YMMV / Resident Evil – Code: Veronica

• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Even those who considered Steve an annoyance throughout the game had difficulties holding back tears when he died from a fatal injury inflicted by Alexia right after declaring his love for Claire.
• Arc Fatigue: Most of the interesting story bits occur during Claire's half of the game, with Steve and Alfred providing a lot of meaty narrative. But since Chris spends most of his story alone (outside of a brief run in with Wesker and two lines of shared dialogue with Rodrigo Juan Raval – he doesn't even interact with Wesker or Alexia until the last couple hours of the game) and basically has to go through the whole game again, it's easy for his half of the game to feel like a long slog.
• Awesome Music:
  • Alexia's themes, along with the cold and unsettling track "Rasen" (meaning "Spiral") that plays in the later areas of the game.
  • "A Moment of Relief", one of the most beloved save room themes in the series.
• Base-Breaking Character: Steve. There's a lot of fans who wants him Back from the Dead in a sequel while others couldn't care less about the kid and his Wangst, his Jerkass behavior, and his whiny voice.
• Cry for the Devil: Although Alfred was an twisted sociopath who took glee in torturing his victims, one can't help but pity him in his final moments when he is finally able to reunite with his beloved sister Alexia before dying from his prior injuries.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Bandersnatches can quickly pull themselves across the room and have a large attack radius with their long arms.
  • The Hunters appear in the second act of the game, and some are poisonous.
  • A literal example in the case of Black Widows, who can ambush you from the ceiling, are annoying to shake off, take quite a bit to put down and can poison you if you aren't careful.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Rodrigo had a small fan following back in the day, much of which was due to his story, characterization, and voice actor.
  • Wesker started to gain his following among fans when this game changed him from a Big Bad Wannabe to a badass chessmaster.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • A lot of fans believe that Steve is just hiding. Understandable, considering viruses only live and reproduce in living tissue and the T-Veronica can only be spread by direct injection. In X, Wesker does hint at him coming back too. Considering Capcom's annoying habit of ignoring even peripheral characters who obviously survived, don't count on the issue being revisited any time soon.
  • Some fans were convinced that Wesker's lackey in Resident Evil 5 was actually Steve instead of Jill Valentine during early trailers when the character is shown over a line spoken by the then unknown Irving, an easy assumption to make since no one knew that Jill had even gone missing. The fact that his voice was strained and coughy didn't hurt either, which would make sense seeing as how he had been transformed into a monster, killed, and then revived only to be put under who knows how many ugly experiments.
  • For a while in early 2012, some fans thought the mercenary character in Resident Evil 6 was Steve.
• Foe Yay Shipping: This game was the start of Wesker's really intense hatred of Chris. Check the comic version for more.◊
• Game-Breaker: Knives in the Resident Evil series have always had a reputation of either being just an okay weapon or insanely overpowered (with one instance of being a flat-out Joke Weapon), but the Combat Knife in this game gives even Resident Evil 2 (Remake) a run for its money as the best knife in the series with its long width of range, fast cool-down time, and absurdly generous hitbox. There's a reason why knife-only runs of Code: Veronica are popular amongst the speedrunning community.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Actual bats. Remember to wield the lighter. Apparently, Capcom remembered bats aren't blind, so they are repelled by the lighter.
  • Moths are poisonous, difficult to avoid, and you have to run through their corridor multiple times. They only take a few shots to kill, but good luck hitting one. Any that are killed get replaced as soon as you leave the room. If one lands on you, then you have an egg planted on you which will poision Claire as soon as it hatches. Thankfully, Chris doesn't have to deal with them, and there's an infinite use Blue Herb in the same room to cure the poison.
• Goddamned Boss: The final boss battle against Alexia is this for the following reasons:
  • Alexia's first form: You start off pretty close to her after the cutscene and if she gets close enough to you, it's instant death regardless of your health status, so you have to immediately do a 180 degree turn and run like hell to put enough distance between you and her. She also throws trails of fire that can trap you in a corner easily and the fire can stun you long enough for her to get in close and kill you, plus she also has a poison attack, and if you didn't bring the Magnum, which is very easy to miss, she's a pain to take down. Later on, there's a short sequence where she's attacking Claire, and you have to shoot her in order to get her to back off. A player who isn't paying attention could easily miss this, which will result in a Game Over.
  • Alexia's second form: Once the fight begins, you're attacked on all sides by Alexia's tentacles, her spitting poison at you, and small bug-like enemies that can easily stunlock you and cause many unfair deaths. Alexia also takes a lot of punishment, so if you don't go in with the right loadout or use too much ammo on the little pests, it's easy to wind up using up all your ammo with nothing to show for it.
  • Alexia's final form: All you have to do is hit her once with the Linear Launcher. Seems simple right? Problem is: the time is ticking, she moves around way too fast, all the while she's spewing fire in your face every five seconds. The two available strategies are to shoot randomly like crazy and pray you actually hit her, or keep firing in one spot and hope she stupidly banks into it; both are equally inefficient. The alternative is to switch to your normal weapons and blaze away, as she becomes sluggish after taking enough damage, but that requires you actually have sufficient ammo left after taking on the damage sponge prior form.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Remember how pausing in the original Resident Evil would reset certain animations? It works for Mutated Steve, too. Pausing and unpausing will revert him back to standing still for about half a second before he charges again, so if the player has enough patience to pause and unpause multiple times, they can outrun him without taking any big weapons or wasting any healing items.
  • Don't touch the Play Manual when you start a new game. As soon as you're able to, arrange your inventory in the order of Play Manual -> any gun -> healing item of your choice. With your gun equipped, read the Play Manual from the Files menu (NOT the Items menu). Exit out of the pause screen and fire your weapon. Congratulations! You now have a healing item that can be used indefinitely, across both discs, and across both characters (assuming you remember to put it in the storage box beforehand). This also acts as a Game-Breaker, especially if you're trying to go for an A Rank.
    • While not as useful as infinite healing (depending to who your ask) you could also use this glitch to get much more ammo for Game-Breaker weapons. For example, you could stock up all 600 Bow Gun Arrows in the game, get the Magnum (which like about 12 ammo total in the entire game), perform the glitch (Play Manual -> Magnum -> 600 Bow Gun Arrows) and you will have 600 Magnum shoots, which will turn the rest of the game into a cakewalk. Just don't forget you can't equip any other item or weapon or you will lose the glitch.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Wesker muses that Alexia's research was All for Nothing, given that she was killed and her T-Veronica Virus isn't particularly more powerful or useful than the regular T-Virus. In Resident Evil 6, T-Veronica is used as the basis for the C-Virus, which is horribly effective.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Alfred and Alexia were originally going to be named Hilbert and Hilda, respectively.
• It Was His Sled:
  • Wesker is back, which doubles as a Late-Arrival Spoiler.
  • Steve dies.
• Incest Yay Shipping: This picture◊ of Chris and Claire, which appears after finishing the game. Whenever this picture is shown during an online discussion, it is common for some fans to say that they get romantic vibes from seeing Claire holding her brother's arm with a loving stare, saying that they seem more like a couple than siblings.
• Memetic Loser: It's not that Steve is a complete Idiot Hero or anything, but for a lot of players his early Jerkass attitude, petty actions and stupidity induced from staring at Claire's ass all combine with his whiny voice to make him a fan-favorite Butt-Monkey. Though it doesn't stop the same fans from feeling hard about what happens to him, either.
• Memetic Mutation: "Steve is suffering."
• Narm: See here.
• Nintendo Hard: This game is widely considered to be one of the toughest in the series. Inventory management at its trickiest, with complex map design and a lot of key items to keep track of and loads of backtracking. Claire also doesn't get any powerful weapons until hours into the game, after she has already had a boss battle and the Bandersnatchers having started showing up. And that's not even getting into the security boxes on Rockfort Island that you can lose valuable items in if you don't get them out before leaving the island, and knowing to leave certain items for Chris before switching to him from Claire later in the game.
• Once Original, Now Common: At the time of its release, Code: Veronica was considered to be the pinnacle of the Resident Evil series, with its Dreamcast-powered next-gen graphics, 3D backgrounds, and interesting new gameplay mechanics (such as dual-wielded weapons and first-person modes); it was also considered to be one of the Dreamcast's Killer Apps alongside such titles as Soulcalibur, Crazy Taxi and Sonic Adventure. However, in hindsight, fans look back on it as having been "just another old-school Resident Evil game" and the subsequent Resident Evil 4 absolutely blew Code: Veronica out of the water and made it look painfully outdated. It still has its fans, of course, but it's no longer considered anything like the series-redefining masterpiece it was perceived as when it was first released.
• Questionable Casting: Why a voice actor in his 30s was chosen to voice 17-year-old Steve is unclear, but it does go a long way toward explaining why his voice sounds so unnatural and whiny.
• Retroactive Recognition: Alfred's voice actor, Peter Oldring, would later go on to voice Cody, Ezekiel, and Tyler.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The dual-wielding weapons can be this if you end up with more than one enemy that's not a zombie. Your characters will split up the gun fire to two different targets at once, range be damned. This can be fatal if a nastier monster is closer to you. Tapping the opposite shoulder button will let you focus on just one enemy, but this does not occur by default if more than one is in front of you.
  • The knife can get caught on the scenery, cancelling your attack. Given the difficulty of gauging your proximity to some background elements due to the fixed camera angles, combined with the confined spaces you often fight zombies in, this can end up getting you gnawed on as your knife bounces off a desk you were a little too close to.
  • The D.I.J. Diary in the Battle Game. It's a nonsensical document hidden in a slot machine that replaces a special weapon or ammo for each character. Usually, this is just a minor "haha, very funny" type of annoyance, but you can still find the stupid thing when playing as the knife-only Wesker, who has a much harder time without the Magnum he's supposed to find there instead if you take too long to get to that room. And this slot machine turns up shortly after the halfway point in the Battle Game, meaning you've already wasted a lot of time and effort on a very challenging mode before you get to find out whether or not you'd wasted too much time and the game screwed you over.
• So Bad, It's Good: The comic of the game turns everyone's badassery into the levels of shonen action heroes complete with every action shot is done spontaneously. It goes so far as having almost everyone in the main cast beating the crap out of the zombies (and Tyrants) with their bare fists, detailing almost every puzzle in the game to a ludicrous degree, and unintentionally predicted the good-ol-beefy action hero Chris that we all know and love in the fifth game onward, and you got yourself a nice light reading that will keep you from falling asleep.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: "Suspended Doll", the theme that plays in the Ashford mansion, sounds a lot like "Tubular Bells".
• That One Achievement: Getting an A Rank. In order to accomplish this, you have to do the following: beat the game in less than 4 hours and 30 minutes, you can't use the First Aid Sprays, you can't use any retries, you have to save Steve from the trap very quickly, you have to be sure to give Rodrigo the Hemostatic Medicine, and you can only save once when prompted to do so. While this is one of the last classic Resident Evil games, Code: Veronica's quite a meaty game and losing progress is very painful. This is doubly so because this game is one of the few with more than a couple of segments where your character can be killed in one hit from numerous bosses and circumstances. Many players resort to using a glitch that lets you get infinite healing from one herb and even then it can still be a tall order because of the one hit deaths and how easy it is to waste time in certain sections.
• That One Boss:
  • What's worse than fighting a Tyrant? Fighting one in the confines of a plane before you have any significantly powerful weapons.^PROTIPThe least painful way to kill Tyrant is to save those three B.O.W. gas rounds and at least two acid rounds. Fire all those gas rounds first then fire the acid rounds. After that, immediately use the crate on him. This will allow you to save those valuable explosive arrows for Alexia who has resistance against the magnum unlike other weapons.
  • Nosferatu if you're not good with the Sniper Rifle. If you get the bright idea to bring your big guns with you to cover your ass, then you'll just wind up hosing yourself later as they won't be available for most of Chris's half since you lose control of Claire immediately after the fight and don't control her again until close to the end of the game. As such, non-skilled snipers are left with the Morton's Fork of either getting stuck at a brick wall of a boss or crippling themselves for most of the latter half of the game. It is possible to kill him with just the knife, but it's extremely risky to do as you'll almost certainly get attacked while doing so, and this is the one part of the game where you can actually fall to your death if you are close enough to the edge and the boss hits you with its sweep attack. Not to mention it's very hard to avoid getting poisoned, and it's a special type of poison that blue herbs will not heal and if that happens you have to heal Claire later on as Chris, which if you're going for an A Rank is especially annoying as that costs you precious time.
  • Mutated Steve is invincible, faster than you, and can kill you in two hits. All you have to do is run to the end of the hall, but unless you brought enough healing items you cannot make it.^note He's quite easy to escape if you leave Claire the bow with explosive arrows, as it's quite easy to put one into him to stagger him whenever he's about to catch up -the quick turn ability is your friend- and Chris can get by with the remaining heavy weapons afterwards, but if you didn't think to take it you're in trouble. It is also possible but difficult to escape Steve without getting hit if you loop round behind him and get him stuck in the corner long enough enough to outrun him. There's also a trick you can use by pausing and unpausing the game that causes his animation to reset, making it so you can get past him without getting hit having to waste any ammo or healing items.
  • Alexia's first form. While not particularly fast, she has an extremely powerful flame attack that's highly unpredictable and hits at a very long range. Get too close and she uses her One-Hit Kill attack on you regardless of your current health. The fight turns into a Curb-Stomp Battle for you if you bring the Magnum, but most first-time players probably won't have it due to it being permanently missable if you don't perform a Guide Dang It! sequence of events in Claire's half of the game.
  • Alexia's second and third forms are no better. First, it's a timed battle, so you'll get a game over if you take too long to kill them. Her second form constantly spawns small mutant monsters that can quickly overwhelm you. Her third form flits about quickly and erratically, and sporadically rains down fiery blood on you, so you basically need to take pot-shots at her with the Linear Launcher and hope you get lucky enough to hit her.^note Unless you somehow retained enough conventional ammo to blast her; she slows down considerably after she gets hurt enough, making it easier to shoot her down for good.
• Values Dissonance: The use of crossdressing as a form of making Alfred come across as creepy appears rather tactless about halfway through The New '10s (it being a Shout-Out to Psycho is likely to be lost entirely on younger audiences). His voice coming across as flamboyant also comes across as cheap, and this line said by Claire when Alfred hacks her emergency plane is one that could only have been seen as acceptable in the Turn of the Millennium, when the game first released:
  Claire: Alfred! You crossdressing freak!
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The graphics for the cutscenes were well ahead of their time, and very well detailed. For example, in the intro, after Claire is struck on the head, she is seen trying to keep her eyes open as she fades out of consciousness, as well as the closeup of her gaze shifting nervously while she's trapped in a darkened cell.

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