Pale Heads are probably the least annoying, since they can be put down with the flamethrower or a headshot from an SLS60 High-Powered Round. But the Poison Zombies, who release a Fog of Doom when killed, and the bulletproof Armored Zombies? Fans hate them.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • After Mr. X shows up, the police station becomes much more dangerous. He will wander the halls trying to find and kill you, and if he's nearby, any gunfire will alert him to your exact location. And you can't kill him, either; you can only hope to tire him out, at which point he'll just get back up after a minute or so. On top of this, some of the hallways you've already cleared out will contain Lickers, who you do not want to deal with while being chased. And God help you if you didn't board up as many windows as you could...
  • The 2nd Run campaigns, which are pretty much a combo of heavily remixed versions of the 1st Run campaigns and the original B scenarios. 9mm handgun ammo is nonexistent unless you use gunpowder to craft it, as all the handgun ammo pickups have been completely replaced with .45 ACP ammo for your shiny new 2nd Run exclusive sidearm, the plot related puzzle solutions are different, and Mr. X shows up much earlier than in the 1st Run. That said, the 2nd Run campaigns themselves are shorter than the 1st Run campaigns.
• Disappointing Last Level: More like "disappointing last few hours" crossed with Ending Fatigue, as some players felt that the Umbrella laboratory and especially the sewer sections towards the end of the game were too vast and went on for too long, as Super Bunnyhop explains here.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Mr. X. He was never as popular as William Birkin, Ada Wong, and HUNK were in the original game. He was even more overshadowed by Nemesis in Resident Evil 3. Frankly, he was never even as memorable as the classic Tyrant from the original. But when this game was released, Mr. X exploded in popularity for being a genuinely terrifying threat who endlessly stalks the player the moment he appears, having a memorable redesign, and for being rather memetic due to his aforementioned stalking and trolling.
  • HUNK, practically the Ensemble Dark Horse of the series, returns in the remake, and is just as badass and popular as he was before.
  • Probably the last character many hardcore fans expected to fall in love with in the remake is Robert Kendo. In the original; Kendo was good friends with Barry Burton, was the brother of the man who made the Samurai Edge line of 9mm handguns for the S.T.A.R.S. department, had a goofy voice, and was nothing more than a meme character who hilariously tried to hit on Claire and subsequently became zombie chow minutes into a character's A route. Come the Remake, and he's completely re-written to be a sympathetic every man who lost everything he ever loved thanks to Umbrella. He even has his own non-canon story mode, where you run to a helicopter pick up spot to escape the city and set up the events of Resident Evil 3. Many fans are holding out hope that by the time the remake for the third game happens, Robert will be one of the people who escapes the city thanks to Barry.
  • Ghost is also rather well-liked by some fans, due to being another rather badass Umbrella Operative like Hunk, having a badass theme, and a mildly unique design to differentiate himself from HUNK. Many fans were clamoring for him to not only survive but also be made canon.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • In the west section of the second floor in the RPD, there's a massive gaping hole near the shower room and the locker room. Considering Mr. X meets the player after they either douse the helicopter (1st Run) or after they leave the S.T.A.R.S. office (2nd Run), there's no indication that Mr. X caused that hole since he actually opens doors. It's not too far-fetched to presume the hole is caused by none other than Nemesis pursuing Jill. The remake of 3 later revealed that it was Carlos who blew the wall up, using C4 to clear a path to the S.T.A.R.S. Office.
  • The friend who offers to help Robert Kendo in his Ghost Survivor scenario is widely speculated to be Barry Burton. They are friends in canon and Barry is known to be in possession of a helicopter around this time.
• Even Better Sequel: While certain aspects of the game are divisive (especially when it comes to the "remake vs reimagining" side of things), it is one of the highest critically-rated games in the franchise, considered to be a step up over both the series' previous entry, which in itself was considered a Surprisingly Improved Sequel, and even the original Resident Evil 2. It's also gotten widespread approval from the fandom, and has incredibly high user ratings on places like Steam (an overwhelming positive rating) and Metacritic, marking a rare occasion when the professionals and the fans agree. The game that followed it however, proved to be far more divisive.
• Evil Is Cool: Mr. X is everything you could want out of a video game villain - terrifying, stylish and badass all at the same time, so the remake version of him gained a huge number of fans.
• Foe Yay Shipping: There is a significant segment of the fandom who ship or make erotic memes featuring Mr. X and one (or both) of the game's protagonists whom he chases. Yaoi Fangirls and bi/gay men like the Guy on Guy Is Hot implications of Mr.X/Leon, and both heterosexual men and women show interest in the fantasy of a strong man chasing a vulnerable young woman.
• Fountain of Memes: The vast majority of the fandom's jokes about this game revolve around Mr. X. And for good reason, as his exceptionally imposing frame and dogged pursuit of the player have resulted in him being the most memorable part of the game while making him perfect material for modders to change his model, soundtrack, or even turn the other enemies into him.
• Franchise Original Sin: Some of the aspects widely criticized in Resident Evil 3 (Remake) originated here, such as short length, divisive plot changes, and the cutting of content found in the original game. The difference being that most people agreed that the problems were less visible and prevalent in this title, and it often found ways to work around them in a more satisfying manner.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Kingdom Hearts fans as this game and Kingdom Hearts III were released around the same time.
  • Quite a few Dead Space fans latched onto this game for being the closest we may ever get to a proper sequel, thanks to its amazing zombie dismemberment and similar shooting mechanics (ironic, considering the original Dead Space already borrowed a lot from Resident Evil 4).
• Game-Breaker: The knife itself is one of the two most damaging weapons in the game, other than a rocket launcher. The knife causes 10 points of damage, but if used on a boss, it will cause clipping damage where it will hit five areas on a boss. Meaning bosses receive 50 times more damage than a gunshot. Even better is that you can obtain a knife with infinite durability by shooting all the Mr. Raccoon toys, which doesn't subtract your score like the special guns do.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The zombies themselves are annoying to deal with if you try to evade them. Their ability to grab you from a distance due to what appears to be Hitbox Dissonance means unless you got a defense item, you will take damage. Getting grabbed from behind is even worse since the zombie's bite from behind can take your health from green (fine) to orange (caution). Pistols require lots of bullets, especially headshots, to put one down. Even trying to kneecap them with pistol shots can take a few rounds. Count yourself incredibly lucky if your pistol headshot manages to actually kill a zombie in less than three shots.
  • Dogs aren't too tough, and go down with just a few pistol shots if you can draw a good bead on them, but that's the trick; they move so fast it's hard to get a lock on them, and their hit and run tactics means that by the time you're turned to face them they're somewhere else.
  • The Ivies are even worse than the zombies, as they have a One-Hit Kill that can only be broken out of if you have a subweapon, and can regenerate themselves after a while. Plus, to even get them to back down, you have to shoot at numerous bulbs growing out of their bodies, which can be difficult to aim at since the Ivy's movements are a bit erratic.
• Good Bad Bugs: In the library, if you kneecap a zombie, then let it bite you on the leg, the struggling animation will cause your character to start floating in midair. Walking up to the collapsible floorboards will then cause Leon or Claire to phase through the floor as it breaks, allowing them to access out-of-bounds areas. Colloquially known as the "Airwalk", this is a Speedrunner's godsend, as it allows one to outright skip many parts of the game and avoid Mr. X. It's especially required on Hardcore mode, if one were attempting to get an S+ rank on that mode which requires that you beat the game in under 2-and-a-half hours ^note it's worse in the 2nd scenario, where you have to beat the game in under 2 hours period, though this is justified as the second scenario is comparatively shorter. However, it's recommended to save before attempting the glitch, as it is quite difficult to actually pull off in that, you specifically have to be up the first flight of stairs, then walk backwards into the zombie's back.
  • It's also possible to do this as Ada, and be able to skip the part where she becomes injured entirely. This lets the player take on G-2 as Ada and makes the item box accessible to her, though progressing past this point causes a glitch that soft-locks the game.
  • For some reason, stunned zombies don't react when Mr. X tries to smack them out of the way. When a zombie is stunned by a flashbang grenade, Mr. X will attempt to push a zombie out of his way, but the zombie won't react to this, and it looks like he's punching them.
  • When you use the detonator with the C4, hiding in front of the door to the library second floor will keep the book shelf from falling over in front of it, saving you the hassle of setting it back up to go out that way again.
• He Panned It, Now He Sucks!: IGN caught flak for their original review complaining about Leon and Claire having the exact same routes, meaning that he had only played their "A" routes and completely missed their "B" routes (which the game explicitly tells you exists after you complete your first playthrough). Naturally, fans pointed out the problem of releasing a review when the reviewer clearly and literally played only half of the game. IGN quickly rewrote the review and raised the score to a 9.0 with an apology.
• Inferred Holocaust: The Ghost Survivors DLC has a character having a happy ending, with Robert Kendo being an exception to what happens in the results screen: Katherine Warren fights a horde to reunite with Ben, but her result screen shows her and Ben running from a pair of zombie dogs, Ghost manages to escape NEST, only to be held up by Ada and we see his helmet on the ground. Daniel Cortini is saved by Leon, but considering the latter is heading to Raccoon City, no doubt he's gonna face its horrors, especially Mr. X and G-Birkin if he did survive that long.
• Jerkass Woobie: William Birkin is one in this game due to him being an Adaptational Nice Guy who spends the first part of the game Fighting from the Inside against the G-Virus. On the one hand, he's a selfish Mad Scientist who is at least partially responsible for the outbreak, but on the other, he sincerely loved Sherry and absolutely horrified by his impulse to infect her. By the end, Leon regards his death as something of a Mercy Kill.
• LGBT Fanbase: Leon has gained a sizable admiration from bi/gay men (and Yaoi Fangirls) who fantasize about he and Mr.X being an Uke/Seme pair. Game mods and fanart in which Leon undergoes severe Ukefication have given rise to the Fan Nickname "Twink Leon" in the LGBT community.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Mr. X is this due to his invulnerability, and the fact he shows up at the most inconvenient times. He's referred to as the "Destroyer of Noobs" on /v/ for a reason.
  • Tofu and his variants are this as well, thanks to fans eating him up as the other biggest badass in Resident Evil despite being a literal block of Tofu, and Capcom seems to notice this by giving them the most badass theme known to man.
• Memetic Loser: Agent GHOST from the Ghost Survivors DLC ended up becoming a favorite subject of mockery due to his resemblance to HUNK and for the fact that he's the only survivor whose story doesn't end on a triumphant note. He's also implied to be J. Martinez, the soldier that shoots Birkin to death on impulse, gets rebuked by HUNK for it and inadvertantly leads to the birth of G. Jokes have quickly spread around the notion that he's basically HUNK with none of the badassery (or the competence). In response to HUNK's awesome codename of "Human Unit Never Killed", fans have dubbed GHOST the unflattering equivalent that is "Generic Human On Suicidal Task".
• Memetic Molester: Chief Irons. Ignoring his backstory in the original game and the fact that he gets off on stuffing animals and human women, some fans have referred to the remake version of him as a pedophile, taking note of his snooping lab right across Sherry's hostage room and God only knows what his true intentions for the poor girl are. Most of Irons' dialogue with Sherry just reeks of sexual undertones, and the Game Over screen says "you are trapped" instead of "you are dead" if she gets caught by him during the orphanage sequence.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • WE DO IT! ^note In Yoshiaki Hirabyashi's video thanking fans for their passion in getting Resident Evil 2 a remake and confirming that it had been approved for development, he pulls back his vest to reveal a shirt printed with broken English expressing excitement over the success of the endeavor. Fans quickly latched on to the genuine enthusiasm he showed during the video and "WE DO IT!" became a rallying cry among the fanbase.
  • MR. X GON' GIVE IT TO YA!^note Mashups of gameplay sequences of Mr. X doing his thing with DMX's signature rap became common shortly after the game's release. Not even a month after release there's already a mod replacing "Black Impact", Mr. X's in-game soundtrack, with the song.
  • Mr. X by himself has become a meme in the Resident Evil subreddit, mostly for his major trolls and unending pursuits of the player.
  • Chrisposting^Explanation A joke where Chris is a massive Leon x Claire Shipper on Deck, and is (often forcefully) trying to get Leon to date his sister and "continue the Redfield legacy". The large amounts of Ship Tease the two receive here that canonically doesn't seem to go anywhere in future entries certainly helps. It also serves as an effective Lampshade Hanging of the No Hugging, No Kissing nature of the main characters, who despite 20 years of adventures have never settled down.
  • Claireposting^Explanation The distaff countepart of Chrisposting, where Claire begs Jill Valentine to get with Chris in order to stop him ranting to her and Leon about continuing the Redfield legacy.
  • Leon's faces from DP023's 500% Facial Animation series also became a meme of its own.
  • Leon misunderstanding the innuendo Ada makes. Best exemplified here.
• Moral Event Horizon: As if Umbrella wasn't evil enough, a new sidestory included in the remake takes their depravity up to eleven. Through various recovered reports, the player can find out that Umbrella set up an orphanage as a front so they could have easy access to orphans to be experimented on in the secret lab underneath the building. It's implied Umbrella had already performed their experiments on over six hundred children before one of the subjects attempted to escape, making it only as far as the orphanage. In order to contain any possible outbreak, Umbrella promptly executed all of the orphans and covered the whole thing up. To make things even worse, they were planning to reopen the orphanage before the outbreak struck. And the whole kicker to this? This entire program was overseen by Annette and Chief Irons.
• Narm: Even this remake isn't immune.
• Older Than They Think:
  • This isn't the first time that a Resident Evil installment adapted Raccoon City to look like an actual city instead of a very large town. That goes as far back as the 2004 movie Resident Evil: Apocalypse, where being shot in Toronto made Raccoon City look like a real city.
  • Many of the new elements in the remake were borrowed wholesale from the original Resident Evil 1.5 build:
    • William Birkin calling out Sherry's name.
    • Ada's trench coat.
    • The RPD shooting range.
    • Sleeker design of the Umbrella lab.
    • Crashed SWAT van in the garage.
    • The drop down gates around RPD.
    • Fat police officer zombies.^note  Their first official appearance were in Resident Evil 3, since they did not make it beyond 1.5
    • Mr. X's nice hat.
    • Grenades as a (sub) weapon.^note Just like the fat zombies, grenades were available in 1.5 before Resident Evil 4.
    • Characters showing physical damage from scratches and bites.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • After meeting Mr. X, you'll be hearing his footsteps within proximity if he's close. People even mentioned that hearing their own footsteps startles them enough to have mistaken them for Mr. X's.
  • The game auto-saving because you have entered a new area: reassuring. Auto-saving because you have turned a switch: not reassuring.
  • Even dead zombies can invoke this feeling thanks to their ability to rise again after seemingly getting killed. Sometimes, you just can't tell if a zombie lying on the floor is dead or about to bite your legs off if you stray too close. Worse, bodies don't despawn over time, and the hallways of the police station can accumulate what look like a lot of corpses. Wonder how many of them are truly dead?
• Porting Disaster: The 2022 raytracing and DirectX 12 update to the PC version has much worse performance than the original, even with the raytracing disabled and the settings like-for-like, which left the game unplayable on many computers that had previously been able to run it just fine. Capcom had to make the original version available again via a Steam beta branch.
• Realism-Induced Horror: The segment in Claire's story where you play as Sherry, a helpless and unarmed child, hiding from Dirty Cop and child-predator Chief Irons in the shadows of an abandoned orphanage, is arguably the single most chilling 3 minutes in the saga. Lacking any of the slimy claws, fangs and superpowers of the other monsters of Resident Evil, Irons is all the more terrifying because he is a threat all too real and sadly common in our world.
• Remade and Improved: The game has been acclaimed by both fans and critics alike for being superior to the 1998 game in many ways, from updated controls to its more effective use of horror tropes. The reworked story also addresses a number of the original's most criticized elements (both major and minor) and making efforts to change or improve them for the better.
  • One of the most ridiculed aspects of the original game was the story's Narm-tastic handling of Leon and Ada's romance and how out-of-left-field it was given the lack of proper development between them. In the remake, Ada clearly takes advantage of Leon's greenhorn naivete to seduce and emotionally manipulate him into doing things her way, with Leon himself increasingly growing suspicious the more he learns of Ada's true motives and no longer acts so blindly smitten with her nor reacts so ham-fistedly devastated upon her apparent "demise". Overall, the remake depicts Leon and Ada's relationship in a more believable and realistic light by putting emphasis on the fact that it stems from deception and uncertainty with just enough hints of maybe something more sincere before they go their separate ways, not repeating the 1998 game's over-the-top "tragic love story".
  • The trucker that rams into Leon and Claire's procured squad car. In the original game, he somehow managed to turn into a zombie in a matter of minutes after being bitten in the arm. Here, he's bitten in the neck, and passes out from blood loss without turning into a zombie, giving infection from a zombie bite more consistency, instead of just when it would be most dramatic.
  • A big complaint in the original game was William Birkin being handed the Idiot Ball and not simply giving HUNK's unit a vial and just saying it was the G-virus, considering that he knew they were going to kill him no matter what. In this version, HUNK's team is ordered to bring him in alive, so there's no way he's going to be able to fool them for long, and the only reason he died was because one of HUNK's men opened fire on him instinctively the moment Birkin drew a gun.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Sherry was easily the most unpopular part of the original game, being a 12 year-old who acted like a whiny kindergartener while having some of the most cringeworthy lines. In the remake, her voice acting is much more natural and her stealth segment in the orphanage is one of the most genuinely terrifying moments of the game. Additionally, she even maims Chief Irons of all people by throwing a bottle of sulfuric acid at his face.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The One-Shot demo only allowed players up to 30 minutes of playtime, though you could reach the end of the demo before time was up. Many hated the limitation as it was too strict and discouraged the player from exploring. As such, some found a way to reset/freeze the timer so that they could play as long as they wanted. Capcom later released an altered version of the demo called the R.P.D. demo, which removes the time limit.
  • The player character will automatically climb up and down anything that isn't a door without the need to press the action button. This becomes especially aggravating when you're trying to explore the room for resources or trying to distance yourself from something.
  • The "Adaptive Difficulty" is this for some players, since it penalizes the player for making significant progress without expending much in the way of resources by increasing zombie damage and decreasing the damage of the player's weapons.
  • Not only does poisoning still drain your health, but instead of this being just a nuisance, now your character will very frequently stop aiming just to complain about being poisoned or suffer its effects visibly. Thankfully, the only thing that can give you this status are the G-Adults, who only appear in parts of the sewers, but those guys are already pains in the ass for their own reasons.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • The knife. It doesn't stagger enemies, and is a Breakable Weapon, making it almost useless for regular combat outside of fending off zombie grabs.
  • The Acid Rounds found here are a far cry to their devastating iteration in the past. To their credit, they can melt off zombie limbs (making them easier to evade) and can be used to stunlock Lickers and several Birkin fights fairly reliably. The problem is that the only way to get them is to combine regular gunpowder with white gunpowder, significantly limiting your supply of handgun and MQ11 bullets when both can blow off zombie legs just as well, if not better. Additionally, most lickers can be evaded by simply walking rather than running, the suppressor for the MQ11 is a Godsend against Lickers, and against Birkin, flame rounds and the Spark Shot can prove to be just as, if not more effective.
• Self-Fanservice: Ada in her trench coat is an obvious target for NSFW fan artists, as the trench coat is often the wardrobe of choice for exhibitionists, streakers, and flashers to cover themselves up with when they're...well, y'know. Needless to say, if you know where to look, you can find fan art of Ada in her trench coat and nothing else.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: DLC difficulty drop, to be precise. While the scenarios of The Ghost Survivors have their own difficulty ratings, the DLC also introduces the Training mode, which is easier than even Amateur, and provides more gameplay relief by giving out more inventory slots and resources. According to the development team, this is intended to be a "training wheel" experience of sorts, to allow players to familiarize themselves with the changes in the DLC before they take on the actual challenges. And like most training modes, you don't gain anything of practical value by completing the scenarios on this difficulty.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Well, remake difficulty spike, anyway. RE2 was one of the easier games in the franchise, for the most part, but the remake suddenly turns every encounter into a potential hell and a half of expended bullets unless you get lucky or try to evade enemies more than kill them. Mr. X is far more persistent a target, the lickers and dogs can terrorize you far more fluidly, and the zombies can chase you to other rooms if given the opportunity. Ammo is also less plentiful, and you'll need all the Gunpowder you can find. Fallen enemies also never disappear and lack obvious "tells" like a pool of blood under them, making it harder to know for sure whether or not they're merely playing possum; a blown-off head is about the only guarantee that a zombie is no longer a danger.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • The death sequences at the various enemy types are supposed to be gruesome and horrifying, but the constant fading in and out was likely done to hide the fact that aside from when the characters' or creatures' domes burst or get eaten, they don't actually get gored and instead just spawn generic entrails or the like on top to fake it, something that fading doesn't actually hide very well at all. Even getting Impaled with Extreme Prejudice just puts blood decals and effects on top.
  • Lighting effects for different areas only kick in once you fully enter the room. It's easy to notice in places like going from the station's main lobby and western office, which will be warmly lit when seen through the doorway until you pass the threshold, at which point the office immediately becomes its normal pitch-dark.
• Squick: Due to new graphic details, there's plenty of this with the highly detailed gore:
  • The sewers look really disgusting, especially the "G-Spawn Hive" area, where you have to sidle around mounds of pulsating muck that look like Meat Moss or heaped masses of intestines.
  • Lickers have a visible anus now. Most fans probably didn't appreciate just how much happier they were not knowing about that.
  • The poor bastard in the West Hall who got his face graphically torn open by a Licker. There's a closeup shot so you can see all of it.
• That One Achievement:
  • Beating the game on either campaigns with an S+ rank on Hardcore mode is quite a challenge. To clarify, you have to beat each campaign within their specific time limits (the first campaign in under 2-and-a-half hours, and the second in under 2 whole hours). There are no autosaves, your manual saves are limited via ink ribbons, the number of inventory pouches you can obtain are cut in half, and the enemies deal more damage and are more resistant to your weaponry. In addition, you cannot use any bonus weapons (save for the Infinite Knife and the pre-order DLC handguns) and you must restrict yourself to 3 saves per playthrough to get the full score.
  • Just getting an S-rank on Hardcore is no small feat, even with the safety net of having more saves and the infinite handgun at your disposal. There simply is not enough time to grab every item you see and dispatch every enemy in your way, so you must be very familiar with the game's entire layout in order to know exactly where to go, when to do certain things, what to have on you at all times, and what items to pass up so you can minimize trips to the item box while also making sure you take enough supplies that you aren't hopelessly stuck at unavoidable enemies and bosses (whose damage resistances on Hardcore sit somewhere between "brick wall" and "unusually big brick wall").
  • Minimalist: You cannot access the item box ever. This will take a complete mastery of the game's pathways and knowledge of when to pick up both main plot items AND extraneous equipment necessary to survive the game.
  • Frugalist: Don't use healing items ever. This can be another challenging trophy to get if only because your characters are surprisingly frail in this game.
  • Small Carbon Footprint. Essentially, you have to beat a playthrough while taking 14,000 steps or less. Meaning you better know where to go, minimize backtracking as much as possible as well as fleeing from enemies. Thankfully, you can check steps taken in the Records Menu.
  • Gotcha. This one requires you to beat G-2 by hitting it with the crane once. While a well-prepared player may have more than enough ammo to weaken it to that point, a new player may struggle with this, since it requires you to pump a considerable amount of ammo into it. The infinite ammo rocket launcher does alleviate this if you don't mind a grade penalty.
  • The in-game Gunslinger achievement. Offering the coveted infinite ammo to anyone who clears No Way Out with only sixty handgun bullets or less, improper planning will see you reach or surpass that threshold before long, or end up in a situation with no other ammo to work with and any of the minigame's three Demonic Spiders making life miserable for you.
• That One Boss: Pretty much every boss in the game qualifies.
  • All five of Birkin's stages, especially on harder difficulties:
    • His first form has him constantly chasing you underground, with very narrow spacing to be able to avoid his rather long ranged grab attack. Not to mention, he moves rather quickly and doesn't give you much time to aim at his eyeball. Your one saving grace is that, when you do enough damage to him, he'll retract his eyeball but will move much more slower, giving you time to grab nearby ammo, healing items, and reload your weapons. What also makes the fight annoying is he'll constantly swing his pipe against the pipes on the walls, which releases steam into the air, making it more difficult to see where he is. If you get too far away from him, he'll jump up to a higher level out of view and then attempt to jump down on top of you.
    • His second form is fought in the sewers. While there's a tad more space this time, his bulkier size and slightly increased speed can make it difficult to avoid getting hit. Plus, the only way to defeat him is to slam a crane into him. However, that is very difficult to pull off since it's possible that you can end up getting hit as well, and the crane takes a minute or two to swing around.
    • The third is in NEST. There's a lot more room to navigate yourself, but his new form is so much larger and faster that it can be difficult to do so. Not to mention, rather than his weak point being just one eyeball, there's a total of four that you have to hit (one on his shoulder, one on his leg, one on his back, and one in his chest that'll only be revealed once the other three eyeballs have been popped). Aiming at the eyeballs is difficult as he is almost constantly moving (and likes to advance with his left arm forward, so that the huge eye on its right shoulder is frequently pivoted away from you), and his attacks pack a greater punch than before.
    • The fourth time you encounter him is on a train elevator as Claire only. This time, you just have to unleash whatever ammunition you got onto his eyeball-laced chest. However, the eyeballs regenerate no matter how many times you shoot at them, and thus takes a lot of firepower to go down. He also has a nasty habit of ramming into you, which can be difficult to avoid if you don't know which direction to turn to, and he will frequently climb the walls around the area, which makes it difficult to hit him.
    • His fifth and final form is encountered on the train itself. It is less of an actual fight and more like an advancing wall of tendrils and meat. The difficulty comes from the fact that most players will have spent a vast majority of their ammo fighting either Mr. X's super form or his aforementioned 4th form. This can result in players finding themselves in a situation where they simply do not have enough ammo to prevent Birkin from approaching and instantly devouring them. He is also completely immune to damage until he reveals the giant eyeball in his maw, a fact the game does not tell you, which can result in wasting even more preciously-needed ammo.
  • Mr. X's super form can be a pain. You're on a elevator making its way to the NEST basement and the rather small size of the elevator makes it difficult to avoid his fast attacks, which only get worse as parts of the walls start crashing down onto the platform you're on. It also takes a lot of bullets to even make him flinch and he has a One-Hit Kill that's completely unavoidable unless you shoot his exposed heart, make him stumble with a grenade or lure him into charging into one of the pieces of concrete that fall from above. As if that wasn't enough, the battle is also a Timed Mission as you have to kill him before the NEST self-destructs (granted, the time limit is quite forgiving, but you're still required to be careful).
• That One Level:
  • The Sewers, especially on Leon's campaign. It's a maze where players can easily get lost in. Not helping is that this area is also where players get to fight the G-Adults. Within the sewers themselves is an even straighter example of this in the large, unskippable waterway leading to the King and Queen Plugs. While Claire will have an easier time getting around them due to having her Grenade Launcher's incendiary rounds, Leon has no such luck and will need to sink a lot of ammo in them. And God forbid you get poisoned by one of those things. Enjoy fighting through the rest of the G-Adults when you're constantly dropping your gun to cough and complain about poison.
    • The early part of the sewers is also pretty hard for Leon on Hardcore difficulty, due to a heaping helping of Fake Difficulty. The player can either a) spend an ink ribbon to save right before the gator encounter, but risk dying during Ada's long and difficult section, or b) save after Ada's section, and thus never have to do either of those sequences again. The problem is that dying in the gator encounter or Ada's section will likely set the player back by a fair amount, which is a large amount of time wasted. Choosing to save before and after the gator encounter is also somewhat difficult to justify, as using two ribbons back-to-back is a massive waste of resources. Thus, the player is put in a Sadistic Choice of either safely betting themselves to pass the gator and Ada sections or risk losing hours of time, versus securing themselves to fail the gator and Ada sections but waste an ink ribbon to do so.
  • The areas where Mr. X lurks about. He's invincible and can only be stunned, but doing so takes a lot of ammo. The player is discouraged from exploring the area and looking for items because they run the risk of him catching up to them, and there are only a handful of rooms he can't enter. If the player is really unlucky, they can get chased into a room that has a Licker in it, leaving them with two big problems.
• That One Puzzle:
  • Accessing the clock tower requires you to move a series of bookcases to form a bridge in the upstairs library. What makes this difficult is that you can't acquire the jack needed to move the bookcases until after Mr. X starts chasing you. In addition new foes, including Lickers, will have spawned in the hallways next to the room holding the jack. A simple puzzle like this is made difficult when an invincible monster is hounding you, and by extension every puzzle in the RPD is harder in the 2nd Run as Mr. X will trigger much earlier (the first time you set foot in or walk past the S.T.A.R.S. office). As if all of that were not bad enough, in either playthrough just walking into the room where the jack is located causes Mr. X to instantly become aware of your current position even if he had been searching for you on the other side of the map.
  • Similarly, Ada has an essentially simple electric puzzle made far harder by having Mr. X breathing down her neck.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Fans missed the iconic ominous voice that plays after pressing start on the title screen as well as in Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. Luckily, the announcer does say the title if the classic music swap is enabled.
  • Some players were not amused with Leon and Claire's new looks.
  • While there's actually a reason for it this time,^note that is, the localization company going for a non-union cast the voice actors being changed once again inevitably caused annoyance among fans who wished that the game could've stuck with the new current voice actors. Especially since Claire was already given a new voice actress.
  • The fixed cameras from the originals being dropped in favor of the over-the-shoulder style also wasn't received well by some.
  • Leon's revised backstory was considered by some fans to be tamer and less relatable than his original one.
  • Although it's far from a universal complaint, both the redesign of the Ivy from an ambulatory plant crudely imitating a humanoid form to a more human-like design and the cutting of the giant moth, spiders and infected crows (which were admittedly minor enemies in the original game) have attracted complaints.
  • The Advanced Licker variant found in the underground lab got a complete ax from the game, although the Lickers that appear in the final version were made significantly more dangerous to fight as a counterbalance.
  • Similar feelings to the redesign of William Birkin's fourth form now being a meaty, bipedal monster with various spikes/ribs erupting from the chest around a bundle of eyeballs as opposed to a hexapedal, panther-like monster with a flowery set of teeth (He does, however, retain a hint of his original design though, as he often goes down on all fours and charges forward like an animal). This is especially apparent in how the remake has this form fight more sluggish and sloppy than before, as Birkin is reduced to this messy state to foreshadow the blob form, while the original was notable for having greatly increased mobility and power, as though to imply that this is a perfected form of G. Concept art reveals that this form was originally more animal-like, however, and it's argued that G4 being faster and more mobile than a zombie dog on top of being grossly spongey and strong would not be a well designed boss for a game designed much more around survival rather than combat, where the original game had bosses be significantly less durable.
  • Mr. X's mutated form is much less of a change from his basic form than the original, who had mottled skin and giant claws on either hand after a dip in molten metal. Now his coat is burned off, but aside from the exposed heart, giant clawed right arm and a distorted face, he looks mostly the same. Some fans are accepting of this change, as the clean, symmetrically clawed Super form was seen as a bit exaggerated before.
  • Birkin no longer having on-screen transformations between stages was something considered a major loss, and the minor transformations in battle only occur within the current stage's form. Though there is a cutscene where Birkin kills Mr. X and in the process, completes the transformation into G2 by growing a new head.
  • The alligator boss was changed to a running segment that ends with it's jaws getting trapped on a gas pipe that you must fire at. It should be noted that this gameplay shift was unique, and adapting such a fight in a more realistic game would demand changes, though many are unsatisfied with the final direction it went (though it isn't like the original fight lasted much longer).
  • Mr. X becoming an invincible monster that constantly stalks you like Nemesis wasn't well liked by some, mostly due to the constant stalking making exploring and puzzle solving frustratingly difficult. Even if you do decide to fight it, it soaks up a ton of ammo and putting it down only saves you around 30 seconds or so until it gets back up and looks for you again.
  • Judging by the Resident Evil subreddit, one of the biggest, stem from the first run/second run making less sense plot wise then it originally did. To elaborate, the original had an A/B scenario division. Events in the A scenario only made sense after playing the B scenario and vice versa. While there are numerous instances of minor continuity errors in the overall story of the original game, the remake makes this even worse by having several glaring plot holes that make no sense, chief among them being Annette somehow dying twice and both characters sharing the first three bosses without alterations. The Already Undone for You aspect probably doesn't help (most of the key items that one character finds in the A scenario will be lying around for the other character to find in the B scenario, with many unblocked areas becoming blocked again (such as the pipe spraying steam in the locker room needing to have a crank placed on it again to turn it off, with said crank somehow moving to the other side of the station again). In all, it gives the impression that the 2nd Run was something of an afterthought when compared to the much more carefully planned-out and plotted A/B scenarios of the original, and plays like a remix of the first scenario instead of that one runs concurrently with it. It makes one wonder what's the point in playing the other 1st Run/2nd Run segment if they're exactly the same. In fact, the only real differences are Mr. X chasing the B scenario character the very first time through the RPD instead of waiting for the second, that the A-scenario character gets to meet Marvin Branagh, and as a holdover from the original, the B-character gets to finally kill William Birkin.
  • A divisive feature is how powerful they've made the zombies, with the average brain eater being extremely durable, and dangerous compared to their original counterparts, though many have also praised how Capcom managed to make zombies a genuinely terrifying threat once again, after they had suffered a bad case of Villain Decay (no pun intended) in pop culture.
  • Grenades are this to those players familiar with the remake of the original Resident Evil; in that game, the flashbang grenade, when used as a self-defense item, would decapitate the zombie it was used on, and could potentially injure or kill nearby zombies. In this game, when used as a self-defense item, flashbang grenades have no effect on their victim beyond stunning them, and frag grenades kill them. Worse, when used in this manner, the effect of the sub-weapon is confined to the zombie whose mouth it was jammed in, which can be a big shock to players familiar with the "stuff a grenade in a zombie's mouth, then use a well-timed shot to wipe out two or three zombies at once" trick from the remake of the original Resident Evil.
  • The soundtrack has more than a few winners, but just like with RE7, it's also minimalist to the point that many areas of the game have music almost inaudibly low-key, or simply have no music at all. Luckily, the optional 1998 soundtrack provides an alternative for those who prefer a more cinematic feel.
  • The protagonists can no longer examine their surroundings or background items like in the original. While this is largely inconsequential to the game progression as a whole, the lack of a character's personal thoughts and insights brought about by this change didn't sit well with many fans.
  • Some fans flipped out over Capcom eventually releasing a DLC pack that opens up all unlockable content in the main game,^note Not including Ghost Survivors mode as they feel giving casual players (or those with no tolerance for speed running) the means to bypass the often stiff challenges needed to unlock most rewards cheapens the accomplishment for those skilled enough to master the game.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The Ghost Survivors mini campaigns would have made for good What If? versions of Leon's and Claire's Campaign. Imagine going through the story as Katherine or Robert.
  • Annette Birkin seems to be more concerned with the G Virus than with her daughter's survival, but in one cutscene, she mutters "There are millions of lives at stake." We could have had scenes in which she decides that she has to put saving Raccoon City above saving Sherry, either in flashback or while talking to Claire.
• Unexpected Character:
  • It's not a huge shock, but how many were expecting the game to contain a reference of Officer Rita from Resident Evil: Outbreak: File #2?
  • Robert Kendo and Katherine Warren are playable characters in the Ghost Survivors DLC, both being very shortlived characters. Similarly, all the promotion for Ghost Survivors focused on Kendo, Katherine, and a USS soldier; down to identifying the mode as having three characters; it was never hinted at that the Sheriff we see getting eaten in the intro would be playable, but he has his own segment.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The new engine for the remake, brought in from Resident Evil 7: Biohazard with photo-realism in mind, allows for increased detail in real time graphics that would not have been possible in earlier console generations, such as when the corpse of a man ravaged by a Licker is examined. In general, the real time rendering is comparable to the highly-detailed, pre-rendered environments and CGI of Resident Evil 0 and the remake of the original Resident Evil, and this is on top of all the little details like the gory Shows Damage for player characters and enemies alike, or how Leon reacts to small things like a falling zombie body landing on him.
• The Woobie:
  • Sherry is a given, due to being a child stuck in a zombie apocalypse trying to find her parents, but the Remake really amps it up by having her be temporarily menaced by Irons and showcasing just how neglectful her parents were to her, especially Annette who would have let Sherry die if Claire hadn't intervened. Thank goodness she had Claire to look out for her, but considering the events of Resident Evil 6, it's only a temporary moment of happiness.
  • Robert Kendo went from a minor NPC who's friends with Barry Burton to a grieving father who's forced to killed his infected young daughter before she fully turns - and before that, he had to kill his wife too. It's no wonder his introduction is considered a Signature Scene, because if it's not leaving the players feeling near tears, it's leaving them feeling helpless since there is nothing you can do to help him or his daughter.
  • Besides Robert, the other DLC characters fall into this as well:
    • Katherine. Her father abandons her to save himself leaving her under the care of Irons who eventually murders her. Even worse was that she was trying to reunite with her lover Ben only for her efforts to end up being useless by both of their deaths.
    • Ghost nearly escaped Raccoon City alive only to be ambushed by Ada who confiscates the G-Virus he had before he's eventually brutally killed by Birkins.
    • Lastly, Sheriff Daniel Cortini (the sheriff at the start of the game) was only doing his job and was completely unaware of what was going on only for Leon to distract him at the worst possible moment resulting in his death.
• WTH, Costuming Department?:
  • Two words: Licker. Buttholes. Thanks for that image, Capcom!

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