Carci’s optimism, while cautious, is premature. After sending G2 to his death in a bottomless pit (yeah, right), he finds Sherry, who’s been infected with the G-Virus, and carries her to the cable car. They hitch a ride to the laboratory, where Carci settles Sherry in a bed and prepares to fight his way through the third and final region of Resident Evil 2 Remake.
Across from the makeshift sick bay, he hits an item box and keeps his grenade launcher, flame rounds, knives for defense items, and his handgun-turned-magnum and his dwindling supply of magnum rounds. He also comes into possession of an ID bracelet that admits him into high-level security areas as he upgrades it.
The lab’s antiseptic hallways are dark when you arrive. Carci goes through one corridor and into a cafeteria, where he swipes a grenade and a set of needles for the spark shot on his way to a ladder that leads into ventilation. He drops into a kitchen, where he retrieves a few items before moseying up to the automatic door. “Zombies can open these doors,” says Carci. “I cannot walk past those automatic doors because they open automatically, and a zombie could lunge out and hit me.”
Carci moves close enough to open the door, gets the lone zombie on the other side in his sights, and deletes his head with a magnum round. “That's what the knife is for,” he says of his equipped defense item. “There’s about a 25 percent chance that he's going to be there, ready to just freaking goof me as soon as I come out of the door.” He proceeds into the sleeping quarters where he finds a chip to upgrade his ID band, some ammo, and an upgrade for the spark shot that increases the time enemies ride the lightning.
He guides Claire back to the sick bay and takes the opposite door, arriving at what I call the nexus, a set of bridges suspended above a cavernous room filled with spinning, flashing, whirring equipment. The antidote for the G-Virus is in the west area, but as you should suspect by now, you can’t just waltz in and whip up a fresh batch. First up is the east area, with its darkened corridors ensnared in a massive plant growing out of control throughout the laboratory. The hallway leading into the east wing also marks your first encounter with the ivy, a zombie mummified in plant vines that croaks deep in its throat as it moves erratically, brokenly toward you. Should an ivy get hold of you, it’ll kill you in a single chomp. “You need defense items if you're going to fight ivys. Fortunately, if an ivy grabs you from behind, you get spun around, and you can use a knife.”
Carci runs past the ivy in the corridor and enters another large room. A window overlooks platforms in the grip of vines. Carci’s first stop is a computer, where he enters two unlock codes: one to power up a fancy machine, and the other to open a trapdoor in the plant-festooned zone. Before heading into the wilderness, he takes an empty canister he’ll need… for science.
He heads outside and to the machine, where he mixes a formula by rotating beakers and filling them with assorted volumes of a green chemical. With that in hand, he returns to the green room and cooks ivys with flame rounds. The fire devours their leafy bodies quickly. Down through the trapdoor, along a tunnel, and then up into another darkened room and adjoining corridors. Carci goes to the left, where bodies are sprawled near vending machines and tables. “We're gonna pull the Magnum back out because we’ve got a lot of zombies to kill,” he says as he decapitates one, two, three undead. He’s done this plenty of times by now, but I’m still impressed by Capcom’s design savvy. Letting players kill enemies before they animate rewards players for taking time to learn the environment and the triggers that activate enemies. Ammo plus foreknowledge equals less danger later on.
Carci spins Claire and sends her running down the hallway, then slows approximately halfway to the door at the far end. A licker smashes through an overhead vent and lands in a crouch. There’s no way to sneak by it. Your options are to run past it or do what Carci does: “I wanted to do damage to that licker,” he says before blasting it with acid and racing past it through a brief passage and up a darkened stairwell. On the way to the storeroom above, he deletes a few zombies with magnum-powered headshots—“I love the decapitation animations in this game. They are quite satisfying with great feedback on popping”—and enters the storeroom to get the signal modulator, a boombox-style device that restores power to rooms by tuning frequencies.
He heads back downstairs and kills the first of two lickers. The second is just around the corner near the break room. He combines a stock, a weapon upgrade he found what feels like another lifetime ago in the parking garage, to his grenade launcher, enabling grenades to fly further and more accurately. Two acid rounds put down most lickers, but just as Carci moves away to restore power to the area, the licker springs to its clawed feet and takes a third acid grenade to the kisser.
Carci and the audience breathe a sigh of relief. “Okay, now he’s dead for real. It is possible to walk past those lickers, but I just wanted to shoot them for the fun of it, and also so I can run through here.” He places the signal modulator into a recess in the breakroom and reactivates power. With electricity flowing again, he takes his chemical-filled canister into a nearby freezer and operates another machine to cool its contents. Back in the hallway, he swings by another supply room containing flame rounds and a large canister of gunpowder. These large powder cans are less common but produce more acid rounds when mixed with white gunpowder, a vital ingredient in his fight against the next boss.
Back into the tunnel and up the ladder leading into the plant-choked room. Two ivy zombies block his path. Carci hits them both with flame rounds and strides into the flames. “This is why I shot these guys earlier,” he says of the first ivy monstrosities he killed as he passed through. “They're going to—oh no!”
A third ivy lunges from the flames. “No, no, no, no, no.” Despite his protestations, Carci reacts like a pro and lobs another flame round. He makes haste into the adjoining room and slots his mixed chemicals into the machine where he picked up the canister. The lab’s automated system dispenses the chemical in the jungle area, clearing a logjam that barred his path to the third ID band upgrade. A few more ivy zombies drop from the ceiling. He exits the jungle room for the last time and makes his way back down the corridor leading to the nexus. Two ivy zombies stand between him and the west wing. “With Leon, we’d have Mr. X chasing us here. We can just take our time with these guys because we don't have Mr. X chasing us.”
The west area is quiet. Carci moves through a few labs, restores power in the room where he mixes the G-Virus antidote for Sherry, and heads out to a platform where he’ll trigger the fight against G3.
G3 is Claire’s most challenging fight. The boss can behave erratically, or so it seems, stalking or jumping or swinging claws the size of small children in a four-hit combo. This is where Carci’s practice pays dividends. “In the initial no damage runs that I did with Claire, I would just stun-lock him with acid rounds over and over and over again. If you have, like, 30 acid rounds, you can just keep doing that, and eventually G3 will die.”
His friend MattDaRoc came up with a flashier strategy. The quickest way to put Birkin down is to pop the eyes on his body and then attack the cluster of eyes that emerge from his chest. Do this three times and he’s toast. It’s not that simple, but it’s a lot simpler than it would be if Carci hadn’t labbed G3 over and over and over until he could predict every movement to a high degree of consistency.
Carci heads into the fight and calls for silence so he can concentrate on playing and provide commentary to break down what he’s doing. He begins by destroying the eye in G3’s left leg with the SMG, then whips behind him and shoots the eye on his back. Carci retreats across the room to hide behind a piece of equipment, waiting to see what the boss will do next. “You can basically shut him down with every shot if he’s in a walk cycle. Or is it an attack cycle?”
G3 stalks forward.
“Okay, he just did a stalk so he's probably going to do a jump next, I think.”
Swapping the SMG for the grenade launcher, he fires acid rounds into every eye except one, on G3’s right shoulder. He hits that one with the spark shot, keeping his finger clamped down on the left mouse button to pump electricity into the eye. A lightning bolt-like strike caps off the damage before the weapon needs reloaded. It’s enough to bring G3 to his knees and trigger the eye cluster in his center. Carci fries them with the spark shot. The rest of the fight is an immaculately strategized dance between the SMG, the spark shot, the acid rounds, and having the patience to wait and see what G3 will do next and how best to shut it down.
After another taste of the spark shot, G3 enters his third phase. He begins by roaring and taunting, leaving the cluster of eyes exposed. Carci whips out the SMG and unloads on him until the boss falls, defeated.
Cheers and applause ring out across the room. Carci’s couch team break into a chant that’s taken up by the rest of the crowd: “One more fight! One more fight! One more fight!”
One more fight: G4, William Birkin’s final form.
