Highlights

  • Remakes in the Resident Evil franchise are popular and often incorporate elements from the mainline games.
  • Capcom frequently recycles assets and mechanics between games, such as the red bolt cutters and colored herbs.
  • Players can likely expect certain gameplay features and nearly identical assets to appear consistently in future Resident Evil games, like the bolt cutters and wooden crates.

Resident Evil hasn’t ever had a wave of unpopular games in its mainline installments, and despite how fans of the original trilogy received Resident Evil 3’s remake, the remake continuity has been profoundly popular, too. Remakes are becoming more widely acceptable as ‘new’ entries in long-running franchises, at least in terms of them being substantial reimaginings, and it’s interesting to see what from Resident Evil’s mainline canon has begun to bleed into its remake canon. That’s not to say that these narratives will ever intertwine, but there are many parallels that can already be made between them.

Capcom can be seen experimenting with features and mechanics that inevitably get used in future games, if not in an immediately subsequent game. Like how Resident Evil 2’s remake bled a lot of its mechanics into Resident Evil 3’s remake and so forth, it becomes easy to see what ideas, features, and assets are recycled rather than needlessly disposed of. In the case of particular tools, environmental objects, or resources that frequently appear, that has been somewhat of a humorous boon for Resident Evil.

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Resident Evil’s Red Bolt Cutters, Wooden Crates are a Franchise Meme

Resident Evil’s Bolt Cutters Have a Life of Their Own

Of all the items that frequently appear between games since Resident Evil 7, the red bolt cutters are easily its most prolific and memorable. They’ve become a meme in the Resident Evil community because they are the same asset from game to game, making it seem as if these bolt cutters have somehow traveled between protagonists rather than them being their own individual pairs.

There isn't a deeper meaning to them being the same asset, only that Capcom rightfully doesn’t want to create new assets for the same function when it already has a perfectly good one. The same idea goes for all the other assets players can find between these newer games, and since they all share comparable features it makes logical sense why they’d all appear identical, if not somewhat similar. Other instances, among many others that are largely unnoticeable or non-invasive, include:

  • The palette of colored herbs used for healing purposes.
  • The assortment of miscellaneous, sacked resources for crafting.
  • The wooden crates and barrels players combust to loot items from.
  • The boxes of ammunition players find for each gun type.

Resident Evil’s Reused Assets are Forgiven Due to Their Fun Series Identity

Unfortunately, because Resident Evil 4 ’s remake left out bolt cutters, it sadly isn’t reliable anymore that bolt cutters will always make it into a new Resident Evil title.

In an ideal scenario, however, players can anticipate having to clip a bolt lock or chain link, unlock cabinet drawers, and destroy crates and barrels all without knowing anything about how future games might look or play because that’s become the franchise identity as it’s persisted up until Resident Evil 4​​​​​​. It would be nice to discern now that Resident Evil 9 and the next Resident Evil remake would both continue this pattern and include the same gameplay features and identical assets, and it’ll always be exciting to see if and where the bolt cutters may end up being retrieved next.

As for other omissions, it’s unlikely that the next Resident Evil game will make any drastic changes to this formula even though each new entry does tend to instill a new mechanic, such as the parry in Resident Evil 4’s remake. There’s no telling whether Capcom plans to have that parry back in Resident Evil 9 or a potential Resident Evil 5 remake, for example, especially since the dodge mechanic in Resident Evil 3 was authentically adapted for the remake alone.

This parry was a brand-new mechanic that wasn’t in the original, though, which demonstrates it could become a new mainstay that future Resident Evil games adopt. Regardless, it’s almost guaranteed that players haven’t seen the last of Resident Evil’s bolt cutters.