Nemesis vs Magician
Table of Contents
So What’s The Theme Here?
Capcom’s alpha zombie vs Sega’s alpha zombie. Persistent, intelligent bio-weapons, though Nemesis is a slave to his parasite programming, an attack dog bred for his job by Umbrella, while Magician rebelled against his creator the moment he woke up. Nemesis is also a the culmination of Umbrella’s t-virus program, the ultimate Tyrant-003, while Magician Type-0 is the first and greatest of Dr. Curien’s creations.
Nemesis-T Type
Do I need to talk about Resident Evil? I don’t think so. Let’s not pretend you haven’t heard of it and don’t get the gist of it. What, are you going to tell me you don’t know about Stars Wars next?
It might sound strange at first given how closely associated Umbrella is with zombie outbreaks that wipe out cities, but a zombie virus was not the kind of bioweapon they wanted to sell. Diseases make for awful military weapons for the same reasons nukes are–they prevent you from taking over the area they hit just like they prevent the enemy, and they escalate the stakes of the conflict to the point mutual destruction becomes a serious possibility. Umbrella never wanted a zombie virus. The zombies were a mistake, a byproduct of the real project: creating BOWs, bio organic weapons, that could be deployed and tactically managed like conventional troops and armaments.
Man, why isn’t there a game where the evil corporation’s bioweapon plans go off without a hitch? I’d love a setting like. Hey, if we’re going to have WW3–and we are–we should make sure it involves some cool stuff. I want to see IQ 70 cannon fodder clones built like pinhead Neanderthals with carbon fiber nanotube bones. I want to see oversized wolfhound pups grafted into WE3 shells before their fur grows in. Lets cash in all our morality chips as a race so that when the nuclear fireball is about to claim us all we can spin it as a mercy kill.
The t-virus, whose complicated multi-retconned origin I’m just going to sum up by saying “they got it from the progenitor virus” and linking to the Resident Evil wiki page, was manufactured with the idea that you could inject it into a person and turn them into a regenerating superhuman, Captain America meets Wolverine. Umbrella managed to create cerberus units (zombie dogs, don’t tell the Cerberean kids!) and, by splicing reptile DNA with a fertilized human embryo, hunter units, which were like hunchback version of the Gill-man, meaning I think they’re really neat.
But you know, there’s only so much you can do with zombie dogs and frog monsters, and they have to have dedicated trainers, and the company is probably liable if they’re deployed and accidentally kill the wrong troops, so they were a good start, they raked in the cash, but they knew they could do better.
What Umbrella really wanted was for the t-virus to turn humans into superhumans, but while it did make people stronger and give them regenerative abilities, it also decayed the human brain to mush and turned them into, well, zombies. And you can’t order a zombie to march in formation.
Umbrella estimated that only about 1 in 10 million people would emerge from the t-virus as true superhumans without their brains frying, and so manufactured the E strain which upped the chances of intelligence surviving the transformation process. The E strain caused subjects to rapidly mutate with the idea being that the more mutations, the greater the odds the subject had of mutating select genes that preserved intelligence against the t-virus transformation.
Odds still weren’t good, and most people turned into zombies, and worse still, zombies who would rapidly evolve into tougher forms under stress through the V-Act process. This is how a lot of the series “super zombies” were created like crimson heads and lickers. But at the Arklay Mountains laboratory underneath Spencer Mansion (the setting of RE1), scientists managed to get a breakthrough out of a batch of convict test subjects. T-virus infection coupled with surgery allowed for them to create a BOW with the strength they were looking for and a level of intelligence comparable to before the subject’s transformation, more or less. The BOW would be able to understand and follow commands–guard this, go there, kill this person, retrieve Hunter Biden’s laptop, etc. He wouldn’t be solving crossword puzzles, but he would be able to get the job done.
This BOW was named Tyrant, for it was the culminating king of the t-virus project…and because, you know, you know a t name to go with t-virus.
Tyrant was the boss of RE1, fighting either Chris or Jill (canonically, it’s unclear who was the one to shoot a RPG in its face.) It was later retconned that he was Tyrant-002 and that Arklay had a second, prototype Tyrant named, you guessed it, Tyrant-001.
El Goblino!
Aw look at him, he’s so happy to be alive!
Tyrant-001 was shelved because they screwed up its intelligence. It was finally put out of its misery by Wesker and Rebecca in Umbrella Chronicles.
Tyrant-002 wasn’t the screw up 001 was, but he wasn’t perfect.
Look at those soulless white eyes–you can detect the fires of at least a third grade intelligence in those milky recesses. A marked improvement on Tyrant-001!
Let me take a moment to say how much I love that cheesy scene. The entire generations-spanning Chris vs Wesker rivalry started with Chris making fun of Wesker’s Tyrant.
Watch the scene. Wesker is so proud of Tyrant. He thinks its so cool. He calls it the ultimate lifeform without any hint of irony (though retcons do make it a little strange since he’s now supposed to consider himself the ultimate lifeform).
And Chris just laughs in his face. This big boulder punching military man meathead bullies him like Wesker is back in high school presenting his science fair project in front of the class.
“Chris?…Stop it!”
He sounds so pathetic, I love it. And then Chris says “This failure…is your savior?” with all the gravitas of Kirk asking why God needs a starship.
I don’t care what the writers say about Chris and Wesker. I don’t care that they say their beef is due to Wesker betraying STARS and turning Jill into a blonde salaryman fantasy. For me, it all comes down to this scene.
Though not a success, the scientists had a soft spot for their unholy abomination (Wesker certainly did), because they would send Nemesis to wipe out the STARS that sent Nemesis to biofreak heaven.
But there were a few steps to get to Nemesis with the first step coming with the Tyrant-003, this time not an individual Tyrant but a series.
The first subject in the Tyrant-003 line was Mr. X, confusingly titled T-00. Mr. X was in Resident Evil II, sent by Umbrella into Racoon City to destroy evidence of their activities–and those that had seen the evidence of their activities
The Tyrant-003 line was a huge success, relatively speaking. X may have not have given it to Claire and Leon, but the line was a fully realized concept. Tyrants could follow orders and follow them to their deaths. A couple of slightly modified Tyrant-003’s nicknamed “Ivans” were even used by Umbrella executive Sergei Vladimir as bodyguards. A mass-production version called the T-078 was even slated to be released and were encountered during the events of Resident Evil: Code Veronica, but the plug got pulled on Umbrella before they could sell them.
Though far more tame than their predecessors, there was still a slight uncontrollable element to the Tyrant-003’s. When equipped with their limiter coats, they followed orders perfectly, but without these coats, they would rapidly mutate into “super Tyrants” with armblades and claws similar to that of Tyrant-002. As super Tyrants, Tyrant-003’s were faster, stronger, and tougher, but also wilder.
The ultimate Tyrant, however, had a feature that ensured Umbrella would never lose control of it, even if it became a Super Tyrant.
It was the ultimate BOW factotum, a capable agent that would pursue its goals to the end, a perfection of a perfection.
Nemesis T-Type, the ultimate Tyrant!
Sure, there were Tyrants after Nemesis, and since the series is going go on until mankind destroys itself there will likely be future Tyrants with powers and abilities that put Nemesis to shame, in fact, you kind of already have one that’s more powerful than Nemesis in the form of Umbrella Chronicle’s TALOS, but Nemesis will always be the people’s Tyrant, the Tyrant with the most SOUL.
Ah, Nemesis. He used to top lists of best video game bosses because he had a really awesome gimmick–he would roam the levels of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. He would jump out at random moments. He would ambush the player. Mr. X in Resident Evil 2 only has scripted encounters, not so with Nemesis.
You always had to prepare for him. You always had to carry something to deal with him. His presence permeated the game in a way few other video game bosses have sense.
Nemesis is a video game boss legend, and Capcom knew he was awesome, that’s why they made his name part of the title.
You know how cool Mr. X was in the remake of Resident Evil 2? You remember how everyone kept talking about how awesome he was and making funny mods about him? You remember all those X GONNNA GIVE IT TO YA jokes? That was because they took the gameplay of Nemesis and gave it to X…along with a fedora.
God, it sure would be a shame if Capcom forgot what made Nemesis a video game boss legend. and reduced him to a moving Halloween prop…but more on that later…
Note that he’s called Nemesis T-Type and not Tyrant Nemesis-Type. There’s a good reason for that. You see, Nemesis is the combination of two different organisms, a Tyrant and the Nemesis Alpha parasite, which was developed over in Umbrella’s European branch.
The Nemesis Alpha parasite, which was retconned to have been based on the las plagas of Resident Evil 4, was developed to solve the “berserk monster” problem once and for all. The parasite, once attached to a host, would sever the spinal cord from the brain and essentially take over the body as its own.
Yes, this does technically mean the Nemesis is a brain-dead zombie. Think of the Tyrant body as a big meat mech piloted by the parasite.
The parasite also gives the Tyrant body a few upgrades. It secretes a lotttt of t-virus goo, which not only makes the Nemesis T-Type extremely infectious but hardens its skin to make it tougher than other Tyrants, which is why its brown and mottled and not corpse white like other Tyrants. The parasite also lets Nemesis project a big, meaty from its arm which lets it lash and grab targets. And if the Tyrant body is destroyed, if even super Tyrant form isn’t enough to save it, the parasite can reconstruct the Nemesis into a pulsing shoggoth-like mass of flesh–perfect for a final boss!
As cool as the parasite is…the remake seriously decreased its coolness by making it common. In the remake, Nemesis parasites infect zombies all around Racoon City, essentially acting as Dollar Tree plagas.
Hey gamer, remember how much you liked the plagas from 4? Here they are again! Don’t you like seeing them again? Did you catch the reference?
But the parasite losing its uniqueness wasn’t the only thing bad about the remake. If only it was the only thing bad about the remake…
This video goes into detail over how the remake disrespected Nemesis and Jill, but to keep things a little brief, they sucked the vulnerability and empathy out of Jill’s characterization. She’s way more of a stoic hardass this time around and it serves, along with all the scripted events, to make Nemesis a far cry from the legend he used to be. He’s more Wile E Coyote than Jason this time around.
In Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, Jill was empathetic and vulnerable and that made Nemesis feel like more of a threat. She was concerned for herself and everyone else that Nemesis was after. It’s like wrestling. You can’t have the face just no-sell everything the heel dishes out, it makes the heel look like a candyass, which is exactly what remake Nemesis was. When you have the heel flail around helplessly again and again while the face calls them a bitch, you don’t get the heel over. At all.
But it’s not just Jill that makes Nemesis suck. In the original, you had to play through a good half hour or so of the game before Nemesis was even hinted at, and then its when you find a lone STARs survivor who tells you that an unstoppable freak is coming to kill him, you, and every other member of STARs like he’s Kyle Reese talking to the cops about the Terminator.
You can feel Nemesis’ reputation shrivel into nothing in the opening cutscene.
But you want to know what’s the worst thing the remake did to Nemesis, the unforgiveable sin, the thing that if they had not done might have salvaged remake Nemesis? They made him like Mr. X from the original RE 2. He does not chase you. He does not jump out at random locations to surprise you. He consists entirely of scripted encounters and boss battles–and the scripted encounters are so, so bad.
Oh no, he’s going to pretend to try and get you during this scripted scene! Hold up to run or he might walk a little faster after you!
Oh, did you drop a bookshelf in front of the door? Ah, darn, he’s done for now. Don’t worry kids, the Nemesis attraction will be back and in operation by the time you reach the next typewriter, its okay.
I remember when Mr. X ended up acting like a rough draft of Nemesis in the RE2 remake, everyone got excited because if Mr. X was this good, Nemesis was going to blow everyone’s faces off.
Talk about a disappointment!
In this fight, Nemesis will get his flamethrower from the remake to go with his classic rocket launcher, but he wont’ get anything else, because there’s nothing else to give him.
And that’s sad for one of video game’s greatest bosses of all time.
Nemesis Powers, Abilities, and Cool Stuff
—STARS…
–Is incredibly resilient, even by the standards of other Tyrants. Can endure countless grenades and gunshots without any noticeable affect on his performance.
—Is in Dead by Daylight! He’s pretty fun to play, his tentacle strike breaks pallets and infects people. He also spawns a small horde of zombies. Let me tell you, it’s so satisfying to herd a survivor into a zombie. Nemesis, believe it or not, has a skin in Dead by Daylight that represents him being experimented on by the Dead by Daylight character Talbot Grimes. Talbot’s blight serum combined with the t-virus to supercharge Nemesis, and he looks pretty cool, though I’m honestly a little surprised Capcom signed off on letting Talbot capture Nemesis and pump him full of magic pumpkin flower goo until it poured out of his every orifice. It seems a little disrespectful to the character to me…but then again is it really any worse then what they did to Nemesis in the RE3 remake? Anyway, I’m not going to add BLIGHTED Nemesis, even if he should theoretically be more powerful than his regular self, because I try to respect the characters featured in these fights and we honestly have no way to gauge how much stronger he is.
–Is armed with a rocket launcher. The remake also gave him a flamethrower. I question Umbrella’s decision making here. I get it. You’re excited that you got a zombie mutant that knows how to point and pull the trigger. But the dude’s not exactly a marksman. His fingers are the size of a person’s arm and his eyes look like they’re about to sink into his skull, let’s not pretend he was built for sniping. So why give him a rocket launcher with very, very slow projectiles that leave very, very small explosions? Why give him a short-range flamethrower that he, clumsy as he is, risks setting himself on fire with (and he DOES set himself on fire!)? Why not give him a big custom made shotgun that just obliterates anything in front of him? The answer from a Doylist perspective is that the devs wanted to make sure Nemesis had weapons Jill could dodge and run away from. You wouldn’t have a chance if Nemesis game out with machine guns blaring. The answer from a Watsonian perspective is that Nemesis was made by angry nerds, not tacticians.
–Nemesis can sprout tentacles from his arm to lash and grab targets. You have no idea how fun they are in Dead by Daylight. Wha-pash!
—Nemesis’ limiter coat works to limit the E strain’s potential for rapid mutations and the V-Act process, presumably by sacs of drugs wired into his circulatory system, like a still suit from Dune crossed with a colonoscopy bag. When this coat is damaged, Nemesis transforms like all Tyrants do into a bigger, tougher form. His tentacles get longer and his claws get sharper.
–When severely damaged, such as after being exposed to corrosive acid like Jason was in Jason Takes Manhattan, Nemesis enters his final form. The parasite goes out of control and repurposes what little is left of Nemesis to create a giant hulking monstrosity. Final form Nemesis was strong enough to take a couple of hits from a rail gun, though it did eventually overwhelm him.
Magician Type 0
The year is 1996. Capcom was been making money hand-over-fist with Resident Evil. What was envisioned as an updated version of NES cult hit Sweet Home was so successful and spawned so many imitators that it’s tagline WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF SURVIVAL HORROR essentially spawned a new genre–survival horror.
Resource management, tank control, fixed camera angles, limited saves–and of course, zombies. These elements were hot hot hot, and naturally Capcom’s competitor Sega wanted to see if they could capture some of the Resident Evil fire. But they didn’t want to make a survival horror, probably because they knew it would just be judged as an imitation. They wanted to do something with zombies and horror elements, but a straight-up RE clone was out of the question. Instead, they wanted to apply zombies and horror to a genre they knew they were good at the Capcom wasn’t.
So what was Sega good at that Capcom wasn’t?
Light gun games.
Yeah. You know, rail shooters. Time Crisis. Virtua Cop. Games like that. They may be fun to play on a console, but these babies were made first and foremost for the arcade. You, a buddy, standing shoulder to shoulder in the back of a bowling alley or movie theater blasting away at pixelated evil with plastic guns–what can be better? Or, if you don’t have a friend (though you will always be my friend, anon), you duel wield and enter John Woo mode.
Sega created a zombie-filled rail shooter and called it House of the Dead. It was…not a horror game. It was an action game, a very corny and cheesy action game that somewhat presaged what Resident Evil would turn into after 4. It was spooky in a campy, non-horror way. It felt like a Halloween party. It felt like Disney’s Haunted Mansion directed by Michael Bay. The zombies were pretty much how you would envision zombies. The setting was an archetypical haunted house. Even the music felt like something on a Halloween party mix tape with the pipe organs and synth. The scares were all cheap jumpscares.
None of this is bad, though. Let me make that clear. I love House of the Dead. Silent Hill it is not, and Silent Hill it will never be, and that’s completely alright. If you want something with the spookiness and fun of a plastic jack-o-lantern full of candy, you will love House of the Dead. It fills a niche.
The story of House of the Dead 1 will sound very familiar to you if you’ve ever played Resident Evil. The story is basically what if instead of being herded into the Spencer Mansion and forced to survive on what little they could find STARS kitted themselves out with infinite ammo and kicked the door down SWAT style.
In the then-future of 1996, special agents of the fictional organization AMS (we are never told what AMS stands for, or even what country they represent) Thomas Rogan and G (yes, that is his real name) are called in to storm mad scientist Dr. Curien’s secluded, enormous mansion from which he’s been unleashing zombies and other nastiness. As the duo blast their way through the gothic surroundings, they soon find themselves in Curien’s underground lab which was financed by DBR corporation which, in a shocking turn of events, is…not corrupt, and in fact distanced themselves from Curien as he acted weirder and weirder until they blew the whistle on him.
Well huh. That was a twist I didn’t see coming.
At the heart of Curien’s DBR lab is the device that gave DBR its name, Curien’s greatest invention–the DNA Bio Reactor.
Think of the DNA Bio Reactor as one of those Play-doh playsets with the molds. DNA and sci-fi magic is the clay, horrible abominations are the molds. With the Bio reactor, Curien was able to cook up an army of disposable zombies, but also subjects that he considered perfect beings and cherished almost as if they were his children:
Hangedman Type-041 (I don’t know why Chariot is 27 but Hangedman is 041. I also don’t know why Hangedman is one work, but then again I do that all the time with superstrength and superspeed in my Capeworld writing so I really can’t complain.) Winged freak with an adorable gremlin voice. Can control bats and sends them to kill you. Then he tries to dive bomb and claw you to death while saying DIE or perhaps DIVE in a very different voice. Fun fact, him saying DIE is actually taken from the second boss fight in Virtua Cop 2. The remake keeps his gremlin voice, and I appreciate that, sometimes cheese is just better than doing things the “right” way, though they take away his DIE battlecry. Still, ultimately I think he’s improved in the remake.
Chariot Type-27. Big lanky janky zombie with armor and a halberd. Loves to shimmy and shake. You blow the armor off then you blow his face off. Pretty cool for such a simple, easy fight. Looks like a manglor under the armor.
Hermit Type-6803. A giant enemy crab spider that fights you as you transition from the secret lab under the mansion to the REALLY secret lab under the secret lab. Fires web balls that make a funny SQUISH noise when shot. The remake made him look cooler, but the tunnels were changed from looking like you were fighting him in Tempest to generic sci-fi corridors, which sucked.
According to the House of the Dead wiki, Magician was designed to look as unlike the other enemies in the game as possible. Instead of wanting the final boss to look spooky, they wanted him to look “cool and handsome.” Basically, they wanted Tyrant, but less ugly science experiment, more next generation replacement for humanity. Magician is Tetsuo, Tyrant is Tetsuo spazing out and starting to turn into a fetus monster– though Magician still has a little unfished funkiness to him, and that’s how you beat him.
Magician is covered in armored plates that can’t be dented by bullets (or in the remake, grenades and machine guns), so you have to shoot for the exposed parts of Magician’s body. His boss fight was a test of your light gun abilities. You needed precision to hit his weak spots but also speed because he would zoom around doing that anime afterimage dash thing. He would zoom around so fast the camera could barely keep up with him, meaning you were either quick or you were dead.
Curien wakes up Magician as his last-ditch move to kill the player, but Magician rebels against Curien after like, three seconds of life, and kills him before focusing on the player.
He hit that rebellious teen phase in speed runner time.
Though easily the alpha-threat of the game, Magician dies like all the other tarot themed monsters and explodes, leaving nothing behind, but in the original plan, believe it or not, was for Magician to sprout wings after losing, becoming invincible, and then, in the good end, getting a hug from Dr. Curien which gives him an attack of the feels causing him to self-destruct, or, in the bad end, flying off to destroy the planet.
The original plan was for Magician to turn into Genocyber, what the fuck?
Though he exploded, Magician would get better in time for the sequel.
Somehow.
Somehow surviving blowing up, Magician’s remains were collected by Caleb Goldman, an absolute treasure of a villain who financed Curien’s research so that he could both create a disaster to reduce mankind back to a state of primitivism and to create a super being to rule over humanity called the Emperor.
He wants everyone to be hunter gather spearmen ruled over by a big naked liquid metal guy.
Some men have dreams.
I quite like House of the Dead 2. It’s my favorite, not only because its really fun to play but because it was at my local bowling alley. I like how they expanded the gothic house of the previous game to an entire gothic city, that was really fun, and the cheese is absolutely off the charts. House of the Dead 2 is infamous for its bad voice acting, but its so bad its beautiful. Improving the voice acting can only make the game worse, so I hope that when they inevitably remake the game they don’t touch it.
House of the Dead II would cause a kind of renaissance for the series where they would lean into the cheese to the benefit of the series. It’s like the voice acting made them give up on ever trying to make the series a serious horror franchise, and that’s unironically a good thing. Sega would create spin-offs of House of the Dead II in the forms of Typing of the Dead and Pinball of the Dead, both really solid games, by the way, I recommend both of them.
Capcom would take a stab at making Resident Evil a serious horror franchise with the Gamecube version of Resident Evil before tapping out and leaning into Michael Bay action movie cheese with 4 onwards, but House of the Dead would follow a different trajectory. They would go whole hog into the cheese, and you can see how they would eventually get a spin-off as wild as House of the Dead: Overkill, though there would be a period where they would try and shave some of the cheese off, much to the detriment of the series, but more on that later…
Magician would be the penultimate boss of II. Apparently, he got over his teenage rebel phase real fast and got on with Goldman’s “lets all return to caves and worship the T-1000” plan.
Magician was probably also grateful for Goldman stitching him back together, because Goldman did one hell of a job considering there was nothing left of him at the end of the first game. He even looks about the same, just with some grody meat worms growing out of his weak spots. Not only did Magician look roughly the same, he fought in pretty much an identical fashion–which was good. When you make a perfect light gun game boss, you shouldn’t mess with the formula.
After being defeated again, Magician would explode, again, and get better in a later installment, again.
Magician would not show up in III, which is another point against the black sheep of the HOTD family.
Well, okay, he shows up as a power-up called the mini-magician. You shoot it and a little gold magician shows up that you have to shoot for extra points. It’s weird.
III was a step back from the series. They tried making the series serious. It turns out that Goldman had a dead man’s switch ready which caused a zombie apocalypse destroying most of human civilization, and that right there is a mistake. Why would you make things so grim in a series best described as “goofier Resident Evil?” The voice acting is better, boo, and now its the post-apocalypse, and the energy that II had is just not here.
And no Magician, just the mini-magician, and what a great metaphor for the step down that III was!
Magician would show up in IV, a prequel to III, having somehow been rebuilt by Goldman’s follower Thornheart, who, unlike Goldman, believes mankind should be completely wiped out. And apparently Magician was on board with the is new plan just as fervently as he was with Goldman’s.
Does he just go with whatever plan someone tells him? He is such a teenager!
His last words in IV are NOTHING CAN ERASE MY PAIN…so yeah, he’s a total teen.
Now with pulsing electricity marking his exposed parts instead of pulsing meat worms, Magician fights just like he did in his last two appearances but with a new trick–he can now surround himself in fire and dive bomb the opponent. But beyond that, same old Magician.
He was also armed with Pandora’s box, a device that, if activated, brings to life several Magician clones for an instant GAME OVER. He won’t be getting this in his fight against Nemesis, however, because its not fair for Nemesis to have to fight MagicianX5.
Magician would be absent in 2009’s House of the Dead: Overkill, and I understand why. They wanted to keep Overkill as kind of its own thing separate from the rest of the series because its camp was on a different wavelength than the camp of the series was used to. But I think it would have been fun to have the Magician show up, even if it was in a bonus stage. Image if it was the final stage of House of the Dead 1, sprites and all, and G and Isaac Washington kept making meta jokes, it would have been awesome.
Magician would also be a no-show for 2018’s House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn, another prequel to III, which was a shame because they brought back Chariot of all creatures. Chariot but no Magician? What’s up with that? I like Chariot, he’s easily one of the best bosses, but he’s no Magician.
Is Magician gone for good? Will they never put him in another HOTD game?
That’s hard to say. Vanishing is an old magic trick. You never know when or where the magician is going to reappear after he leaves your sight. And you know what they say, a good Magician never reveals his tricks…
…So basically Sega, put him back in. Make it a clone if you have to. Clones have a lot to do with magicians, you know. Ever seen The Prestige? It would be thematic.
Magician’s Powers, Abilities, and Cool Stuff
–That up there? That’s a production sketch of Magician. I only bring you the coolest stuff, anon, because I love you–and because it’s easy to lift images from the HOTD wiki.
— Can levitate with the power of psychokinesis and dash around leaving shadow images behind. Is notorious for being hard to hit so much to the point that in III he would cameo as the “mini-magician” item which would shadowdash around. To get the points, you had to have the Magician’s pattern down. While he’s shadowdashing, the Magician is invincible (so don’t be a schmuck and try and shoot him), and the color of the shadows reflect what kind of attack he’s about to pull off–that’s a pro tip from gamemaster Otto. Red means he’s about to get in close and claw you with a hand covered in fire, blue means he’s going to hang back and shoot one of his fireballs, speaking of which–
–Is pyrokinetic and commonly manifests his pyrokinesis in the form fireballs. Lots of fireballs. Magician loves fireballs as much as Ganon and Bowser. These fireballs can slightly adjust themselves and home in on enemies, but have a big weakness in that they vanish if you shoot them. In IV, Magician learned to coat himself in purple fire and swoop down for a strafing attack. But his ultimate fireball attack has always been summoning a swarm of fireballs in the air which then rain down on the opponent. You got to shoot them before they hit you, a true test of your light gun abilities. Just how strong is Magician’s pyrokinesis? It’s moderately powerful. He made a floor of Goldman’s skyscraper blow up in II as a way of introducing himself.
–Has a really awesome theme in both original and remix flavors!
–His armor renders him invulnerable to small arms fire unless he’s shot in one of his unarmored spots. He seems to need parts of himself exposed, I don’t know why, but if he didn’t why wouldn’t Goldman have upgraded him with full armor when he was reconstructed in II? A Doylist explanation is that you can’t win if he’s fully armored. A Watsonian explanation would be something like he needs some exposed skin to breathe otherwise he dies like the girl from Goldfinger.
–I’ve been waiting for this time to come…
–In IV, he acquired the Pandora’s box, a plot device that allied for genetic cloning. When he pulls it out at the end of his boss fight, you have a single instant to throw a grenade, otherwise he activates it and unleashes several clones of himself. You don’t even get the chance to fight the clone army, it cuts straight to the bad ending. He’s not going to get Pandora’s box in this fight, because that was a one-time item and it wouldn’t be fair to have him suddenly swarm Nemesis with clones.
So Who Wins?
Magician makes Nemesis suffer way more than G did.
Nemesis is way stronger, way more durable, and his weapons don’t have to hit Magician in his weak spots to hurt him. Just hitting Magician period with the rocket launcher or flame thrower is going to hurt Magician through splash damage.
So why does Nemesis lose?
Because he’s way slower than Magician, can’t fly, and has the has very bad aim.
Think of it this way. Jill and he tank control agility is fast enough to foil his aim. Now imagine Jill can fly and can leave afterimages.
And Magician can hurt Nemesis. In fact, fire is a pretty good counter to Nemesis’ regeneration. Being set on fire knocked him before, and I got no doubt that if Magician kept applying more and more fire that even Nemesis in his final form would be killed, especially if Magician kept spamming his cluster attack or that one move he did in a cutscene that took out a floor of a skyscraper. Magician’s fireballs don’t pack the punch of a railgun, but they’re much better at putting down something like Nemesis than a railgun. Kinetic damage and a hole through his body? Nemesis’ toughness and regeneration takes care of that, to an extent. But fire? Especially fire that isn’t going to stop by Nemesis doing stop-drop-and-roll? Fire is going to reduce all that expensive t-cell flesh to cinders. We’re talking continuous deep tissue damage, just the thing to shut down someone with a cellular generation power.
Magician can just keep going until there’s nothing of Nemesis left but a small hill of ash. And lets not forget that Nemesis is going to be smoking. Resident Evil zombies are biological entities who rely on biological processes, albeit exaggerated to the point of science fiction, to function. They aren’t magic like Evil Dead deadites. They need food, water, and oxygen. They need to breathe, and Nemesis is going to find that hard to do when he’s inside a cloud of his own smoking flesh.
When Nemesis does go final form or just breaks his weapons the fight is pretty much over then and there as he has no way to reach Magician. Yeah, Magician does throw out melees moves…on normal people. But he’s not a moron. He’s smarter than Nemesis. Way smarter. He can talk in more than monosyllables and figured out that he could use Pandora’s box to clone himself. He’s probably smart enough to figure out that he shouldn’t get close to the giant meat mountain with tentacles, not when he can just spam fireballs and win. If Magician did get close enough for Nemesis to grab him, Nemesis would no doubt be able to tear him apart, but there’s no reason he has to get close.
The advantages that come when you can fly and your opponent can’t are easy to understate. You decide how and when melee combat is initiated, if at all. And if you got a ranged weapon and they don’t, you’ve won before the fight’s even started.
If Umbrella equipped Nemesis with shotguns and machine guns, this fight could have ended very differently. But they didn’t. Nemesis’ armament was insufficient to deal with a smaller, faster target like Jill and its insufficient to deal with a smaller, faster target like Magician.
Here’s how I’d like the fight to go–we open with Nemesis breaking into a sealed lab filled with Magician clones, like in IV. He growls ZERO… showing that he’s been programmed to destroy Magician Type-Zero and all his clones. He blows up several tubes with his rocket launcher, but
Magician says his catchphrase, which was even used in Typing of the Dead, I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS TIME TO COME… and then to add a little more context to the fight says UMBRELLA CANNOT CONTROL ME. NO ONE CAN CONTROL ME.
The fight would start from Nemesis’ perspective as if he’s playing House of the Dead. He struggles to hit Magician with the rocket launcher as he shadow-dashes around and hits him with fireballs. Nemesis is now on fire, but seemingly fine. We switch out of first-person mode. Nemesis gets pissed and surprises Magician by throwing his rocket launcher at him. Magician falls and Nemesis grabs him with a tentacle and pulls him close. Nemesis tries to crush his head and a crack appears on his face armor and bleeds.
Magicians says MINDLESS PUPPET. I WILL CUT YOUR STRINGS! and blasts Nemesis back with the cutscene explosion from II, snuffing out the fire. Nemesis uses his tentacle to retrieve his rocket launcher, but after Magician blows up a rocket with a fireball and sets him on fire again, Nemesis shows his intelligence by shooting at his feet, snuffing the flames in the blast and knocking him towards an Umbrella cache containing a flamethrower.
Magician shadowdashes towards him and Nemesis blasts him with the flamethrower. Magician shows off his pyrokinesis (I don’t think it’s a stretch to say he could do this) by turning the flames back on Nemesis and blowing up his fuel tank.
Nemesis falls to one knee. Being on fire is starting to get to him. Magician rises into the air for his cluster attack. Cut to Nemesis throwing off his coat and turning into a super tyrant. The fireballs hit, exploding the ground beneath him. Nemesis falls but takes Magician with him by grabbing with a tentacle.
They land in an enclosed facility. Nemesis has an edge here in the cramped quarters and the tempo of the fight changes. Magician bobs and weaves between Nemesis’ strikes with his shadowdashing, but Nemesis gets some brutal hits in, breaking off chunks of armor, making satisfying crunching noises.
Nemesis goes ZERO…and grabs Magician with a tentacle. Magician tries to shadow dash away but gets pulled inch by inch. Magician breaks off the tentacle by severing it with a fiery. Nemesis instantly regrows the tentacle. Magician sees this and realizes he’s in trouble here. He’s got to focus. He braces himself. No more fancy movements, he’s focusing everything on power. He starts unloading on Nemesis while moving back–back, back, chased by several thrashing tentacles that regrow as soon as he burns one. He hits the wall, but the tentacles finally shrivel and die. Over a hallway full of wrecked equipment and busted walls, he sees a blackened Nemesis slump, fall over, and go still.
Magician shoots the ceiling, burying Nemesis’ body, and shadow dashes through the hole. He thinks Nemesis is dead, but then the rubble starts to shake and out pops Nemesis in his final form.
Now much more confident that he has room to move, Magician says IS THIS THE TRUE FORM OF THE PARASITE?
Final form Nemesis shoots out tentacles, but none of them can reach Magician, who baits the now berserk Nemesis into grabbing a chunk of wall and pulling it down on top of himself.
We switch back to Nemesis’ POV to come full-circle. He pushes the rubble off to see Magician fire off several clusters of fireballs that hover ominously overhead.
STAY IN THE GROUND WHERE YOU BELONG.
The fireballs all fall and all hit, one by one.
Cut to Magician watching the blaze. He says THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE ULTIMATE LIFE (yes, lifeform would probably be more correct, but I want to put some of House of the Dead’s infamous engrish jank into the match).
Magician snaps his fingers. The fire vanishes, leaving behind a small hill of ash that starts to blow away.
Magician turns to the viewer, bows, and then shadow-dashes away
Oh, and by the way, the fight music should be called Wild Types. As in how they’re both “types” and instead of being “wild types” in the sense of “natural subjects,” they’re “wild types.”
Death Battle would probably call it something stupid like Magic Nemesis.
wow, this is such a cool matchup, how i never heard of it before
Although it isn’t canon, Operation Raccoon City gave Nemesis a minigun so if that weapon was included Nemesis would definitely take this. That’s hundreds, if not thousands of rounds per minute, which would shred the Magician, which died to mere handgun bullets