I got like four hours of sleep and I need to wake up so while the water for coffee and tea boils I'm going to get mad about Resident Evil 0 for a moment because none of these huge YouTube review retrospectives will.

The best way that I can put this is that as a single child looking in at friends who had siblings, there is, shockingly, a lot of times in families a dynamic where one of the kids got very, very sick when they were young and apparently something just stuck in the parents' brains where that kid now needed to be coddled for the rest of time.

In this metaphor the kid is RE0 and the parents are the vocal parts of the fanbase. Resident Evil 0 gets basically an infinite amount of passes on the merits of being the last of the classic style/era games, getting to be a numbered entry unlike Code Veronica, coming out sandwiched between REmake 1 and RE4, and that it was almost didn't happen twice.

Resident Evil 0 is baffling to me because it is a game in a franchise that is clearly meant to be a fanservice game, the kind of lore-heavy entry that sets up for bigger things down the road by giving you the background you need for that impact and then doesn't actually impart anything remotely substantial.

RE0 is a game that at no point can justify its own existence.

And it isn't as though the franchise from the jump doesn't leave open plenty of questions, even in the early aughts when this game was being made we had enough lore that there was whole decades of space that it could have happened in and instead it is the most awkward set of retcon kludges humanly possible so that Rebecca Chambers can have her own game.

It predicates itself on basically explaining the plot hole of the original RE1, namely why did you send what amounts to your local extrajudicial SWAT team/special task force out to the middle of the woods because you had the vaguest reports of feral dogs and maybe a cannibal somewhere out there.

Which... didn't need an explanation, actually because Wesker fucking knew what was out there and was already plotting his defection from Umbrella and decided the best parting gift would be COMBAT DATA by feeding his employees into the proverbial woodchipper that was the Tyrant, then Chris laughed at him and 11 years later they fistfight in a plane over it.

But sure now STARS is out there because there's some kind of luxury train stoppage and also the US military was apparently driving a guy via WW2-era jeep from Raccoon City to fucking Fort Leavenworth to be executed for war crimes, that totally makes sense, sure.

For the record this is why I presume that we never see Billy Coen in another Resident Evil anything beyond RE0 and the rail-shooter recap of RE0.

Even if we the reader know it was bullshit, Billy Coen was still known to the world at large as the ex-FORECON officer who was sentenced to death for psychotically snapping and murdering a defenseless African village and then, as the events of RE0 would be explained, two MPs and several cops.

According to the games Rebecca reported him dead but she did so from a local municipality's police department as a member of a unit that also tried to convince everyone that zombies existed.

I am pretty sure we never saw Billy Coen again because Billy Coen got fucking murdered by a group of NCIS agents probably a week after RE0 ended.

This is one of the less egregious places where RE0 can't even keep up the thinnest veneer of logic the rest of the franchise uses as a fig leaf.

Or like, Rebecca. Let's take Rebecca Chambers herself.

So in RE1 we are presented with Rebecca as the team rookie, an 18 year old medical student who is presumably working with STARS as a team medic because she needed field hours and thus when trapped in a nightmare mansion-laboratory full of monsters reacts like an 18 year old young woman with no combat training wood.

Mostly by closing herself in a supply closet and maceing the first person to come through the door. She just lucked into it being Chris Redfield, a man too dumb to understand what chemical irritants do the body and also whose characterization for the majority of the franchise is that he is essentially a Saint Bernard cursed to walk the world in human form.

But RE1 basically makes it super clear that Chris has to protect Rebecca because she's a non-combat civilian, and then RE0 tacks on that, no, actually the last 24 hours prior to their meeting she has fought through a monster infested train, a different monster mansion, a secondary monster lab, two screens from RE2, a funicular, and a Tyrant of her own.

Also since the rail shooter is canon, three quarters of the mansion from RE1 in reverse boss order.

Umbrella Chronicles tries to offer the explanation that after basically 36 hours of constant uptime and fighting horrible monsters and also seeing Yosuke Hanamura with a gun Richard Aiken get chowed down on by a giant snake she pretty much is in full nervous breakdown mode by RE1 proper's beginning, but it's flimsy even by this franchises' standards.

(Aside: I just realized Yuri Lownethal voices like three dudes in the RE franchise, they all have the Yosuke voice, and they all die horrible agonizing deaths.)

You have to understand this isn't even me touching on the big one, that apparently the T-Virus was supposed to be the big deal when RE0/Umbrella Chronicles reveals that Wesker is a bioweapon with a better virus already, or the Progenitor Virus is a do fucking anything super virus that outstrips its successors in T and G.

Or that Umbrella had two mansion laboratory complexes tied to a third lab via moving train-mansion.

Or that Wesker and William Birkin were treating the events of the game like their private sleepover movie night.

Or that the Progenitor virus brought back one of the founders as a young man again but also a leech hivemind superweapon so basically eat a dick Ozwell you were sitting on the answer to the thing you wanted already, this whole franchise is now bullshit.

Also leech James Marcus is apparently a bishonen in a dressing gown who controls his minions via abrupt improvised operatic solos.

And also apparently if we take Umbrella Chronicles into account like 75% of the Umbrella top brass was walking around said abandoned mansion/lab complex duopoly without the others knowing until the very end trying to backstab eachother both figuratively and literally.

But yeah.

This is the game that gets the pass somehow.

People are critical as shit of Outbreak, of the light gun games, of the Revelations subseries, of Code Veronica...

But RE0, the fever dream game with 90% expendable cast that for every thing it adds to the canon fucks up like three others, that is the one people go to bat for.

I've never seen anyone go to bat for RE0 myself, but I'm also not deep into the franchise. From what I've seen of it, it's pretty much the definition of a nothing game—both mechanically and I'm regards to building the lore (or using it in later entries)—and the greater Resident Evil franchise treats it as such, for good reason.