Top 10 Dumbest 'Resident Evil' Moments

Just what were Capcom thinking? Welcome to WatchMojo and today we’ll be counting down our picks for the top 10 dumbest Resident Evil moments.

For this list, we’re looking at the stupidest and most ridiculous moments from throughout all the Resident Evil games.

There’s no doubt that Wesker is a great villain. His arc of betraying the series’ heroes for his own selfish gain was a masterfully done plot twist, but that doesn’t mean he gets a free pass for some of his quirks. While Wesker is portrayed as an all-powerful criminal mastermind, he’s thwarted time and time again by his absolute refusal to take off his sunglasses. Choosing aesthetics over practicality every time, during one of his boss fights in Resident Evil 5 he’s even defeated by Chris and Sheva turning the lights off, preventing him from being able to see. Just take them off already.

Implementing live action segments into video games has never really been successful. Even in a good game, people are always left wondering why they didn’t just animate it. The precedent for bad live action acting was set by Capcom when the first Resident Evil was released, and after seeing it, it’s a miracle anybody could sit through the intro to actually get to the game itself. But the intro had more issues than just being bad—it had to be censored outside Japan, to remove images of dead bodies and a brief scene where Chris Redfield smokes a cigarette.

If Wesker is one of gaming’s best villains, Ramon Salazar it one of its worst. A whiny brat with an annoying voice, Leon seems utterly incapable of actually killing him throughout Resident Evil 4, which leads to no shortage of painful encounters with the obnoxious antagonist. The game’s storyline bends over backwards with ridiculous reasons to keep Salazar alive to the last, like Leon missing with a quick-time knife-throw, or Leon just deciding not to draw his gun, shoot Salazar in the face, and get the whole ordeal over with.

Comic relief isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it has to be done right in order not to come across as obnoxious. However, the inclusion of Quint and Keith is something that probably shouldn’t have been done at all; nobody really needs comedy thrown into their survival horror cocktail. Quint and Keith—or, to give them their respective nicknames, Jackass and Grinder—have awkward, unfunny scenes inserted into all the Resident Evil action players actually wanted. Their cheesy, fooling around only ever comes across as annoying, and luckily, they’ve never reappeared in later games.

For a game called Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, the actual Nemesis stalking Claire Redfield throughout the entire campaign isn’t actually all that frightening. Because of the restrictions of the console, players were subjected to long loading periods before cutscenes and scripted events where the Nemesis actually showed up, ruining all the suspense. But the segment which really takes the cake is an encounter between Claire and the Nemesis on a bridge, where the player is able to just push the Nemesis over the edge with one easy quick-time event. And to think, he’s supposed to be scary.

It’s not just parts of the writing and gameplay where Resident Evil has sometimes fallen short, but also in their character designs. While most of them are your ordinary, run-of-the-mill video game protagonists, there was quite a lot of criticism levied towards Chris Redfield’s character model in the fifth game; namely, his arms. To put it bluntly, he has a pair of ridiculously oversized biceps, muscles so extreme that players found it hard not to make a steroid joke at every opportunity. Thankfully, this was toned down considerably in his later appearances.

It was supposed to be the biggest and best Resident Evil yet, combining everything Capcom had learned after sixteen years making the series, but it was inherently unrecognizable as a Resident Evil title. The segment where this is most obvious is during Chris’s campaign, where players will have to board a jet plane in order to strategically take down an aircraft carrier. Yes, really—aerial combat in Resident Evil. When you’re done with the boat, an enormous B.O.W. will also appear which you need to take down, all while trying to master some very awkward flight controls.

With every new game or movie, the over-arching plot and lore of the Resident Evil franchise just gets more and more convoluted. This all came to a head in Resident Evil 6, when at its core, the complex plot was really just a story about a guy who couldn’t get a girl to like him. Simmons’ obsession with Ada, whom he clones to create Carla—quickly proves to be a pushover—and is ultimately his downfall. During his boss fight, after going through a dozen different forms from a dinosaur to a giant fly, Simmons is finally pushed off a building and impaled. Because apparently bullets aren’t good enough.

It’s no secret that lots of English translations of Japanese games are full of errors—but there’s only so far something can be considered an error before it becomes bad writing. Resident Evil not only cemented Jill Valentine in history as the “master of unlocking”—but at one point, she was also nearly turned into a “Jill sandwich” by a boobytrapped room with a descending ceiling. You’d think Barry would take his partner almost dying a little more seriously, though Jill just laughs it off, too. Maybe this would have been overlooked as well, if it wasn’t for the notoriously shoddy English voice acting we were also subjected to.

Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few Honorable Mentions:

• Playground, Resident Evil 6 (2012)
• Tofu Survivor, Resident Evil 2 (1998)

By the end of the fifth numbered title, Wesker has finally mutated beyond all recognition; a giant, monstrous shadow of his former self. The big show-down against him takes place, first of all, in the mouth of an active volcano—which is plenty dumb all on its own. But the part players remember most distinctly is Chris making a path for Sheva to cross the treacherous lava by pushing an enormous boulder into it. Or, rather, punching an enormous boulder into it. This is just a short QTE, but the fact that Chris was even capable of moving the rock—which is at least five times his size—speaks for itself.