Resident Evil 5 [2009]
Resident Evil 5 is actually the latest, chronologically, in the main-series Resident Evil games that I've played, and thanks to my PS3 crapping out, I don't think I quite made it past the first big boss battle -- I just really disliked the 'buddy ally' system or whatever it's called here.
EDIT: Since then, I've completed Resident Evil 5. It's a lot less fun in single-player, and a lot of the game's gimmickry really didn't age well. The 'buddy system' would be fun with two actual players, I suppose, and I do appreciate the actionized nature of this game (even if I find it's a bit too actionized) but this game also has some of the most obnoxious quick-time events, and probably my least favourite inventory management ever in any Resident Evil game. I really did like the ambience of the game, and seeing the Chris/Wesker stuff is nice, but while I can see why RE5 is successful back in the day, I also see why this was the turning point post-RE4 where they really tried to 'do what RE4 did different and keep making it bigger'.
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The Story:
Abridged from the fan-wiki and the cutscenes I zoomed through online, the story picks up with Chris Redfield, one of the main characters in Resident Evil 1, arriving as part of the anti-bioweapon organization BSAA to investigate B.O.W. smuggling in Africa. working with local BSAA agent Sheva Alomar, they arrive in the Kijuju Autonomous Zone, but arrive too late. They find out that most of the townspeople have been infected by Type 2 Plagas -- unknown to Chris and Sheva, this is a modified version of the Las Plagas parasite utilized by Los Illuminados in Resident Evil 4. Soon, the two find themselves back-to-back against hordes of hostile parasitized townspeople called Majini.
Chris and Sheva escape the village Majini, and encounter the final dying member of Alpha Team who warns them of the bioterrorist smuggler Ricardo Irving, before dying. Chris and Sheva face off against a creature made up of a large mass of worms, which was the cause of Alpha Team's demise. After burning it with an incinerator, they receive aid and intel from other BSAA members before the two hunt down Irving. Irving is rescued by a mysterious hooded figure (actually a mind-controlled Jill Valentine, who had been assumed dead during the events told via flashbacks). As more and more BSAA members and teams are wiped out by the increasingly powerful B.O.W.'s, Chris and Sheva have to fight and deal with these monstrous mutations. While ordered to retreat, Chris decides to continue on to figure out what's going on with all these hints of Jill Valentine being alive and walking around. At around this point, Chris talks about the events leading to Jill's supposed 'death', during an operation to apprehend the higher-ups of Umbrella. During this event three years prior to RE5, they find out that Wesker had killed Umbrella's president Oswell Spencer, and in the ensuing battle Jill and Wesker fell out of a window into a chasm.
Chris and Sheva make their way through the marshlands and the village of the Ndipaya tribe, which have been infected with Type 3 Plagas. As they fight the infected, they discover that the company Tricell is behind the Plagas infection in Africa. They corner Irving, who reveals Tricell's involvement and injects himself with a Plagas species and transforms into a gigantic behemoth that Chris and Sheva take down with heavy weapons. After taking Irving out, Chris and Sheva enter an underground series of tunnels that's home to more Ndipaya tribes, guarding a mysterious flower known as the 'Stairway of the Sun' -- which turns out to be the source of the Progenitor Virus that the T-Virus of previous games were derived from. Chris and Sheva discover an abandoned Umbrella facility there, which has been taken over by Tricell, and defeat a massive abomination. They exchange barbs with Tricell head honcho Excella Gionne, who sics more mutations on them. Chris and Sheva eventually encounter the mysterious hooded woman, who, of course, turns out to be Jill, mind-controlled with a device by Albert Wesker. After a prolonged battle, however, Chris and Sheva manage to rip apart the device mind-controlling Jill, freeing her from Wesker's brainwashing.
At Jill's insistence, Chris and Sheva move on to hunt down Wesker and Excella. Excella is cornered first, and she ends up being infected by the Uroboros Virus, a new strain based on the Progenitor virus and the source of the worm-like monsters they've seen earlier in the game. Wesker betrays Excella and leaves her behind to die, and she mutates into a gigantic Uroboros mutant that gets taken out by the heroes. Wesker monologues about his desire to become god after wiping out most of humanity with Uroboros. Jill tells Chris and Sheva about the weakness of the Uroboros carriers -- they require a regular dose of a serum called PG67A/W to keep in control of their parasite, and overdoses of this antidote will kill them.
Chris and Sheva hunt Wesker through the wilderness, eventually arriving at a hangar where Wesker is ready to unleash planes with plague-carrying missiles over the planet. During the ensuing battle, Wesker is weakened by an injection of the serum, and the battle continues in Wesker's main bomber plane where he's about to unleash Uroboros globally. After being injected with the serum yet again and blasted out of an airhole, Wesker falls into a volcano, although not before an attempt at dragging Sheva down with him. Wesker survives, however, and merges with an intact Uroboros missile and goes insane, ranting as he fights Chris and Sheva. Ultimately, Wesker is defeated via helicopter missiles and sent tumbling into magma, while Chris and Sheva are saved by their BSAA ally from earlier in the game, Josh. The end, until the next game!
Majini (and Type 2-3 Plagas)
The basic enemy this time around, the counterpart to the 'Ganado' of Resident Evil 4, is the Majini (the Swahili plural form of 'jinn', or roughly 'evil spirit'). Which means that just like the Ganado, they basically look like regular villagers that try and murder you with guns or clubs or spears or whatever they have nearby. These guys are infected by a modified version of Las Plagas, known as 'Type 2' or 'Type 3' Plagas. Interestingly, this is done by splicing Las Plagas with leech DNA which gives it a faster time of taking over the host. The Type 2 Plagas has to apparently be administered while the parasite was already matured, so instead of injecting an egg into the bloodstream, Tricell's agents just force-fed the villagers matured Plagas parasites... but at least they take over their host within minutes (instead of a whole day like what happened to Leon Kennedy), and are not weakened by sunlight.
There are three more-or-less major groups of Majini that Chris and Sheva encounter throughout the journey -- more modern villagers from the initial village; a group that has descended into barbaric tribal outfits; and a group that wield guns and dress in soldier uniforms. Notes found throughout the game show how much the Majini breaks down the minds of those infected, leading that second group to descend uncharacteristically to over-the-top tribal behaviour.
That said... even more so than the Ganados, the Majini are just there. They're not zombies, and they're technically sentient, just super-hostile. The ambience of how the village turning hostile to Chris and Sheva and them being stalked all throughout their journey is cool and all, but ultimately I felt they don't quite have the same 'bioweapon' vibe as zombies or the parasite cult.
Most of the 'lesser' Majini can have the parasite reveal their 'true' form by showing off a pretty cool petal-tentacle ensemble tipped with fangs, a visual that is so cool that the live-action Resident Evil movies took painstaking time to show them off a lot in what is honestly one of the low-key cooler visuals for a non-boss enemy... but in actual gameplay, the 'flower mouths' don't really matter for the basic Majini, just a little thing that show up in cutscenes and death animations. It is a bit sad since I remember them quite vividly from the live-action movies and the cutscenes in this game.
Majini Minibosses
We've got a couple. The iconic Executioner Majini was so cool due to its pyramid-head look that it shows up in one of the live-action movies. But the rest are... they're there. We've got the Big Man Majini (who's a big guy), Chainsaw Majini (who's Chainsaw Man from the previous game, but African), the Giant Majini (who's a giant, has a tribal mask and a big fantasy weapon) and Gatling Gun Majini (who's a big soldier guy with a chaingun). Yep! They are here!
Cephalo
Far, far cooler than 'hey, look at these angry people, but they are big' minibosses are these variants, which are the equivalent to the alphabet head-replacing Plaga. The Cephalo ("head", obviously) here is first seen via a plot-relevant character called Allison, and... and it's basically a combination of Plaga A and Plaga B from Resident Evil 4, huh? We've got a giant swarm of centipede-esque legs twitching where the Cephalo has burst out of the neck, but instead of an insectoid parasite head we get just this huge mass of tentacles ending in a creepy tumourous flesh-club that writhes around. It sure is a flesh-beast, but I honestly kind of prefer the more unique look of (again) the previous game's Plagas or even this game's 'Hatchling' Plagas in terms of visual design. Still, a pretty cool extrapolation of RE4's Plagas.
Duvalia
Duvalia is created by Type 3 Plaga, and is named after a genus of South African milkweed. Instead of merely replacing the head, the Duvalia Plaga basically causes the entire upper half of the body to burst open into, well, this abomination resembling its namesake flower. These are very rare, and quite scary since they have a one-hit-kill move.
It's a bit hard to see what's going on from the image here, but the Duvalia are just basically stumbling around with their upper body replaced by massive chunks of chitin like a closed-off flower, while a pile of flesh that used to be the human upper body -- you can see the ribcages and what I think are eyeballs -- trailing behind like a weird tail. The Duvalia's newfound hard carapace can one-shot your players, but shooting the exposed organ entrails causes the 'flower' to open and reveal the vulnerable mass of nested fleshy mouths inside that you can shoot. Pretty cool, particularly in action!
Kipepeo
Oh, shit, this is a cool one. The Kipepeo (Swahili for 'butterfly') burst out and utterly transforms their host into this... this massive giant moth-like fleshbeast, and I absolutely like what they're going on here. The Kipepeo actually burst out of the backs of the remains of their human host like butterflies out of a cocoon, which is a pretty awesome visual. The Plagas parasites always had some form of arthropodal features to them anyway, and while they've mostly had a vaguely spider or centipede like vibe, turning into this butterfly-esque thing is pretty awesome, too. I like that the large wings are made out of flesh, there's a mass of nasty-looking pustules on their back, and their lower half of their body is just a mash of whip-like tentacles and a huge, nasty lamprey-mouthed claw-arm.
That more cartoony artwork from Clan Master also shows the details of their 'head' a bit better, with two tiny cute slug-like eyestalks and a torso that almost resembles some sort of moth or butterfly abdomen. Also, clearly whoever made the live-action movies loved the Kipepeos, because they also show up a fair bit in the last one! It's a bit of a shame that, bosses notwithstanding, the Kipepeo is basically the last common enemy that I really like from this game's bestiary.
In addition to the Cephalo, Kipepeo and Duvalia, some Majini also just... explode upon death.
Adjule (taken for a term for African wild dogs) are this game's obligatory evil dog enemy. And they look boring as hell other than the fact that they used a different dog base... until they show off just how much the Plagas have transformed them. The twist here is that the entire front halves of the dog split sideways to reveal a massive maw of flesh and teeth, and that's a pretty neat and unexpected visual. Otherwise, I have nothing much to add here other than the fact that the Adjule also show up as live-action Wesker's pets in Resident Evil: Afterlife and look pretty nasty there, too.
Crocodile
I'll also note that at one point you fight crocodiles, but since they seem to be regular crocodiles without any Las Plagas tentacles, they're just... mean crocodiles. Really, game? That seems like a massive missed opportunity.
Bui Kichwa
Named after the Swahili words for 'spider' and 'head', the Bui Kichwa are just large, mutated spiders. It's a bit hard to tell, but their legs end in massive sickles, and their bodies are just creepy masses of tumorous tissue. The game doesn't really tell you properly, but the Bui Kichwa aren't actually mutated wildlife!
They are basically this game's equivalent of Plaga C from RE4, being a spidery parasite that bursts out and scuttles around after its host's death. This never actually happens with any of the Majini, and the Bui Kichwa are just encountered in random subterranean areas where they would be easily mistaken as giant spider monsters that Chris and Sheva have to slay.
Licker Beta
Oh, hey, it's the Licker! We haven't seen one of these in a main series game since Resident Evil 2, actually. I... I still don't know how I feel about this one, if we're being honest. It's cool that we're getting a new version of the Licker, and apparently these are created by Tricell after stealing data from Umbrella because there is, apparently, a high demand on the black market for these creatures. Licker Beta here is created by injecting the Uroboros virus to a regular Licker and... instead of looking like it's a flayed man, now it looks like a meat-man? At least they still kept the massive claws and the exposed brain. Design-wise it's kind of a shame that I have to say that I prefer both the original Licker from RE2 or the newer revised Licker from the RE2 remake... but this is a decent design.
Licker Beta also has an exposed heart on its chest that acts as a weak point, but considering it moves on all fours all the time it's probably hard to get a bead on it. It's also apparently developed to its own species that it can actually reproduce. It's a bit of a small detail! The Licker Betas are an interesting bit where they are very numerous in some parts of Resident Evil 5, but are otherwise unremarkable to the main story. They swarm you a lot in a very Aliens vibe, and there are a couple of great moments in the game where you're just trying to solve puzzles while the game just disgorges hordes after hordes of Licker Betas at you.
A strange random note is that the progenitor virus has mutated the Lickers that they are able to... reproduce? Uhhhhhh... okay? The flayed mutated corpses can make babies. That's disturbing.
Reaper
Unlike last game's Novistadores, the Reaper aren't actually humans who were transformed by Las Plagas, but cockroaches that got transformed with the Uroboros virus. And... they sure are cool bug-people, although they don't really look too cockroach-y other than those iconic roach antennae that now stick out of their backs. They're cool because they are four-armed bug-people, but in these main-numbered-games alone we've already had a couple of far cooler-looking bug monsters in the Chimaera, the Novistadores and the Drain Deimos, so I'm surprisingly ambivalent about this one.
Being based on a cockroach, and the game also having files that say that the Umbrella/Tricell scientists have no idea how these things happened was quite funny. They do look quite cool, if somewhat 'obvious' as a multi-scythed monster. The Reapers clog up a bunch of the areas with cocoons and webs, and appear in rather unexpected locations.
Blob
Not actually seen in the main story taking place in Africa and only during the flashback DLCwhen Chris and Jill storm the Spencer Estate in the past, the Blobs are... interesting creatures? They sure don't look blobby at all, but are very humanoid. They have a huge mass of tumours on their shoulders and back, and their head (which is hard to notice at first glance) has been replaced with a lamprey like mouth... but they're just kind of a generic humanoid 'big man' enemy. I do like that they swing around rusty anchors, which is always a fun, wacky visual. Not much to say here, they're apparently just a 'palette swap' of the Executioner Majini. It's sure an interesting humanoid abomination, but at this point we've seen a lot better. Sorry, Blob.
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BOSSES:
Uroboros Test Subject
The first couple of bosses in the game are actually the Executioner and Chainsaw Majini, but... yeah, I really can't say too much about them which is why I lumped them with the 'elite' Majini above. The first real monstrous boss is this giant 'Uroboros Test Subject', otherwise called 'Test Subject #1' in some sources. It... it sure is a mass of tentacles arranged in the shape of a man! The Uroboros virus is depicted as a mass of writhing worms or snakes that takes over the host body, and undulates around like a weird serpent.
It sure looks better in motion! We've had tentacle-themed parasites before with both Nemesis and Las Plagas, but this is a creature that's nothing but tentacles shambling around, with its 'core' moving around in its writhing mass of a body. Not a bad look for a boss! Surprisingly, despite being the brand-new virus, we only actually fight three proper Uroboros test subjects. They are very weak to fire, and this writhing mass is fought in a location where you can trick him into walking into a convenient incineration room.
Popokarimu
Okay, this one is cool. The Popokarimu (a rough Swahili translation of 'bat silkworm') is a Plagas-infected bat that fused with a silkworm, and somehow this ends up with a four-winged draconic monstrosity. Perhaps a bit too fantasy-monster, but I like it a lot! The four wings look cool, and the massive armoured worm-tail is great. I also kind of like just how mutated the face of this creature is. The upper jaw certainly looks like a gross bat, but the lower jaw has mutated into a nastier looking underbite. It's a bit easier to see in that official artwork, but the bat's lower half has been fused to a massive, mutated silkworm that spits sticky silk to grab your characters in place. The profile look makes it look a lot more clearer!
The Popokarimu is fought twice in the game, the first one in a ravine where you can drop mines and knock the rampaging beast over to expose the fleshy underside of its silkworm half. The Popokarimu is then encountered a bit later in the game, having survived your initial encounter. as a surprise boss that you can evade or kill off for good.
Ndesu
Ndesu (a mis-transcription of the Swahili word 'Ndevu', meaning beard) is... El Gigante from the previous game. But with a beard. He also has a belt of dead soldiers? I really didn't care all too much for El Gigante in the previous game, because that's just a big Lord of the Rings troll-man. Ndesu is also a big troll-man.
The fight does involve the Ndesu's stitches bursting apart and having centipede-like parasites pop up, but he's also fought in a very gimmicky 'railgun' segment where your character is just sitting on a turret that makes an already boring boss even more boring.
Ricardo Irving
The first half of the game's main human villain is the "Merchant of Death", the black market dealer Ricardo Irving. Irving is the game's attempt to catch lightning in a bottle twice with Ramon Salazar from the previous game, but they perhaps steer too much into the 'obnoxious' side of things this time around. I do like him and his over-the-top cockney accent, but he also doesn't quite have enough of a presence in the game. He should have menaced Chris and Sheva a lot more! Which is actually a problem that I do have with RE5 versus RE4... there are just so many segments where it's just hordes and hordes of Majini without the villains taunting you.
Of course, as something that's on par with most of the enemies in this franchise, Irving eventually injects a Dominant Plagas onto his own body, which... turns him into a massive... thing?
And I do mean massive. Here's a screenshot to make you appreciate just how utterly large Irving is, because that's Irving's monster form 'head' next to poor Sheva. It's far, far bigger than any of the giant enemies we've fought in this franchise, up to and including the likes of Plants 42 and 43; Del Lago; the Salazar/Queen Plagas fusion; and both of Birkin and Nemesis's final fleshglob form. It sure is a giant creature for sure, reminding me of something like a kraken since Chris and Sheva fights Irving while on a boat. Irving's mutated form is this massive kraken that swims on either flank, using its massive chitin-tipped tentacles to slam and attack the boat.
You have to take control of the boat's machineguns to shoot at Irving's exposed weak spots, but it's a bit more involved than the Ndesu fight because you run around the boat a lot more as Irving dives in and out of the water. If you're going to make a boss into a 'turret fight', make it cinematic like this! Irving's real body still hangs around inside this monstrous (and surprisingly, unnamed) form's mouth like a tongue, and eventually Chris and Sheva shoot his body off, leaving the giant bioweapon body to sink into the river.
It is spectacular... but also feels a bit 'too much' especially compared to how the other Plaga mutations have been shown.
U-8
Its name, I think, is supposed to remind us of the previous game's U-3, but other than being a Plagas monstrosity there really isn't much between them that's super common. U-3 is like this bizarre human-lizard-bug centaur who later manifests a second parasite head. U-8 is... a giant crab monster with giant tentacles ending with claws. His name is apparently short of "Ultimate 8" and there aren't any real good screenshots that show off U-8's anatomy particularly well, but that's because the U-8 is also a giant beast that menaces Chris and Sheva while they're on a giant circular platform.
It's essentially a giant spider-crab creature, using those longer claws to anchor itself on the walls of the cylindrical room, and it has a very cool bug-face with multiple extra jaws and whatnot. It attacks you with two pincer arms, and the end result does feel like a pretty cool giant monster. Oh, at one point it lifts its abdomen out and launches a bunch of tiny mosquito B.O.W.'s at you, too.
In the story, U-8 is just another bioweapon that Tricell has manufactured, and is randomly unleashed without much buildup on our heroes, who proceed to slay it and send it dropping down onto the bottom of the base. Again, I do feel like while I do like the ambience and aesthetic of Resident Evil 5, some of its bosses and enemies do just feel so disconnected and unfocused. As a big crab spider kaiju, it sure is a cool setpiece, but otherwise... I do like it, just... not that much. I think it's at this point that the franchise ends up getting a bit of a boner for "BIGGER AND BIGGER MONSTERS!" that ended up really making RE6 feel so messy.
(Speaking of setpieces, the boss after this is a dual boss of Albert Wesker and a mind-controlled Jill Valentine, but they're just mostly regular people with some super-strength).
Uroboros Mkono
I almost considered lumping Mkono and Aheri together as just 'look at these writhing worm-snake masses', but that really isn't fair. Uroboros Mkono is the last non-named character boss fight in this game, as another test subject is injected with the Uroboros Virus, fails to take hold, and his fleshy body is torn apart as the worm-mass thing glorps out of him. Uroboros Mkono ('arm' in Swahili) is basically a bigger, deadlier version of the first Uroboros boss, able to launch its arms like whips or snakes, and to dissolve into the walls and reappear elsewhere in the room.
A lot of his fight involves dodging him and trying to get him to try and absorb fuel tanks, or to use the convenient flamethrower in the room to kill him.
There are lumpy fleshy tumours that you have to shoot and burn, which will cause the Mkono to reveal its two 'cores' atop of tentacles. It's probably another annoyance on my part of how obvious Resident Evil 5 makes the Uroboros weak spots. They're not even eyeballs or flower cores or something, they're just weird lumpy things! The animation for Uroboros Mkono is cool, and I actually enjoy this fight a lot. It does look a lot better in motion as it writhes and moves around, and the designers wanted to make the Uroboros feel like a 'tree', and they certainly do a pretty good job at making him gross!
Uroboros Aheri
Uroboros Aheri (Swahili for 'end') is formed out of one of the main villains, Wesker's lieutenant Excella Gionne -- another character who I felt could've had a much bigger presence in the story. Excella ends up being betrayed by Wesker and injected with the Uroboros virus and it also doesn't accept her, leading her to transform into another Uroboros creature. The difference is that Wesker has prepared a gigantic pile of corpses, and as Excella transforms into Uroboros Aheri, she absorbs all of the pile of corpses, leading to a gigantic writhing plant-snake-worm-goop abomination that takes up the entirety of a cargo ship. I guess since the Uroboros came from a flower, the idea is that this is also a giant twisted kaiju flower?
Uroboros Aheri feels designed to be a 'spectacle boss fight', and you spend the entire level running around the ship trying to find resources and clues on how to fight something even bigger than Ricardo Irving's weird plagas-kraken form. It is quite cool to run around the ship as Aheri's tentacles writhe around and threaten to crush the boat, and ultimately Chris and Sheva have to use a laser-guided satellite to slam and blow up those yellow flower-petal-tumours that keep appearing.
After menacing you for an entire level, the actual boss fight for Aheri is... a lot more bark than bite. Despite its impressive form, she's probably one of the easier boss fights since her attacks are wide-sweeping and easily dodged and you just have to spam the same space-laser weapon to keep zapping her from on high. It is quite impressive for what it is, and I do give credit to Resident Evil 5 for making the 'mood' of this whole level and fight quite creepy.
Albert Wesker
"Wow. What a mansion!" Sorry, Albert Wesker. The franchise in its many, many media may have built you up as this utterly badass cold-hearted mastermind with a god complex, a treachery complex and a complexity addiction who dresses like those villains from The Matrix... but to me you'll always be that dork who gets excited at an abandoned mansion's stairs. Wesker has been a recurring enemy that's involved in some capacity after showing up as the obligatory treacherous teammate in the first game, basically taking over Umbrella as The villain for the franchise. It's in Resident Evil 5 that you really contend with him as a major factor in the story instead of being the man pulling the strings or whatever, though, and... and you know what? I am totally up for Wesker's comic book supervillain ensemble right there with the glasses and the long coat and the gloves. For the part of the game's history that's trying a bit too hard to be serious, I love that Wesker is, as Chris Redfield says, 'taking his plans out of too many comic books'.
Wesker's plan has transformed into him wanting to launch Uroboros to envelop the world with complete global saturation, and let those 'worthy' to be chosen while wiping out the rest of humanity. In-between the grandiose ideals that he inherited from the original founder of Umbrella (which he killed in the prologue to the Resi 5 story), he's also got a massive hate-boner for his old friends Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield, hence the very personal vibe that he has against them.
Wesker is encountered several times in the game, and fought twice (three times if you play the prologue DLC). For most of it, Albert Wesker is fought in his human form where he is basically Neo from the Matrix, teleporting around and displaying super-dodging, super-strength, and abusing the hell out of this in cutscenes and gameplay. I love just how much the design team really committed to homaging The Matrix for no real reason! With this game starting off as being a bit too dour and serious, I love that it ends with Albert Wesker hamming it up.
The actual final boss fight starts off with him in human mode, and you have to shut off lights, launch RPG missiles at him, have him catch the RPG missiles, shoot the RPG missiles, and then inject him with a plot device to make his Uroboros virus unstable. The joke here is that Wesker keeps wearing his sunglasses throughout this fight, which appears to be why he's having trouble seeing in the dark.
After a fight abroad a bomber plane while Wesker's internal Uroboros mutations go haywire, Albert Wesker loses his shirt... and lets the Uroboros emerge out of his body. It's thankfully a lot more unique and preserves his face and humanoid body, while still having the writhing snakes that the Resident Evil 5 team are clearly very proud of. Also, Wesker uses his right arm to tear apart some metal chunks from the plane crash, giving him a silhouette that resembles Resident Evil 4's Krauser.
The fight against Wesker's second phase is a combination of some cinematics as Chris and Sheva fight in an active volcano, and at one point Chris iconically (and memetically) punches a rock larger than he is. Wesker just kind of defaults to swinging his giant tentacle arms, creating some tornadoes with Uroboros, and trying to bash Chris and Sheva with his giant metal-spiky tentacle arm... which admittedly is a bit disappointing as a boss. Sometimes an orange orb appears on his chest or back, which are the opportunities to hurt him.
But ultimately, I don't mind because Wesker keeps his mind and his taunting throughout this whole fight, which I thought was way more important. On paper, I don't like the idea that we're just fighting a 'super-soldier' that feels very much like a superhero show, but Albert Wesker is probably the only Resident Evil character I can get behind as that kind of a boss.
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Ultimately, an utterly mixed bag, huh? The idea of the Uroboros bosses is actually something I find cool, but they really don't do much with it despite repeating an Uroboros-themed boss four times in the game. A lot of the enemies feel underwhelming despite me really liking the mutated Majini and the simpler mutations like the Adjule, Kipepeo and Duvalia. But yeah, I dunno... RE5 is just a weird mixed bag in general as far as monster designs go for me, I guess. Fortunately, there's the next game.
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