Reviewing Monsters - Resident Evil 6 Bosses

Resident Evil 6 (Bosses)

We talked about Resident Evil 6's common enemies and minibosses a while back, so let's jump in to the bosses! 

Lepotica

This is one of the complete J'avo mutations that shows up early on (again, depending on the order of the campaigns you play) as a boss, and I believe you fight her a couple of times in other campaigns, too. And... I'm not sure how I feel about this one? The Lepotica (pronounced and sometimes spelled as 'Lepotitsa', a Serbian word that describes feminine beauty) is... uh... it sure is something? I'm not sure how to feel about it other than 'grossed out', which I think is the intended reaction. It's body is just a mass of breast-like warts running down its body, and its creepy skull-face (the eyes are like fleshy warty tumours, too) splits apart like a flower. Very nasty look within that, huh? Pretty nasty looking monster all around, and this is the sort of 'hey, at least make it over the top' sort of fat, waddling zombie that I was talking about when I panned the Whopper in the previous review. Also, the revelatoin that the Lepotica are apparently failed attempts at creating a clone Ada Wong adds an extra layer of disturbing quality to it. 

Lepotica's "breasts" aren't actually breasts, though, but more like little gas bags that the creature uses to walk around and spread the C-virus, literally being a walking vector for the C-virus. It's a bit odd since Neo-Umbrella clearly has C-virus missiles that they can deploy, but I guess the Lepotica just got spontaneously created during the random chrysalid mutations and Neo-Umbrella just weaponized them? Sure. One particularly interesting showcases of the Lepotica's usage is when one is snuck on board a plane. Not my favourite boss, but one that's certainly effective in what it is. 

Brzak

I never noticed it, but between Neptune, the Raccoon City alligator, Del Lago and Ricardo Irving, a giant underwater boss is as much a trope that recurs each game as 'zombie dog' or 'obligatory bug mutant', huh? Brzak (Serbian for 'rapids') here is another one identified as a 'C-virus B.O.W.' similar to the Ogroman or Rasklapanje, and it's... it's a shark with some bony hand-fins. I do like that the fins look a lot more like a bony amphibian hand, this thing was human before the over-the-top C-Virus mutation, after all. 

I could talk about how its gills seem to be on its head, how it's got this bizarre weak point that's this random chameleon tongue with claw-like fingers... but the most hilarious bit is that the Brzak was used as waste disposal. Not for corpses like Del Lago was (the Brzak hates corpses), though, but for computer equipment. Somehow. That's like, the one detail that made me can't take this thing seriously, because for whatever reason my brain can accept that the bizarre flower-based virus causing zombification and bug-based mutation can also be created to transform some random human into a shark-monster but not that it causes the Brzak to develop a taste for computers. 

Mutant Deborah Harper

Deborah Harper is the sister of Helena Harper, who is Leon Kennedy's sidekick in his part of the campaign. She is taken hostage by the bad guys as blackmail material for Helena, but then injects Deborah with the C-virus just for shits and giggles. In an attempt to rescue her Deborah's C-virus activates, and she mutates into a Chrysalid before emerging like this. And... eh? It's a naked woman with five giant vaguely crustacean or insectoid claw-tentacles from her back. It's not terrible but very underwhelming compared to all the other Complete Mutations. The cracked skin is neat, and at least it's got some buggy features, but I dunno, she's kind of just there. 

Iluzija

Okay, yet another very, very animalistic creature, but the Iluzija (Serbian for 'illusion', natch) is yet another human-based B.O.W., just like the Brzak. Okay, sure? Kind of a homage to one of the franchise's very first bosses, Yawn the giant snake, Iluzija one-ups Yawn by being able to turn invisible, because why not. In addition to the nicer graphics allowing them to animate dead rotting flesh better, the Iluzija is one where the boss fight has to be pretty neurotic because you fight him in a labyrinthine apartment complex. And in addition to being able to become invisible, the Iluzija's weak point? Its teeth, which aren't actually teeth, but bug-like symbiotic creatures. Nasty! And the Iluzija's teeth and jaws already look unnaturally wide for a snake!

Perhaps interestingly, the Iluzija was conceptualized not as a snake, but a bizarre blob with tentacles that can stretch its main body like a spitting cobra. Huh!

Ubistvo

This is another boss that's created from a complete C-virus chrysalid mutation, and Ubistvo (Serbian for 'murder') is actually one of the few only C-virus complete mutants that looks like it's still in the style of the body-parts-puzzle J'avo mutations. It still has a vaguely humanoid look to it, but it's got three maggot heads poking out of the remaining half of his face, which is far more disgusting than Glava-Begunac (a.k.a. Triple Cicada Head Man); half its flesh is flayed; its legs is covered with organic armour like the Noga-Oklop J'avo, and, of course, its most terrifying (and simultaneously ridiculous) part of its anatomy is that its arm has transformed into a giant mass of flesh, bones and gore that somehow works as an organic chainsaw. There's an entire ribcage in there; ribcages don't move that way. Because of Resident Evil logic, the Ubistvo's heart and other vitals are located in this secondary chainsaw ribcage. 

Somehow, the combination of the organic chainsaw and the little parasite buddies makes the Ubistvo loop back from being creepy to hilariously awesome. Just a mite too ridiculous, perhaps, but one that I like because of its ridiculousness. 

Ustanak (and Oko)

This game's answer to Nemesis and Mr. X is Ustanak (Serbian for 'revolution'), a relentless Neo-Umbrella implacable man Terminator operative that hunts down Jake Muller. I do like that they don't recycle the trenchcoat large badass again, and went for different large-strong-man trope in making him an extra from Mad Max. You fight Ustanak multiple times, and he keeps swapping around the weapon attached to his right arm, going from that hilariously over-the-top Warhammer 40K contraption of joints and claws, to a triple-barreled gatling gun, to a ball and chain, to three buzzsaws. Honestly, Ustanak reflects a lot of the over-the-top ridiculousness of this game and I can appreciate that. He's an intelligent hunter and all that (which apparently it trades in exchange for limb regeneration), and apparently views one of the main antagonists, Carla Radames, as his mother and goddess. Sure. 

In some of the boss fights, Ustanak will reveal that he's just a bit more mutated than being a big scary man with a stapled-together face, because on his back is a small nest where he unleashes little weirdo bugs called Oko (Serbian for 'eye'), which are... well, they sure look weird with their leafy wings, their very bent antennae, and being a bunch of spiky claws that are arranged around a central egg-sack-looking abdomen. The Oko, adorably, will not attack like regular insect minions, but just screech really loudly to summon big daddy Ustanak to beat the enemy up. 

Carla Radames/Carla Spore

Carla is one of Neo-Umbrella's leaders, and is one of Derek Simmons' co-conspirators (technically the 'bigger bad', except she falls earlier in the story) and surgically altered to look like one of the main characters, Ada Wong. This means that Carla, as Ada, can go around committing crimes and very nearly causing some of the other heroes to murder the real Ada. It's... trust me, something that the game could probably do without. As with most of the villains in this franchise, Carla gets a high dose of the C-virus and gets transformed into a big cement-like flesh-glob... and she stays a literal flesh-glob, while also taking over an entire facility as the goop... and this gray goop continually sprouts dripping "Carla Spore" clones to fight your character as you run around it. It's hard to describe since the entire boss is basically a segment of the game map. Click here for a playthrough. Some of them are human-sized, but  some are small and some are large. And each differing size have different powers, some with acidic blood and some with the ability to fight with three-lobed jaws or explode. And then sometimes Carla just manifests like a mass of hands or eyes or a giant fanged face the size of half a room

It's a very, very interesting way to depict a human boss transformed into a mass of tissue that actually feels fresh and new and different. And judging by the name "Carla Spore", does that mean that this particular C-virus mutant is actually a fungal-based organism? Interesting. Did I mention that at this point, Carla is so crazed by her mutation that she thinks she is the real Ada Wong, and fights to kill the real Ada Wong (your player character at the time) who she thinks is a pretender? Neat! 

Haos

Okay, this is another giant monster. One of the final boss fights depending on which campaign you select, Haos (or HAOS, based on the Serbian word for 'chaos') is a gigantic B.O.W. that... well, I'll let the video speak for itself. "Shit" is sure the right word there, huh? Haos reminds me of the last boss of Mass Effect 2 specifically, but where that is at least like some sort of half-mechanical creature, Haos is just... what is that? It's a giant zombie the size of a small building, but it looks so human, at least from the waist up, and that face! That skull face is so much creepier that it's got actual eyeballs and a nasty film of transparent goopy skin around it, and that melting mouth! Sure, there's the rest of the body with giant zombie arms and its entire lower body is like, tentacles and whatnot, but the thing that is the most memorable has to be that giant skull head. Judging by the fact that its entire lower body is just a mass of tentacles, people say that maybe this is created with a giant squid as a basis, but I've never really 'got' the fact that the C-virus mutations were like Umbrella's other work where they spliced specific DNA into the B.O.W.'s. I dunno. Maybe I need to play the game. It's long humanoid limbs are apparently very bendy like an octopus's, and like the Rasklapanje, it can split its body up into different bits to chase down different enemies. Also somehow, this is also a creature that can spread the C-virus for complete global saturation? Hmmm?

Haos, interestingly, is still under development, developed under Carla's supervision in a secret underwater base. I've seen this thing derided many times for being 'too unrealistic', and... I dunno. On one hand, it is admittedly a bit too much, but on the other hand, it's not like we haven't had giant zombie bosses before. And this is a constructed B.O.W., which explains how relatively more human it looks. I dunno. I feel like it's a bit like U-8 in the previous game, a great setpiece... just probably one that's not that sensible even in a franchise with a fuck-ton of big B.O.W.'s. I just prefer Haos a lot by how ridiculous a giant skull with eyeballs and a glossy film is. It sure is an interesting enemy, I just am not really sure about it. Part of me kind of appreciates that it's not trying to be kinda cheap and go for the "creepy undead baby" vibe, but part of me feels like maybe this would be a lot more memorable if it was? I dunno.

Derek C. Simmons
And here we go, Derek Clifford Simmons! You actually encounter him early on in any route you choose, sort of like William "G" Birkin in Resident Evil 2, and just like Birkin and a bunch of other bosses in the franchise, Simmons has a bunch of forms that he mutates through as various characters encounter and engage against him. He's also quite an over-the-top villain, apparently, in backstory if not quite in delivery, but let's not go into that. And hoo boy, Derek has a bunch of forms for sure! And we'll be quickly covering through Derek's many, many forms. He shambles around as that C-Virus infected human form for a while, and I like the texture that makes him look like he's a puzzle piece that's falling apart. 

Then he turns to what is often called a "Beast Form", which is a pretty cool mutant fleshy dog with a bunch of spider-like eyes. Nothing too special for the course of this franchise, though, flesh-beasts and especially dog-themed flesh-beasts are bread and butter for Resident Evil. I like the way the talons are attached to the legs, though. And there's half a human face stretched out on the dog's 'back'. It's kind of just a bit too much forced gore, I feel. 

Then we have this form, called the "Centaur Form", which is what the doggy creature transforms halfway through the fight. That certainly makes the anatomy feel a bit more sensible, because I certainly wasn't sure what I was looking at. For a 'centaur', though, what would be the human torso and head is instead just a mass of rib bones and a vague spine, and then we've got a big-ass bone-scythe jutting out of it. It's less of a 'centaur' and more of a quadruped body with an elaborate scorpion tail stinger jutting out of it. I respect what they're going for here, even though it's too messy for me. 

Derek's next form is another boss fight one, the "Dinosaur Form"... which, y'know what? Explains that anatomy a lot, because the screenshot doesn't make it clear that it's leaning forwards. Seeing it in motion also works a lot better. (Also, Derek apparently keeps reverting back to his zombie-human form between mutations? That's bizarre). A grody zombie dinosaur of flesh and bone is already ridiculous for a Resident Evil boss, but the T-rex head splits apart like a flower to show off the central eyeball within. Are you sure Derek doesn't have the G-virus or Plagas parasite injected in him somewhere? Y'know what, unlike Haos, I can totally get behind giant eyeball zombie t-rex. I will defend this hilarious monster to the death. 

What is called the "Scorpion Form" or "Recovery Form" is intentionally messy, Derek sort of reverts back to being a human and has a bunch of fleshy limbs and tentacles jutting out of his back and protecting him. Deborah Harper did this, too, but her zombie flesh-arms look a lot more pleasant. I think Derek basically goes back and forth between Dinosaur and Recovery forms during the second major fight, one of the huge things that makes people find this particular form to be super-duper unrealistic due to the whole conservation of mass... and y'know what? I can't believe but I kind of agree with those people. All the Resident Evil mutations have been explosive growths to become bigger and bigger. To have Derek go back and forth from dinosaur-sized to somewhat-messy-human multiple times in a row is kind of stretching the suspension of disbelief. 

Simmons's final mutation occurs after he gets devoured by a horde of zombies. But instead of a karmic death, Simmons instead absorbed the zombies and becomes his final form, which is... a fly? Probably a lot less climactic than a zombie T-rex, but thinking about it a bit more, turning into a giant monster fly works well thematically with the very insect-based C-Virus, doesn't it? More importantly, flies and maggots are so ubiquitously tied together with corpses that one of the indicators to determine how long ago a corpse has died is whether flies have laid eggs on it or not. I've never quite thought about it, never quite associated flies with death that way. 

Anyway, "Ultimate" Derek is... I'm surprised that he keeps the fly's iconic sad faec, but I suppose that's how you recognize it's a fly. He's got a pair of tattered wings, and a whole bunch of legs that look like they're bent the wrong way even for a bug. But since this isn't a real bug and just a bunch of corpses bent and forced together in the shape of one, let's not play semantics here. A very, very cool and interesting final boss, and I actually really, really like this a lot more than if Dinosaur Simmons, Goopy-goop Carla or Haos had been the final boss instead (and those three would definitely work well as final bosses).

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...holy shit, is this my favourite Resident Evil game in terms of monster selection? I honestly think it might be. Granted, my taste of monsters have always been leaning more towards the arthropods and the more ridiculous over-the-top monsters, but honestly, I feel that RE4 does have a bunch of more 'classic' zombies and enhanced zombies in its bestiary, too, and even the bosses have a lot of pretty cool regular Resident Evil tropes that are all done well. Again, it's just such a shame that RE6 is treated as this old shame due to how poorly it was received by fans and critics alike. Sure, gameplay and story-wise RE6 certainly didn't do that well, but apparently the design team for the next couple of mainline series games -- RE7 and the two remakes -- took this as a sign to dial back the ridiculous over-the-top monsters which I am really vehemently against. Oh well, at least we did get RE6 and its hilariously insane bestiary.