Cards on the table: I never really enjoyed the original Resident Evil 3. At the time of its release, not only the Resi franchise but Survival Horror itself had become well established in terms of tropes, cliches and characteristics, with numerous franchises attempting to collect on its popularity. As a result, for those of us who immersed ourselves in such fare, it had begun to lose its allure, whilst certain species of more revolutionary horror (most notably those occuring on the PC) were starting to swell in terms of popularity and market presence.
Resi 3 I find to be the weakest of the original 3 games. Not a bad effort, by any stretch; an important game in many respects, in that it includes certain revolutions that would become de rigeur in video game horror to the present day, but certainly lacking in the atmosphere and novelty that made the first two titles such seismic hits.
Part of that disappointment certainly lies with the design of the game’s most prominent feature: the eponymous super-bio-weapon, Nemesis.
FEATURE: TOP TEN RESIDENT EVIL MONSTERS NEMESIS (RESIDENT EVIL 3 REMAKE)
In game, Nemesis is a fantastically terrifying entity; one of the first “stalker” antagonists in horror video gaming, whose presence is felt throughout the run-time, that may turn up around any corner or at any moment to harass player character Jill Valentine.
That technical element of the game is superb; whenever Nemesis turns up, it’s always a tense and terrifying struggle between whether to stay and fight the ostensibly immortal bio-horror or run and preserve essential commodities such as health, ammo etc.
Yet, the horror of Nemesis derives more from his framing than from the monster itself. In all honesty, compared to the Cronenbergian body-horror nightmares of Resident Evil 2 (William Birkin , Mr. X et al), Nemesis is almost comedic in his original incarnation, the design -in isolation from its situational framing- more likely to evoke sighs and laughter than yelps of horror.
This factor is improved later when the entity -in classic Resident Evil style- goes through several unlikely mutations, becoming ever more elaborate and nightmarish until the final encounter, when it becomes nigh-Lovecraftian. The monsters have even made their way into the gaming world as playable characters “and surprisingly in the world of casino games online where several slot machines have been created about them
However, even these moments feel like diluted echoes of the same truly horrific metamorphoses evinced by the previous game’s William Birkin (stay tuned to the series for more on that particular abomination). Hardly ever in the original Resi 3 do I feel the same degree of tension, dread and fraught atmosphere as in the prior two titles. Atmosphere is largely sacrificed in favour of shocks and set-pieces, which is a shame given how profoundly reliant on that factor the series was heretofore.
Alone of the original three games, Resi 3 is the one I never completed all the way through nor felt particularly compelled to (learning much later, thanks to the internet, that the game was effectively a rushed-together demo that Capcom swelled out to fill an otherwise empty Christmas period does not strike me as surprising in the least; the whole game has a patchy, rushed-together feeling entirely at odds with the operatic composure of the previous entries).
Flash forward almost a couple of decades, many, many developments, trends, fashions and experiments in video game horror later, and we have the inevitable 2020 remake of Resident Evil 3.
Hot on the heels of the sublime and insanely successful remake of Resi 2, this title immediately fell into a more fraught and cautious situation (the original Resi 3, whilst beloved, has always been the least popular of the original games). Fans were somewhat dubious about the development cycle, given that the game was set for release within a year of the Resi 2 remake. Could it possibly be a fully fleshed-out game in that time frame? Could it be significantly distinct from Resi 2 in terms of gameplay to even warrant being a separate title, rather than elaborate DLC?
Of course, present-day-Capcom being present-day-Capcom, we needn’t have worried.
Whilst certainly the least distinct and certainly the least successful of the remakes, it is still a remarkable update that changes more of the original game arguably than any of the previous two. Clearly recognising that more would have to be done to make this title work, Capcom have gone out of their way in terms of design, technicals and writing to ensure that this is a fitting successor to Resis 1 and 2, as well as a more complete and rounded game in its own right than the original.
Entire sections of the original game have been reimagined, subtly reframed or changed/excised. Rhythm is all-important in this title, as it boasts a more fraught and tense species of horror; that of being hunted through impossible circumstances by an entity that cannot be reasoned with, cannot be stopped. This is the core of Resi 3’s peculiar species of horror; it foregoes the slow dread of the previous two entries in favour of an almost perpetual state of panic: the “safe zones” and safe rooms of before are largely done away with, Jill’s ability to render areas passable or inert massively truncated.
And, of course, there is the all-new, all-singing, all-dancing Nemesis.
As before, this titanic, leather-clad super-zombie occurs fairly early in the game, crashing through Jill’s apartment wall -a notably different introduction from the original game-, growling its iconic “STARSSSSS” catchphrase (Nemesis has been genetically programmed by his creators to hunt down and murder the surviving members of the original STARs team from the previous two games) and demonstrating its incredible capacity for violence. Unlike most of the monsters encountered before, Nemesis is not awkward or clumsy, but moves with incredible speed, deftness and purpose, often leaping to scale walls and rooftops only to descend in front of Jill, forcing the player to double pack or seek alternative routes on the fly if they want to survive. He is a notably different presence and species of threat in the game from the more directionless, mindless bio-horrors that infest the rest of it, often -comedically- punching lesser zombies out of the way, picking them up and hurling them aside when they get in his way or -a development later in the game- infesting them with parasitic matter that has the quality of mutating them into something more akin to Resident Evil 4’s Ganados monsters (which this remake cleverly links the Nemesis himself to mythologically).
In terms of design, the Nemesis has been phenomenally upgraded, his previous 32-bit goofiness abandoned in favour of a scarred, stretched and tortured look reminiscent of some of the more elaborate Cenobites from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser franchise. This version of the game also hammers home the monster’s sheer indestrucible nature: from the beginning, Nemesis is variously crushed, shot, burned alive, hurled from buildings, rammed by trucks, blown up by missile launchers and explosives, yet always returns in new and more monstrous forms.
The creature’s occurrence in the game and its general framing have been dramatically altered: in dynamic, he is more akin to the “stalker” entities to be found in Resident Evil 7 (e.g. Jack Baker) and the Resi 2 remake (Mr. X/The Tyrant), wandering around the various environments in active search for Jill, relentlessly pursuing whenever he catches wind of her. This lends the game a certain degree of stealth and subtlety that wasn’t present in the original: it’s often necessary to plot a route around Nemesis or distract him down particular corridors or alleyways before doubling back to make it past to other essential areas. All the while, he engages in numerous -and highly entertaining- forms of attack, from ripping up elements of the environment and hurling them at Jill to whipping and stabbing at her with the parasitic tendrils that emerge from his hands. Later, he’ll even use certain long-range armaments such as missile launchers and flamethrowers -yes, undeniably silly, but also surprising enough for monsters in a Resi game to lend the development a certain tension.
In the set-pieces that follow, Nemesis generally experiences some fresh mutation, the unstable G-Virus in his system (the same that reduced its creator, William Birkin, to Lovecraftian abomination in the previous game) interacting with the tailored Las Plagas parasites grafted into his anatomy to produce body-horror that is as brilliant in its elaboration as it is horrific. Foregoing his former -somewhat- humanoid appearance, the resultant creature lopes down on all fours, swells into a bestial condition and lashes out with toxic barbs, one of which pierces Jill and infects her with the T-Virus itself in one of the game’s most tense twists.
In a final encounter with the entity, its body loses all constraint or control, flowering into a fleshy, tentacle-sprouting, multi-mawed nonsense that requires use of a science-fiction rail-gun weapon in order to finally put down.
In all of his new incarnations, Nemesis is not only fantastically threateniing but also tremendously cool; a monster more akin to those that we’ve come to expect from the franchise, that -cleverly- pays homage to what has come before and what -with the benefit of hindsight- we know will come after (the much anticipated remake of Resi 4 is purportedly already in the works).
Even so, he features quite low down on this list owing to a couple of factors: first and foremost, those already mooted: he is the poster-boy for the least of the original three games, and thus, unlike Resi 1’s Tyrant or Resi 2’s William Birkin and Mr. X, suffers massively from over-exposure: there is no surprise in Nemesis: he occurs from the beginning of the game, is fairly clear in terms of his nature and intentions and is simply a monster to avoid and inevitably defeat. His equivalents in prior entries boast more in the way of build up, mystery and back story, and are framed so as to be the ultimate horrors of their respective narratives. Nemesis is such a perpetual and pervasive presence -even in the remake-, that he becomes almost an environmental hazard; something the player knows is going to occur at particular points in the narrative, and is therefore diminished in terms of impact.
The remake also makes a minor error in including too many encounters with the monster. Certainly towards the end, there’s at least one set-piece battle that feels somewhat contrived, too “video game” in nature and doesn’t need to be there in terms of story. This has the effect of diminishing the final encounter, when the monster’s re-emergence would have been surprising and signficant.
On a personal level, Nemesis lacks the nostalgia and sentiment I might apply to other monsters in the series. He marks my own removal from the franchise in my youth, when I somewhat abandoned survival horror in favour of newer and more exotic species.
Whilst the remake’s incarnation of the creature has gone a long way to redressing that balance, he is still, for me, one of the lesser of the “Big Bads” this series has to throw at us, and particularly suffers in context with those that occurred in the previous Resident Evil 2 and the succeeding Resident Evil 4.
A fantastic monster in his own right, but one perhaps diluted by his place in the franchise’s history.
Check out the other articles in George’s series on Resident Evil
TOP TEN RESIDENT EVIL MONSTERS PART 1: THE CERBERUS
TOP TEN RESIDENT EVIL MONSTERS PART 2: THE LICKERS
