Survival of Horror: Resident Evil Zero
Team and group-based activities in school were always my least favorite thing in the world. You would get one of two outcomes: either you buddy up with your friends, or you get stuck with a random assortment of your classmates. In my experience, that was code for “you’ll either spend more time goofing off than working, or you’ll be picking up the slack of everyone else”. Nobody ever managed to mesh together when you’re randomly teamed up in such a way. We got the work done, but it was hardly the best work of any individual person. Even with friends, they mostly ended up as silly side-projects to sort of finish while we were hanging out. Granted, there were rare occasions where somehow, we all clicked and had a great time while focusing on the work. When that happens, you get our class group’s (definitely not-at-all embarrassing) silent film rendition of The Picture of Dorian Gray. With lightsabers.
That last example was an exception, not the rule. It shows that cohesion is important. You can have fun with something and you can have good ideas, but it won’t come together unless everyone can integrate themselves into the process and learn to work with others. If this sounds a little hamfisted and on-the-nose, that would be because it is and I needed a segue into Resident Evil Zero.
Resident Evil Zero began its life as a Nintendo 64 exclusive back when Capcom was insistent on spreading Resident Evil’s seed far and wide to anyone walking down the street. It was being developed at the same time as Resident Evil 3 (at the time PlayStation exclusive), Resident Evil CODE: Veronica (at the time a Dreamcast exclusive), Resident Evil 4 (at the time a PlayStation 2 exclusive), and also the Nintendo 64 port of Resident Evil 2. Capcom wanted everyone to have their own special Resident Evil, which is both commendable and downright insane when you think of the output around this time.
Unfortunately, unlike Angel Studios’ incredible Resident Evil 2 port, Capcom themselves quickly realized that Resident Evil Zero wouldn’t fit on a 64MB cart. They didn’t want the game to go to waste, so they instead delayed it for a bit and restarted its development on Nintendo’s next generation console, the Gamecube. This came with various upgrades; there was far more space on discs, and the graphics got a complete overhaul. Most of the initial ideas for gameplay remained unchanged, however, and we’ll be getting into that later on. Since its initial debut on the Gamecube, Resident Evil Zero followed much the same trajectory as REmake. It was exclusive to Nintendo, only receiving a straight Wii port, for 14 years! A year after the Resident Evil HD Remaster, Capcom put out a remaster of Zero.
It has since done quite well for Capcom, selling upwards of 3.75 million copies across the Gamecube and remastered versions. However, despite these fairly strong sales, critical reception is far more divisive than nearly any other classic Resident Evil game. Perhaps rivaled only by CODE: Veronica’s split reception in the current day, Zero remains hotly contested among fans. Anecdotally, I happen to know one person whose favorite Resident Evil game is Zero and one who thinks it’s the worst mainline entry in the series. What could cause such a serious divide, and where do I stand on the matter? Well, grab a seat and hold on tight, because I get the feeling this train is in trouble.
This is part of an on-going series. Be sure to check out the other entries in Survival of Horror!
Resident Evil Zero — November 12, 2002 (GC, Wii, X360, PS3, PC, X1, PS4, NSW)
Warning: This review will spoil the entirety of Resident Evil Zero!
Story
“There are still many unanswered questions about these seemingly unrelated yet intensely traumatic events.”
Resident Evil Zero claims that it answers several major questions related to the history of the T-Virus and its origin. Namely, it promises to tell players where the T-Virus came from and who created it. If you’re a Resident Evil super fan, this is already enticing enough. However, it also takes place only one day before the original Resident Evil, and follows the ill-fated S.T.A.R.S. Bravo Team in their bid for survival before our heroes from Alpha Team show up. This means that the main character is rookie medic Rebecca Chambers, who appeared in the original as Chris’s side character. It should be interesting to see what she survived before the original game!
So, while investigating deadly murders in the Arklay Mountains, the Bravo Team’s helicopter malfunctions and they must make a rough landing in the forest. They spread out and quickly find a couple members of the Military Police slaughtered near their Jeep, and notice a clipboard with information about a dangerous convict. Lieutenant William Coen, sentenced to execution for murdering 23 people, is nowhere to be seen, so they split up and search the forest. Rebecca finds an abandoned train nearby, and hops aboard in her search for Lieutenant Coen.
Things go from bad to worse as, almost immediately, the corpses inside the train car rise and assault her. Rebecca escapes, eventually finding herself face-to-face with the escaped felon. William (who goes by Billy) seems rather blasé about being caught by a S.T.A.R.S. member, noting that they’re now trapped with monsters on the train and need to work together to survive. This is made more apparent when Rebecca is set upon by a mass of disgusting leeches that took the form of a person! Billy saves her life, and they agree to work together. Unfortunately, things get even worse from there.
After hearing some strange opera singing, the two see a youthful man on a hill in the rain in a ratty white cloth. As he sings, the train suddenly begins moving! Now truly trapped, they must attempt to stop the train. After several trials and tribulations involving leech men, zombie dogs and a giant scorpion, Rebecca and Billy manage to hit the train’s brakes a bit too late. Instead, the train hits the end of the line at an Umbrella training facility and derails. Thankfully, both of them are unharmed with strong plot armor! They come across a mural of a higher-up at Umbrella named James Marcus, who looks a lot like the old man that the mass of leeches was imitating on the train.
The pair explore the facility extensively, uncovering all manner of gross monsters and twisted experiments. The facility is brimming with creatures that have escaped their enclosures, including giant spiders, killer monkeys and freakish frog-man things called Hunters. During their time here, the monkeys nearly kill Rebecca and Billy is forced to save her, where he then opens up about the charges levied against him. His platoon was given false info while they were in Africa, and only found a small village of people. Not content with coming up empty-handed, the platoon leader ordered them to gun everyone down and when Billy refuses, he’s knocked out and the next thing he knows, he’s convicted of murdering 23 innocent people. This is impressively dark for the Resident Evil franchise, I’ll give it that!
After a little more exploration, they make their way to a lab opposite an observatory, where they uncover the office of James Marcus. They notice a picture of him graduating in the 1930s and he looks like a twin of the young opera-singing man, who has been wreaking havoc on the facility with his immense grudge for Umbrella.
Eventually, they confront this man, who reveals himself to be… James Marcus himself. See, Marcus created the T-Virus and tested it extensively using his leeches. He was getting a little too heady for Umbrella’s tastes, so he was assassinated by none other than Albert Wesker and William Birkin, the evil dynamic duo. The leeches infested his body, T-Virus and all, and created a mimic of him with his memories and thus, his intense rage for Umbrella. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the opera-singing white smock anime antagonist is, in fact, the Queen Leech mimicking James Marcus. Yes, I said that out loud as I read it. No, I’m not changing it because it’s completely accurate.
They finally take out the Queen Leech with the help of sunlight in a warehouse and escape into the forest. Billy knows that nobody will believe his story, so Rebecca salutes him and he runs off, while Rebecca sees a mansion in the distance and chooses to take shelter there. The End!
Aside from the weird Queen Leech Marcus mimic and its obsession with singing, it’s not too bad, right? It does tell you where the T-Virus came from, who made it, and even how it eventually leaked into the Spencer Estate. That should make this a solid prequel! I admit, however, that I left a fair few things out. Remember what I said before about cohesion? This is right about where things start to come apart at the seams.
For starters, we see how various Bravo Team members meet their grisly fate. It starts off with Edward Dewey, the pilot, crashing through the train window… somehow. Despite being about ten feet or higher off the ground, he comes smashing through, beaten and battered by some horrible zombie dogs. It’s supposed to be tragic, but I never really got to know him enough to feel bad for him. It doesn’t help that I was so puzzled by how he managed such a high jump that I cared less about him and more about that.
However, there’s an even stranger disconnect later on. You (and I suppose Edward at that point) are the only S.T.A.R.S. on the train, which goes for quite some time before reaching the testing facility. After that, you eventually make your way to a cable car that takes you to a rather surprising location: the lab from Resident Evil 2! This puts you far, far, far away from where you started, and yet somehow team captain Enrico Marini shows up here acting like he didn’t just teleport from miles away. He shows up for literally one scene, tells Rebecca to be careful, and just walks off in a random direction. He’s written out of the story in one of the most unintentionally funny lines in all of classic Resident Evil history, in my opinion.
The other, far more egregious failing of the game’s plot is its total inability to connect with the original Resident Evil properly. In Resident Evil Zero, we see Rebecca need saving several times. So far, this tracks with how we see her in the original game. However, we also see incredible moments of badassery from her. She fends off a freaking Tyrant (and potentially kills it later on) completely on her own! She goes through so much, fights tons of monsters, gets armed to the teeth… and then somehow, one day later, she becomes a quiet, scared little girl who can’t even fight a single Hunter without needing Chris to come save her as she cowers in a corner.
Perhaps even worse than that, she knows practically the entire history of the T-Virus and Umbrella by this point! She never once mentions any of it to Chris or any other S.T.A.R.S. she encounters, and at one point even seems confused by the various chemicals with the Umbrella logo on them in the guardhouse. Her character in Resident Evil Zero is almost antithetical to how she’s portrayed in the remake that released mere months before this game. Shinji Mikami once said that he never really liked Rebecca’s character, as he prefers the strong female leads of Resident Evil and dislikes the damsel trope that Rebecca represents. He only added her because his coworkers asked for a character like her.
Despite him not saying that publicly until much later, it almost feels like Resident Evil Zero was a response to Mikami’s sentiments by having Rebecca do strong, great feats… but it then contradicts her entire character elsewhere in the timeline and makes her seem even more ridiculous than before. It’s one thing to have the scared rookie girl trope, it’s quite another to see it knowing that she single-handedly gunned down a Tyrant less than 24 hours earlier. The two portrayals seem almost like different characters entirely, and to say it’s jarring is an understatement.
Unfortunately, that’s the biggest divide in the story department. Resident Evil Zero does deliver on its promise of giving some T-Virus backstory which is compelling all its own, but it leads to an utterly ridiculous antagonist and in telling said story, it gives us a character who I’m still not certain is the same Rebecca Chambers as in the original Resident Evil. I’m not sure exactly what the outline of the story was when Resident Evil Zero was still on the N64, but I have to imagine it gelled a little more with the narrative of other entries at the time.
Graphics
“Hey, Queeny! Feast on this!”
Last month, I lauded REmake for its fabulous visuals. That is one thing that Resident Evil Zero did not compromise on in the slightest, I’m glad to say. In fact, it’s rather commonly accepted that Zero looks even better than the remake, and it is not hard to see why. At the very least, in terms of graphics, Capcom made the right choice to move development from the N64 to the Gamecube. The prototype footage showed a very good-looking N64 title, but the leap from a good-looking N64 title to a marquee graphical powerhouse on the Gamecube is nothing short of astronomical.
Much like how REmake took advantage of the Gamecube’s power as well as using pre-rendered backgrounds to free up resources, Zero follows in its footsteps. The backgrounds are simply a cut above the already-gorgeous remake, with lavish detail in every frame. Similarly, this method of rendering allowed them to make many detailed characters and grotesque enemies, coming together to deliver a truly stunning presentation.
The gap between REmake and Resident Evil Zero’s graphics is even more apparent in the HD remaster. While REmake still looks fantastic, Capcom unfortunately lost the source files for the game’s backgrounds on Gamecube. This wasn’t a problem for Resident Evil Zero, so they were able to upscale said backgrounds and touch them up using the original files. This results in a remaster that only further highlights the improvements made in Zero. It’s not that REmake looks bad or anything, rather that Zero simply looks even better.
As I said, the enemies in the game are wonderfully gross as well. The Eliminators are feral monkeys with patchy white fur and scars on them to denote their ferocity. Leech men are horrendously slimy, wet, shiny monsters that are uncomfortable to even look at as they wriggle and writhe toward you. There are various disgusting insect monsters that will ruin your day with how creepy these crawlies are. The enemy designs are great, with a couple exceptions. Namely, the Queen Leech’s Young Marcus form is hilarious. It’s supposed to be intimidating, but I just can’t help but laugh every time I see him. He’s not scary at all. Whoever thought it was a good design should just… never do that again.
The remaster of Resident Evil Zero is beautiful, as I’ve said. With the source files available for upscaling, the team made the original game’s art direction shine on current consoles and PC. It’s a great-looking game all around, no matter how you play it. This is one of the few categories where RE0 is unequivocally top-shelf. It’s a sight to behold what they accomplished on the Gamecube.
Sound
“It’s dark and silent… But, you can still hear your heartbeat.”
Now we come back to a more contentious category, though to Resident Evil Zero’s credit this is far from the most divisive element. In fact, nothing about the music or voice acting stands out as terrible or incredible. It’s all just… there.
For the music, this time around the composer was one Seiko Kobuchi. Kobuchi worked originally at Konami in the late ’90s before joining Capcom in 2000. Actually, Resident Evil Zero is the only title in the franchise that she fully composed, with most of her time at the company being spent working on various other titles. However, an interesting tidbit is that she did compose one of the offspring of Resident Evil 4’s wild development! You may recognize her work in Haunting Ground, but she also worked on anything from Disney’s Hide & Sneak to Mega Man X7. She even composed a couple tracks for Resident Evil 5 before departing Capcom.
As for the tracks in Zero, truth be told, it’s all simply fine. I would say that there are perhaps two or three standout tracks, but honestly aside from that, the majority of the OST is fitting but forgettable. That’s not to dig at Kobuchi’s skill, as the music fits the tone of the game quite well! It’s actually a good, well-fitting OST. Merely, I think that it’s not as memorable outside of the game. However, I feel that the two or three tracks that I can remember offhand are really good.
“Training Main Hall” is, just as it says, the theme of the main hall after the train derails. It’s dark and moody, with a constant deep bass undertone emphasizing the atmosphere immediately once you enter the hall from the sewers. This is accompanied by various brass and strings, and even some haunting vocalizers for good measure. It’s a fairly simple track, but it’s stunningly effective in setting the mood for the second main hub of the game. It’s not necessarily loud or abrasive, but it’s definitely unsettling.
By contrast to the main hall’s brooding theme, “Adrenaline Rush” is a polar opposite beast. This piece plays when Rebecca is separated from Billy and hanging by a thread over a precipice. The anxiety-inducing percussion and synthesized bassline mesh with high-pitched strings and a brass melody that often rises to instill the feeling of anticipation and trepidation. It accurately mimics the panic that sets in when someone is under immediate and intense pressure, and it helped heighten a highly stressful rescue sequence.
When uncovering a strange mystery, you need to have proper musical accompaniment. “Study Room” uses piano and strings to give off the impression of a place that is both calm and temporarily safe, as well as strange. It’s used when the player finds the picture of the young man in the white cloth in an office, yet the photo is from around 60 years prior. “Study Room” is a lovely little piece that mirrors the confusion that the player feels when trying to figure out this odd occurrence.
Unfortunately, much like the music, the voice acting is just fine. Again, it isn’t bad, and everyone involved turns in a decent performance. It just simply doesn’t feel like anyone has a standout role, with one exception that we’ll get to. Rebecca is good as a rookie cop trying to seem tough at first when encountering a wanted felon, and Billy’s carefree attitude about the situation at the start is pretty entertaining. William Birkin and Albert Wesker also make appearances in the game as observers, and it’s so nice to hear Richard Waugh’s voice again as Wesker. Love it!
That said, there is that classic Resident Evil cheese spilled into this game through and through, especially when it comes to Billy. He knows he’s in a series that was built upon wonderful B-movie goodness and he acts like it. Seeing him snidely undermine Rebecca’s attempts to intimidate him in the beginning is honestly hilarious, and he opens up to be a much deeper character later on. I definitely think if there’s a standout role, it has to be Lieutenant Coen.
Sadly, despite Billy’s best efforts, he can’t make the soundtrack magically more memorable, nor the other performances in the game. I want to stress one more time that I don’t think either the OST or the acting are bad, simply that they only work for the game and little else outside it. Both are serviceable, but both could also be so much more.
Gameplay
“Nothing in our training could have prepared us for the nightmare that ensued. We didn’t stand a chance.”
This, right here. This is the one. This is the section that splits this game’s discussion cleanly in half. When you see discussion of Resident Evil Zero in any capacity, it’s going to be about the different gameplay systems that it has, for better or worse depending on your perspective. This is going to be tough for me, because I know where I stand after replaying the game. Resident Evil Zero has lots of good ideas for its gameplay, and I want so badly to love it, but playing it quickly turns from a fun experiment to a dreadful slog.
On the surface, it seems like the average Resident Evil game. You explore a location, solve puzzles and battle monsters. You find keys of various shapes and sizes to unlock other parts of the several areas in the game, and eventually you find your way out of the nightmare. However, within the first ten minutes or so, you start to see the first of many significant changes to the average gameplay formula.
Once you meet Billy and he saves Rebecca from some leeches, the game suddenly becomes ostensibly a two-character campaign. I don’t mean that in the traditional Resident Evil sense of similar campaigns but as different characters. Rather, I mean you play as both characters at the same time. You can switch control between them at any time, and the other character is controlled by simple AI that you can tell to follow, wait or attack.
This is called partner zapping, not to be confused with Resident Evil 2’s zapping system. With the press of a button, no matter where either character is, you can switch over to them. If they’re in a room and under attack by a zombie, however, you won’t be able to swap to them until you rescue them. This doesn’t happen often in regular gameplay, but it’s something to be made aware of! The game often tries to separate Rebecca and Billy to make use of the partner zapping, leading to some interesting puzzles and moments of tension when they can’t rely on each other for help.
With two characters, that means you’re going to be managing two inventories. Unlike other games in the series, there are no inventory upgrades. Instead, you keep the same 12 slots between both characters the entire game. When the two are near each other, you can exchange items and weapons between them. Rebecca also has a mixing kit with her, and she’s unique in that only she knows how to mix herbs between her and Billy. It’s an interesting wrinkle to the gameplay when you’re in need of healing items. Another glorious addition is the ability to use and combine items without the need to fit them into your inventory first! This needed to be standard, and yet Resident Evil Zero remains the only classic game to allow it.
Actually, both characters have several differences that set them apart from each other. Rebecca can mix herbs and chemicals with her mixing kit. Billy is much stronger than Rebecca, and can take way more damage. Seriously, Rebecca has about as much fortitude in this game as a piece of paper in a hurricane. She can go to Danger status in two or three zombie bites! It’s so obnoxious that if you don’t play as Billy whenever possible, you’re actively making the game harder for yourself.
Another weird difference is that, in a certain puzzle, you need to play a piano in order to open a hidden door. Sounds familiar, right? Except for some reason, this time around it has to be Billy since Rebecca doesn’t know how. I know anyone who’s played REmake or the original just furrowed their brows, because I did too. Somehow, Rebecca can’t be bothered to play a piano here while it takes about a minute of practice for her to bust out some Beethoven the very next night. I understand that it’s probably supposed to be some funny reversal of expectations, but it makes so little sense that it rings hollow and is more annoying than amusing. This is another example of the total lack of cohesion I mentioned before.
Sadly, things are only about to get worse from here. Having 12 inventory slots sounds like a lot at first, since you often only get 6–10 depending on the game you’re playing. The issues here are twofold: firstly, a lot of items and weapons use up two item slots when they previously did not. The grenade launcher, the hunting gun, the shotgun and worst of all, this stupid key item called the Hookshot all take up multiple spaces in your inventory. The Hookshot in particular is an enormous pain in the ass, but we’ll get to that in a bit. Right now, the fish to fry is the way that Resident Evil Zero handles item boxes.
It doesn’t. At all.
You read that right. Resident Evil Zero doesn’t have item boxes of any kind. Instead, you can choose to drop an item literally almost anywhere in the game, and in doing so you can come back later if you need it. On the surface, this doesn’t sound necessarily bad. It’s different, sure, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done properly to make it fun. The problem is that Zero fails at this and because of it, other parts of the game suffer immensely in my opinion.
For starters, Resident Evil Zero is one of the most location-rich entries in the series. You go to all sorts of places, from the train to the training facility, to a church with a lab underneath it, to the marshaling yard from Resident Evil 2, to a water treatment facility. It essentially becomes one enormous long chain of areas, and I think the problem of not having item boxes should become immediately apparent. If you forget even one key item further in the game, you have to navigate almost the entirety of the game again to pick it up, then trudge all the way back to where you need to use it.
You think that won’t happen, but I promise you that it will. The Hookshot is used early on in the train portion of Resident Evil Zero, so you may think little of it. However, this is a big mistake, as you will need it at several points throughout the game. It lies on the ground for large stretches of time in the main hall if you drag everything up there, only for you to need it in the chapel nearby. Okay, that’s annoying but not horrible. You take it to the chapel and use it, and then you drop it there since you assume that’s the end of it. Congratulations, you’re about to take a death march back to here later. You need it one more time later on to access cable car controls, and getting to the chapel from here is a dangerous mess of leech men and zombies if you tried avoiding anyone earlier.
In fact, I know it’s a messed-up mechanic because the level design has to turn to the impossible for the dropping system to even function. After you escape the training facility and go through the lab, you take a cable car all the way to the marshalling yard from Resident Evil 2. This means that you have gone from the mountains in the forest all the way into the city by this point. Here, you encounter an elevator that takes you to different floors and areas, including… the very same room the train crashed in. At the very start of the training facility. In the mountains more than three miles away.
The inventory system is such an incredible hindrance that the developers had to implement a magic elevator to teleport you to the beginning area in case you forgot some items. For a series that oftentimes has level design as a central focus, I’m sorry to say that this is an amateur move. The problem should’ve been identified much earlier on before they had to slap an ineffective Band-Aid on it. I know this might seem like a nitpick, but it really does bother me how poorly-implemented the dropping system is. It’s by far the most crippling thing in an otherwise decent Resident Evil game. With item boxes, I sincerely would enjoy this game much more than I do now, despite its other faults.
It’s frustrating because aside from the dropping mechanic, I could live with the fact that more items take up double the space they used to. I could live with the long chain of connecting areas. Neither of these would be even remotely a problem with item boxes. As it stands, your choices are to make multiple trips through an area lugging everything from hub to hub, or to risk it and not take everything when you may need it later. I’m sure there’s a way to do this mechanic properly, but Resident Evil Zero misses the mark so hard it brutally kneecaps the entire game.
And much like someone with a messed up leg, I had to hobble to the finish on this one. The train section is a fantastic slice of gameplay, but then as the game goes on you start to accrue more items and by the time you’re at the end, I was dragging myself to the goal because I was so unmotivated to play the game. It’s unfortunate, because with the experiments of the partner zapping system and the item dropping mechanic, there’s absolutely room to make a solid game. However, the item dropping experiment is handled so poorly that it actively interferes with the rest of the game for the entire experience. It’s honestly just sad.
Extras/Replay Value
“I’ll use my charm to distract her majesty!”
While playing the game may be something of a kick in the pants at times, at the very least Resident Evil Zero has a few extras to keep you entertained after the first time through. There are different difficulties of course, but also a fun little mini-game called Leech Hunter. In this mode, Rebecca and Billy are plopped into the main hall of the training facility with handguns and first-aid sprays. They have to run around and find 100 Leech Charms scattered throughout the facility.
Leech Charms are special, as you cannot drop them when you pick them up and they are color-coded. There are 50 green charms that only Rebecca can pick up, and 50 blue charms for Billy. Depending on how many charms you have when you leave the facility, you can unlock different stuff for the main game. The funniest reward is if you start the game, immediately turn around and exit the door. If you find up to 29 charms (including 0!), you unlock extra SMG ammo within the main game.
From 30 up to 59 charms, you unlock unlimited handgun ammo. 60–89, unlimited Hunting Gun ammo. 90–99 charms gets you a gorgeous magnum to find in the train and use, though it isn’t infinite ammo. However, if you manage to find all 100 charms, that problem disappears because that unlocks infinite ammo for all weapons. Yes, this even applies to weapons like the molotov cocktail! Much like Resident Evil 3, it’s a nice change of pace to have unlockables behind a game like this rather than a time limit like most entries in the series.
That said, of course this game has an infinite rocket launcher. Beat Resident Evil Zero in 3.5 hours or less and this bad boy is yours for the taking! I have yet to beat this game within that time frame, as I always get lost or sidetracked carting everything around. However, it’s nice to know that it’s still available for any stalwart adventurer that looks for a challenge.
There are also tons and tons of unlockable costumes. In the Gamecube and Wii versions, there are merely three costumes: Billy’s “Jacket” outfit that makes him seem like he’s going to a high-end club, and then Rebecca’s “Leather” and “Cowgirl” outfits. The leather outfit is Rebecca’s club attire as well, and the cowgirl outfit is taken right from REmake, where she had it as an alternate costume as well. In the HD remaster, however, they took an opportunity to stuff the game full of costumes, mainly for Rebecca. However, these are all actually DLC, so your mileage may vary, but I must say that I love a majority of these.
Billy gets two extra outfits in the remaster, one of “Wolf Force” which turns him into a commando-looking type, and one called “Cody” which gives him a blue and white prison outfit to match Cody from the Street Fighter series. Rebecca, on the other hand, receives a Capcom cheerleader outfit from Resident Evil: Deadly Silence, her Nurse costume from Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D, her alternate costume from Resident Evil Director’s Cut, her basketball outfit from Resident Evil 2, her outfit from the original Resident Evil and perhaps most cool of all, her S.T.A.R.S. uniform from the scrapped Resident Evil Zero prototype on Nintendo 64.
In addition, Capcom held an ingame T-shirt contest for the remaster. They added (as paid DLC, of course) the top three designs to the game, and an additional one for free for anyone who participated. After that, Capcom artist Shinkiro added another t-shirt design. Then they added even more t-shirts, seven in total, as Japanese-only additions. I love the fanservice, don’t get me wrong, but Billy has three outfits and Rebecca has a staggering eight outfits and 12 t-shirts! It’s incredibly lopsided, but at the end of the day, I still love all the various designs they added to the remaster.
Eagle-eyed observers may have noticed I said Rebecca has eight extra outfits. If you count up the Leather outfit and her DLC outfits, that only makes seven. However, another addition to the Resident Evil Zero HD Remaster is Wesker Mode. In this mode, you play through the game as normal with one change: Billy is replaced with Resident Evil 5-era Albert Wesker and Rebecca has a special outfit with the same mind-control device on her chest that… well, I wouldn’t want to spoil that upcoming surprise just yet, as much as Capcom loved to with that game’s marketing.
Wesker has several tricks up his sleeve that serve as a fun way to experience the game. Firstly, he has his fast dash from Resident Evil 5, allowing him to sprint through enemies as needed. His other major advantage is a rather interesting new ability. Essentially, he gets, and I swear I’m not making this up, death ray eyes. It’s an area-of-effect in front of him where, if you charge up his attack and release, he will cause an energy explosion from his eyes, popping the heads of any zombies near his front and causing tons of damage to any other monsters. It’s so much fun. In addition, beating Wesker Mode unlocks Rebecca’s outfit from said mode in the main game. Et voila, eight outfits.
That just about covers it for the extras. While the main game is a slog, it becomes much more tolerable with infinite ammo or murder eyes to undo the frustrations. These modes alleviate several of the issues with the gameplay, as infinite ammo means you don’t have to mess around with the inventory system as much and by extension, the item dropping mechanic. Needless to say, the extras are both fun and actually help the replayability of the game.
Conclusion
“You were so happy just a few hours ago…”
I swear I want to like Resident Evil Zero. It’s a gorgeous game, it has an interesting premise and answers a couple questions regarding the T-Virus that I was excited to uncover as a fan. The team clearly cared about stuffing it full of extras originally, and that extends to the remaster that adds loads of fanservice costumes and an entirely new mechanic in Wesker Mode. Unfortunately, the base game has two major problems that prohibit me from enjoying my time with it.
The story goes in some strange places, but the worse offender is that Resident Evil Zero doesn’t mesh with REmake in the slightest. Rebecca is all but a different character between the two games, even down to gameplay differences like her not knowing the piano in one game while being able to play Beethoven in the other 24 hours later.
Worse still are the experiments gone wrong. I love the concept of the partner system and I think they use it to great effect. That’s not what I’m referring to, as I really think there are cool new ideas for the series in this game. Instead, it’s the other major mechanic that kills it all. I know I harped on it a lot above, but I cannot stress enough how much the item dropping system affects Resident Evil Zero. It’s improperly done in such a way that it forces the game world to bend around in impossible ways to accommodate it. It’s always good to experiment, but sometimes experiments fail. In this instance, Resident Evil Zero failed spectacularly in such a way that it tanks the entire experience. I applaud them for trying, but sometimes trying simply isn’t enough.
