Of all the Resident Evil remakes to burst forth from Capcom like zombie-spawn in recent years, I am most intrigued by the just-unveiled Resident Evil Veronica. The original game, released in 2000 for sixth generation consoles, is an important entry in the series, but it’s also a mess that probably stands the most to benefit from a shiny coat of RE Engine paint.
Unlike Resident Evils 2, 3, and 4, which have all aged well, Code: Veronica is a tedious affair in this day and age. It features obnoxious backtracking, bullet-sponge bosses, and a clunky shared inventory that can actually lead to the loss of key items. That said, it does open with a cutscene featuring Claire Redfield performing gun fu and running from helicopter turret fire. (If you haven’t seen this piece of 2000s-era Matrix-inspired silliness, go watch it now.)
The remake’s much creepier trailer sees Claire entering a Parisian hostel owned by an elderly lady clearly voiced by a young person. This disconnect aside, the trailer appears to show what happened to Claire before a helicopter attempted to mow her down. I’d go so far as to assume that Veronica is going to make what was previously an intro playable and more developed, which bodes well for the game. There’s an awful lot to develop in Code: Veronica, which featured one of franchise’s weirder plots (even by Resident Evil standards).
Beware, dear reader, as spoilers for the original Code: Veronica (now nearly three decades old) lie below. That said, if we’re lucky, the remake will put a new spin on all of this stuff.
In a nutshell, Code: Veronica opens with Claire imprisoned on an island fortress after her Paris mission goes south. The island is owned by a guy named Alfred Ashford who has dissociative identity disorder and masquerades as his twin sister Alexia, who has been cryogenically frozen and implanted with the T-Veronica virus. There are a slew of cross-dressing and mildly incestous scenes between the Ashford siblings which have not aged well, and while I don’t expect Capcom to excel at refreshing these problematic bits for a modern era, it’s probably decent practise before they tackle the Africa of Resident Evil 5.
While Claire runs around dealing with the Ashfords, she gathers a companion named Steve Burnside, who in my opinion is the most annoying Resident Evil sidekick in the entire series. He constantly complains, voice acts with the aura of an early ’90s anime dub, and is either attempting to smooch Claire or checking out her ass, as was the case in the retelling of Code: Veronica that took place in 2009’s Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles. (How Steve will be rehabilitated in this remake, I have no idea, but I’m hopeful after Capcom managed to remake Resident Evil 3‘s Carlos Oliveria into something more than just a “flirty Latino man” stereotype.)
But that’s not all that Code: Veronica has in store. The game ends with Claire and Steve leaving the Ashfords’ island and going to an Antarctica military facility, where they fight an Albert Wesker who has Agent Smith powers (once again, Code: Veronica was clearly Matrix-coded). There’s a fight on a plane with a Tyrant that’s admittedly cool, and Chris Redfield also shows up to retrace his sister’s steps, making Code: Veronica the only mainline Resident Evil game where the two siblings have screentime together.
These issues aside, Code: Veronica is important for serving as a quasi-culmination of now-forgotten plot threads that appeared in the original Resident Evils 2 and 3. Both of those games hinted that Umbrella Europe was the company’s HQ, and portrayed Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine as heading there for a climatic confrontation. If you grew up playing Resident Evil (or played through all of the entries chronologically like I did), then it was impossible to not feel invested in this plot hook, as it promised a game full of old S.T.A.R.S friends blasting through a plethora of European zombies with gusto.
Alas, we never got this game. Capcom seemingly attempted to manifest it with their multiple prototypes for Resident Evil 4 – one of which featured Leon invading an Umbrella castle and fighting a ghostly appaition called the Hook Man – but when we finally did get Resident Evil 4, it had been rebooted into a mostly self-contained story about Leon suplexing Las Plagas cultists. The fall of Umbrella was dictated in the opening text crawl, and attributed not to a badass takedown of the bioweapon empire by our protagonists, but to stock prices plummeting in the aftermath of the Racooon City incident.
Code: Veronica, for better or for worse, is the nearest we ever got to this final showdown. Even it it ends in Antarctica with ninja Wesker, it at least starts with a semblance of prior plot threads, toying with our dreams of seeing the Resident Evil gang in Europe taking down Umbrella. And if Capcom truly wants to make this fan happy, they can expound upon this fan service. I doubt they’ll create an entirely new timeline, as some of my comrades in the RPS Treehouse have speculated, but seeing as how these remakes seem to be presented as the now-canonised versions of the franchise’s story, who knows. Obviously, the trailer hints at new possibilities, and some folks are speculating about the inclusion of Hunk as the guy who grabs Claire from behind. (That said, it may just be Rodrigo, a character in the original, wearing a mask similar to Hunk’s.)
Let’s be real – the only way that Capcom has churned out so many Resident Evils since 2017 is via asset reuse. If Hunk is in the game, his model will be ripped straight from Resident Evil Requiem, and I’m pretty sure the spider enemies, military turrets, and Wesker-wannabe Zeno in that game were all created in preparation for Veronica. The annual Resident Evil machine churns on, in other words, but at least Veronica is a very intriguing churning of the colossus. There’s much here that can be improved upon and elucidated – and hell, at the very least, I daresay they cannot make Steve Burnside any worse.
