Resident Evil: Ethan Winter’s Most Unbelievable Injuries, Ranked

Content Warning: This article contains a discussion of potentially upsetting themes.

Video game protagonists tend to go through the roughest of lives. Whether it be through cutscenes or poor decisions by the player, the main characters end up in all kinds of terrible situations, and the most recent Resident Evil hero, Ethan Winters, has been through the wringer many a time.

Over the course of just two games, Ethan Winters has been stabbed, torn apart, and tortured more than any normal human being. In Biohazard and Village, the seventh and eighth games of the series, as he tries to find his wife and daughter, Winters has faced death time again and somehow walks away unscathed almost every time.

9 Falling From Insane Heights

Most of the time, the injuries a character sustains in a game happen when the gamer makes a mistake or messes up a challenge. With Ethan Winters, though, many of his injuries come from cutscenes, and throughout both games, Ethan’s fallen from insane heights multiple times.

From being dropped by Jack Baker, tossed about by a mutated Eveline, or dragged down a crumbling tower by the likes of the memable Lady Dimitrescu, Ethan has fallen from the tallest of buildings and heights.

8 Fingers Chewed Off By A Lycan

For one reason or another, RE characters see their hands brutalized a lot. When Ethan Winters arrives in the mysterious village, he quickly finds himself attacked by a group of werewolf-like monsters called Lycans that constantly plague the player.

What’s worse, in one of the first encounters, Ethan’s left hand is chewed up by the Lycan, causing him to lose two fingers and forced to bandage his hand for the entire game. Although all of his other wounds seem to heal over the game’s length, the first injury remains in sight.

7 Hands And Legs Hooked

After having his fingers bitten off by the Lycan, Ethan made his way towards Castle Dimitrescu and is attacked by the fan-favorite Lady Dimitrescu’s three vampiric daughters. Eager to show Ethan off to their mom, the daughters hook Ethan’s legs and drag him through the castle.

Upon showing their prize off to the tall vampire lady, Dimitrescu’s so excited to feast on Ethan that she has her daughters drive hooks through his hands and lift him up. What’s worse, Ethan tears the spikes out of his hands to get free, worsening his wounds.

6 Mauled By A Massive Lycan

Resident Evil thrives on having many scary moments throughout the games; these moments can appear as jump scares or scares that are eerily built up. Getting attacked by a giant Lycan lies in the middle of both of those.

Getting sidelined out of nowhere by a massive Lycan, Ethan’s thrown around by the monstrous beast who tears him apart. The weird thing is, Ethan manages to stumble away from it all with hardly a scratch on him, a recurring theme of both Resident Evil Biohazard and the memeable Village.

5 Leg Hacked Into Pieces

Before the likes of Village, Ethan went through the trials of the terrifying Baker family, a family living in the Louisiana bayou who has become infected by a virus called Mold. Although Ethan faces down villainous foes like Marguerite and Lucas, none did as much damage as the difficult Jack Baker.

Constantly plaguing Ethan throughout his journey, Jack ends up hacking Ethan’s foot off in one of his first encounters, leaving him stuck in a moldy bathroom. In the end, Ethan manages to reattach his foot somehow and keeps on going.

4 Hand Lopped Off (Twice)

Ethan getting his foot cut off wasn’t the first time he’d lost a limb. While searching for his wife Mia, Ethan ends up being attacked by an Eveline-controlled Mia who cuts her husband’s hand off with a chainsaw.

Yet, while Ethan lost his left hand at the Baker estate, a whole game later, he would lose his right to the likes of Lady Dimitrescu, who lops his appendage off with her claws. Despite the injuries, Ethan reattaches both hands and keeps on-going.

3 Killed By Jack Baker

Throughout both Biohazard and Village, Ethan Winters shows surprising resilience to any injury he gets. While it was believed the juice found and created around the maps was what allowed Ethan to keep going, it was revealed that Ethan wasn’t actually alive.

At the beginning of Biohazard, Ethan was attacked by Jack Baker, and his head was smashed in. Rather than just be knocked out, Ethan was, in fact, killed by Jack. Thanks to the Mold, he came back to life and continues to use the mold to aid him on his quests despite his death.

2 Heart Ripped Out

Funny enough, dying wasn’t the worst injury Ethan ever faced. All that really happened with Jack was a quick blow to the head or throat. When Ethan went up against Mother Miranda, the village’s patron, though, Ethan got his heart ripped out.

After everything he went through, a death like that doesn’t seem that bad, and yet having Miranda tear his heart out ended up paving the way for Ethan’s ultimate demise as missing his heart pushed the regenerative properties of the Mold to their limit.

1 Blown Apart

In the aftermath of getting his heart torn out, Ethan ended up coming back from the grave and battling Miranda for Rose. Although he could defeat her, his injuries were so severe that the Mold could no longer sustain him. As such, Ethan entrusted his daughter to Chris Redfield and Mia before detonating an explosive that decimated the remains of the town.

While the explosion appeared to be the end of Ethan, there is the possibility he did survive. In a post-credits scene, a teenage Rose is seen driving away from her father’s grave towards a shadowy figure that may be the apparently unkillable Ethan Winters.

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