As a remake, all spoilers for the original Resident Evil 2 and its predecessor are unmarked. You have been warned.

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 Video Game Remake of the 1998 survival horror game, developed and published by Capcom. It was released for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on January 25th, 2019.

Set on 29th September, 1998, the game focuses on two civilians travelling to the Midwestern town of Raccoon City for their own personal reasons: Leon Scott Kennedy, a rookie police officer who was told not to enter the city, but has decided to investigate after a week of radio silence; and Claire Redfield, the younger sister of Chris Redfield who is investigating her brother's disappearance while he was looking into the pharmaceutical Umbrella Corporation.

Both protagonists run into each other at a gas station on the city's outskirts, and are shocked to learn that a Zombie Apocalypse has struck Raccoon City, its residents transformed into grey-skinned, cannibalistic monsters. They decide to take shelter at the police department, but following an accident on the road, Leon and Claire are forcibly split up and left to fend for themselves in the burning, infested streets. The pair must escape Raccoon City with their lives, attempt to find and help any remaining survivors, and learn just what happened to Raccoon City in the months since the Spencer Mansion incident.

The game is 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 Zapping System from the original was dropped, with each character having a single campaign that combines elements from their A and B Scenarios into one run. Instead, a new "2nd Run" mode is unlocked after beating the game, which adjusts various puzzle solutions and item drops.

After the remake's massive success, Capcom released a free DLC expansion, The Ghost Survivors, on February 15th, 2019. It features a series of short campaigns based off of The 4th Survivor, where you play as doomed side characters in What If? scenarios where they survive their fates in the canon storyline and must navigate a gauntlet of monsters to reach the end, while relying on a limited inventory.

On March 2nd, 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 13th, 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. The game would be followed by Resident Evil 3 (Remake) in 2020 and Resident Evil 4 (Remake) in 2023.

The remake provides its own unique examples of:

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Main Game Tropes # - A

11th-Hour Superpower: Leon gets an anti-tank launcher at the very end of his campaign to kill the Super Tyrant. Claire gets a minigun to deal with G-Birkin 4.
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 pistol and submachine gun are both Heckler & Koch made: a USP9 (MUP) and an MP5A3 (LE 5), respectively. Ada's sidearm is a Mauser HSc (Broom Hc).
Ability Required to Proceed: In the 1st Run, the switch that opens the shutter blocking the reception area, and thus the west wing of the station, is taped shut and must be cut open using the first combat knife you get from Marvin. To prevent sequence breaking, the infinite-durability knife doesn't work here, forcing the player to explore the east wing and meet Marvin first.
Absurdly Sharp Claws: G-Birkin skewers Mr. X, a Tyrant that can withstand point-blank grenade explosions, through the chest with his claws.
Ace Custom: The three Samurai Edge pistols available through DLC^note are noted to have been personally customized by their respective owners, and thus have different traits: Chris' has reduced focus time, Jill's draws faster, and Wesker's deals more damage.
Acid Attack: Claire can craft acid rounds for her grenade launcher. They're easier to find since gunpowder is more common than flame rounds, but have reduced range and damage. However, they are especially effective against G-Birkin, capable of stunlocking him for heavy damage.
Actionized Sequel: Zigzagged. The remake combines this trope with the same focus on survival horror as Resident Evil 7, using a third-person "over the shoulder" perspective as opposed to static camera shots. To compensate for the player's increased mobility and accuracy, the monsters are even more resilient to firearms.
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's design has been updated to feel more urban, with a skyline of high-rise buildings visible in the opening. In previous games, Raccoon City more or less resembled a large town, with little to suggest it was a city other than its large population.
- Four additional characters have been added to The Tofu Survivor, each of which has a unique starting loadout, voice, and backstory. For example, Konjac is armed with an enormous swath of incendiary equipment, while Flan is armed with the strongest weapons in the game but has no healing items.
- In the original, Mr. X's goal was to obtain the sample in Sherry's pendant, and only stalks the player in Scenario B. The remake integrates him into both the 1st and 2nd Runs, and gives him a new directive to destroy incriminating evidence and kill any remaining survivors.
Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole:
- Not actually a new plot hole, per se, but still counts given the potential was there to close a preexisting one. The Outbreak series established that Raccoon City had been under military quarantine for nearly a week by the time Leon and Claire arrived. So how did Leon and Claire get past the quarantine and into the city, and how many hours had they been driving prior to their arrival at the Mizoil gas station? In the original game, Leon overslept at a motel while drunk following a nasty breakup. According to the director of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, Leon and Claire happened to pass through an area that was abandoned due to zombie attacks. Whether the latter explanation is canon to remake continuity is unknown, but it, too, has its own issues, namely the fact that it would require the route they travelled to have had every small trace of a military presence carefully cleaned up, something not likely to have occurred if the military had hastily retreated for the given reason. Either way, some sign of the quarantine would have still been encountered whether it was manned or not.
- The 1st and 2nd Runs don't fit together as closely as the original game's Zapping System, with several differences that ensure they simply can't be two different perspectives of the same course of events. This is especially notable at the end, where both protagonists witness Birkin mutate into Stage 3 and fatally wound Annette in NEST, and her death in each character's run is different.
Adaptational Angst Upgrade:
- Both protagonists frequently met face to face in the original, and exchanged radios to keep in touch. In the remake, outside of a brief meeting across a fence in the police station, neither Leon or Claire keep in touch with radios, and don't reunite after the aforementioned encounter until after escaping NEST. 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.
- In the original, Leon quickly stopped fearing the zombies after learning headshots were effective against them, and showed indifferent blasé to the horrors unfolding around him. The remake has Leon act more like an inexperienced rookie cop, who shows fear when facing monsters and occasionally has to calm himself down during or after encounters, especially if he misses shots.
- The 1st Run protagonist attempts to save Elliot before zombies maul him in half, unlike in the original where they just watched, and both of them are clearly traumatized by the event, with Leon giving out a depressed sigh and Claire tearfully apologizing.
- Unlike the original where there was none, Claire has dialogue during the G-Birkin 1 fight where she frantically pleads for him to stop. Claire has faced enough zombies at this point to know begging is useless, so she's clearly pleading as a coping mechanism.
- Claire's last encounter with Irons in the original saw her trying to talk him down and out of his madness. Here, after Irons kidnaps Sherry, Claire makes it clear that she's going to kill him the first chance she gets, although G-Birkin ultimately beats her to it.
- Leon and Ada's relationship is put under a more realistic and frosty lens in the remake continuity. Rather than blindly trusting in Ada like in the original, Leon actually grows skeptical of her when Annette tells him she isn't an FBI agent, and he is not happy after finding out that Ada used him as a pawn.
- Robert Kendo, of all people, is given this treatment in spades. In the original game, he's an upbeat Red Shirt who only appears in one scene in Scenario A before getting Devoured by the Horde. In the remake, he's a broken father whose daughter is infected with the t-Virus, and he had to put his wife down after she was infected too. He ends his scene by taking his daughter inside, begging Leon and Ada to leave them alone, before shutting the door and giving his daughter a Mercy Kill. Though we don't see it, The Ghost Survivors indicates that he was Driven to Suicide as well.
Adaptational Backstory Change:
- In the original, Leon was late for his first day because he broke up with his girlfriend and overslept at a motel after getting drunk. In the remake, he instead received a phone call telling him to stay away from Raccoon City, but went to investigate a week later after getting no further response.
- Robert Kendo is now shown to be a father who has to Mercy Kill his wife and daughter after they both get infected.
- While William and Annette Birkin are morally questionable Umbrella scientists in both continuities, they still loved each other in the original. In the remake, Annette admits that the two of them grew distant with each other due to their work.
Adaptational Badass:
- While Sherry can only run and hide from the monsters, in the remake she manages to fight back against Chief Irons by throwing a vial of acid in his face.
- In the original, zombies were fairly standard shamblers that could easily be killed with a direct headshots. Here, they are bullet sponges that won't go down until their brain is thoroughly splattered, capable of losing half their face and being no worse for wear. Lickers are also stronger, capable of shrugging off multiple shotgun blasts, grenades, and even magnum rounds.
- Mr. X is dangerous in both continuities, but could be knocked unconscious when pumped with enough lead in the original. The remake upgrades him to an Implacable Man who can shrug off bullets like they're milk duds, and only headshots with higher-powered guns can temporarily knock him down.
- The slow, lumbering Ivies were easy to dodge in the original, but in the remake, they have been replaced with Ivy Zombies, which are quicker, can only be knocked down by shooting buds on their chests, have a One-Hit Kill attack, and will only stay down if their body is burned with Leon's flamethrower or Claire's incendiary rounds.
- 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 lets you escape from a monster grappling you without taking damage, and is reusable so long as you kill the monster you used it on to retrieve the blade. You also need one to access a shutter switch in the police station blocking the west wing.
  - The Colt SAA was a weak replacement for Leon and Claire's pistols, its low ammo capacity and long reloading negating its rapid fire. Now, while it still takes a while to reload, it's much stronger than the starting handguns, routinely capable of downing zombies in only 4-5 shots.
  - 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 for continuous damage and kill Ivies permanently.
  - 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 Spark Shot was originally a Lethal Joke Weapon, which was incredibly effective against G-Birkin but near useless against anything else. Here, it is a One-Hit Kill on anything short of Ivies when fully charged, and now has ammo drops rather than having a limited battery.
  - In the original, Claire's Browning Hi-Power pistol was weaker than Leon's VP-70 by virtue of not having custom parts. The remake gives it a laser pointer and allows you to upgrade it with an extended magazine, giving you a 26-round pistol that doesn't need to wait to charge focused shots.
- G-Birkin is much more powerful and cannot be taken down through firepower alone. His Stage 2 form is only defeated by using a crane to knock him off the arena you fight him in, and his Stage 5 form manages to rip the entire roof off the train car it's in.
Adaptational Context Change: In the original, HUNK's team was specifically sent to kill William Birkin and retrieve the virus samples from his lab, with Birkin infecting himself with the G-Virus to retaliate. In the remake, they attempt to bring Birkin in alive, shooting him in self-defence after he draws a pistol and Birkin infecting himself to survive his injuries.
Adaptational Early Appearance: In the original game, William Birkin isn't encountered until the cable car (Scenario A) or when leaving the police station into the sewers (Scenario B). Here, both protagonists fight his Stage 1 form when going through the underground facility to reach the parking garage.
Adaptational Explanation: The original game never explained why Birkin didn't attempt to trick the U.S.S. by giving them a different viral container, beyond him being stressed and holding the Idiot Ball. Here, HUNK explicitly states that Birkin was to be brought in alive with the samples, so tricking them would be pointless.
Adaptational Heroism: In the original game, Annette was blindingly loyal to William and had held the protagonists at gunpoint when she thought they killed him. Though she is still evil in the remake, as evidenced by the orphanage's true purpose, she is now fully aware of the dangerous monster her husband has become, to the point of trying to atone by destroying all remaining G-Virus samples.
Adaptational Jerkass: While Chief Irons was already an unpleasant person, he's even more so in the remake. In the original, he at least attempted to come off as a sophisticated gentleman before showing his true colors. The remake, on the other hand, has him more verbally and violently abusive, completely devoid of any nonsense, and complicit in Umbrella's experiments on the children at the orphanage.
Adaptational Modesty:
- Downplayed with Claire. Her original outfit wasn't exactly Stripperific, but it did show a little skin. In the remake, Claire wears a red full jacket with jeans to better reflect what a motorcyclist would realistically wear. However, the tank top she wears underneath is significantly smaller, making her outfit more revealing to the point of showing her bra after she gives her jacket to Sherry. The original pink vest, cutoffs, and short body glove are available as an unlockable costume, and receive a few changes to increase the fanservice.
- Subverted with Ada. She initially appears wearing a trench coat, but ditches it after Leon gets shot, revealing that her original red halter dress, leggings, and flats have been replaced with an even slinkier cocktail dress with nylons and high heels.
Adaptational Nice Guy:
- In HUNK's epilogue file in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, the helicopter pilot in The 4th Survivor was quite caustic and bitter, displeased that HUNK was once again the Sole Survivor of his team. Going from his lines in the remake, the pilot acts more like he's a fanboy getting to meet his hero.
- The U.S.S. 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, and he only gets shot by one soldier after drawing a pistol. One of the video tapes shows a fatally wounded soldier begging G-Birkin to stop killing his comrades.
- HUNK himself is far less of a sociopath than he was in the original game. The context of his iconic "Survival is your responsibility" quote is delivered at the expense of himself, telling the helicopter pilot to leave 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 William and Annette. While they don't look too bad, both of them appear older than their original continuity counterparts and with more unkempt hair.
Adaptational Villainy: The 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 zombie cockroaches are hit by this hard. In the original, they were physically frail, but large enough to prey on rats, attacked in swarms, and possessed a One-Hit Kill against Ada/Sherry if you didn't shake them off. The remake reduces them to just a wee bit larger than your common household critter, and are no longer considered enemies — they cannot harm the player, and scatter if you get close or shine your flashlight at them.
- The zombie dogs. In most of the series, short of a lucky headshot, they can take several handgun rounds before dying, and can occasionally survive a single shotgun blast. Here, they go down in 2-3 handgun shots, with Leon capable of mowing them down with a single burst once he gets the stock for the Matilda.
- Downplayed with the Super Tyrant. While still tough and possessing a One-Hit Kill attack, he only has one clawed arm as opposed to the full body mutation in the original game, isn't quite as fast, and can be stunned by shooting his exposed heart.
Adapted Out:
- The entire Zapping System from the original. Though each protagonist still has a 1st and 2nd Run, they are nowhere near as intertwined as they were in the original.
- The protagonists can no longer examine background items or environments like in the original.
- 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 submachine gun, which both protagonists could find in the original, takes its place as one of her exclusive weapons.
- Zombie crows, spiders, moths, and Evolved Lickers make no appearance in this game.
- Due to Ada's cover story being changed, there's no mention of her "boyfriend" John this time around.
- G-Birkin's fourth form has been reworked from a six-legged creature with More Teeth than the Osmond Family to a bipedal abomination of flesh, eyes, and bone.
- Extreme Battle mode doesn't return. Since it was added in the original game's DualShock Version, the developers likely didn't prioritize it. The Ghost Survivors serves a similar purpose, however.
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. While Scenarios A and B ran concurrently to each other in the original, with actions done in the former affecting the latter, the remake changes this so only the current scenario is canonically relevant, with the other protagonist somehow managing to find their own way forward without exploring the same areas.
Always a Bigger Fish: In Claire's run, Mr. X is disembowelled from behind by G-Birkin while trying to open the elevator she and Sherry are inside.
Ammunition Conservation: Because the monsters are durable and ammunition is limited, especially for the stronger guns, this trope is key to survival.
Anachronism Stew: Though most of it can be somewhat explained by Umbrella having access to all kinds of cutting-edge technology:
- Leon's car, while slightly modified to avoid trademark, is clearly based on a JK-series Jeep Wrangler, which didn't become available until 2007.
- Several of the abandoned cars on the streets are clearly based on models from the early 2000s. One white sedan littered around the city resembles a 2004-2011 Audi A6 sedan.
- Chief Irons is seen using a Smith & Wesson Model 329PD, which wasn't invented until the 2000s.
- One key item is a USB dongle hidden 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.
- The U.S.S. use combat shirt-type BDUs with pockets on the sleeves and Velcro on it. That style was not widely seen with police/military units until the early-to-mid 2000s.
- The email inbox messages you can read in NEST are based on a more modern look of 2010s Hotmail.
Anachronistic Orphanage: Claire's run involves her trying to reach an orphanage that Irons kidnapped and took Sherry to, but the story is set in 1998, well after the foster care system supplanted orphanages in the United States. Umbrella built it as a deliberate PR move, and used the children there as guinea pigs for their experiments.
And Now for Someone Completely Different: Both protagonists have a section where you play as the supporting protagonist, Ada in Leon's run and Sherry in Claire's. Ada tracks Annette through the sewers while using a spy gadget to hack machinery and avoiding Mr. X, and Sherry has a stealth section where she must avoid Chief Irons and try to escape the orphanage.
And Your Reward Is Clothes:
- After completing the game, recreations of Leon and Claire's outfits from the original game are unlocked as alternate costumes. The supporting protagonists are also affected, with Sherry getting her classic outfit too and Ada wearing her cocktail dress from the start.
- Beating the game with a specific character unlocks custom variants of their remake outfit, which lets you set it to a specific state; Leon's civilian clothes, R.P.D. uniform, and damaged uniform, and Claire with and without her jacket. Beating the game on Hardcore difficulty unlocks the same customization for the character's classic outfit.
An Arm and a Leg: You can sever a zombie's limbs by carefully aiming for the elbows or knees, with the latter reducing them to crawling after you. Considering headshots are no longer insta-kills, this is a good way to get around them while reducing their threat. There is an in-game achievement for removing all four of a zombie's limbs, which kills them since they can no longer move.
Anger Born of Worry: A justified example on Claire's part, where after fighting through the sewers to reunite with Sherry, she calls Annette out for sitting in the security room and writing her infected daughter off as a lost cause.
Claire: Are you fucking kidding me?! You're her mother! Get IN here!
Animals Lack Attributes: Averted. Zombie dogs have testicles this time around.
Anti-Frustration Features:
- In the 1st Run, if you took any damage in the gas station, your health will be fully restored after the opening, since you have to run through the streets and dodge more zombies, with no healing items until you make it inside the police station.
- The game has adaptive difficulty, so if you're struggling, it will subtly reduce the toughness of enemies to make things easier. In contrast, if you're blazing through without any issue, they will get tougher instead.
- Typewriters no longer require ink ribbons to save, unless you're playing on Hardcore difficulty. Even then, to compensate for the difficulty's Checkpoint Starvation, ink ribbons can always be found near every typewriter and are actually pretty common to find if you look thoroughly.
- Rooms on the map are colour-coded based on whether you've taken every item and finished every puzzle inside; red if you haven't, blue if you have. Items and puzzles will also appear on the map once you've seen them and remain until collected or solved, respectively.
- When prompted to use a key item while examining a puzzle, you can inspect them from the pop-up in case you haven't got them in the necessary state yet. This is especially helpful with the Signal Modulator puzzles in NEST.
- Key items that have served their purpose gain a red checkmark in the inventory menu and can be discarded. This is a big help with item management and gives you hints on what items you should be carrying with you.
- When using item boxes, you can combine items in your inventory without having to close the box first. Also, if you collect an item that takes up two inventory slots, the game automatically sorts your inventory to make room for it if you have the space.
- The combination locks on safes open regardless of the direction you turn the dial, even if the direction was specified in the place where you got the code.
- If a custom part causes a gun to take up two inventory slots, it can be detached at any time if the player wants to free up space.
- Many bosses are resistant to damage from mid-level firearms, i.e. the shotgun and grenade launcher, giving the player a fighting chance if they didn't manage their ammo while still decently rewarding them for saving high-level firepower. All boss arenas are also well stocked with items so you aren't completely screwed.
- If you die during a boss fight, the loading screen tips will explain how to deal with the boss to help make subsequent attempts smoother.
- If you used a knife on G-Birkin 1 or 2, after finishing the fight, it can be found lying on the ground near where they fell off the arena. This is likely to prevent you from losing the infinite-durability knife.
- There is no need to babysit Sherry in sections where she's following Claire, as she can keep up with you just fine.
- When Mr. X spawns by moving the helicopter blocking the 2F east hallway, the zombies spawned by the helicopter crash are despawned to ensure you don't have to deal with them while running away.
- While Mr. X stalks you throughout the police station, he cannot enter safe rooms (excluding the main hall), the S.T.A.R.S. office, or the clock tower, giving you spaces to breathe and wait for the Tyrant to leave you alone.
- When Ada saves Leon from Mr. X in the parking garage, she will wait in the room for the shutter to be opened, giving you an opportunity to double back and scavenge freely.
- After leaving the police station, Mr. X will not be in the building due to having followed the protagonists into the sewers. After finding the shortcut back to the police station, this allows the player to scavenge for any remaining supplies without having to deal with him anymore.
- If you somehow don't have any ammunition to detonate the explosive pipe and kill the zombie alligator, a single grenade will spawn off to the side that you can use.
- When G-Birkin 2's grapple becomes a One-Hit Kill, the arena will be stocked with secondary weapons so you aren't screwed if you slip up.
- As Claire is carrying Sherry to the cable car, she will move at full speed regardless of her current health, and the zombie near the safe will despawn if you didn't kill it previously.
- The cable car to NEST, which functions as a Point of No Return, is explicitly pointed out by the characters so you know what you're in for.
- In a cutscene while taking the cable car to NEST, Leon/Claire receives an ID wristband from their partner, which is needed to gain access to the facility. If the player's inventory is full, the wristband will spawn in the environment near where the player starts, ensuring they don't have to waste supplies to make room.
- If you somehow reached NEST without getting the shotgun/grenade launcher, another one will spawn at the beginning of the facility.
- If an Ivy Zombie grabs you from behind, it will always flip you around to face it so you have a chance to break free.
- One of G-Birkin 3's attacks is to rip a pillar out from the wall and throw it, with the player capable of countering by shooting him until he drops it on himself. If the player is struggling, Birkin will eventually drop the pillar automatically to help whittle his health down.
- To compensate for the 2nd Run introducing Mr. X early, the .45 ACP handguns deal noticeably more damage than the 9mm ones and high-grade gunpowder is more common, making it easier to clear out the building.
- Any Mr. Raccoon bobbleheads you break will carry over across all save files, so you don't need to get them all in one shot.
- For speedrunners or those attempting to earn an S+ rank, the timer doesn't run during cutscenes or in the pause menu, though it still runs in the inventory and map screens. This lets you take pauses every once in a while to avoid burnout.
- The infinite durability knife and the Samurai Edge pistols do not void S+ ranks, making it slightly easier to get by in the beginning of S+ Hardcore runs.
- In The 4th Survivor, to compensate for the lack of additional supplies, HUNK has more health than Leon and Claire, capable of taking 2-3 zombie bites before dropping a health phase.
Apocalyptic Log:
- In keeping with series tradition, the environment is littered with the frantic scribbles of long-dead victims. Some of them are even scarier than the infamous Keeper's Diary from the original Resident Evil:
  helq
  theyre komming
  helq me mommy
Artifact Title: The "4th" in The 4th Survivor made sense in the original, as HUNK is the fourth known survivor of the Raccoon City incident after Leon, Claire, and Sherry. However, as Ada's survival was confirmed in literally every single Raccoon City-related game released afterwards, making HUNK the fifth survivor, it's lost most of the original meaning. Granted, HUNK was the fourth survivor of the game to escape Raccoon City, with Ada escaping on September 30th 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 InsurmountableWaistHeightFences, like the bench in the second floor locker room that barely goes up to your knee.
- Lickers can't go through doors.^note Because of this, there is an exploit for killing Lickers in Leon's run called the "doorway peek" method: equip the shotgun, open the door just enough to see the Licker, shoot it in the head, go back through the door, and repeat until it dies. If done right, it can't retaliate. As long as you don't actually step into the room, the Licker won't register your presence and make no effort to retaliate.
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 taken out near the outskirts of the city in a separate explosion of the train's own self-destruct mechanism, which is activated upon detection of a biological outbreak. The remake blunders with this, though, showing its lab facilities' inexplicable endless blast chasing the train that consumes him, despite being a 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 have 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 from 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, when he hears a talk show guest describe a zombie, remarks that the zombie may resemble 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 and 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.
- In Claire's route, upon entering the interrogation room, a Licker will fling itself through the one-way mirror.
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 work 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.
Bookends: A fuel truck is seen driving towards Raccoon City at 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, and unlike magnum ammo, shotgun ammo can be manufactured in larger quantities with large doses of gunpowder.
- Flash grenades. While they lack the destructive power of other equipment available to the player, they could stun a sizable group of enemies (including many bosses!) for quite some time, allowing one to quickly slip past them without bloodshed or reposition oneself to grab useful supplies or fight on better ground. Far from being immune, the blind Lickers are actually particularly vulnerable against flash grenades, because the loud noise they produce deafens the creatures' superb hearing. 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, and can rip off limbs to greatly reduce their threat level.
- 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. A good example of this is Elliot's death — in the international release, he loses his entire lower body after zombies eat it as the 1st Run protagonist is dragging him under a shutter. In the Japanese version, though they are fairly chewed up, the legs are still attached.
- The naked, partially-skinless zombies in the Umbrella lab 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: Leon's ATM-4 rocket launcher and Claire's minigun. Both weapons have infinite ammo and let you bend the entire game over your knee, but require the demanding task of getting an S+ rank on the respective character's run, on Hardcore difficulty. By the time you unlock them, you'll have finished the hardest challenge the game has to offer and proved that you're skilled enough not to need them, but it's still fun and satisfying to blow through every single room.
Breakable Weapons: Regular combat knives have limited durability and will eventually break, forcing the player to look for spares, use it carefully, and retrieve the blade if it gets stuck in an enemy by defeating them. You can get a single unbreakable one by finding and breaking all 15 Mr. Raccoon miniatures.
Bribing Your Way to Victory: For those who don't have the time and/or patience to complete Challenge Runs or simply hate speedrunning, a DLC was released on April 5th, 2019 that unlocks all in-game rewards straight away.
Brutal Bonus Level: The 4th Survivor and The Tofu Survivor are both this, and they're even harder than the original thanks to the remake's increased difficulty. You're practically required to memorize the entire level and all the enemy patterns to safely evade them all and conserve ammo, and while the zombies are fairly easy to avoid since they only wake up once you enter their room, good luck once you reach the police station and have Mr. X breathing down your neck for the final stretch. Most new players only finish the run with a sliver of health remaining.
Butt-Monkey: Comparing Leon and Claire's paths shows a horrendous lack of luck on the former's end. The fire escape ladder breaks under his weight, G-Birkin uses him to break the floor grating while Claire only falls through, Mr. X never stops following him, he gets shot, nearly becomes gator chow, and the escape door blows up in his face.
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.
- Complete with Irony, Leon comments once he learns about the truth of Umbrella over how he expects the federal government to get involved to end the pharmaceutical company for good. While he’s right about them being key in shutting them down, because of the US government’s own involvement with company and even the incident itself, it’s a case of them covering their tracks than to actually do good.
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 fight, Mr. X will appear and will chase you relentlessly. When he's 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.
Clown-Car Grave: Once Claire and Leon make back into the police station after exploring the basement, zombies and lickers start popping up in places that have already been cleared. The zombies can be mitigated with proper placement of the boards you find around the station, but you're on your own with the lickers.
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 at 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 ago^note.
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.
The Croc is Ticking:
- 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.
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 a 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, with the latter being crafting-exclusive.
- 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 block off the windows using loose boards, making them safe for the rest of the game, but there're 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 in Custody: This occurs specifically in the remake. Corrupt police chief Irons locks investigative reporter Ben Bertolucci in a basement cell in the police department. Rookie cop Leon Kennedy finds him down there, who begs to be released, but Mr. X, a creation of Umbrella Corporation, kills him.
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 try 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. A minute or two later, they have to crawl under a barricade themself... and then a zombie grabs their foot. Fortunately, Marvin is on hand to save them and squish the critter's skull in. 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 purchases 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 for individual purchases.
- The free Ghost Survivors mode, which has three non-canonical mini campaigns starring Robert Kendo, Katherine Warren, and a USS soldier with the codename "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 be 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 speaks 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: Unlike the original game, which was clearly scaled towards Leon, the remake takes the Resident Evil (Remake)'s approach of balancing out both characters with different, distinct advantages:
- 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 one licker that bursts through the two-way mirror in Claire's campaign for a jump scare 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, whereas 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. They're also more space-efficient; Leon's upgraded Matilda stock to compete with the JMB's laser sight takes up an extra inventory slot, and later the upgraded Lightning Hawk (which the SLS 60 starts competing with once upgraded to be able to chamber and fire high-powered ammo) does too. Even her Quickdraw Army fires much faster than Leon's M19 and does more damage (180 vs. 140, respectively), but it does come with one big drawback: it has to be reloaded one round at a time like the SLS and never gets a speed loading upgrade.
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 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 (presumably because they have the good fortune to be resistant to T).
- 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 presentation implying the second campaign takes 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.
- Even though the player can access any unlocked bonus weapons as soon as they arrive at the first item box in the Police Station lobby, the unbreakable knife cannot be used to cut through the tape on the control panel for the West Hallway door, forcing the player to still venture into the East Hallway, be rescued by Marvin Branagh, and receive the regular combat knife.
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.
- Splattering a zombie's head and permanently removing it from play is purely a matter of luck rather than just pouring on damage; the same is true for blowing off any other limbs. Obviously, shooting or slashing more times means more chances to get that lucky Critical Hit, but it's rolled separately each time. Also, the submachine gun doesn't have the ability to critically damage the head, meaning it's much better used to blast off limbs when dealing with zombies.
- 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.
- In Birkin's final boss fight as G-5, he's actually invincible until the animation of him exposing the eye in the center of his mouth is complete. Since you can control the player character for the seconds-long interval it takes for the animation to play through, you're likely to be tempted to start unloading the moment you have control... which will achieve nothing except to deplete already precious ammo, which has likely already taken a hit from the penultimate boss — G-4 or Super Tyrant — that you fought before. So it's very easy to make this battle impossible to win.
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. However, the man is grabbed by zombies coming after him as they go to pull him to safety, and only the man's torso gets pulled through in the end.
- 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.
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.
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.
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 specially 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.
Irony: When Ada uses the ID Wristband to open a door, it tells her to return it by October 1st, which Ada says will never happen. If you played Resident Evil 3, that's the day Raccoon City gets nuked.
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 to reflect their separate arsenals: yellow for Leon, white for Claire. Although like Ethan, Leon and Claire don't need a reloading tool like Jill did to make bullets.
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; Claire can save a lot of powerful and useful flame shells by blowing out Ivies' vulnerable orange spots with other weapons until they're lying in a regenerating heap before using a single round to ignite them all together at once.
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 it.
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.
Load-Bearing Boss: Subverted on Claire's route; The Umbrella facility's self destruct kicks in soon after defeating G-Birkin with no obvious reason why that should be the case. However, on Leon's route it's shown this is due to Leon taking a sample of the G-Virus without permission.
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, even into a 2nd Run where it can still supplement the high powered handgun.
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.
Missed Him by That Much: Unlike in the original, Claire and Leon are physically separated for most of the game except for the beginning and end. During the 2nd Run, your character will enter a place where the other just was, only for them to have already moved on, leaving behind a note.
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.
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, turning what should be an extremely crucial safety feature into a tripping hazard. 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 is 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 vaguely Harley-Davidson looking, 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 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 its frivolous tone does not match her brother's serious personality. In the original game, Chris' planned investigation was discussed 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.
Reality Is Unrealistic: A few commenters have noted that Claire is carrying a handgun for self-defense despite being under the age of 21, but this would only be illegal if it were concealed on her person; open carry of handguns is permitted in most states for those age 18 and up (it's never stated which one Raccoon City is located in), and Claire has a holster on her hip that allows the weapon to be plainly visible.
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 downplayed; 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.
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 later games firmly establish 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. As the remakes moved in the direction of Alternate Continuity over time, this made more sense, but it's worth noting Ada and Leon do still get a fair bit of teasing themselves here, including at least one full mouth kiss and Ada dramatically letting go of Leon's hand to fall deep into the abyss under the Lab to her seeming demise rather than risk pulling him down with her.
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 (although the fact that it's wrong is helpfully pinned to the board right next to said label).
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: The "98 Classic" costumes revert Leon and Claire into their models from the original game, in all their low-poly glory.
Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
- Leon is a rookie cop in both continuities, but it shows more heavily here. 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 when he meets Ben; he follows protocol and refuses to let him out before checking with Chief Irons, even as Ben tells him that Irons is not to be trusted, 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 firearms training for self-defence. 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. Even in the gas station opening, Leon is a bit more decisive than Claire, and saves her from a zombie creeping up behind her when she hesitates.
- The R.P.D. officers were planning a welcoming party for Leon involving a puzzle lock on his desk, among other things. When the t-Virus outbreak occured, 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 show children being targets of a B.O.W. attack. Here, children in danger are on full display. Robert Kendo tries to prevent Leon and Ada from coming near his daughter, who got infected by Robert's own wife, taking her into the back room after begging them for privacy. This leave Leon and Ada in Stunned Silence after a gunshot is heard from the back room.
- 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 saves his life a few times and 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?
- 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. Now, as to how quickly it snaps, that's another trope.
Tactical Door Use:
- Partially averted. In previous games up to Resident Evil 7, 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 and/or they have working legs to reach the knobs. The only areas they can't follow you into are safe rooms, the main hall (and even then, Mr. X can chase you there and the room is infested on the 2nd Run), the S.T.A.R.S. office, and the clock tower.
- You 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 realize the trick 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 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 rounds are very effective against Lickers, can be used to melt off zombies' legs for crowd-control, and can stunlock Birkin's first and third stages, but because they deal damage over time they aren't always the best choice when fast burst damage is needed. Flame rounds are most effective because they can one-shot many enemies and are the only means at Claire's disposal to burn up Ivy Zombies, but they're also far less common compared to acid rounds because you cannot craft them, only finding them scattered around during your adventure.
Take Your Time: In the sewers, the player's objective is to find and rescue Ada/Sherry. You can take as long as you like solving puzzles and backtracking to clear out previously visited areas, and neither of them (Ada's leg being impaled and Sherry being infected) will grow any worse for wear.
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 that he'll bring him to a hospital.
The Three Faces of Eve: The three main female protagonists fall into this trope, which fits with Leon's Coming of Age Story. This trope is made more prominent in the remake:
- Claire has added Ship Tease with Leon and spends most of the game looking after Sherry and trying to protect her. Sherry even thinks Leon and Claire are a couple and suggests in the ending that they adopt her, fitting her neatly as the Wife.
- Claire's Adaptational Modesty means that Ada's dress looks more seductive then ever. Since the John subplot has also been removed, she is that more available, landing her squarely in the Seducer role.
- Sherry is obviously the Child. Her segment takes place in an orphanage, and Claire's main goal during her run is to keep the girl safe.
Timed Mission:
- During Ada's segment, she has 1 minute to escape from an incinerator that Annette locks her inside.
- Leon and Claire get 10 minutes to defeat the Final Boss and reach the train to escape NEST before the facility self-destructs.
Too Awesome to Use:
- The Lightning Hawk can be this, if you can't scrounge up enough ammo to maintain it and have wasted most of the high-grade gunpowder on 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. After escaping NEST, Leon throws his ID wristband that Ada gave him off the train. 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 Irons 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 t-Virus, but it's unknown whether she fully turns when her father shoots her because it happens behind a closed door.
Unique Enemy: There are 3 zombified U.S.S. operatives in the game, albeit missing their helmets.
Unwitting Instigator of Doom: J. Martinez, the U.S.S. operative who shoots Birkin after he draws a gun. Little did anyone know this would 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 doesn'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.
Vanity License Plate: The license plates on Leon's and Claire's vehicles read "M4T-ILD4" ("Matilda") and "MD3-IN-H3VN" ("Made in Heaven"), respectively.
Villainous Rescue: In Claire's run, Mr. X corners her and Sherry in an elevator. All seems lost until G-Birkin suddenly impales Mr. X from behind, killing him. Unfortunately, Birkin then mutates into Stage 2, completely loses control, 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 when her health is at "Caution", which means taking a little damage is actually beneficial to a speed run.
Visual Pun: On Leon's 2nd Run, he obtains a pistol that uses .45 ACP rounds. When Leon aims the gun, he holds it at a 45 degree angle.
Wacky Sound Effect: The "walking" noise of Tofu and co. more than qualifies, as everyone moves to the sound of wobbly jelly.
Was It All a Lie?: Leon confronts Ada in NEST after learning that she's actually a mercenary paid to acquire the G-Virus. He asks if she was just using him, and while her response is of the evasive kind, she isn't able 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: Claire says this to G-Birkin 5 at the end of her 2nd Run.
What Measure Is a Mook?: You can find a VHS tape on the corpse of a U.S.S. mercenary, A. Kirkpatrick, in the sewers. Watching it shows the team being attacked and slaughtered by G-Birkin 1, with Kirkpatrick begging the monster to spare his comrades as he bleeds out on the floor.
What the Hell, Hero?: Kendo rages at Leon for the police's inability to stop the outbreak. Tragically, both of them are unaware that the real reason they failed wasn't incompetence, but internal sabotage thanks to Umbrella and Chief Irons.
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 get increasingly exasperated when an Implacable Man is after them, and they tend to exclaim something along the lines of "Why don't you stay dead!?".
- Players going into the game 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 attaches the suppressor, which fully extends it and allows her to properly shoulder the thing.
You Shouldn't Know This Already:
- Averted with puzzles, safes, and combo locks. The solutions for plot-related puzzles aren't randomized and only differ if you are 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, as it means every solution can be put in a cheat sheet. None of them hold plot-relevant items, so there is no Sequence Breaking.
- Played straight with the portable safes and hidden items in the police station. With the former, their combination is randomized every new game, while with the latter, you aren't able to search the places they're located until the photo revealing them is developed.
- In the 1st Run, the infinite-durability knife cannot be used to open the reception shutter and begin proper exploration of the police station, requiring you to go to the east wing, get Elliot's journal, and meet Marvin first.
Your Head A-Splode:
- Critical headshots can blow a zombie's head off, killing it instantly and definitively.
- Ben dies after Mr. X squeezes his skull until it pops.
- In Leon's run, the zombie alligator gets stuck chewing on a gas line at the end of the chase, requiring you to shoot the pipe to detonate it and blow the creature's head off.
Zerg Rush: Zombies can attack you in droves, and can easily catch you off guard if you aren't careful thanks to the new third-person camera.

The Ghost Survivors

Adaptational Badass:
- Katherine Warren is long dead by the game's events, her corpse found on a table in the orphanage during Sherry's section. In "Runaway", she manages to kill Chief Irons with a knife and fights through the infested streets armed with a revolver and flamethrower, Kicking Ass in All Her Finery.
- Sheriff Cortini is eaten by the first zombie you encounter after trying to restrain it and getting distracted by the 1st Run protagonist entering the room. In "No Way Out", he shoots it, and successfully fends for himself against an entire horde while stuck in a cramped gas station.
Alternate Universe: Each story is set in a continuity where a certain Red Shirt survived their death in the canon storyline (Robert Kendo doesn't shoot himself and escapes Raccoon City in a helicopter, Katherine Warren kills Chief Irons in self-defence and reunites with Ben, Ghost survives G-Birkin's attack and holds his own long enough to retrieve the G-Virus sample, and Sheriff Cortini shoots the zombie instead of restraining it and takes Claire's place in the story). While most of these would likely only have minor effects, "Runaway" has heavy consequences for the timeline; if Irons is dead, Sherry doesn't get kidnapped, which could prevent her from getting infected with the G-Virus, so the government would have no reason to hold her, and therefore Leon and Sherry wouldn't become government agents. Though Ashley would still be kidnapped, someone else would be sent to her, someone Ada would be less inclined to help, which could lead to an unpredictable outcome, and Sherry wouldn't be Jake's partner in Resident Evil 6.
And Your Reward Is Clothes: The Ghost Survivors has its own set of Records separate from the main story, and rewards cosmetic hats 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. The one hat that does something is the Cat Ears, which grant unlimited reserve ammunition, 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" Cortini's Broom Hc infinite reserve ammunition, though it does track the number of rounds you use from it and you need less than 60 to unlock the Cat Ears.
- 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: Cortini 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 "No Time To Mourn", Kendo shoots Emma before she can turn into a zombie, something implied but not shown in the main game.
Elite Zombie: Thematically calling back to the Crimson Heads, each Ghost Survivors scenario has different enemies depending on the character you play as:
- Robert Kendo encounters poisonous zombies that can poison you with their bites or the Fog of Doom that they expel on death. Thankfully, the zombies themselves are somewhat squishier than normal, and the cloud is pretty short-ranged and dissipates on its own rather quickly.
- Katherine Warren faces Pale Heads, a mutant zombie that looks like a blend of the Regeneradors 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 flamethrower or a headshot with the SLS 60's high-powered rounds.
- 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 weak spots, 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 those zombies are 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 face 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 "No Time To Mourn", after putting his daughter down, Robert Kendo is about to shoot himself before his partner calls him on a radio, informing him that he's secured a helicopter they can use to escape.
Jiggle Physics: The characters in The Tofu Survivor have plenty of wobbly jiggling whenever they move. According to the game's producer, Tsuyoshi Kanda, the team scanned the jiggly movement and texture of real-life tofu in order to make them as realistic as possible.
Let No Crisis Go to Waste: The Poison Zombies in "No Time To Mourn" were created when the R.P.D. used Umbrella's experimental P-Z gas on regular zombies. This makes another example of Umbrella using the Raccoon City incident as an opportunity to test their B.O.W.s in the field, eliminating survivors and bypassing safety boundaries at the same time.
Loose Canon: The entire DLC 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 "Runaway", where Katherine Warren not only escapes her untimely fate but kills her would-be murderer in self-defence.
No Fair Cheating: The Cat Ears give you unlimited ammo for your guns, but your time won't be saved if you're wearing them.
Piñata Enemy: Some zombies are wearing backpacks containing supplies, which can be looted after killing them. In "Runaway", they will also have keys necessary to progress, and they'll usually be surrounded by other enemies to make things harder.
Secret Final Campaign: After completing "No Time To Mourn", "Runaway", and "Forgotten Soldier", a fourth scenario is unlocked, "No Way Out". It focuses on Sheriff Daniel Cortini, the man eaten by the first zombie in the gas station, who manages to shoot it in this scenario, and must hold out against the horde swarming the building.
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 escaped from G-Birkin's ambush, survived for several days in the sewers, fought his way back to NEST, retrieved the G-Virus sample, and fought his way back out while the facility was self-destructing... only for Ada to stick him up at the cable car and take the sample for herself. 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. make wobbling jelly noises while moving.

Resident Evil 2 (Remake)

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As a remake, all spoilers for the original Resident Evil 2 and its predecessor are unmarked. You have been warned.

The remake provides its own unique examples of:

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

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Video Game / Resident Evil 2 (Remake) 9 Following

As a remake, all spoilers for the original Resident Evil 2 and its predecessor are unmarked. You have been warned.

The remake provides its own unique examples of:

Video Example(s):

Keeping Score

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

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Resident Evil 2 (Remake)

9 Following