Reviewing Monsters: Resident Evil 3: Nemesis

Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (1999 / 2020)

The last one of the Resident Evil games that have received the remake treatment, Resident Evil 3's remake was released this year! And the original was released two whole decades ago. Two whole decades! It was on the Playstation, before Playstation added numbers to the back of its consoles! I actually remembered this game, because it was one of those games that were considered 'too adult' and 'too disturbing' at that time. This game is honestly how I actually first stumbled upon the Resident Evil franchise, really!

Anyway, I'm going to try to at least get through all the main numbered parts of the franchise (I know Code: Veronica and some others are counted as 'main' games) before October is over. Spooky month and all that, y'know? 

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The Story:

The story of RE3 takes place basically concurrently alongside RE2. I will be a lot more brief this time around because as the games grow more sophisticated and the story becomes a bit longer, the story itself becomes fairly more complex and has more twists and turns... and, of course, being a game with multiple different-but-similar endings, I'll try to be as brief with the synopsis as possible. 

Anyway, Jill Valentine, the female protagonist of RE1, rendezvouses with a bunch of survivors in the zombie-infested Raccoon City, but discovers from a wounded comrade of hers that there is 'something' hunting down S.T.A.R.S. members (the same elite task force that Jill and Chris Redfield are members of). As Jill tries to escape Raccoon City, she stumbles upon the mysterious threat that kills one of her friends, Brad... the ominous, mysterious trench-coated man, Nemesis. 

Barely managing to escape, Jill manages to meet the source of a radio transmission she's been tracking, which comes from Carlos Olivera, a mercenary that once worked for Umbrella's Biohazard Countermeasure Service. Rightfully untrustworthy of someone who introduces himself as an Umbrella goon, Carlos proves himself to Jill by helping her survive another encounter with Nemesis. Carlos divulges that there's a contingency escape plan involving a helicopter evac, and they journey to try and repair a tram that would take them to the evacuation site. However, throughout this process the rest of Carlos's team are killed by either Nemesis or the threats around the city. The tram itself is dislodged from its track during a fight against Nemesis. Despite their efforts, Nemesis shoots down the helicopter anyway. During the seeming final confrontation with Nemesis, the seemingly unstoppable being is defeated when his rocket launcher self-destructs due to Carlos's gunfire. However, Jill gets infected by the T-Virus and is evacuated into a nearby chapel. 

A couple of days later Carlos heads off to try and find an antidote, and in the process of doing so realizes that his squad member Nikolai (presumed dead during the events earlier in the game) is a traitor to his team, planning to take the B.O.W. secrets and sell it to a third party. While he succeeds in creating a T-Virus vaccine from Umbrella machinery, Carlos narrowly survives an attempt by Nikolai to blow up the hospital with him in it. Carlos injects Jill with the vaccine and cures her, and they head to the nearby park where they find a secret Umbrella operations base in the cemetery. Jill finds out orders that Raccoon City isto be destroyed in a missile attack, before facing against the UCBS traitor Nikolai. Their scruffle is interrupted by the arrival of the monstrous Grave Digger mutant, which Jill kills. She reunites with Carlos in an Umbrella factory and discovers yet another helicopter room. 

This leads to ultimately a final confrontation with the Nemesis, which survives the exploding rocket launcher. Jill fights the Nemesis in a waste-processing room and manages to drop him into a pit of acid. With the threat of the incoming thermobaric missile, Jill has to face off against the Nemesis as it emerges, mutated and transformed due to the stress of being dropped into an acid pool. Nemesis is finally defeated with the aid of a railgun, and Jill and Carlos ends up being evacuated by the surprise arrival of Barry Burton, a S.T.A.R.S. ally of Jill from Resident Evil 1. (Depending on choices made, Nikolai either escapes in another helicopter or is killed by the protagonists) They escape, just as Raccoon City is utterly obliterated by the United States government with a missile strike. 

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Returning Enemies: Zombie, Pale Head, Zombie Dog, Crow, Giant Spider

I'm 90% sure Resident Evil 3 reuses some assets from Resident Evil 2, and that includes a bunch of enemy assets. So yeah, I'll just lump these guys all together and just acknowledge that they return. It gives a neat moment of connectivity between various games (and both the zombie crows and zombie dogs are pretty iconic atmospheric moments of the franchise anyway). I don't think there really is a whole ton to say here, after the novelty of Umbrella's T-Virus infecting animals and turning them into monstrous zombie versions of themselves are gone, it's just kind of nice for them to round up the bestiary as somewhat weaker enemies, y'know? (The Giant Spider, I believe, gets removed in the RE3 remake.) The Pale Heads finally get incorporated into the main story after skipping out on RE2's. 

There is a significantly less amount of differing monsters for me to talk about in this game, I feel, compared to RE1 and RE2. Part of it might simply be due to them reusing a bunch of monster assets from the second game, but at the same time I think they're going for a quality-over-quantity feel as far as the creatures go -- as well as focusing more on the story of Jill and Carlos. (And, y'know, the titular Nemesis monster being the monster of the game). Again, I really do love the focus that the game has on the story, but bestiary-wise... well, it's a good thing that the new Umbrella-related horrors were all pretty awesome, otherwise I would've lumped this game's short bestiary as a little footnote in RE2. 

MA-121 Hunter Beta

We saw the lizard-men Hunter Alphas in Resident Evil 1, and just like how RE2 featured an upgraded 'Tyrant' model, Resident Evil 3 also features upgraded, refined versions of the Hunter model seen in the Spencer Mansion. The Hunter Beta is noted to be weaker in attack power compared to its larger Alpha cousin, but is a lot faster and has better reaction time to bullets and stuff. Umbrella being Umbrella, they decided to deploy a bunch of their B.O.W.'s into Raccoon City to test and monitor their performance against the S.T.A.R.S. agents. It's like a demonstration, except the demonstration involves sending a bunch of bio-engineered lizard-men clones to hunt and kill people.

The original concept of the Hunter Beta is interesting, showing its body being riddled with nasty, meaty tumours that sometimes even obscured their vision... and it even has a larger left hand, a bit of an asymmetry that I completely missed until I read the Wiki's description of it. Did they try to replicate some features of the Tyrant into this thing?

The remake's version of Hunter Beta drops the tumours and the feel that the Hunter Beta is like a 'diseased' version of Hunter Alpha. I do like the tumours, but in this case I do have to agree with the remake team's decision to make the Beta feel like a truly formidable being and a more 'complete' B.O.W. like how the original Hunter Alphas were. It's got longer, meaner claws, and its face makes it look like some sort of bizarre combination of an insect and a lizard or something... really love those armour plating on its mouth. I kinda wish they kept the original tumour-encrusted creatures as a prototype or imperfect version of these new Betas, but you can't have everything. Pretty neat!

MA-124 Hunter Gamma

Of course, while the Hunter Beta just honestly looks like an improved version of its Alpha counterpart, the Gamma (nicknamed 'The Frogger' by Umbrella) looks completely different. The original 1999 version of the Hunter Gamma basically swaps out anything reptilian in Alpha or Beta and swaps it with aspects from amphibians -- with clear webbed frog feet or sucker-tipped fingers, a hunched-over posture, and a head that resembles either a blind salamander (in the concept artwork) or a frog (in the in-game models). Either way, the Gamma is eyeless. Interestingly, whichever branch of Umbrella developed the Gamma actually dismissed them as being impractical for battlefield use, because being part-frog they were sensitive to heat and their mouths were susceptible weak points. In a somewhat unexpectedly tender moment (which felt like it belonged in a setting whose bestiary did not comprise entirely of zombie bioweapons) an Umbrella scientist refused to kill his murder-toad pets, and ended up smuggling them into the sewers of Raccoon City. And while most of the non-intelligent B.O.W.'s have mostly been shown to be monstrous, apparently these Gammas were docile and friendly to their handlers.

They looked neat and kinda cool in the original RE3, but man oh man, the 2020 remake truly improved on them. They turned the Hunter Gamams into these sick blobby lumps of frog-heads with two legs, and I absolutely love just how purulent and nasty the skin on this thing is. 2020's Gamma are still eyeless... but they have these cluster of yellow vesicles where the eyes should be. Moreso than the actually cool-looking frog-man of 1999's RE3, these new Hunter Gammas genuinely look like they were wretched, failed products. And most interestingly, as you fight these Gammas, you realize that those mouths don't work like frog mouths anymore! They open up in four directions like a flower, in a pretty appropriately hideous animation. I like it, and it reminds me of my favourite type of 'basic' enemies in a Resident Evil game, next game's Plaga.

Sliding Worm

Regrettably, a lot of these monsters get absolutely dropped in the remake, which is honestly extremely regrettable. Dear remaster team, have you guys not seen the sheer amount of bizarre monsters in all the Resident Evil franchise? I feel like those giant over-the-top monstrosities is what made Resident Evil stand out in the first place beyond just being a humdrum zombie-shooting game, and unlike the remake for Resident Evil 2, they didn't give us something better to replace any of these monster designs that are just gone. Redesigning the franchise to focus more around the survival horror and making the zombies be tougher is certainly something I can appreciate, but not at the expense of taking out half the monsters in a game (and apparently some of the fandom's favourite levels too) just because the monsters are 'too unrealistic'. 

Anyway, the 'Sliding Worm' are just... well, worm enemies with some pretty nasty petal-like mouths tipped with fangs. I used to think that these sort of mouths are features that belonged solely to fictional plant or worm monsters, but turns out that a lot of real-life parasitic worms have similar looking mouths. Okay! The Sliding Worms are encountered hatching from eggs and can deceptively leap at you, and would later be revealed to be the offspring of something far, far larger.

The Grave Digger

...which is the Grave Digger! Encountered as a boss in a cemetery (and, again, very regrettably dropped by the remake), the Grave Digger is this franchise's version of the Graboids or Dune Worms or what-have-you, those giant subterranean giant worms that burrow and burst out of the ground, wrecking the terrain around it and stuff. It's less of a worm and more like a giant maggot, though, especially with the bloated body segments and the nubby legs and the colour used for the in-game model. Of course, it has the weird Sarlacc-Lamprey mouth that its younger brood shares. Even the name 'Grave Digger' seems oddly appropriate for this giant maggot. Interestingly, at least from what I can gather in the wiki, Grave Digger isn't even some sort of Aliens style 'giant queen' of the species, merely the mature version of it. If the Sliding Worms weren't annihilated by Jill and Carlos (or the bomb), each of them would've grown to a full-size Grave Digger in around a week.

The game is a bit ambiguous on just what the Grave Digger is, other than the fact that they are contaminated underground bugs from near the Umbrella disposal plants. The game keeps it ambiguous whether they are mutated maggots, leeches, earthworms or some sort of millipede (I've always seen a mix of maggot in the design and diet, and earthworm in the behaviour) but honestly, when the creature has been mutated to hundreds of times its size, does it really even matter what the basis organism is?

Brain Sucker

Another casualty of the remake is the Brain Sucker, although it's less removed and more 'combined' with the next enemy, the Drain Deimos. The Brain Sucker is already noted to be a 'close relative', so unlike the removal of the giant grave-destroying burrowing zombie worm, at least there's a valid reason to take out the Brain Sucker. Look at that artwork, though. Brain Sucker's in-game model is basically just a slightly-reskinned Drain Deimos, the Brain Sucker is apparently a mutated blood-sucking arthropod that drew blood not from human zombies, but from other infected animals, and cluster around the Umbrella incineration plant. I guess they are like, mutated ticks or fleas in the crows and dogs you find running around? As its name implies, the Brain Sucker prefers to crack open its victims' skulls and suck out the brain within.

The artwork is really cool at making this resemble less of a mutated tick or spider and more of a mass of nasty, creepy flesh shaped in the vague shape of an arthropod. I love the fact that it's got three legs on one side and two on the other, and I love how the legs taper off in creepy little flesh-tentacles. The best part, of course, is its two heads that looks very awkwardly fused together, with the beady, mismatched eyes and little tentacle-tongues. Nasty!

Drain Deimos

Borrowing its name from the personification of terror in Greek mythology, the Drain Deimos are also parasites that are mutated by the T-virus. In the original 1999 game they are honestly kind of just there, basically just jumping giant spider-fleas, but hoo boy, look at that artwork, huh? The Drain Deimos in the artwork is depicted as this bipedal humanoid bug-man, and I think that face is supposed to be a heavily mutated flea? The somewhat 'flat' looking vibe, and the chompers kind of make it look like one. And its got two pairs of hands that emerge in different directions, and... it looks just pretty dang cool, y'know? Unlike the Bloodsuckers, the Drain Deimos are mutated from feeding on human-zombie blood. Interestingly, thanks to their mutation, the Deimos now doesn't hunger for blood like its base organism, but rather hunts for the cerebrospinal fluid of their prey. Which means that, like the Brain Sucker, they go for the brain! Or, well, they will stab their proboscis into their prey and suck out their fluids.

I do like the little detail about how the creature's massive, decidedly non-insect-like appearance is caused by multiple, repeated molts to compensate for the T-Virus stimulating muscles, and also the little detail that the Deimos are all female that reproduce through parthenogenesis (i.e. the females can lay eggs without needing to mate with a male). To my knowledge and my brief research through google, I don't think there are any known fleas who reproduce that way, but some ticks and mites (and certainly many other non-parasitic insects) do.

The 2020 remake, meanwhile, takes the concept art and the more 'spidery' look of the polygonic 1999 Playstation model and improves on it significantly.  Look at the new Drain Deimos! It kinda looks somewhat like a generic giant spider or beetle monster in its 'default' state  but there is that addition of the creepy, vaguely-human-skull-shaped little 'helmet' on top of the Drain Deimos's face, which... actually makes its 'face' look more like a flea while also hammering it home that this is still a hideous zombie-creature.

Interestingly, while it's not displayed in most of its animations, New Drain Deimos still  has the bipedal legs of its original incarnation. Again, I haven't played the remake, but I imagine it'll be quite a shock when these spider-beetle zombie creatures suddenly stand up on two humanoid legs -- although I don't think it happens too often. Also, if the Drain Deimos isn't creepy enough, they now kill your player characters by shoving their ovipositor (hidden under that skull-helmet) into your character's throat and laying their eggs in you. Fellatio jokes aside, that's a significantly more terrifying way to die, knowing you've got baby zombie fleas gestating inside you ready to burst out instead of simply getting your jugular ripped or something. Actually pretty cool, and the Drain Deimos area has been noted to be one of the best parts of the remake. Shame they didn't put like, a miniboss there, huh?

Nemesis: Alpha Type

Originally just a creature briefly glimpsed as part of the story's background and not an actual enemy, the Nemesis Alpha (or NE-α Type) is what makes the titular eponymous bio-weapon so damn terrifying. It's not just a mere T-Virus, it's now got a second, more powerful parasite. The original version of the parasite was a lot more obvious sci-fi prop, with thick worm-like tentacles, but the newer one with its thread-like mass of tentacles look so much more like something microscopic enlarged with a microscope. The Nemesis Alpha was created specifically as an augmentation in the brain, to prevent their bioweapons from degenerating into 'me eat brains' stupidity or the simple feral anger of the Hunters and Tyrants. Most importantly, it allows its subject to use weapons! You get the iconic 90's vibe of our good ol' Nemesis, a trenchcoat zombie man with a goddamn bazooka. While originally just part of the escalation process between the original RE1, RE2 and RE3, other supplementary games, as well as the later-produced Resident Evil 4 and the Resident Evil 1 remake would reveal that Nemesis Alpha was inspired by the Las Plagas parasites (we'll see them next game!) and Umbrella has already been fucking with the Nemesis parasite with Lisa Trevor (whose multiple mutations and injection of the G-Virus and T-Virus made her immune to the Nemesis parasite's lethal effects).


We'll talk about the titular Nemesis (or, rather, 'Nemesis T-Type') later, but the 2020 remake, in an effort to expand on the Nemesis program, added the Nemesis Alpha as a variant to the zombies, where some zombies with the Nemesis Alpha parasite will cocoon their head in a nasty, bony carapace with creepy little fingers sprouting from its side and a giant glowing red puckered mouth (which I originally thought was a giant eye, G-Virus style). That's pretty cool, and I do like the idea that these Nemesis parasites are basically protecting their host body (or, well, their 'vehicles') from harm. Interestingly, in addition to these Nemesis-hijacked zombies, any zombie directly killed by the 'main' Nemesis apparently gets coated by secretions of the Nemesis parasite and ends up becoming far more stronger than a regular zombie. Neat!

Nemesis: T-Type (a.k.a. "The Pursuer")

And finally, we have unquestionably the 'face' of the franchise. Sure, you've got your Lickers and Tyrants and whatnot, but the Nemesis is undoubtedly the most iconic and most easily memorable 'face' of the franchise as far as zombie antagonists go. And how could you forget him? This creepy giant of a man, with a fancy 90's trenchcoat lugging around bazookas and gatling guns, shooting up people and being completely unstoppable until the end of the game? And other than his iconic lipless face, I do like how Nemesis really embodies a 'super-zombie' for the most part of the game. Unlike the Tyrant or William Birkin, who look obviously hideously mutated from the get-go, Nemesis feels like it's the perfect bio-weapon, looking very much like a super human and behaving like one. It's perhaps somewhat quaint these days, what with superheroes and whatnot being the norm, but still, Nemesis is still pretty cool. He's basically "Mr. X done right", at least back in the original games. 

It's not apparently obvious since we call this dude "Nemesis" all the time (or 'Nemmy' if you want to be mean) but his full title is 'Nemesis: T-type'. He's a T-103 Tyrant implanted with the Nemesis parasite, making him an upgraded version of the first game's final boss! Again, while Nemmy was almost entirely silent throughout the entire game (his sole line of dialogue was an iconic 'STARS!' yell), the storytelling makes it pretty evident that Nemmy was cunning and intelligent, far moreso than any previous zombie monster in the franchise -- able to utilize weapons and to recognize which specific targets it has to hunt down Sure, he's no Machiavellian schemer, but Nemesis's portrayal sure ended up really making him memorable to the fandom of this franchise.

That face, very prominently featured in both game arts above, is probably one of the most enduring reasons, too. Exposed teeth and gums, and flesh that drapes down from cold, unfeeling eye? The fact that part of his face is just a lump of flesh stitched together like a burlap mask? Yeah, this sure is a scary 'zombie' that is beyond just a regular zombie for sure!


As with William Birkin of the previous game, as the 'final boss', 1999!Nemesis gets increasingly mutated as it keeps coming back again and again after seemingly fatal wounds. After its first huge defeat, the original game just shows off what's under that trenchcoat, and turns out that Nemesis's real body is just as mutated as any Tyrant out there and those hoses? Those sci-fi hoses are actually the tentacle tendrils of the parasite within its body! For Nemesis, I'm going to talk about his mutated forms separately between the original and remakes.

And I'm of two parts about this third form. The original 1999 game had Nemesis, after surviving an acid bath and an explosion, have the parasite within forcibly merge the original Nemesis body with another T-103 corpse it happened to find, turning it into this shambling mound whose head is somehow dominated with a giant, jagged beak. Which... is weird? I kind of get the cysts, the ribcage bones forming some kind of back-spikes, and a bunch of squiddy tentacles lashing around. But unlike Birkin from the previous game, I kind of feel like this feels so odd. Maybe it's because Birkin was more hideously mutated so turning into his spike-mouth-dog mode felt like a naturally-unnatural progression, but Nemesis keeps so much of his original design (and most importantly, that iconic face) in all of his other forms, that I feel like this felt a bit off. I can't believe that I'm criticizing the blob-monster for not being humanoid enough. There's a day for everything, huh.


Perhaps with the addition of the generic 'Nemesis Alpha' zombies, the designers of the remake decided to emphasize other parts of T-Nemesis instead of the parasite within its body (plus, y'know, all the story changes), and made its first mutation turn him into a giant, ghoulish dinosaur-sized goliath with bone spikes, exposed bone and whatnot. I like that the face still remains the same, and it sure is a pretty cool form. It's nothing too special in the franchise's standards, but Nemesis has always been memorable for being a humanoid monster, so in this case turning him into what's basically the equivalent of a regular zombo turning into a licker fits. 

Perhaps to further distance Nemesis from every other Resident Evil boss whose final stages turned them into giant tumour blob monsters, Nemesis's new third form in the remake still gives him a mostly ogre-esque humanoid body, but I feel like this is the remake team's take on the original second form... only instead of a bunch of hose-like tentacles whipping out of Nemesis's body, the tentacles seem to have completely fused with Nemesis's zombie flesh, forming the giant tentacle-flesh arm that dominates his left side as well as his torso. It crawls around like a ghoulish dog-creature, too, really emphasizing how much less of a 'enhanced human zombie' this thing is anymore. It's not as drastic as last game's Birkin, but still pretty cool. They basically split the original "Nemesis Type 2" into two mutations, and that actually works pretty well to make Nemesis's transformation a bit more gradual. 

Nemesis's final form (click and see the image in a new tab to really understand what we're looking at here) is a typical giant tumour flesh-blob monster similar to William Birkin's final form in the previous game and many, many other giant cancer-globster monsters in subsequent Resident Evil games, Nemmy's final form ends up as what can be charitably described as a giant tumourous giant flower or something with fangs and bones all over, but in the heart of it all is still the very humanoid torso and face of the iconic Nemesis design. Granted, it's a bit hard to tell what's going on from screenshots and you probably need to look at a video to understand a good vibe of the anatomy of this monster. It's originally just this giant house-sized glob of flesh and blood that goops out of the giant acid disposal waste that Jill dunked Nemmy in. And more terrifyingly, Nemesis is still hunting for his primary target Jill even in this form.

And then it opens up like a flower, sends out tendrils to stick itself to parts of the final boss battle room, and its two gigantic car-sized claw-arms emerge out of the giant petal-like tumour-body while the center Nemesis body remains more or less a similar size. It's not a monster design idea that I haven't seen before -- I've seen this sort of 'small body attached to a giant monstrous form' in Digimon or Zelda or whatnot, but in this case, considering how much Nemesis's character is emphasized on Nemmy himself, I felt like it's extra appropriate.

Yateveo

The remake comes with a multiplayer game called Resistance, where, I think, a bunch of survivors have to survive against a bunch of Umbrella-affiliated characters and B.O.W.'s, including a couple of returning enemies from RE2 like G-Birkin and the Ivy Zombies. Named after a man-eating tree cryptid from Central America and Africa, the Yateveo here is this huge, bulbous plant thing that is immobile and is deployed by one of the playable Umbrella-affiliated characters, who can deploy this huge bulb, and either command it like a pokemon to either vine-whip, swallow the enemy or self-destruct. Not bad, but I kinda feel that this might've been a lot cooler as a mini-boss in the game proper. If not in RE3, maybe in RE2. Maybe they had intended on reworking Plant 43 to have a 'central' body like this but ended up not being able to do it? It would've been great if they had put this dude in the actual RE3 remake to replace the Grave Digger or one of the enemies that were removed, for sure. 

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A pretty cool end to a pretty cool game, even if I'm not the biggest fan of some of the changes in the bestiary. Next up, though, we abandon viruses entirely and go straight to parasites!