Jill Valentine
Jill Valentine was the first female character I ever really got to experience. Before I played
Resident Evil the female characters I was most familiar with were the likes of Dixie Kong, Princess Zelda and Peach back when it was Princess Toadstool. None of them are exactly gonna win any prizes for being deep, well-rounded characters.
I was petrified of
Resident Evil when I first played it. I was 6 years old and I couldn't even look at my TV half the time. I refused to play the game after 8pm and made my way through with tiny little baby steps because my nerve would only last so long. I knew I would need something to help make me feel safe and that thing was Jill Valentine. I chose to play as her because I find a female presence more comforting and reassuring than a male one. If I had played as Chris I just would have felt like it was me in that mansion (not helped by sharing his name) and I would have projected my vulnerability onto him. With Jill it was as though she was exploring the place on my behalf, fighitng the monsters to protect me from them.
The comfort of having a female lead is why I was one of the few people who actually played Claire's disc first in
Resident Evil 2, but I never got the same feeling from her. That and the fact that Leon was a police officer so I naturally found more safety in playing as him, being a figure of civil authority and all. Then
Resident Evil 3: Nemesis came along and it took the role I had given Jill in the first game and reversed it. Now, what with Nemesis hunting her down, I was the one who had to protect her. There's a point in the game when you have to play as Carlos Oliveira as he looks for a vaccine to treat a T-Virus infected Jill. In the entire franchise that is perhaps the sequence that scared me more than any other. That feeling of my rock being helpless and dying and me having to go off alone to try to save her. I genuinely felt isolated and weak.
I'm not going to lie either, seeing Jill in her
Resident Evil 3: Nemesis outfit made me realise how attractive I found her. It was the first time I'd ever thought of a fictional character as beautiful and it only enadeared me to her more.
Jill was given a new face in the remake of
Resident Evil, the face most people will recognise her for, and by that point it was undeniable that she was my favourite female character in any video game. Seeing her in that mansion again was a totally different experience, mainly because I was no longer a scared 6 year old who needed protection but a 13 year old boy who felt he had to keep the girl he fancied safe. That might sound silly but that's how it was for me. It's one of the reasons why I love the remake, it really helped me see how much I had grown over the years and put a new dynamic on a familiar partnership.
Jill was gone for 7 years after that. Sure she was in
The Umbrella Chronicles but since that was a first-person recap of
Resident Evil and
Resident Evil 3: Nemesis it didn't really count. It wasn't until
Resident Evil 5 that she came back and I know a lot of people didn't like that game so much but having to fight Jill Valentine was hard for me. There was of course the feeling of needing to save her, needing to get the device off her chest and break Wesker's control over her, but I didn't want to hurt her to do it. That Wesker/Jill boss fight is one of my all-time favourites because of how engaged I was emotionally due to the significance I had been placing on Jill since childhood. Even though I knew I was helping her I felt terrible for how I had to do it.
I actually can't think of another female character (or just character in general, really) that I have had what, for want of a better term, I will call a 'relationship' with. I've grown up with Jill and she's been a way for me to realise how I've changed over time. Sometimes she saves me and other times I save her but whatever role we find ourselves in there's a connection that I do not have with any other character from any game. I was a little sad to see her face change for
Resident Evil: Revelations but the face does not make the woman. She was still Jill and she's a large part of why I love that game.
Now if they would only put her in a lead role alongside Leon and I can finally die a happy man.