"Fear can't kill you, but..."
In 2002, Capcom produced a completely revamped version of their Survival Horror hit Resident Evil for the Nintendo GameCube in an effort to bring the main series to Nintendo's new home console. This new version, known amongst fans as the REmake, featured revamped character models set against full-motion backgrounds, CGI cut scenes (which replaced the cheesy live-action versions from the original), a brand new soundtrack, wholly redone (but still cheesy) voice acting, updated gameplay mechanics, and story line revisions that bring it in line with the sequels released up to that date.
The remake was exclusive to Nintendo consoles for many years (it was re-released for the Wii in 2008) until Capcom announced an HD remaster of the game for the PlayStation, Xbox and PC platforms as a digital download. The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions were released in Japan in November 2014 (the former has an exclusive physical release in the region), while the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC versions achieved complete global saturation alongside the overseas releases of the other versions in January 2015. Upgrades from the GameCube version include fully remastered graphics, the ability to switch between widescreen and "standard" screen sizes, an option to choose between the original's "tank controls" and a modern control scheme inspired by more recent entries in the franchise, and B.S.A.A. outfits for Chris and Jill. A Nintendo Switch version was released on May 21, 2019.
Resident Evil contains the following:
- Ace Custom: While the Samurai Edge gun used by Chris, Jill and Wesker is already an Ace Custom variant of the Beretta 92F, Barry's unlockable version is even more customized than the others, featuring a larger build, a stabilizer and is chambered in .40 S&W rounds.
- Achievement Mockery: The HD remaster adds a trophy just for dying. ("Get Used To It") With how hard this game is for newcomers, this is likely to be their very first.
- A.K.A.-47: While the 1996 version used real brand names for the firearms used by the player (Beretta, Remington, and the Colt Python), the 2002 remake changed them to generic names instead.
- Adaptation Expansion: The remake expands upon the environment and the story in several ways, most notably with the addition of Lisa Trevor, the ability to save Richard Aiken (temporarily) and earn his automatic shotgun, and new/bigger maps to fit things like Lisa's cabin and the crypt where you face the Alpha Crimson Head.
- Adaptational Badass: The Black Tiger is a much more formidable adversary, which may be a nasty surprise for those who played the original.
- All There in the Manual:
- To advertise the game, a supplemental in-character journal called Wesker's Report II was written. This journal, written by Wesker himself, details his past as an Umbrella scientist, his working relationship with William Birkin as well as his history with the likes of Alexia Ashford and the Nemesis parasite. Its importance to this game comes from it detailing the sad, gruesome history of Lisa Trevor.
- The "biohazard SAMURAI EDGE History"
guide book reveals more about the Samurai Edge pistols used by the S.T.A.R.S. team in this game, including the unlockable Barry model gun from this game. In particular, it details how Barry's version is chambered in a different ammunition type than the others.
- Anachronism Stew: The HD remaster lets Chris and Jill wear their B.S.A.A. outfits from Resident Evil 5. It's less noticeable with Jill, but Chris looks way buffer with it despite having the same voice as his RE1 self. This is due to the B.S.A.A. costume models being ripped wholesale from RE5, rather than recreating them on the younger models from this game.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes:
- The remake has an entirely new set of alternate costumes, including Jill's tube top and miniskirt ensemble from Resident Evil 3 and Chris' new S.T.A.R.S. uniform from Code: Veronica.
- For the HD remaster, Chris and Jill have access to their B.S.A.A. outfits from Resident Evil 5's "Lost in Nightmares" mission.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- Real Survivor mode disables the broken doorknob feature that is present in every other difficulty and New Game Plus mode, which makes exploring the mansion easier on the players. Apparently, the developers thought that having players deal with unlinked storage boxes and that travel restriction would be pretty annoying. This is further justified because otherwise, through a combination of leaving keys in a chest in one wing of the mansion and by repeatedly going through the door until the doorknob breaks, it would be possible to lock yourself in the other wing with no way to get out.
- The HD remaster has an achievement/trophy for beating the game by using the knife only. If you happen to fight the Tyrant again during the escape sequence, you have to use the rocket launcher to finish off the monster. Using the weapon won't count against the achievement/trophy.
- Even if you manage to burn through all available shotgun shells going through the mansion and dormitory when you return to the mansion, there are enough shotgun shells behind the Helmet Key doors to kill all the Hunters located at the critical paths.
- In Invisible Enemy mode, enemies will briefly become visible when they attack so that you can get a general idea on where they are.
- Apocalyptic Log: A video cassette on Kenneth's corpse can be salvaged. It can be played at the very end of the game on a computer terminal, depicting his last moments against a zombie.
- Arbitrary Gun Power: The 'Self Defense Gun' (a .22 derringer), will kill anything, short of bosses, in one shot (and even the bosses will feel it), but it only has the one shot. Of course, it is a .22 Magnum derringer.
- Artistic License – Biology: The "bees" in the residence are very obviously actually wasps. They have the typical "wasp waist" and lack the fuzz the bees have.
- Bag of Holding: Possible to subvert in an optional mode. Those interconnected item boxes you relied on in the main game? In Real Survival mode, that interconnectivity goes away. They can still store limitless items, but now you have to run back to the actual box you stored a particular item in. Fun fact: this was actually intended for the original release, but playtesters complained that it made the game too hard. The unlock message even references the prototype directly.
- The Battle Didn't Count: Kill the first zombie as Jill and it'll get back up and follow her into the dining room where it's killed by Barry, then it'll get back up again and return to the hallway and politely lie back down.
- Bee Afraid: The nest in the dormitory. Unlike in the original game, however, you'll have to kill the nest with insecticide first.
- Bizarrchitecture: Even more so than the original. Most of the really mind-boggling set-pieces like the underground crypt and the spinning blade trap are new to the remake.
- Blood Is the New Black: Crimson Heads are so called that for good reason. They are zombies that previously thought dead reanimated a second time, now capable of sprinting after the player with claws, neon white eyes, and most importantly, blood soaked heads.
- Body Horror: Besides the zombies and B.O.W.s, there's also Lisa, a hunchbacked, tentacled monstrosity that was once a human girl, wearing the rotted faces of Umbrella researchers that she tore off herself.
- Bonus Feature Failure: Barry's Samurai Edge handgun. It's a great replacement for the standard Beretta, having a slight power upgrade, faster firing rate and infinite ammo. Nevertheless, it's considerably weaker than the shotgun, magnum, and grenade launcher, so it'll still end up banished to the item box at the same point the basic handgun usually is.
- Boring, but Practical: It can actually be better to aim the Handgun downwards at the knees of zombies when shooting them than at their heads. The chance to blow out a kneecap seems to be slightly better than getting a head shot, and (somehow) this also instantly kills them and prevents Crimson Head transformation.
- Boss-Altering Consequence: You have the option of using V-Jolt against Plant 42. Using it as Jill lets you skip the fight entirely, while using it as Chris significantly weakens it.
- Boss Tease: Lisa appears several times guarding or patrolling areas before her actual boss fight. If you decide to face her during these encounters, you will only knock her down for a while before she gets back on her feet again. This makes it important to avoid her early on.
- Bowdlerise:
- The first gameplay trailers ended with a Hunter beheading your character just like they can in the 1996 original. This was censored out in the final version and they kill your character via a Slashed Throat instead. This change is present in all versions, and is speculated to have been made due to a combination of the Japanese CERO rating guidelines becoming stricter and the fact that it was being made for a Nintendo console.
- A Japanese-only book about the process of remaking the game reveals that they had to change certain staircase camera angles in order to keep players from looking up Jill's skirt while she was wearing her Resident Evil 3 outfit. When faced with the unavoidable water reflections, they admitted to giving her black underwear.
- Brick Joke: Upon examining Kenneth's corpse, the player will receive Kenneth's Film. Late in the game, if the player decides to use a video player in the lab, they can finally see what's on the film. It's Kenneth's last moments.
- Broad Strokes: The revised ending in Jill's scenario, where Wesker survives and escapes, might seem like the canon ending at first glance, but it isn't consistent with the events of the sequels since Wesker doesn't get gored on the Tyrant's claw. Therefore, it fails to explain Wesker's revival, his infection with the prototype virus, and especially his future vendetta against Chris in Code: Veronica and Resident Evil 5 for wrecking his plans, when Chris spends nearly all of Jill's scenario trapped in a jail cell.
- But Thou Must!: As Jill you can avoid running into the first zombie by repeatedly running back to Wesker, but Chris is going to have to view it ripping out Kenneth's throat.
- Cheated Death, Died Anyway: During both Chris and Jill's campaigns, you can save Richard from dying of venom by retrieving anti-venom for him, only for him to perish later by being eaten by the aforementioned Yawn in Jill's route or by being attacked by Neptune in Chris's route.
- Choice-and-Consequence System:
- If the player makes the effort to retrieve antidote "serum" for Richard, then they unlock Richard's Auto Shotgun after facing off against either Yawn (for Jill) or Neptune (for Chris). However, Jill has to fight Yawn to get the Auto Shotgun; if she runs away, she loses the weapon and Richard gets killed off-screen.
- Saving Barry and Rebecca is simplified from the multi-stage path of the original to two obvious choices. Jill has to choose whether or not to give Barry back his gun when their fight is interrupted by Lisa Trevor, with Barry dying if she refuses and living if she does. Chris has to choose whether or not to save Rebecca from a Hunter shortly after they return to the mansion.
- Clown-Car Grave: Zombies will sometimes pop up in rooms after you have already cleared that room and even any surrounding rooms. Where are they all coming from? Yes, they can open a few doors, but there are still instances where the player character will come from a completely zombie free area, and then have a zombie come into the room from right behind them. There are also instances of the Hunters respawning in rooms that had been cleared.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The load-saved-game screen has different color text for different difficulty levels. Very Easy is purple, Easy is green, Normal is white, and Hard is red.
- Console Cameo: The computer terminals for the MO Disks are GameCubes. This was retained in the Wii version, but changed in the HD remaster.note
- Conspicuously Light Patch: The original release of the remake averted this, but the added fidelity in the HD remaster means 3D objects once again stand out from the original backgrounds.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Before he's able to encounter Chris and Jill, Kenneth dies choking on his own blood after a zombie bit through half his throat.
- Cutscene Incompetence:
- Chris is the only one to actually lose his handgun in the opening intro.
- Jill has an unerring ability to get herself in trouble and needing Barry to save her, such as with the ceiling trap or if she gets bit by Yawn in the first fight.
- Jill has an unerring tendency to fall flat on her ass anytime she is confronted by a monster, which is usually a lone zombie.
- A zombie that surprises Jill results in her at least stomping on it when it tries to grab her. Chris, on the other hand, just stares at it as it gets up, forcing a fight once the scene is over.
- If you trigger either of the "zombie attacks Jill and Barry" scenes at the start of the game, it takes three shots from his Colt to put it down, but it survives the shots and goes back to where you first met it. If you can get your hands on the gun's cousin, it's normally a One-Hit Kill to any enemy in the game.
- When Enrico is shot and killed right in front of them, common sense would dictate that Chris and Jill/Barry immediately pursue the shooter and, considering the confined space and limited escape routes of the cave they're in, have a good chance of identifying and even capturing him. Instead, they just mope over his corpse and let the shooter get away.
- Decapitation Required: Zombies that are killed can come back to life as a Crimson Head, which run faster, hit harder, and can take more punishment before dying for good. Lighting a zombie's body on fire, whether by the Lighter or from the flame rounds in the Grenade Launcher, will prevent its resurrection, but blowing the head off is also the other requirement if fire is not available.
- Despair Event Horizon: Rebecca has a brief moment where she breaks down in the chemical room after Richard's death.
- Detachable Doorknob: There's a door near the second save room which serves as a convenient shortcut to the main hall. However, after a certain amount of uses, it will suffer this trope, leading to a sort of inverted Door to Before scenario where the player has to take a longer way around later in the game.
- Developer's Foresight: The developers made a point to mess with veteran players' minds. Some are minor alterations. Other times, the developers use the original pathways to lead veterans the wrong direction:
- The infamous L-shaped Corridor. In the original, two Cerberuses will suddenly crash through its windows and attack you on your first trip through it. In the remake, they will only crack the windows on your first trip through the corridor if you enter from the southern entrance (the one most players would use first). Entering the corridor via the northern entrance will trigger the Cerberus attack.
- In addition to the above, the remake added several more unexpected enemy encounters, where enemies would suddenly appear in previously explored areas and attack without warning after fulfilling certain Event Flags.
- There's the tiger head statue. In the original game, the vacant eyes are meant for the blue and red gemstones, instead of the remake's blue and yellow ones. However, it is possible to acquire all three gemstones in the latter version. Vets of the original game (or curious new players) who dare try the red and blue setup are in for a nasty surprise.
- In the original game, the first hallway in the Guardhouse/Residence had a hole in the floor where one of Plant 42's tentacles could emerge and attack the player if they walk over it. The player needed push a statue to block the hole and then walk around it in order to bypass this trap. In the remake, the hallway now has two holes (one of which is difficult to see due to the camera angle), a stack of immovable crates and a single moveable crate. Pushing the crate onto the closest hole and attempting to walk around it like in the original will funnel the player into the walking over the second hole and get attacked by Plant 42's tentacle. The player must climb over the crates every time they pass through this hallway in order to avoid the trap.
- To a lesser extent, the solution to create V-JOLT is slightly different in the remake due to some of the chemicals having different numerical values assigned to them, but the strategy to find the solution is the same.
- If you happen to use a defensive dagger on a zombie or Cerberus, but then immediately decapitate it, you can pick up and re-use the dagger for later.
- Barry's magnum can be obtained if he is killed by Lisa. It's powerful enough to One-Hit Kill anything, including the Final Boss. However, the caliber in Barry's magnum uses .44 rounds, which is completely different from the .357 rounds that you find for the normal magnum. Therefore, you can't cheese the rest of the game by saving your magnum rounds for Barry's gun.
- If you attempt to enter the password MOLE instead of CELL on the lab computer, you'll hear a couple of Tofu soundbites.
- Real Survivor mode changes the note your supporting character leaves you in the Garden Shed. Since the doorknob never breaks, they never have to fix it, leaving out the part where they mention doing that.
- If you manage to kill two or more zombies so that their bodies fall on top of one another, setting fire to one will cause the other corpse to catch fire and burn as well. A patient player can severely cut down the number of Crimson Heads they encounter and greatly extend their oil supplies by doing this.
- If Richard was saved in Chris' scenario and Chris himself gets poisoned, Rebecca can check on Richard while you have control of her. Being a medic, she checks his vitals (Chris merely watches over him.)
- The effects from the storm in Resident Evil 0 are still present, which is why the occasional flash of lightning occurs in certain spots too.
- Disc-One Nuke: Using the Grenade Launcher glitch can make the game a cakewalk. It's only present in the GameCube version, however, and was fixed for subsequent releases.
- Doomed by Canon: The remake allows the player to save Richard by delivering the serum on time, but this conflicts with the fact that all the Bravo Team members (except for Rebecca) died during the Mansion Incident. Because of this, the game simply kills off Richard at a later point. The achievement/trophy for saving him on time in the HD remaster? "Delaying the Inevitable".
- Driven to Suicide: Several of the zombies encountered are found after they have lost the will to live before they turned undead, such as the bathtub zombie, implying that he had drowned himself, or the one found hanging from a noose in the residence. Additionally, several suicide notes are left behind that the player can pick up.
- Drone of Dread: The soundtrack has a number of these, such as "Lost in Darkness" (second floor), "Narrow and Close" (basement), "The Encounter" (Lisa's cabin), "Ivy's Domain" (guest house), and "Rush of Horror" (second floor revisited). That last example is especially creepy with its use of near-infrasound low frequency drones. Also present to a lesser extent in the original, such as in the revisited mansion and the underground areas.
- Dutch Angle: Once the player reaches the labs, every third screen change comes with a slanted camera of varying degree.
- Early-Bird Cameo: At the very beginning of the remake, if you go around the back wall of the foyer and to the door at the end, you can hear Lisa screaming. She doesn't appear physically until much, much later.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: This is the only Resident Evil remake to use Pre-Rendered Graphics and a Fixed Camera like the original did. The later Resident Evil 2 (Remake), Resident Evil 3 (Remake) and Resident Evil 4 (Remake) would switch to the Always Over the Shoulder perspective introduced in the original Resident Evil 4.
- Easier Than Easy: The HD remaster has a Very Easy difficulty. On Very Easy, you barely take any damage, healing supplies and ammo are practically given to you at every which way, enemy encounters are far less frequent, and certain puzzles become blatantly obvious to solve.
- Easter Egg:
- Beating Invisible Enemy mode in less than 5 hours will unlock a secret photo, a special message from Shinji Mikami and a gallery of unused costume designs.
- Fulfilling certain conditions will net an encounter with a red-colored Hunter, although it's not any tougher than the average Hunter.
- Beating Invisible Enemy mode in less than 5 hours will unlock a secret photo
- Easy-Mode Mockery: Subverted. The Very Easy difficulty is called "Walking," and has the flavor text "You can relax and enjoy the view."
- Eaten Alive: Richard is either eaten by Yawn or Neptune if he was cured earlier.
- Electrified Bathtub: While the Neptunes become harmless once the lab they inhabit is drained, the mother can be finished off by throwing a fuse box into the puddle beneath her and throwing a switch.
- End-Game Results Screen: The results screen shown changes depending on the outfit wore by Chris or Jill.
- The End... Or Is It?: When you beat the game without saving your supporting character (Barry for Jill and Rebecca for Chris), you'll get an extra cutscene during the ending that shows that the Tyrant is still alive, watching as you escape in the helicopter.
- Epic Fail: Kenneth's Apocalyptic Log is a first-person view of a zombie stumbling towards him and Kenneth panicking and missing every shot with his fully loaded pistol.
- Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Lisa is still wandering through the catacombs, looking for her mother.
- Eyes Do Not Belong There: In Lisa's final appearance, the giant hump on her back is revealed to be an enormous bloodshot eye, hinting at her connections to the G-Virus.
- Facial Horror: Lisa stitched together the faces of her assorted victims, wearing them like as a mask. In later playthroughs, you do get a brief peek at her real face. As technology progressed, fans have been able to extract her character model from the game data and upload shots of her model sans the mask and hospital gown remnants.
- Failure Is the Only Option: In the original game, you could not save Richard. The only difference getting the serum to him on time makes is whether you get his radio or not. In the remake, you can save him, but he suffers a Plotline Death shortly afterwards.
- Fanservice:
- Once you gain access to the Closet Key, you'll be able to unlock Jill's Resident Evil 3 outfit. Then there's the Jiggle Physics...
- Rebecca's cowgirl outfit shows off her legs.
- Faux Action Girl: While Rebecca is still this, the events of Resident Evil 0 and Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles justify it this time: she's already gone through hell and back by the time Chris finds her.
- Fire Keeps It Dead: Zombies will turn into Crimson Heads if they are killed but the head is intact and the body isn't burned. The best way to make sure they don't is carrying around a flask of kerosene and a lighter to burn bodies. However, your kerosene is limited, with the flask only having two uses before needing a refill and jerrycans having only enough to do so twice. If you're willing to use the ammo for it, you can also use the flame rounds in Jill's Grenade Launcher to kill a zombie instantly with fire and prevent it from becoming a Crimson Head at the same time.
- First-Person Dying Perspective: The player receives a video tape by examining the body of Kenneth from S.T.A.R.S bravo team. After reaching the Umbrella facility located underneath the Spencer mansion, the player finds video equipment that can be used to view Kenneth's videotape. The footage is from Kenneth's point of view and shows him trying to shoot a zombie, but fails and is ultimately killed by the creature.
- Foreshadowing: The remake adds a file written by William Birkin that mentions Alexia Ashford and the G-Virus.
- Game-Favored Gender: The remake tries to play with this somewhat. While Chris can start using the kerosene + lighter combo as soon as he finds the flask, can score a critical shot against zombies at a slightly higher rate than Jill, and his self-defense weapon will prevent Crimson Heads, Jill gets the assault shotgun from Richard much, much earlier (so early in fact that she can store the regular shotgun as soon as she empties it), and gets help in the first Yawn fight from Richard, and she will stomp on the bathtub zombie's head when it tries to grab her, while Chris just stupidly stands there and gawks at it, forcing a fight. And unlike Jill, who can skip the bathroom entirely, Chris needs to go in there for one of his Old Keys. That said, Jill does get one advantage taken partially away from her; in the original Resident Evil, Jill's lockpicks could bypass the Sword Key doors as well as the various small key locks that plague Chris. Here, Jill can only pick the small key locks, and has to retrieve and use the Sword Key just like Chris does. In addition, Chris does have higher defense than Jill. Jill can easily find her health dwindle in less than two hits while Chris can take more punishment than her.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: Like in the original game, once you return to the Mansion after exploring the Residence a cutscene will display the Hunter making a beeline for your location. Unlike the original you can re-lock the door outside by removing the Key Item (which you need to use again elsewhere later). This changes absolutely nothing; the Hunter will still open the door as if it were still unlocked.
- Giant Spider: The remake keeps the huntsman/tarantula/wolf design for the Web Spinners, while the Black Tiger is reskinned into the highly venomous and aggressive funnel web. The HD remaster has the already detailed models cleaned to the point you can even see the detail of the fangs.
- Guide Dang It!: Knowing exactly when to fire the rocket during the second Tyrant boss fight.
- Harder Than Hard: The remake/HD remaster has three new difficulty modes:
- Real Survival mode. Auto-aim is disabled, and item boxes are no longer linked which means if you leave something in one box, you have to trek all the way back to said box to retrieve it. This is especially painful with Chris as he can only hold six items at a time, so planning far ahead what and what not to take is absolutely critical. Oh, and the difficulty is also locked on Hard, which means much less ammo and health pickups all-around. Good luck. About the only good thing about this mode is that the door with breakable knob won't break.
- Invisible Enemy mode. You'd better have memorized the positions of every enemy in the game, as they're now completely invisible, except when they hit you, and auto-aim is also disabled. One saving grace is that unlike the mode above, item boxes are still linked and you can choose your difficulty.
- To a lesser extent, One Dangerous Zombie. A zombified Forest chases after you at a lot of set points, can match your running speed, and the bandolier of grenades he's wearing means shoot him once and they go boom and kill you too. This particular mode can't be disabled in a New Game Plus playthrough once it's unlocked.
- Head Crushing: If a downed zombie latches onto the Player Character, they'll be dispatched by a boot on their skull one they have been shaken off.
- He Knows Too Much:
- As detailed in his memoirs, George Trevor believes this to be the reason why Spencer had him detained in the mansion and caught in his own traps as he built the trap-filled manor and thus knows just as much about the facility's nature as Spencer does, and Spencer isn't so keen on letting any possible leak survive.
- Enrico knows enough about Wesker being The Mole that Wesker shoots and kills him rather than keeping him around to get more combat data on the B.O.W.s.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels:
- The game's Easy and Normal modes are labeled "Hiking" and "Mountain Climbing", respectively, when you start a new game for the first time. The HD remaster takes it even further by adding a Very Easy mode, "Walking". Many first time players, unaware that "Hard" mode is not selectable on the first playthrough, naturally assume "Walking", "Hiking", and "Mountain Climbing" are "Easy", "Medium", and "Hard" rather than "Very Easy", "Easy", and "Normal", and end up playing on "Easy" when they intended to play on "Normal".
- As in the original game, due to Game-Favored Gender, difficulty is also partially determined by the selected character, with Jill being Easy and Chris being Hard.
- Implacable Man: Lisa and Forest in One Dangerous Zombie mode. The latter is particularly irritating as attempting to defend yourself against him will trigger an instant Game Over.
- Indy Escape: There are two rooms in the Courtyard tunnels where you have to escape a giant boulder.
- Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: One of the doors is so rickety that the knob falls off if you go through too many times, but the combat-boot-wearing protagonists will never kick it in. It's a blatant game lengthener. In Real Survival mode, that doorknob never breaks, though. Knowing that it's about to happen, the character will never do anything so bold as leave the door open to allow unrestricted access, considering the fact that it's a very useful shortcut.
- It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: A storm is starting up when the S.T.A.R.S. reaches the mansion. It never rains, but occasionally you hear thunder and see a flash of lightning.
- Jiggle Physics: Jill's breasts bounce up and down a bit every time she moves. But not in cutscenes, for some reason.
- Kill It with Fire: Unless you used a flame round with the grenade launcher or managed to get a headshot, killing a zombie means you need to use a flask of kerosene and a lighter to burn the corpse.note If you leave the body behind without doing so, said body will stay there until it transforms into a Crimson Head.
- King Mook:
- Crimson Head Prototype 1, who is the only Crimson Head needed to be killed to complete the game.
- Forest, a.k.a. the One Dangerous Zombie, can match the main character in running speed, hits harder, and intentionally pops up at the least opportune times. He is also covered in grenades; if you shoot him, it is an instant Game Over.
- Little Useless Gun: Zig-zagged with the Self-Defense Gun. The derringer pistol only has one unfired .22 WMR round and no extra ammunition exists for it, but that single round is enough to kill any enemy that's not a boss.
- Made of Explodium:
- The player character become this while refueling the capsule in the laboratory. You can't run or react to being attacked by an enemy while transporting it unless you would like to explode.
- There's an unlockable mode where a certain zombie has a ton of explosives strapped to his body—and one bullet to him will instantly kill you (and destroy half the mansion).
- Mirror Scare: Reflections are almost the only way to see a monster in Invisible Enemy mode.
- Multiple Endings: The player's partner will assist the protagonist during the final battle with the Tyrant. It's possible for the partner to die during this battle, which will result in an alternate ending where the mansion blows up and only Chris and/or Jill escape without Barry or Rebecca.
- Mythology Gag: Although all of Barry's classic narmy lines are watered down, their spirit remains intact. For example, if he saves you in the shotgun room, he comments on how Jill would have fit nicely into a sandwich if he'd been a second later, and at the start of Jill's game, he passes her a lockpick and tells her that she'd probably make better use of it.
- Nerf: In the original game, the shotgun is a near game breaker since a well aimed headshot could blow off zombie heads every single time without fail. The remake has it where instant kills with a shotgun to the head are more reliant on luck. The magnum has a higher probability of doing so, but its One-Hit Kill rate is cut down from 100% in the original to about 80% here. It's entirely possible to expend two shotgun shells or magnum rounds on a single zombie's head, and still have to deal with it again once it gets back up as a Crimson Head.
- New Game Plus: The remake has three of these: Real Survival (unlocked after finishing the game once), Invisible Enemy (unlocked after finishing Real Survivor once or completing the game on Normal or Hard difficulty with both characters), and One Dangerous Zombie (unlocked after finishing the game with both characters). All of them are more difficult than even default Normal/Hard settings, and they're all frustrating for various reasons.
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Nintendo Hard: While the remake eased the overall difficulty and added a selectable difficulty level so the game isn't completely unfair, the punishing difficulty returns in the unlockable modes:- Invisible Enemy makes every enemy invisible unless they're attacking.
- Real Survival doesn't link the item boxes, which forces you to take care in where you store your items. It also turns off auto-aim.
- One Dangerous Zombie features a grenade-strapped zombified Forest Speyer that appears in several locations and explodes (taking you with him) if you attack him. Most egregiously, this mode is mandatory — once it's been unlocked, it's applied automatically to every subsequent game!
- Nitro Express: The remake has you refuel the laboratory's power generator, which requires you to walk slowly while carrying the fuel to avoid exploding.
- No Body Left Behind: The regular zombies avert this: their corpses remain unless you decapitate or immolate them, and if you don't do that, they'll turn into much deadlier Crimson Heads. You have limited amounts of fuel with which to burn zombies, which heightens the tension by making it unsafe to backtrack unless you meticulously burned every zombie you could.
- No-Sell: There is a chance that the Tyrant will actually deflect a rocket with a swipe of its claw.
- Nothing Is Scarier: The hallway where the dogs burst through the windows is changed, so that the first time you walk through there, one of the windows just cracks. In fact, you can come through the south entrance of the hallway as many times as you like without triggering anything. However, if at any point you decide to come through the hallway from the north side... well, that's another story.
- Oh, Crap!: The player character will visibly have this reaction after watching Kenneth's Film.
- Offscreen Teleportation:
- There are a number scripted events where a monster will bash through a door after certain conditions are met. One of these conditions is usually that there actually be a zombie or hunter present in the room they're coming from, but this isn't always the case, and it's not uncommon to enter a room only to find that a zombie materialized three feet behind you and is trying to break the door down.
- Forest's appearances in "One Dangerous Zombie" are scripted, meaning he'll randomly appear in the strangest places regardless of where the player potentially last left him.
- One-Hit Kill: In the original game, Hunters can decapitate you by simply swatting at your head. In the remake, the Hunters are notably weaker, but can still slit your throat, resulting in death, if they get too close.
- Permadeath: If you don't give Barry back his gun during the Lisa fight, she'll knock him off the platform and into the abyss. Even if you do give him his gun back, it's still possible for him to be knocked off the platform and killed if Lisa decides that he's more worth going after than you (which isn't often, but it can happen). Interestingly, the same thing can also happen to Wesker during this boss fight if you are playing Chris's scenario, but unlike Barry, he still shows up later in the laboratory anyway.
- Permanently Missable Content: Once the self-destruct in the laboratory is triggered, which happens only if Barry or Rebecca are alive, a Point of No Return is created—the entry elevator is disabled, which prevents you from backtracking to the mansion and other areas. If you missed the MO Disk in the tiger statue and you saved your game at this point, rescuing your partner becomes impossible. In Real Survival mode, all items in item boxes not in the laboratory also become inaccessible when the self-destruct is triggered.
- Personal Space Invader: The zombies will grapple and try to eat you. In the remake, you're able to find items that allow you to avoid taking damage by instead ramming a small knife in their head, tasing them, or ramming a flash bang grenade into their mouth which promptly blows their head up due to Chris pulling the pin.
- Pistol Whip: Wesker smacks Jill during their confrontation in the labs.
- Plotline Death: If you give Richard the serum, he'll survive, but later be eaten by either Yawn (Jill's scenario) or Neptune (Chris's scenario). If he dies in this way, he'll leave behind his Assault Shotgun, which is a much better weapon then the ordinary shotgun.
- Prematurely Marked Grave: George Trevor's last journal entry describes finding one of these. The player finds it a bit further along the passageway, implying Trevor is now occupying it.
- Pre-Rendered Graphics: The opening cutscene and the environments in-game are pre-rendered, while the player character, enemies, and NPCs are rendered in real-time. Interacting with certain objects or solving certain puzzles will also trigger a pre-rendered cutscene.
- Rapid-Fire "No!": Kenneth's last words before being zombie food was a long succession of "no"s.
- Real Is Brown: A somewhat egregious example as the game it's remaking had a fairly vibrant color scheme. On top of the palette being almost exclusively muddy shades of beige and grey, many rooms have radioactive-green tinting that's so aggressive that it's hard to tell that Jill's uniform is supposed to be blue. The HD remaster cranks the tint up so far that the game begins to look like a Fallout 3 mod.
- Reviving Enemy: Zombies that aren't completely destroyed via decapitation or immolation later come back as Crimson Heads, which means avoiding zombies is often the better option.
- Running Gag: The number of times Jill falls on her butt when a minor enemy confronts her runs on the absurd.
- Schmuck Bait:
- Go ahead and open the mansion's front door, despite being chased by zombie dogs through the forest during the game's opening. See what happens. One of the dogs will slip inside, and you'll have to fight it.
- The tiger room is this if you use the red gem in one of the statue's eyes instead of the blue or yellow gems. Technically speaking, there isn't anything that outright spells out the potential danger of using the wrong gem... but, when you consider everything you've encountered so far, as well as the fact that "Tiger Eyes" is mentioned in George Trevor's diary immediately following the phrase "booby-traps", you'd probably be wise to conclude that something bad might happen if you use the red gem when the statue's inscription clearly states "blue and yellow". So, what happens? The statue shoots into the ceiling, and venomous snakes fall into the room. This doubles as a continuity trap for those who played the original game, which only had a blue and a red gem - both of which were used for the tiger statue.
- The map for the dormitory is pinned over a hole in the wall that the player character will take note of. Said hole happens to be right next to a giant beehive, and it is here that you spray insecticide in order to exterminate its oversized inhabitants. Until then, you're probably better off not examining that hole...
- Imagine playing through the game as Chris, and then starting up a new file as Jill. When you were Chris, you explored the mansion's east terrace and drew the ire of your undead comrade Forest when you ventured all the way to the other end. As Jill, you decide to revisit the area at your own risk, only to find Barry standing over Forest's body.note Go to the end while Barry's still there and... nothing. You don't get attacked, nothing comes back to life; you're safe. Depending on which difficulty you've selected, you can find a couple of green herbs here, and you'll probably have the inventory space while playing as Jill to take both of them with you – meaning that there should be absolutely no reason for you to come back outside and see what happens if you go to the other end when Barry isn't around.
- See You in Hell: Wesker doesn't take kindly to getting winged by Barry's revolver:Wesker: Jill and Barry, together...In hell!
- Shaky P.O.V. Cam: Yawn's POV as it is about to eat Richard in Jill's scenario.
- Skippable Boss: In both scenarios, you can skip the first fight with Yawn by madly running around it and getting the Mask without a nose. It will still be there until his second appearance, though.
- Spared by the Adaptation: In the route in which Barry survives Jill's story in the original game, Wesker is killed offscreen by a Chimera after activating the self-destruct mechanism. In the remake, it is implied that he manages to escape.
- Speed Run Reward:
- The rocket launcher is still unlockable via the same three hour time limit. Should you at least make the five hour mark, the game will grant you the bonus Samurai Edge handgun, which sports infinite ammo, a faster firing rate and higher critical hit chance.
- The HD remaster adds achievements/trophies for completing the game in three and five hours. It even included an online leaderboard for showing everybody's fastest completion times. Unfortunately, the sheer number of people using a trainer program to keep the timer at absolute zero means that it's nothing but a wall of people tied for "first place" with a completion time of absolute zero.
- Suicide Attack: The One Dangerous Zombie (i.e. Forest). Upon unlocking him, Forest chases you around the mansion during the first investigation of it while wearing a grenade-covered vest. Shoot him at your own risk.
- Swallowed Whole: If the player cures him of his envenomation in time, Richard's fate is to be devoured by either Yawn the giant snake (if playing as Jill) or Neptune the giant shark (if playing as Chris).
- Taking the Bullet: Even if you manage to cure Richard, he shields the player character from an attack—Jill from Yawn, Chris from Neptune—and is devoured in the process. Rebecca does not take his death well.
- Tap on the Head: Chris or Jill will get hammered over the head by the manacle wearing Lisa, who is strong enough to shatter stone statues, in their first encounter with her. Outside of briefly losing consciousness, they will suffer no ill effects.
- Tear Off Your Face: Lisa, when she was still being used as a test subject, killed a handful of female researchers this way. The mask she wears are their faces sewn together.
- Tentacle Rope: Plant 42 uses these to pull the player character into its bulb-chamber from the flooded ring, even if they used the V-Jolt on it.
- Timed Mission: The player character has a limited amount of time to get Richard the serum. While you won't get a game over if you take too long, and you have to intentionally take your time due to how long it takes for Richard to die on his own, you will miss out on his Assault Shotgun.
- Too Awesome to Use: In the remake, the flame rounds are the rarest of the grenade ammo by a very wide margin. They are, not coincidentally, also the most useful.
- Tortured Monster: Lisa is a twisted mockery of a woman who's been trapped in a constantly-mutating, undying body for thirty years, and was driven insane by her ordeal a long time ago.
- Tragic Monster: Lisa thanks to what happened to her and her family.
- Undead Barefooter: Most of those infected with the T-Virus go barefoot.
- Unexplained Recovery: Wesker helps out in the final battle with Lisa if you are playing as Chris. He can be knocked off the platform just like Barry. Unlike Barry, he will still show up in the labs, acting like nothing happened.
- Unique Enemy:
- There's a bald, fat, near-naked zombie in the graveyard. This particular zombie model does not appear anywhere else in the game.note
- There's a single Sweeper in the Kenneth Room upon returning to the mansion. Unlike the ones in Code: Veronica, however, it can't poison you, due to it technically being a regular Hunter that's been reskinned to look like a Sweeper for the sake of an Easter Egg.
- Zombie Forest in One Dangerous Zombie mode stalks you throughout the mansion for the first third of the game once his feature is activated. He sprints at the speed of a Crimson Head so outrunning him is difficult, self-defense weapons aren't usable on him and more importantly, the bandolier of grenades on his body mean shooting him or damaging him even once will blow both him and you to kingdom come.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential:
- You can refuse to give Barry his revolver back, which allows Lisa to kill him. Speed runners will advise you to do just that: you won't have to fight the final boss as a result (saving a few minutes), and Barry's revolver is capable of killing almost anything with one shot, including the Tyrant (which, again, saving a minute or two).
- The HD remaster has achievements/trophies for finishing the game with both NPC companions, one of them, and neither of them. Do you want to be a hero, or do you want to get all of the achievements/trophies?
- Violation of Common Sense: One part of the game in the remake involves going to the mansion's basement so you can restore power to an elevator. This would be fine...if the power breaker wasn't constantly sparking and the room where you find that breaker wasn't flooded by a foot of water. Fortunately, nothing terrible happens.
- Vomit Discretion Shot: In Jill's scenario, she vomits after stomping on the bathtub zombie's head.
- The Walls Are Closing In: The mobile museum room. It works different from most examples of this, since the walls keep shifting back and forth, depending on what you are doing in the room, and you have to use a statue to safely move through the room's center.
- What Happened to Mommy?: Lisa is looking for her mom.
- Worst Aid: When Rebecca offers to treat Chris' wounds, the cutscene basically consists of her looking at Chris' arm, a brief blackout, and then her telling him he's all better now.
- You Monster!: Jill snarls at Wesker, calling him a bastard for holding Barry's family hostage. She gets a Pistol Whip to the face in response.
- You're Insane!: The remake treats us to "Wesker, you've become senile!"
- Zombie Gait: Crimson Heads subvert this, as they're capable of running constantly and moving faster than even the player can.
