Resident Evil is famous for popularizing survival horror games. It’s even credited with inventing the term ‘survival horror’ to describe its gameplay. Across its 21-year history, the franchise has gone from strength to strength, and has had its ups and downs as it’s shifted from one gameplay style to another.
That said, for a horror series, Resident Evil is just as notorious for its goofy scenes. For every creeping zombie or hissing Regenerator, there’s something that just makes the player laugh, cringe, or stare in disbelief. So, here are the 10 silliest things that have happened in Capcom’s zombie-killing series in order from kind of dumb to outright ridiculous.
10 Mother Miranda's Arguing Offspring
Lady Dimitrescu would probably have taken this spot alone. However, her design does actually harken back to an actual Japanese ghoul. While the Hachishakusama isn’t usually as sexualized as Village’s curvy Nemesis equivalent, she fits the bill from the white dress to the wide hat.
Instead, it’s her squabble with her ‘family’ over Ethan that gets her on the list. The bickering Baker family in Resident Evil: Biohazard worked as they were a reference to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In Village, it’s not so effective. Especially as Heisenberg’s best crack towards Lady D’s condescension was to ‘grow a few more feet’. Nice comeback.
9 A Tactic-Less Tactical Shooter
While Capcom tailored Street Fighter 5 towards the e-Sports market, they also tried to do the same with their premier zombie franchise. Resident Evil Vs Street Fighter could’ve been a blast. Instead, they tried to enter the tactical shooter market with Resident Evil: Umbrella Corps.
The game did get tournament play. But by then the game was dead on arrival. The dull maps, brain-dead AI, choppy frame rate, and wonky gameplay killed it with players in general. While the only sure-fire tactics multiplayer aficionados found to get around their foes was to break out the melee weapons. Players could withstand multiple gunshots, but not one blow from axes like the Brainer.
8 The Sincerest Form Of Flattery
Resident Evil 5 is generally regarded as a rather solid game…when played co-op. Chris Redfield’s partner Sheva wasn’t so smart when she was left to the AI. But, if the hero had a lady friend to fight against the questionable quality of foes in the game, the main villain Wesker needed one to fight back with too.
Enter Jill Valentine. Prior to the game’s story, Jill had gone MIA following an encounter with Wesker. On her return, she was being controlled by her former STARS superior via a device on her chest. He also gave her a bottle of blonde hair dye and a purple tactical suit. The result made her look like Nina Williams from Tekken, only less interesting than either that game’s femme fatale or her original design.
7 Horn Section By The Porta-Potties
To make up for delays in Resident Evil 2’s development, Capcom commissioned a re-release of the first game titled Resident Evil: Director’s Cut. It would even feature a new soundtrack by Mamoru Samuragochi- known as the ‘Japanese Beethoven’ for composing top quality music despite having hearing problems.
Except it turned out to be a lie. Most of Samuragochi’s best known work was actually made by Takashi Niigaki, who exposed Samuragochi back in 2014. Unfortunately, the music from Director’s Cut was actually made by the man himself, and it was a downgrade. The Mansion Basement music is especially notorious for its misplaced MIDIs making an originally haunting tune sound like a bad night after a pork & beans feast.
6 Jill Sandwich
Every line from the original Resident Evil could count as an example in this list. The delivery of Wesker’s warning (“Stop! Don’t open that door!”), Chris Redfield’s bon mot near the end of his run (“He’s sleeping with the ultimate failure!”), and the comic timing of Enrico’s response to Jill (“Is that voice… Enrico’s?!” “… Yeah?”).
Then there’s Barry Burton. This one character has all the original game’s most notorious lines. The most infamous of them all is when he saves Jill Valentine from getting crushed, where he declares “That was too close! You were almost a Jill Sandwich!”. The line has entered meme-dom since then, getting referenced in other games and media. Like the ‘Jill’s Sandwiches’ restaurant in Capcom’s other zombie game Dead Rising.
5 Alfred Ashford
Resident Evil: Code Veronica hasn’t aged too well. Its gameplay is considered a little too hard and stiff, even when compared to its other tank-controlled brethren. One of its villains, Alfred Ashford, was another drawback. On the one hand, his deranged behavior and awkward laugh could be genuinely creepy at times.
On the other, his wonky, posh accent and clothes made him more comical than fearful. His twin sister Alexia fared a little better, until it was revealed that she was Alfred in disguise while the real deal was literally chilling in Antarctica. People probably shouldn’t expect a remake of this game anytime soon.
4 Tofu Survivor
Both the original Resident Evil 2 and its modern-day remake had an alternate mode called ‘The 4th Survivor’. If players could beat all the main campaigns, they could play as HUNK as he tries to make it out of Raccoon City before it gets obliterated. He just has three guns and two health items to keep him going, with no other items to replace them. The player either survives or dies.
Now replace HUNK with a giant chunk of tofu, and the player has Tofu Survivor. It’s the same game, except the tofu only has a knife, and a wider hitbox for zombies to strike. It even gets redder with each hit it takes. As goofy as it is, it does provide a decent challenge for the player.
3 The Salazar Robot
Resident Evil 4 also offers plenty of goofy stuff to riff on. Suplexing monks, ‘ballistics’, that dog, and more. Ramon Salazar, the cackling, diminutive castellan, would be the pinnacle of it. Except there is one thing sillier than him. The giant statue of himself that he had built within one of his towers.
Not only that, but he made it mechanical, so it could lift people up to platforms for some reason. That’s already a convoluted way to move things around. But, to take the cake, it can break free and chase after trespassers, destroying the whole tower in the process before falling to its doom. No price is too high to deal with intruders, apparently.
2 The Opera Singing Leech Man
From being an N64 project to a Gamecube release, Resident Evil 0’s journey from concept to game wasn’t a smooth one. The development team put a lot of work into the game. Sadly, it wasn’t a great success, and most players tend to pass over it in favor of the Resident Evil 1 remake. So, they missed out on 0’s main villain, James Marcus.
He had experimented with the original T-virus using leeches. While working on his final experiment, Queen Leech, he was assassinated, and his body was dumped. The Queen Leech then absorbed Marcus’ body, taking on its identity and memories, and orchestrated a revenge plot by attacking labs with leeches. Which it would control by singing opera to them. That made sense to someone within Capcom at the time.
1 The Ada Clone
Capcom really wanted Resident Evil 6 to be the biggest, most bombastic game in the series. It did achieve that, for better or worse. There was plenty of action, from rooftop motorcycle rides to jet fighter combat. All so it could bring down its main villain, Derek Simmons. He had many goals. The dumbest was that, since he couldn’t charm Ada Wong, the series’ alluring secret agent, he would make his own Ada instead.
After a decade’s worth of work, he’d turn his willing assistant Carla Radames into an exact duplicate of her. The result just made the plot more convoluted as the player had to determine which Ada was the real one, right up until one turned into a white glob monster. Chances are that was the fake one, but the next Resident Evil game could end up changing that for kicks.