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PlayStation > Playstation Help > Playstation Walkthroughs > Game Guide | |
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| RESIDENT EVIL - Plot Guide Written By: Thomas Wilde |
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A DETAILED PLOT ANALYSIS OF THE
---------------------------------------
---- RESIDENT EVIL ----
---------------------------------------
VIDEOGAME SERIES BY CAPCOM ENTERTAINMENT
Begun by Dan Birlew, 1998
Updated by Thomas Wilde with permission, 2000
*****************************CONTAINS SPOILERS**************************
This thesis contains spoilers. If you have not already played the games,
the authors strongly suggest that you do so before reading the document.
The best introduction to the games is to play them.
************************************************************************
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction and Legal Stuff
2. The Realm of the Dead: RESIDENT EVIL
3. Things To Do In Raccoon When You're Dead: RESIDENT EVIL 2
i. The Plot Thickens
ii. Events Between RE and RE2/RE3
iii. A Summary of the Basic Plot of RESIDENT EVIL 2
iv. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL 2
v. Differences Between Claire A/Leon B and Leon A/Claire B
vi. The 4th Survivor Minigame
vii. Conclusions About The Conclusion
4. The Last Woman Standing: RESIDENT EVIL 3: NEMESIS
i. The Death of Raccoon City
ii. A Summary of the Basic Plot of RESIDENT EVIL 3: NEMESIS
iii. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL 3: NEMESIS
iv. Different Paths
v. Different Endings
vi. The Epilogue Files
vii. Conclusions About The Conclusion
viii. Random Musings
5. Ten Thousand Bullets: RESIDENT EVIL: SURVIVOR
i. Coming Soon
6. Sibling Rivalries: RESIDENT EVIL: CODE VERONICA
i. A Lovely Island Hideaway: CODE VERONICA, Part One
ii. The Return of Chris Redfield: CODE VERONICA, Part Two
iii. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL: CODE
VERONICA
iv. Conclusions About The Conclusion
v. The Ashford Family Diaries
vi. Random Musings
7. Becky's Big Adventure: RESIDENT EVIL ZERO
i. Coming Soon
8. Unanswered Questions
i. RESIDENT EVIL 2
ii. RESIDENT EVIL 3: NEMESIS
iii. RESIDENT EVIL: CODE VERONICA
iv. The Resurrection of Ada Wong
9. Frequently Asked Questions
i. Miscelleanous
ii. RESIDENT EVIL
iii. RESIDENT EVIL 2
iv. RESIDENT EVIL 3: NEMESIS
v. RESIDENT EVIL: SURVIVOR
vi. RESIDENT EVIL: CODE VERONICA
vii. RESIDENT EVIL ZERO
10. Say What?!
i. The Weirdest of the Lot
11. Conclusion
===============================
1. Introduction and Legal Stuff
===============================
This ain't livin'
It's just survivin', you know
-- Luscious Jackson, "One Thing"
Dan Birlew wrote this thesis in 1998. I lucked across it in
1999, just when I was starting to get good and obsessed with
Resident Evil, and found it to be a useful resource.
After the release of Resident Evil 2 for the N64, I wrote a
transcription of the EX Files from that game, combined with
some notes on the RE storyline for the sake of the N64 crowd.
That transcription is currently hosted by gameFAQs (among
others), and after I wrote it, I got a lot of e-mail from N64
owners asking about the finer points of the storyline.
After about the twelfth e-mail I got, I went back to look
at Birlew's analysis for help, and wound up deciding that it
needed an update; rather than answering a flood tide of
e-mail, I could just point at this document and say, "Lo!
I have come down from the mount with answers!"
Birlew had already told me earlier that he wasn't planning on
updating this document and, in fact, was legally prohibited
from doing so. I asked him if I could do it. Please note the
following, which was not extracted under duress of any sort:
> Thomas Wilde has my full permission to continue the
> Resident Evil Thesis in my place. He has full permission
> from me to use any materials from my former versions that he
> sees fit. I relinquish these materials to him, since I am unable
> to continue or update the Thesis due to certain agreements I have
> made with certain companies.
>
> Sincerely,
> Dan Birlew
> formerly known as "President Evil"
Every time I say "me" or "I" in this document, it's Thomas
talking; every time I say "we", I refer to the audience of RE as a
whole. This document is copyright 2000, Thomas Wilde, except for
those parts that are copyright 1998, Dan Birlew. All recognizable
concepts from the Resident Evil series are copyright Capcom, and
their usage in this document does not constitute a challenge to
that copyright. And so on. And so forth. All rights reserved;
violators will be punished, once again, with JR Kerr's "powerful
Internet voodoo" (TM; used without permission, but I'm sure he
doesn't mind).
+-------------READING THIS DISCLAIMER *COULD* SAVE YOUR LIFE------------+
| |
| Before we begin, I'd like to issue a general disclaimer. I don't |
| mind people e-mailing me to ask questions that aren't covered in |
| this FAQ, but: |
| |
| I'M NOT INTERESTED IN YOUR "THEORIES". |
| I'M NOT INTERESTED IN "ANONYMOUS SOURCES". |
| I'M NOT INTERESTED IN INFORMATION "FROM THE RE STAFF". |
| |
| This document deals in actual, documented, in-game plotline |
| information. Don't send me your dissertation on why Rebecca is a |
| spy, don't tell me anything that you got out of one of S.D. Perry's |
| novels, don't tell me anything that a friend of a friend was told by |
| a friend who had a friend who delivered pizza to the RE staff, and |
| don't e-mail me naked pictures of your sister because "she looks |
| just like Jill" (wait... actually, go ahead and send those). |
| I don't mind questions, but I do mind having my time wasted. |
| If you *do* send me a theory, don't expect me to reply. |
| If I don't reply, don't get upset. I warned you. |
| |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
+-------- NOT READING THIS DISCLAIMER CAUSES CANCER IN LAB RATS --------+
| |
| This is a *storyline* FAQ. It deals strictly with plot |
| elements of the Resident Evil series. It is not a gameplay |
| FAQ. If you're having trouble getting through the game, I |
| encourage you to seek out the various online FAQs written |
| for the Resident Evil games (particularly those by Dan |
| "President Evil" Birlew, Brett "Nemesis" Franklin, Vincent |
| Merken, Henry LaPierre, Vesther Fauransy [although I recommend |
| him with slight reservations; his FAQs are a little weird], |
| and "Stinger 3:16"). They are all available on www.gameFAQs.com, |
| among other places, and can probably be found in the same place |
| you found this document. |
| |
| In short, send the gameplay questions to one of those |
| talented gentlemen, and/or check out their FAQs. They're |
| very well-written, and have helped me with my own |
| gameplay problems in the past. |
| |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
+-- IF YOU DON'T READ THIS DISCLAIMER, I GET TO HIT YOU WITH A PICKAX --+
| |
| No, you are *not* Shinji Mikami. Don't you even *try* that. |
| |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
=======================================
2. The Realm of the Dead: RESIDENT EVIL
by Dan Birlew
=======================================
In 1996, Capcom Entertainment released a video game for the
Sony Playstation game console entitled Resident Evil. The game
was received by the growing console gaming community with
seemingly mixed reviews and marginal opening sales. However, the
game quickly caught on with game players of all ages. Soon named
"Videogame of the Year" by the Consumer Choice Awards, Resident
Evil's sales soared.
The game begins in the forest outside Raccoon City, in the
Midwestern United States. A series of bizarre murders have
the citizens of the city up in arms. Players were cast as
either Jill Valentine or Chris Redfield, two members of the
Alpha Team of the local Raccoon City Police Department's
Special Tactics And Rescue Squad (S.T.A.R.S.). The S.T.A.R.S.
have been assigned to the murders. Unfortunately, while the
S.T.A.R.S. Bravo Team was investigating the forest in search
of clues, their helicopter malfunctioned and crashed. The
Alpha Team immediately scrambles to investigate, only to
find the helicopter abandoned and the Bravo Team nowhere
in sight.
As the Alpha Team searches the area for any clues, they are
being watched by something else. Joseph Frost, the Alpha
Team's mechanic, discovers a severed hand, still holding
a pistol. He screams and drops it, just before something
jumps out of the forest and onto him. The rest of the Alpha
Team is helpless as the creature tears out his throat.
It becomes apparent that the creature that killed Joseph
wasn't alone. The survivors of the Alpha Team run for
their own helicopter, but their pilot, Brad "Chickenheart"
Vickers, panics and takes off without them. Stranded in
the middle of the woods, the Alpha Team runs from the
pack of monsters -- vicious, undead dogs -- and takes
shelter inside a nearby mansion. Unfortunately, they soon
discover that the mansion is by no means abandoned.
Depending upon which character is chosen, the player will
experience a different adventure depending on how the game
is played, what decisions are made, and which characters
survive with the player-character. Chris contacts Rebecca
Chambers, the medic of the Bravo Team, while Jill is aided
in her quest by Barry Burton, a fellow member of the Alpha
Team. Each rescues and is saved by their partner.
The character soon finds the residents of the mansion. The
place is infested with flesh-hungry zombies, more undead dogs,
and a vicious giant snake. One bullet is never enough for these
hideous creatures, but with some cunning the character can locate
weapons of greater power and more ammunition.
One by one, the player-character finds the unfortunate
members of the Bravo Team. Unfortunately most of them are dead,
half-eaten. Some of them come back to life and attack the
player-character, and others live just long enough to reveal
the mansion's secrets. Documents uncovered along the way also
inform the hero of what is going on.
An evil corporation called Umbrella has been conducting secret
experiments in a lab somewhere on the property. An accident
occurred, a mutating virus escaped, and the researchers and
guards have all become the living dead. The hero must find any
survivors and escape as quickly as possible to avoid contracting
the virus and becoming one of...them.
Each room of the mysterious mansion contains a mysterious
puzzle to be solved. Each puzzle equips the character with
one of the keys needed to escape. After facing the fearsome
giant snake, the player gets the final key, but the game
isn't over.
The game proceeds to a guardhouse at the rear of the
property, where new creatures rear their ugly heads. The
hero must survive encounters with a mutant shark and a fauna
experiment grown wildly out of control. Wesker makes another
appearance, ordering the character back to the mansion to
uncover more secrets.
However, the residence of evil is a more dangerous place
than ever. A horde of strange and deadly frog mutants with
sharp claws has overrun the main house, and the character
must now fight to save the other survivors still left there.
New areas of the house can now be accessed with items found
in the guardhouse, and a battle-scarred giant snake is back
for revenge. New horrors await in the basement, but hope is
regained when the player spots a helicopter landing pad on
the premises. Perhaps "Chickenheart" can be convinced to
make an emergency landing.
Gaining access to a cavernous underground, the player finds
Bravo Team leader Enrico Marini, wounded and half dead. He
insinuates treachery from within the S.T.A.R.S., but is killed
by an unknown assassin's bullet before he can reveal the
traitor's identity.
Avoiding rolling boulder traps and tangling with a gigantic
spider, the exhausted player makes it to the secret
underground lab. The hero fights through yet another
frightening species of experimental bioweapons generated
here, searching for a way to unlock the emergency exit
leading up to the helipad.
On the bottom level of the hellish laboratory, the traitor
reveals himself. Albert Wesker has manipulated Barry into
aiding him, and used the S.T.A.R.S. Team as test subjects in
combat situations against the bioweapons he himself
developed for Umbrella. He has made arrangements to destroy
the lab, the monsters, the heroes, and all the evidence so
that he may abscond with the "T-Virus" and sell it to the
highest bidder. But first, he invites the player to witness
the birth of his greatest creation, the ultimate bioweapon.
Named for the virus that created it, the "Tyrant" is a
monstrous undead giant. Upon its release, the horror turns
on its own creator. Wesker is impaled and held aloft on its
oversized claw. Now the abomination slowly turns on the
hero. The player blasts away at the creature, which is
easily killed. The ultimate bioweapon is the ultimate
failure, it seems.
Wesker's destruct system activates, and the player must race
to the helicopter landing pad to escape. Pursued by all the
lab's horrible creatures, one player must rescue the other
playable character, and then it's a free-for-all fight to
the exit.
Near the end, the monsters catch up to the survivors. The
two rescued characters repay their debt to the player by
making a stand against the onslaught. Now it's up to the
lone player to ascend to the helipad and signal the circling
pilot, in the hopes that Brad will regain his courage and
make an emergency landing.
After signaling with a handy flare, the character waits for
a response from Brad for an unbearably suspenseful moment.
The chopper finally swoops in and hovers overhead. In the
biggest surprise of the game, the Tyrant bursts out of the
ground and charges at the player. The player has to avoid
the monstrosity until Brad drops a rocket launcher onto the
battlefield. Quickly scooping up the weapon and turning on
the advancing enemy, the player blasts the thing into a
hundred squirming pieces.
In the ending movie sequence, Brad lands and quickly lifts
off with the survivors. The player watches as explosions
rock the Umbrella compound. Safely away, the exhausted team
members catch up on some much needed rest, commiserate on
the fate of the missing, or reload their weapons in
preparation ... for the next encounter.
============================================================
3. Things To Do In Raccoon When You're Dead: RESIDENT EVIL 2
============================================================
=====================
3i. The Plot Thickens
=====================
The original Resident Evil is a relatively straightforward
horror game. Its sequels have been entirely different,
mixing horror with equal parts of action, mystery, and
conspiracy. Each RE game since the second has had an
intricate series of subplots, as well as at least a few
independent mysteries to solve. Furthermore, each game
has left a lot of questions unanswered at the end. In other
words, things get a lot more complicated from here on out.
One of the stranger wrinkles in the RE storyline is the
weird way that RE2 and RE3 relate to each other. I have the
two games listed separately here for the sake of maintaining
some kind of order, but in actuality, half of RE3 takes
place before RE2, and the other half takes place well
afterwards. This is noted in RE3's plot summary, below.
==================================
3ii. Events Between RE and RE2/RE3
==================================
After the "mansion incident" in July of 1998, Chris Redfield
attempts to start an official police investigation of
Umbrella, but Chief Brian Irons sabotages it. Suspecting that
Irons might be on the take, Chris requests an investigation
of Irons' background and a federal probe into Umbrella.
With typical government efficiency, the FBI doesn't respond
to Chris's requests until the night of September 29th, when
Claire gets their fax in Chris's old office.
Chris begins investigating Umbrella alone. He manages to
uncover a great deal about Umbrella's operations inside
Raccoon City, including the work on the G-Virus and the
location of the labs underneath the city. He's apparently so
intent upon his work that, to his sister Claire, it looks
as though he's dropped off of the face of the Earth.
In August of 1998, Chris finally tells Jill Valentine about
what he's been doing. In mid-September, without telling Claire,
he and Barry Burton leave for Europe to further investigate
Umbrella. Jill elects to stay in Raccoon City for a while,
intending to investigate Umbrella's underground labs.
At some point, Jill resigns from the S.T.A.R.S. and the Raccoon
City police department for unknown reasons. (We can make all
sorts of guesses, though, most of which involve Brian Irons.)
====================================================
3iii. A Summary of the Basic Plot of RESIDENT EVIL 2
by Dan Birlew
====================================================
On the night of September 29th, 1998, Claire Redfield
motorbikes into Raccoon City. She is a college student, and
is searching for clues in the disappearance of her older
brother Chris. On the other side of town, Raccoon Police
Department recruit Leon Kennedy is making his way to the
Precinct for his first day of duty. Stopping to investigate
a mysterious corpse in the middle of the street, he fails to
notice the figures closing in behind him. Claire pulls up to
a diner for a late meal, but finds that she is intended to
be the next course.
Both characters are surrounded by zombies. They collide in
the alley behind the diner, where Leon saves Claire. Finding
an abandoned police cruiser, they make a run for it.
In the car they get acquainted, while Claire finds a gun in
the glove compartment. But they are not alone. In an amazing
sequence, a zombie leaps out of the backseat and struggles with
Leon. The rookie loses control of the vehicle and they crash into
a wall. The zombie flies through the windshield. Before they can
catch a breath, a dying trucker bears down on them in a massive
gas tanker. The two leap out of the wreck as the tanker collides
and flips over, exploding in a huge ball of flame. The characters
are separated by the blaze, and each must make their individual
way through the game.
This is the point at which the player begins, choosing which
character to assume based on which of the 2 game disks are
loaded. When the player finishes with one character's adventure,
the save file enables the player to approach the same game from
the other character's perspective, in a reverse game. Thus, the
scenarios progress as either Claire A & Leon B, or Leon A &
Claire B. There are differences in each game, and there are
differences in each combination. In addition, whatever the
first character does in their scenario affects the second
character's game.
For the purpose of brevity, this synopsis will follow the
plot as it occurs in the Claire A & Leon B combination, by
far the more structurally sound of the two scenario
combinations.
Claire begins on the Raccoon City streets, now overrun by the
zombies who have come out due to the crash. By baiting them
in a certain direction, she figures out that she can create
openings in their ranks and slip past them. She ducks into a
gun shop, hoping to find ammo for her weapon.
Inside, the clerk points a crossbow at her. After she
convinces him that she's not a zombie, he locks his door.
With a slightly sexist attitude, he admits he doesn't know
what is happening in Raccoon City or where the zombies have
come from. Claire finds some ammunition for her gun and
starts to move on just as the undead lay siege to the store.
Crashing through the display window, they tackle the shop's
employee and chew him to pieces on the floor. Unable to save
the man, Claire's only hope is to run through the back door.
Weaving her way through the slow moving ghouls, she makes
her way to the police station. S.T.A.R.S. helicopter pilot Brad
Vickers is encountered near the precinct, recently deceased
and come back by diabolic means. Executing this former hero,
Claire enters the Raccoon Police Department. She finds that
the place has been electronically locked and barricaded
against an apparent siege by the undead.
Leon finds himself directly behind the Police Department. He
has a shorter run than Claire, but must find the key to get
into the maintenance shed at the back of the Precinct. All
the while, flesh eaters converge on him. He gets lucky and
finds a back stairway to the roof of the station, but he
witnesses a rescue attempt fail.
A helicopter appears overhead. There is a lone precinct
survivor on the roof, signaling to it. Zombies attack the
unfortunate wretch. He sprays random machine gun fire
everywhere, accidentally killing the helicopter's pilot.
The helicopter crashes into the station and explodes into
flames. There's a water tank near the wreckage that can be
used to put out the fire, but Leon will need a valve handle.
Claire finds a cop lying on the floor of an office, seriously
wounded and dying. (In RE3, we learn that the cop's name is
Marvin Branagh.) In a brief speech, he tells Claire that her
brother Chris, and the other S.T.A.R.S., tried to get them to
believe that they'd encountered zombies in the woods outside
Raccoon, but no one would listen to them. He gives her the card
key that will open the electronic locks in the Precinct. He tells
her to rescue the other survivors in the police station and get out.
When she starts to protest, the half-disemboweled officer sticks
a gun in herface and rudely orders her out. He locks the door
behind her. Claire accesses the computer in the main hall, unlocks
the doors and continues on.
In the zombie-infested office on the first floor, Leon finds
the necessary tool to put out the fire. When he opens the
water tank and douses the blaze, another helicopter appears
overhead. This one is towing a rack of huge cylinders. One
of them detaches and drops. The bomb-like container blows
apart, revealing a huge humanoid creature.The giant crashes
through the roof of the precinct. The trenchcoated menace
heads right for Leon, who empties his weapon into the
stalking monstrosity before it falls. When Leon leaves the
room, the sinister intruder rises... and follows. Little
does Leon know, but anyone who had survived the mansion
incident might recognize this creature as a new and improved
version of the Tyrant.
At the same time on different sides of the station, Claire
and Leon both encounter a new and deadly lifeform.
Amphibious and spider-like, these creatures look like
crawling people turned inside out. They lash out with claws
and an incredibly long and sharp tongue. Police documents
refer to these creatures as "lickers", and no one knows
where they came from.
On the second floor of the west wing of the precinct house,
Claire finds the S.T.A.R.S. office and the log kept by her big
brother Chris. This document explains that he and the other
S.T.A.R.S. members had no luck investigating the involvement
of the Umbrella Corporation in the mansion lab incident. They
departed for Europe to search for Umbrella's main
headquarters. Suddenly a fax comes in, addressed to Chris. A
federal investigation on Umbrella has yielded naught for
clues, but an inquiry posted to the internal affairs
division by Chris regarding Raccoon Police Chief Brian Irons
has been answered. By his record, the Chief would appear to
be a deranged genius and former rapist.
Back outside the office, Claire catches sight of a young
girl being pursued by a zombie. While Claire dispatches this
thing, the fleeing little girl bumps into Leon. Frightened
out of her mind, she ducks into a small opening in a broken
door before he can stop her. Leon and Claire reunite. Leon
admits that this place is dangerous, and Claire suggests
that they split up and look for the girl and a safe exit. The
rookie cop gives her a radio so they can keep in contact.
Leon finds the two parts of a police operation report,
detailing the events of the past few days. The courageous
citizens of Raccoon made a grim standoff in the precinct
house against the flesh-eating undead. But some escaped the
precinct through the exit to the basement in the east wing.
He also finds a note addressed to him from the RPD, and the
party favors for a surprise welcome party they were planning
to throw for him. It seems his party has been cancelled.
He heads for the basement while Claire is startled by a
woman's screaming on the second floor. In order to save
whoever's in trouble, she needs a bomb to clear the helicopter
wreckage. Nearby,she finds the key to unlock the door
downstairs and save the wounded cop. When she returns to
him, he has been fighting off zombies unsuccessfully. Claire
now learns why he rudely forced her to leave him. He
rises, transforms into a zombie, and attacks her. With a
quick reaction, Claire incinerates him. She locates the
parts of a timer bomb and heads back upstairs.
In the basement, Leon is fired upon by a beautiful woman
named Ada Wong. She's looking for a reporter named Ben
Bertolucci in one of the basement jail cells. After Leon
graciously helps her clear some wreckage out of the way, she
ditches him. He tries to catch up to her, but instead finds
the incarcerated reporter in one of the jail cells. Ada
catches up to them now, but where she went first is a
mystery. Questioning Ben, Ada reveals that she's looking for
her boyfriend John, who works out of an Umbrella branch
office in Chicago. He disappeared in this area some months
ago. Ben refuses to tell her what he knows about what's
happening in Raccoon City. Just then, a monstrous roar fills
the air. Ben has locked himself in his cell for protection
and refuses to leave, but directs the others how to get out
of the Precinct. Ada takes off, and Leon runs after her.
Claire detonates the plastique near the helicopter wreckage
upstairs. She finds an office full of stuffed trophy
animals... and a more gruesome trophy on the desk. The
Mayor's daughter lies sprawled out, a medium-sized wound at
her abdomen. Behind the desk sits Police Chief Brian Irons.
He has completely lost his mind. Although the girl's wound
looks like a bullet hole, he claims that she was attacked by
a zombie, and that she will resurrect within an hour. The
only way to stop the zombification is to decapitate the
victim or put a bullet through the brain. He admits that
taxidermy used to be his hobby (which links him to the
Umbrella mansion, because of all the stuffed trophies found
by the S.T.A.R.S. team there). He asks to be left alone,
and Claire is only too willing to get away from him.
In the room next to the Chief's office, Claire hears the quick
footsteps of someone fleeing from her. She finds the little
girl crouched in the dark. She radios Leon to let him know
that she cleared the helicopter wreckage and found the
little girl. The little girl says her name is Sherry Birkin,
and her parents work at the Umbrella plant. Her mother
called her during the T-virus outbreak and instructed her to
go to the police station for safety. She has heard her
father's voice in the station, but can't find him. Also, a
creature is stalking her. A mighty roar emanates from
nearby. Sherry runs off, and Claire tries to pursue her. In
the office, the Chief and the dead woman's body have
disappeared. However, he has left behind his diary detailing
the extents of his depravity. Thanks to Irons, there are
no survivors of the RPD's siege besides himself.
Leon has found the sewer system that runs under the city. In
the processing plant, he comes across what appears to be the
exit door but doesn't have all the necessary keys to get
through. Going back, he finds Ada also investigating the
sewage plant. She has found an open vent shaft that she can
get through with a boost. She hits the ground on the other
side, startling the same little girl Leon and Claire
encountered previously. As she runs off, Ada notices that
the little girl dropped her pendant. Amused, she decides to
keep it in case they meet again. After a quick search, she
finds a precinct key and returns to where Leon waits. She
throws the key back through the vent, but she can't get back
herself because the vent is too high. Once again, Ada runs
off on her own against Leon's orders.
Leon returns to the precinct house, searching for the last
few keys he needs to get out. While looking for clues on the
first floor, the horrible Tyrant bursts through the wall, and
only falls after Leon empties his shotgun into it. Leon races
upstairs and finds more items he needs. The Tyrant follows.
Again, Leon is forced to shoot it out with this brute. The
thing is finally subdued, even if only for the moment.
After gathering several keys of her own, Claire finally
catches up to Sherry in the Chief's office. Behind the desk
is a secret elevator, and Claire makes Sherry stay behind
while she goes to investigate. The elevator lowers her into some
kind of custom dungeon beneath the precinct, lit by flickering
torches. As Claire cautiously creeps down the hall, she hears
the Chief scream.
In his private chamber, Chief Irons is backed into a corner
by a hideous mutating creature. Something shoots out of this
thing's hand and down Irons' throat.
In a hideous torture room, Claire finds the Chief, ranting,
raving, and armed. He explains to Claire that his town has
been torn apart by the experimental monsters of the Umbrella
corporation. He tells her that a man named William Birkin is
to blame. Claire recognizes the name. Irons states that
Sherry is Birkin's daughter. Completely paranoid, the Chief
is ready to kill Claire. Before he can execute her, something
bursts through his upper torso from within. A small creature
leaps out of Irons and falls down an open chute nearby. Claire
follows this thing, only to see it quickly grow into some kind
of horrible infant. The thing attacks her, but she destroys it
fairly easily. She runs back to the second floor to get Sherry;
their escape route is now clear.
Leon makes his way to the precinct's clock tower where he
finds the final piece in the Chief's bizarre architectural
puzzle. Now able to exit the police station, he finds an
open dust chute and slides back down to the basement. Upon
landing, he hears Ben screaming in the jail cell nearby.
Leon runs to the reporter's aid, but is too late. The same
thing that impregnated Irons has gutted Ben. The dying
reporter gives Leon a document which entangles Raccoon
City's chief of police in a government conspiracy. In terrible
pain, Ben dies. Ada finally catches up to Leon, and they
read this document together. It is a series of letters from
William Birkin to the police chief, describing in detail how
Umbrella was bribing the chief to keep secret their actions
in the town. Birkin had learned that Umbrella sent spies to
steal his research. Ada then rushes off, explaining only
that she has to find John. She thinks he's in the chemical
plant. Leon is prevented from following by another call from
Claire. She has found a different exit from the precinct and
will join him in the sewers.
Leon runs after Ada, but in the sewage plant, he is
confronted by the mutating Dr. Birkin. The scientist attacks
him with incredible strength, takes a full clip full of
Magnum bullets at point blank range, and dives into the
muck. Leon opens the exit door.
In the sewer beneath the station, Sherry is separated from
Claire when a drainage chute opens and sucks her into a
lower level. Sherry runs for safety, finding herself in a
garbage room. Just when she finds a nice shiny trinket, the
floor springs open and dumps her into the garbage hold.
Knocked unconscious, she fails to see a monster slouch out
of the darkness. Birkin has found his daughter at last.
Ada abruptly rejoins Leon, and he admonishes her for
running off. She agrees to stick with him, for now.
Searching everywhere to find Sherry, Claire runs into her
mother, Annette. The suspicious woman worked with her
husband William on a bioweapon called the G-Virus, a
mutagenic substance that turns whatever it infects into
a giant monster. Birkin injected himself with the virus when
armed Umbrella agents seized the virus from him. When Birkin
was accidentally shot, he used the virus to keep himself
alive. The G-Virus rejuvenates dead cells, but it also
mutates them. He became a monster, a "G-Type", and hunted
his killers down. The T-Virus leaked from his laboratory
after the attack, and was carried into Raccoon City by the
rats in the sewers.
The G-Virus seeks to spread by finding other host bodies.
When Annette learns that Sherry is in the chemical plant,
she becomes upset. The virus can only be spread through a
complimentary genetic host. Birkin will try to find and
impregnate Sherry with a virus embryo. From somewhere close,
they hear the little girl scream. Claire sends Annette
searching in the opposite direction and continues on.
Leon and Ada search the chemical plant for weapons and
ammunition. They bump into the frantic Annette. Ada chases
the armed scientist. Annette turns and fires on her pursuer,
but Leon jumps in front of Ada and takes the bullet. While
Leon lays unconscious and seriously wounded, Ada chooses to
run after Annette.
Claire finds the garbage dump and spots Sherry, lying
unconscious on a heap of rubble. She calls out to the little
girl, but a gigantic alligator hears her and attacks. Claire
runs back down the corridor and finds a switch to release a
gas canister. When the alligator grabs the canister in its
huge maw, Claire shoots the cylinder. The resulting
explosion flings chunks of the sewer beast's head
everywhere. Moving to Sherry, Claire spots some sort of red
worm slithering away; one of William's embryos. Stirring,
Sherry complains of stomach pains. Claire assures her that
everything will be all right. She leads Sherry out of the
spider-infested sewers, past the bodies of several soldiers
wearing gas masks...
Ada hounds the scientist through the sewers to the central
control area. Annette blasts Ada's gun out of her hand, an
adept shot for a scientist. She advances on Ada,
interrogating her. Learning that Ada is looking for her
boyfriend John, Annette realizes that she's talking about
one of the researchers at the mansion lab. She knows that
John turned into a zombie, and then died when the lab was
destroyed. She makes it seem that William was working at the
mansion as well, and that he developed the G-Virus there.
Annette starts to explain the new G-Virus to Ada when she
spots her daughter's pendant around the woman's neck. In a
suddenly aggressive manner, she demands to have it. A cat
fight ensues, ending with Ada punching Annette and sending
her flying over the rail. Inside Sherry's pendant, Ada finds
a secret compartment containing a sample of the G-Virus.
Claire and Sherry discover an underground tramcar. After
powering it up, they ride for some distance to an unknown dock.
Apparently they aren't out of danger yet, as the grunts of
the undead are heard nearby. Claire blasts through corridors
full of zombies. They arrive at a train turntable platform.
Inside the engine car, Claire finds the key to the control
panel outside. An alarm sounds upon activation, and the
girls run back inside the car. The entire platform
disengages and drops. It seems they have found some sort of
large secret elevator. Sherry is overcome by her stomach
pains and passes out. Her monstrous father shows up,
threatening to smash the traincar to pieces. Claire runs
outside and ducks a steel rod flung at her by William. The
screaming madman mutates, growing a new head and a
vicious-looking claw. Claire quickly pelts the thing with
enough flame grenades to burn down a forest. When the G-Type
is finally face down in a pool of its own blood, Claire runs
back into the train car. The elevator finishes its descent,
and she carries the unconscious girl into an Umbrella
loading dock. It would seem she has discovered a large
underground laboratory.
A slightly delirious Leon awakens and hunts for Ada. He
finds her in the subterranean garbage dump. After bandaging
his bullet wound, she lets him know that John is dead. She
doesn't seem terribly upset though, and insists they get out
of the sewage plant. At the tram platform, Leon recalls the
car. They board and head for the train elevator. On route,
they are attacked by the G-Type, which isn't dead yet. It
stabs one gigantic claw through the ceiling over and over,
seeking the passengers. Ada fires at the hand, blowing off
one of the fingers. The monster retreats. The two slip out
of the tram and make for the train platform.
Claire sets Sherry on a cot in the security office. She
gives Sherry her vest to keep her warm. The girl stirs, and
lets Claire know that she trusts her and depends on her.
Claire assures her that she will find something to cure her.
Leon has to recall the train elevator platform. Leaving Ada
in the control room, he descends to a secret security room
and there finds the necessary key. When he flips on the
surveillance camera aimed at the door he just entered, he
sees Umbrella's ugliest and most fearsome agent hot on his
trail. After one more battle with this 'Mr. X', Leon returns
to the upper control room to find Ada unharmed. He recalls
the elevator from there and they descend to the lab. But
their moment alone is not to be enjoyed. William is back,
and he exacts a terrible revenge against Ada. His claw
shoots through the wall, stabbing her in the back. She
passes out, and Leon goes out to fight William. The
G-Virulent has grown two new arms and doubled in size. Leon
pumps the thing full of shotgun blasts before it does any
good. Bleeding heavily, William leaps onto the elevator
shaft wall and leaves Leon alone.
In the lab, Claire figures out that the main power conduit
has been shut down. She finds a fuse for power connection,
and then she is free to explore the lab. Umbrella has
conducted further experiments with plant vegetation, as a
titanic vine grows up from the bottom of one shaft. Its
offspring slide along the ground, spitting acid at her. Worse,
there is an even stronger variety of the "lickers" here than
those encountered before.
The elevator platform's engine overheats, and it stops on an
upper floor of the lab. Leon leaves the wounded Ada in the
train car while he goes searching for something to patch her
wound. He crawls through a vent duct and drops into a
corridor. The elevator platform restarts and continues to
descend. Leon has lost Ada again. He finds an emergency
elevator that will take him down to where Ada has gone, but
it needs power. He finds a door to a "Power Room", but it is
locked. In a room with a huge smelting pit, he fights his
way through the tougher new breed of "lickers". He connects
the emergency elevator's power and goes up to the lab. In
what is obviously William Birkin's former experiment room,
he finds the power room key and goes back to the first level.
Leon runs off the elevator, but not very far. Now Annette is
shooting at him. She calls him a fool for believing Ada,
saying that the woman he is falling in love with is a spy
working for Umbrella, using him only to help her steal the
G-Virus. Leon refuses to believe it. Annette doesn't care
and prepares to shoot him. Mr. X suddenly crashes through
the ceiling behind Leon. Annette flees. Evading the powerful
giant, Leon gets to the power room and unlocks it. The
monster has followed him, and now the rookie cop is
cornered. Shots ring out. Ada is back, blasting away at the
unholy behemoth. Unfortunately, she runs out of bullets.
As she reloads, the Tyrant seizes her and lifts her into
the air. Ada fires several rounds point blank into his face.
Temporarily blinded, the giant swings Ada into a control
panel, denting the panel and probably breaking every bone in
her body. Blood gushing from his face, Mr. X falls off the
platform into the smelting pit. Leon runs to Ada's side. In
her last moments, she wishes she could stay with him. Leon
kisses her passionately. Ada goes limp and dies. Leon screams
in grief. Near Ada's body, Leon finds a master key that the
monster dropped before falling into the pit.
After Claire finds a keycard in the research room, Annette
pops up again. She's still armed and dangerous, and somehow
knows that Claire tried to kill William. After Claire tells
Annette that Sherry has been infected by the G-Type, the
monster growls nearby. Excited, Annette runs after him.
William crashes out of the ceiling, still alive. More
monster than human now, he cuts his own wife down with one
terrible claw swipe. When Claire rounds the corner he leaps
back up into the ceiling. A dying Annette begs Claire to
save her daughter, giving her detailed instructions on how
to create an antidote to the G-Virus, using materials that
can be found somewhere in the lab.
The damaged central unit in the power room is wracked by
explosions. Lightning bolts course up and down the huge
column. A computer voice comes online to announce that the
self-destruct sequence has been activated, and all personnel
should evacuate to the cargo train platform at the lowest
floor of the lab.
At the edge of the iron smelting pit, a gigantic clawed hand
emerges from the red hot pool. Mr. X isn't down for good
yet, and he may be more dangerous than ever.
Claire runs out to the monitor room. A motion detector
alerts her that someone else is in the lab. Leon is
onscreen, emerging from the power room. Claire tells him to
go back to the security office to rescue Sherry while she
creates the G-virus antidote.
Leon rides the elevator back down into the lab, and retrieves
the barely conscious girl. He uses the master key in the
elevator to take the emergency access tube and reach the
lab's escape route, a high-speed train.
Following the instructions for the G-Virus vaccine, Claire
rushes to the VAM room on the Lab's 4th floor. Killing
several last zombies, she finds a vaccine cartridge. Reading
the instructions for the "Devil" vaccine, she inserts the
cartridge into the machine and starts it up, allowing the
base vaccine to be synthesized. She takes the cartridge and
heads back down to Birkin's lab.
Leon finds the train without power. Laying Sherry on the cot
inside, he finds a platform key at the back of the train and
hurries to power up their escape transport.
Claire inserts the base vaccine into the virus antidote
synthesizer in Birkin's lab, and the machine creates the
"Devil" automatically. On her way back out, she accesses a
corridor to the experimental containment room, where she
finds a huge cargo elevator that will take her down to the
train platform.
An explosion rocks the entire lab. The computer announces
that the self-destruct sequence has begun. There are only 5
minutes remaining until total detonation.
Leon races across a bridge over the train to the opposite
platform. There he unlocks the containment chamber for the
power plugs for the train's generator. He takes the plugs
into the next room and inserts them into the power grid. The
computer warns him that the power will be completely shut
down momentarily in order to power up the train. In the
blackout, a huge creature lands behind him. A transformed
Mr. X is ablaze from his dip in the molten vat. With two
huge claws, he charges at Leon, knocking the poor guy from
one end of the room to the other. Suddenly another familiar
shape appears, at the top of the gantry over them. Still
wearing Sherry's pendant, Ada drops Leon a rocket launcher.
The cop recognizes her, but doesn't have a moment to spare.
He dives for the launcher, scoops it up, and fires at his
vicious adversary. The creature explodes into a dozen body
parts. The power comes back on and so do the lights. With
two minutes until detonation, Leon runs back to the train.
Waiting patiently for the elevator to reach her floor,
Claire's thoughts are suddenly interrupted as something
smashes through the ceiling right above her. She backs up
just in time to avoid being squashed as the G-Type drops
into the room. She fires several grenades into the genetic
monstrosity, but all she does is trigger yet another mutation.
The creature's newest form is doglike, pursuing Claire on
four legs and slashing at her with a mouthful of jagged
fangs. Claire runs around the room, playing matador as it
charges at her. Finally, her weapons have an impact on the
thing, and it dissolves into a puddle of genetic jelly.
Claire's elevator arrives, right on cue, and she descends
to the train loading platform.
Leon finds the train platform crawling with naked zombies.
Blowing their heads off left and right, he fights his way
to the switch that opens the gate blocking the train's path,
and throws it. As the gates open, he returns to the train
and starts it up. Slowly, the train comes to life.
Claire gets to the platform just as the train is taking off.
She sees Leon, leaning out an open door, yelling for her to
get on. She misses that opportunity, but luckily there is
another open door.
Once she's inside, the Umbrella lab completes its detonation
sequence in a huge explosion. The train rocks, throwing a
still-unconscious Sherry to the floor. Claire quickly
administers the vaccine to her and they wait. Finally, Sherry
comes to and thanks Claire for saving her. Leon thinks that
the danger is over, but Claire disagrees. She still has to
find her brother. Leon moves up into the cockpit. Still upset,
he says goodbye to Ada.
The train suddenly lurches. Leon moves back into the cabin
with the girls. No one can figure out what the disturbance
was. Leon runs toward the back of the train. The train is
equipped with the same computer system as the lab. The
computer warns them that a bio-hazardous material has been
detected on board. The train will detonate in just two
minutes. The cabin is locked, and Leon is unable to get back
to Sherry and Claire. He runs to the back of the train to
search the cargo compartments.
At the rear, giant tentacles smash through the ceiling. Leon
races back to the front as the G-Type makes an encore
appearance. Birkin is now nothing more than a gigantic black
blob, pulling itself forward with four huge tentacles. Leon
blasts the thing until it loses solidity once more. Then he
heads back toward the cabin.
===================================================
3iv. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL 2
===================================================
Leon, standing on the gap between the train's two cars,
tries to get back inside and discovers the door has locked.
Claire can't open it from the other side. The biohazard
is still present, apparently... and still after Sherry.
The G-Type has reformed, and attempts to smash into the
cabin. Claire, not knowing where Leon is, tells Sherry to
hide. Sherry opens a vent to the cockpit and crawls through.
She promises Claire that she can stop the train.
Leon is on top of the engine car, climbing up to the
cockpit. He looks behind him to see the G-Type's tentacles
searching for him.
The main body of the G-Type smashes into the cabin. In order
to hide, Claire climbs down through a hatch and hangs onto
the bottom of the train while it's still moving.
Leon rips open an escape hatch on the roof of the cockpit.
Sherry hasn't had so much luck figuring out which button to
push. Leon spots the emergency stop switch immediately and
points it out to her. Sherry slams her fist on the button.
The train brakes. Sparks shoot out from behind the wheels as
the transport slows, dousing Claire in a shower of yellow
fire. She fights to hold on.
The train stops. The computer warns that the train will
detonate in thirty seconds. Claire crawls out of her hiding
spot and with a sigh of relief, spots daylight at the exit
of the train tunnel. Leon and Sherry are out, looking for
Claire at the front of the train. She joins them just as the
G-Type smashes into the cockpit. The heroes dash for the
mouth of the tunnel, through which they can see the rising
sun. They've lived to see the morning of September 30th.
The monster's tentacles smash through the cockpit
windshield, searching for its enemies. The computer counts
down, 5, 4, 3, 2...
At the last second, the G-Type realizes what is about to
happen.
The heroes leap clear of the tunnel.
The transport train detonates quickly car by car, from the
rear to the front. A vicious geyser of fire blasts out of
the tunnel.
Claire and Sherry get up, commenting that each of them look
pretty awful. Leon rises, but is already moving off, saying
they don't have time to waste. Claire wonders why. Leon
turns and tells them, "Hey, it's up to us to take out Umbrella."
Blackout. Heavy metal theme music and the credits roll.
===========================================================
3v. Differences Between Claire A/Leon B and Leon A/Claire B
===========================================================
If you play the game in the opposite order, starting with
Leon first, the plot is different in several respects:
1. Sherry keeps her pendant throughout the game. This means
that Ada never obtains the pendant or the G-Virus sample it
contains. Also, Mr. X wants the G-Virus, so he goes after
Sherry and Claire and not Leon and Ada.
2. Annette explains William's mutations to Ada, rather than
to Claire. Claire finds Annette after Ada knocks her over
the rail, and Annette falls unconscious soon afterwards.
3. Sherry is never impregnated with a G-Type embryo, so
Claire doesn't have to create a G-Virus antidote. Thus, no
mention of an antidote is heard.
4. Ben Bertolucci is impregnated by Birkin with a G-Type
embryo that later bursts out of him. Why Birkin would
implant him with this is never discussed or explained.
5. Chief Irons is ripped in half by Birkin instead of
implanted.
6. Annette is fatally wounded when the G-Type pounds on the
ceiling in the lab and drops a pipe on her head. Leon takes
the G-Virus sample that she is holding.
7. Leon confronts Ada about being a spy. Annette, barely
alive, shoots Ada. Leon's love falls over the rail into a
deep chasm. Enraged, Leon tosses the G-Virus into the abyss.
8. In the game finales, Leon confronts the G-Type while
Claire battles Mr. X.
9. In Claire's final confrontations with Mr. X, she lures
him into the smelt pool by tossing Sherry's pendant with the
G-Virus over the side. On the trainpower platform, Claire is
aided in her battle against the mutated Mr. X by Ada. This
provides a larger mystery than the previously explored
scenario. How did Ada survive such a fall?
10. At the end of the closing movie, it is Claire instead of
Leon who leads them off, stating "We have to find my brother."
Perhaps the reasons why the previous plot summary focused on
Claire A/ Leon B are now clear. The focus scenario is much
richer in plot and explanations. There is not as great a
leap of faith required to believe that Ada still lives. An
exploration of how Ada might have survived her brutal death
in order to aid in the final battle with Mr. X are explored
in "The Resurrection of Ada Wong", below.
Resident Evil 2 is a game much richer in story than its
predecessor, as is evidenced by the number of pages needed
to summarize the plot versus that of the original Resident
Evil. In this chapter of the story, questions are raised.
Some are answered, while others may never be solved.
==============================
3vi. The 4th Survivor Minigame
==============================
A couple of secret games are available to the most capable
of Resident Evil survivors. With the right timing, skill,
and stamina, players will receive an A ranking in Resident
Evil 2. While the secret weapons gained make for a fun
replay, the most interesting aspect of this ranking is a new
playable character named "Hunk". The players are asked to
create a new save file for a minigame called The 4th
Survivor, the special mission suitable only for this
seasoned Umbrella agent. The 4th Survivor is a "battle
game." The player is given a limited amount of ammunition, a
simple goal, and an enormous army of evil monsters to outwit
in order to survive. This side-adventure is a true test of a
player's survival skills.
Whether it is his real name or a codename is uncertain, but
Hunk is certainly a buff character. Dressed in militaristic
biohazard containment gear, Hunk's eyes glow with the power
of his infrared goggles. He runs much faster than the usual
Resident Evil playable character, even when seriously wounded.
Playing as Hunk requires a good amount of quick thinking and
strategy on the part of the player. While some strategies
can be useful every time, the game's enemies sometimes react
differently to Hunk. This means that The 4th Survivor is
always a challenge, even to seasoned Resident Evil veterans.
==========================================
3vii. A Brief Summary of The 4th Survivor
==========================================
The game begins in a total blackout. Someone is thinking,
"G-...G-Virus... I have to deliver it to Umbrella..." The
scene opens at the end of the sewer station, sometime after
Ada and Leon have made their way to the Lab, but before the
end of the regular game. A body floats face down in the
muck, one of the Umbrella infiltrators sent to steal the
G-Virus from renegade scientist William Birkin. The body
stirs, shifts, and shows signs of life. Slowly, Hunk regains
consciousness and rises.
After a quick look around, Hunk pulls out his radio. "Alpha
team here," he says through his gas mask, "Mission
accomplished." "Roger," confirms another agent on the radio.
"We'll meet at the rendezvous point."
A map cuts in. A blinking beacon light shows Hunk that he
has to get to the second floor roof of the RPD precinct house
in order to be airlifted out. Hunk takes off up the stairs.
Between this stealthy agent and his goal is a small army of
the evil dead. Zombies plague his flight, along with giant
spiders, killer dogs, and slithering botanical experiments.
He has only a limited amount of ammunition, and must balance
his present needs against what he may encounter in the future.
Luckily he has some herbs to heal himself and treat poisons,
but it's not a lot. Leon and Claire have already taken all of
the ammunition from the RPD, so Hunk is stuck with what he has.
The zombies have retaken the Precinct in greater numbers
than ever before, and have laid several traps for the
unfortunate Umbrella agent. With some skill, he just barely
avoids these. But as he nears his goal, the insanity grows.
Each room bears an ever-greater horde of ghouls, quickly
converging on the lone survivalist. Shaking off his
attackers, he clears a pathway out with the barrel of his
gore-splattered gun.
After several close calls, Hunk tops a staircase to the
second floor of the RPD. He's halfway home, but the
nightmare is not yet over. Stomping toward him is a
monstrosity he has only heard rumors about at his agency. At
long last, Umbrella has perfected the Tyrant, and they've
sent it after the G-Virus. Somehow able to sense that Hunk
possesses a sample, the monster attacks him. Reasoning with
the beast would be no use, so Hunk evades the slowly
advancing thing and moves on.
In the final hallway, Hunk meets the Tyrant once again. How
it got over here so quickly is a real mystery, one Hunk
doesn't have time to solve. Evading the hulk yet again, the
agent reaches the roof and lights his last flare to signal
for a rescue.
The pick-up chopper swoops overhead immediately, as if it
has only been a block away this entire time. It hovers over
the precinct for an unbearably long moomising that this is the end of one nightmare,
but only the beginning of another.
=======================================
3viii. Conclusions About the Conclusion
=======================================
Resident Evil 2 leaves us with the following resolutions:
1. William Birkin's laboratory and research have been
destroyed.
2. Somehow Umbrella has almost perfected a Tyrant, and has
more at their disposal. Their research continues elsewhere.
3. Leon, Claire, and Sherry have all survived.
4. Ada may have also survived.
5. Raccoon City is in ruins.
6. Leon has a new mission in life, while Claire continues hers.
7. The rest of the S.T.A.R.S. team may be somewhere in Europe.
===================
3iv. Random Musings
===================
1. As pointed out by Dan Birlew in the original version of
this document, Tofu, another hidden character, is also
accessible in RE2. However, his scenario is so incredibly
silly that it doesn't really apply to the storyline. He is,
after all, a block of bean curd with a knife.
2. Mr. X isn't really very committed to his mission. He seems
to deliberately put it on hold a couple of times to go after
the player. This is most obvious in either B scenario, where
although the person carrying the G-Virus is up in the control
room, the player's character is on the elevator shaft. Guess
who Mr. X goes after?
3. So why, exactly, didn't anyone clean out Wesker's desk?
They thought he was dead.
====================================================
4. The Last Woman Standing: RESIDENT EVIL 3: NEMESIS
====================================================
RE3 has more replay value than any other RE game to date,
with three endings and plenty of secrets to unlock, as well
as the incredibly fun (read: addictive and frustrating)
Mercenaries minigame. It also introduced the Dodge feature,
which let players duck or roll out of the way of incoming
attacks with the push of a button, and featured the return
of RE's Hunters.
=============================
4i. The Death of Raccoon City
=============================
Even though the mansion was destroyed, the threat isn't over.
There are still monsters loose in the Raccoon Forest, some of
which actually wander inside the Raccoon City limits. Umbrella's
experiments continue, despite the loss of their mansion laboratory.
Everything changes in late September of 1998. After Umbrella's
attack on William Birkin, as shown in RE2, sewer rats carry
the T-Virus into Raccoon City. While the epidemic is somewhat
slow to start, it spreads very, very quickly. Soon, zombies
are roaming the streets. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people
are killed by both the zombies, and by the mutants the T-Virus
creates. Things degenerate quickly, and martial law is declared.
The Raccoon police force tries to fight back the zombie
invasion, but their efforts are sabotaged from within by
their police chief, Brian Irons. Not only does the
steadily-getting-crazier Irons somehow prevent the RPD from
calling in backup from outside Raccoon, but he deliberately
spreads confusion among the policemen. As a result, the police's
first major battle against the zombies, on September 27th, is a
near-total disaster. The few surviving policemen withdraw to the RPD
building and reinforce it to withstand a seige by the undead. Over
the next three days, the policemen and surviving civilians die
one by one, cut down by either mutants, zombies, or Irons himself.
By the time Claire and Leon arrive at the RPD on September 30th,
the RPD has been reduced to Irons and the dying Marvin Branagh.
As the police battle the zombies, two helicopters marked with
Umbrella logos land in the city and drop off a small number of
armed men, also wearing Umbrella logos. These men lose
several comrades in their first encounter with the zombies,
and are soon on the run.
By September 28th, Raccoon City is a ghost town, populated
mostly by zombies and other creatures created by the
T-Virus. A military blockade surrounds Raccoon City, enforcing
a quarantine; no help is coming. Thousands are dead.
Jill Valentine is not one of them.
=======================================================
4iii. A Summary of the Plot of RESIDENT EVIL 3: NEMESIS
=======================================================
On the morning of September 28th, Jill Valentine makes her
last attempt to escape from Raccoon City. After literally
blowing her way out of her apartment complex, Jill takes
shelter inside a nearby warehouse and meets another survivor.
She tries to get him to come with her, but he refuses to leave
the warehouse, as his daughter was just killed by zombies. Jill
tells him that their only hope is to get out of town, but he
shuts himself inside a nearby trailer rather than listen to her.
Alone, Jill leaves the warehouse. The streets are disturbingly
quiet, with only the occasional zombie wandering around. On
her way through a back alley, Jill is surprised when a man
suddenly bursts out of a nearby alleyway, pursued by a mob
of zombies. She's doubly surprised when she recognizes him
as Brad Vickers. She runs after him.
After chasing him through the streets and back alleys of
Raccoon, Jill finds Brad inside a local bar. They briefly
talk about what's happened to the city. Brad, although he's
wounded, gets up, telling Jill that "he's comin' for us.
We're all gonna die! He's after S.T.A.R.S. members. There's
no escape!" With that enigmatic comment, he leaves the bar.
Outside, Brad's nowhere to be found, so Jill sets out on her
own. She emerges onto the street in front of the RPD building.
Both ends of the street are blocked by car crashes, but a nearby
alleyway leads further uptown. The door to it is locked, but Jill
left a set of lockpicks in her desk at the RPD, so she heads there.
In front of the RPD building, Brad Vickers finds Jill again.
He looks like someone dropped a truck on him. He starts to
say something, but is cut off by the arrival of a new monster,
a humanoid creature dressed in black. Its face is permanently
stuck in a lipless grimace. (Two days from now, Leon will meet
Mr. X, who looks a lot like this thing.) Jill is frozen in
horror as the creature grabs Brad by the face and lifts him
into the air. It kills Brad by shoving a tentacle through his
head, throws away his body, and advances on Jill, muttering
a single word: "...S.T.A.R.S...."
Jill's weapons seem to have no effect on the creature. She
ducks inside the RPD building and slams the doors behind
her. Although the doors buckle under the creature's attack,
they don't give. Safe for the moment, Jill searches the
building for equipment and ammunition. More than half of the
building has been sealed off by the surviving police, but
fortunately, she can still get to her old office.
The S.T.A.R.S. office is wrecked. Someone has deliberately broken
the radio, and the desks have been ransacked. As Jill leaves
with her lockpicks, the radio plays an incoming transmission
from a man named Carlos. His unit has been cut off and no
survivors have been found. He asks for anyone who can
hear him to respond, but the broken radio can only receive
transmissions. All Jill can do is wish him luck as she leaves.
The only warning Jill gets before the creature returns is the
sound of shattering glass. It jumps through a window on the
first floor of the RPD, toting an oversized cannon in one hand.
Dodging a barrage of missiles, Jill barely manages to get out
of the RPD building alive. She picks the lock on the alleyway
door and keeps running. She seems to have lost the creature.
As Jill makes her way uptown, she finds a dead man wearing
the Umbrella logo. According to his diary, the dead man was a
member of the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasures Service, an
in-house paramilitary unit maintained by Umbrella. For some
reason, Umbrella's hired and sent mercenaries into the city.
More dead UBCS soldiers turn up elsewhere. One is lying in
front of a nearby parking garage, killed by a pack of zombie
dogs, and another has fallen victim to a new creature, some
kind of giant, mutated insect. These "Stingers" attack Jill
as she passes through a construction site, and they don't
live long enough to regret it.
Jill steps back onto the street outside the construction
site, and sees a man run into a restaurant. Jill follows him
inside, and the man introduces himself as Carlos Oliviera, a
corporal in the UBCS. His squad was told to rescue Raccoon's
civilians, but the mission went wrong the moment they landed.
Before he can continue, the creature stalking Jill appears
again, entering through the restaurant's back door.
As the creature charges, Jill notices a gas leak in the
restaurant's kitchen. She and Carlos hide behind the
restaurant counter. As the creature stops next to the
leaking pipes, Jill throws a lit oil lamp at it. The ensuing
explosion nearly kills both Jill and Carlos, but also knocks
the creature unconscious.
As they leave the restaurant, Jill asks Carlos why his squad
was sent to Raccoon. Carlos' answer -- that they're rescuing
civilians -- isn't good enough for Jill, since the
destruction of Raccoon is largely Umbrella's fault.
Carlos replies that he and his fellow mercenaries are just
hired hands, and if Umbrella had some kind of ulterior
motive for sending them in, he doesn't know what it is. If
Jill wants answers, she's asking the wrong guy. A sudden
sound of shattering glass inside the restaurant cuts him
off. Carlos invites Jill to join his squad, and runs off.
Jill follows him, but the creature walks out of the
restaurant, seemingly unhurt, and resumes its pursuit.
After losing the creature in Raccoon's shopping district,
Jill hides inside the offices of the Raccoon Press. Inside,
she finds another gemstone that matches one she found in
the RPD building. They turn out to be missing parts to a
time lock on the gates to Raccoon's city hall. Jill repairs
the lock and opens the gates.
The city hall is boarded up, and looks as though it's been
undergoing the same kind of siege as the RPD. Past it is a
trainyard, where one of Raccoon City's cable cars is parked.
Inside the cable car, Jill meets a gray-haired man wearing
the same logos as Carlos. Jill greets him, assuming he's one
of Carlos's teammates. The man asks her insultingly how she
managed to survive. Jill replies that she's a S.T.A.R.S. member,
which seems to satisfy him. He walks into the next car,
leaving Jill alone with a badly wounded and delirious UBCS
officer. Jill tends the man's wounds as best she can, then
follows the grey-haired man.
Carlos is in the next cable car, and renews his invitation
from earlier. The gray-haired man, who is apparently Carlos'
commander, says that they can't trust Jill. Before Jill can
respond, Carlos says that they need her help, as their unit
has been reduced to Carlos, the gray-haired man, and Lieutenant
Mikhail, the injured man in the last cable car. His commander,
Nicholai, grudgingly agrees, and tells them about his plan.
An extraction helicopter is waiting for a signal from their
team. The designated landing zone is by the St. Michael Clock
Tower, a Raccoon City landmark. Nicholai intends to use the
cable car as a mobile shield to get them through Raccoon City,
although the car will require repairs first. Carlos and Jill
agree to this plan, and the three of them split up to look for
parts for the cable car.
Jill heads to a nearby gas station first, to get motor oil.
Carlos enters the station behind her, but a mob of zombies
sniffs them out. As Carlos keeps watch, Jill finds a locked
cabinet with oil in it. Carlos steps outside to fight off the
zombies. Jill hurriedly opens the lock and grabs the oil.
Before she can get outside, a live wire falls into a pool of
motor oil in the gas station's garage, starting a fire. Jill
sprints out the front door before the place burns down.
Outside, Jill finds Carlos slumped against the wall, next to
a pile of dead zombies. Jill briefly thinks he's dead, but
Carlos shakily gets to his feet. The fire suddenly spreads
outside, to the pools of gasoline leaking from wrecked cars,
and then to the gas station's pumps. Jill and Carlos barely
escape an explosion that completely destroys both the gas
station and most of the block that it's on. As they pull
themselves to their feet, Carlos tells Jill that he's going
to look for extra equipment, and leaves.
Jill manages to find some engine parts and returns to the
cable car to see if she can fix it. Outside the cable car,
Mikhail, despite his wounds, massacres a horde of zombies
and collapses. Jill runs up to him and demands to know if he
has a death wish. Mikhail insists that he cannot stop
fighting just because he's wounded. Even though the zombies
are innocent victims as well, as Jill says, there's no
reason for him to take responsibility for anything that's
happened to Raccoon. After all, none of the UBCS soldiers
are really involved with the company. Jill agrees, and says
that that's the only reason she's trusting the UBCS at all.
Jill helps Mikhail back into the cable car and tells him to
rest. She also tries to repair the cable car's engine.
While the power cable and fuse she's found will work, she
needs a special additive for the motor oil. She heads back
into Raccoon, towards an Umbrella-owned sales office and
chemical warehouse.
Before going to the office, Jill stops by the warehouse in
downtown Raccoon where she left the survivor earlier.
Inside, she finds a group of zombies greedily devouring his
dead body. In the trailer that the man was hiding in, Jill
finds a book where the man has written his final words. His
name was Dario Rosso, and he had always meant to be a novelist.
When Jill reaches the office, Nicholai is already there. He
has just killed another UBCS trooper who was infected with
the T-Virus. Jill demands that Nicholai explain why he shot the
man, who was still conscious. Nicholai explains to Jill, as
if it's obvious, that it took fewer bullets to kill the man
now, before he became a zombie. His callousness horrifies Jill.
Jill lets herself into the office's storage locker, where she
finds the additive she needs. At the same time, though, another
horde of zombies finds the sales office. Jill hears Nicholai
scream in agony, and when she fights her way back into the
office, both Nicholai and the UBCS mercenary's body are gone.
On her way back to the cable car, Jill has another encounter
with her stalker outside City Hall. Once again, Jill runs
for her life. The creature doesn't follow her to the next
street, and before Jill can wonder why, the ground crumbles
under her feet. She's dumped into part of the Raccoon sewer
system, which a large, mutated worm has claimed as its own.
Jill fights it off and escapes from the sewers via a
conveniently located emergency ladder.
Jill finishes her repair work on the cable car. Carlos walks
in, and Jill tells him that Nicholai won't be joining them.
Carlos grimly accepts the news, and offers to drive the
cable car. The car begins to glide smoothly away from the
station, but suddenly, it shakes with a tremendous impact.
Jill cautiously investigates, to find that the creature
stalking her has somehow broken in. With nowhere to run,
Jill knocks it to the ground with a barrage of grenades.
The creature gets right back up again, seemingly unhurt
by an attack that would have killed anything else.
Suddenly, Mikhail opens fire on the creature with his
assault rifle, commanding Jill to get out of the cable car.
The creature advances on Mikhail, whose rifle jams at
exactly the wrong moment. The creature backhands him against
the wall, then throws him across the cable car. A tentacle
emerges from the creature's hand, coiling around its wrist
like a striking snake, and it walks towards Mikhail to
finish him off. Just before it reaches him, Mikhail rolls
over, pulls a grenade from his vest, and pulls the pin. The
resulting explosion knocks the creature out of the back of
the cable car, kills Mikhail, and destroys the cable car's
brakes. Jill pulls the emergency brake, but the car still
doesn't stop until it hits a wall. Jill blacks out.
Jill regains consciousness alone in the courtyard of the St.
Michael Clock Tower, next to the twisted ruin of the cable
car. She finds Carlos inside, who is now convinced for some
reason that Umbrella isn't going to let the two of them out
of town. Before he can get hysterical, Jill slaps him, asking
him if he's just going to give up. Carlos says that he just
can't handle what's happening, and runs off.
The clock tower is nearly deserted, except, as usual, by the
occasional zombie or giant spider. Jill finds several more
dead mercenaries within it, one of whom is carrying a copy of
the UBCS's mission plan; sure enough, they were here to rescue
civilians, but were specifically after Umbrella's employees.
The UBCS's extraction chopper is in the suburbs of Raccoon,
waiting for someone to signal it by ringing the clock tower's
bell. Jill runs up to the bell tower, to find the bell's
mechanical ringer has been dismantled. Solving another of the
puzzles that seem to be everywhere in Raccoon City, she finds
a key to unlock a storeroom downstairs.
On the balcony of the clock tower, the creature returns,
seemingly unhurt. Jill rips the wiring out of one of the
clock tower's searchlights and electrocutes the creature. As
it lies twitching, Jill makes her escape, but once again, it
gets up and gives chase. For some reason, though, it doesn't
follow her downstairs.
In the storeroom, Jill finds an ornate gear that'll fit in
the bell's ringer. She runs back upstairs and installs it.
The bell starts to ring, and as Jill rushes outside, the
extraction chopper comes flying in. Jill waves it down, and
for a moment, thinks that she's finally safe.
She is, of course, wrong.
Someone fires a missile at the helicopter. As it explodes,
the helicopter plows into the clock tower. Burning wreckage
showers the courtyard. Jill looks up to see the creature
standing on top of the clock tower, its missile launcher
in its hand. It jumps down in front of her, intent upon
finishing her off once and for all. Before Jill can react,
the creature stabs her with one of its tentacles, and Jill
immediately begins to feel shaky and ill. She's been
infected with the T-Virus.
Suddenly, Carlos arrives and attacks the creature. The
creature, more annoyed than hurt, returns fire. Carlos is
knocked silly by a near-hit, but manages to blow up the
missile launcher. As he passes out, Jill opens fire on the
creature, hitting it with everything she has. The creature,
after taking enough damage to kill an army, finally staggers,
then falls face-down into the flames from the burning helicopter.
Jill limps over to Carlos and passes out. Carlos wakes up
and cradles Jill in his arms, desperately trying to wake her up.
Jill is unconscious for two days, during which Leon Kennedy
and Claire Redfield make their own escape from Raccoon City.
She wakes up in the chapel of the clock tower on the night of
October 1st. Carlos has been watching over her. She doesn't
feel any pain from her infection, but that in itself worries
her. Jill makes Carlos promise that if she turns into a zombie,
he'll kill her. Carlos says that he'll find something to help
her, and that she'll be safe in the chapel until he returns.
Carlos leaves the clock tower through a door in the
storeroom, and discovers that he's right next to a hospital.
He goes there, hoping to find something to combat the
T-Virus infection.
The hospital lobby is strewn with dead men and partially
locked down with a steel shutter. As Carlos enters, a zombie
slowly shuffles towards him from the back of the room.
Before Carlos can shoot it, something decapitates the zombie
from behind. A new creature, some kind of viciously clawed
reptile, screams at Carlos. Jill would recognize it as a
Hunter, one of the deadlier things she fought in the
Spencer mansion. After a vicious, albeit brief, fight, Carlos
kills the thing and enters the head doctor's office.
Carlos takes the head doctor's private elevator to the fourth
floor. The hospital is crawling with Hunters and the occasional
zombie. There, in the hospital's file room, he finds Nicholai,
who is holding a smoking gun and standing over the body of
another UBCS member. Carlos has a lot of questions for Nicholai,
but the only answer Nicholai has is that he -- Nicholai -- is
"one of the supervisors". That's all Carlos needs to know.
Nicholai points his gun at Carlos, but before he can fire,
the man on the floor pulls the pin on a grenade. Both Carlos
and Nicholai run for cover, and Nicholai winds up going out the
fourth-floor window.
Carlos is confused about what just happened, but he continues
his search. To his surprise, he finds another of Umbrella's
laboratories in the hospital's basement, where two creatures
are floating in incubation tanks. They look like Hunters, but
where the Hunters Carlos has been fighting are sort of generically
reptilian, these appear to be deliberately patterned after frogs.
(These are probably the MA-121 Hunters mentioned in RE2's EX Files.
See Frequently Asked Questions, below.)
Carlos finds a set of instructions in the lab. Using them as
well as the laboratory's machines, he creates a vaccine that'll
be effective against the T-Virus. Running back to the clock tower,
he finds a surprise waiting for him in the hospital lobby. Someone
has set explosives to demolish the hospital. Carlos leaves the
hospital at a dead run, taking cover from the explosion inside
the alley leading to the clock tower. The hospital is completely
destroyed, crumbling inward on itself.
In the clock tower, the ceilings are buckling and groaning,
as if the tower is planning on following the hospital's
lead. As Carlos crosses the clock tower's front hall, the
creaking intensifies into a pounding. With a sudden
crash, the creature that has chased Jill throughout Raccoon
City breaks through the wall. The creature's heavy coat has
burned away, revealing that it's covered in writhing tentacles.
Either the fire has forced it to mutate, or it just burned
off its clothes and this is how it's looked all along.
Carlos tries to fight the thing, but it's only interested in
getting to Jill. Fortunately, Carlos beats it to the chapel.
Carlos gives Jill the vaccine. The drug takes effect almost
immediately, and Jill wakes up. She asks Carlos what
happened to him, and Carlos says that he just had another
fight with the monster. Jill starts to wonder aloud whether
the creature can be stopped at all, and Carlos says that
he's sure it can; he doesn't sound real convincing, and
sounds less convincing when the creature roars at them from
outside the room. Jill realizes that the creature is toying
with them. Carlos then tells her about Nicholai's survival,
and warns her that although he doesn't know what Nicholai
has planned, he's sure that Nicholai is their enemy. Claiming
that he has to "take care of some things", Carlos leaves.
Jill runs into the creature as she leaves the chapel. She
leads it a merry chase through the clock tower, losing it
along the way, and ducks into Raccoon's city park.
The park is infested with monsters, but Jill easily takes
care of them. Inside the tool shed in a local graveyard, Jill
breaks through a bricked-up doorway and discovers an abandoned
Umbrella command center. Several documents are scattered
throughout the room. One of them, a report from one of the
supervisors, finally gives her a name for the creature that's
been chasing her; Umbrella calls it "Nemesis".
Nicholai is waiting for Jill when she leaves the command
center. He's impressed at her survival, but refuses to help
Jill in any way. When Jill asks him, he admits that the true
mission of the UBCS was to gather data on Umbrella's
bioweapons in a combat situation, but no one ever expected
the UBCS units to be completely wiped out. After a sudden
tremor shakes the ground, Nicholai runs off.
As Jill follows Nicholai, the earth falls out from under
her. The giant worm that Jill fought in the Raccoon sewer
system is back, but not for long. The worm destroys the
graveyard trying to kill Jill, and she responds in kind with
a barrage of grenades. The worm crumples up and dies, its
body dissolving, and Jill climbs out of the graveyard.
The park has been overrun by a fresh wave of zombies while
Jill fought the worm, but they're little more than
annoyances at this point. On one of the park's isolated
footpaths, Jill finds two more dead UBCS soldiers, one of
whom is clutching a set of orders from Umbrella. The orders
confirm what Nicholai said earlier. The supervisors were
also instructed to destroy the hospital and all the data
stored inside it. Umbrella is covering its tracks, and, for
some reason, a lot of their supervisors are winding up dead.
The footpath leads to a rickety bridge, which in turn leads
to an abandoned factory. As Jill walks across the bridge
towards it, the Nemesis jumps onto the bridge in front of
her. Jill throws herself off of the bridge and into the
river below it. The Nemesis, after she's gone, turns and
walks towards the factory.
Underneath the bridge, Jill finds an entrance to an old
sewer duct, and from there finds her way into the factory. A
quintet of zombies spring a crude ambush on her, but Carlos
arrives and saves Jill a second time. Jill thanks him, and
he tells her that a nuclear missile is going to be launched
into the center of the city at dawn, which is coming soon.
The two of them have to split up and find some way to
escape, or they'll be caught in the blast. Carlos puts a
hand on Jill's cheek and tells her to watch out for Nicholai.
The factory is obviously nowhere near as abandoned as it was
supposed to be. Umbrella has been conducting experiments
with the T-Virus here and using the facility to dispose of
toxic waste; as a result, the factory is crawling with Stingers,
Hunters, and powerful, mutated zombies. As Jill explores, a
sudden burst of gunfire sends her running for cover. Chortling,
Nicholai walks through a door and seals it shut behind him with
a keycard.
Jill accidentally stumbles into the facility's trash
room. Not only does the door lock behind her, but the room's
automated systems come online; in five minutes, the room
will automatically dump everything in it into the factory's
waste area. Given what's *in* the waste area, that might be
a fate worse than death. Just as Jill thinks things can't
get any worse, the trash room's lights come on, revealing an
old friend. The Nemesis has been waiting for her.
For the first time in four days, Jill gets lucky. She ducks
underneath one of the Nemesis's wild swings, and it tears
open a pipe on the wall. Whatever is flowing through the
pipe is corrosive enough to burn off half of the Nemesis's
tentacles almost instantly. As the Nemesis recovers, Jill
shoots out another pipe, drenching it in acid a second time,
and then a third. The Nemesis screams, covered in horrible
burns. As it falls dead for a second time, Jill notices
the body of an Umbrella scientist in one of the trash heaps.
Searching his pockets, she finds a keycard which unlocks the
trash room doors. As she gets out, the Nemesis's body is
dumped into the waste pool.
The factory's speakers crackle to life, and a woman's voice
reports that a missile attack has been detected.
Jill runs towards the door Nicholai went through and unlocks
it with her new keycard. The door leads to a communications
tower. As Jill picks up a portable radar receiver, the radio
suddenly comes to life. Outside, Nicholai taunts Jill from a
helicopter, and rakes the tower with a burst of machine-gun fire.
Apparently, since he's killed all the other supervisors,
Nicholai can demand a bigger bonus from Umbrella. He had
also intended to collect the bounty that Umbrella has placed
on Jill's head. Jill negotiates with him over the tower's
radio, and an amused Nicholai decides to fly away. Jill,
he says, is doomed anyway.
Carlos runs in. He hasn't had any luck in finding an escape
route, but he refuses to give up. He frantically uses the radio
to scan all frequencies. A familiar voice comes over the
radio. Someone else is coming in a helicopter, specifically
for Jill. All the two of them have to do is meet it at the
factory's helipad. The factory's systems alert Jill and
Carlos that the missile has been launched, and unlock
the door to the helipad. Jill heads there, and Carlos runs
back into the factory to make last-minute preparations.
Apparently, the factory used a scrapyard as their landing
zone. Jill runs through a maze of crushed and stripped cars,
and finds that a small war was fought here recently. Several
dead U.S. Special Forces soldiers are lying outside of the
factory's power room, as well as the burning corpse of a
mutant (actually a Mr. X unit, like the one that attacked
Leon the day before). An official report is on the ground
near one of them, accompanied by a photograph of an
experimental new weapon code-named "Paracelsus' Sword". The
report specifically mentions using it to fight Umbrella's
bioweapons. The Sword is an enormous rail cannon, and looks
like just the thing to take out a Tyrant, but it's far too
big to sneak it onto hostile territory. There's a mystery or
two here, but unfortunately, Jill doesn't have time to figure
it out.
Jill enters the power room, and an explosion from outside
seals the door shut behind her. Dead bioweapons are lying
everywhere, including several Mr. X units and an older model
of the Tyrant, with several dead soldiers lying among them.
On the other side of the room, Jill finds the Paracelsus'
Sword cannon, still hooked up to the factory's power plant
and aimed directly at the dead Tyrant. Jill tries to turn
it on. The cannon's computer tells her to hook up several
oversized batteries strewn around the room.
As Jill shoves the first battery into place, she hears the
sound of dripping water behind her. Chemicals slowly begin
to leak into the room. Jill turns around, and the Nemesis's
"corpse" falls through a hole in the ceiling. All the bath
in the factory's waste pool did was mutate it enough that it
survived. Jill draws back in horror as the Nemesis twists
into a new four-legged shape, growing a tail and a set of
vicious spikes along its back. The Nemesis is now saturated
with biohazards, and sprays them from its body with every
step it takes.
Jill frantically hooks up the last two batteries to the rail
cannon. As the Nemesis showers the room with lethal toxins,
Paracelsus' Sword begins to charge up. Left with no other
choice, Jill has to turn and fight back. The Nemesis is
still a vicious opponent, but it's nowhere near as durable
as it was in the past, and Jill's assault drives it away.
The Nemesis limps to the other side of the room and begins
to chew on the Tyrant's corpse. Why it's doing that is soon
made a moot point, as Paracelsus' Sword fires.
The rail cannon's blast shakes the room, tears through a
four-foot block of scrap metal, vaporizes the Tyrant's
corpse, and doesn't really look like it hurts the Nemesis
much at all. A second blast finally sends the Nemesis
screaming to the ground. Jill checks the radar receiver, which
tells her that she has less than five minutes before the nuclear
strike hits. Before she can leave, the Nemesis gets back up
for one last attempt to kill her. Jill dodges a blast of
venom and grabs a Magnum from one of the dead soldiers. Jill
stands over the the Nemesis and empties the gun into its head.
Finally, bleeding from its every pore, it stops moving.
Jill leaves the power room and takes an elevator up to the
helipad. Carlos takes the elevator up just after she does
and runs forward, lighting a signal flare. A blue-and-white
helicopter slowly descends to the ground in front of Carlos,
and both he and Jill climb aboard with only a few minutes to
spare.
=============================================================
4iii. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL 3: NEMESIS
=============================================================
Jill thanks the helicopter's pilot, who says that he couldn't
just let her die. Jill seems to recognize him and leans forward.
The pilot turns to her and asks her, "Are you ready to finish
this?" (The pilot's apparently supposed to be Barry Burton,
although it's never said out loud.)
A flash of light outside the window draws Jill's attention.
The nuclear missile flies past the helicopter and hits the
center of Raccoon City. The surviving zombies look up at
confusion at the bright light, just before they're
destroyed. A wave of fire rolls across the entire city,
utterly destroying it. All that remains is a smoking crater.
As the helicopter flies east, Jill, looking out the window
at what used to be Raccoon, vows that Umbrella is going down.
We're then treated to a news broadcast. The morning's top
news story is, of course, the nuclear strike on Raccoon. The
President and Congress planned and executed the destruction
of Raccoon City, which has been "literally wiped off the
map". More than a hundred thousand casualties are expected.
"Our hearts go out to the citizens... of Raccoon City."
====================
4iv. Different Paths
====================
The game's basic plotline can vary each time you play
through it. However, while the details change, the
fundamental events are always the same, so they aren't
worth listing in full here. For most of the choices,
I've just kinda picked the one that I liked more and
used it for the summary.
The exception is that I deliberately placed Carlos in the
gas station. Nicholai is a huge badass, but I'm not willing
to believe that he's enough of a badass to survive an
explosion that levels a city block (unless the explosion, as
Vincent Merken and I have theorized, knocked him through a
plot hole). I can accept a lot, but that's just crazy.
=====================
4v. Different Endings
=====================
The ending I've used for the summary is apparently the
official one, as one of the files in Resident Evil: Survivor
is written by Nicholai on October 5th. The other two possible
endings are detailed below, and both of 'em wind up with
Nicholai being real dead.
Ending #2:
Instead of negotiating with Nicholai, Jill blows him out of
the sky. Aside from that small, yet satisfying, detail, this
is the same as Ending #1.
Ending #3:
Instead of jumping off the bridge, Jill shoves the Nemesis
off and walks into the abandoned factory via the front door.
She and Carlos meet up in the second-floor break room, where
a visibly exhausted Carlos tells her about the incoming
missiles. Things proceed as above after that, but when Jill
reaches the trash room, she's ambushed by Nicholai. From
cover in front of the trash room, Nicholai explains that
there's a "modest" bounty offered by Umbrella for whoever
kills Jill, which he intends to collect. Jill tells him,
basically, to stick it.
Nicholai replies by firing a couple more shots at Jill.
Something, probably the Nemesis, grabs Nicholai from behind.
Jill hears him scream, followed by some wet crunching
sounds. When she rounds the corner, she finds Nicholai's
dead body, hanging off of the pipes in the ceiling.
When Jill reaches the communications tower, she hears an
incoming transmission from Carlos. Carlos tells her to take
the nearby radar receiver and meet him elsewhere; he's found
a helicopter.
After Jill's showdown with the Nemesis, she rides the
elevator up to find Carlos waiting for her in Nicholai's
helicopter. Jill watches Raccoon explode as they fly off,
saying that this time, "they've gone too far."
=======================
4vi. The Epilogue Files
=======================
Every time the game is beaten on Hard Mode, an Epilogue is
shown after the credits and ranking screen. There are eight
Epilogues, each dealing with a major character from RE; in
order, the files are about Jill, Chris, Barry, Leon, Claire,
Sherry, Ada, and Hunk. Each file is about a paragraph long,
and is accompanied by original character art.
>From the Epilogue Files, we know the following:
-- after escaping Raccoon, Jill Valentine found one of
Chris's hideouts. It was trashed, but Chris wasn't there.
She plans to keep looking for Chris so the two of them can
finally take down Umbrella. Carlos and Barry may or may not
be with her.
-- Barry has left his family. He doesn't intend to
return to them until he's paid his friends back for
betraying them at the mansion. (He is *so* dead.)
-- after they escaped the lab at the end of RE2, Leon angrily
told Claire to leave him and Sherry alone. She promised to
return, and disappeared into the woods near Raccoon alone.
She may or may not have kept that promise.
-- Leon has been made some kind of unspecified offer by
either the U.S. government or someone claiming to represent
them. He attempted to get them to leave Sherry out of this
offer, but she "knows too much". We do not know what Leon's
response to the offer was.
-- the woman who had called herself Ada Wong survived. She
is leaving that identity behind, although not without tears,
and preparing for another mission.
-- Hunk is a little crazy, and has a tendency to be the
only one to survive the missions he's sent on. He's seen
without his mask in his file.
======================================
4vii. Conclusions About the Conclusion
======================================
Resident Evil 3 leaves us with the following information:
1. Raccoon City has been completely destroyed. Thousands are dead.
2. Jill and Carlos have survived, thanks to Barry Burton.
3. Nicholai Ginovaef has also survived.
4. A vaccine exists for the T-Virus, and it's been given to
Jill. In theory, she's now immune to it.
4. Ada and Hunk are both still alive. This brings the known
total of Raccoon survivors to eight, out of more than a
hundred thousand.
5. Jill is newly dedicated to the destruction of Umbrella.
She's looking for Chris.
6. Umbrella is actively seeking the deaths of the remaining
members of S.T.A.R.S.. They have a "modest" price on Jill's head.
7. Claire Redfield is somewhere in America, continuing her
search for her brother.
8. Leon Kennedy and Sherry Birkin are in government custody.
9. Leon has gotten an unspecified "offer" from someone claiming
to be a government agent. While we know that he's still alive by
the time of Code Veronica, we don't know what his reaction to the
offer was or if the man making it was actually with the government.
10. The U.S. government has attacked at least one Umbrella
facility with very little, if any, success.
11. Umbrella actually tried to *stop* the government from
nuking Raccoon. Apparently, there's something else going on
here that we don't know about.
12. Hunk survived. Umbrella has a sample of the G-Virus.
13. Someone on the Capcom development team *really* hated
Brad Vickers' guts.
=====================
4viii. Random Musings
=====================
1. In the power room, scattered amidst the dead Tyrants, are shards
of red containment capsules, similar to the one that Umbrella used
to transport Mr. X in RE2. If anyone was wondering where that
helicopter might have gone after it visited the RPD, it probably
went straight to the Dead Factory.
2. As I've mentioned below under Unanswered Questions, the
military blockade around Raccoon is apparently manned by spider
monkeys. Neither Leon or Claire so much as see a blockade,
and we've seen no fewer than six helicopters, some unmarked, enter
and leave Raccoon's airspace without any problems. (Count 'em.
You might even come up with a few that I missed.)
3. The Mercenaries minigame, while horrifyingly addictive,
doesn't really apply to the storyline. I would've thought
that this was obvious, but apparently, it isn't.
4. For those who didn't know, RE3 was subtitled Last Escape in
Japan. This is why Jill uses that phrase a lot. (Personally, I
think it's cool and should've stayed the subtitle of the American
version, but that's me.)
5. Although the back of the CD case says Jill quit S.T.A.R.S., she
never says as much in the game. As a matter of fact, she claims
membership several times.
6. In the "Bloopers" section: no one ever tells Jill Nicholai's
name. She just kinda figures it out on her own.
================================================
5. Ten Thousand Bullets: RESIDENT EVIL: SURVIVOR
================================================
Half standard Resident Evil and half first-person
gun-in-hand shooting game, this game has gotten mixed
reviews everywhere I've looked; Vincent Merken, as well
as roughly half of Europe, has written to tell me that
the game's actually pretty lame. We're still waiting for
it here in the States.
===============
5i. Coming Soon
===============
I've yet to play Survivor. When I do, I'll update this FAQ
accordingly. Please don't take this as an invitation to send
me your own summaries; I really would like to play the game
for myself. Fortunately, according to PSM, the game is due to
come out in July 2000.
In the meantime, you can read all of Survivor's files,
courtesy of Rob McGregor and his Resident Evil Timeline, at
http://www.new-blood.com. They're creepy as hell.
==================================================
6. Sibling Rivalries: RESIDENT EVIL: CODE VERONICA
==================================================
The newest and most elaborate Resident Evil game is for the
Sega Dreamcast. Spanning two discs, it is, as of this
writing, getting a wide selection of rave reviews from every
gaming magazine in existence, and has been called the "best
game for the Dreamcast" more than once. It's easily more
than twice as long as any previous RE game, with a surprisingly
elaborate plot, and as such, is going to require the Plot
Summary From Hell. You might want to go get a drink or something.
Code Veronica, in brief, follows Claire Redfield as she
continues to look for Chris. She's captured while searching
an Umbrella facility in Paris and sent to an Umbrella-run
prison in South America, where she meets and fights against
Alfred Ashford, the insane descendant of one of the original
founders of Umbrella.
The last half of the game features the long-awaited return
of Chris Redfield, as he arrives on the island to try and
save Claire. Unfortunately, he finds out that he has
problems of his own.
=====================================================
6i. A Lovely Island Hideaway: CODE VERONICA, Part One
=====================================================
It's been three months since Claire disappeared into the
woods near Raccoon. In that time, she's found an Umbrella
memo that reads: "CONFIDENTIAL: PHASE I -- RACCOON CITY.
TEST COMPLETE. PHASE II -- PARIS FACILITY. FULLY
OPERATIONAL." In December of 1998, she travels to Paris and
infiltrates that facility, hoping to find clues to the
whereabouts of her brother Chris.
She's discovered, and a chase ensues. As she runs from a pair
of armed guards, a bright light at the end of the hallway blinds
her. When she can see again, the first thing Claire sees is an
attack helicopter hovering outside the window. Its chaingun
begins to warm up. Claire doubles back and ducks into the
nearest hallway, as the chaingun chews the guards that were
chasing her to ribbons.
The helicopter chases Claire the rest of the way down the
hall she's in. Claire barely stays ahead of its constant
stream of gunfire. As it starts to get too close, Claire
jumps through an open door and down a flight of stairs. She
rolls to her feet and finds herself staring down at least
two dozen more of Umbrella's guards, all of whom are
pointing guns at her. As they walk forward, Claire sees that
they're standing in front of a tank full of flammable
chemicals. In a trick worthy of John Woo, Claire puts her
hands up, drops her gun, hits the floor, catches the gun
before it hits the ground, and puts her last three bullets
into the tank. The resulting explosion sends the guards flying.
(You can download a movie of this sequence from dreamcast.ign.com,
or at least you used to be able to. If you still can, as of
this writing, do so. It's well worth watching.)
Claire gets to her feet as another guard comes down the
stairs. Both she and the guard react at the same time,
shoving their guns in each other's faces, but the guard's
gun has bullets in it. Hers doesn't.
Claire is captured, and, ten days later, is taken by
helicopter to an isolated prison. She spends most of the
ride there with a bag over her head. It's taken off as a
guard tells her what her serial number is, and welcomes her
to her new home. Another guard cracks Claire in the face
with the butt of his rifle. Claire blacks out.
She wakes up in a dank cell, somewhere underground. As Claire
stands up, the cell shakes with distant explosions. It sounds
as though a war is being fought aboveground. The lights flicker
and die, leaving Claire alone in the darkness.
Slowly, someone clutching his stomach shambles into the room
and stands outside Claire's cell door. Claire uses her lighter
to see who it is, and is surprised to see the face of the man
who took her prisoner in Paris.
The man unlocks her cell and opens the door. As Claire
hesitantly steps outside her cell, he slumps into a nearby
chair and pulls an empty bottle of medicine out of his
pocket. He throws it against the floor in frustration. Not
looking up, he tells Claire that this place is finished.
They've been attacked by what he thinks is a "special forces
team". Claire's free to leave the prison grounds, but he
warns her that she has no chance of getting off of the island.
Before leaving the cellblock, Claire picks up a knife, and
notes that the man needs hemostatic medicine. A manifest on
the desk tells her that the man's name is Rodrigo Juan Raval,
and that he's a member of Umbrella's medical division.
It's raining gently when Claire gets outside. The cellblock
opens into a small graveyard. A truck has crashed through
the wall, and is burning merrily. Suddenly, it explodes. A
burning man climbs out of the driver's seat. One good look
tells Claire that the man's become a zombie. Somehow, the
T-Virus has been released. As Claire backs away from the
burning zombie, more emerge from open graves all around her.
Claire scrambles to her feet and runs through the nearest door.
Claire gets about two steps out of the door when someone
opens fire on her from a guard tower. Taking cover behind
the crashed truck, she grabs a handgun off of a dead man and
returns fire, shattering the gunman's spotlight and forcing
him to take cover. The man screams. Claire demands that he
tell her who he is. The man -- a boy, really -- is glad to
see that she's not a zombie like he'd thought, and hops down
off of the tower. He introduces himself as Steve, another
prisoner, and says that he's looking for an airport that he'd
heard was on the island. Claire tries to follow him as he
leaves, but Steve claims that she'd only slow him down.
The prison is only lightly populated with zombies, so Claire
doesn't have much trouble as she searches the place. Inside
a nearby mess hall, she finds a map of the facility, as well
as one of the other prisoners' diaries. The prisoner had
managed to figure out that the island is south of the equator.
The prison's file room and computer lab is nearby. Claire
runs into Steve, who's playing with one of the computers.
Steve asks her if she's related to Chris Redfield. When she
says she is, he shows her that Chris is under electronic
surveillance by Umbrella. Claire uses the computer's Internet
connection to forward Chris's location to Leon Kennedy via
e-mail, hoping that Leon can figure out some way to help
her. Steve tells her that the latitude and longitude of the
prison is stored on the computer and, with a snort, suggests
that she have Leon forward that to her brother so he can
come help them out. Claire thinks it's a good idea and does
so, but Steve indignantly claims to have just been kidding;
Chris won't come to help them. Claire denies this. Steve says
angrily that other people will just let you down, and storms
out of the computer lab. Claire is left alone again, wondering
what Steve's problem is.
Using one of the machines in the file room to forge a key,
Claire lets herself out the prison's front gate. A recent
rockfall has blocked the main exit and destroyed the main
bridge, so Claire runs up a nearby staircase instead. To her
surprise, she's now standing in front of a military training
facility on one side, and a mansion on the other. She decides
to investigate the mansion first.
The mansion hasn't escaped damage in the recent assault, but
the interior is more or less intact. Claire finds an ornate,
locked door in a study on the second floor, but instead of
keys, the door is molded so as to accept a pair of guns. In
the same room, she finds a diary kept by one of the servants
that lived here. The servant talks about his master, Alfred,
and how Alfred is incredibly secretive about his relationship
with his sister Alexia. No one is allowed near her, or has
even seen her except at a distance, sitting in the window of
Alfred's house.
Someone's private war museum is on the first floor.
Antique handguns and models of battleships line the walls.
Claire presses a button near a sculpture of a giant ant, and
an old movie begins to play on the room's screen. The movie
features two blond-haired, beautiful children, a boy and a
girl, obviously twins. Slowly, the boy plucks the wings off
of a dragonfly, and sets the helpless insect in an ant farm
to be devoured. As the dragonfly writhes, the boy turns to
the girl, and both share an innocent smile.
The end of the movie coincides with a secret door opening in
the corner of the room. Claire finds a pair of gold-inlaid
Luger handguns inside, but taking them from the wall mount
they're on triggers a deadly trap, closing the secret door
and turning up the heat inside the room. Claire quickly
replaces the guns and tries to leave the mansion, but as she
puts her hand on the doorknob, she hears Steve scream for
help. She returns to the museum to find that he's caught
himself in Alfred's trap, and refuses to put the Lugers back
on the wall. Claire quickly figures out the room's computer
systems and releases the secret door, freeing Steve from the
trap. Steve, happy with his new guns, shows off for Claire.
Claire recognizes the guns as the ones she needs to open the
door in the study, but Steve refuses to give them to her unless
she gives him something fully automatic in return. Once again,
Steve runs off.
In the front hall of the mansion, Claire notices a laser
sight as it focuses on her head. She dives to the side and
hides behind a pillar. The gunman, a blond man dressed in a
blend of preppy fashion and military gear, demands that she
tell him who her friends are. He's convinced that Claire
deliberately let herself be captured so she could lead her
allies to his base to destroy it. Claire says that she
doesn't know what he's talking about, but he doesn't believe
her. His name is Alfred Ashford, he says, commander of the
base. Claire retorts that he must be one of Umbrella's
low-ranking employees if he's in command of such a small,
isolated facility. Alfred angrily tells her that his family,
the Ashfords, is one of the oldest and greatest in the world.
His grandfather was one of the original founders of Umbrella
Incorporated. He leaves, telling Claire that she's just a
rat in a cage.
A strange setup outside the palace, when Claire plays with
it, brings a submarine to the surface. She goes in,
hoping to use it to get away, but instead, winds up in an
underwater port for seaplanes; this must be the "airport"
that Steve was talking about. A cargo plane is docked inside.
If Claire finds a pilot, she could use it to escape. Even
better, she's already found one of the three keys she'll need
to unlock its hatch.
Claire finds a keycard inside an abandoned cargo bay, and heads
back to the military training facility to see what it unlocks.
The training yard is guarded by an enormous worm, which
tunnels under the ground and attempts to devour Claire. She
dodges it and runs into the facility.
Stairs just inside the entrance lead to a lab on the second
floor. The lab's experiment area is locked down due to
environmental pollution. As Claire walks by the lab's
observation window, a man in a biohazard suit desperately
beats against it, trying to get her to open the door. Claire
can't, and helplessly watches as something in the room with
the man grabs him by the head and crushes his skull against
the glass. As he sinks to the floor, a recording on the
overhead speakers alerts Claire that the area has been
contaminated, and will be locked down for ventilation.
Claire barely makes it out of the lab before it seals itself.
Claire finds extra ammunition in the facility's locker room,
then sets out to explore the rest of the first floor. As she
walks down a hallway, a steel gate silently shuts behind her.
In the next room, Alfred Ashford tries to ambush her, and
fails. Claire dodges his badly aimed gunfire and runs up to
the balcony where he's aiming from, but Alfred is already gone.
She chases him in the only direction he could've run in, but
he seals every door behind her from somewhere else in the
complex. As the final door locks, he jeers at her from a
hidden speaker, telling her that he's prepared a special
surprise for her. He hopes that she won't die too quickly.
The only door that Alfred's left unlocked leads to a
storeroom. A discarded pair of Ingram submachine guns lies on
the balcony with Claire. She picks them up, just in time to
watch a door on the other side of the room open. A new
creature makes it way in; it resembles a zombie, except it
only has one long arm. Its upper body is bulging with
muscle. As Claire watches in horror, the creature's arm
stretches to an impossible length, grabbing a pipe in the
ceiling and using it to swing over to her. Claire barely
manages to kill the creature.
As the rubber man falls dead, Alfred opens a door via remote
control. Claire tries to walk through it, but another rubber
man drops from the ceiling and seizes her head with its arm.
Claire struggles vainly against it as it hoists her into the
air, threatening to either crush her skull or suffocate her.
Suddenly, a window above the creature shatters, and Steve
jumps through it, blasting at the rubber man with the
Lugers. Roaring in pain, the rubber man drops Claire. Steve
drives it backward with a barrage of gunfire, kicks it into
the corner, and finishes it off with a final gunshot to the
head. He walks over and greets Claire, claiming to be her
"knight in shining armor". Claire denies that he's any such
thing, but offers him the Ingrams she found as a trade for
his Lugers. Steve accepts the trade. Suddenly, the floor
they're on begins to descend.
When the floor stops moving, Steve runs ahead of Claire
through the nearest door, anxious for an opportunity to try
out his "new toys". Claire catches back up to him on a
bridge overlooking the facility's sewer system, probably by
following the long trail of spent shells and dead zombies
he's left behind him. Steve claims that this is why Claire
needs him around; he'll watch her back. He then contradicts
himself, saying that the Ingrams he's been using are more
reliable than any person. Claire, who's still confused by
him, asks him why he's on this island, and where his family
is. Steve's response is to yell that he doesn't want to talk
about it and to shoot at the wall. He runs into a nearby
elevator, and Claire follows.
The path Alfred has set for them leads to a
balcony overlooking a motor pool. As Claire runs up to
Steve, the balcony collapses underneath them. Steve falls
free of the balcony, but Claire drops her gun and is pinned
underneath a chunk of rubble. A zombie shambles towards
Steve, who raises his Ingrams, but doesn't fire. Claire yells
at him to shoot it, but Steve is seemingly frozen in place.
The zombie turns towards Claire. Claire yells for Steve to
help her as the zombie bends down to attack. Steve hesitates
for a single long moment, then levels both Ingrams at the
zombie and yells, "FATHER!" He empties both guns into the
zombie, trying to fire even when he's out of ammunition.
Slowly, Steve sinks to his knees, sobbing.
Steve explains to Claire that his father used to work for
Umbrella, but had begun stealing information and auctioning
it off to the highest bidder. Umbrella caught him. Steve's
mother was killed, and he and his father were sent to this
prison. He despises his father for being so reckless and
stupid. Claire comforts him, telling him to rest, and leaves
him alone to mourn.
Alfred has apparently given up on his "deathtrap". The only
other problems Claire encounters in the military facility are
zombies and the odd mutated dog. In a storeroom, she finds a
copy of the Ashford family crest, an eagle clutching a
halberd in its claws. The crest is forged of some kind of
blue metal, while the halberd seems to be inlaid gold.
Elsewhere in the facility, the crest opens a compartment
containing a copy of Alfred's personal keycard. Using that
and the keycard she found earlier, Claire is able to unlock
most of the doors inside the base. Among other things, she
finds a grenade launcher and a vial of the kind of medicine
that Rodrigo needs.
Claire unlocks another door to find a monitor room. The
screens are still lit up. Inside, she finds the second key
to the cargo plane's door, as well as data on a creature
called an "Albanoid", the result of injecting the T-Virus
into a salamander. The creature is capable of generating
powerful electric shocks, and reaches adulthood only ten
hours after being "born". One of the monitors tells her what
the password to the lab she had to escape from earlier is,
as well as letting her know that the lab's systems have
finished the ventilation process. Claire heads back there.
Inside the lab, Claire takes a painting she finds on the wall.
As she does so, an infant Albanoid breaks out of one of the
nearby storage vats. Before Claire can do anything, the
insanely quick creature disappears into one of the ventilation
shafts. Claire is forced to escape from the lab a second time,
as the automated systems declare the lab contaminated and
permanently seal the area.
In the storeroom where Claire found the Ashfords' crest, she
uses the painting to solve a puzzle. The wall of the
storeroom slides back, revealing an elaborate diorama of the
facility and a golden key.
Heading back to the mansion, Claire uses the Lugers to
unlock the door in the study. The door leads to what looks
like Alfred's private office. Using his computer, Claire
discovers yet another secret passage, leading through an
abandoned aqueduct to an enormous house, sitting high up the
side of a mountain. Claire heads towards it as lightning and
thunder crash in the distance, and a woman's mocking
laughter echoes over the island...
The house has been hit fairly hard by the assault on the island.
It's guarded by rubber men, but Claire easily avoids them
and gets inside. The interior of the house is like a twisted
parody of childhood; either dolls or books cover every
available surface. A larger-than-life doll dangles from the
chandelier hook in the ceiling; it has been eviscerated.
Most of the furniture is sized for children, or for dolls.
On the house's second floor, Claire walks in on a
conversation between Alfred and his until-now-absent sister,
Alexia. As Claire lurks outside her bedroom window, Alexia
asks an unseen Alfred what's taking so long, when his
opponent is only a little girl. Alfred's success is
necessary, Alexia continues, to restore the honor of the
Ashford family. Alfred insists that he doesn't need to be
reminded. He intends to raise Alexia to the position of
leader of the once-again-glorious Ashford family. Alexia
sees Claire, but chalks it up to her own imagination.
The twins, having finished their conversation, leave.
Cautiously, Claire enters the twins' bedrooms, but no one is
in either of them, and she didn't see either of them in the
hall. A locked secret door above the bed in Alexia's room
tells her why. Both rooms have an ornate, locked music box,
both of which require yet another unique key. Claire finds a
silver key in Alexia's room and heads back to the mansion.
Claire uses the keys she's found to unlock several doors
inside the palace. One door leads to a boardroom, where,
after a frantic battle with a pair of rubber men, she finds
another copy of the Ashfords' crest. Another room, a private
casino, is apparently where Alfred goes for recreation.
The last and largest room in the palace is a shrine to the
past leaders of the Ashford family. An oil painting of a
twelve-year-old Alfred is in the place of highest honor. An
inscription tells the onlooker to find the family's real
master, with a history of the Ashfords lying underneath it.
When Claire solves the puzzle, the picture of Alfred
rotates, revealing a painting of an adult Alexia. Underneath
her picture, Claire finds an ant-shaped key that will fit
the music box in Alexia's bedroom.
With nowhere to go for now, Claire takes the crest back to
the prison, where it unlocks a door she saw earlier. The door
leads to the prison's medical facility, which is guarded by
a mob of zombies. Claire dispatches them handily. Inside the
medical facility, she finds stacked body bags and the journal
of the facility's doctor. The doctor is apparently just as sick
and crazy as everyone else who works for Umbrella, and Alfred
lets him use the base's prisoners to pursue his "studies". If
the base hadn't been attacked, Claire herself might've been one
of the doctor's guinea pigs.
Claire investigates the prison's crematorium, which has
little of interest besides a small chair in the corner,
sized for a child. When she comes back, one of the body bags
is empty, and a zombie in a lab coat is feeding desperately
on the dissected corpse. The doctor has apparently returned.
Claire shoots him dead, and finds a glass eye on his body.
The eye fits in the doctor's anatomical dummy, which opens
a secret passage to the doctor's private torture chamber,
filled with antique but well-used torture devices. Blood
cakes the floor. Claire finds a roll of piano music in this
hellish place, and leaves as soon as she can.
Rodrigo is still in the dark cellblock when Claire gets back
there. She gives him the vial of medicine. A surprised Rodrigo
thanks her, but refuses any further help. Claire lets him keep
her lighter, and mentions that it was a gift from her brother.
In gratitude, Rodrigo gives her a set of lockpicks, and urges
her to leave while she still can.
The piano roll from the torture chamber fits in the piano in
Alfred's recreation room. As the piano plays the same song
that Alfred's music box did, a secret panel in one of the
slot machines swings open. Inside, Claire finds the key to
Alfred's music box.
The music boxes are the disguised keys to a secret door in
Alfred's bedroom. Claire goes through to find herself
standing on a full-sized merry-go-round with only two
horses. The room is filled with toys and keepsakes of the
twins' childhood. A golden dragonfly sits on a child's
chair, across the room from a painting of an ant. The ant's
mouth is a concealed keyhole. Remembering the movie in
Alfred's museum, Claire plucks the dragonfly's wings off and
puts it in the ant's "mouth". Behind her, the merry-go-round
starts up again and turns, orienting itself so Claire can
climb up to yet another level in the room.
The final tier of Alfred's hideaway is a well-cared-for
study. Thick, well-thumbed books on biology, chemistry,
and genetics fill the bookcases on the walls. A newspaper
clipping on a stool is about a 10-year-old girl, maybe
Alexia, who graduated from a university with top honors
and was offered a job as a head researcher by Umbrella
Incorporated. On top of one of the bookcases, Claire finds
Alfred's private diary. He has written of his unwholesome
obsession with his sister; he regards Alexia as his queen,
a woman who the entire world must worship. Claire takes the
diary, and finds that it hides the final key to the cargo
plane. She can finally escape.
As she climbs down into Alexia's bedroom, Alexia herself
somehow sneaks up on Claire. Holding Alfred's rifle, Alexia
tells Claire that for the glory of the Ashfords, she must
die. Claire dodges Alexia's first shot, but she knows the
second won't miss. Alexia moves in for the kill.
Suddenly, Steve kicks in the bedroom door. He sees Alexia at
the same time she sees him, and each points their weapon at
the other. Alexia fires first, grazing Steve. As Steve
falls to the floor, he returns the favor with a wild burst
from one of his Ingrams. Alexia retreats into Alfred's bedroom
through a secret door.
Steve and Claire cautiously follow Alexia. At the end of a
trail of blood, Claire finds a blond wig on Alfred's music
box. As she picks it up, Alfred suddenly jumps from above
his bed, meaning to crush Claire's skull with the butt of
his rifle. Claire dodges, and as Alfred takes a second swing,
Steve kicks him across the room and holds him at gunpoint.
Alfred drags himself shakily to his feet, and accidentally
catches a glimpse of himself in the bedroom window. He's
wearing the same makeup that Alexia was. Screaming insanely,
Alfred runs, and a shocked Steve lets him go.
Steve, confused, asks what just happened. Claire, realizing
that she never did see Alfred during his "conversation" with
Alexia, concludes that there must never have really been
an Alexia. Alfred went to such extremes to hide Alexia from
everyone on the island because he thought he *was* Alexia.
This weirds Steve out, who decides that now they *really*
have to get out of this place (forget about the undead monsters;
it takes a *transvestite* to bother our man Steve). No sooner
does he say that than alarm klaxons start ringing all over the
factory. Alfred has activated the base's self-destruct system by
remote control.
Several cargo planes fly overhead as Claire and Steve leave
the mansion. Steve guesses that the other survivors are on
them. Quickly, they follow their example and run for the
underwater airport. Claire's keys unlock the cargo plane's
door, and Steve sets into the pilot's seat. He begins to
prepare the plane for takeoff, but he realizes that the
airport's maintenance bridge is in the way. Claire volunteers
to raise the bridge while Steve gets ready to take off.
Claire dashes across the airport and throws a switch, raising
the bridge. This forces her to take the long way around to get
back to the plane; Claire uses the airport's cargo elevator to
return to the training facility's courtyard. A female voice,
almost exactly the same as the one she heard in William Birkin's
lab, tells Claire that the facility will explode in five minutes.
As Claire boards the elevator, Alfred has reached the training
facility's monitor room. Speaking in Alexia's voice, he swears
revenge on Claire. He types a series of passwords into a computer
and punches a red button.
A lab elsewhere in the facility suddenly powers up. Automated
systems defrost a storage tank marked T-078. It swings open, and
a new creature steps out. It looks nearly human, save for its
chalk-white skin and lack of gender. Both arms terminate in
clublike, spiked protrusions. The Tyrant has returned.
Claire starts running the moment the elevator opens. As she
turns the corner towards Alfred's palace, the Tyrant breaks
down a fence and steps into her way. Claire frantically fires
at the thing, which endures incredible punishment before it
falls on its face. Claire jumps over its body and takes off
towards the airport.
Steve is anxiously waiting for her when Claire gets back to
the plane. He takes off, just as the base begins to rock
with scattered explosions. They get into the air without a
hitch, and for a moment, Claire dares to think that their
ordeal is over. Steve tells her that he hopes she finds her
brother, because he now knows what it's like to be alone in
the world. After an uncomfortable silence, he changes the
subject, asking her where she wants to go. Claire suggests
Hawaii, and Steve sets a course.
Back on the island, Alfred runs to the antique tank he keeps
outside the military training facility. He opens a hatch on
its back and moves the tank forward, revealing yet another
secret passage. Using a special key, a minature gold halberd
like the one on his family crest, Alfred opens the door at
the passage's end. He maintains a hangar here. As Alfred
climbs into a Harrier jet marked with the Ashfords' crest,
he promises Claire that he will show her what real terror is
all about.
A sudden impact shakes the cargo plane. Steve looks at the
plane's instruments, and somehow, the cargo bay's door has
come open. Claire volunteers to check it out.
Claire finds a stowaway in the cargo bay. The Tyrant turns to
her, one of its arms growing into a vicious claw. Claire's
weapons only seem to slow the creature down, but fortunately,
the cargo catapult is loaded and ready to fire. Claire leads
the Tyrant near the open cargo bay door, dodges one of its
mad lunges, and hits the switch on the catapult. The Tyrant
tries to catch the crate, but to no avail, and both it and
the crate tumble out into the ocean.
As she walks into the cockpit, Steve asks Claire what was
wrong. Claire nonchalantly tells him that it was nothing. As
Steve grins, the plane's autopilot suddenly turns on. Steve
tries to turn manual control back on, with no luck. Alfred's
face appears on a screen above the pilot's seat. Sneering,
he tells Claire and Steve that he's decided on a new
destination for them.
Several hours pass. Steve is slumped against the side of the
cockpit, with Claire asleep on his shoulder. He turns to
look at her, and slowly lowers his face to hers. Just before
he can kiss her, Claire starts to wake up, and Steve jerks
away. Standing up, he looks out the plane's window and
realizes that the plane is descending. Steve tells Claire
that according to the plane's instruments, they're in the
Antarctic.
As the plane heads towards the ground, Claire sees a small
facility on the ground. Parked outside it are the cargo
planes that they saw leave the island. Apparently, Umbrella
owns this base as well.
The plane's autopilot apparently doesn't know how to land.
It descends to the base's runway, but goes into a skid. The
plane crashes into the side of the base. Both Claire and
Steve are knocked unconscious.
More time passes. Claire wakes up on the floor of the
plane's cockpit and shakes Steve. As he comes to, Steve is
surprised to be alive.
Umbrella's base is constructed around a deep chasm of some
sort. Steve kicks the plane's door out and jumps down onto
the base's balcony. As Claire jumps out, he catches her, but
accidentally falls down with her on top of him. After a few
seconds' worth of cheap sexual tension, Claire gets to her
feet and offers Steve her hand. Steve ignores her and gets
up, saying that the plane is trashed. At his suggestion,
they split up and look for a way out.
Alone, Claire explores the base. In a barracks for
Umbrella's employees, she's caught in a crude ambush by a
quartet of zombies. The base may look deserted, but it's
still inhabited by its share of monsters.
The base appears to be both a mine, although Claire never
finds out what it's mining for, and a warehouse for Umbrella's
chemical shipments. One of the miners has left his diary
behind. He has written about both Alfred's tyranny
as a supervisor, and the creature that's rumored to haunt
the base. The miners call him "Nosferatu", and say that
late at night, you can hear him roar.
A richly furnished office on the base's second floor belongs
to Alfred, and inside, Claire finds a note written to Alfred
from his family's butler, offering Alfred condolences on his
sister's death. There *was* an Alexia Ashford, but according
to the letter, she died in an unspecified accident fifteen
years ago, soon after Alfred's father died. Alfred was forced
to assume the responsibilities of an adult at a young age, and
lost his beloved sister soon afterward. His insanity starts to
make a little more sense.
A second folder contains a report/confession by Alexander
Ashford, the twins' father and the original architect of
this base. His report concerns the founding of Umbrella, the
creation of the T-Virus, the death of his own father, and
the Ashfords' fall from grace. The most interesting revelation
by far is the fact that there's a great deal of competition
in the field of T-Virus research. Umbrella isn't the only
company in the world that deals in monsters.
After dealing with the base's meager population of zombies,
dogs, and giant spiders, Claire reactivates the base's
generator. Now that the lights are back on, Claire searches
Alfred's office again and finds a hidden switch. Pushing it
slides a door back, revealing a room with a mesh floor. Far
below this room, a screaming man is blindfolded, gagged, and
shackled to the wall. An ornate battle axe is embedded in the
wall with its haft across his chest. His scream is a completely
inhuman, bonechilling sound. This must be the "Nosferatu" that
the miner was writing about. Claire finds the key to the base's
machine room and leaves Nosferatu's prison.
The base's mining drill can be controlled from the machine
room. Claire meets back up with Steve, who tells her that
there's an Australian outpost seven miles from the base. If
they can use the drill to break out of the base, they might
be able to reach the outpost. Steve takes control of the
drill and starts to guide it towards the wall, but at a
crucial moment, he's staring dreamily at Claire instead of
watching what he's doing. He winds up smashing open a pipe
filled with toxic gas, which fills the mining and machine
rooms. Claire grabs him by the scruff of the neck and yanks
him out of the room.
Steve gets outside and immediately starts beating himself
up over being so stupid. Claire tells him to not blame
himself. (Not right *now*, anyway.) Whatever happens,
they'll escape, and they'll do it together. Steve is cheered
up by this, and runs off to find a way to fix what he's done.
Claire, using a gas mask and a reshaped valve handle,
proceeds to do it for him by shutting off the flow of gas
through the pipes.
The air clears in the mining room. Claire takes off the gas
mask and is immediately ambushed by a freshly arrived Alfred
Ashford. Steve arrives in the nick of time, and after a short
gunfight, shoots Alfred in the chest. Alfred falls over the
railing of the machine room to the floor of the mining room,
next to one of the yawning pits that the base was built on top
of. He staggers to his feet, but the edge of the pit crumbles
underneath him. Alfred falls out of sight, screaming. After he
disappears, something at the bottom of the pit roars in rage.
Claire picks up Alfred's sniper rifle and gets into the
mining drill with Steve. Steve throws the drill into gear
and drives forward through the wall. The heat produced by
the drill melts the ice on the other side of the wall, which
in turn floods most of the base.
In his prison below Alfred's office, Nosferatu roars. His
chest splits open with a sickening crack, revealing his
oversized first-generation-Tyrant-esque heart. With casual
ease, he pulls himself away from the wall, snapping steel
shackles like spider webs. The axe across his chest is
thrown across the room and sticks in the floor. Nosferatu
staggers forward, still roaring...
Steve and Claire get out of the drill. They climb up to the
top of a nearby helipad, and find a staircase on the other
side. Claire is about to go down the stairs when she sees
Nosferatu at their bottom, coming up. Steve steps in front
of her and points his Ingrams at Nosferatu, yelling for it
to back off. Suddenly, an enormous mandible, like that of a
praying mantis, sprouts from the Nosferatu's back and swats
Steve, sending him tumbling off of the edge of the helipad.
Claire runs to where Steve fell, to find him clinging by one
hand to one of the helipad's support struts. Steve begs
Claire to run and save herself. Claire replies that she'll
help him up as soon as she, and I directly paraphrase here,
waxes the monster. Using Alfred's rifle, Claire calmly shoots
out Nosferatu's exposed heart.
Claire helps Steve up. Steve apologizes; despite having
saved her life at least three times in the last day, he
feels that he failed her against Nosferatu. Claire claps him
on the shoulder and tells him to forget it. Steve stands up,
clutching the bullet wound Claire just accidentally hit, and
quietly promises that next time, he will protect her.
At the bottom of the stairs, Claire and Steve find a
snowmobile. Claire gets into the driver's seat and starts it
up. It'll easily reach the Australian outpost.
Somewhere in the base, Alfred Ashford drags himself down a
long hallway. He is mortally wounded. In his own voice, he
promises Claire that things aren't over between them.
Alfred collapses inside a laboratory, on a set of stairs
leading to a raised platform. In a faint voice, he says
Alexia's name. Suddenly, a series of computers and monitors
activate. A cylinder rises in front of Alfred and defrosts.
Fluid drains out of it, revealing the form of a naked,
blonde woman.
"Alexia... you're finally awake. Alexia..." Alfred says.
They are his last words. He dies.
The woman's eyes widen in anger.
Claire and Steve talk and joke as they drive towards freedom.
Something shatters the roof of Umbrella's Antarctic base. In
a blur, moving so fast that it's unidentifiable, it races
towards Claire and Steve's snowmobile. Steve sees it in the
rearview mirror just before it reaches them. Whatever it is,
it hits the snowmobile with stunning force. The snowmobile
is knocked onto its side. The thing that hit it lashes around
the snowmobile like a boa constrictor, slamming it again and
again into the ground.
The naked woman sits on the stairs where Alfred died,
cradling her brother's head. She hums to herself quietly as
she strokes his hair.
On one of the nearby monitors, she is watching the
snowmobile burn.
==========================================================
6ii. The Return of Chris Redfield: CODE VERONICA, Part Two
==========================================================
As Claire and Steve's snowmobile is destroyed, a small boat
lets off a passenger on Rockfort Island.
Slowly, Chris Redfield climbs hand-over-hand up a sheer
cliff, burdened by a heavy bag filled with equipment. Leon
managed to contact him, and he's come to rescue Claire. As
he hauls himself up, one of his handholds breaks away, and
Chris accidentally drops his bag into the ocean. Grimly, he
continues onward, finding a cave on the side of the cliff.
The cave has been turned into a mausoleum. Chris has been in
it for a few seconds when the ground shakes. Something
nearby roars, and Chris's entrance collapses.
A man is slumped against the wall of the mausoleum. Rodrigo,
whose wounds haven't gotten any better, has made his way
here from the cellblock. He says that he had thought he was
the only man on the island who was still alive. Chris
replies that he's looking for a girl named Claire Redfield.
Rodrigo recognizes the name and tells Chris that he's
wasting his time; Rodrigo helped her escape, and he's sure
that she was on one of the planes that left the island.
Chris thanks him for helping out.
Suddenly, the worm Claire encountered returns. Chris is able
to get out of its way, but Rodrigo cannot. The worm swallows
him whole and disappears into the soft earth of the mausoleum.
Chris catches up to the worm in a large cave nearby. If he
hadn't dropped his bag, he'd have something more appropriate
to the job, but all he has is his Glock handgun. The worm is
soft-bodied, though, and the handgun proves to be enough.
After Chris shoots it three dozen times or so, the worm
spasms and dies, spitting Rodrigo out onto the cave floor.
Mortally wounded, Rodrigo tells Chris to leave the island, and
gives him the lighter that Claire gave Rodrigo earlier. Rodrigo
says that it'll be good to see his family again, and dies.
An elevator has been cut into the cave wall. Sadly, Chris
leaves Rodrigo's body behind and takes the elevator down,
winding up in the military training facility's motor pool.
The military training facility has weathered the base's
self-destruct sequence surprisingly well. Chris finds his
way outside, to the courtyard where Alfred kept his tank.
The secret passage Alfred used to escape is painfully
obvious, but he's puzzle-locked the door at the end with an
incomplete version of the Ashfords' crest.
Chris hooks up a battery to a lift system in the motor pool,
which takes him up to the balcony. He finds a document and a
key on a shelf at the top, where they've apparently been
discarded; the document is a report on the properties of a
new metal alloy called Duploid. While Duploid is remarkably
durable, a combination of two common chemicals will dissolve
it. This metal is what the Ashford crests were made out of.
A door on the balcony leads to the hall outside the facility
control room. Inside, someone is singing. Chris runs in. The
main screen of the control room shows a woman in an evening
gown, cradling a dead man in her lap. (Alexia is dressed
exactly how Alfred dressed, when he was pretending to be
her.) Chris watches her sing, unsure as to how to react,
until the screen goes dark.
In the airport, near where Claire boarded the cargo plane, a
man in black curses as he watches Alexia sing; she's not
supposed to be fully conscious yet. Another security
monitor comes on, showing Chris. The man in black is
surprised to see Chris, but immediately arranges a surprise
for him. He activates a small hovercraft by remote control
and opens a large white storage device. Slowly, a reptilian
creature climbs out; although it looks different, it is
unmistakably a Hunter. As the hovercraft flies away, the man
in black laughs.
In the room where Alfred ambushed Claire, one of the Ashford
crests is lying in plain sight, but no sooner has Chris seen
it than it falls through a hole in the floor. Chris realizes
that if he dissolves the crest, he'll be left with a golden
halberd which'll unlock the door underneath the tank.
Unfortunately, that means he has to figure out some way to
find it, somewhere in the base's underground waterway.
He takes the elevator to the basement. Most of the basement
has been flooded with toxic gas after the failure of the
ventilation system, but a staircase that was raised when
Claire was here has now fallen. At its bottom, Chris
appropriates a shotgun and walks through a storage room,
right by the cylinder from which Alfred released the Tyrant.
Chris finds one of the chemicals he needs to dissolve
Duploid in a chemical locker. In a pile of wrecked transport
crates on the facility's cargo elevator, he also finds a
doorknob, which he can use to open a door on the second
floor. He kneels to pick it up, and a beam of red light
shines on his back. Chris looks up to see a small hovercraft,
equipped with a spotlight. It sounds an alarm.
In response, a pair of Hunters leap down on Chris from the
top of the elevator shaft. These newer creatures are far
more durable than the ones at the mansion were. Chris manages
to get to the door and escape before they attack.
The hovercrafts are suddenly everywhere in the base. If they
detect Chris, an alarm sounds, and a Hunter arrives almost
immediately. Chris carefully avoids the hovercrafts' motion
detectors, as well as a swarm of fresh zombies. These
zombies are dressed in black military gear and wearing
night-vision goggles; obviously, the people who invaded the
facility, whoever they are, are having their own problems.
On the second floor, Chris finds a small model of a tank.
Earlier, Chris has seen the diorama of the facility, so he
heads back there.
The tank model fits into an empty space on the diorama. A
secret panel hisses open behind Chris, revealing a lever
guarded by laser beams, a trio of keyholes, a book, and a
key to the cargo elevator. The book is one of Alfred's
diaries, where he has written about his plans to build a new
bridge from the facility to his mansion, using the labor of
his prisoners. The entrance he uses now, which takes him to
his mansion via the facility's underground waterway, is
apparently sealed by what Alfred calls the "diorama trick".
On his way back to the cargo elevator, Chris is walking
through the storage room when he hears chuckling behind him.
He turns to find the man in black... Albert Wesker. Somehow,
Wesker is still alive. Chris realizes that it must've been
Wesker who attacked the facility, which means Wesker attacked
his sister.
Chris raises his gun to shoot Wesker. Suddenly, Wesker is a
blur. He covers the space between him and Chris in a
fraction of a second and knocks Chris across the room. With
superhuman speed and strength, Wesker races over to where
Chris landed and picks him up by the throat. As Chris
struggles to breathe, Wesker tells him that since Chris
spoiled his plans, Wesker has been forced to "sell his soul"
to a new employer. Furthermore, Wesker's figured out that
Claire isn't on the island any more; she's with Alexia, in
the Antarctic. Wesker slowly begins to strangle Chris. Chris
punches Wesker in the face, knocking off his sunglasses.
This reveals Wesker's eyes. To Chris's shock, they are yellow,
and their pupils are slitted like a cat's.
A screen by the storage cylinders lights up, showing Alexia
Ashford. She laughs, and the screen goes blank. Wesker,
surprised, throws Chris across the room and into one of the
storage cylinders. A rubber man is released into the room
from the broken cylinder, and by the time Chris has dealt
with it, Wesker has disappeared.
Chris takes the cargo elevator up to the first floor of the
facility. The side of the elevator shaft has been breached,
which leads to the partially collapsed front hall. Scattered
fires are still burning fitfully. Chris navigates through
what's left of the first floor and finds the controls to the
ventilation system. He turns it back on, clearing the toxic
gas from the basement. In the basement, by someone's work
desk, Chris finds the other chemical he needs. Mixing them
together, he creates a compound that'll dissolve Duploid.
The front door of the facility is unlocked and undamaged.
Chris walks outside, and while the door to the palace has
been blocked by rubble, the airport elevator still works.
Chris rides it down.
The airport is just about untouched, although it's now
populated by Hunters and a handful of zombies. Chris fights
his way to the bridge controls and lowers the bridge that
Claire raised. On the airport's control platform, Chris finds
the three keys that Claire used to open the cargo plane;
they'll also fit in the keyholes by Alfred's diorama.
When Chris uses the three keys, the diorama slides back into
the wall to reveal an escape hatch in the floor. The tunnel
to Alfred's mansion has partially collapsed, making access
to the mansion impossible, but the Ashfords' family crest is
lying in a pool of water. It's guarded by an enormous
creature that looks like a cross between a manta ray and
an electric eel. This is the Albanoid that Claire saw earlier,
and it has reached adulthood. Chris jumps into the water,
grabs the crest, and scrambles back out before the creature
can electrocute him.
The crest dissolves when Chris uses the chemical mixture on
it, leaving him with a golden halberd. Finally, Chris can
see what's at the end of Alfred's secret passage. The "key"
lets him into Alfred's private hangar. One of Alfred's
private Harrier jets is brought to Chris by automated
machinery. Chris smiles and climbs in.
Chris flies to Antarctica, and lands in an underground
hangar by Umbrella's base. He takes the elevator up to the
base's balcony. Claire and Steve's plane is still sticking
out of the wall, but to Chris's surprise, a pair of
tentacles are lying across the balcony, almost as if they're
standing guard over something. After he shoots them a few
times, the tentacles withdraw in a spray of green blood.
Most of the base's second floor has frozen into a solid
block of ice. Alfred's office is still untouched. Inside,
Chris uses the halberd key to open a locked bookcase.
Inside, he finds an old diary of Alfred Ashford's and an
oddly labelled paperweight. Alfred has written about, among
other things, the "secret" of his and Alexia's birth, an
experiment that turned his father Alexander into a monster,
and Alexia's decision to experiment on her own body. Alexia
Ashford, after faking her own death, has been in cryogenic
storage for the last fifteen years. Alfred also writes that
there's a secret passage in the base, and he needs the three
jewels each member of the Ashford family wears to open it.
Chris makes a note of this before he leaves.
Earlier, when Claire was at this base, part of the walkway
above the sorter had collapsed, keeping her from going through
the doors on the other side of the room. Now, Chris can just
jump off of the walkway and run across the ice to the other
half of the catwalk. A crane hook is submerged in the ice,
but Chris needs a key to work the hook's controls. He leaves
through the nearest door, but as he does, he doesn't see a
massive shape move beneath the ice.
In a hallway, Chris finds two more of Wesker's hovercraft
waiting for him. Apparently, Wesker has come to Antarctica
as well. He adroitly dodges the hovercrafts' searchlights
and ducks into a nearby elevator. On the next floor down, he
finds a switchboard and turns the base's power back on,
reactivating a series of elevators.
The fifth floor of the base has a strange room that's
familiar to Chris; it's a near-exact replica of one from the
mansion outside Raccoon where he first fought Umbrella's
creations. A hall leading out of it, lined with biohazard
suits, has a statue of a tiger at its end that resembles one
in that other mansion's basement.
Chris steps out of the elevator onto the base's sixth floor,
and stops. An enormous anthill has been built here, towering
dozens of feet above the floor and surrounded by a new
species of mutated ant. Chris forges through the ants to the
laboratories on either side of the anthill.
One lab is dusty and little-used. Chris finds Alexia Ashford's
research notes on a desk inside. The girl somehow fused the
remnants of a virus from the body of a queen ant with the
T-Virus, creating a new virus that she refers to as the
"T-Veronica", after her ancestor. This virus is what she used
to turn her father into a monster, and what she used to experiment
on herself.
The other lab is high-tech and has been carefully maintained.
A trail of dried blood leads straight to it. The inside of the
room is lined with supercomputers, each one hooked up to a
strange mechanism at the far corner of the room. Chris
activates it by solving another of Alfred's puzzles, and a
cryogenic tube shoots up behind Chris. Alfred's corpse falls
out of the tube. Chris takes Alfred's ring from his body,
recognizing it as one of the three proofs that Alfred mentioned
in his diary.
Back on the second floor, Chris finds the key to the crane
in an aquarium, of all places. He starts up the crane, and
it breaks through the ice. Alexander Ashford's dead body is
impaled on the crane's hook. Chris recoils in shock and
disgust. Behind the body, Alexia Ashford is standing on the
other side of the room. She laughs at him, and asks Chris
how he wants to die.
A spider, bigger than any Chris has yet seen, bursts forth
from the hole in the ice. Chris throws himself out of the
crane's control room as the spider crushes it. Alexia has
disappeared. Fortunately, while her spider is huge, it isn't
smart or fast, and Chris can run circles around it. Before
he leaves, Chris finds an earring on the ice near
Alexander's body and pockets it.
There's still one place Chris hasn't gone. He heads to the
fifth floor, and as he walks down the hall, he hears...
calliope music. A merry-go-round, sized for children and
with two horses, is spinning in the middle of a carefully
built playground.
The room next to the playground is a rude shock. Alexander's
sanctuary looks very much like the front hall of the mansion
outside Raccoon. At the top of the stairs, Chris finds a
painting of the Ashfords, with hollows at Alexander's ear,
Alfred's finger, and Alexia's throat. The jewels from
Alfred's ring and Alexander's earring fit perfectly, but
that leaves Alexia's jewel, which she's unlikely to part with
without a fight.
Behind the mansion's staircase, Chris finally finds Claire,
unconscious inside a coccoon. He cuts the coccoon off of
her, and waits until she wakes up. She hugs him, and tells
him that she can't leave until they find Steve. She explains
who Steve is, and says that they were separated. She's sure
he's somewhere in the base.
>From the balcony, Alexia laughs at Claire and Chris. Holding
Alfred's rifle, she promises to destroy the "genetically
inferior siblings" before disappearing through a nearby
door. Chris and Claire give chase, with Claire in the lead. As
Chris ascends the stairs, a tentacle bursts through the wall
and destroys the balcony beneath him. Chris falls to the floor,
and both he and Claire are knocked unconscious. The
tentacle, which looks like a snake, complete with a mouth,
descends to the floor and examines Chris before disappearing
back through the hole in the wall.
Claire is the first to wake up. She leans over the edge of
the destroyed balcony to look at Chris, who is awake and
clutching at an injured leg. From behind the door Alexia
went through, she hears Steve scream. Chris tells her to
save him, and that he'll be fine. With a final look at
Chris, Claire runs.
Two more tentacles try to ambush Claire as she runs after
Alexia, but she cuts them down with bursts of gunfire.
She emerges in a cellblock, with Alexia nowhere in sight.
One of the cells has been turned into storage for antique
weapons, and underneath a cannon, Claire finds a blue
binder. A note inside, written by Alexander, tells the
reader how to arm the base's self-destruct system. The
password, of course, is "Veronica". Inside the cannon is a
keycard, suspended in a glass sphere. Claire shatters the
glass and takes the keycard.
The closest place where Alexia could've gone is an empty
room with a lowered gate. Claire opens the gate with the
keycard, but as she does so, the door to the cellblock
audibly locks. Beyond the gate is a hallway lined with suits
of armor. At its end is the room that once imprisoned
Alexander Ashford. It now imprisons Steve Burnside.
Claire hits a switch on the wall, and Steve's shackles open.
The battle axe across his chest refuses to budge, even with
both of them pushing it. Steve tells Claire that the crazy
woman, Alexia, said she was going to perform the same
experiment on him that she did on her father.
Suddenly, Steve's voice distorts. He clutches at his chest,
and screams for Claire to help him. Blood bursts from his
neck, cutting him off. He rumbles, deep and guttural, and
Claire backs away from him in horror. Steve's body begins to
expand and change, growing bone spurs and vicious claws. His
skin turns green and scaly, and he easily triples in size.
His head, grotesquely, is nearly unchanged. With no effort
whatsoever, he wrenches the battle axe from the wall and
stands up. Steve, or the creature that Steve has become,
roars, and swings the axe at Claire... and at the same time,
the gate at the end of the hall begins to lower.
Claire's weapons don't do much more than slow Steve down. She
turns and runs, and Steve gives chase. Ducking Steve's axe,
Claire rolls underneath the gate as it closes. She can
already tell that it won't hold against Steve, and the door
to the cellblock is locked. He begins to hack at it with the
axe. The gate bends and buckles.
A tentacle bursts through the wall next to Claire. With
impossible speed, it wraps around her and pulls her into the
air. Claire struggles helplessly.
Steve finally destroys the gate. He steps through the
wreckage and pulls his axe back. He swings it at Claire's
head... and stops. In a deep, guttural voice, he says
Claire's name. With a furious roar, he cuts the tentacle
holding Claire. Claire falls to the floor.
The tentacle thrashes, like a thing in pain. It lashes out
with its bloody stump. Steve is hit with bonecrushing force.
As the tentacle withdraws, Steve slowly becomes human once
more. Claire runs over to him, to find that he's been
mortally wounded. Claire begs him to hold on, and tells him
that her brother's come to save them. Steve says that he
can't keep the promise he made earlier, that he'd escape with
her. He tells Claire that he's glad to have met her, and that
he loves her. Steve dies. Claire, cradling his body, bursts
into tears.
Back in the ruins of the mansion's front hall, Chris is
hiding amidst the rubble. Alexia stands regally at the top
of the staircase, while Wesker is at the bottom. Wesker, who
still isn't wearing his sunglasses, says that he has been
sent to obtain the T-Veronica virus, the only sample of
which is now inside Alexia's body. He demands that Alexia
come with him.
Alexia says that Wesker isn't worthy of the virus's power.
She descends the stairs towards him, and suddenly bursts
into flames. Her clothing burns away. In the middle of the
fire, Alexia changes. Her skin turns slate-gray, and parts
of her body begin to look like the chitinous exoskeleton of
an insect. At the top of the stairs, she was human; when she
reaches Wesker, she is anything but.
Wesker gawks at her. Alexia casually backhands him. Despite
his own superhuman strength, Wesker tumbles across the room;
one might guess that an ordinary man would've been killed
instantly. He shakily hauls himself to his feet. Alexia gently
hops off of the stairs, across the twenty feet that now separate
her from Wesker, and hits him again. Wesker goes tumbling into
the corner of the room. Alexia turns to smile at Chris, as if
she's known where he was all along.
Seeing that Alexia's distracted, Wesker runs for the mansion's
front door. Alexia gestures, and suddenly, a wall of flame
springs up in front of the door. She's not fast enough to stop
him. Chris makes his own move as Alexia attacks Wesker, dashing
towards and up the main stairs. Alexia makes another gesture,
and Chris is nearly incinerated by another wall of fire. He
tumbles back down the stairs, and Alexia steps in front of him.
Chris runs from Alexia, whose every gesture sprays some kind
of ichor or blood across the floor. Where it lands, it burns,
creating a short-lived wall of fire. She toys with Chris
like a cat would with a mouse. Chris responds by shooting her
several times. Alexia Ashford falls to the floor in a pool of
blood; once again, the "ultimate bioweapon" isn't hard to dispose
of. In the ashes of her clothing, Chris finds a red jewel in a
choker -- the final Ashford family proof. Putting it in the
painting, he opens Alexander's secret passage.
As the door shuts behind Chris, Alexia slowly climbs to her feet.
The fight isn't over yet.
Alfred has remodeled Alexander's hideaway into a set of
children's bedrooms, which don't seem very well-suited to
an adult. (For all intents and purposes, these bedrooms
are exactly identical to the bedrooms on the island
facility.) Chris finds little of interest in them besides
another pair of locked music boxes with jewels missing from
the lids. Chris inserts two jewels he has found, and a
secret passage opens, just as it did for Claire in the
prison's mansion. Above the bedrooms, Chris finds an
abandoned dining room, lined with portraits of the Ashfords.
Alexander Ashford's picture has been crudely defaced.
An ant farm is on the table, in which sits a golden
dragonfly. Chris pockets it. Although he has no way of
knowing it, he's standing in the room where, long ago,
Alfred and Alexia were filmed as they killed a dragonfly.
Fighting his way through a fresh swarm of zombies, Chris
finds an abandoned lab where Alexander Ashford must once
have pursued his research. A journal on the countertop
contains the secret that made Alfred and Alexia destroy
their father; they were never his real children. They
were the result of Alexander's experiments in genetically
determining intelligence. If the twins are Ashfords at all,
it's because Alexander's experiment used a sample of Veronica
Ashford's DNA. They're more her "children" than his.
Alexander's lab connects to the cellblock. Chris hears Claire
sobbing on the other side of a locked door, and tries to open
it. The door is electronically locked, and Chris can't break
it down. Claire tells Chris that Steve is dead, and pushes the
binder under the door with the keycard in it. She's read in the
binder that, once the self-destruct system to the base is
activated, all the locks in the base automatically disengage
to expedite an evacuation. Once she's free, the emergency
elevator to the base's hangar is close by. They can
easily escape before the base explodes.
The control room is locked, but the golden dragonfly serves
as a key. Discordantly, the floor leading up to the control
room is made of mesh, and if Chris looks down, he can see
the top of Alexia's anthill. Chris uses the keycard to gain
access to the control room's computers and inputs the
password: the final code Veronica. The base's nuclear
reactors decouple and prepare for detonation, and the
automatic locks are released. A countdown begins.
Outside the control room, Claire runs up to Chris and hugs
him. Before they can get to the emergency elevator, a
tentacle bursts through the floor. Its "mouth" opens wide,
and it regurgitates the naked body of Alexia Ashford. The
tentacle itself loses its cohesion, flowing like wax onto
Alexia's body. The resulting substance covers her and hardens
into chitinous plates, like an ant's exoskeleton. This doesn't
answer the question of where the tentacles came from, but it
does explain what they were part of.
As Alexia transforms, Chris spots a nearby emergency locker.
The labels on the outside say that it contains an anti-B.O.W.
weapon called a "linear launcher". Chris and Claire hurriedly
open the locker. Unfortunately, the launcher needs power to
work, and slowly begins to charge up.
Alexia turns and smiles at the Redfields. Her transformation
is complete; she's once more become the same creature that
Chris fought in her father's mansion. Chris tells Claire to
get to the elevator while he keeps her busy. Claire tells
Chris not to die on her, and breaks into a run. Alexia throws
a wall of fire in front of Claire, and advances towards her.
Before Alexia can kill Claire, Chris shoots her in the chest.
Alexia crumples to the floor, and her fires die, giving Claire
the chance to escape.
Alexia begins to undergo a terrible transformation. Her body
expands like Steve's, changing into something much, much larger.
Chris looks away from her and smiles at Claire, who is watching
from the glass wall of the elevator car. The car descends, taking
Claire out of sight, and leaving Chris alone with Alexia Ashford.
Alexia's latest incarnation is a sickeningly pregnant cross
between an ant and a woman. As she finishes her transformation,
her face, the only part of her that's still recognizably human,
twists into a contemptuous smile. She attacks Chris with small
"soldier ants" and her ubiquitous tentacles, both of which spring
forth from her bloated torso. Chris returns fire with Claire's
grenade launcher, showering Alexia's body with explosive rounds.
After a vicious fight where the two seem to be evenly matched,
Alexia finally screams in pain. Her lower body begins to break
apart, dissolving into nothing.
Suddenly, swarms of winged ants burst from the anthill underneath
Chris's feet. They cover their queen, and Alexia seems to absorb
their mass into herself. She rises like a phoenix from the ruins
of her body, taking on the form of an enormous, winged ant.
At the same time, the linear launcher finishes charging.
====================================================
6iii. The Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL: CODE VERONICA
====================================================
Chris pulls the linear launcher free from its housing. Alexia's
newest form is fast, but he's able to dodge her attacks and get
her in his sights.
Apparently, "linear launcher" is Umbrella-speak for "plasma rifle".
When Chris pulls the trigger, a burst of energy strikes Alexia in
the chest. It shines inside her for a moment like a star, and for
a moment, Alexia seems like she might survive even this...
...but then she explodes, nearly liquified by the force of the blast.
Chris drops the launcher and takes cover as the platform is showered
with gore. At the same time Alexia dies, the base begins to shake
with small explosions, as the self-destruct sequence enters its final
stages. Chris runs to the emergency elevator, hoping he's not already
too late.
Under the platform where Alexia died, her anthill crumbles and
explodes into a pillar of fire. All of her ants burst into flames,
one at a time. None survive her death by more than a few seconds.
All that fire has to go somewhere, though, and the first place it
goes is straight up. Chris barely manages to get into the elevator
car before the entire fifth floor of Alexander Ashford's hideaway
is scoured clean by flames. As Chris's car descends, flames chase
him down the elevator shaft.
Claire is in Alfred's jet, waiting for Chris, when the elevator
opens. Chris gets exactly one step out of it before the firestorm
hits, blowing him off of the balcony and to an undignified landing
on the nosecone of the jet. Claire asks if Chris is all right. His
response is to say, with a smile, that she knows he always keeps
his promises.
The jet rises out of the base's hangar in a cloud of flame.
Claire puts her hand on Chris's shoulder, asking him to
never leave her alone again. Chris replies that he's sorry,
but they have a job to do. They've got to destroy Umbrella
once and for all.
As Chris and Claire fly away, Umbrella's Antarctic base, and
the Ashford family's legacy, are obliterated in a tremendous
explosion.
======================================
6v. Conclusions About the Conclusion
======================================
1. Claire and Chris Redfield have both survived; as usual,
it was through the creative employ of self-destruct mechanisms.
(If Umbrella ever really wanted to kill Chris, all they'd have
to do is lure him to a base without a self-destruct device.)
2. Albert Wesker has also survived. (According to the hidden
Diary of D.I.J. file, he escaped Antarctica via submarine.)
3. Steve Burnside did *not* survive. I have rarely seen a
character who survived less than Steve. Neither did Rodrigo
Raval, unfortunately; I was rooting for him.
4. Alexander, Alexia, and Alfred Ashford are dead. Unless a
distant relative shows up in a future game, the "proud
Ashford family" has died out.
5. Alexia Ashford's T-Veronica virus has been destroyed,
along with all the notes and equipment that led to and aided
its creation.
6. Albert Wesker has a new employer. That employer is
apparently a competitor of Umbrella's in the field of
biological research and warfare, and is just as cutthroat
as Umbrella is.
7. Umbrella is not the only company performing research on the
T-Virus. As a matter of fact, they have vicious competition
in that particular field (as embodied by Wesker and his "new
employer"). If Chris and company *do* destroy Umbrella, their
problems may just be beginning.
8. Edward Ashford and "Lord" Ozwell Spencer founded Umbrella.
We don't know exactly how old this makes Umbrella, but it places
its founding within the twentieth century, as Edward was Alexia
and Alfred's "grandfather".
9. Ashford and Spencer also discovered the T-Virus. The T-Virus
has actually been around slightly longer than Umbrella itself has.
10. Umbrella is still making Tyrants, and seems to have
ironed most of the kinks out of them.
11. Umbrella is far more powerful than we were led to believe.
We knew it was an international corporation that virtually
owned Raccoon City, but this is the first indication we've had
that it actually maintains its own private army.
==============================
vi. The Ashford Family Diaries
==============================
The Ashford family is intricately linked with the history of
Umbrella, and thus with the background story of the Resident
Evil series. CV tells this particular story, but it does so
haphazardly; the relevant information is in files scattered
throughout the game, and at least one of them is "hidden in
plain sight", where it's very easy to miss. Therefore, in
this section, I've assembled the known facts about the Ashford
family, and put them together in a rough chronological order.
The Ashford family was founded by Veronica Ashford, about
five generations ago or so. They're constantly referred to
as "glorious" throughout the game, but we're never told
exactly why that is. (Maybe it's the power of positive
thinking. They said assertively that they were glorious for
six generations, and suddenly -- bam! -- glory.)
A nobleman named Lord Spencer (who is referred to in an RE2
EX File as "Ozwell") and Edward Ashford, Alfred and Alexia's
grandfather, discovered the "mother virus". They eventually
derived the T-Virus from it. They studied the T-Virus's
military applications, and founded "Umbrella" Chemical to
serve as a "cover" for their research. By the time RE begins
in 1998, Umbrella's an enormously successful international
corporation, which, in addition to the bioweapons research
that drives RE's plot, makes and sells various pharmaceutical
products. In RE3, we see Umbrella's commercials for its
name-brand painkillers, cold relievers, and whatever the hell
Aquacure was supposed to be. When a product has a tagline like
"Escape to Ecstasy", I'm not sure I want to know what it does.
Umbrella also appears to make most of its equipment in-house,
as we've seen security systems (RE2), computer OSes (RE, RE2,
RE3), and weaponry (RE2, RE3) with the Umbrella label.
Edward had a son, Alexander, who got a degree in biogenetics
and assisted his father with his research. At some point,
Alexander caused an accident which killed Edward. As a result,
Spencer, or his descendants, rapidly gained more power over
Umbrella, and Umbrella lost ground to its competitors in the
field of T-Virus research. The next (and last) generation of
Ashfords, and Alexander himself, trace the Ashfords' fall from
grace directly to the accident that killed Edward, and to Alexander.
In an attempt to gain back some respect, Alexander commissioned
the construction of a research facility in the Antarctic,
making it out of a transport terminal. Inside the facility,
he had a series of rooms built, patterned after the mansion
built by "the late Trevor", where Alexander could cherish his
memories in peace. Trevor's mansion was where RE took place.
(According to various sources, "the late Trevor" was meant to
be mentioned in RE, but was excised in the final version. Trevor
Spencer was the man who built the mansion in the Raccoon Forest
where RE took place, and in the beta of RE, the player was to
have encountered a number of his mysterious warnings and traps,
as well as entries in his personal journals. Thanks to Dana Jones
and Ben Plante for pointing this out, as well as the webmaster
over at http://www.geocities.com/wesker_albert.)
Finally, inside this replicated mansion, Alexander constructed
a private lab that only he had access to. He codenamed this project
"Veronica", after the legendary founder of the Ashford family.
(The "Code: Veronica" of the game's title shows up three times:
1) The codename of Alexander's lab.
2) The name Alexia gives the virus she created.
3) The password for the self-destruct system in Alexander's
base.)
Later, Alexander isolated the gene that controlled
intelligence within the human genome, and developed a way to
deliberately manipulate it. To test it, he impregnated a
surrogate mother with an embryo that he created, using a
sample of the genes of Veronica Ashford. To his surprise,
the woman gave birth to fraternal twins, who he named Alfred
and Alexia and raised in his Antarctic hideaway. Alfred was
a smart kid, but Alexia was a complete genius; Alexander
regarded her as the literal reincarnation of Veronica. After
she graduated from college at the age of ten, Alexia soon
had a job as a head researcher for Umbrella Incorporated.
Early in their lives, the twins became fascinated by ants.
The events depicted in the movie in Alfred's war museum seem
to have permanently left their mark on him, as the
motif of dragonflies and ants is repeated endlessly inside
his private chambers. Alexia was fascinated by the society
of the ants, and how they were hopelessly dependent upon
their queen to survive.
(Lemme English-major at you for a second here. I don't believe
for a second that this is intentional on Capcom's part, but it's
interesting to note how the dragonfly-ant theme plays out over
the course of the game. Early, to escape from Alfred, Claire
must recreate his torture of the dragonfly, plucking the wings
off of the dragonfly object and placing it in an ant's mouth.
Later, Alexia becomes, for all intents and purposes, a queen ant,
complete with an anthill and her own swarm of mutant soldier ants.
Chris, to destroy both Alexia and her family's mazelike underground
facility, puts the wings back on a dragonfly and uses it to
unlock the way to Alexia's destruction. In short, he symbolically
undoes the dragonfly's torture, by putting it back together
and destroying the "ants" responsible for its torment.)
(...I just scared myself half to death.)
(Moving on, quickly...)
Alexia conducted private experiments on ants, assisted by
Alfred, who she refers to in her private diaries as a
"loyal but inept soldier ant". (Alfred, as an adult, seems
to have taken that comment to heart; he dresses like a toy
soldier, is obviously fascinated by war, and the man can't
shoot straight. He has a laser sight and a starlight scope and
he *still* misses everything he shoots at.) Inside the body of
a queen ant, perhaps the same queen ant that Chris finds dead
in the Antarctic base, she found traces of an ancient virus.
Mixing this with the T-Virus her "grandfather" discovered,
she created what she named the T-Veronica virus.
The twins grew to hate their "father". Alfred eventually
figured out how to get into Alexander's private lab, where
he learned the truth about his and Alexia's birth. Soon
afterward, Alexia deliberately infected Alexander with the
T-Veronica virus as an experiment, transforming him into the
homicidal mutant that would become known as "Nosferatu". The
twins somehow managed to imprison Alexander underneath the
base in the Antarctic. As far as anyone else was concerned,
Alexander Ashford simply disappeared. (It's also worth
mentioning that, at this point, Alexia and Alfred were
probably only twelve or thirteen, and, as such, were above
suspicion. When you're as big a screwup as Alexander is and
you're the son of the co-founder of an incredibly successful
corporation, people who'd want to make you disappear are
probably lined up around the block.)
Alexia continued her research, and decided to conduct
further experiments on herself. She theorized that cold
storage would slow down the infection, allowing an infected
organism to peacefully coexist with the virus, although it
would take at least fifteen years to do so. Over Alfred's
objections, she infected and stored herself in a secret lab
underneath Antarctica. Either Alfred or Alexia came up with
a cover story for this, saying that Alexia had died in an
unspecified "accident". (Of course, she would eventually
reappear, but she'd be rich, an adult, and theoretically
omnipotent. It didn't have to be a *good* cover story.)
No one ever learned the truth about this until Alexia woke
up, although the Ashfords' family butler, Tom Dorson, came
very close to figuring it out a couple of times.
Alfred was forced to assume Alexander's responsibilities at
a young age, and the problem was compounded by his sister's
"death". Umbrella gave him a relatively meaningless
position as the commander of an isolated prison in the southern
hemisphere. Alfred became obsessed with regaining the Ashfords'
former glory.
Speaking of obsession, Alfred became insane in a number of
other ways. The most obvious is, of course, how he coped
with Alexia's "death"; unable to live without her, he simply
constructed a delusion inside his own mind where Alexia was
still around. The extent to which he went to maintain that
delusion is one of the more disturbing things in CV. Even
if you ignore how he pretended to be Alexia, and consciously
forgot that he was doing it, it looks like he consulted her
on the decoration of the island mansion (would a ten-year-old
girl genius and professional biochemist *ever* be that obsessed
with dolls?).
The end of this story, naturally, is told within Code: Veronica.
=====================================
6vi. Random Musings on CODE: VERONICA
=====================================
1. Claire's arrival and the attack on Rockfort Island both
occur at night on December 27th, 1998 (according to the Diary
of D.I.J. File). Claire and Chris escape Antarctica on
December 28th.
2. As was pointed out on the Evil-Online message boards,
Claire looks *very* different than she did in RE2, and it's
not just the better graphics. She looks a lot thinner, and
she's become a lot tougher. Moreso than any other character,
I'd really like to know what happened to her after RE2.
3. It's an interesting touch, characterwise, that Chris
still wears gear with RPD and S.T.A.R.S. insignias on it.
4. People were excited that CV would return to RE's
"tradition" of lousy voice actors, and they weren't
disappointed. Claire and Chris's actors are decent,
and Rodrigo's voice actor is actually very good,
but the rest...
5. Alfred Ashford could change clothes faster than any man
alive. Somehow, he managed to change from an evening gown
and long gloves into his preppy-soldier outfit in about
twenty seconds while he had a bullet in his arm.
6. Steve is annoying at first, but he does have his moments.
It's interesting to watch his character develop; at first,
he balances his anger at his father with his need to show
off for Claire, who's the only pretty girl around. After he
kills his father, he becomes so attached to Claire that he
becomes incredibly protective of her. Claire, of course, is
totally oblivious. Some thought went into the dynamic between
Steve and Claire, and it's a shame that a lot of it was shot
down by Steve's mediocre voice actor. (In his defense, though,
Steve's voice acting gets better the further you get into the
game, and improves markedly right after Steve is forced to shoot
his father. The actor does a great job with Steve's death scene.)
7. Is it just me, or does the prison's crematorium look like
it could've been taken straight from Silent Hill? For that
matter, do you think Alexia and Parasite Eve's Melissa
Pearce know each other?
8. The Resident Evil tradition of characters being far too
young to have the skills they're supposed to possess
continues. Chris is ex-Air Force *and* an ex-cop at 25 (a friend
of mine is in the Air Force, and they're not going to let go
of him until he's at least 26); Jill is a munitions expert,
classical pianist, chemist, gunsmith, mechanic, ex-cop, *and*
ex-Delta Force at 23; Claire is a skilled gunfighter, demolitions
expert, and motorcyclist at 19; Rebecca is supposed to be a field
medic and a member of an elite police unit at 18; and Steve is a
crack pilot, gunman, and truck driver at 17. I shudder to think
what Sherry must be capable of.
9. If I could get a biker jacket with the same design on the
back as Claire's vest, it'd be very cool. (You finally get
to see what it says across her shoulders just before the
last fight with Alexia: "Let Me Live". This is also the same
design that's on the back of her alternate outfit in RE2.)
10. CV is the only Resident Evil game so far that hasn't
taken place at night and ended at sunrise. It's full morning
when Chris arrives in the Antarctic, and it looks like high
noon when he flies out with Claire.
11. I didn't notice this until I played through RE2 again
recently, but it's somewhat interesting: the Tyrant from RE
was T-002. Mr. X was T-003. The CV Tyrant is T-078. Umbrella
works *fast*.
12. Watch _Mission: Impossible II_ and then play through Code:
Veronica. See how many similarities you can spot.
============================================
7. Becky's Big Adventure: RESIDENT EVIL ZERO
============================================
RE0 is exclusively available for the Nintendo 64. The game,
said to be the hardest RE yet, follows the pre-RE adventures
of Rebecca Chambers and a new character, an ex-Navy SEAL
named Billy Koen. The game's development team also promises
that there'll be more background on the S.T.A.R.S. Bravo Team,
and more information on how they died.
A day before the events of RE, the S.T.A.R.S. Bravo Team is
sent into the Raccoon Forest. They discover a mysterious train,
which Rebecca investigates, and things go straight to hell
after that.
===============
7i. Coming Soon
===============
As soon as the game comes out, I'll work it into this document.
Of course, if it's the continuity nightmare that some fans are
predicting, it'll probably just make my head explode. You know
how that can go.
=======================
8. Unanswered Questions
=======================
This section is a list of the storyline questions that still
remain for each of the last three Resident Evil games, when
all has been said and done. This deliberately does not
include small plot holes; this is only for plotline elements
that Capcom has deliberately left unsolved, or for plot
holes that could easily be plotline elements.
In order for a question to be in this section, there must be
*nothing in the game* that answers it. Once again, I feel the
need to restate the point that I don't want or need anyone
to e-mail me their "theories". I'm drowning in them, they're
usually half-baked, and there's nothing to support any of them
in the game. Stop sending them.
Note that there's no entry here for RE. RE didn't really
leave anything unsolved, aside from the issue of which
scenario is the "official" one. That's dealt with in
Frequently Asked Questions, below.
===================
8i. RESIDENT EVIL 2
===================
1. How did Ada survive? (This is explored further in Dan
Birlew's essay, "The Resurrection of Ada Wong", below.)
2. (from "JRMShutout") Who was the "suspicious individual"
from the Patrol Report file? (It's entirely possible that
this was a member of Hunk's team, but it's never said.)
3. What's with Jill's boyfriend? (When you check Jill's desk
in the S.T.A.R.S. office, the one with the beret on it, you
find a picture of a man who's "probably her boyfriend". However,
when Jill checks the same desk in RE3, there's no mention of
any such thing. This is a minor detail, but a somewhat
interesting one.)
=============================
8ii. RESIDENT EVIL 3: NEMESIS
=============================
1. Why did the U.S. government attack Umbrella's factory on
October 1st? (Did they want to destroy the T-Virus, or did
they want it for themselves? As a corollary, how did they
manage to get the rail cannon into the factory's power room?)
2. Why did the President order a nuclear strike on Raccoon
City, and why did Congress support that decision? (The issue
here isn't how the President knows about the outbreak; that's
obvious. The issue is what he knew that made him decide upon
nuclear sterilization of the area, as opposed to sending in
the CDC. This is a B-movie, yeah, but it could be an interesting
plot point. Conspiracies abound...)
3. Why did Umbrella try to stop the nuclear strike? (You'd
think that the whole city being obliterated would actually
help Umbrella, since all the evidence that they were to blame
would be destroyed. I also have a hard time believing that it
was out of some sense of concern for their surviving employees
and mercenaries inside the city. Alert reader Vincent Merken
points out here that Umbrella is notorious for doing really
stupid things in order to collect research data, such as luring
the S.T.A.R.S. to the mansion lab in the first place, and
suggests that that might be the case here as well.)
4. How did the Nemesis keep finding Jill?
5. If there was a military blockade in place around Raccoon
City, how did both Claire and Leon manage to drive right
into town? (It's entirely possible that the quarantine was
lifted on the 29th due to the imminent nuclear strike, but
even then, there should have been police, military, and
press stacked three deep in every direction around Raccoon.)
6. What was the offer made to Leon?
7. (from Jim Stevenson) Why does Carlos wait for two days
before going to find an antidote for Jill? What does he
do in that time?
8. For that matter, what did Carlos "have to take care of"
when he left Jill in the chapel? (What could have possibly
been so important that he'd leave a convalescing Jill alone
with Nemesis so close by?)
=============================
8iii. RESIDENT EVIL: SURVIVOR
=============================
None yet.
==================================
8iv. RESIDENT EVIL: CODE VERONICA
==================================
1. How did Wesker survive the "mansion incident"? (In the best-
case scenario, good old Albert gets gutted like a rainbow
trout. I'm still amazed that they brought him back.)
2. Who are Wesker's new employers, and exactly what are they
up to? (Yes, yes, I've seen his logo in Battle Mode. That
tells us exactly nothing.)
3. How (and when) did Wesker become so powerful? What was
done to him? (It's been pointed out more than once that
Wesker's sunglasses never came off in RE. For all we know,
he's always been superhuman. On the other hand, as alert
reader Steven Bygrave points out, if Wesker *was* superhuman
in RE, Barry shouldn't've been able to knock him out.)
4. Where did Alfred get the idea that if he killed Claire,
it'd restore the glory of the Ashford family? Does Umbrella
really consider Claire that much of a threat? (Alert reader
Chris Armour points out, and rightly so, that Alfred is
crazy, and, as such, plays by his own rules.)
5. Exactly what was Alexia capable of? She was pyrokinetic,
she controlled all those enormous tentacles that came seemingly
out of nowhere, she apparently managed to spawn and/or
control a legion of mutant ants, she changed shape every so
often, she was stronger and faster than Wesker, and she was
still fairly intelligent and logical. More to the point, she
comes out of cold storage early with no obvious help from
Alfred, she activates the computers in her storage room
without touching them, and when she sends the tentacle to
smack the crap out of Claire and Steve, she has no way of
knowing that they're responsible for what happened...
6. What has Chris been doing for the last three months? For
that matter, what has *everyone* been doing for the last
three months, besides sitting around being prequel bait?
7. This is just an idle question of my own, but what did
Claire do or see inside Umbrella's Paris facility that had
Umbrella going after her with an attack helicopter?
8. Here's another of my own questions: what was it about
Alexia's appearance that stopped Wesker from killing Chris?
All she does is appear on a viewscreen and laugh.
9. Finally, as has rightly been pointed out by "Utopia" on
the Evil-Online message boards, how did Claire manage to
infiltrate Umbrella's Paris facility?
=========================================
8iv. The Resurrection of Ada Wong
by Dan Birlew, with notes by Thomas Wilde
=========================================
In Resident Evil 2, Ada appears at the end of the Leon B
game to aid him in his fight against the evil Tyrant.
Although she stands in the shadows, Sherry's pendant is
illuminated hanging around her neck. Quite presumably, she
still has the G-Virus sample.
How did she survive her 'death'? There has been much debate
between fans over the Internet regarding this touchy
subject. Some have pointed out that if the player accesses
her item menu while playing as Ada, she has a First-Aid
Spray, which instantly and completely restores health. The
suggestion is that perhaps Ada was only unconscious
following her battle with Mr. X, and revived briefly enough
to administer the spray. But if the player uses the spray to
recover health while controlling Ada, she still returns
after her 'death', proving this theory inconclusive.
Some speculation indicates that maybe Ada is one of many
clones developed by Umbrella. Backing up this theory is her
unexplained appearances and disappearances throughout the
game. Perhaps Ada is running off to join her "sisters", so
that they might combine what they have all learned in their
separate searches. This would explain how she appears during
the Mr. X power room encounter, standing and ready to fight
even though she was previously badly wounded. This would
also explain how she appears again during the final battle
on the train platform. But this theory is highly subjective,
and more concrete proof within the plot is needed. There is
no mention of Umbrella conducting cloning experiments in
either game, but that doesn't mean it won't be brought up in
future episodes.
Notice that Annette explains to Ada in their encounter how
her husband William used the G-Virus to revitalize himself.
The dramatic cinema cut-scene shows that he gave himself a
full injection. If Ada woke from unconsciousness in the
power room and took a smaller dose of the G-Virus, it would
revive her. She does not appear during the final battle
fully lit, because we would glimpse the first stages of her
genetic mutation. After Leon defeats the Tyrant, Ada does
not rejoin him. Surely she wouldn't want the handsome young
rookie to see her rapidly transforming.
[Note: in Ada's Epilogue file in RE3, the art depicts her
looking much the same as she does in RE2, except for a nasty
scar across her back where William clawed her. If she *did*
use the G-Virus to survive, she managed to escape the
virus's mutagenic effect.]
In the Leon A game, after Ada falls from the catwalk, Leon
tosses the G-virus into the same chasm. This allows the
G-Virus to land in the same place as Ada. This would
certainly allow the dying woman to reach over and swallow a
bit. Ada taking the G-Virus to revive herself proves
conclusive in either case.
Also listed as a theory is that perhaps Ada is a different
kind of creature created by Umbrella, an impervious
shape-shifter similar to the T-1000 in James Cameron's
_Terminator 2: Judgement Day_. Although unsupported by the
story, this theory would explain how Ada is able to take
much more punishment than Claire or Leon. When playing as
her, note that she can sustain several zombie bites or
spider acid attacks before actually showing damage. She can
slip through a T-virus swarm of cockroaches without a
scratch. This theory would explain how she appears in the
infested precinct house unscathed, and how she recovered
from a fatal wound to save Leon's neck. When Mr. X smashes
Ada into the steel control panel, the control panel comes
out a lot worse than she does. Ada would seem to be tougher
than steel...
[Note: The appearance of the augmented Wesker in RE:CV adds
another theory to the mix. If Wesker has been made superhuman,
the reasoning goes, Ada could have been as well, and thus
been able to survive what happened to her. If Ada was a
Wesker-style superhuman, one might expect her to have
catlike eyes. Then again, there are always contact lenses...]
Whatever mysterious force may have provided for the return
of Ada Wong, her survival definitely allows the game planners
to return her to the Resident Evil series in the future.
=============================
9. Frequently Asked Questions
=============================
Before you fire off an e-mail, asking me questions that
might wind up in this section, I have three very simple
points to make:
One: The Resident Evil series is, when you take all the
trimmings off of it, a series of B-movies.
B-movies don't have to make much sense, don't sweat the
small details, and frequently have an interesting selection
of plot holes. Resident Evil has all of those characteristics,
and oh-so-much more. Therefore, it'll be easier on all of us
if those of you who are fairly obsessed with RE keep that in
mind. I don't want to hear anything about the various conspiracy
theories that fans of the game seem to have come up with out of
whole cloth to explain what they perceive as errors.
Two: please read the entire document, searching for the answer
to your question, before you e-mail me.
Three: I am a wiseass.
Now, on with the questions. These come from e-mail I've received,
both about this document and regarding the RE2 EX Files transcription
I wrote, and from conversations on the Evil-Online message boards.
=================
9i. Miscelleanous
=================
Q. Why does Claire have a *combat* knife when she enters
Raccoon City? Why is Jill making her "last escape" in a tube
top and miniskirt? Where did Leon get his RPD uniform if it
was his first day on the job? Why don't Claire and Leon use
the fax machine in the S.T.A.R.S. office to send for help? How
come Claire and Steve don't freeze to death in Antarctica?
Why why why why why why why why why why why...?!
A. Stop. Breathe. You're putting too much thought into this.
They're video games. Don't you have homework to do or something?
Q. Why'd you write/update this?
A. First, I'm a pretty big Resident Evil fan. Second, I was
getting a lot of e-mail about RE2's various plot holes and
continuity issues and immediately thought of the previous version
of this document. When I went back to look at it to confirm a few
things, it occurred to me that it could use an update. I asked Dan
Birlew if it was all right, he said "yes", and I started the project.
I honestly didn't know what I was getting into.
Q. How long did this take you to write?
A. The first update (where this first appeared on gameFAQs.com
with my name on it) took me two or three weeks. It wasn't a big deal.
Q. Will you put [something from the previous version of the Thesis]
back in?
A. Not likely. This thing is big enough as it is, and if I start
including stuff like Dan's comparison of _Aliens_ and RE2 in here,
then I'll start talking about Code Veronica and the literary Gothic,
and that'll draw the weirdos out of the woodwork, which in turn
will inevitably lead to my becoming even more of a damn fanboy
than I already am, and quite frankly, no one wants that. Despite
what you may think, I do have something which I laughingly refer
to as a "life".
Q. Do you know where I can read the games' files online?
A. You can find transcriptions scattered around various FAQ sites,
like gamefaqs.com. Also, Rob MacGregor, your friend and mine, has
included every last file in the series in his Timeline FAQ. (The
Timeline FAQ is a handy resource, and I'll be citing it frequently.
http://www.new-blood.com. Please make a note of it.)
Q. Why is the series called Biohazard in Japan and Resident Evil
in North America and Europe?
A. Because the heavy-metal band Biohazard has copyrighted that
name in North America and Europe.
Q. What's the deal with the Resident Evil movie?
A. Here's what I know: it's still going to happen. George Romero,
of _Night of the Living Dead_ fame, was briefly attached to the
project, but has since been dropped. While there were reports
earlier this year that the film had been totally scrapped, those
reports were apparently just rumors. I've also heard rumors that
Mark Wahlberg (_The Big Hit_, _The Perfect Storm_) has been cast
as Chris Redfield.
I'd prefer that they made a full-length anime, myself. But that's me.
Q. Which game is the movie based off of?
A. According to all reports, it's an adaptation of the first one.
Q. Who's Shinji Mikami?
A. The director of the RE and Dino Crisis games. He calls the shots.
Q. T-Virus, G-Virus, T-Veronica virus... what's the scoop?
A. The T-Virus was created by Edward Ashford and Ozwell Spencer
at some indeterminate point in the early to mid-twentieth century,
after research into the mysterious "mother virus". When it infects
an organism, it mutates the creature into a monster. Humans turn
into zombies or Lickers, while animals tend to get vicious, mutate,
and/or grow to ridiculous size. The T-Virus's infection pattern is
best described as "dramatic convenience"; it more or less does
whatever the plotline needs it to do. The T-Virus is used in the
creation of Umbrella's bioweapons, such as Hunters and rubber men.
Umbrella has created a T-Virus vaccine, which has been given to
Jill Valentine.
William Birkin completed his work on the G-Virus at some point
before September of 1998. He considered it a vast improvement on
the T-Virus. The G-Virus must be injected directly into a target
before it's effective; unlike the T-Virus, it isn't a viable airborne.
Once it *does* infect something, step back. A creature infected by
the virus, is a psychopathic, rapidly mutating killing machine, also
known as a G-Type. It possesses incredible strength, a fair amount
of animal cunning, and can endure insane amounts of punishment. It
can also generate miniature embryos, which it'll attempt to implant
in other organisms. If these embryos reach maturity, they'll quickly
kill their hosts and crawl off on their own. The exception here is if
the G-Type impregnates a blood relative; we don't know exactly what
would happen next, but the process takes a lot longer. There was a
vaccine effective against the G-Virus, the "Devil", but it may have
been lost when William Birkin's labs were destroyed. Of course, it's
possible that the vaccine might be recreated using Sherry Birkin's
blood. Thanks to Hunk, Umbrella has a sample of the G-Virus, and
Ada Wong, wherever she is, may have a sample as well.
The T-Veronica virus was created in the early '80s by Alexia
Ashford, by combining the T-Virus with a dead virus Alexia
found inside the body of a queen ant. If it's used on a human,
it'll create an uncontrollable mutant with homicidal tendencies,
as evidenced by both Alexander Ashford and Steve Burnside. However,
if an infected human is placed into cold storage for about fifteen
years, her body is able to cope with and adapt to the T-Veronica
virus, thus gaining a truly obscene amount of power. Alexia Ashford
went through this process, and in so doing became the meanest mother
in the valley. As of CV, unless someone recreates Alexia's lab work,
the T-Veronica virus has been destroyed.
Also mentioned, in RE3, is the NE-T virus. We don't know anything
more about it than that it exists, although its name has led some
to believe that it has something to do with the creation of Nemesis.
Q. Why don't any RE games ever take place in daylight?
A. You may as well ask why so few horror movies ever take place in
daylight. Nighttime is scarier.
Besides, the first half of RE3 *does* take place in daylight. It
just doesn't look like it because half the damn city's on fire.
Q. Where the hell is Raccoon City?
A. Right now, it's slowly drifting to Earth as radioactive dust.
Before the nuke, it was somewhere in "America's Midwest", and
there's nothing in any RE game that would place it anywhere more
specific (Leon's police car in RE2 has a "Raccoon" license plate).
Q. What is Resident Evil 1.5?
A. I quote Dan Birlew, from the first version of this thesis:
When the original Resident Evil topped the videogame sales
charts, Capcom realized two things. They needed a sequel,
and they should have put more quality into the first game.
Reprogramming it, they re-released it as Resident Evil:
Director's Cut in 1997. The package contained a second disk
this time, a demo version of Resident Evil 2. The demo was
met with extreme confusion, however. Capcom had previously
released to the press screenshots of a prototype for the
sequel. The demo, although definitely not the finished
version, was nothing like what had been previously advertised.
Internet Resident Evil fans have taken to calling this scrapped
prototype game Resident Evil 1.5. Leon appeared in the game, but
the earlier version of Claire was an unrelated college girl named
Elza [Walker]. With blonde hair and red biking gear, she was similar
to Claire only in her love of riding Harleys.
[Thomas adds: the version of Leon in RE1.5 doesn't look much
like the one we know either. I've got a picture of him
around here somewhere, from Game Informer magazine, and he's
a brown-haired guy who looks like he answered a casting call
for a "cocky rebel".]
The game was developed with the same map as the game that
was eventually released, but the graphics were steeped in
atmospheric blues and neon lighting. Evidence of widespread
chaos in Raccoon City was far more plentiful and severe in
this game's scenery than in the final version. The Birkins,
Chief Irons, and Ada Wong were all missing from the
ambivalent plotline of this game. Resident Evil 2 in this
version threatened to be too much like the original. The
planners wanted something that would take the storyline
further. What the fans had been shown and told to expect
from the sequel was not what they got.
Q. Hey, my friend says he has a copy of Resident Evil 1.5.
A. Your friend lies. Destroy him.
Q. Will Resident Evil 1.5 ever be released?
A. Probably not. It'd be a huge throwback if it was; while it
had a couple of relative innovations (like, reportedly, hand
grenades), it'd be a step backwards from both RE2 and RE3. Every
so often, a petition circulates among the Internet fans of RE
to have RE1.5 released, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Q. Where can I get the RE1.5 ROM?
A. Fantasyland. It doesn't exist, as it was never completed.
Q. What is it with RE's women always saying "It's over" just
before something bad happens to them?
A. Both Jill and Claire suffer from a horrible birth defect
that left them without a sense of irony.
Q. Hey, have you read any of the novels?
A. Yeah, all of them. For those who don't know, there are four
Resident Evil novels, all written by S.D. (Stephani Danielle)
Perry and published by Pocket Books. _The Umbrella Conspiracy_
is a novelization of Resident Evil (a blend of the scenarios,
where Chris explores the dormitories while Jill encounters the
Tyrant), while _City of the Dead_ is a novelization of Resident
Evil 2 (Leon A/Claire B). There are also two original novels,
_Caliban Cove_ and _Underworld_; the former features Rebecca
Chambers and a bunch of original characters, while the latter
stars Claire, Leon, Rebecca, and the original characters who
survived _Caliban_. (If you see someone refer to characters
named "David" or "John" in RE fanfics, they're referring to
characters from Perry's novels.) They're decent enough books
in a pulp-fiction sort of way, even if--
-- Perry's writing style gets on my nerves. In the United States,
the books are in surprisingly wide circulation, and can be found
in any decent-sized bookstore's science-fiction section. I don't
know if they've been translated into any other languages, or if
they're available in other English-speaking countries. Alternatively,
you could always order them from Amazon or something.
There's a fifth Resident Evil book, "Nemesis", slated for release
in October 2000. Check simonsays.com for the fine details.
Q. Do the novels mean anything to the plot?
A. Not really. The novels exist in their own little sub-continuity,
a point that was driven home by RE3. In point of fact, it almost
looks like RE3 was deliberately crafted to contradict Perry's novels
at every turn. I'll touch upon the high points:
Capcom | Perry
----------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Raccoon City is in the "American | Raccoon City is in Pennsylvania.
Midwest". It had more than a | It had about eight thousand people
hundred thousand people in it. | in it. It's an hour from New York.
----------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Raccoon City got nuked on | A huge fire destroyed the city
October 1st, right after Jill | at some point after Leon and Claire
escaped. Leon and Claire got out | escaped on October 4th. The
on the morning of the 30th of | surviving S.T.A.R.S. are, as of
September. There were about | _Underworld_, being framed for the
eight known survivors: Claire, | outbreak by Umbrella. The ruins are
Leon, Sherry, Hunk, Ada, Jill, | being sorted through by the CDC,
Carlos, and Nicholai. | the military, and some Umbrella-
| funded biohazard teams. Besides
| Leon, Sherry, and Claire, there
| were close to a hundred other
| survivors.
----------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Jill Valentine is ex-Delta Force.| Jill Valentine is an ex-thief, and
This means that she is also an | the daughter of notorious cat
ex-Green Beret or Army Ranger. | burglar Dick Valentine, hence
She is 23. This is highly | explaining why she's the "master of
implausible. (Depending on who | unlocking". She joined the S.T.A.R.S.
you listen to, women can be in | because her father pressured her
the Delta Force, but only in a | to go into a line of work that
specific division of it. It's | wasn't patently illegal. While
highly unlikely that a woman in | this makes a little more sense
Delta Force would actually see | then Capcom's version, it's still
combat.) | absolutely ridiculous.
----------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Jill stays in Raccoon until she | Jill leaves town with Barry and
blasts her way out of town on | Chris on September 26th, well
October 1st, a day after Claire | before the T-Virus outbreak.
and Leon forcibly renovate | Claire and Leon don't get anywhere
Umbrella's underground labs. | near Raccoon City until the night
| of October 4th.
----------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Claire and Leon don't part on | Claire and Leon are picked up
the best of terms. Claire runs | outside Raccoon by Rebecca Chambers
off, while Leon and Sherry are | and her posse from _Caliban Cove_.
taken into military custody. | Sherry now lives with her Aunt Kate.
| Leon and Claire go off to have
| more anti-Umbrella adventures
| together, in _Underworld_.
----------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Rebecca Chambers is horribly | Rebecca is the heroine of _Caliban_
annoying, and is AWOL after RE. | Cove_, where she saves the world
| and stuff. Perry is fixated on
| Rebecca, and displays this unhealthy
| obsession by having EVERY CHARACTER
| conduct lengthy interior monologues
| about how smart, funny, clever, cute,
| and brave little Becky is. It's
| really kinda disturbing, when you
| get right down to it.
----------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Chris, Jill, Claire, and Leon | An enigmatic man named Trent feeds
survive their adventures by | the S.T.A.R.S. and their associates
being smart, tough, clever, and | information in the form of weird
lucky. They're rarely given any | riddles, usually immediately after
outside help. | appearing or disappearing
| mysteriously. Some fans like him,
| and Trent has a weird habit of
| showing up in Resident Evil
| Conspiracy Theories (tm). I'd like
| to see him get killed, personally.
----------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Q. What about the comic books?
A. Avoid the comic books if you have to chew off your own leg to do it.
Q. ...and the manga?
A. I've heard that there's RE manga, but I've never seen it for
myself. (I have seen some RE hentai doujinshi, courtesy of Geson
"Racewing" Hatchett, and it's so good it makes me want to kill
the artist with my teeth. When in Tokyo, be sure to visit Saigado
Publishing, bring an automatic weapon, and tell 'em Thomas Wilde
sent you...)
Q. Where can I find Resident Evil hentai?
A. Stop asking me that. You don't want to see it anyway.
Q. Why aren't there any bathrooms in Raccoon City?
A. Vincent "Guns Are For Sissies" Merken has the answer:
"...there might be a *secret passage* somewhere... that leads to
the toilets. Since about every room in [Raccoon City] is initially
locked and requires the fetching of numerous objects in previously
unlocked areas, why shouldn't the can be the same? But due to
memory shortage, the necessary items weren't included in the [games].
"So the cops never had to 'hold it'. They did have to plan in
advance though... "'Hey, Charley, there's a chance that I might
need to go to the little boys' room in about 45 minutes. I better
quit and head for it right now. You cover me.'"
Q. Why the hell was Code Veronica released for the *Dreamcast*?
A. I imagine that it involved a dump truck full of money. RE is
a hot license, so having the new and innovative RE game on their
new console was a major feather in Sega's cap. They're gonna need
all the help they can get.
Q. Why the hell is Resident Evil Zero coming out for the *N64*?
A. See above. Do you have any *idea* how well RE games sell?
Q. Is Code Veronica coming out for the PSX2?
A. I wouldn't bet on it. As I'm given to understand things, not only
does Sega have the exclusive rights to CV, but Sega and Capcom worked
together on the title; alert reader Jasmine Wylie tells me that Sega
used the same programming team on CV that worked on the Saturn game
Deep Fear. However, because a lot of RE fans are also drooling PSX
fanboys, rumors keep flying that CV will be 'ported to the PSX2 in 2001.
I have no idea whether this is true or not, and everyone who's written
to me on the subject is giving me information from "anonymous sources".
I *hate* "anonymous sources".
Q. What's in the future for Resident Evil?
A. RE: Survivor will be released in North America at the end
of August, according to Capcom's website; no one's quite sure
why it's been delayed for so long here, but the game's been out
for quite some time in Japan and Europe. Also, after some initial
hype, RE0 is in fact coming out for the N64. It's supposedly
set to be released in Japan in October.
Resident Evil 4 is reportedly in production for the PSX2,
and is rumored to be the first RE game where the story's told
from an Umbrella agent's perspective. Hunk is rumored to be
a playable character, as are two new characters named Anne
and Mark. I've heard that it may be out in Japan as early as
December of 2000, although I really doubt that. If you didn't
know already, the picture of the RE4 box art that's been
making the rounds on the 'net lately is a fake.
Another rumor I've seen on a couple of websites is that Capcom
is considering a remake and update of RE for the Dreamcast. I
have no idea whether it's true or not, but I'd love to see it.
Q. Will there ever be a Dino Crisis/Resident Evil crossover?
A. As fun as that sounds, probably not. I've read a number of
interviews with Shinji Mikami where that question has come up,
and the answer is always "no". However, some players have
reported an Easter egg in Dino Crisis, in which several chemical
tanks in the facility's basement bear the Umbrella logo.
==================
9ii. RESIDENT EVIL
==================
Q. Why is the American version's intro edited?
A. I'm going to just go ahead and blame American censors. In
the Japanese version of RE, or so I'm told, things are a great
deal more gory and explicit; we get to see the entirety of the
severed arm, Joseph Frost's death is considerably bloodier, and
a Cerberus is shot to death on-camera. Also, a shot of Chris
smoking a cigarette was removed.
Q. What's the official ending of RE?
A. That's something that's been confounding the hell out of
fans of the series since RE2 came out. Apparently, all five
characters who could survive RE did so, even though in both
possible RE scenarios, there are at most four survivors. All
we know for sure is that the mansion was, in fact, destroyed
at the end of RE. Hopefully, RE0, or the rumored Dreamcast
remake of RE, will clear this up. In the meantime, fans assume
that the "official" ending is some kind of mix of both scenarios,
like in _The Umbrella Conspiracy_.
Q. How many endings are there?
A. There are four endings for Chris, and four for Jill.
Chris:
-- Jill and Rebecca are alive. Jill is asleep on Chris's shoulder,
and Rebecca is passed out nearby. The helicopter flies off.
-- Rebecca is alive, but you didn't rescue Jill. Chris says that
he's sure Jill survived.
-- Jill is alive, but Rebecca isn't. Chris and Jill are sad about
her death. The mansion doesn't explode, and the Tyrant pulls itself
out of the mansion.
-- Neither Rebecca or Jill survive. Chris is alone in the helicopter,
looking enraged. The Tyrant emerges from the mansion.
Jill:
-- Chris and Barry are alive. Jill is asleep on Chris's shoulder, and
Barry is reloading his revolver. They fly off.
-- Barry is alive, but you didn't save Chris. Jill is sure that Chris
survived the explosion.
-- Chris is alive, but Barry isn't. Chris and Jill mourn him. The Tyrant
pulls itself out of the wreckage of the mansion.
-- Neither Chris or Barry survived. Jill sits, exhaustedly, in Brad's
helicopter (her disheveled state has led some fans to call this the
"Sexy Jill" ending). Behind them, the Tyrant pulls itself from the
wreckage of the mansion.
Q. How do I determine which ending I get?
A. I recommend that anyone interested in getting RE's various endings
check out Dan Birlew's exhaustive Resident Evil Ultimate Guide, available
on www.gamefaqs.com. It's bursting at the seams with gameplay information.
Q. Hey, the mansion didn't explode!
A. Nope. In order for the mansion to explode, your supporting character
must live through the game. Otherwise, there's no one to set the charges
in the Power Room, and when you reach the helipad, the Tyrant doesn't
show up. Your character will simply grab Brad's rope ladder and escape.
Q. [from Mileki Rynjar] If Wesker's still alive, shouldn't this
thesis be pushing the idea that Jill's storyline is the "official"
one? In Jill's game, he's just knocked unconscious by Barry...
A. ...and then he's decapitated by a Chimera in the laboratory's
power room, right after he triggers the laboratory's self-destruct
system. If Barry's dead, then Wesker leads Jill into the lab and
the Tyrant guts him, just as in Chris's game. Any way you look at
it, Wesker's survival is unlikely at best. (As Ben Plante puts
it, Capcom seems to have "pulled a Marvel Comics".)
Q. Why did Wesker shoot Rebecca? Shouldn't he have known that she
wore a bulletproof vest?
A. Not necessarily. He was the captain of the Alpha Team, and Becky
was on Bravo. Besides, did Rebecca *look* like she was wearing a vest?
(For some reason, this question -- which seems reasonable enough --
is the jumpoff point for a great many "Rebecca is a spy for Umbrella"
conspiracy theories. Some people have too much free time.)
Q. Where do the welded-shut doors in the courtyard go?
A. The helipad. You can't open them.
Q. What's the difference between RE and RE: Director's Cut?
A. Not much, really, except for the addition of Arranged Mode.
It's also packaged with a demo of RE2, which lets you play as
Leon up until the point where you reach the S.T.A.R.S. Office.
In the demo, that's where you meet Ada Wong.
Arranged Mode is RE set on its ear. Many of the pre-rendered
"camera angles" are different (Vincent Merken tells me that
they're recycled angles from the beta version), almost every
item in the game is now somewhere else, every character gets
a new outfit, and the monsters have been randomly redistributed
throughout the mansion. Ammunition is scarce in Arranged Mode,
so it's a challenge.
Q. What happened to Rebecca Chambers after RE?
A. We know she survived, since William Birkin mentions her in
his letter to Chief Irons in RE2. However, she seems to have
dropped right off the face of the Earth. Hopefully, in RE0, we'll
find out where she went.
Q. Have you heard about the researcher John?
A. Yeah, actually. I get this one a lot, for some reason.
In brief: in RE2, Ada Wong says that she's looking for her boyfriend
John. In RE, one of the files is written by a researcher named
John, who's set up the mansion's security computer with Ada's name
as a password. John finishes this file by mentioning that he's
turning into a zombie. Therefore, he did exist (he wasn't just a
story Ada made up), and he was dead by the time RE2 started.
However, when Annette meets Ada in the waste management plant in
RE2, Annette tells Ada point-blank that her boyfriend's dead and
that he became a zombie. It really isn't all that unclear an issue.
Q. Why are you so hard on Rebecca in this document?
A. It's my upbringing. I accuse my parents.
Q. "Master of unlocking"?
A. Don't ask me. I just work here.
=====================
9iii. RESIDENT EVIL 2
=====================
Q. What's the official ending of RE2?
A. Judging from the Epilogues in RE3, it's Claire A/Leon B,
as Sherry needs medical attention. In Leon A/Claire B,
Sherry was just fine when the dust settled.
Q. How can that be the official ending? Claire and Leon are both
on the wrong sides of the car at the beginning.
A. I thought so too, until alert reader Ben Plante pointed out
the angle of the destroyed truck on that first street. In either
scenario, Claire and Leon do, in fact, get out on the correct
side of the car.
Q. (from Jim Stevenson) If the T-virus outbreak starts on the 22nd,
then why are there reports of the "cannibal disease" before this?
A. Not all of Umbrella's bioweapons were inside the mansion. Several
of them escaped at some point, such as the zombie dogs that killed
Joseph Frost in RE's intro, and thus weren't killed when the
mansion exploded. They may be responsible for the monster sightings.
Also, the Dead Factory out behind Raccoon Park was the site of
experiments on T-Virus "guinea pigs" as early as June 1998 (as
mentioned in RE3), and Raccoon's hospital has a Hunter factory
in its basement. Given Umbrella's tendency to lose viruses
and let monsters escape, the real question here is how they
managed to avoid a major outbreak for as long as they did.
Q. How come that truck driver became a zombie so quickly?
A. It's either the aforementioned dramatic infection pattern of
the T-Virus, or he never became a zombie at all. As has been
pointed out to me, he might have just passed out from shock
and blood loss, or something.
Q. Why do you call it "Mr. X"? It's a Tyrant.
A. Because the first RE2 FAQ I ever read called it "Mr. X". I
continually refer to it as such in this document from force of
habit, and to distinguish it from the RE T-001 Tyrant.
Q. Where did all the Lickers come from?
A. According to Survivor, Lickers are what happens when someone
who's already a zombie gets a fresh dose of the T-Virus. In other
words, they're mutated zombies.
Q. Why do Claire and Leon have to do the same things in both
games? Who keeps fixing up the RPD?
A. I don't know either, and I was just as annoyed as you are.
Q. How did Chief Irons survive the helicopter crash on the
roof of the RPD building?
A. I can't believe I've gotten this question more than once.
The cop on the roof isn't Irons. It's some other fat guy with
a mustache. Come on, kids. I'm using my head right now, so
you'll have to use yours.
Q. What the hell is with the RPD building? The ammo's all over
the place, all the equipment is hidden, all the keys are hidden...
A. Chalk it up to Brian Irons. As he says in his diary, he did
his best to make sure no one would survive the siege of the RPD
building. If something doesn't seem right to you about the fall
of the RPD, you can usually blame it on Irons.
Q. So what explains the statue puzzles/sewer entrance/secret doors?
A. We can also blame Irons for the puzzles in the RPD. Apparently,
he wasn't just on the take, but the maniac was also letting Umbrella
do the decoration. There are some lines you just shouldn't cross.
The sewer entrance, on the other hand, is the work of Thomas, the
crazy chess fanboy who the RPD's night watchman hung out with.
There must be some crazy in the water down Raccoon way. (Do you
realize that it's easier to access the weapons locker in the RPD
than it is to get into the sewers?)
Q. [from "NYPlayboy1080"] Why did Umbrella attack William Birkin
to begin with?
A. That's a decent question. Although Annette says several times
that Umbrella is out to steal the G-Virus, nothing is ever said
to indicate why Umbrella would *need* to steal it. After all,
Birkin was supposed to be working for them.
Fortunately, NYPlayboy1080 came up with an answer to this question
on his own. He points out that in one of the files for RE: Survivor,
an Umbrella operative says he was told that William Birkin intended
to keep the G-Virus for himself. While this is Umbrella's side of
the story and is thus somewhat suspect (William also gets all the
blame for the destruction of Raccoon City), it's the only answer
we're getting for the moment, since William and Annette are dead.
Thanks also goes out to Rob MacGregor on this one, who has listed
the files for Survivor in his Resident Evil Timeline FAQ. Check
his site out at http://www.new-blood.com.
Q. Why did Umbrella send so many agents after the G-Virus?
A. Hunk's team was sent after the virus and didn't report back to
base until the 30th of September. When the T-Virus broke out, it
would appear that Umbrella sent Mr. X as a clean-up crew, to obtain
the G-Virus and eliminate any witnesses. That doesn't seem
like an overreaction.
However, when Ada Wong is added to the mix, things get a little
more interesting. Her goals are the same, but her methods are much
different; where Hunk and his crew go for overt violence, Ada is
sneaking and seducing her way towards the G-Virus. There are a
couple of ways to look at this:
1. In the EX Files for the N64 RE2 port, Hunk is identified as working
for Umbrella's French division. It's possible that Umbrella, as Dan
Birlew theorized in the first draft of this document, may be working
against itself; one branch sent Ada, while another sent Hunk.
2. Annette identifies Ada as one of the agents sent after the G-Virus,
but she never says who Ada works for. Ada doesn't identify her employer
either. It's entirely possible that Ada may not work for Umbrella
at all, especially in light of the dead soldiers in RE3.
Hopefully, all of this will be cleared up if and when Ada returns in a
future game.
Q. When did Ada reach the RPD building?
A. We don't know, and to be honest, it doesn't really matter. She
could've been involved in the siege (which would make her the only
survivor), or she could've gotten to the RPD building at some point
after Leon and Claire did. Either way, it doesn't affect RE2's plot.
Q. Why did William Birkin "impregnate" Ben Bertolucci/Chief Irons?
A. Couldn't tell you on a bet. We know that li'l Willy was out
to perpetuate his species, but we don't know what, if any, criteria
he was using to pick and choose victims.
Q. How did William get into Ben's cell?
A. No one knows for sure, but you could probably just assume that
William tore the door open. He wasn't strong enough to bend the
door yet, but he could definitely have broken the lock.
Q. What escaped from the holding tank?
A. No one's really sure. I tend to agree with Rob MacGregor, in
that the holding tank in the Umbrella lab is the same tank shown
in Film B, which would mean that there was a Tyrant in there. Where
that Tyrant went, on the other hand, remains a mystery. Please note
that the monster encountered at the end of the B scenario is the
mutated Mr. X; it is *not* a different Tyrant altogether.
Q. What are the RE2 EX Files?
A. RE2 was released for the Nintendo 64 in late 1998. (Surprisingly,
it was a very good port.) Several features were added to this new
version, such as new alternate costumes, a "randomizer" feature
that turned most non-"quest" items (i.e. ammunition, herbs) into
something else at random, and the EX Files.
The EX Files aren't anything to get excited about. There are
sixteen of them in the game, scattered around in various places
in various scenarios; to see all of them, you have to play all
four possible games. Several of the EX Files are taken straight
from RE3, and the others hint at developments in RE, RE3, CV,
and RE0. While some of them are interesting (as mentioned above,
one says that Hunk is employed by Umbrella's French division),
they're mostly intended to provide background on the series for
newcomers. There are transcriptions available on gamefaqs.com,
new-blood.com, gamewinners.com, and my personal website.
Q. Why are some of the N64 files different than the PSX's?
A. Some minor mistakes were fixed for the N64 port; for example,
the dates in the Night Watchman's Diary file now make more sense.
Check out the Timeline FAQ for details.
Q. Are there any other differences between the N64 and PSX versions?
A. One or two, but there's nothing spectacular.
-- the "guest access" password in the Umbrella lab is now "NEMESIS".
-- the safe in the corner office in the RPD building has a different
combination.
-- there's now a dead Hunter lying in the corner of the double-locked
room in the Umbrella lab. When you examine it, you get the same
message that you get if you examine the tank it's lying next to:
"It looks like the remains of a failed experiment."
Q. Who are all those people in the S.T.A.R.S. group photo?
A. I really don't want to go through them head by head, but to
be brief, the photo shows both the Alpha and Bravo teams of the
Raccoon City S.T.A.R.S. The Bravo team was led by Enrico Marini,
and consisted of Forest Speyer, Kenneth Sullivan, Richard Aiken,
Ed Dewey (who I'm assuming is the unarmed guy on the left-hand
side), and Rebecca Chambers, who isn't in the picture (she is,
however, the woman in the secret film on Wesker's desk). The
Alpha team was led by Albert Wesker and consisted of Joseph Frost,
Chris Redfield, Barry Burton, Jill Valentine (the only woman in
the photo), and Brad Vickers. If you want faces to go with the
names, pick up a copy of RE and look at the instruction manual.
As of RE:CV, the only people in that photo who are still alive
are Chris, Barry, Jill, and Wesker; the rest, except for Brad
and Ed, are either killed or found dead in RE. More specific
details about their deaths are promised in RE0.
Brad Vickers, old Chickenheart, has the dubious honor of being the
only character who's been killed twice (once as a zombie in RE2,
and once by Nemesis in RE3). Ed Dewey has the distinction of being
the only identified member of the Bravo Team who never turns up
dead over the course of RE. It's widely believed that the severed
hand Joseph Frost finds at the beginning of RE was Ed's; one of
the early screenshots from RE0 shows Rebecca kneeling next to a
man whose arm has been severed.
Finally, there's one guy in this photo who no one recognizes and
no one's ever heard of. He's on the left-hand side of the bottom
row. I'd guess that he's Rebecca's predecessor.
Q. Secret film?
A. Yeah. In RE2, check the messy desk in the S.T.A.R.S. office
fifty times and you'll get a film canister. If you develop it,
you'll get a picture of Rebecca in an RPD basketball uniform
(Film D). In this picture, she looks like she might be fifteen.
Q. Why isn't Rebecca in the group photo?
A. I don't know for sure, but I'd guess that it's because she
joined the S.T.A.R.S. at some point after that photograph was
taken. She is a rookie, after all.
Q. Why did Wesker have that photo of Rebecca?
A. Because he's the captain of S.T.A.R.S. Stop looking for
significance everywhere, dammit.
Q. [from ChronoDK16] How would you explain the door that won't
open on the second floor of the police station?
A. The door in question, which is in the same room as the statue
puzzle, would lead to the second-floor lounge if it wasn't boarded
up. Check the map, or play Leon B and watch Sherry Birkin crawl
under that door.
Q. Who threw the rocket launcher?
A. Most fans, and this analysis, will tell you that it was
Ada Wong, somehow returning from the dead. The pendant the
mysterious figure is wearing at the end of Leon B would seem
to prove that. However, there is a small but vocal group among
RE fans who believe that it was Annette Birkin, making one last
attempt to save Sherry. While I think the latter group is crazy,
I mention it in the name of equal representation.
Q. It couldn't've been Ada. Ada died onscreen.
A. So did Wesker, the Tyrant, William Birkin, Annette Birkin,
Mr. X, Nicholai, Nemesis, and Alexia. In Resident Evil, getting
killed is a minor inconvenience. See "The Resurrection of Ada
Wong", above.
Q. If Ada threw the rocket launcher, how did she escape the
base before it exploded?
A. No one knows that yet. Just assume there was more than
one way to escape from the base, or some kind of blast
shelter where she could've waited out the explosion, and
leave it at that. Some people claim to have noticed a second
train on the same track as the one Leon and Claire used to
escape, but I've never seen it myself.
Q. How did Hunk manage to survive in the sewers?
A. Yeah, this one's a little irritating. Judging by RE2's files,
the attack on William Birkin's lab took place somewhere between
the 19th and the 22nd, as it was the cause of the Raccoon City
outbreak. Hunk, on the other hand, doesn't manage to escape the
sewers until the morning of the 30th, at some point after Leon
and Claire have left the RPD building. This means that, somehow,
Hunk survived both a beating from William Birkin *and* at least
eight days' worth of wandering around in the monster-infested
sewers underneath Raccoon City, carrying a vial of the G-Virus
all the while. This grates upon some fans' nerves.
In short, we must assume that Hunk was extraordinarily lucky and
is extraordinarily tough. It's also been observed that there are
four bodies lying around when Leon and Claire go through the
sewers, so either Hunk isn't in Annette's flashback FMV or he's
still unconscious at that point. To sum up: it's a minigame.
We've gotta accept that sometimes, it won't make a lot of sense.
Q. If Hunk and Mr. X both work for Umbrella, why does Mr. X
attack Hunk?
A. Because Mr. X wants, and Hunk has, the G-Virus. Mr. X isn't
all that bright.
Q. Hey, was Hunk Wesker, maybe?
A. Interesting idea, but no. Hunk is shown without his mask in his
RE3 Epilogue file, and he is most certainly not Wesker.
=============================
9iv. RESIDENT EVIL 3: NEMESIS
=============================
Q. How come Jill can blow away zombies by the dozen, but the RPD was
taken down really easily?
A. The RPD just set up a barricade in the middle of the street and
tried to shoot all the zombies dead. They didn't know what they were
up against, and by the time they realized their mistake, dozens of
zombies were overrunning their position. The survivors of that
fiasco were further hindered by Brian Irons' various machinations.
Basically, the RPD was screwed from the start, and the fight with
the zombies was just a formality.
Jill, on the other hand, has experience in fighting Umbrella's
creations and is relatively mobile. She sticks to the back streets
and alleys of Raccoon City, and is lucky enough to never fight more
than eight zombies at a time. Note that whenever Jill encounters a
large group of zombies in a cutscene or FMV, she runs away.
Q. What happens to the [construction equipment in the RPD
courtyard/boarded-up doors in the RPD building/movable statues
on the RPD's second floor/the red jewel in the statue/the
inscription on the goddess statue] between RE3 and RE2?
A. They were whisked away by elfin magic.
Q. What?
A. By "elfin magic", I mean, of course, dramatic necessity.
Capcom didn't want to put the whole RPD building into what
was ostensibly a sequel, so they put in a few subtle visual
cues that you weren't going to be able to run off and play
through RE2 again. Relax, kid. It ain't nohow permanent.
Q. Well, then, why is the window that Nemesis jumps through
still there in RE2?
A. Storyline-wise? Couldn't tell you. Maybe it was fixed by
the same guy who hauls away the corpses while you're not looking.
Reality-wise, Capcom wasn't expecting there to be a Resident
Evil 3, so RE3 and RE2 don't agree on a wide variety of relatively
minor points. Examples include the broken window, the boarded-up
doors, the absence of Lickers in the RE3 RPD, and the general
layout of Raccoon City (like how there isn't a sewage plant in
RE3 at all, even though it's right behind the police station in
RE2). You've got to take this with a grain of salt.
Q. Why does Umbrella have secret labs in every building in
Raccoon City?
A. Because Umbrella donated the money to build almost every
building in Raccoon City. They funded the construction of the
hospital, for example, and bought Michael Warren lock, stock,
and barrel (cf. the City Guide file). Apparently, those donations
entitled them to special perks, like illegal laboratories.
Q. Where are all of these dynamite charges and barrels full
of explosives coming from?
A. I don't know, but I'll bet John Woo is somehow to blame.
Q. Why is Marvin Branagh dead, when he's in RE2 a day later?
A. He isn't dead. He's wounded and unconscious. Next time you
play the game, check that office again on your way out of the
RPD building. At some point, Marvin gets up and leaves.
Q. Why did Umbrella send Nemesis after Jill, when all they
did was keep Chris under surveillance?
A. For all we know, Umbrella *did* send something after Chris.
Jill does find a trashed hideout of Chris's in her Epilogue.
Besides, it's easier to send a horrific mutant to kill someone
when that person is in a town full of horrific mutants. Jill
was what's called a "target of opportunity".
Q. How come Jill can't climb things?
A. For one thing, most of those things are usually on fire.
For another, *you* try climbing in a miniskirt.
Q. How do *you* know?
A. That's none of your damn business.
Q. Who was Nemesis?
A. A snappy dresser, a hit with the ladies, and a good
friend. We mourn his passing.
Q. No, really, who was Nemesis?
A. Okay, from the top: the way I heard it, this question
started because someone at Capcom, probably Shinji Mikami,
said that Nemesis was actually someone we knew from the past
or something. I figure that he was quoted out of context,
mistranslated, or was screwing with people's heads. Ever
since that quote made it across the Pacific, literal-minded
RE fans have been wracking their brains, trying to figure
out who Nemesis could have been. (Of the various theories
I've heard, the one I like the most is the idea, brought to
my attention by alert reader Chuck Lai, that Nemmy was made
out of recycled parts from the RE Tyrant.) In any event, the
debate has largely been abandoned as of this writing, and
Nemesis is considered to have been no one other than the
meanest bioweapon to ever walk the Earth. ("Y'know, I heard
that Nemmy was one bad mutha..." "Shut yo' mouth!")
A few die-hard RE fans, though, had come to the conclusion that
Nemesis must've been Wesker, since every other major RE character
except Rebecca was accounted for, and the idea of Becky "Useless"
Chambers being turned into a killer bioweapon was (and is) just
silly. These people could usually back the theory up pretty well.
Wesker's return in Code Veronica kinda screwed them. Now, they
have to explain how Wesker could've (deep breath now) survived
RE, gotten turned into Nemesis, survived Jill and Carlos blasting
the living hell out of him, taken a nice long nap in a gasoline
fire, mutated into Tentacle Nemesis, had his head dissolved clean
off his body, survived being thrown into the Dead Factory's waste
dump, mutated into Kinda-Looks-Like-William-Birkin Nemesis, lived
through another severe beating courtesy of Jill, endured two blasts
from Paracelsus's Sword, gotten to a minimum safe distance from
Raccoon City in less than five minutes despite being dead, gotten
turned back into Wesker, quit his job at Umbrella, joined whatever
organization he's working for in CV, somehow become Super Wesker,
decisively lost a slap fight with Alexia, fled the Ashfords'
Antarctic base via a convenient submarine, and still managed to find
the time to get that *great* haircut. The answer is, of course, that
Wesker couldn't and that he wasn't Nemesis, but some people just
refuse to give up on something once they've spent that much time on
it. This theory constantly resurfaces on Evil-Online's boards, even
now. Hell, after writing this paragraph, *I* want him to be Nemesis.
Q. Was Nemesis a G-Virus creature?
A. No. Umbrella doesn't get a sample of the G-Virus until September
30th, and Nemesis was made at some point before September 28th.
Q. Okay, then what was Nemesis?
A. According to a file in Survivor, he was a specially-designed
Tyrant. Umbrella built him at their European laboratories.
Q. Is the girl with the briefcase at the end of the Mercenaries
minigame Rebecca?
A. That girl's just some generic woman with a briefcase. Don't
read so much into this. (For that matter, the guy wearing the
hood probably isn't Chief Irons, either. They're both recycled
polygon models, just like everyone else in Mercenaries. Hell,
the hooded guy's polygon model is ripped directly from RE2, when
Chief Irons spins around in his chair and points a gun at Claire.)
===========================
9v. RESIDENT EVIL: SURVIVOR
===========================
None yet.
=================================
9vi. RESIDENT EVIL: CODE VERONICA
=================================
Q. How did Leon find Chris so quickly?
A. Thanks to Claire, Leon knew exactly where Chris was at the
time. After that, all he would've had to do is make a few
telephone calls. This is, after all, the age of global
communication.
Q. Y'know, Steve looks a lot like Leonardo DiCaprio. Here's a
witty comment about it!
A. [through gritted teeth] Stop doing that. Everyone does that.
Q. If the T-Virus was accidentally spilled at the island
prison, why wasn't Claire infected?
A. We don't know how long Claire was unconscious, how bad
the spill was, or just how long the T-Virus stays "hot". There
are about a dozen ways I can think of for her not to have been
around for the actual virus spill, most of which involve things
we don't know. Besides, CV would be *much* less fun if you
were playing as a zombie. Claire wouldn't be near as cute.
Q. Why are there zombies and monsters all over the place in
the Antarctic base?
A. To learn the answer to this question, we must consult the
"Diary of D.I.J.", a secret file hidden within CV's Battle
Game. According to it, the T-Virus was deliberately spilled
inside the base and most of the workers were evacuated via
cargo plane. One can guess that the zombies and corpses in
the base were crew members that didn't get to the plane fast
enough. D.I.J. also tells us that Wesker escaped the Antarctic
via submarine, and that D.I.J. went with him.
Q. How do I find this secret file?
A. It's one of the random items you can get from the slot
machine in the Battle Game. Once you've found it, it'll be
in your file list whenever you start a new game.
Q. Who's D.I.J.?
A. A mouse. Specifically, he's the mouse that runs under
the closing blast shutter when Alfred traps Claire in the
military training facility. He also shows up again in
Antarctica, when Claire lets him out of the locker in
Alfred's office. Reportedly, if you stay alert, you can
see him again and again throughout the first disc.
He is not, repeat *not*, the Ashford family's butler. We don't
know what happened to Scott Harman, but he wasn't in the cargo
plane when Claire fought the Tyrant.
Q. How the hell can a mouse keep a diary?
A. He's a very smart mouse.
Q. Weren't those two mice different colors? How could it be
the same mouse?
A. He's a *very* smart mouse.
Q. What does D.I.J. stand for?
A. No one knows. Make something up.
Q. (from Jim Stevenson) How does Wesker have access to
Hunters when he no longer works for Umbrella?
A. He did just capture an Umbrella facility. He could've
just taken the Hunters out of storage.
Q. Doesn't Wesker work for Bioject now?
A. Bioject, Umbrella's "true owner" or something like that,
is an unsubstantiated rumor that seems to have come out of
thin air. There's nothing in CV to indicate who Wesker works
for now, except his logo in the Battle Game, and even that
isn't anything definite.
Q. (from Devvrat Shukla) Why is Claire poisoned when I find her?
A. Because you got a little too close to Alexander when you
fought him on the helipad. If Claire gets hit by one of
Alexander's clouds of purple mist, she'll get poisoned, and
will stay poisoned until Chris finds her behind the stairs.
At that point, you, as Chris, will need to run back to the
weapons storage locker on the second floor and get a container
of serum. You'll need the lighter to get the serum, so I hope
you saved Rodrigo. When you return to the front hall of the
"mansion", Chris will automatically use the serum on Claire.
The tearful-reunion cutscene will ensue.
To avoid being poisoned by Alexander, you can either fight
him from a distance -- once you know what to look out for,
it's actually very hard to get poisoned -- or go for the
one-shot kill with Alfred's sniper rifle. Just zoom in on
Alex's heart and fire; it may take more than one shot, but
you'll see a "hidden" cutscene where Claire kills Alexander.
Q. Why do the winged ants attack Alexia?
A. Everyone seems to see something different during that fight;
it's like a Magic Eye puzzle. I thought that she was making the
ants part of her, the same way she did with the tentacle, and
that was why and how she became Dragonfly Alexia (tm, patent
pending) soon afterwards. Your own mileage may vary.
Q. Hey, could Wesker's new employees have rescued him somehow
from the mansion, and revived him in his new superhuman form?
A. I suppose anything's possible in this, the weirdest of all
possible worlds. However, unless Wesker's new employees got
to him before the mansion blew up, they would've had to have
"rescued" him with a spatula and paper towels. Not only was
he decapitated/disemboweled, but he was in the basement of
the mansion when the place exploded. Don't try to figure out
how he survived; it'll only make your head hurt.
========================
9vii. RESIDENT EVIL ZERO
========================
Q. Who's that guy talking to Rebecca in the screenshots?
A. That's Billy Koen. He's mentioned briefly in one of the
RE2 EX Files, in which Rebecca says he's been dead since the
22nd of July and that his body is missing. Obviously, what
really happened is probably in RE0. (Becky really just can't
lie convincingly...)
==============
10. Say What?!
==============
You people are crazy.
This section deals with the weirder and wilder theories, "facts",
claims, and proclamations that I've received since this thesis
made its freshly updated debut. It's strictly for fun, and isn't
meant to mock any of the people who sent me the theories in
question. (This also isn't an invitation to send me even *weirder*
theories in an attempt to get in the thesis, or, indeed, to
send me theories at all.)
============================
10i. The Weirdest of the Lot
============================
1. Wesker is "obviously" a vampire as of CV. He's fast, he's
strong, he's arrogant... he's a vampire! Come on! Work with me!
2. Jill quit S.T.A.R.S. and the RPD because of -- ahem -- unwanted
attentions from Chief Irons (according, that is, to "anonymous
sources" inside the development staff. Why is it that everyone
and their mom, EXCEPT ME, has "anonymous sources" inside Capcom?).
3. You can play as [Rebecca/Wesker/Akuma] in RE2.
4. Wesker works for the American government (yet another fact
from those "anonymous sources").
5. Brad was an Umbrella spy before his death. (And not a very good
one, either.)
6. Wesker survived RE because there is more than one Wesker. There
is actually a *series* of Weskers, created by forces unknown, and
sent out to go about various tasks. These Weskers are:
6a. ...clones.
6b. ...robots.
6c. ...robot clones.
6d. ...robot killer death clones. Yeah, bitch.
6e. ...Rebecca. Yes, that's right, *all* of them are *Rebecca*.
She's *very* *clever*.
6f. ...Nemesis. Turnabout is fair play.
6g. ...created by Dr. Mephisto for his own evil purposes. Some
of them have as many as *five* asses! Quake in terror,
puny mortals! The five-assed Wesker thirsts for your blood!
6h. ...created by Howard Mackie, the no-talent sonuvabitch.
(Okay, so I made those last five up. Sue me blind.)
7. Annette Birkin threw the rocket launcher in RE2. (It's Ada's voice
actress, it's Ada's polygon model, Leon thinks it's Ada, and Ada's
still alive.)
8. Wesker was, in fact, Nemesis, but the radiation from the nuke
revived him and turned him back into Wesker. (How he survived being
*vaporized* by the nuke is anyone's guess.)
9. Nemesis was Jill's anonymous boyfriend from RE2.
10. D.I.J. *is* the Ashfords' butler. The T-Virus turned him into
a mouse. Now, he uses his powers to fight evil!
11. Lara Croft threw the rocket launcher in RE2. Yeah. I know. The
girl gets around.
12. Nemesis was a G-Virus creature, because the Resident Evil 3
two-page magazine ad shows a broken vial of the G-Virus. (It's not
the assertion I have trouble with; it's the process by which the
assertion was created.)
13. Ada survived the end of RE2 by using the G-Virus, and then
turned right around and became Nemesis. (...say what now?)
14. Ada was Rebecca in disguise, who was in turn Nemesis, who lived
in the house that Jack built! (Okay, now you're just being silly.)
==============
11. Conclusion
==============
Thanks to Dan Birlew, for starting this document and letting
me update it. Thanks also go out to Ben Plante
[Kuririn321@aol.com], who's apparently my editor, and to everyone
else who's contributed to this document. I appreciate the e-mail.
Those who are interested in further information on the
Resident Evil storyline are encouraged to check out Rob
MacGregor's Timeline FAQ, available at:
http://www.new-blood.com
People interested in Resident Evil 1.5 can check out a site
dedicated to it at:
http://www.geocities.com/bioflames
I found information on Trevor Spencer at:
http://www.geocities.com/wesker_albert/index.html
To discuss Resident Evil, check out Evil-Online's boards at:
http://boards.evil-online.com/
If you're looking for me specifically, my handle is Storyteller.
A German translation of this document is on the way, courtesy of
the undoubtedly lovely and talented Sarah Nist.
I can be reached at storyteller@msc.net with comments, questions,
and job offers (hire me to write Resident Evil 5, Capcom! I have
a really good idea for it! hire me to write the novelization of
Resident Evil 3 or Code Veronica! Hell, hire me to write anything,
anybody! I'm not picky! I don't eat much! I'm clairvoyant, and I
invented wool!). Please be civil, and remember: just because I
wrote this does not mean I am willing to alleviate your boredom.
Please do not send me unsolicited attached files. I will not respond
to theories, insults, or requests for hentai.
Thomas Wilde
a.k.a. Wanderer
a.k.a. Storyteller on Evil Online
storyteller@msc.net
http://www.dimfuture.net/elsewhere/
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