Resident Evil - Ending Jill’s Run
I have finished the Jill Valentine run of Resident Evil. Only 24 years after it was originally released. The controls took a little getting used to, but in the end, they felt as natural as any modern game. That being said, over the course of playing the whole game it becomes readily apparent the game is intended to be played with tank controls. The updated layout is easier to get used to but there are still hiccups that probably cannot be removed without reimagining the game (kind of how RE 2 Remake does). When pressing up always moves the player forward, the abrupt changes in camera probably don’t appear as jarring.
Barry’s betrayal starts out being dramatic, but by the end he has let Jill down so many times, it just becomes funny. Oh no Barry is saying he got our back. Can’t wait to get left out in the cold again by him. Still, I ended up giving him his gun back, since I knew that was necessary for the good ending. I think that might have been the only time Barry was not lying to Jill. Playing a game that is almost two and a half decades old means, there are some spoilers I will not be able to avoid. This holds more true of a game as popular as Resident Evil. Barry, Wesker, Jill, Chris, etc., are common names to anyone who has played video games in the past two decades. Instead of detracting from the game, prior knowledge of the game gives more context to some of the plot points. I thoroughly enjoyed experiencing firsthand some of the situations I had heard about so much. The dogs that jump out the windows only when you go in one certain direction gave me a good scare even though I knew it was going to happen one of the times I walked through the hallway. The anticipation of when it will happen kept me on edge. The first time I saw the angry red zombie got my heart pumping. And then there were things that happen as a part of the metagame. Running out of the ammo at inopportune moments. Not having antidote when Jill gets bitten by a snake, having full pockets when trying to pick up key objects. Those things are not explicitly commented upon, but they are just as essential to Resident Evil.
Resident Evil continues its commitment to subverting boss battles. Lisa is another example. She is still invincible so there is no use attacking her directly. Nothing happens to her that makes her vulnerable to any of Jill’s weapons. Instead, we need to be using the environment to neutralize her. Here it translates into Zeldaesque pushing of the statues to open up a coffin. The mental anguish of seeing her dead family finally pushes her off the edge, literally. According to the lore of Resident Evil Lisa Trevor is the daughter of the owner of this mansion. The whole family was held hostage by the Umbrella Corp. and experimented on. The parents succumbed to the experimentation, but Lisa survived. She has become invincible from all the viral infusions she has gotten, but it has also turned her into a hideous monster. She roams the mansion looking for her parents now. I think the coffins either contain her parents or help her realize they are dead. It is enough to drive her to jump off the platform into the dark depths below. While Jill tries to move the statues around, Barry keeps Lisa’s attention by constantly shooting her. Man was I glad I trusted him one last time and gave him his gun back.
The Mansion is the representation of Jill’s mental state. When she walks into the front hall after surviving the attack in the jungle, she is a little scared and out of breath but still alert. She has not been exposed to the horrors that lurk here and for the most part still holds strongly to her sanity. The mansion is a little old and unused, but it still looks magnificent, untouched even. As Jill struggles to survive the night, she sees the monsters Umbrella has created. She sees her colleagues die and disappear. Even worse, she comes to realize the ones remaining alive cannot be trusted. At the same time the player is moving through the mansion and into the residence. The sheen of the mansion gives way to the unkempt gardens, and then to the dilapidated shack. This is followed by a broken-down residence. As we move through the game, environment gets worse and worse. The residence is followed by narrow, incomplete tunnels, and the labs full of shattered and broken things. Jill does not talk much in the game. And it would definitely be impractical to have her break down in the middle of the game. Instead, the developers choose to represent the decline in her mental state by showing the progressive deterioration of her surroundings. The insanity effects of later survival horrors (like Eternal Darkness and Amnesia) were not possible on the Playstation, but I really enjoyed this workaround. The player feels things getting worse further the game goes. Whenever faced by limitations of the hardware, the developers at Capcom came up with genius workarounds that ultimately made Resident Evil a better game.
The mansion is also symbolic of Umbrella Corporation. They present a clean image to the world and manufacture family products for everyday use. When you dig a little deeper, the sheen of wholesomeness rubs off and the ugliness of the company comes into full view. There is something sinister about how there is no face of the company. We never see a spokesperson, CEO, or the owner. Other than the logo there is nothing representing Umbrella Corp. All the villains and goons are taking orders from someone higher up. Who these decision makers are is never shown. I can just imagine a board of directors who meet to discuss how the stock is doing and what government contracts they can get for weaponizing a virus. Then going home like they have not just played with numerous human lives. It is more believable and ultimately much more evil than believing Wesker did everything out of his own accord.
Speaking of Wesker, he is apparently at his most subdued in the first game. I have been told he gets flanderized as the series goes deeper. He tends to double cross everyone in his path. Umbrella human resource department will do better to remember not to trust a man who wears sunglasses at night. What he does later on, I will hopefully find out as I play through the rest of the series. Here, Wesker is forcing Barry to do his bidding by keeping his family hostage. At the same time, he has been screwing Umbrella over by releasing the Tyrant. Barry has had enough. He decides to stop shafting Jill and comes back to shoot Wesker, but he is too late to stop the Tyrant from being released.
Jill makes a run for it. On the way she sees Chris locked in one of the cells, and she has the MO disks to get him out. When they have all made their way to the surface, Tyrant shows up again. He is the final boss, but he is promptly dispatched with a rocket launcher.
To say the game holds up is a massive understatement. The survival horror genre was made popular by this game and it still shows. It is a truly enjoyable experience. Every door being opened made me think about what may be behind it. I was always counting my bullets, doing the mental math on how far I was from my stash. I found myself trying to keep track of where I saw each zombie. And then the game threw new enemies at me to mess my count. Every lunge a zombie took made my heart jump to my mouth.
I will have to take a break before I can start the next run. I think playing with Chris is mostly the same as playing with Jill. I don’t see myself finishing a Chris run right now, but I will definitely play to see how much it differs. I can see myself coming back to Resident Evil in the future. At the same time, it really makes me want to play the rest of the games in the series.
06-07-2020
