I really hate Capcom for this...
Okay but I’m still not over Zeno and the absolute wasted potential here.
Because the more you look at him, the more it’s obvious he was never meant to just be “Albert but again.” He’s framed like that at first — the clone, the resemblance, the name — but everything about him is slightly off in a way that feels intentional.
The smoking alone already separates him. Albert was always controlled, pristine, obsessively composed. Zeno feels rough around the edges. There’s something restless about him. Like he’s carrying the weight of being manufactured and he doesn’t quite know what to do with it.
And then there’s the earring. Not just any earring — a cross. On his left ear.
Albert Wesker styled himself as a god. He had that whole superiority complex, the evolution rhetoric, the messiah complex without the humility. Zeno wearing a cross feels symbolic in the most layered way possible. Is it rebellion? Is it irony? Is it guilt? Is it a subconscious rejection of Albert’s god complex? A cross represents sacrifice, mortality, humanity — all the things Albert tried to transcend.
So why give the clone a symbol tied to suffering and faith?
It feels like visual shorthand that Zeno is more human. More conflicted. More grounded in pain instead of supremacy.
And then we get to the Victor scene.
When Victor calls him an imitation and Zeno’s face just falls for a split second — that wasn’t villain swagger. That was someone who’s heard that before. Someone who knows that no matter what he does, he’ll always be compared to a man he didn’t choose to be based on.
Imagine being engineered from one of the most infamous bioterror masterminds in history and constantly being reminded that you’re just the sequel. Not the original. Not the legend. Just the copy. Albert would’ve turned that into a threat. For Zeno, it looks like it actually hurts.
There is also an irony in this dynamic. Albert Wesker spent his life rejecting human limitation, striving to transcend ordinary existence. Zeno, in contrast, seems to crave something more fundamentally human: individuality. His emotional reaction suggests insecurity, doubt, even pain—qualities Albert suppressed in favor of calculated dominance. In that sense, Zeno’s differences may not make him weaker; they may make him more complex.
And that’s what makes his death so frustrating.
He gets killed before we really get to sit with any of this. Before we get to see whether he would’ve leaned into villainy out of resentment, or broken away completely. Before we get to see if he would’ve rejected Albert’s ideology or twisted it into something new.
We barely get a feel for who Zeno is outside of being “the clone,” and then he’s just gone.
It’s annoying because there was so much thematic potential there. A clone trying to escape the shadow of one of the franchise’s most iconic villains? A man struggling with the idea that his identity might never be fully his own? A character visually coded as rebellious and possibly more human than his source?
And instead of letting that arc breathe, they cut it short.
Now we’re left with fragments and the sense that there was a deeper character buried under all of it. Zeno didn’t feel like Albert reborn. He felt like someone fighting to prove he wasn’t.
And we never got to see if he would’ve won that fight.
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