Resident Evil: Revelations Story Explained

Resident Evil: Revelations came out on the Nintendo 3DS in early 2012, with HD versions following in 2013. It sits between Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5 on the timeline: the year is 2005, and the young BSAA is chasing ghosts on a drifting cruise ship. Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield lead, each with a new partner, and almost nobody is who they claim to be. This page covers the whole plot and the ending, so it has full spoilers. (Resident Evil: Revelations)

Before the story begins#

After the fall of the Umbrella Corporation, Chris and Jill helped found the BSAA to fight the bioterrorism Umbrella's leftovers made possible. A rival body, the Federal Bioterrorism Commission (FBC), run by Morgan Lansdale, had more money and more political reach. (Resident Evil: Revelations)

In 2004 the terror group Il Veltro attacked Terragrigia, a floating solar-powered city in the Mediterranean, with the T-Abyss virus, a mix of the t-Virus and a virus taken from deep-sea fish. The outbreak became known as the Terragrigia Panic. Lansdale's answer was to turn the city's own solar satellite, Regia Solis, on it and burn it to the waterline. Veltro was believed wiped out, and the FBC came out of the disaster with more power than ever. (Resident Evil: Revelations)

The Queen Zenobia#

The game opens with Chris and Jessica out of contact in the snowy mountains of Europe, following a lead that Il Veltro was back. O'Brian sent Jill and her new partner Parker Luciani, a former FBC agent, to Chris's last known position in the Mediterranean. That turned out to be the Queen Zenobia, a luxury liner adrift and apparently empty. (Resident Evil: Revelations)

The ship was not empty. Its corridors were full of Ooze, crew and passengers turned into bloated, waterlogged creatures by T-Abyss. Jill and Parker found no sign of Chris, only a mannequin dressed in his gear, before a hooded figure knocked them out. Jill woke alone, stripped of her weapons, in one of the cabins, and fought her way back to Parker. (Resident Evil: Revelations)

Flashbacks to 2004 run through the story. In them, Parker and Jessica, then both FBC agents, fight through the dying Terragrigia, and a young Raymond is caught up in the same disaster. Back on the Zenobia, an FBC agent called Raymond Vester, who knew Parker from those days, tried to kill Jill and Parker, then vanished. They also met Rachael Foley, an FBC agent who had been on the ship and had mutated into an Ooze herself. (Resident Evil: Revelations)

Chris, Jessica and the false trail#

Chris and Jessica had found what looked like a Veltro base, an airstrip in the mountains. When O'Brian told them Jill and Parker were missing, the pair flew to the Mediterranean and landed on a ship they took for the Zenobia, only to learn it was its sister ship, the Queen Semiramis. Meanwhile two more BSAA agents, Keith Lumley and Quint Cetcham, were sent to the mountain airstrip. Among the files there they found footage of an invisible creature killing a Veltro member: a new breed of Hunter infected with T-Abyss. (Resident Evil: Revelations)

Things on the Zenobia got worse. Jill and Parker reached the communications tower and learned that Regia Solis had been switched back on and was aimed at the ship. With Quint guiding them over the radio, they launched a drone from the bow and used it to draw the satellite's targeting away. The strike hit the drone, not the ship, but the shockwave flooded the lower decks and the Zenobia began to sink. (Resident Evil: Revelations)

The truth about Veltro#

Quint and Keith dug deeper into the data and found that O'Brian himself was behind Veltro's reappearance. Before they could do anything with that, an airstrike flattened the building they were working in, and contact was lost. (Resident Evil: Revelations)

Chris and Jessica reached the real Zenobia and joined Jill and Parker. When a masked Veltro figure confronted them, Jessica shot him before he could talk. He was Raymond, and he had been working for O'Brian all along; a Kevlar vest kept him alive. Jessica's own loyalties came out soon after. She shot Parker and set the ship's self-destruct running, proving she was the mole. (Resident Evil: Revelations)

Jill and Chris then faced Lansdale, who had come to the ship to make sure the evidence died with it. He admitted the plan: the FBC had worked with Il Veltro on the Terragrigia attack to prove the world needed the FBC. Notes left aboard showed he had also sent a research team to the Zenobia to build a T-Abyss vaccine, then let the ship's monsters kill them once they handed it over. Jill and Chris stopped the virus being released and escaped the sinking ship. On the way out they found Parker, but a broken catwalk gave way and he fell into the fire below. (Resident Evil: Revelations)

O'Brian finally told them the full story. He had staged Veltro's return to flush out Lansdale and get proof. Keith and Quint's data pointed to a third sister ship, the Queen Dido, lying under the ruins of Terragrigia, which held the evidence Lansdale had tried to destroy when he burned the city. Then the line went dead: Lansdale had O'Brian arrested. (Resident Evil: Revelations)

The Queen Dido and Jack Norman#

Chris and Jill went down to the wreck under Terragrigia to find Jack Norman, Veltro's leader. He had survived a year by injecting himself with T-Abyss and holding off full mutation through hate for the people who had betrayed him. Believing Chris and Jill were FBC agents sent to finish him, he took a massive dose of the virus and mutated into a huge Tyrant-like creature. (Resident Evil: Revelations)

They killed him after a long fight. Dying, Norman seemed relieved it was over. His PDA held proof of the deal between Veltro and the FBC. (Resident Evil: Revelations)

The ending explained#

Chris and Jill broadcast Norman's evidence. O'Brian was freed and arrested Lansdale himself, the truth about the Terragrigia Panic went public, and the FBC was dissolved. Its resources were folded into the BSAA, which became an organisation under the United Nations. O'Brian took responsibility for staging Veltro's return and stepped down as director. Keith and Quint turned out to have survived the airstrike. (Resident Evil: Revelations)

Parker survived too. Raymond had pulled him out of the fire, and he was found drifting off the coast of Malta. After about a month of recovery he returned to the BSAA. (Resident Evil: Revelations)

The last story scene jumps forward to Chris and Jill approaching Oswell Spencer's estate in Europe, the raid that opens the flashback chapter in Resident Evil 5. In a post-credits scene, Raymond meets Jessica at a cafe and gives her a sample of T-Abyss. She asks why he saved Parker, and he says only that he had his reasons. Who the two of them really work for is never answered. (Resident Evil: Revelations; Resident Evil 5)

The point of the story is that the threat wasn't the terrorists. Veltro was real, but it was used by a Western security agency to justify its own existence, and burning Terragrigia was a cover-up as much as a containment. That idea, governments and agencies playing the bioweapons game themselves, comes back again and again in later games. (Resident Evil: Revelations)

What it sets up#

The ending hands straight on to Chris and Jill's raid on Spencer's estate in 2006, where Jill disappears after tackling Albert Wesker out of a window, and to the events of Resident Evil 5. The BSAA's new status under the United Nations shapes every game that follows. For the next spin-off, which takes Claire Redfield and Barry Burton to a prison island in 2011, see the Resident Evil: Revelations 2 story, and for every game in release and story order, the Resident Evil games in order. (Resident Evil: Revelations; Resident Evil 5)