Resident Evil 3: Nemesis

Traz melhorias mecânicas muito relevantes pra franquia e introduz um de seus personagens mais marcantes e aterrorizantes. A ameaça de Nemesis é atemporal por conta da sua imprevisibilidade.

Como ponto negativo, no entanto, Resi 3 é quase que uma segunda (terceira?) campanha do 2, uma vez que compartilha cenários e se passa em momentos praticamente idênticos.

Gonna be one of "those" guys and say I do view Resident Evil: Code Veronica [バイオハザード コード：ベロニカ] as the real third game in the main series, and I often refer to this game by a truncated title: Resident Evil: Nemesis. The main thing to me is that Nemesis doesn't much advance the plot from the original Resident Evil [バイオハザード]. Resident Evil 2 already has a "File" for Chris's diary, in which he mentions heading off to Europe to hit Umbrella's HQ; we can assume Jill tagged along, so Nemesis really just exists as a means of showing how Jill found her way out of Raccoon City. 2 already expanded the T-virus threat to the streets of Raccoon, as well as introducing Claire (who will be the protagonist for most of CV), Leon (who will be the protagonist for Resident Evil 4's transition from virus to parasites, and from horror to action), and Ada (who operates behind-the-scenes and is integral to the end of the Redfield/Wesker story in Resident Evil 5 [バイオハザード5] and Resident Evil 6). In terms of the series as a whole, writing from 2021, the story of Nemesis is less significant for Jill than it is for... well, Nemesis. The Nemesis is introduced as a new brand of Tyrant powered with a super-special parasite; similar parasites would be used for the rest of the series in bullshit borderline-magic ways. While I don't expressly dislike any particular game in the franchise's main story (even 6 at least has fun gameplay), I never much cared for how parasites stole the limelight from the viruses. Even the beloved remade Resident Evil [バイオハザード] is less-fun to me than the 1996 original, largely because I feel the Lisa Trevor shit is extraneous, though ironically I do respect how it better ties the Nemesis parasite to the T- and G-viruses - indeed, I was strongly against the new lore in Nemesis until I played RE1make, and the harmony between both games' stupid fucking parasite nonsense helped me better appreciate the parasites, and prepare me to better enjoy 4 and 5.

My feelings for Nemesis are terribly complex. I first got into the franchise through Resident Evil: Apocalypse, which starred the Nemesis as a major enemy, and who was extremely cool to my ten-year-old self, as I'd never before seen a giant zombie with a rocket launcher. But it would not be long before I would play Resident Evil: Deadly Silence, my third game after 4 and Resident Evil: Outbreak [バイオハザード アウトブレイク], but the first I actually played to the end, and replayed several times. It was enough to make me dislike the action focus of the Anderson movies, but I was also really feeling the lack of stereotypical B-movie creatures like the Yawn, Black Tiger, and Plant 42, and I thought the Tyrant's clawed arm was a hell of a lot cooler than the conventional weaponry of the film Nemesis (and later, when I finally played Nemesis's game, I would see that he mutates quite a bit, reminiscent of Birkin and Mr. X, which would make me respect Nemesis more, but Paul W. S. Anderson less). As far as the game itself, I appreciated the dodge mechanic, which would infrequently work when I tried to use it, but would often activate when I'm shitting myself versus Hunters, and led to a couple cool moments of Jill teleporting around the lizardmen's claws while I try to get some shotgun shells fired off. The environmental hazards were a neat touch, allowing me to save a few dozen bullets by shooting one into an oil drum and taking down several zombos, rather than making a choice between wasting twenty rounds or risking popping a few off to stun zombies and run past them. And the ammo-crafting was a very nice touch, as I was able to make a shitload of shotgun shells and ultimately kill almost every zombie in Raccoon City before making my way to the Dead Factory for the final showdown; I often enjoyed using the "infinite ammo" cheat code in RE2 for a quick run through the game, destroying everything in Leon and Claire's path just for the hell of it - RE3 has no such cheat, but the ammo-crafting and its ability to level-up allows for a decent, fair simulation... if not a little too game-breaking! Unfortunately, the dodge, environmental hazards, and ammo-crafting turn Nemesis into far more of an action game than past installments, paving the way for 4 to drop the "horror" almost entirely (and definitely do away with the "survival" by adding ammo drops to fallen enemies!), culminating in the oft-maligned 6, a rather fun (if flawed) action game, but very weak on the horror (and extremely silly in its narrative...). To me, you can't hate the TPS games while also liking Nemesis... so my plan is to be hypercritical of Nemesis to allow myself to shit on later games if I so choose (which backfires, as I enjoy 5 WAY too much...!).

This game introduces a number of QoL factors, which improve upon the series. For one, you can skip many cutscenes now, instead of just FMVs, making replaying parts after dying a hell of a lot simpler, and allowing for speedruns without clutter (if I'm playing the same game over and over, I don't really need to see the same cutscenes over and over). We also have the quick turn, allowing Jill (and Carlos) to do an instantaneous about-face by pressing the Run button while pressing Down, making it easier to dip out of unwanted situations, including dodging Nemesis (though, I must say, I'm far too used to the lack of a quick turn in the first two games, that I sometimes forget to do it here...). You can also mash buttons to free yourself from enemy attacks, which is something I've often tried doing in the prior games, but which I don't think actually worked. Jill can thus take only minimal damage, while also pushing the offending zombie back into the cluster of his mates, knocking them all down, and freeing Jill to run through them.

What I don't really like too much is that the game does away with the multiple playable characters and alternate routes, at least in the ways the previous couple games handled these ideas. I mean, you get to play as Carlos for a bit, but it's not much different from the short Ada segments in 2. There isn't an entire Carlos game, as there is for Jill, as there was for Chris and Jill in the Spencer Mansion incident, or Leon and Claire in the RPD escape. Nemesis makes up for this by offering alternate paths during the games, similar to the choices in RE1 regarding whether or not to allow Rebecca and Barry to survive. In certain cutscenes, the game will momentarily freeze time allowing you to choose from one of two "Live Selections," often resulting in different events for the game overall, including allowing a couple painless Nemesis takedowns, and an alternate ending. Beyond the Live Selection gimmick, the game also has some random chance for certain item pickups or enemy encounters; e.g. the STARS room in the RPD HQ has a 50% chance of holding either the Magnum or the Grenade Launcher, with the other weapon appearing in the Substation; some rooms have a possibility of holding Green Herbs or leaving them out, while others may hold Gunpowder between disparate locations. The hallway to the RPD meeting room may contain regular zombies or dogs, and other rooms elsewhere in the game may get nastier with the possibility of Hunters or Brain Suckers existing instead of basic zeds. This keeps the game somewhat fresh as you play it eight times for the epilogue Files for other characters, or if you want Jill to wear Regina's costume from Dino Crisis [ディノクライシス] but don't want to play everything exactly the same as a prior run through the story.

This game also introduces the "Mercenaries" mode, an evolution of the "Extreme Battle" and "4th Survivor" modes from 2, and blueprint for future Mercenaries and Raid modes in later games (though I don't think later games give you survivors to save, focusing strictly on combat instead). I can't write too much about this mode, as I'm not very good at it, so I'll have to come back later :)

If I had to bitch about anything, it would be that this game's setting is perhaps the most nonsensical of the series. The labyrinth of the Spencer Mansion makes some sense because... Gothic horror and Scooby-Doo. Spencer was weird, and architect Trevor was weird, so it adds up. The RPD used to be an art museum, which explains its basic design, and also Chief Irons was weird, which kinda explains the puzzles. The mayor of Racoon is eccentric enough to maybe justify having some puzzles made out of wacky landmarks (e.g. the colorful clockface beside the entry to City Hall), but... I think his past as an engineer isn't a great enough excuse for why there are fucking doors closing off alleys. Or maybe other cities in reality do have doors everywhere? I just don't know. Anyway, the point of the game is to have Jill escape Nemesis through the streets of Racoon City, but the game also includes the Mansion-like Clock Tower and the Lab-like Dead Factory as major locations, both of which have you spend significant time indoors, and both of which recall standard location-types for the series thus far (there's a Hospital as well, which is perhaps more innocuous). I don't have any problem with the Clock Tower or Dead Factory, by the way, and I do miss their absence in the remake Resident Evil 3; I'm just saying the game does kinda fall back on "tried and true" location-types to ensure it's not going too far away from the skeleton of a "classic" Resident Evil experience. For that matter, I don't see how anyone could take too much issue with the backtracking in Code Veronica throughout Rockfort, as I feel it's at least marginally more "logical" than running all over a city (even if Racoon is quite small compared to a real city; I've always just assumed Rockfort would be a smaller island than Racoon is a city...). CV and Resident Evil Zero are probably inarguably inferior games, but I think their settings and the aesthetics thereof make a bit more sense in their context, versus Nemesis which prioritizes "video game logic" over believability. Not that I look for realism in RE games, but... whatever.

A good game hindered by deadlines. That's the best way I can describe Resident Evil 3, but that's not to sound negative or disparaging. When I say it's good, I mean it, giving us a rewarding experience familiar to the first 2 games veteran fans know and love, with the action dial turned up even higher than 2. The game's showpiece, Nemesis, is easily the most iconic monster in the franchise. Even 20+ years on, his implementation and AI is quite impressive, guaranteeing a challenging playthrough for the uninitiated. What holds this game back is content (although compared to its Remake, it feels like a fucking Zelda game). The game was originally going to end at the helicopter scene at the Clocktower, but they felt it was too short and decided to add more content. And while I completely agree with their decision, the content added does feel a bit tacked on and underdeveloped in contrast to the earlier sections. Barring that, I really have no complaints about this. The level design still features the things we know and love about the OG trilogy, this time expanding out into the streets of Raccoon City, treating the city like a sprawled out Spencer mansion or RPD, having the user explore and backtrack through the city streets/establishments to find key items and solving challenging puzzles to progress, and I wouldn't have it any other way (take notes, R3Make). I also think that staggering the story to 24 hours before and after the events of RE2 was a neat touch.

If you're a fan of the OG style RE games, I don't see how you wouldn't like this either. After 2 and REMake, this is the next best game in this style.

Mikami could absolutely not develop RE3 with all the vision he had. A massive city to explore, both action-packed and tense and loads, loads of zombies. Considering how it turned out in the end... It kinda resembles that feeling. Nonetheless, this new focus transformed Resident Evil 3 in the worst installment of the original trilogy. The game is not terrible, anyway.

How much you enjoy this title will be dependand of two aspects: The fondness you have for Nemesis as the main threat and if you reaaally dig the dodge mechanic. I'll address those two topics directly. Now, Nemesis is a fantastic addition - absolutely better than Tyrant-103 and more menacing, capable of even killing the player with one missile. He makes the first half of the game really interesting and injects some adrenaline to the backtracking bits we're accostumed to. One the obligatory challenges against him fucking sucks though: the fight with the acid pipes. It's such an unnecesary gimmick because you can kill it with magnum rounds anyway -and the game gives plenty rounds to kill it. Beating him for the weapon parts it's just as silly; yes, you get a cool gun, but considering the amount of gunpowder obtained throughout the campaign... better just dodge the bastard.

The dodge mechanic is so annoying in both theory and execution. It just doesn't work in a rigid camera, tank control environment. And it doesn't balance out either; no, adding gazillions of zombies didn't make the function any better or engaging. The window against bosses is laughably open, and against normal mobs it puts you between two categories:

-You cannot, for the love of God, use it as intended because you just can't dodge, the window is stupidly finnicky. So, you just get pistol bullets and kill everyone, because the game gives you looooads of ammo anyway.
-You become a pro around the system, and while you'll probably love the mechanic, the difficulty drops to zero. You are basically untouchable and will end with 300+ pistol bullets.

It's not a good balance.

The setting is wildly reminiscent of the original idea Mikami had though. While the level design is kind of simple -and having complicated puzzles in a random town makes my brain numb-, it has a great art and SFX direction: you really feel inside a zombie-infested city. Sadly, and once again, the last half is just serviceable. While the Clocktower reminds the player of the gothic scheme from the first game, design-wise is the RE1 courtyard. It's boring and short, and the plot unravels seamlessly without it. The gunpowder mechanics are basically a puzzle on themselves and are quite entertaining! That's something I didn't expect.

So, what about the action-horror thing, apart from all this nonsense. The game is EVEN MORE fun-oriented, with CGI explosions and bullets wasted and dead people. Once again, terrible dialog, which is actually a bad thing here; the writing is grounded like in RE2 but the voice acting is TERRIBLE, like what the hell happened here. Jill's costume is so juvenile, Jesus - she was attractive in RE1 but there was no trace of being skimpy; she was uniformed and the outfit made sense. Here? Jill is supposed to be PREPARED to take Umbrella out... why in the Elder God's names is she using cleavage? It IRKS with Capcom's sex sellout, something the franchise didn't have until this point -no, Ada does not count, she's a light deconstruction of the femme fatale character = she's objectified by default.

As you've noticed, I didn't say stuff about the plot. It's basically the same "Wow the world is fucked, who did it?" plot we've had since the first game, and it's already becoming a bit stale. It has some changes to the formula, like controlling Oliveira for making the virus vaccine -which... wait, when did Carlos learn that?.

It's good, it's fun, it's a bit tense and scary on concept-only. But apart from some surprisingly clever puzzles, it's a much, much dumber RE2. Which is a shame really. Some days I like a lot, sometimes I just think is a decent title.

Resident Evil 3: Nemesis is actually the 4th entry in the survival horror franchise Resident Evil, as by Capcom's own admission, Nemesis was a side game and Resident Evil: Code Veronica [バイオハザード コード：ベロニカ] was actually their intended third title in the franchise. Well, intentions are one thing and reality is another. In my opinion, this is a better game and a better companion piece to the first two games than Code Veronica was. Nemesis is one of the most unique titles in the franchise and there is a lot I like and dislike in this game.

I remember I rented this game as soon as could when it was first released. First things first, that intro when the zombies start to attack the police was one of the most memorable intros to me for a long time and offhand without really thinking about it, I can only really think of one other game from around this time that had a more impressive intro than it. We ain't going into what that game is here because you don't give a wooden nickel about the legacy of this shit. Just know that this Nemesis intro got me pumped. I was hyped even before that bomb ass intro for this game and I remember that whole weekend being me playing this nonstop. I really loved this game at the time, enough that I was confused for a while as to what title was the best until I slowly but surely settled into my current rankings which in regards to the classic games is RE2>Both iterations of 1>3>Zero>4>Code Veronica. I don't really consider RE4 part of the classic games but more of a "transitionary" game between past RE and now, but I figured I would rank it anyway. Even with these rankings, I feel strongly in the positive about all these games except Code Veronica, which I think was the first mediocre game in the main series. I keep saying "main" series because up to this point Resident Evil Gaiden and Resident Evil Survivor [バイオハザード ガンサバイバー] had been out and they were both pretty awful games.


Like every Resident Evil title in the main series before Resident Evil 4, this is a third person shooter with tank controls and a fixed camera. While you're shooting things you're trying to solve puzzles and explore the environment to the extent that you can while trying to waste as little ammo and medical supplies as possible. This game isn't a fundamental shakeup in the formula in regards to its basic gameplay. If you played the first two games you know exactly what to expect with this. One of the few new mechanics was an ammo creator, I don't remember using this a whole lot in playthroughs before and in replaying the game this time I only used it to see how it works again for this review and like herbs it just a simple UI thing with an item. It makes the game slightly easier and it adds a little complexity or variation in what you can have during a playthrough but as I said at the start nothing really shakes this game up that much in terms of gameplay and the other early entries in the series.
Like the previous titles, the things you're shooting at are monsters. These monsters include zombies as usual and a slew of other Umbrella creations, some new and some of them are returning champions. So the returning monsters, well you have hunters, in fact, you have the kind you already know about but in this game they're a little worse for wear, their frog faces have started to rot and deform a little bit and on top of the regular kind of hunters you also have ones that are even more frog-like than the original and they're dangerous because they can swallow you in one gulp. The evil Doberman Pinscher's also make a return, but there seem to be a lot less of them in this game than in previous titles. You got your giant spiders that were in both of the previous games and crows make a return and they're just as useless as ever. I think the returning monsters and that one new type of frog hunter are the best enemies this game has to offer. A lot of the new stuff is not that great. You have brain suckers, which are basically Lickers, but not as dangerous and they don't seem to be in a lot of areas of the city. Then you got the small worms, which are about as useless as crows. The last new enemy is Brain Demos and they're basically like Chimeras except for a little bit more dangerous than those, I think they're an ok addition to this roster, but like a lot of these new creatures, they don't really add enough to make them particularly memorable to me. I think a question I had while initially playing this and one that I still have never seen a good answer to is why more of the enemies from the second game don't make an appearance here. I can understand why the plant and moth enemies that are sequestered to the lab aren't above ground, but there is one particular enemy I think would be a good edition from the second game. Those being Lickers which I think would be a much better add to this game than either the brain demos or the brain suckers. They encapsulate the threat possessed by both of these creatures well and story wise there is no reason why they shouldn't be all over Raccoon city since they're the furthest mutation of a zombie. In fact these and one of their transitional phases "redheads" should be all over the city at this point. I mean I know why redheads, don't exist in the original version of Nemesis because they didn't exist canon wise until the Resident Evil [バイオハザード], but there is no real good reason why we don't see Lickers everywhere in Nemesis. I used to hear the excuse that these needed to be deliberately created in a lab, but subsequent games just showed that a particularly strong dosage of the T-virus and a propensity to turn into this rather than continue to rot is all you really need. so in the case that we ever get a remake of Nemesis like ten years from now, please have Lickers and redheads all over this shit. I want their long tongues lashing all over La Blue Girl Jill. You know, for reasons of challenge and lore continuity.
One core mechanic this game likes to rely on a little too much in hindsight is large groups of enemies clumped together around an obvious environmental cue that will take them all out at once like a steam vent or a red barrel. This would be a good mechanic in a game where you could aim your shots directly at an object but in a game like this, it just doesn't work that well with tank controls and a fixed view. I remember a lot of instances of playing this game and having the enemies block the object that was supposed to easily take them out. Resulting in a slow boring grind where you end up having to kill them all conventionally even though the game had something else in mind. This was a neat idea, but not one that necessarily fit these early games that well. I heard one of the reasons they rely on this and large groups of enemies so much in Nemesis in general, was one of this games technological achievements over its predecessors was the ability to have nine enemies on the screen, whereas most areas in the previous games had five enemies at most in whichever area you happen to be in. I guess they wanted to show off a little.
So there are two bosses in this game a giant worm and someone we will talk about later. So the Giant worm is kind of this nagging threat that leads to an anti-climax battle. I think boss battles are kind of a let down in this game in general and by that I mean more the lack of them aside from the games titular monster, which is what I really want to talk about anyway, but I just thought I would say this is the game first general area of disappointment and their tremors ripoff monster didn't do much to help the game.
Seeing as this game takes place partly during the time frame of Resident Evil 2 and in the Raccoon City Police Department. I think an interesting thing they could have done to add to the boss fights of this game is give us one fight with an early iteration of the William Birkin creature. Your time in the police station happens too early to face Mr.X because he doesn't drop in until Jill is already on the other side of the city. but Sherry alludes to the monster that her father becomes being there for possibly days or weeks in the game and in the novelization. She sees him near constantly in fact because the creature is drawn towards the G-Virus vial she has hidden in her locket. It's hard to know when the cinematic happened where we see William inserts the Virus after Umbrella raided his lab but we know it happened before Raccoon city was already in ruins because the majority of monsters in both games are T-virus creatures and not G-virus like William and the vials broken in his case were T-Virus shit which infected the city. This is why he and MR. X are looking for other samples of the G-virus for different reasons. I think having him as a small boss at the start of this game, would help give us yet another boss, it would be easy do because it is reused assets like the police department itself and it would help tie the two games together. It would also, of course, build our suspense about the Nemesis creature a bit if we had a boss in between our first encounters with him. I don't know this was just a possibly implausible idea I had depending on how the time frame works and when William was infected.
Now the worm boss and the general lack of other bosses may be disappointing, but luckily for Capcom, Nemesis is THAT maphuckin dude. He is that hard The Terminator and Jason Voorhees shit mashed together and with a gory design that would never fly in today's clean horror stories. Ok so one of the best unique things about this game is right in the title and that is the Nemesis monster. You know there were slight moments of tension and scariness in earlier title's especially in regard to things breaking through windows, but Nemesis is the one title that managed to constantly keep me on edge throughout my playthroughs. So the Nemesis is a Tyrant infused with a strong parasite and his one mission is to kill the last remaining members of STARS that are in Raccoon City at the time of this "third" game. Which means he is hunting Brad our cowardly pilot from the first game and the main character in this Jill. What this means in a gameplay sense is that this creature keeps chasing and attacking you at seemingly the most inopportune times. Knowing this unstoppable bastard could chase me through the Raccoon city streets and start attacking me at seemingly any time was one of the few moments in the franchise when I genuinely felt a sustained sense of panic and unease. This sense of unease kind of dissipates the more you play the game and the more you learn the limits and range of the Nemesis attacks, but there is no doubt in my mind even with a veteran's awareness of this AI that this creature was a genuine accomplishment in the horror sense. It is also one of the few villains whose threat and scale of it is firmly established throughout the game, you see him Kill Brad easily at the start and you see him end your plans for escape through a helicopter at the clock tower. It does a lot of big actions like this or forces you into stalemates in most of the areas of the game that let you know how serious and persistent his want to kill you is. He also seems to grow stronger and stronger after every defeat and you're shown this visually through the way he looks and fights you. I honestly think this is one of the best examples of a silent antagonist in any game ever, although he does utter "STARSSSS" so maybe that discounts him. You get a real sense of unstoppable persistence and threat from the creature that you don't get in any other game that doesn't involve multiplayer somehow. Yo and with all those disgusting tentacles, it almost makes me feel like I wasted an odd reference above.
One problem with the Nemesis mechanic or at least their execution of it here was it seems like you get way more ammo and then the ability to create more as a way of making sure people can properly deal with him as a threat. I think they overcompensated a bit in the survival department in this game when really it would be far more exciting and better for multiple playthroughs if you only had enough ammo to take the Nemesis out sometimes as opposed to every time you see him.

Two things that are minorly disappointing. First the graphics, I won't compare this to the REmake or anything like that but for a game that should have more varied areas and more unique locations, it has always seemed especially lacking in comparison to the first two games in terms of a setting and environmental uniqueness. A lot of this game is trying to get to specific areas of the city, like a pharmaceutical store, garage and a hospital and the main areas you're trying to get to look "good" but most of the city starts to run together after a while. It doesn't feel enough like a "city" given this series limitations at the time I wouldn't expect it to be too much like a city, but of all the games that need a remake in this series, I feel like this one would do particularly well with some modern technology and fewer space limitations.
The setting doesn't feel as unique or as interesting as either The Spencer Estate or the Raccoon City Police Department. So after the first two games, the music in this series isn't particularly good or bad. It just kind of exists in the game. I've always thought for instance that the Nemesis theme should have been more intense, like a pumped-up slasher villains theme. Instead, you get this oddly subdued track with irregular bouts of tenseness. I find it really hard to remember the music in this game even though I played this title a lot back in the day and I remember music from games I have played far less than this. Specifically as a key point of comparison Dino Crisis [ディノクライシス]. So I have only beaten Dino Crisis [ディノクライシス] about four times, which might sound like a lot for some games but with these titles isn't that much play time. By comparison, I probably beat Nemesis about thirty times in a generous estimate and the first two titles way more than I can fathom a guess. I know I have at least beat Nemesis enough times to have unlocked all those epilogue card's back in the day. Even with all that time in the game I still remember the music and graphics of Dino Crisis [ディノクライシス] way more. I only think of Dino Crisis [ディノクライシス] as an above average game, so if I remember this much of that game and so little of Nemesis that has to say something at least a little bad about Nemesis. I'm glad I already brought DC up here because Nemesis has a similarity to it that I think is also a little disappointing, it is like the other Resident Evil games, but with less overall content. Now granted I think the Nemesis as a boss justifies the existence of this game over some other entries in the series and makes me overlook it's relatively short nature a bit, but this is a big factor in why I don't quite like it as much as the first two games. Again though, I like Nemesis and even with its copy pasted nature that obviously reused some assets, I would rather it exist than not exist and I think it's a good example of how reused assets and game mechanics don't matter that much to people if a good enough gameplay twist can otherwise justify its existence. Something I talked about at length in my Dark Souls II review.
While I'm mentioning other reviews and disappointments here, I criticized Silent Hill for not having as many different ways and "modes" of playing the game and in comparison to the first two RE's Nemesis also comes up short. I thought I would be fair and mention that here. In this game, you only get to play as Jill, which is an obvious break from tradition from the previous two games where you got to play as another character and a have a slightly different take on the adventure with them. You do get a second mode to play called "The Mercenaries" where you play the game as one of the three UBCS members (explained below) on a time limit traversing the city through harder and harder clusters of enemies as you try to make it to the goal. To extend your time limit you have to kill enemies, but this wastes your extremely limited ammo in this mini-game and you try to save survivors that are always in the same area's each playthrough which is usually a little bit out of the way from the path you're trying to make towards the goal. Depending on which UBCS member you pick to play as you get different weapons and health items and these are the only items you get in the mini-game. It's not that much different from the Hunk and Tofu missions in the second game, but I feel like the Mercenary game is more fully realized than those as its own little game. At the very least I have more fun playing it than those.
Like with the first game and my review of it, the story in this game isn't the greatest thing ever written. I would say this game has much less of a story though than that one. As with previous games in the series, Nemesis continues the trend of giving you some story exposition through documents, files, and journals. As I already alluded to in the paragraph above it also gives you an additional ending panel called an "Epilogue File" depending on how many times you have played the game explaining what everyone in the series is doing up to that point. Capcom stayed surprisingly accurate to the continuation of the information of these cards in regards to each character they represent in subsequent games. There is one for every character in the series that survived up to that point except one and that is my favorite member of the medical profession Rebecca Chambers. I remember there being lore speculation because of this that it may have been canon that Jill's ending is the one that happened in the first game and that Rebecca may be dead as a result of this. She is just fine doing medical research, don't ever even entertain the thought for a fucking second that harm could come to this precious woman. As is shown in バイオハザード ヴェンデッタ. She is going to continue her medical research and then she is going to run to be the first female president of AmeroJapan. Then Chris who will be nine beers into a 24 pack stupor will look upon the television on the moment of her inauguration and say "Nice lady save me one time from plant guy." Before drowning in his own alcoholic vomit and Top Ramen. Sitting there atop a couch with thousands of mysterious stains on it Chris Redfield who couldn't be stopped by any of Umbrella's highly ineffective monsters, will finally be killed by the one noodle with beef broth on it he wasn't smart enough to pull out. He wasn't supposed to eat unsupervised but Barry was too busy trying to raise his kid's to also be watching this moron.

So an explosion occurs and out of the fire, a person roll's out with some flaming zombies. Here comes our woman of the hour Jill. Jill as in Jill Valentine member of STARS and a main character from the first game. She is one of the last members of STARS in the city or the police force in general since most of them are already dead. This game takes place before and slightly after Resident Evil 2 in the town and surrounding area of Raccoon City. So Jill turns a corner into a huge group of zombies and gets "sandwiched" into needing to take one small locked door that leads her to a warehouse. You talk to some asshole there named Dario that was part of a bigger group of survivors near the start of the zombie apocalypse event but something happened between that time and when you as Jill started playing the game and now his worthless ass is the only person still living. Jill tells him it's safer to leave, but he is too cowardly to go. So you leave him and proceed to explore around the ruins of the once formerly great Raccoon City. You walk around town for a while as you make your way to the game's first major destination the police station when you inevitably run into Brad. First when he is booking it hard out of a shed away from a group of zombies and secondly in a bar where he tells you that something even more dangerous than the usual beastie has been hunting him and it's trying to kill all the members of STARS so they can't speak publicly about this incident or the last one. Brad runs away again, but you quickly run into him getting trepanned by one of the Nemesis tentacles right outside of the Raccoon police station building from the second game, which is why he is a secret zombie you can kill for the costume locker key in that title. While running through the building you see about a tenth of the place that you get to see in the second game. One thing you get to see is police officer Marvin Branagh already wounded and unconscious in the same place Leon finds him in the original version of RE2. You also see the Nemesis again once before leaving this place and as if the dudes sheer size and ferocity aren't enough he introduces you to his rocket launcher in this fight. I almost see this is a joke by Capcom who probably saw this as a revenge scenario for the many creatures who have no doubt had to take it to the face from our infinite rocket launchers in the previous titles. A little Deer Avenger if you will.
After leaving the police department, You walk around the city some more, all the while being chased by the big dude with tentacles and in Amerojapan, one of the biggest concerns is tentacle related death or injury, usually as a result of a mishap involving sex. This dude ain't even wait for you, he will sometimes bust through doors in pursuit of Jill and one of those doors was the protagonist of Persona 3 and he was just a few days away from retirement. So we're told that the Nemesis is pursuing her all this time as a mission for Umbrella, but if you have seen Jill in that blue top, boots and short skirt, you know it's for a different reason... When great thinker of our time Jason Derulo first put forward the idea of an ass so big it was "like two planets." People laughed at his contrived idea of an ass, but he may have just been looking at Jill because good lord they certainly increased the size of one part of her body in this game. I mean he did follow the line with the inexplicable "go head and go ham sammich." I take that it was an inside joke that only us true gamers would know. I'm joking of course kids, the Nemesis is chasing Jill through these city streets on behalf of the Umbrella corporation. So before we get too serious again I would like to ask the Umbrella employee what it was like briefing the Nemesis on his mission, did that thing really just sit there and listen to its orders to kill the members of STARS? Like did a guy from Umbrella sit down with it at a table and show it pictures of each member? Imagine the Nemesis with a cup of coffee and one very anxious umbrella employee discussing this future cop killers plans in a calm manner. Like what is the process for briefing Nemesis and Mr. X on a mission? I think it was implied somewhere that I can't remember that it tracks them based on their DNA but I'm not exactly sure how that would work. I remember seeing a shitty cinematic where Nemesis has Terminator eye vision that shows him objectives, but on a robot that makes sense because their software can be directly programmed and their eyes given the evolution of hardware and how AI is studied today probably would be camera like. In this biological monstrosity that is really just a vessel for a small parasite, it makes absolutely zero sense to have his vision and his input for objections work this way. Look, the game has a canon reason, but I'm going with dat ass, as the reason he is able to track her, the large vibrations it makes as she walks sends signals to his brain that makes her easy to discern from the rest of the denizens of Raccoon city.
So aside from these characters eventually as Jill is rummaging through the remains of this city trying to dodge the Nemesis, you run into some dudes that look like they're in the military, but shockingly these same dudes have Umbrella's insignia on their shit. Can we trust them? Well Jill doesn't get a choice, her and her big ass eventually collide with Carlos a dashing young Latino man who she learns is part of an umbrella mercenary group called the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasure Service (UBCS) me and my friends in high school used to call them the Upright Citizens Brigade because of the Comedy Central show that was on at the time. Anyway, this man tells Jill that they almost have the lift working to go to the clock tower where they will escape through helicopter. So it's best if they work together. Aside from Carlos, there are two Russian dudes that have the same names every Russian male has in an American piece of fiction, only you can't blame this one on us because it's Japanese. Blame it on the AmeroJapanese and their stereotyping ways. Mikhail is the commander, but he was wounded before you even met him and Nikolai a guy who is in it to win it and he ain't care about your ass. I mean he isn't the least bit swayed by Jill's amazing ass so he must be inhuman. One of my favorite moments with this character doesn't take place in the game, it takes place in the novelization. When UBCS hit's the ground initially in Raccoon city, another member of the squad is standing in front of Nikolai and as a group of zombies is marching forward Nikolai kicks this dude into the crowd and runs. He is basically Shane from the walking dead, but with military skills and unlike Shane this dude really ain't give a shit about nobody. He is so sociopathic I'm not even sure why he wants to stay alive when he just ain't give a shit about nothing, but somehow someway through story magic he wants to. I discussed this Ad Nauseaum in my review of Monster, but I don't like emotionless characters, Nikolai isn't exactly that, but like a tentacle coming close to an entry point he rims it.
So you help these dudes get the various parts needed to make that fucking tram go and eventually you do. Which results in an ebic scene where Mikhail sacrifices himself to not kill the Nemesis but who the fuck cares if he died if he looked awesome doing it at the end of the day? So you do some more puzzles and shoot shit for a while around the clock tower, trying to get up to a high point there and send the signal that will bring a helicopter. So you do but in another badass scene Nemesis shoots the fucking thing down before it can reach you. I can't say I have been shocked many times in a game, but I remember being genuinely shocked by this turn of events the first time I witnessed it. It's like Capcom knew you would be shocked too because Nemesis just looks into the screen with a face that says, "You know you ain't see that shit coming."

You fight the Nemesis after this and in the ensuing battle two important things happen. One Carlos gets knocked down, but before he takes a small nap during this battle he manages to destroy the Nemesis's rocket launcher. So spectacularly that the Nemesis clothes are finally disfigured. Another thing that happens in this battle, is Jill gets a love bite from the Nemesis and is infected with a strong strain of the T-Virus. So you play as Carlos for a while while he explores a hospital and searches for a possible cure. One of the additional times you see Nick is during this time. You find a rare cure for this disease by mixing chemicals spread throughout the hospital in yet another one of the game's puzzles. A lot of the rest of the game past this point is collecting more things to get to a second evacuation area. They manage to cut down on the backtracking and odd pacing of this game by closing off a lot of the earlier areas since the clock tower was a good distance away from the starting area. They tried to fix odd pacing issues and a stretched out story in a similar way in Code Veronica and it just didn't work at all for me. Whether or not you agree with that you go around doing a few more puzzles and tying up some story loose ends on your way to that exit. One of which is again Nicholai. The dude survived all that other shit and he comes around to fuck with you a few more times because.... Well in the extended canon it's because he had independent objectives to complete that the other members of his unit weren't privy to, but in the game with only a small inkling to these explanations, it seems like he just sticks around for a while to be a dick. He doesn't even have like a moment of comeuppance or anything, he just kind of leaves the narrative anticlimactically. Maybe they muted his actions and get away a bit as to not take your focus away from the Nemesis as your main concern, but it seems kind of dumb to have his character and basically do nothing with him. Alternatively and this was kind of long rumored to be the case, they could have been setting him up as a pro-umbrella protagonist of a future game. It was kind of unofficial canon among fans for a long time that a game from Umbrella's perspective would come out and Nasty Niko would be one of the people you play as along with HUNK and maybe some others. This fanon game even had a title, but I can't recall it at the moment. The game many other fans and I imagined in our glorious G-virus shoulder eyes never came to fruition, so I can only speculate what the point of this character was but in a review of this game I can say if he exists for any reason at all it's to give some slight tension with the added level of threat an evil human brings to the situation and to give some context and motive for why Umbrella does the dumb shit it does. He tells Jill at one point that one of the reasons umbrella allows things like the infecting of a small Amerojapanese city to happen is so that they can collect combat data.... I've heard of some risky ventures and some dumb short-sighted business decisions, but this seems to be on a level beyond what most companies can even fathom a fuck up being like.
So here is a question I have about the Nemesis and his ability to track people again. When Jill was infected shouldn't that have registered as a death? Or does the Nemesis have a special way of knowing when a person dies "for real" or not? Like did the creature sit on a park bench and then jolt from inactivity the minute she awoke seemingly cured of this plague? How did it know she wasn't dead and if her being infected didn't register as a death in whatever parameters or criteria he was given why didn't he go back to kill Brad's zombie corpse? I don't understand this biological weapons reasoning or abilities, but maybe I don't need to. Maybe this is in fact just a game, but the minor inconsistencies and a lack of explanation for how the Nemesis tracks and confirms kills on a victim do bother my anal-retentive nature just a little bit.
Putting that aside, Jill gets her amazing ass up from the altar and the Nemesis starts picking up good vibrations again. This leads to you learning umbrella had like a way station or a smaller lab or some shit that you need to get to it because it has a helicopter you can leave in. Long story short you find the place but it is revealed that Nico just stole your last means of escape. On top of this Umbrella decides to wipe the town off the face of the map with a missile attack to cover up their misdeeds. Leading to the now by this point tired ending of a self destruct sequence happening. Which doesn't make a lot of sense since mice, dogs, crows, (presumably other birds) and insects can spread the T and G virus meaning that at this point this disease would probably spread across North Amerojapan faster than the Bubonic plague moved from, east to west. This solution to the problem is almost as dumb as the golf ball net solution proposed to correct the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. We also know from the second game that there weren't checkpoints or quarantine measures in place because between Jill's adventure Claire and Leon come into the city without so much as a sign saying the city might be dangerous now. Umbrella and their dumbass decisions again. So aside from the further nonsensical nature of this story, you go through a few more tense scenes with monsters when you finally face the last iteration of the Nemesis which unfortunately like the first games last boss is a bit anticlimactic in terms of difficulty. At this point, the Nemesis creature who went from being decked out in black to being a shirtless tentacled monstrosity is now a glob of shit that kind of looks like a slug. You fire a rail cannon at it and the bastard finally dies. Jill and Carlos manage to contact an incoming flying object just in time and it happens to be a helicopter piloted by Barry Burton. Even in this game, he comes to save Jill just at the right time. They fly off seeing Raccoon city being destroyed and are presumably safe for now.

The story works instrumentally but as I showed in various ways and means it's fairly nonsensical even under basic scrutiny. It really shows that this was one of the fastest made games in this series. I think the story of this game while more minimalist than a lot of the other entries in the series also manages to be less compelling than even their simple cliche narratives. This is definitely not a high point of the game or the series in general. I like that this game has Jill as a protagonist and I like her general characterization in the game even if most things around it are weak and unsatisfying from a story perspective. She is strong smart and capable, which is what keeps her big ass safe, even in a mad city like this one. Carlos is played fairly straight as a "good guy" and like the first game I can't help but see yet another missed opportunity here to make his nature more ambiguous and mysterious at the start but maybe they felt Nico was good enough for that. The three UBCS guys work for the minor story significance they have but I don't particularly think of them as great or memorable characters. I think the best character in this game is actually the Nemesis and it's because it is silent and its personality and value to the story is defined completely by its use as a game mechanic. Without a doubt again the best antagonist the series ever had and the one monster that genuinely had me fucking scared beyond a jump scare or some mild tenseness here and there.

Nemesis is a middle of the road title for me with a lot of things that make it inferior to its prequels but it has things like the Nemesis creature itself that make me glad it exists as a title in the series and that get me to play it again despite my now lukewarm feelings about it. I would still highly recommend it to fans of the series and the genre as it's still one of the most unique games in the series. I planned on reviewing Resident Evil 2 and It's REmake Resident Evil 2 after this, but as a possible spoiler here for that review when it comes out, I didn't really like the new RE2 and I'm not really keen on dedicating hours of playthroughs for it at the moment in order to give it the kind of review I would like to. That review will come at some point but instead of that, I'm going to review Resident Evil Zero next.

Nemesis might not be as good as the previous games, but I still like it. Nemesis came out a year after 2, which was an incredible game and often looked on as the peak of the fixed camera Resident Evil games. 3 decided to add more action and focus more on the outside of the city and the destruction that was going on. It starts off heavily action packed where you are given a machine gun and are in the open streets of a city overrun with zombies. Unlike previous games, enemies in this game often come in groups and certain areas have respawning enemies that will always come back. On top of that you have Nemesis who will stalk you throughout the game and hunt you down at random points.

This game was pretty different than 2, you only played as Jill, well not counting the brief moment you play as Carlos (its kind of how you played Rebecca for a brief moment in RE 1). That means the game didn't have multiple stories or characters, so you had one main story, but also you had multiple endings. During certain events in the game you get 2 options to choose, and while no events can be failed, they do give you a cool action sequence to follow. RE 3 does feel a bit more straightforward and focused than the previous games, there is more emphasis on character interaction and story, but at the same time 3 does have flaws.

RE is a game about survival and horror and while it does have limited ammo and challenge, I did find the respawning enemies to get annoying at times and mainly just felt like ammo wasters. Nemesis was a badass villain but at times it would get a bit predictable when he'd show up. The voice acting and characters are still pretty awkward, and the story is really nothing special, just typical Resident Evil with cliche villains and a cliche outbreak plot. Not to mention the bosses in this I didn't really find that enjoyable, the fight with nemesis where you have to shoot the handles to make acid spill on him was annoying, plus the boss fights were hardly memorable outside the Nemesis fights. Also there is hardly any replay value since the game only has a single campaign and once you beat it there isn't much incentive to replay.

But still, Jill is a great main character, I did like the atmosphere and it was a different feel than the other games. The game did still have the survival feel and easily is in the top Resident Evil games. Sure at the end of the day I may prefer 2, Remake, and even Code Veronica over this, but that's not to say this isn't a good game in its own right.