It is something that has caught my attention, on Reddit they comment that this only happens when you play with Jill for the first time, in a second game the ink ribbons appear. It's something I don't fully understand, it should be optional to be able to use the inked ribbon or not. Was it like that in the original PC version?

Also missing is an animation where the character we control walks backwards briefly after seeing the first cinematic of the first zombie, curious to say the least.

This game, which came for windows 95. Has a easy mode in first play with Jill. In Game+ Jill will require the Ink Ribbons. This was made like this by Capcom back then.

But if Jill is the default easy mode

It was made even easier on PC and we don't know why.

Crapcom, the strange thing is that I could swear I had played a PC version where playing with Jill there was Ink Ribbon from the beginning.

You did, back then the PC version was the Directors' Cut and that one had Ink Ribbons in every Jill game...

There never was a director's cut for PC

We do know. All the PC versions of Residentevil were based on the JPN gamefiles. What we dont know, it's if this was either an error or just lazyness. I guess they just used the japanese release as base of development for the PC market, since it was already uncensored. And yes, japanese difficulty is easier: auto-aim, weaker enemies, more ribbons, more ammo. The only way to play with the western difficulty settings is on Playstion or Saturn.

Yes Obviously. The japanese playstation version also uses Inkribbons for Jills first playthrough. So the decision to make the japanese PC version even easier by not having ribbons for her on a first playthrough was deliberate. And that's what I meant when I said "we don't know why"

One could speculate that Capcom deliberately wanted to make the PC version different from the initial PSX release by coming up with creative ways to make it different. The way Jills campaign is handled is very close to what we today know as "NewGame+" mode. It's a very cool and very interesting change. They could have done the same for Chris too. But just kept his scenario the way it was and labelled it hard.

Anyway. I really apprechiate the decision to change things up with Jills scenario. But as veterans of playing this game hundreds of times, its actually impossible to be able not to finish this game under 2 hours. Many others and I would actually need to FORCE ourselves to idle the game. Which makes the super easy Jill scenario not really stand out anymore and is more of a bore, than of a cool idea to remix the experience. But it absolutely is for people that never played the game before.

Yeah I did a super casual run, just having fun and still managed to beat it under 2 hours. I was expecting way more for actually killing enemies.