YMMV / Resident Evil 4

For YMMV tropes regarding the remake, see its own YMMV page.

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• Adorkable: While most appearances of Leon have him being a Deadpan Snarker of some fashion, this version's of him, while still being one, is one of the most beloved due to the sheer cheesiness and Narm Charm of his iffy, if not bad one-liners while he still pulls off cool stunts, making him a likable dork, according to enough fans.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • Mendez can be easily dispatched by four well-placed incendiary grenades, two for each phase.
  • Krauser can be made into this if you know that the knife actually does the most damage to him. Granted, actually being able to slash at him is a bit tricky since it requires that you bring him to his knees by shooting at his legs, which by itself can be difficult since he moves at superhuman speed and his parasitic shield covers a wide area of himself. Once you do make him vulnerable, however, repeated slashes with the knife will cause the battle to be over with sooner than you'd expect. The VR edition allows you to trivialize the entire fight using only the knife, as you can manually dodge most of his attacks with ease and the moment when you couldn't can still be avoided with QTEs.
  • Saddler is infamous for being one of the easiest bosses in Resident Evil history, as not only does the arena provide a multitude of traps that can be used to stun and damage him, but he has a blatantly obvious "shoot me" spot that can be easily sniped with the Rifle. He's a little less anti-climactic when battling him in Separate Ways, where he's faster, has difficult to avoid attacks, and takes a lot more firepower.
• Awesome Ego: Salazar has such an ego that he has a giant clockwork mechanical statue of himself, which is encountered in Chapter 4-4.
• Best Level Ever:
  • Chapter 1-1 is a superb introduction to the game, and features the incredibly intense and memorable village combat sequence that serves as the game's Signature Scene.
  • Chapter 1-3 features the memorable dock encounters and has the boss fight against Del Lago as you fire harpoons at it in a reenactment of Jaws.
  • Chapter 2-2 features intense sequences of protecting Ashley in the village and is capped off with the memorable cabin encounter.
  • Chapter 4-1 is a gauntlet Marathon Level with tons of unique and varied encounters. It features such unique scenarios like a massive lava chamber and two Garradors at once, as well as being capped off with a fight against something appropriately tense enough to be considered the Best Boss Ever: Verdugo.
  • Chapter 4-3 is a fun underground ruins level that ends with an engaging Rollercoaster Mine finale.
  • Chapter 5-3 is a Boss-Only Level, but with three boss battles instead of just one: a Quick Time Event battle against Krauser, the terrifying multi-stage battle with the U-3, and a second fight against Krauser in a wide open area as he utilizes guerilla tactics to try and kill Leon.
  • Chapter 5-4 has Leon finally getting some backup in the form of Mike, who mans an attack gunship to support Leon as he tears the remaining ganado forces in half. The following is one of the most protracted and explosive enemy encounters in the game, and it feels very satisfying to finally cut loose and even the odds after an entire game of getting swarmed by enemies.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In Chapter 5-1, a Militia Ganado bursts out of an oven, screaming and inundated in flames, and attempts to grab the protagonist. If his corpse is examined, Leon will lampshade how bizarre the situation is:
  Leon: What was he doing in here?
• Breather Level:
  • Chapter 3-3, the shortest chapter in the game. There are only two rooms with enemy encounters in the entire chapter. The first is a somewhat tricky fight with a Garrador in a cage, which can be skipped by shooting the lock off the cage and leaving, and the second is a straightforward fight with standard enemies that rewards you with a cache of ammo, grenades and a rocket launcher at the end. It certainly is a welcome change of pace after the hell that was the last two chapters.
  • Chapter 3-4 is almost as short. Aside from a sniping section at the start, the rest of the chapter is played through Ashley, who has to face some easily avoidable enemies and solve stupidly simple puzzles.
• Broken Base:
  • What's better, the Red9 or Blacktail? Arguments over this rage to this very day.^note The HD re-release makes the race even tighter by increasing their respective power maximums to 6.5 and 4.5, reducing the relative difference between their damage per shot. On one hand, the Red9's damage is second to none and has some steady aim with the stock, but the Blacktail's superior handling and comparable damage make it almost as good, if not better in the right hands. It's worth noting that the Red9 becomes the superior option when played on the Wii, since the slow handling on consoles is completely counteracted by the pointer aim from the Wii remote.
  • Which rifle is best? Some players love the huge damage the bolt-action rifle offers while others prefer the more user-friendly semi-auto.
  • In more Casual-Competitive Conflict, the Riot Gun versus Striker.^noteThe first default shotgun didn't count since it's strictly inferior to the other two. Casual and some hardcore players prefer the Riot Gun because it's practical jack-of-all trades that can be used in any situation when needed, while in more competitive (speedrun) scene the Striker is a superior choice because of the Ditman glitch alone, which allows users to sequence break the harder parts of the game while also allows them to move faster than the enemy could hit you.
  • The TMP. Quite a few are inclined to despise it as a useless waste of space, just as many swear by it as essential to their toolkit.
  • All the Escort Mission sections. Some wish they were gone entirely, and that Ashley is The Load played straight whose presence drags the gameplay down with her terrible AI. Others found them to actually be an enjoyable source of gameplay variety and that Ashley actually does a pretty good job of staying out of your way most of the time even with the questionable AI, and believe that the hatred for them is severely overblown.
  • Among Spanish fans, there are those who find funny how badly their country is represented in enough ways, and those who find it insulting.
  • The island, the final section of the game. One half of players enjoyed the island for increasing the combat and digging deeper into the game's lore. Others, however, view the island as a Disappointing Last Level due to the Difficulty Spike and feel that the action-oriented atmosphere clashes with the more survival horror feel of the game's previous sections. There's also a third group of fans who otherwise enjoyed the island but agree that some elements (like the introduction of gun-toting enemies) could've been either better executed or left out entirely.
  • The game's control scheme, and whether it has aged well, has become somewhat divisive. Detractors argue that certain elements of the game's controls, such as the Tank Controls and strict enforcement of Do Not Run with a Gun are archaic compared to more modern and/or conventional shooter control schemes that allow for strafing and moving while aiming. Others appreciate the controls for giving the game its own unique feel, and are more grounded and realistic compared to other shooters that allow the player to move unrealistically fast without sacrificing accuracy, and argue that the gameplay is balanced around the controls.
• Common Knowledge: Despite the game's reputation as one big escort mission, Ashley is really only around for maybe a third of the campaign. This likely stems from her presence during one of the game's more infamous difficulty spikes, that being the Water Room in the Castle.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: The game is tailored to be approachable by anyone, including newcomers and veterans alike, but there are instances where several decisions are just more preferable than others:
  • Veterans of this game will only use two of multiple available pistols that you can buy; Red9 (with stock) and Blacktail. The Red9 with the stock gives you firepower and stability worthy of a handheld rifle while the Blacktail is a practical and powerful pistol with solid DPS and stability and doesn't take as much space as the Red9. Other pistols aren't as useful as those two and are largely ignored unless you're doing a challenge run.
  • For speedrunning, the Striker, Semi-Auto Rifle and Rocket Launcher are your best friends. The Striker is worth purchasing for the Ditman glitch alone while it's also pretty decent crowd control weapon. The Rifle is useful for killing single targets because it's critical headshot rate is high enough to kill literally any kind of non B.O.W. Ganado. The Rocket Launcher will kill almost every enemy in one shot, which makes them perfect for fighting bosses.
  • After the hold the line sequence with Luis in the village cabin, most players will choose the right path to fight El Gigante for a good reason: you can skip the entire fight as long as you have the key to escape. In the left path, you have to whittle down an army of villagers and kill one of the Bella Sisters to progress, which is tougher than El Gigante. Plus, the left path is essentially a mini-maze.
  • Experts prefer to start off in Professional mode over Normal mode because the game uses adaptive difficulty that changes depending on your performance on the entire game. Professional mode simply fixes the difficulty to the highest so that you don't need to worry too much if you're performing too well.
• Complete Monster: Osmund Saddler, the master of Los Illuminados ("The Enlightened Ones"), reawakens the Las Plagas parasites, infecting multiple villagers before determining the strain works. Injecting himself with a "master" Plaga, Saddler spreads the parasite to the rest of the village, destroying the minds of everyone it comes into contact with and leaving them as Saddler's puppets. Saddler also conducts horrible experiments on those in his clutches and disposes of the corpses by feeding them to Las Plagas infected monsters. However, when children are infected they die painfully due to their bodies not being developed enough to handle the strain. Saddler plans to use the President's daughter to infect her father and from there take over the US and then the rest of the world, infecting everyone with Las Plagas and leaving them as broken shells for him to control while Saddler reigns over the world.
• Contested Sequel: Some fans think this game is too action-oriented and not atmospheric, while others think the previous Resident Evil games sacrificed fun and playability for said atmosphere. Its sequels have mitigated this somewhat. After Resident Evil 5 and Resident Evil 6, it's hard not to look back on RE4 as the most subtle and haunting of the "new age" Resident Evil games.
• Damsel Scrappy: Ashley's a bit of a mixed bag. You'll hear "LEON HALP!!" so much that you're bound to want to kill her yourself by the end of the game. Anytime the player starts wanting to cut her some slack for being an unarmed, young woman stuck in such a nightmarish situation, she'll go and do something eye-twitchingly stupid like shove Leon (i.e. the only thing keeping her safe) away and run headlong into a booby trap. The most frustrating part? Unlike you and your comrades, she only has one death animation, so you can't even enjoy the momentarily therapeutic satisfaction of ignoring the cries of "LEON HALP!!" and just standing back to watch Dr. Salvador (or, by access, a chainsaw sister) slice her obnoxious head off. Thankfully, that's the worst of it, and otherwise she's actually pretty tolerable as far as escort characters go, between the hiding spots that allow you to to clear out an area without having to worry about her, her tendency to stick close to Leon and follow orders consistently so you can keep her in safe spots while you handle enemies, and the fact that she makes an effort to stay out of your line of fire. On top of all of this, give her the suit of armor and suddenly she becomes very useful bait, since she's invincible and enemies won't be able to carry her off.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Novistadors are not often well-liked among the Resident Evil community. They fly, they lunge, and they almost always come in a crowd. In the higher dynamic difficulty setting and Professional mode, not only they're a lot more durable and can tank more shotgun blasts than usual, their flight pattern also becomes a lot more jittery and unpredictable as the game goes on. At least they only appear in the Castle and are only seen three times through the entire game, four with a backtracking sequence but in small numbers, and since they kidnap Ashley in a cutscene, you don't have to look after her while dealing with them.
  • Shield-wielding Ganados are introduced in the Castle level. Their shield essentially acts as their second health bar, hides their vulnerabilities, makes them immune to Flash Grenades and increases the range of their attacks, making avoiding them difficult. They always appear in squadrons of 2-3 members, often guarding other enemies. Thankfully, once their shield is broken, they're just a normal Ganado that you can easily dispatch.
  • Ganados with protective headgear. Just like the shield wielding ones, they start to appear in the Castle level onwards, and although less abundant and lacking the barrier efficiency of the shield guys, they are completely invulnerable to headshots. This means you can't instantly kill them with a rifle round to the head or by suplexing them. Worse yet, it's possible to encounter a Ganado wearing both a helmet and a shield at the same time. They at least won't sprout a Plaga.
  • The Regenerators, as their name implies, regenerate from damage at astonishing speed, making them massive bullet sponges as well. They also do a terrifying amount of damage, and the only quick way to kill them is to use the infrared scope to blast the plagas in their body. And if you think about just knee capping them and running, think again; they slither after you at astonishing speed. When you do kill them, they explode. Then there is the Iron Maiden, a spike covered version, that has a devastating grab attack that can be a One-Hit Kill if you have less than 3/4's of a full healthbar. They also have more plagas to shoot, including one on their back. And they do more damage when they explode, with a bigger blast radius too.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • That dog you save from the trap at the beginning of the game. The Video Game Caring Potential is nice, but what cements him into the hearts of fans everywhere is when he repays the favor by helping you kill your first El Gigante. Capcom had made another game called Haunting Ground where an identical dog called Hewie spends most of the game as the protagonist's loyal companion.
  • Luis due to his style, characterization, and personality - he might come across as trying to be cool himself, but to enough fans, he succeeds.
  • The Merchant. Aside from a number of catchphrases and the gameplay importance of him being a reoccurring Item Shop, we know nothing about him beyond face value.
  • Mike, who helps Leon by shooting zombies from his helicopter. He also knew a good bar.
  • The Regenerators. Only a handful of them appear in the game, and mostly near the end of it too, but they are one of the most memorable and terrifying enemies in the entire franchise.
  • HUNK from RE2 returns, but only in The Mercenaries mode. Despite this, many fans who had never played RE2 love him for his interesting gameplay style and mysterious background even though he's not in the main story at all. It also helps that he's the sole out-of-left-field mercenaries character pick: Leon, Ada, and Krauser are all main characters, and even Wesker makes a few appearances in Ada's campaigns. HUNK? Only in The Mercenaries mode.
• Even Better Sequel: The Resident Evil games were always well liked, but this game is considered the apex of the entire series. It's sitting at 96 on Metacritic and is considered the game of the year for 2005. It's been released on multiple platforms and holds the Guinness World Record for best-selling survival horror game. It did so well and is so liked that almost all of the main entry Resident Evil game since RE4 have followed its template and tropes. On top of all those accolades, it's credited for bringing the Always Over the Shoulder viewpoint into new prominence in Third-Person Shooter genres and inspired a lot of other games, such as Dead Space for one. As such, while RE4 may lead to a bit of a Broken Base for fans who decry its shift to a more action-oriented tone, you're more likely to find a lot more people who treat this game as a Sacred Cow.
• Evil Is Cool:
  • Mendez is well loved despite his scant screentime for his truly intimidating physical presence, his great boss fight, and being a No-Nonsense Nemesis unlike his blowhard superiors.
  • Salazar due to his tendency of stealing every scene that he's in.
  • Krauser for being a major badass and having perhaps the best fight in the game.
  • Wesker never fails to deliver on the coolness, and his appearances during Ada's campaigns are certainly highlights.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Due to the way the logo is presented, the game is jokingly referred to as "4 Resident Evil" by some fans.
  • "The Merchant of Menace" for the Merchant.
  • The unnamed burning Ganado who Jump Scares you in the Island kitchen is known by fans as "Oven Man".
  • "Super Salvador" for the giant Ganado wielding a double-bladed chainsaw in the Mercenaries mode. He has actually had many nicknames - "Dr. Salvador X" and "(Mega) Salvador" among them.
• Foe Yay Shipping: Krauser's complete fixation with Leon (complete with a fight that is full of innuendo), hatred for Ada, and ambiguous past with Leon led to a lot of Leon/Krauser shipping. Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles fleshing out their backstory only strengthened this further.
• Fountain of Memes:
  • Leon. Plenty of his one-liners are memetic due to being often takesn as So Bad, It's Good.
  • The Merchant. All of his lines are extremely quotable memes in their own right.
• Franchise Original Sin: RE4 was met with commercial and critical acclaim for being an Actionized Sequel that still had enough horror elements to stay true to the genre. Nearly every other Survival Horror or related game, including its sequels, tried to follow suit, upping the action further in response to the more mainstream popularity of FPS and other shooters. This is viewed as an Audience-Alienating Era for the genre, where it neglected the horror aspect and became indistinguishable from any other action game, because they lacked the action-horror balance that let RE4 succeed. The genre only got back on track with smaller titles that often removed the "action" half to focus purely on the "horror" end, while the Resident Evil series itself (after the massive Broken Base RE6 caused) only started getting back on track with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and the Resident Evil 2 (Remake).
• Game-Breaker:
  • Playing as Krauser in The Mercenaries, seeing as how he's a Lightning Bruiser whose arrows will kill all regular enemies in practically one shot (especially if you're aiming for their heads). He also can activate his plagas arm which will obliterate every enemy in his path (even Super Salvador) in a single hit, with the only downside being that it takes a while to recharge.
  • The Wii Edition is the easiest version overall because, in a game designed around using a control stick to aim, the 1:1 aiming of the Wiimote makes combat a cakewalk.
  • The VR version has motion-controlled aiming on par with the Wii version and allows you to dual-wield your knife and a one-handed gun, as well as move while shooting. This trivializes almost every enemy encounter, since it provides Leon with mobility, accuracy and firepower that the original release could not account for. Additionally, the downtime between each knife slice has been decreased, while the Semi-automatic sniper rifle no longer requires the player to aim through its scope, making two already reliable weapons even more efficient. That being said, certain options that are provided can help mitigate this and bring back some challenge, such as being able to disable the laser sight on your weapons or retaining the movement system of the original game, being unable to move and shoot simultaneously.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The prominence of the Spanish language in the game ensured a thriving Latin American fanbase for RE4. However, the Brazilian fan community appears to be the most noticeable of these- despite being from a Portuguese-speaking country. At any rate, expect to see lots of Brazilians in YouTube comment sections of videos about the game.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The Crossbow Ganados. They are annoying as sin, especially when you can't tell where they are. They also have excellent accuracy on Professional mode, and will do more damage than you'll be pleased with. They will also come back to haunt you in the Mercenaries modes, spawning far away while you deal with nearer threats.
  • Plagas. Specifically, the second and, especially, third forms. The second type is due to it biting your head off. However, the third appears to exist specifically to piss off players accustomed to using flash grenades or shotguns to kill Plagas.
  • Colmillos are Plagas infested wolves that are smaller than other enemies, move erratically, and can easily pounce on Leon to deal heavy damage. While dealing with one usually isn't too bad, they often come in packs to make things more difficult and annoying. They are also fast, often not giving the player much time to react to their attacks while also being able to easily catch up and pounce on the player when they attempt to run away. Lastly, they can also sprout Plagas tentacles to deal additional damage and interrupt the player. On the bright side, they don't have much health compared to other enemies and can be instantly killed with incendiary grenades or flashes if their parasites are out - the player can even tilt the camera away from them to prevent enough of their attacks.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • Salazar is a pain to fight, if only because his reaction to being hit anywhere but his 'weak' point (a bullet sponge in its own right) is a Large Ham.
  • It's easy to get sick of the U3's underground attack due to how often it is used, as well as the fact that you can't really do anything but Press X to Not Die until the thing decides to come back to the surface.
• Good Bad Bugs: Lots in the GameCube version, though most of them were fixed in subsequent versions:
  • An exception is clipping, especially the knife through the hole in the door glitch. It was actually made better in the later releases by preventing you getting hit while using this glitch.
  • The famous Ditman glitch, which is especially useful for speedrunning: Aim the Striker but go to the pause menu before the laser sight appears, then select another weapon. Leon will now move about 50% faster! This glitch exists in every version of the game, except obviously the VR version due to programming and playstyle differences.
  • Ashley is able to suplex certain enemies via a glitch in the North American GameCube version after stunning them by busting a door open in their faces. The PAL and Japanese GameCube versions and subsequent ports fixed this glitch. However, it can be restored in the Steam version via re4_tweaks.
  • In Chapter 4-2, there's a part where you have to fight two El Gigantes in a small room. It's possible to make one fall in the lava that's under the floor, which kills it after a minute. In the GameCube version, if you leave the room and then came back, there will be money on top of the lava pit that you can pick up (the reward for killing El Gigante). This was fixed in later versions.
  • In the GameCube version, during the Salazar fight, there is a spot near where the tentacles comes out of the walls on either side where Salazar will not attack you. The tentacles will try to hit you if they are out, but otherwise you have complete impunity to whale on Salazar. This was fixed in later versions.
  • In the Oculus VR version, there's a way for you to infinitely get as many shotgun shells as you could in few simple steps; First, buy the cheapest shotgun (or the get the shotgun from the village if you're first time playing). Then cock your shotgun when its fully loaded and empty as many shells as you can, then upgrade the ammo capacity once, repeat ad nauseam until you fully upgrade the ammo cap and empty all the shells, then sell it for extra return value, and repeat until you basically fill your inventory with all the shotgun shells you need. With the 1:1 aiming of the VR edition that makes aiming shotgun much easier, and you don't even need to spend your money or scour for resource ever again. YouTuber Dante Ravioli were able to complete the entire game with shotguns through using this trick.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • To give some real world credence to the Ganados, the game contains a document which (accurately) describes several real world parasitic organisms which are capable of altering the host's behavior to be more beneficial to the parasites. One of the parasites mentioned is cordyceps fungus that infects ants, the very same thing that mutates to infect humans in The Last of Us.
  • Shinji Mikami's insistence that the game would stay exclusive to the GameCube becomes this when not only was a PlayStation 2 port announced before the original version was even released, but as of 2019, it's become one of the go to examples for games that are Port Overdosed (along with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim), having received fourteen ports across thirteen different platforms.
  • Leon's infamous "Your right hand comes off?" quip. While Salazar's may not, there sure would go on to be another character in the series whose right hand proves detachable.
  • After overpowering Ada in a cutscene, Leon snarks "next time, use a knife", emphasizing that they are better for melee combat. Jump forward to the Resident Evil 2 (Remake), and the knife has been made exceptionally useful against both Lickers and the final Super Tyrant fight due to its unique properties in that game.
• Ho Yay:
  • When Leon unties Luis, the latter says, "Little rough, don't you think?" And then he asks for a smoke.
  • Luis dies from being impaled by what appears to be a giant tentacle schlong that comes from under Saddler's robes.
  • Krauser's behavior in the Fortress Ruins. Some of his dialogue, such as "That's what I'm talking about" is innuendo-laden and delivered in a particularly sexually suggestive manner, and as the battle in Fortress Ruins progresses, Krauser gets increasingly excited as he takes off more and more of his clothes and personal effects.
• Homegrown Hero: This is lampshaded, despite not being an example itself (being a Japanese game with an American protagonist): The U.S. President's daughter is kidnapped to a Spanish speaking Ruritania and Leon (now a secret service agent) is sent to rescue her. The villains enjoy taunting him over how things won't turn out "like your American action movies", despite to a man dying with Leon's all-American foot buried in their asses.
• It's Popular, Now It Sucks!: The style change, while making the series more popular, has caused many fans of the series' original style to feel overlooked.
• Low-Tier Letdown: While Leon is the most balanced out of all playable characters in Mercenaries mode, his equipment load is still strict and he has no quick access to highly damaging melee attacks outside of suplexes, which pales in comparison to other characters like Ada's massive loadout, Krauser's punching power and mutant arm, Wesker's balanced combination of the two, or HUNK's neck snap. He, short of picking up grenades, cannot do much damage at far range with his guns. This makes it hard to rack numbers on Bonus Time compared to all other available options.
• Love to Hate: Osmund Saddler enslaved hundreds of innocent people to his will, kills Luis and Mike and plans to Take Over the World with a horrific Puppeteer Parasite by using a teenager as a sort of Manchurian Agent. While he may suffer from a severe case of Bond Villain Stupidity, his relentless Smug Snake and Faux Affably Evil attitude, smarmy voice and ability to match every single one of Leon's quips with one of his own make him just as memorable as any of Resident Evil's other Big Bads.
• Magnificent Bastard: Chief Bitores Mendez is one of Osmund Saddler's lieutenants within the Los Illuminados and "The Big Cheese" of the village who combines cunning intelligence with frightening strength. When Leon begins investigating the village to find the president's daughter, Mendez organizes the villagers in stopping him, setting up various ambushes and deploying monsters against Leon. Mendez personally confronts Leon multiple times, defeating him with ease and only sparing his life on Saddler's orders. Mendez also captures and nearly kills Ada Wong when she interferes. Setting up one final ambush for Leon, Mendez's only reaction to Leon blowing him up is to mutate into a more dangerous form and continues fighting even after being reduced to just a torso.
• Memetic Badass: The Merchant. To quote Cracked:
  Screw the guy who blasts through the undead scourge and penetrates the deepest levels of the sewers to save the president's daughter. We want to know about the guy who's so badass he beat us there and set up an item shop and shooting gallery.
• Memetic Mutation: Can be found here.
• Mis-blamed: The criticisms towards the original 2007 PC port are often pointed against Ubisoft as the ones responsible for its dire state. While they did publish the original PC port in Europe and North America, they didn't develop it; the PC port was developed by SourceNext, a Japanese PC-based development and publishing company whom previously released well-received (and Japanese-only) PC ports of RE2 and RE3 among other PC ports of PlayStation games.
• Moral Event Horizon: Saddler transforming peaceful villagers into bloodthirsty savages to do his bidding, as the credits would suggest.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The soft clarinet music you hear in some saving rooms is very relaxing, especially when you just went through a hellish survival sequence. This tells you "Don't worry, it's safe here."
• Narm: See here.
• Narm Charm: As Yahtzee Croshaw has pointed out in his retrospectives on the game, the scenes where Leon and Salazar trash talk each other does not really come across as the intense battles of wit and sharp tongues the writers clearly intended, but rather as a bunch of pitiful verbal Wimp Fights where both parties manage to embarrass themselves over and over, and yet, somehow, it still works.
• Once Original, Now Common:
  • The over the shoulder gameplay was revolutionary for the time, and later games like Gears of War and the original Dead Space were compared to RE4. Now that this style of play is everywhere, it's easy to forget that this was the game that blazed the trail, and many players who play RE4 after playing those later games may find its implementation lacking.
  • The Action Commands were a neat little gimmick that caused Leon to perform cinematic feats that normal mechanics wouldn't allow, like flipping and dancing around lasers and having a cutscene revolve around them for a knife fight. Ask almost anyone nowadays, and they'll tell you that Action Commands have overstayed their welcome by a long shot.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Mike the helicopter pilot. He shoots and blows up some Ganados, only to get shot down at the end - though he does take out quite a few of them.
  • The Oven Man, due to how terrifyingly (and, to some fans, hilariously) sudden his appearance is.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • The fact that some decapitated Ganados will keep walking forward for a couple seconds before keeling over might be an unintentional quirk of the game, but it actually ends up adding a lot of tension, as it leaves you guessing for those few seconds whether a Plagas will burst out of their neck or not. Fortunately, this doesn't happen until the second chapter. Worse yet, even if no parasite emerges, headless Ganados can still sometimes successfully grab and choke Leon anyway, which is nearly unavoidable if they were making a mad dash toward you when you blew off their head.
  • The music in the "Ball Room" detailed under That One Level and in a few other areas has a strange, dissonant bassline that sounds very similar to the Zealots' guttural chanting, so that even when the coast is clear it still sounds like the bastards are always right behind you.
• Player Punch: Some of Saddler's appearances have him doing this, such as him killing Luis or having this done with Mike. The former is made worse by the fact the victim spent the last minutes of his life searching for medicine that would suppress the plaga inside Leon.
• Polished Port:
  • The Wii Edition has everything the original PC version claimed it was going to have, and on top of being perfectly stable, the Wii Remote's 1:1 aiming gives it the best controls out of any entry outside of using a mouse while also giving those who prefer traditional controls the option of using either the Wii Classic Controller or GameCube controller.
  • The Oculus Quest 2 version, which turns the entirety of the single-player campaign into a VR first person shooter, is masterfully done. Enhanced visuals and sound, stellar controls with plentiful amounts of accessibility options, quality of life improvements like being able to have a two-handed and one-handed weapon equipped at the same time, reprogrammed AI to account for the new perspective, and you have yourself an amazing VR game as well as an excellent version of RE4. The only downsides are, at launch, all side content is not available, having only the single player main story to play, but that's more than enough. However, this downside is mitigated slightly with The Mercenaries mode returning as a free update in early 2022.
  • The HD Edition, released on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 has upgraded the visuals to run at 720p with added shadows and colored lighting in many locations. The PC port of the HD release, dubbed Ultimate HD Edition, is playable at even higher resolutions than its console versions, has an added hi-res texture pack, has controls comparable to the Wii Edition thanks to supporting mouse and keyboard controls, and can run at 60 frames-per-second; the HD Remastered version on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and to a lesser extent, the Switch are also comparable to the Ultimate HD Edition in terms of visual fidelity and frame-rate with some extra character model improvements. This is opposed to...
• Porting Disaster:
  • The original 2007 PC port, which claimed it was going to have the graphical quality of the GameCube with all of the PlayStation 2 version's content. It was a buggy product with visuals that are much less detailed than the PlayStation 2 version with missing lighting, visual effects, and heavily-compressed FMVs that look worse than the PlayStation 2 version, which needed to be patched (and modded) frequently to even be playable. As with many PC ports of Japanese console games at that time, it's primarily designed for gamepads, with no native mouse support and rather clumsy keyboard controls. The in-game button prompts only refers to generic numbered gamepad buttons, not the keyboard controls or conventional gamepads such as Xbox 360 ones, which would be forgivable if it wasn't for the game's extensive use of quick-time events. What's also ironic is that the original PC port of RE4 was handled by SourceNext, the very same company behind the well-received (and unfortunately Japan-only) PC ports of Resident Evil 2 and 3.
  • The PlayStation 2 version is also inferior compared to the original GameCube version in a number of ways. While it was the first version to feature Ada's additional story campaign and the unlockable P.R.L. 412 for completing Professional mode, eliminated the need to swap discs at the last third of the game, supported proper widescreen presentation,^note the original GameCube version's game screen is displayed at 16:9 letterboxed to a 4:3 viewport, while the PlayStation 2 version features an option for widescreen presentation, provided the player has a widescreen television that can stretch the video output to fullscreen and features some minor fixes that are exclusive to this port, the game's graphics and audio were downgraded in order to run on the console despite being released in DVD format. Downgrades includes lower resolution textures, simplified models and environments, missing details and effects, sound effects and voice overs compressed so badly to the point of being muffled, and introduces some glitches and loading issues. The cutscenes where also noticeably replaced with pre-rendered FMVs, rather than rendering them in real-time with the game's engine.
  • The Zeebo version is this to the (already heavily cutdown) mobile ports. The game's original soundtrack, which plays faithfully to the console and PC releases in the mobile versions, were poorly converted into MIDI and sound horrifically off-key on the Zeebo version, along with incorrect lighting and jarring use of fog in some areas, struggles to maintain 20 FPS, and all of the humanoid enemies have blue skin for seemingly no reason (only the cultists had blue skin in the mobile versions).
  • The Ultimate HD Edition and HD Remastered versions released respectively for Steam, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Switch are solid ports all around (see Polished Port above) apart from the Switch version's performance issues despite running at a lower resolution compared to its competitors, but they have one major gameplay bug that can make certain sections unpassable: the QTEs are tied to the frame rate, but the game was originally designed to play at 30 frames-per-second. This means that when running the game at 60 FPS, players need to mash the onscreen button prompts twice as fast as they would when playing at 30 FPS. While most of the QTEs are generous enough that one can still pass them while playing at 60 FPS, the two sequences where Leon must pull himself up from a ledge (after the mine-cart sequence and the robot-Salazar chase) have a much slimmer threshold for success—a player will likely find themselves falling from the ledges over and over no matter how quickly they mash the on-screen prompts. The only way around this is to go into the options menu during these sequences and set the game to run at 30 FPS (or install re4_tweaks), but unfortunately this option only exists for the Steam version as the later console ports are always locked to 60 FPS.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • In order to provide some realism, the game was programmed so that Leon cannot hold his gun completely still. As a result, if the player takes too long to shoot, Leon will shake slightly and lose his aim. While this isn't much of a problem against slow or static enemies, it can lead to Fake Difficulty when handling enemies that constantly move around.
  • This game introduces real-time reloading, meaning you can't reload your gun by combining it with its ammunition on the inventory screen like in previous entries. Instead, the player must trigger an animation where Leon manually inserts the bullets into his equipped weapon, which leaves him vulnerable and unable to run for its entire duration. Predictably, the stronger the gun, the longer its reloading animation is.
  • The absence of item boxes forces the player to carefully manage their inventories, since not even the largest Attache Case can hold every weapon in the game. As a result, once the inventory starts to get cloggy, the player has no choice but to either discard some of their equipment or sell them to the merchant. Either way, the items will be lost forever.
  • The Action Commands penalize the player for dropping their guard during cutscenes, as almost all of them come without warning and result in a Game Over. This is made even worse during the infamous Leon vs. Krauser knife duel in which you must do several QTEs, which can be unresponsive even if you press the right buttons, spread over one long unskippable cutscene. And if you lose then it's instant game over and you must redo the entire scene from the start.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • The Punisher. Its exclusive upgrade pertaining to penetrating rounds falls flat when compared to the better crowd control a shotgun or TMP can offer, and despite its ability to punch through more than one foe, its strength is the weakest among all the handguns - even the initial one's special upgrade of increased critical headshots has its uses.
  • The Minethrower. Not only do the mines have a delayed explosion & no knockback (meaning the enemy has time to close in before exploding), but ammo is rarer than the magnum rounds. Supposedly the exclusive heatseeking mine upgrade would help you against fast enemies who can dodge your gunfire, like the Novistadors or the fire breathing Zealots, but the Novistadors only appear in some segments, and the fire breathing Zealots only exist in one particular area of the game (and if you think to simply look up and shoot the chains supporting their dragon statues, you don't even need the Minethrower for that), leaving the weapon with a very small niche that several other weapons can easily fill.
  • Out of all the secret weapons, the Mathilda pistol is essentially the least powerful of them. Not only you had to fully upgrade it to unlock its Exclusive upgrade (which is very risky and drain bullets faster than almost any weapon in the game), it's not even any stronger than the Blacktail, one of the best weapons in the game for its power and availability.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • This game has managed to spawn many different challenges. All grenade runs, no attache case runs (ie. never opening the attache case), no Merchant runs, knife only, handgun only (normally just the original handgun, upgraded, but some people will pick their favorite handgun instead), no deaths, speed runs, no ammo and grenade pickup run, mine thrower only runs, rocket launcher only runs, no running 'run' by exploiting a certain gameplay quirk, completing the game with the least amount of kills possible, etc. One certain streamer challenges himself by collecting all of the fishes available in the game and keeping them all the way to the endgame without eating them.
  • The newly released Randomizer for the PC version of the game (both Original and HD Edition version) brings more under the table as now you can adjust it so you can complete the game with randomized enemy spawn, starting weapon, store lineup and prices, and even randomized bosses, et cetera. You can even set it up by making it so (almost) all enemies and bosses you fight are Verdugos and Super Salvador, restrict yourself for only using your randomized starting items, et cetera.
• Signature Scene:
  • The first brawl against the villagers, being the moment where the new formula is first put into effect, followed by the villagers being called away and Leon quipping that they were called away to bingo quickly became one of the most iconic scenes in the game for showing that while the gameplay is gonna be very different, the writing was gonna remain campy.
  • Leon getting decapitated if you’re caught by the chainsaw wielding Dr. Salvador in the village brawl is one of the most infamous death animations in the series.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer:
  • The rewards for the Shooting Range (24 bottle caps and some pesetas) aren't particularly useful, but the minigame is fun enough to warrant a few plays.
  • While it's only unlocked after the main game is beaten, Mercenaries mode is ridiculously addictive. Some players are known to sink hours just replaying it before turning their attention to a New Game Plus or the bonus missions with Ada.
• Special Effect Failure: Separate Ways uses pre-rendered cutscenes rather than similar in-engine cutscenes throughout the campaign and Assignment Ada. While it's not as noticeable on the Sixth Generation console versions and the Wii, it's glaring in the HD version even when using the original textures due to poor video artifacting.
• Take That, Scrappy!: Ashley's deaths will lead to a Game Over. But to the players who regard her as a Damsel Scrappy, her deaths can be oddly satisfying. The same may go for her being captured.
• That One Achievement: Getting the Handcannon requires you to get a 5-star ranking on each stage with each character in Mercenaries mode. That's 20 perfect runs you have to do, and some are significantly harder to pull off than others.
• That One Boss:
  • The Verdugo is a two-legged nightmare to kill unless you have serious firepower, and you first have to confront it in a room full of tight corridors without enough room to avoid its attacks. It's also Nigh-Invulnerable unless you freeze it with a nitrogen canister, and there's only a few of those lying around the area. It's sorely tempting to either keep dodging long enough to escape down the elevator or just hang onto that free rocket launcher you found and be done with it in one go.
  • The battle against Salazar can be challenging even in Easy. It doesn't help that Salazar can basically direct traffic to instantly kill Leon with one move, though he can only do so if he's standing too close to him.
  • The first fight against Krauser involves several quick time events that if not pressed correctly Leon will die. The game will change the prompt every time the player loses so this is not about memorizing but training reflexes. He's also a pain in the butt during his last fight because the knife that was so useful against him before is now too slow to use, and he has no hitbox whenever he decides to backflip away from you.
  • The boss fight against U3 wouldn't be considered that hard if not the fact that you had to race against the time to escape each segment of the stage while you had to fend him off at the same time. Pray that he doesn't block your way or be ready to waste a lot of ammo, and maybe restarting.
• That One Level:
  • The very first level, where all you have is the basic pistol, a knife, and maybe a couple of grenades. After facing enemies in groups of at most two, you come to the village where you can end up with about a dozen villagers, two with chainsaws, coming after you.
  • The notorious Cabin Fight, where you must survive an onslaught in a cramped cabin, covering six entrances over two stories with an endless stream of Ganado until forty enemies are killed.
  • Chapter 2-3, the section after said Cabin Fight. Due to the previous section you'll have used up much of your ammo and the section is frustratingly stingy with giving you new supplies, forcing you to conserve until you get to the end. Said section is swarming with Ganado, and has a particularly tough mini-boss fight with the Bella Sisters. Luckily, you can skip this section by taking an alternate route... And then have to fight another El Gigante in a cramped ravine instead.
  • Chapters 3-1 and 3-2 are overall quite loathed:
    • The former is a massive Marathon Level that introduces the new Castellan enemies by forcing you through multiple close-quarters encounters with them. It also introduces the Demonic Spiders known as the Garradors, and then puts you through the infamous "Water Hall". There's little space to maneuver, Elite Mooks are coming at you from every direction, who have the highest Plagas spawning chance in the game and they will constantly get reinforcements until you've taken down a substantial amount of them, and you have to protect Ashley during the whole process. Prepare to hear her annoying cries for help a lot. Finally, if you leave her in the back room to deal with the enemies, Zealots will drop down a hole in the ceiling to attack her while you're outside— Not capture; attack, when she can only take about two hits before dying.
    • The latter has the infamous sewer level with the Novistadors, as well as loads of Crossbow Ganados and the garden maze with the surprisingly deadly Colmillos.
  • Any time a Garrador is fought outside of the initial encounter is utterly painful. Of note is the encounter with two of them shortly after Ashley is kidnapped by the Novistadors, not helped by the various Ganados that will flank Leon and force him to do something that will attract the Garradors' attention.
  • Chapter 4-4 is a succession of fights against massive groups of enemies that are guaranteed to be ammo sinks, topped off with Salazar's boss battle. A particularly nasty part is the Elevator Action Sequence leading up to Salazar's boss chamber, where you have to defend yourself against waves of red robed zealots that drop down on you from above while you also have crossbow Ganados shooting at you from the sides. Not only do you have precious little room to maneuver, the zealots have more health and a higher chance of spawning Plagas than regular Ganados. If you're short on grenades or shotgun ammo to knock them off the elevator, it can be hellishly difficult to scrape by.
  • That horrible wrecking ball room on the island is like a "greatest hits" compilation of the worst things the game can throw at you; fast and hard-hitting Giant Mooks that do high damage, crossbow soldiers that pick you off at a distance, and a freakishly high rate of plaga-spawning Ganados all while you're crammed into a relatively small chamber that gives you no way to defend yourself from sneak attacks.
  • The battleship raid in the fourth chapter of Separate Ways is by far the hardest part of the scenario period. Not only you had to juggle inbetween places and to circumvent as many enemies as possible as they keep respawning every so often up until the boat explodes, but you had to avoid all the batteries and artillery cannon that will happily rain fire upon you as they can oneshot you even at full health.
  • The water level in Mercenaries. It is the only place in the game that has Super Salvador. It also doesn't help that this is one of the few levels in Mercenaries where there is little to nothing in the way of good camping spots.
• That One Sidequest: The shooting ranges are tough already, but they become excruciating due to Leon's shaking while aiming, which makes headshots or even hitting the targets at all (consecutive hits cause bonus targets to appear, which are required for the rare prizes) much more difficult than it should be for a cop turned bodyguard for the president.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Several changes were made exclusively for the VR edition, which doesn't sit well with long time fans:
  • The removal of the extra game modes (Separate Ways, Assignment Ada, and The Mercenaries) doesn't sit well with the fans, since the hardware in question is more than capable of rendering the game perfectly in 30-60 FPS. This also means the corresponding secrets such as the Chicago Typewriter and the Handcannon were all omitted from access. That said, it was announced that The Mercenaries would be added as a free update in early 2022, so this has been mitigated somewhat. Time will tell if the rest is added, however.
  • While puzzle solving in the game is very easy to begin with, changes done with how you can solve puzzle such as the ability to automatically grab a key item from the get go instead of having to open the inventory were welcomed, but certain gimmicks were done makes it more frustrating to control as you had to grab and plug the key item manually each time. You can also no longer combine key items, which means you had to take out one key item at a time.
  • Several flirty and suggestive lines, such as Luis' flirting with Ashley in the cabin or Leon trying to get Hunnigan on a date in the end were omitted for no inexplicable reason, but the cutscene that has it still has the aggressive and tense tone which doesn't really make any sense (Ashley snaps at Luis for making a rather rude comment in the original, whereas here she randomly snaps at him for no reason at all, making her look like a total jackass). It's really jarring especially the lines in question are considered T-rated at worst, among many other explicit elements like the amped up gore compared to the original game.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: In spite of having a role in the main story and Separate Ways, Luis is unavailable to play in the Mercenaries mode in spite of being proficient with a gun himself.
• Too Cool to Live:
  • Luis is Leon's only ally for the first few chapters of the game and proves himself to be just as badass as the American agent despite being just an ordinary biologist. His death comes out of the blue during the Castle arc, as Saddler sneaks on him and impales his chest with a Plagas tail.
  • Mike the helicopter pilot. How many times in this series can you say you have a chain gun and missile launcher-toting helicopter coming to your aid, and doing a damn good job at that? It's nothing short of a travesty that he and Leon weren't able to stop by that bar he mentioned.
• Tough Act to Follow:
  • Resident Evil 4 received universal acclaim upon its release. Direct sequels like RE5 and RE6, while overall competently made, are still outshined by RE4. These days, RE4 is often even compared favorably to the remakes of the first two games.
  • In terms of the many different versions, the Wii Edition is this to every port that came after it. While higher fidelity and better framerates from more powerful consoles were appreciated, the Wii's usage of motion controls makes it so that the Wii Edition is widely considered by fans to be the most fun version of the game to play, as the aiming and shooting is that much better due to motion controls. Many were even disappointed at the Switch's lack of gyro for its version, given that the console already supported gyro with Splatoon 2.
  • The VR version for the Oculus/Meta Quest 2 takes it even further, with full VR immersion and the option for different movement styles (teleporting forwards, snapping and even full locomotion) as well as VR specific movements that turn the gameplay on its head (being able to dual-wield a pistol or long gun with a knife or even another gun) and featuring updated textures.
• Viewer Pronunciation Confusion: Regarding J.J., is it "Jay Jay" or "Hota Hota" (i.e., the letter J pronounced in Spanish)?
• Vindicated by History:
  • While it's generally considered great, there are a number of fans who didn't like the greater action focus. A number of the same fans see this in a different light after the much more actiony, and much less atmospheric RE6.
  • When the game first came out, Ashley was considered The Scrappy for being helpless and forcing the player to divide their focus between protecting her and fighting enemies. With Resident Evil 4 (Remake) removing most of the tension in escorting and protecting Ashley by having her hide in the safe room during combat, some fans admitted that the tension of escorting Ashley actually enhanced their gaming experience and that the change was completely unnecessary, arguing that her AI was actually quite good, given she knew how to duck, hide, and follow Leon accordingly.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: For a GameCube game, this one has gotten a lot of mileage in the visuals department as an example of the system's power:
  • The graphical quality of the game is seen as amazing, for the time it released as well as as time marched on, and the graphics on all the ports (save for the original PC port) look amazing to this very day. Animations are also incredibly fluid and realistic for the time, especially during the cutscenes, and still look fantastic in the 2020s. One of the main reasons the remake went for a major Adaptation Expansion with the plot and setting was that the original has aged well enough to make a straightforward graphical and gameplay update somewhat redundant.
  • The RE4 HD Project is one of the most polished fan updates to a game ever made. After the unsatisfying release of the Ultimate HD Edition on Steam, a team of fan modders went back and gave the game an unbelievable facelift, with one of the project leads even traveling across Spain to take higher quality photos of the architecture that the games developers had used as references. Every single texture, model, effect, and location was given a number of touchups, or in some cases completely revamped, to better match modern visual quality while slavishly adhering to the originals artistic vision. For instance, several 2D textures and model elements were made fully 3D, while several models were updated to use higher quality versions. The result is an incredible visual improvement across the board. It's so impressive that Capcom themselves pinned the mod to the top of the Steam Discussion forums for the game, essentially making it an officially promoted mod.
  • The VR edition ramps up the console-generations-old game's visual by readjusting the lighting for every location in the game and upgrading the VFX, making them more atmospherically uneasy and ramping the horror even more, especially with the Castle areas. In addition, textures were sharpened and touched up to account for the new perspective, meaning that textures generally still look good up close.

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