LogFAQs > #968189314

On the surface, a game detailing the origins of both the Umbrella Corporation and STARS Bravo Team could've been a slam dunk. After all, we get tons of juicy information about Umbrella pieced together through files in RE1, and full fledged character backgrounds for each Bravo member too. There's actually a ton to work with. Resident Evil Zero manages to be a game about neither however; it's a confused sham that muddies more lore and events and even locations than actually revealing any secrets as it so boldly claims in the game's opening narration. In fact, the game makes very little sense as a whole.

So the story starts with the Ecliptic Express being attacked by a mysterious man and his leeches. It's a cool and horrific scene, even if the man looks like a Final Fantasy reject and doesn't really fit the tone at all (though at that point RE was already destined to head pretty far off the rails anyway.) Cut to Rebecca, flying with STARS Bravo Team on her first mission. Their helicopter is sabotaged (as Rebecca states in RE1) and they crash. Unfortunately after this, Bravo Team is a total non-entity. Only Rebecca, Edward, and Enrico even get any lines, and one of those dies in the first minutes of the game and the other only appears over radio and one random scene which contributes nothing. It's a TOTAL disappointment. We never get to see how Rebecca interacts and works with her team, we never get to see their personalities, no they're immediately written out of the story. Now, I do argue that part of the allure of RE1 is finding your Bravo Team comrades scattered dead around the mansion, leaving it up to you to piece together what happened to them. If you're already doing a prequel though, why not just go full on and show what did happen! It would've been so much fun to see Forest get attacked by crows or see more of what led up to Kenneth's demise. Instead, we get one of the most hilariously confusing and badly-directed scenes in the series, with Enrico coming down an elevator in Birkin's lab from RE2 (how he got there we'll never know), meeting up with Rebecca, they have a super stilted conversation about Bravo Team and Billy, and then Enrico fucks off to god knows where after that. This scene baffles me to this day. It's so pointless and the logistics of the location and character placement hurt my head probably more than it should.

That all sucks on its own - but here's some other stuff that bugs me. So, Bravo is supposed to be investigating the cannibalistic murders in the Arklay Mountains, and they crash, and IMMEDIATELY drop what they came there for when they just luckily stumble upon this overturned MP vehicle to hunt down an escaped convict. Like that becomes the mission right away. It's so forced and only serves to get Rebecca on to the train.

Rebecca bumps into the convict, Billy; now I think Billy & Rebecca are a great pair together. I can accept a little RE cheese and a little bit of the unrealistic nature on how Rebecca reacts upon seeing him, though it always bugged me that they stay on the Ecliptic Express for no real reason even after seeing all the monsters aboard it. Still, I like Rebecca in this game - she's unsure of herself but at the same time shows moments of assertiveness, even disobeying orders to put her trust in this possible murderer, who has saved her time and again. Her portrayal however is very inconsistent with REmake, and you can argue there's some trauma there or something between the two games, but it's a little too night and day for me. Rebecca not being able to handle a hunter for example in REmake but slaying them left and right (and a Tyrant ON HER OWN!) with ease in RE0 is a hard bullet to swallow. Just judging on this game alone though, Rebecca's great in Zero, a likable protagonist for sure who rightfully gets most of the screen time.

And so is Billy for that matter. His cool allure and mysterious past has made him a rightful fan favorite of the series that people chomp at the bit for a return or at least a hint of, myself included. Scrutinizing more closely however, Billy ends up feeling actually under baked. His PTSD is merely hinted at, he gets separated from Rebecca for large swaths of the game giving us less time for us to enjoy their dynamic, and unfortunately nothing about his character ever really gets resolved in a satisfying way. I still like Billy a lot despite these gripes - which really goes to show Capcom had a pretty cool character here they unfortunately let rot away and how character design and gameplay can really go a long in developing a personality.

On to the other half of the game - Umbrella. The admittedly stronger half, though not really by much. Look, I'm an RE diehard, I love Umbrella lore and reading up on the back story and stuff. It's just inherently interesting to me. Marcus' leech experiments are creepy; still, there's some diminishing returns with how this stuff is handled here. Sometimes files read as if Umbrella employees were just writing their first drafts of the better RE1 files. Marcus himself is an inherently unnecessary edition to the franchise, and learning how the T-Virus spread in the mansion adds... basically nothing. Wesker and Birkin are involved, though their role mostly consists of sitting around and pointlessly expounding on every action they're about to do to get to the real plot starting in RE1. It's actually kind of hilarious how disconnected everything is. Rebecca and Billy have no real stake in the plot, just their survival; Marcus gets revenge on Umbrella but we only see Birkin and Wesker's reactions and they don't seem overly concerned about it; and Wesker and Birkin themselves are so remote from the main action that they may as well not been included in the story at all. This really speaks to how disjointed Resident Evil Zero is as a whole. It feels like a Frankenstein's monster with totally disparate elements that each got a little lost in itself along the way.

Umbrella Chronicles' Nightmare scenario ended up being a better prequel than this. Hell, that game even did the Zero scenario better itself because we get more dialogue between Billy and Rebecca! Like, how do you let a light gun shooter outdo a main series entry? There's of course some good in Zero; the environmental storytelling here is extraordinary with the most beautiful pre-renders I think the series has ever produced. Rebecca and Billy manage to be a fun pair despite the game's best efforts to destroy that. Everything else however, was a total nonsensical drag and I really think overall this was a story better off not being told to begin with.