Main game (RE4)

This page is for information and options for Resident Evil 4's main game.

Structure
Resident Evil 4 features a story mode and additional modes such as The Mercenaries, Separate Ways and Assignment: Ada. The last two are not present in the GameCube version of the game.

There is no chapter select for any of the story-related modes but it's possible to save the game in different slots within the saving menu. There are 20 slots available, the main story has 19 total chapters, so the player has the potential to "chapter select" in 19 chapters.

Separate Ways also allows the player to save via the use of typewritter but Assignment: Ada has no manual saving.

Any progress made within The Mercenaries or NG+ mechanics (such as unlocking the P.R.L. 412, Handcannon, or Special 2 costume) are saved automatically within a "global" save and these weapons or special bonuses will be available every time the player starts a New Game or New Game+.

Difficulty
The game has four difficulty modes, Amateur, Easy, Normal and Professional. Amateur mode is exclusive to the Japanese versions of the game and the main difference would be that Leon start out with a Shotgun and some parts of the game are skipped to make it easier for the player.

Easy and Normal are available by default, and Professional mode only unlocks after beating the game once on Normal difficulty.

Resident Evil 4 also features a hidden dynamic difficulty, if the player is accurate and takes only a few hits, the enemies will automatically become more agressive and deal more damage, but if the player is missing a lot of shots or getting hit too many times and dying, the enemies will become more passive, deal less damage and sometimes not even spawn.

One example for this is during the gondola area in the village, if Leon takes enough hits at this part, the two archers will not spawn at the water room. This dynamic difficulty is turned off in Professional modes and the enemies are on a set agressive manner that cannot be changed.

Saving
The game features manual saving with the use of typewriters, there are no ink ribbons however so the player can save an infinite amount of times. When saving, the screen will display the current chapter, how many times the game was saved in that file, how much time has been played in that run, the "Round" (how many times a new session was started using that file), and the mode.

When saving within Separate Ways, the screen remains the save but the color around the saved file will instead become pink/red and the mode will now display "ADA".

There are 20 slots within the save menu.

Game over
The game over screen is triggered by either losing all health, failing certain QTEs that are programmed to kill you once failed, shooting the water before fighting Del Lago, or when Ashely is taken by an enemy to another area or killed.

During the You Are Dead or Mission Failed screen, there are only two options: to either select Yes or No to Continue?, if Yes is selected, the player will start at the last checkpoint they crossed, not where they last saved, if No is selected, the player will be taken back to the main menu, next time they re-load their saves they will not spawn at the last checkpoint, but where they last saved with a typewriter.

Loading screens
All versions of Resident Evil 4 share the same type of loading screens, the screen is completely black with the text "Loading..." on the bottom right corner of the screen, some versions won't show loading screens due to fast load times, and depending on the version, the "Loading..." text will have a different font.

Endings
Resident Evil 4 only has one pre-determined ending that can't be changed.

Results
The results screen in Resident Evil 4 displays no overall rank, only the hit ratio (accuracy), enemies killed and number of times killed (deaths), next to these stats it display the total stat of each, so at the end of Chapter 1-2, it will display how many enemies you have killed in both Chapter 1-1 and 1-2, and so on. Above these numbers is also an image of the next chapter, each chapter shows different images or Leon or Ashley in the background.

In Separate Ways, the results screen is the same as the main game's screen, except the image showing the next chapter is absent and the background shows different images of Ada in each chapter.

In The Mercenaries, the results screen shows the number of enemies killed, score, max kills in a row (combo) and a rank based on stars, with 5 stars being the maximum, below all of it is the player's overall highest score and the character they got that score with. Each character has a different background image during this screen.

Assignment: Ada has no results screen.