How many Resident Evil 4 runs does it take to unlock all achievements?

If you're going for the Resident Evil 4 completion, you likely already know that this won't be a simple one-and-done for all the achievements. Here's how the list breaks down, and how many runs you're looking at needing...

It's going to take multiple full runs of Capcom's remake to grab all of the Resident Evil 4 achievements, but how many, exactly? That's what we're setting out to solve here, and unlike in most similar cases, there's a lot more going on here that makes it pretty tricky to pin down precisely how many times you will need to roll credits on your way to the completion, not to mention what each run would need to look like to tick off everything along the way. Good thing it's a fantastic game, picking up a 9/10 in our Resident Evil 4 review. Expect slight spoilers as to some unlockables and secret achievements as we break this down.

Theory-crafting the optimal Resident Evil 4 completion

Let's start with a tl;dr as this gets pretty complex — the absolute bare minimum requirement for grabbing all of the Resident Evil 4 achievements is three full playthroughs and one 'partial' New Game+ run through the majority of the game. However, it's not nearly as simple as that, since there are a whole bunch of additional factors at play here, including conditions that must be met for other achievements, weapons that need to be unlocked, and loads more. Let's break down what this optimised completion would look like, and why it's so borderline impossible that you're realistically going to be looking at a few additional runs on your way to a full completion.

Since the S+ rank achievements do not appear to stack and can only be done on a new file, to hit that bare minimum and tick off all the difficulty-related achievements, your main runs would need to be a fresh Standard run in under five hours (S+), beat Hardcore from scratch in under five-and-a-half hours (S+), and a Professional clear. Already, we come to our first complication beyond that lofty initial hurdle of needing to ace the game on your very first run in well under the eight-hour limit of the speedrun achievement — two weapon unlocks are tied to Professional difficulty so with the optimised route only playing through the tricky mode once, this would require both conditions to be met, beating the hardest mode on a fresh file run rather than NG+ in under seven hours for an A rank, and using no bonus weapons. One important thing to note on difficulty levels with auto-saves (so all bar Professional): Do not use the 'continue' option after dying. Doing so keeps the in-game timer running to include each failed attempt, but if you instead quit to the title screen and continue from there, it will reset the clock to when the checkpoint was first saved... trust us, you'll need as much wiggle room as you can get for some of the stricter time limits, and a few fails on longer sections could easily kill an S+ run. Still, it only gets worse from here, so let's break down the other conditions that would make this optimal route absurdly difficult, if not actually impossible.

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No Merchant: One achievement requires you to do a full run of the game without ever speaking to the Merchant, locking you out of a ton of useful things. Since all three runs in an optimal completion would be fresh files, this would mean somehow hitting the tight target times without access to shop-bought weapons, knife repairs, body armour, crafting recipes, purchasable resources and heals, and Request rewards. Not having access to rocket launchers to skip longer bosses is a pretty major time loss on its own, but even just having no weapon upgrades would mean all of your minimal ammo (which you can't even top up via crafting without the right recipes) would be doing less damage and you'd likely end up running out very quickly, and with only disposable knives to fall back on after the Combat Knife breaks. For all of these reasons and more (no Trade option means no treasure maps), you have to wonder whether this is even doable on a fresh file that needs a top grade run for other achievements, so this alone is likely to add another run, ideally on New Game+ where you can already be fully upgraded and stocked up on ammo going into the game.

Pistol/knife only: Another achievement demands using no weapons beyond handguns and knives for the entire game, and while this also means no rockets for quick boss kills, it's still among the easier stipulations here. Red 9 can be found relatively early in the game and when maxed out, the pistol hits hard, though you do really need Merchant access as well to grab the stock to rein in its heavy recoil, as well as extra Resources to top up the only ammo type you will be using (as well as actually upgrading the thing, of course). Having access to one of the non-default knives also helps, though the Fighting Knife only comes into play late in the game or via NG+ (which an optimal completion would only touch for a partial run) while the unlockable Primal Knife would need you to destroy all Clockwork Castellans on an earlier run (which can add a decent chunk of time if you have to go looking for them) and can't be used on the Professional run here anyway. Still, being able to sell all weapons and ammo bar handgun stuff is a decent boon, even if there's only so much you can do with that extra cash, and with speed so important to an optimised completion, again, we have to question whether the long boss fights of pistol-only would still let you make it to the credits in time for the grades you would need.

No healing items: This one's a doozy, and realistically speaking, this effectively adds a fourth run to the completion unless you're an absolute god at this game and can beat all 16 chapters without taking more than a couple of hits, ever. You see, there is zero health recovery in Resi 4 outside of items — your health only ever goes down, and is never topped up during the course of the story. This means that as soon as you hit the critical state, you're left to slowly limp through the rest of the game, dead in one hit to most attacks and more vulnerable to getting tagged in the first place with your weaker mobility, which in turn would make it much harder to stay on pace for good grades. Given three fresh file runs, this would also mean no way of upgrading your maximum health beyond its starting value, since Yellow Herbs have to be used in conjunction with other healing items. Realistically, you'll probably want to do this on Assisted difficulty, which adds (very slow) out-of combat recovery out of the critical range to offer a very small safety net... routing this into the minimum playthrough count would be incredibly tricky, especially with the removed auto-saves on Professional throwing you back to the last typewriter you used on death and making it basically a non-starter there unless you think you can do a full run without taking more than two hits.

Speedrun: While there is an achievement for beating the game in under eight hours, the target times for all three runs in the fully optimised scenario come in below that, making this a gimme at some point in the completion, ideally at the end of your first run.

All requests: Most of the Merchant's Requests can be completed with relative ease and without costing you too much time, although there is one in each area that involves considerable backtracking to face a challenging mini-boss. One upside here is that this achievement is cumulative and doesn't need to be done in a single run, so you could theoretically tick off one of the three difficult ones per run, perhaps even choosing to focus on all Requests in one of the three areas in each run while only doing others that don't eat into your time too much on the others.

All treasures: Similar to Requests, this doesn't all need to be ticked off in one go, since it comes in the form of three individual achievements, one for each area. You will, however, need Merchant access to grab the treasure maps for each area if you don't want to miss any of the goodies, though if you were planning on routing in a no-Merchant run as part of an efficient completion, you could always use map screenshots from previous saves or an external guide to help you find them all. Again, you'd probably want to focus on cleaning out one area per playthrough in an ideal world, although given that the first two areas especially involve a lot of scavenging for Small Keys and backtracking, these would still add a not-insignificant amount of time to a run that could make S+ that much harder.

All weapons: We mentioned two of the four Resident Evil 4 unlockable weapons earlier, which require a fresh Professional run with no bonus weapons for one, and a Professional A rank for the other. The other two aren't quite so demanding, with one simply requiring you to round up a specific collectable in every chapter, and the other a New Game+ exclusive (and a very expensive one at that). The latter is the only reason any NG+ action is factored into the optimal completion at all, though given how much cash is needed and how much time that theoretically partial run adds anyway, it may make more sense to turn that into a full run to save a few headaches on some of the above.

Proposal: Add a completionist triple-threat Assisted NG+ run into the mix

Hitting top grades on fresh files will be hard enough without additional factors, so how about we pull a lot of the complications listed above into one additional playthrough, building on the already required New Game+ investment while taking some otherwise borderline impossible stipulations for S+ runs out of the mix and doing them here? The basic plan here is to ignore all of the above conditions when doing your main playthroughs, since time is of the essence. At the end of your first run, keep your save before the final boss — the Merchant will tell you when you reach the point of no return in chapter 16. Beat it as normal (hopefully with an S+ rank!) then post-credits, you can reload this save to prep for what is to come — sell (almost) all weapons and ammo bar handgun stuff, as well as all healing items, upgrade your handgun of choice as much as you can, and grab a rocket launcher from the Merchant to make short work of whichever phase of the last boss you prefer... the other phase will be handgun-only unless you choose to hang onto something more powerful for now, which might be a better play depending on the difficulty of your current run.

Once you beat the boss, you're primed to dive right into Assisted NG+, aiming for no Merchant, no healing, and handgun/knife only, all at the same time. There's no time limit to this run, making it the perfect place to do everything at once while you farm cash to eventually buy the Infinite Rocket Launcher, though you'll need to either save that until after this run is done, or reload your save after buying it (which still counts towards the weapon collection achievement). While certainly challenging, this triple threat run isn't actually that hard outside of a few encounters — again, a maxed Red 9 absolutely destroys things here, and you could always combine a thermal scoped rifle (you're safe on pistol-only so long as you never actually pull the trigger) to scout otherwise tricky Regenerador weak points and take them out with Punisher shots if you have that upgraded too, or all bar one of them can be avoided. I managed to make it all the way to the end of chapter 14 on this challenge run before I could afford the infinite launcher, at which point I elected to do my sanity a favour and split the run — grab the bottomless rockets and nuke the world while keeping the no Merchant and no heal conditions alive, then jump back into that same save to finish the pistol-only run, this time with the use of all the healing stuff you've been stockpiling (my inventory was ridiculous by the end of the run), as well as all those sweet Merchant benefits. This adds very little in terms of time to what would otherwise be needed just to get the launcher for the 'all weapons' achievement, so it just makes sense to me.

One final note is that you'll probably want to keep saves for three section-specific achievements, just in case you don't get those done first try. Time limits and general difficulty are lower on Assisted difficulty so you can focus on getting these done there, and on any difficulty level other than Professional, you can load your auto-save as soon as you know you've messed up to save some time and jump straight back in to try again. These are the two damageless mine cart sections in chapter 11 (the second is longer and has an auto-save halfway through), the damageless escape sequence at the end of chapter 16, and the non-stop clock tower elevator ride near the end of chapter 12 which requires you to keep enemies off the platform.

With all that in mind, let's compare the 'perfect' completion on paper to a realistic and achievable version of events.

'Perfect' Resident Evil 4 completion:
1 — NG Hardcore, S+ rank, no Merchant
2 — NG Professional, A rank, no bonus weapons
3 — NG Standard, S+ rank, no healing, handgun/knife only
Partial — NG+ any difficulty
Few players are going to be able to realistically jump into the game on Hardcore with no experience and come away with an S+ grade while dealing with an additional restriction on top, but it would have to be done here — none of the three main extra stipulations are really going to fly on a fresh Professional run, and neither of the others wants to be paired with no Merchant here or you lose knife/armour repairs and ammo crafting, so this feels like the best way to break it all down. Starting with Hardcore, however, unlocks Ashley's Armor gear, making her invulnerable on subsequent runs without impacting grades. Castellans would want to be prioritised during the first two runs to have the Primal Knife available on the last one, while missing treasures could be focused on during in the NG+ mop-up, along with any Requests that had been skipped. You'd also need to stay alive and stay on pace for the rank time limits in order for this to be truly optimal, which again is perhaps not especially realistic with those gruelling extra conditions needing to be met along the way. Since the NG+ partial run is likely to be most of the game anyway in order to save up the two million Pesetas needed for the infinite launcher (unless you happen to luck into the discount charm should you find time to visit the shooting range... which would also be required at some point in the completion for its own achievements), it could well make sense to offload some of the challenges onto that playthrough to take the load off the ranked runs, and this would only add maybe a couple of hours to the theoretical 'perfect' completion.

Realistic Resident Evil 4 completion:
1 — NG any difficulty, any rank
2 — NG+ Assisted, any rank, no Merchant, no healing, handgun/knife only
3 — NG Hardcore, S+ rank
4 — NG Professional, A rank, no bonus weapons
5 — NG Standard, S+ rank
Real talk: you're almost certainly not going to be getting top marks on your first run, so just get a feel for the systems, encounters, and puzzles, and enjoy the game you bought at your own pace on your first playthrough. We've suggested doing the NG+ challenge run second as it's another opportunity to feel out the mechanics, get accustomed to being challenged, and learn how each section works before starting on getting the top ranks, though if you're feeling confident, doing Hardcore first would make that triple threat run much easier thanks to having access to Ashley's Armor outfit, while pulling the Professional run forward could unlock two powerful bonus weapons to use in later runs, assuming you make the grade. One issue here is that a no Merchant NG+ run means you can't mop up all treasures there, although these can always be done on your very first run so long as you're thorough as there are no other requirements there, with any leftovers split between the other runs if needs be, or they could even tidied up with an additional partial playthrough if it comes to it. So while the completion is technically possible in three-and-a-bit playthroughs, it's much more likely to take five or more for most players, especially considering how tight those S+ time limits already are.

However you slice it, Resident Evil 4 is no easy completion, so best of luck to those going for it... we'd love to hear how your path looked and how it differed to ours! Let us know how you get on, strangers!

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Written by Luke Albigés

Luke runs the TA news team, contributing where he can primarily with reviews and other long-form features — crafts he has honed across two decades of print and online gaming media experience, having worked with the likes of gamesTM, Eurogamer, Play, Retro Gamer, Edge, and many more. He loves all things Monster Hunter, enjoys a good D&D session, and has played way too much Destiny.