Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D is a game that no one really cared for. Released in 2011, the third-person wave-based shooter not only sold poorly, but was critically shunned for its lack of content and finicky controls. Nevertheless, almost 15 years after its release, a team of modders have revived the game with a gorgeous HD remaster for 3DS emulators.
Dubbed the Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D HD Project, modders Alister, aka xZombieAlix, and Felicia, aka Jtegh, spent months remastering the game with pre-existing assets and hand-drawn recreations.
In an interview with FRVR, project lead Alister explained that the two modders aren’t the the biggest fans of the 3DS game. “I’m actually not a huge fan of this Mercenaries,” Alister told us. “I love the game because it’s a fun mash-up… Jill [Valentine] in an RE4 map has always been a big appeal to me”.
Nevertheless, as the team explained, every game deserves some form of preservation. After playing through the game in online multiplayer with custom servers—which the team also promote via their project’s Discord server—the duo decided to give the ugly 3DS game a new lick of paint to at least look presentable on modern displays.
The biggest challenge in making the new HD version of Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D was actually just getting the project started. Unlike prior RE games, there weren’t any modding tools available for the 3DS spin-off.
“Unlike other Resident Evil games, which have had a plethora of modding tools, this game has had nothing because no one really cared about it,” we were told. “We just sat on the idea until one day we were like, l’et’s just ask some people if they would make a modding tool’… we asked the person who made the Resident Evil 5 mod tools, and he got it back to us within a week and it worked.”
As a quick 3DS game, The Mercenaries 3D is actually largely a colleciton of reused assets from prior Resi titles. The game consists of maps from Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5 with returning enemies, weapons and more. In fact, as the team told FRVR, even the game’s skins are reused with Business Claire’s suit being a largely reused version of Sheva’s outfit from RE5, and Rebecca Chambers’ Nurse outfit being a reworked version of Sheva’s Fairy Tale costume.
“Pretty much everything is taken straight from the files. original titles, the PC versions,” the team said. “We avoided AI upscaling as it’s just not something we super agree with in our workforce, so anything that needed to be done by hand, we just kind of did ourselves…
“Most of the stuff we did by hand are stuff like the [outfits] alternative characters get. Those are not outfits that are actually in Resident Evil games, but if you kind of look closely, you can tell that they are reused assets. They’re just pieces of other characters’ outfits in other games mashed together.”
Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D’s reworked versions of its Resident Evil 4 maps are now the highest quality flatscreen versions of those maps. To get the highest quality assets possible, the team didn’t scrape the game’s upscaled PC assets or even use the GameCube originals, but instead made use of the often overlooked VR redux of the game for the Meta Quest 2.
“We kind of always kind of joke to that, funnily enough Resident Evil 4 is the older game in the series, yet the assets we’ve used are the most modern,” they said.
While the work on the game’s remaster is mostly done, there are ideas for what the team could do next. At the time of writing, there aren’t any concrete plans, but the team does have ideas for full characters that could be added as alternative costumes for others with their own skins, models, voice lines and more.
“We’ve actually been talking about initial addons we could do for stuff like new characters” Alister said. “We’ve learned so much from doing this. We could add characters with their own audio and stuff now. So, we want to almost add a pack that adds like six new characters over the character’s alt characters as we can’t just add new character slots, but we can replace specific costumes with everything we need.”
Despite being a celebration of the Mercenaries mode, the 3DS game lacks major characters. For example, while there’s a host of Resident Evil 4 maps to play through, Leon Kennedy and Ada Wong aren’t in the game, which the team could do if there’s time and demand.
Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D is no one’s favourite game, but it is a game that deserves to be preserved. Capcom will likely never release a full HD version of this game, but a small group of modders who don’t even really love the game have gone above and beyond to keep the maligned 3DS game alive and well.
