Credit: Capcom

While I was initially wary of the addition of sidequests to Resident Evil 4 for the remake, I admit that most of them ended up being fairly harmless distractions. For the most part, the game gives you fairly clear instructions about what you need to do and where you need to do it, which is certainly more helpful than the vague nature of the sidequests in the original version. Even so, there is one particular instance in these sidequests that I found to be absolutely intolerable, to the point that it gutted a large portion of my enthusiasm for the last forty minutes or so of the game.

The Blue Medallions in Resident Evil 4 Remake Make Me Mad

Throughout the Resident Evil 4 remake, you’re regularly encountering sidequests requiring you to shoot down hanging blue medallions. This is a carryover from the original game, albeit on a much grander scale, as they appear in more frequent bunches and in larger areas. As a nifty little assist feature, when you accept a blue medallion sidequest, the general locations of these medallions appear on your map. Now, this is helpful, especially since the medallions often appear in places you can’t necessarily reach on foot and may not think to look in.

However, there is a bit of a problem here. Some of the medallions’ hiding places are above or below established rooms on your map. Granted, the medallion positions are marked on the map in the same way as important icons, greying out if they’re not on the same floor as you, but some rooms may have higher or lower levels within themselves. More than a few of these medallions have been hanging high in the rafters of rooms in the castle, for instance.

The Offending Medallion

Credit: Capcom

This little quirk came to a head for me at the tail-end of the game, for the very last medallion sidequest, and indeed, the very last sidequest period for the entire game. Most of the medallions for this final quest were placed in somewhat-reasonable locations, findable with a little bit of intuition and problem-solving. However, there was one medallion that was shown to be on the top floor of a nearby building.

“Okay,” I thought, “it must be in a high point inside of that building.” I went inside the building, took a good look around, and found nothing.

“Okay,” I thought, “perhaps if I progress forward a bit, I’ll find a staircase or a broken window that will lead me up or give me a higher view. This is something that the game has done before.” So I progressed forward through this building, and with no warning whatsoever, was trapped behind a one-way door.

There was not, in fact, a way further up past that point. In actuality, the medallion I was looking for was not inside the building, but rather hanging, barely visible, in a dilapidated bell tower up above. That one-way door wasn’t a narratively-significant spot or anything, either; there was a room with a Merchant right afterward. The game had just sort of arbitrarily decided to lock me out of this final medallion, and by extension, 100% sidequest completion, all over what I would think to be a perfectly understandable mistake.

As an additional insult to injury, immediately after that Merchant room was another open combat space with a full view of the aforementioned bell tower. However, because it wasn’t the right view, I couldn’t get the medallion in my sights to shoot it. I tried looking at it from every possible angle and even employing splash damage via an RPG, but there was no use. The medallion, and full sidequest completion, were now lost to me for the entire playthrough.

Now, you could argue that I should’ve known the medallion wouldn’t be inside the building since the sidequest specified a location, or that I should’ve been rotating my saves. Perhaps, but I think it’d be a lot more sensible to just… not put a one-way door in the building? Like I said, it wasn’t a narratively-significant spot. There were enemies in the building that they may have wanted to keep out of the Merchant room, but the game had shown plenty of other ways of doing that that didn’t lock you out of backtracking.

I’m aware I’m just shouting into the void here. I know the majority of folks who have beaten Resident Evil 4 didn’t have a problem with this, but I have found more than a few others who did. It seems like a very obvious oversight on the developers’ part, and rather mean-spirited to kneecap players at the finish line for trying to be thorough. I don’t expect Capcom to patch the location of the medallion or remove the one-way door. I just want it known that one more person had a very understandable problem with a poor design choice in what was otherwise a very good game.