Resident Evil Veronica, the remake of the weirdly-titled Resident Evil Code Veronica, or the even weirder Resident Evil Code Veronica X, looks great. Still, Capcom sure has to retool its awful cast of main characters to make it palatable to modern audiences.
Spoilers to the original games follow.
Steve, really?
Resident Evil thrives on bad actors, ranging from cartoonishly evil foes to regular billionaires who’d also come across as cartoonish if social media hadn’t recently revealed that’s actually how they behave IRL. The least likable of all, however, is Steve Burnside, from the original Veronica.
Most people will find Steve unlikable from the get-go. He acts tough and independent, but he’s rash, immature, and prone to loud childish outbursts. That’s a stark contrast for a main character in a series where the protagonists tend to be trained badasses who can do no wrong.
And, like, a lot of Steve’s annoying behavior is justified. He’s a 17-year-old who Umbrella imprisoned out of spite. His only mistake was being with his father, who’d been caught stealing company secrets for personal gain. Naturally, Steve went through enough of a rough patch even before the zombie outbreak. He feels betrayed by his father, which led to his abandonment issues, but he still has a deep-seated love for him. Steve’s complicated relationship with his father culminates early in the game, when Steve encounters him as a zombie and makes the decision to kill him to prevent Claire from being bitten.
Steve’s origin story has more emotional complexity than that of any other playable character in Resident Evil. That dramatic moment could’ve served as a turning point to guide Steve to becoming the hero that the tale needed, but that’s the only good moment we get. In fact, we’re only now getting to the bad part.
Steve dies later in the game, maybe because even the developers could no longer stand him at that point, but not before setting an incomparable low for main characters in the series. Halfway through the game, the two characters manage to escape the prison area by plane. Feeling safe around Steve, Claire takes the opportunity to nap, which prompts Steve to try to kiss her before she regains consciousness. The only thing preventing contact is Claire waking up in time.
The whole thing is bizarre in writing, but even more as you see it played out like a supposedly tender moment. Even worse, the scene goes nowhere. By the end of the game, Claire’s none the wiser about having been in the presence of a pretty shady guy for the longest time. In a series infamous for some legendary unintentionally funny writing, this stands out as unintentionally vile.
Unfortunately, Claire isn’t great, either. Throughout the first half of the game, Alfred Ashford, a member of an old-money Umbrella family that owns the island where that portion of the game takes place, serves as its main villain. He’s just as annoying as you’d expect given his background, but he’s actually as complex as a RE villain has ever gotten.
He has a twin sister named Alexia Ashford, who’s in a coma because she’s carrying the game’s big new virus. Alfred deals with the absence of his dear sister by dressing up as her, likely in a nod to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, not as anything sexual, and players sometimes battle Alfred while he’s in the Alexia persona. Claire, the supposedly more sensible main character in the series, addresses this deeply complicated response to trauma by simply shouting, “That crossdressing freak!” Like, even ignoring how modern-day sensibilities have evolved far past that, is that truly one of the weirdest things Claire witnessed while living in the Resident Evil world?
The game later introduces a third main character that I won’t spoil, and he doesn’t do or say anything awful, though that’s likely because he has no personality whatsoever.
I usually don’t much care for remakes, but the idea of a remake that deeply retools bad or misguided parts of games that could’ve been great is one I truly do like. Veronica seems like the perfect opportunity for that.
