Kojima Learned Why Resident Evil’s Jill Is Better Than Chris the Hard Way

Hideo Kojima has discussed his experiences playing the original Resident Evil, and he had to learn the hard way why Jill Valentine is the better character, as her route is far more forgiving than Chris Redfield’s. Resident Evil allowed the player to select between Jill and Chris at the start of the story, which changed both the difficulty of the game and which characters they encountered.

Jill’s route was easier because she could hold two extra items and always had the lockpick on her. Jill is a master of lockpicking, which allows her to open several doors without needing a key. The lockpick also doesn’t take up any inventory slots. Chris has fewer item slots and needs to carry around keys to open the same doors as Jill. In Jill’s scenario, she is aided by Barry Burton in boss fights, and he also helps her complete the Shotgun puzzle straight away. Chris is aided by Rebecca Chambers, who is less helpful, and he needs to complete the Shotgun puzzle on his own to acquire the weapon, which can be potentially fatal. Chris has more health than Jill and he’s faster, but he also faces more enemies in his route.

Famed video game director Hideo Kojima was unaware of these details when he played Resident Evil for the first time. He explained his experiences playing the game on Twitter. Kojima initially tried playing as Chris, but he kept dying, and this caused him to quit the game. Kojima later took the game with him when he moved to Tokyo and was able to complete it using Jill, along with a guidebook.

Development on the original Metal Gear Solid had already begun by the time the original Resident Evil was released in ’96, though it wouldn’t hit store shelves until ’98. Resident Evil 2 even managed to launch before it in the same year. There’s a strong possibility that Resident Evil inspired Metal Gear Solid, considering both franchises’ focus on survival. In the case of Resident Evil, the player didn’t have enough weaponry to deal with the monsters in the Spencer Mansion, while in Metal Gear Solid, the human soldiers could overpower Snake with gunfire, regardless of his weapons. How both games let the player deal with these limitations is a big part of what made them popular.

The Resident Evil series has used the dual protagonist concept on different occasions and treated the mechanic in different ways, with Chris and Sheva experiencing the story together in Resident Evil 5, while Claire and Leon experienced different stories in Resident Evil 2. The first game used dual protagonists as a difficulty mode, and this clearly wasn’t apparent to everyone who played the game back in the ’90s, including a young Hideo Kojima.

Source: Hideo Kojima/Twitter

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Scott Baird
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Scott has been writing for Screen Rant since 2016 and regularly contributes to The Gamer. He has previously written articles and video scripts for websites like Cracked, Dorkly, Topless Robot, and TopTenz.
A graduate of Edge Hill University in the UK, Scott started out as a film student before moving into journalism. It turned out that wasting a childhood playing video games, reading comic books, and watching movies could be used for finding employment, regardless of what any career advisor might tell you. Scott specializes in gaming and has loved the medium since the early ‘90s when his first console was a ZX Spectrum that used to take 40 minutes to load a game from a tape cassette player to a black and white TV set. Scott now writes game reviews for Screen Rant and The Gamer, as well as news reports, opinion pieces, and game guides. He can be contacted on LinkedIn.

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