# Game Resident Evil 5 Recap
Macatrens – Released by Capcom in 2009 on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 and later ported to multiple platforms, Resident Evil 5 would be a more cinematic and action-oriented turn for the main series. Directed and written by Kenichi Ueda, the game would become the second-best selling installment for the franchise after the original game.
For gameplay, camera and controls are essentially unchanged from 4 with the exception that there is now an accomodation for new actions involving a co-op partner for the entire game. Should the game be played solo, the second player is controlled by an AI instead. The inventory system is now limited to 9 slots for each character, and is managed in real-time so the game is not paused when the inventory is open.
For story, the game features the return of protagonist Chris Redfield, and introduces new BSAA agent Sheva Alomar, and continues the episodic chapter pacing. Compared to most of the series, the game mainly takes place during the day, and incorporates more wide open or outdoor environments. As such, the game no longer using save points, and instead uses autosaves and checkpoints.
There is no in-game shop, and instead, equipment is changed, stored, bought, sold, and upgraded in between chapters. A new plaga and enemy type called the Majini debut here, and like the Ganados they retain intelligent thought after infection. However, unlike the Ganados, they can operate in daylight, can infect very quickly, are much more durable, and are not directed by a dominant plaga making them more independent.
In side stories, Lost in Nightmares and Desparate Escape, characters Jill Valentine and newcomer Josh Stone are also playable. In addition, the Mercenaries minigame from Resident Evil 3 and 4 returns here in the same fashion as before. Also introduced here is a new 4 player versus mode, where players can play solo or in a team in a variety of competitive modes.
Keep in mind I have no proficiency in Swahili, so apologies in advance for some of the pronunciations. The story only gets larger from here, so let’s cut it down to size with a RECAPitation. In 2006, one year after the events of Resident Evil: Revelations, the BSAA receives intel on the location of Umbrella’s fugitive founder, Oswell Spencer.
Veterans Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine are deployed to investigate the lead and arrest Spencer, in the hopes it will lead to information on Albert Wesker. On a dark and stormy night, they enter the mansion that has an uncanny resemblence to the Arklay mansion, complete with cranks, doors locked with emblems, and traps all too familiar.
It turns out Spencer continued BOW testing on his own, with the assistance of his butler, resulting in a new creature called the Blob, though after this, Spencer had his butler reveal his location to Wesker. Crushing the Blobs with the local traps to where they could fit into a sandwich, they make it to the doors of where they believe Spencer is hiding.
Opening the room, they are surprised to see Albert Wesker already there standing over a dead Oswell Spencer. Wasting no time, they do their best to fight him, but Wesker’s superhuman speed and strength makes him extremely formidable. He takes his time toying with especially Chris, savoring his revenge very slowly, as he prepares to end his personal foe once and for all.
As Wesker is about to strike, Jill tackles him head on, causing both of them to crash out the balcony window, and tumble off the cliffside beyond. Chris reaches out to his partner but its too late as Wesker and Jill fall to their death. As 3 years pass and it’s 2009, Chris Redfield is a colder and more cynical man since losing Jill, though he still holds onto hope of her survival since no body was ever found.
Business continues for the BSAA neutralizing BOW hotspots around the world as bio-terrorism is still on the rise in destabilized regions. As such Chris’s current mission takes him to Africa outside the Kijuju autonomous zone. There he meets his new guide and partner Sheva Alomar of the BSAA West Africa Branch, though ghosts of Jill still haunt him.
On the hunt for a black market BOW dealer named Ricardo Irving, their helicopter pilot Kirk informs them of a deal Irving will be at in Kijuju, making that their destination. As Alpha team has already infiltrated the area, Chris is mainly there as backup. As they approach their mission contact, they see the town curiously clears out right behind them.
Their contact lets them know about the deal just ahead, informing them about the rumored Uroboros project, and Chris reminds Sheva that as partners on their mission, their top priority is to stick together. Moving on ahead, there is sinister presence about, and following a scream, they enter in the middle of seeing a some men force a live parasite down the throat of another man, infecting the man almost instantly, raising awareness of how deadly this new Type 2 Plagas can be with no need for an incubation period.
This is Chris’s first time seeing such a transformation, and after putting this man down, a horde of more hostile locals come storming in to surround them. Escaping, they move ahead to the mission, only to find there is a mob being riled up outside, and their mission contact is being publically executed.
After he’s cut down to size with a decapitation, the mob leader spots Chris and Sheva, directing the frenzied mob after them. Chris calls in Kirk for backup, and while fending off the countless infected, Kirk flies in and blows away the mob, saving the day. Kirk flies ahead to the deal location as Chris and Sheva overhear Alpha team encounter and be overwhelmed by a strange new monster.
Their progress is paused as they see a woman in distress, but by the time they come in to help, the woman is already an infected threat. Moving on, they get closer to Alpha Team’s location, but find strange black ooze everywhere and worse yet, the bodies of Alpha team members. Finding the dying leader of Alpha team, he shares that this was all a setup and Irving got away.
They did manage to recover some intel about the deal as well as other things from their computers and he passes the data to Chris. Their mission now changes to delivering the data to a relay and sending it to headquarters, but along they way they run into the mysterious monster that killed Alpha team. The creature is unlike anything they’ve seen before, composed of a mass of black leech-like worms, and moving togther in a vaguely humanoid way.
Their guns are hardly effective on it, though it seems vulnerable to fire, and manage to destroy it by trapping it in an incinerator and burning it completely. Making it to the relay, they update HQ on the loss of Alpha team to a new BOW, and infected that are similar to the Ganados from Leon Kennedy’s report.
Despite all this, HQ maintains their mission of capturing Irving, even if he setup a trap. They inform Chris that Irving was spotted heading into the mines, and dispatches Delta team to back them up in their pursuit, but still wants the duo to immediately pursue Irving alone, despite their protest. Heading to the mines, they encounter a new variant of plaga infected dogs, a new flying type BOW, and increased resistance from the Majini.
Kirk’s chopper gets taken down by the flying BOW type, and Chris hurries to check the crash zone for survivors. Getting past a chainsaw wielding Majini, they confirm no survivors from the helicopter crash, though they are quickly surrounded by infected on bikes. Things look bad, but suddenly Delta Team comes in, rescuing the duo and securing the area.
Their captain, Josh Stone, used to mentor Sheva, and tells them they’ll be right behind her as they clean up here. He also hands Chris new research info, and checking it, Chris is shocked to find a picture of Jill within. Navigating through the pitch black caves, they find and corner Irving at last, though a mysterious woman crashes in, drops a smoke bomb and makes a complete escape with him.
Rumaging through what he left behind, they find clues that his next location will be an oil field in the marshlands. On the way there, they see one of Irving’s trucks derail, and within, one of his larger, more powerful BOWs, a mutated bat called Popokarimu, and they must put it down. As soon as Popokarimu is destroyed, one of the BSAA team drivers races in, and they hurry on.
As they drive to the marshlands at top speed, they hear from Josh over the radio that the area is swarming with Plaga infected, and they’re struggling to hold position. Soon, literally truckloads of Majini bar the path of the duo, but Chris and Sheva, alongside their expert driver, get by with no loss. As night begins to fall, they see most of Delta team is dead, yet the town is eerily quiet.
Stopping to investigate, they hear heavy footsteps, and suddenly their driver is crushed underfoot by an actual giant Majini. Scrambling away and using the twin heavy machineguns on their truck, they manage to kill the multiple parasites sustaining the monster, and get away before it destroys their truck with its fall.
As Sheva is upset at the loss of her own Delta Team, they get orders from the BSAA to pull out, and though Chris tells her its ok if she wants to pull back now, he’ll still go on ahead. She questions this, and he explains that he saw his old missing partner still alive according to recent intel, and that makes this mission personal for him.
Sheva reconsiders and affirms they’re partners on this, to the end. As they travel and day breaks again, he tells her of the Spencer raid mission where she was lost and presumed dead, but because a body was never found, he held onto hope. With this new intel, he now has to know if she’s still alive, and Sheva questions how close the two were.
For herself, Sheva also lost her parents to an Umbrella incident, as Umbrella was using Africa as a test bed for experiments, causing her to join the BSAA. With their boat they wade through the wetlands, finding dangerous crocodiles lurking everywhere about and all of the tribal locals infected as well, leading to some dangerous new mutations.
The natural athleticism and hardiness of the Sodibaya makes them dangerous BOWs especially with how they already hunt as a group and wear armor. With no choice but to invade and survive the infected tribe village, they make it past the sacrifical grounds beyond, along with more wildlife, and find they aren’t the first foreigners to this village.
To their shock, pharmaceutical conglomerate Tricell, one the companies that formed the BSAA, had established a camp right between the village and the oil field beyond. As it turns out, these plaga types were actually developed by Tricell. By genetically engineering the base Plaga, they combined it with Leech DNA, similar to how the t-virus was first created, and this resulted in much faster infection and mutation, and thanks to engineering, they removed the natural sunlight weakness.
Taking it further, Tricell then improved the plaga with testing on the indigenous Ndipaya tribe forming the type 3, which greatly enhanced the physical abilities of the host, while reducing bizarre mutations that exposed weaknesses, even in instances of giantification. Approaching the oilfield, they are hot on the heels of Irving, though run into Josh again, who survived the slaughter of his team, and the three of them pursue Irving together.
They see him board his boat while the cloaked woman moves ahead, and he gloats as he gets away blowing up the facility behind him. They still manage to catch up and corner him, and with nowhere to go, Irving injects himself with a vial given to him by the cloaked woman. Embracing his transformation he leaps overboard and mutates quickly into a massive aquatic BOW.
Using the turrets on his own boat they fend off Irving’s slimy tentacles and clip him from his massive body. Dying, he drops the name Excella, and mocks their ignorance to their whole situation. He directs them to answers in the caves ahead, assuming they live that long, and spends his last breath laughing.
As Josh catches up to them and gets them to the caves, they see the cloaked woman’s boat so they know they’re on the right track. Dropping them off, Josh says he’ll go back to HQ and try to get the withdraw order rescinded. Now entering the caves, Sheva mentions how Exella is the name of the director of Tricell’s African division.
They are surpised to find an entire ruined ancient city down here, though there are signs of recent activity. The area is still rife with infected natives, and traps. As they’re operating the ancient puzzles, and dodging fresh dangers, we see Excella, assisting Wesker and hoping to get on his good side as Wesker is focused on completing his plan with Uroboros.
The masked woman walks in, reporting Chris Redfield is still hounding them, as we now see Chris and Sheva discovering the secret beneath the ruins. Finding a shrine overgrown with a bizzare underground flower, Chris is surprised to find old equipment belonging to Umbrella down here, and alongside Tricell camps as well.
Beyond they find an old research facility still in operation, and learn the flowers are called the Stairway of the Sun, and naturally produces the Progenitor virus. The flowers were long used in a tribal ritual where one who ate the flower and lived would gain great strength. Following that rumor, Oswell Spencer and James Marcus found the flower in the 1960s and extracted the virus within it, naming it Progenitor, and the rest was history.
Chris runs into a newer model of an old Umbrella BOW, the Licker, though this beta model is currently beig mass-produced by Tricell with some improvements. They find a room full of pods like they saw in Jill’s picture, and Chris quickly tries to find if Jill is among any of them. He finds Jill’s file, though as the platform they’re on starts moving, they must deal with a new crab-like monster codenamed U-8.
When they find Jill’s pod, Chris finds it empty, though he’s hailed immediately by Excella, who also happens to be the one who ordered the BSAA to withdraw. She warns them to turn back, which only drives them to go forward as they now run into infected military guarding the facility. Along the way, Chris overhears the name Albert spoken by Excella, confirming his biggest worry that Wesker also survived that fateful night.
The facility beyond is in full production of BOWs as they also encounter an African roach mutated by Uroboros, accidentally creating the deadly Reaper. Dropping into another lab, they meet Excella face to face as she lets loose upon them the same worm-like monster that killed Alpha team earlier. They accuse her of making more weapons to spread bioterrorism, though Excella corrects them, saying she has no intention of selling Uroboros, but instead will use it to evolve mankind and let it be the filter to select those with superior DNA to survive.
Those with inferior DNA will become useless monsters, like the one they are left to deal with. Now pursuing Excella, they enter an underground cavern and confront her, only to be intercepted by the cloaked woman. She’s excellent in close quarters combat, though a stray bullet knocks off her mask, forcing her back.
Now entering the scene, Albert Wesker greets Chris personally, and jokes how Chris should be happier to see both of them again. Confused, Chris is shocked to see Albert pull back the cloak of the woman to reveal she’s been Jill this entire time. However, Jill is clearly not normal, immediately moving to attack both Chris and Sheva.
Eager to end things once and for all, Wesker and Jill team up to hunt down Chris and Sheva, though Wesker gloats he can only spare a few minutes to play with them. Unable to beat them in direct combat, Chris and Sheva switch to hit and run tactics to stay alive, though Wesker is soon called away for other business, leaving Jill to deal with them both.
Calling out to her, Jill staggers back, and Wesker is intrigued at the continued level of resistance by Jill. He activates a device that injects more of a mind-controlling drug into her, the pain of which exposes the device. Leaving Jill to suffer as well, Wesker exits and Chris must now save his berserk former partner hoping to remove the device from her chest.
With the help of Sheva, the duo are able to rip off Weskers device, and though weakened, Jill returns to her senses, apologizing that she was aware of her actions, but unable to control any of them. Their reunion is short, as Jill then stands up and urges them to move on without her and stop Wesker from his plot of spreading Uroboros across the globe.
She convinces him she can get out on her own, but he has to be the one to stop Wesker, and as Chris reluctantly leaves her, she asks Sheva to watch over Chris for her. Running ahead they spot Wesker and Excella boarding a ship, and getting on themselves, night falls as they storm the bridge. At the same time, Jill is making her own desperate escape, as she is helped up by Josh, who explains he has a helicopter ready for them to follow Chris and Sheva.
Teaming up, they fight together, and Jill suddenly remembers she must tell Chris something, so they make a slight detour to the communications facility. Back with Chris and Sheva, they catch Excella, but she takes the chance to flee, dropping one of her briefcases full of vials as she flees, which they examine and hold onto for now.
Meanwhile, as Wesker looks on, he reflects how Spencer revealed the advanced eugenics he endorsed with the Progenitor virus, as well as the Wesker children project, who were entrusted with endless potential. In that project, only one of the Wesker children survived, obviously Albert, who questions that he was manufactured.
Spencer’s ambition was to be a god among the new advanced human race, but Wesker slays him, claiming that right will be claimed by him instead. Outside, they find a massive pile of bodies, with Excella wincing in pain nearby. She claims she was betrayed by Wesker, but Chris states aloud Wesker never cares about anyone but himself.
As it seems Uroboros now rejects even Excella, the resulting monster claims the nearby mountain of bodies to grow enormous in size. The pair flee the rapid growth as it overtakes the ship, soon discovering there’s also a satillite targeting device on the ship too. Using it to destroy Excella’s mutation from orbit there’s now nothing stopping them from reaching Wesker.
However, they now spot Wesker preparing a bomber aircraft, realizing this was how he was planning on spreading Uroboros around the world. He’s now hailed by Jill who reveals Wesker’s strength comes from a virus, but since the virus is unstable, he must recieve regular, measured doses of a serum. Since he just took a dose he’ll be powered up for a while, but she remembers that Excella mentioned that the doses have to be precise, meaning too much will actually poison him.
It’s the same serum they recovered from Excella earlier, and armed with this knowledge, they move out to meet Wesker. After getting the message out, Jill and Josh hurry to the landing zone where they’re expecting their helicopter pilot Doug to arrive, but instead find an endless horde of infected waiting for them.
Pushed to their limit, Doug arrives to pick them up, hopping out and providing cover fire for Josh as he helps a wounded Jill aboard. When the coast seems clear a missile is aimed at Doug and strikes true, killing the pilot and Josh’s friend. Lifting off, they honor the fall of Doug, but stay focused as they hurry on to support Chris and Sheva on the tanker.
Wesker stil doesn’t consider them a threat as they confront him, hurling his perpetual sunglasses out and still beating them away easily. Chris asks why he wants to destroy the world with Uroboros and Wesker reveals humans are so self-detructive already, he’s actually using Uroboros to save the world. Hurling them onto the flight deck, they retaliate by distracting him with an RPG rocket, and while stunned, inject him with extra serum.
Successfully weakened, Wesker pulls back, enraged at Chris and hurries to the bomber’s hangar. Launching the bomber himself, Chris and Sheva barely make it aboard and see there’s enough Uroboros loaded on here to infect the whole planet. Confronting Wesker again, he claims that in 5 minutes they’re be at the altitude where Uroboros will be unstoppable in the atmosphere.
Even weakened, he’s still more than a match for the two BSAA agents, but he’s just slow enough to still be caught and hit again with another serum injection. In the struggle they seek to crash the plane, opening the hangar door and force Wesker off as the entire bomber wrecks inside an active volcano. All three stagger away from the wreckage alive, though Wesker in his haste and hatred, tears open an Uroboros missile and engulfs himself in the virus, while also fortifying himself with wreckage.
Barely in control of the mutation or his sanity, Wesker lumbers towards them, hunting each one separately. After uppercutting a boulder to bridge a river of lava, Chris reunites with Sheva while they stand off on one final plateau. Exposing a weakess in his rapid mutation, the teamwork of Chris and Sheva flank the treacherous, prodigal son of Umbrella, and as they take turns driving their knives deep into his heart, the platform Wesker’s on breaks off, plunging the longtime villain into the molten fire below.
Overhead, Josh flies in on a helicopter with Jill in tow, as she tosses them a ladder to climb up on. As the game ends, a defiant Wesker lunges out to seize the helicopter and attempt to wreck it, but with twin RPGs on board, Chris and his trusted partner Sheva take aim and blow away the man who aspired to be god, Albert Wesker.
With no sign left of Wesker, the group flies away as Uroboros is destroyed, and on the flight away, Chris feels more alive than ever, with his archnemesis finally gone, his longtime partner alive and back, and for the first time in a long time, rejuvenated in his fight for a future without fear. Resident Evil 5 has enjoyed the success of selling over 8.8 million copies worldwide.