Resident Evil – Code: Veronica X (2001)

Little fishy, come see my hook.

My Resident Evil marathon continues, and it’s been a long road thus far. Looking behind me, I see a lot of accomplishment. Looking ahead, there are many miles to go. I’m tired.

I could’ve burned through the original PlayStation trilogy real quick by now, but I chose to play the remakes instead. It started that way for a simple reason. Prior to the marathon idea, I’d completed dozens of ‘96 RE speedruns, but I only gave its remake a single complete playthrough in my lifetime. After my replay and review, it felt natural to continue through RE2Make and RE3Make, following the revised timeline.

Traveling that route highlighted a big tonal difference between the PlayStation versions and their REMake counterparts. The old games heightened the tension through jump scares, atmosphere, and gore. But they were also tongue-in-cheek takes on wacky B-movie horror. The bad acting and bumbling characters were intentional design choices.

By contrast, the remakes prefer drama over camp, evoking horror with a greater sense of pathos. The updated graphics technology emphasizes how visceral a mass casualty event like a zombie outbreak could be if it happened in real life.

And that got me thinking. Capcom’s next rumored project after Resident Evil 9 is a remake of Resident Evil – Code: Veronica, the canonical, but sometimes overlooked and unnumbered installment after 3. I’ve no doubt Capcom will convert C:V into another intense incarnation, where you aren’t supposed to laugh anymore, you sick bastard.

But the tonal shifting hit me hard as I moved from remake to older generation canon with C:V. I buried my nose in the thesaurus for this review, searching for synonyms to prevent overusing the word ‘silly.’ That’s because Code: Veronica is the silliest of the silly when it comes to Resident Evil insanity. Scatterbrained? Yeasty?

Nowhere is this point driven home harder than in the game’s opening cutscene. It is, from the point-of-view of a cynic rewatching it in 2026, a hilarious spectacle. The video game industry did not take itself as serious twenty-five years ago, so this cutscene blended in with the rest of the ridiculousness.

Three months have passed since the Raccoon City Incident. Claire is still looking for Chris Redfield, her older brother. Despite her presence in human history’s biggest event, Claire never received as much as single phone call from Chris in the aftermath. Maybe I’m not seeing the bigger picture, though; since this is still 1998, the only people with cell phones are the upper middle-class and drug dealers.

So Claire makes her way to Chris’s last known location, an Umbrella facility in Paris. She picks her best outfit for dangerous international espionage, consisting of her biker jacket, skinny jeans, and midriff cutout top. But it gets crazier. In my review of the Resident Evil 3 remake, I mentioned how strange it was for a pharmaceutical company to have its own paramilitary unit. The Code: Veronica intro ups that ante within the first minute. If a private military is odd, how about attack helicopters, equipped with miniguns? Sir, I’m just here to cure a headache.

Capcom also forgets Claire was a college sophomore before she got mixed up in all the zombie business. According to what unfolds, three months is plenty enough time to train for outrunning rapid gunfire and performing Max Payne bullet time dives. But everybody’s luck has to run out sometime, as Claire is captured and transported to an island. There, she’s locked up in the publicly-traded corporation’s civilian prison.

The island falls under attack not long after, and the siege unleashes another T-virus Umbrella had lying around. Claire’s jailer is kind enough to free her as the usual zombies rise, though he warns that her chances of survival will be slim.

Claire will not have to face this nightmare alone, however. She runs into escaped prisoner Steeeve Burnside. Steve is Urkel if he were white and sounded like Steve-O. He’s also a pain in the ass, wannabe love interest, and potential sex pest. But sometimes the narrative mirrors Capcom’s own short term memory, and decides Steve is a decorated action hero, too. Steve sucks.

And it wouldn’t be a proper Resident Evil without a villain showing up. In this case it’s Alfred Ashford, an aristocratic, foppish mustache twirler. With Alfred, I keep imagining the ADR director. “Okay, that’s what I was hoping for when I asked for a Eurotrash accent, except scream it into the mic this time.”

Beyond that, Alfred has an odd obsession with his twin sister Alexia, bordering on the Song of Ice and Fire. The entire island pays tribute to the twins’ pretentious asses at every turn. Wherever you go, there are constant reminders of how important they are and their suspicious closeness.

And speaking of mustache twirlers, series villain Albert Wesker makes his grand return after surviving the mansion explosion. This is where the X enters the PlayStation 2 version’s title. Code: Veronica was originally released in 2000, without the X, for the ill-fated Sega Dreamcast. The most significant alteration from Dreamcast to PlayStation 2 is new cutscenes of Wesker showing up to beat the shit out of your character, laugh manically, and then leave. While he’s at it, Capcom alludes to him being both Judge Doom from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? as well as the Terminator.

If you’re playing this as number four in classic canon order, not much has changed. C:V still uses the same third-person perspective and tank controls, with some new additions. The game utilizes 3D environments instead of the old pre-rendered backgrounds. The game doesn’t allow control over the camera, which follows you on autopilot when you move. This brings the environments to life in ways that weren’t present when the developers superimposed 3D models against static JPEGs.

But the game often plays this trick of hiding enemies out of view. Since the camera scrolls with your character, it’s difficult to detect danger until you’ve run straight into a zombie’s arms. A lot of the damage I took was from moving too fast, since I’m used to holding down the run button in these games.

Code: Veronica is a bit tougher than the previous installments. The monsters are aggressive with their bites and swipes. Take the devious camera into consideration, and losing health is almost guaranteed. As a counterbalance, there’s a great deal of health and ammo lying around. The supplies allowed me to clear most rooms of enemies, an act of necessity given their tenacity.

Furthermore, the gameplay includes very handy quick turn buttons in the control scheme, that allow you to avoid potential enemy grabs. And auto-aiming adds extra help on top of that, since you can lock on targets instead of having to pivot your character 180 degrees. This is all standard stuff we take for granted now, but back then it made a world of obvious difference.

Returning to Claire’s search for Chris Redfield, C:V hands control over to Chris for the game’s second half. Responding to a distress beacon his sister sends out, he arrives on the island. Without spoiling much, Claire has since relocated to a new map in freaking Antarctica, where she and Steve can stay dressed the same way without freezing to death.

Chris follows Claire’s trail as the story continues. The character switching is comparable to the zapping system from the original Resident Evil 2. Whatever monsters you do or do not wipe out as Claire are the same ones Chris will or will not have to deal with. And whatever items you leave alone in rooms, or drop in the universal magic Item Box, are likewise possessions Chris inherits. In other words, if Claire holds onto her Grenade Launcher prior to the switch, Chris won’t get to use it.

And that’s a good place to jump straight from the good to the ugly with Resident Evil – Code: Veronica X. Softlocking is this game’s most infamous flaw. There are two notable places where a lack of foresight can wreck your entire run. And I don’t mean the kind of wreck that reloading a previous save can fix. I’m talking about restarting with New Game at the title screen, throwing away hours of work. The softlocking hearkens back to old Sierra point-and-click adventure games, where Leisure Suit Larry drowned because you didn’t buy the swim trunks or whatever.

Of course, even as far back as 2000, we had an Internet to help us with these issues. But anyone unsealing their fresh copy of Code: Veronica X wouldn’t have had a clue, as the truth lurked on the disc to ambush them. That’s why I recommend Google searching the softlocking problems before attempting this. It will save a lot of heartache

With that, I’d like to thank WordHippo for helping me choose the right words to explain this daft, featherheaded game. Code: Veronica is crazy. It’s also a fun experience, despite its bigger problems. The only reasons I wouldn’t recommend it is if you’re hoping to take it serious. Before Leon’s one-liners stole its trophy, Code: Veronica was, indeed, the wackiest of the goofy.

Final Rating: ***