Resident Evil Requiem toys with the idea that Leon Scott Kennedy, one of the beloved faces of Capcom’s horror series, may be on his last job. He’s got a mysterious infection that threatens his life, and he spends much of the ninth mainline game grappling with the possibility of his imminent death.
In the game’s early hours, this tension seems to be setting up Requiem as a pivot point for the series, with an older generation of survivors passing the torch off to newcomers like the very green FBI agent Grace Ashcroft. When I played the game myself, I was a bit underwhelmed at the route that it ultimately ends up walking, but it sounds like Capcom isn’t looking to take a big swing like cutting Leon out of the franchise for good anytime soon.
In an interview with Eurogamer, Requiem director Koshi Nakanishi and producer Masato Kumazawa talked about Capcom’s approach to capturing all the flavors of horror in one game, making something that felt celebratory for the series’ 30th anniversary, and how the team managed to mix Leon’s cheesy one-liners with some of the game’s more somber lows. At the end of the post-mortem, Nakanishi says that, despite the obvious passage of time in Requiem, the team doesn’t “feel the need to replace [its most recognizable faces] with younger characters…we don’t really think of it in those terms.” It turns out Capcom isn’t planning to age out series mainstays like Leon, Chris Redfield, or Jill Valentine (who apparently ages much more slowly than her male colleagues because of reasons).
“It’s not a cast iron rule that whenever we come up with a new game and we decide to release it here, that we have to exactly age everyone up to match it or anything like that,” Nakanishi said. “[…]I mean, I think Leon is really appealing in his current form. And who knows, we could bring him back when he’s 70, and I’m sure he’ll still be a great character.”
When I theorized, pre-release, that Leon might die in Requiem, a friend of mine said he kind of considered Resident Evil heroes to basically be immortal. They’ve survived several world-ending events with mostly only emotional scars. I hoped he was wrong because it could have made Requiem a much more significant moment for the series, but it sounds like Capcom maybe does view them as such and doesn’t plan to take them off the table at this time. More Leon quips for Resident Evil 10, I suppose.