Warning! This post contains spoilers for the entirety of Resident Evil Requiem’s story, as well as some spoilers for the larger Resident Evil canon. Finish the game before you read this.
You don’t get Resident Evil Requiem without Resident Evil 6.
When it was released in 2013, the return of Leon S. Kennedy, Chris Redfield, and Ada Wong was set to be the pinnacle of the series. With RE6, the series was going to merge its survival-horror roots with its action-horror evolution. It was going to add even more co-op, and it was going to tell the biggest story Resident Evil had ever seen, featuring a bunch of its major characters.
Everyone hated it.
Resident Evil 6 is something of a mess. Focusing on three sets of characters, each running through their own campaigns, it tries to be survival-horror when you play as Leon, straight action when you play as Chris, and an ongoing, Nemesis-style stalker chase when you play as Jake Wesker. (You may be asking: “Who?” And honestly don’t worry about it.)
None of the approaches really work, thanks to the bleeding-together of Resident Evil’s gameplay sensibilities. More than that, though, the game’s story is genuinely confusing. While it was a legitimately cool idea to have the same story told from three different perspectives, it leaves the whole thing tough to parse. RE6 covers governmental conspiracies and strange new villains, with multiple evil organizations, and if you didn’t play through all four campaigns, you likely never understood what was going on or its significance to the overall canon. Add to that some serious tonal whiplash–such as ludicrous, superhero movie-like action set pieces and cutscenes–and the horror can never set in. That’s also true of RE6’s serious, sad moments, too–like when Leon is forced to shoot his friend, the US President, after a viral attack has turned him into a zombie.
RE6 encapsulates an overall Resident Evil problem: Despite trying to unify all the different parts of Resident Evil’s identity and canon, it merely adds more confusion. The game drops all sorts of organization names and proper nouns that feel meaningful to the overall plot of the series, if only you could keep them straight. But just as Resident Evil 4 was a hard shift away from the Umbrella story of the earlier games, the next game in the series, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, was a hard shift away from the governmental conspiracy story of RE6–so its plot just never comes together with the overall series.
RE7 and its follow-up, Resident Evil Village, were a paradigm shift in a series that is pretty much all paradigm shifts. Every time Resident Evil reinvents itself, it also greatly recalibrates its story. The first five Resident Evils (including Resident Evil 0 and Code: Veronica) were fixed-camera survival-horror experiences, and they all focused on the evil Umbrella Corporation creating viruses as weapons it couldn’t control and thus destroying a whole American city. In RE4, with its third-person action approach, we left behind viral mutations to go after a cult that infected people with mind-controlling, head-popping parasites. Resident Evil 5 went for co-op, included both viruses and parasites, and brought back Albert Wesker, a villain of anime proportions hoping to turn the whole world into mutants.
RE6 hinged on a cover-up of Umbrella and Resident Evil 2’s Raccoon City disaster, while actually being about a guy so obsessed with Ada Wong that he did a bunch of deranged science and mass murder about it. RE7 shifts to a mind-controlling mold that could store the memories of anyone it absorbed. And RE Village retconned in a tenuous connection between the mold and Umbrella, just to keep things vaguely on the same track.
And so we come to Resident Evil Requiem, a game that, in its run-up to release, drew comparisons to RE6–and created some trepidation because of them. Requiem tries once again to unify the many identities of Resident Evil. It’s a first-person survival-horror game starring a new protagonist, and it’s a Leon-driven action game in the vein of RE4, running two separate campaigns and featuring two different characters. Its story would see players return to Raccoon City, previously destroyed by Umbrella’s viruses and a government missile strike to cover it up. Requiem looked like a game that would once again try to spin all of Resident Evil’s plates simultaneously, returning to the glory days of the past rather than offering any innovation.
And to a large degree, it’s true that Requiem is a greatest-hits record. But it doesn’t revisit the past solely to sell your nostalgia back to you, as some have said. It’s putting an end to all that stuff that has dogged RE for years, through the original games and the retcons, the confusing lore and the remakes. It’s closing the loop on past Resident Evil in as many meaningful ways as it can manage. It’s the end of one era for Resident Evil, and the beginning of another.
Requiem is about legacy–Umbrella’s, Raccoon City’s, and Resident Evil’s. The villain, Victor Gideon, is an acolyte of his evil virus-making mentor, Umbrella co-founder Ozwell Spencer, and he’s trying to get hold of Elpis, Spencer’s final and most powerful creation. Gideon’s plot leads him to abduct Grace Ashcroft, herself a link to the past through her mother, Alyssa, a character from Resident Evil Outbreak. And that draws in our old pal Leon, who’s investigating Gideon’s crimes. Eventually, the action takes the characters back to where it all began: Raccoon City.
Hidden in the center of the destroyed Raccoon is a(nother) secret Umbrella laboratory–the ARK. It was Umbrella’s headquarters facility, where Spencer himself would hang out and work on viruses, and it both survived Raccoon City’s destruction at the end of Resident Evil 2 and houses the vault that locks up Elpis, which Gideon needs Grace to help him open.
It’s in the ARK that we start to see the story reasons for why Requiem is playing the hits: The bad guys are selling Umbrella’s old stuff. Gideon, with the help of his buddies in the shadowy evil group The Connections, has used the ARK as a factory. They created a variant of the T-virus to make new zombies, and you’ll find readouts in the lab that talk about various past monster products they’ve updated for current sale, like the Licker, the Tyrant, and the Nemesis.
The story tidbits along the way also help link to the other games. Zeno, a new Wesker-looking character working with Gideon, is apparently a member of The Connections, the group that was working with the mold in RE7 and RE: Village and has some hold over or integration into the US government. We learn that the missile strike on Raccoon City wasn’t meant to contain the outbreak–which is made clear by the fact that it completely failed to do so, given all the zombies still wandering around–and was instead meant to hide the ARK, Elpis, and Umbrella’s ties to these powerful people.
Notes and documents also suggest The Connections were responsible for the presidential zombification in RE6, an attack staged to eliminate him before he could reveal the truth behind what happened in Raccoon City. That suggests RE6’s villain, Derek Simmons, and another spooky group called “The Family” he was a part of, are included with The Connections, too. And we hear that The Connections were linked to Tricell, a seemingly rival corporation that rose up in the aftermath of Umbrella.
All this to say that Requiem is retroactively expanding on The Connections’ role in the overall series, and quickly positioning the group as the force behind a lot of the series’ events. If The Connections killed the president and are tied to Tricell, it stands to reason that Albert Wesker and Ada Wong were probably working for them as far back as Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2. Requiem makes them into a through-line for the series: They worked with Spencer and then betrayed him, they tried to seize Umbrella’s power for themselves, they convinced the government to destroy Raccoon City to cover their tracks, and they assassinated the president via zombie virus when he threatened to blow the lid off. They tried to make use of the Las Plagas parasites in RE5 after Leon stopped Osmund Saddler’s Los Illuminados cult in RE4. And separately, they worked with Mother Miranda of RE: Village, hoping to use her mold to control minds, which led to the events of RE7. Now they’re working with Gideon to resurrect Umbrella’s creations with ARK, and are hoping to get hold of Elpis.
In one story, The Connections deftly links all the big threads left by other games and their constant shifts to new stories; guess now we know why they’re called that. But Requiem isn’t just looking to tie up loose ends–it’s cutting them off for good.
Leon’s adventure through Raccoon City sees him very pointedly destroying various blasts from the past, with the game bringing up old, important creatures and characters so they can be killed once and for all. He cuts his way through Plant 42, a monster from the original Resident Evil, and faces down a Mr. X-like Tyrant that he defeats much more easily here than in Resident Evil 2. He kills a whole heap of Lickers, the iconic monsters from Leon’s Raccoon City experience.
Finally, Leon takes on the Commander, a legendary Umbrella enforcer who is almost certainly Hunk, another RE2 character. One of the last and best of Umbrella gets his throat slashed, and it’s hard not to see that as a metaphorical moment.
And then there’s Elpis, the ultimate ending to the Umbrella era. Grace finds video of her mother interviewing Spencer and realizes that Elpis was his hope for undoing all the carnage he’d released on the world; not another viral superweapon, but an anti-virus that would destroy all viral weapons.
We see Elpis in action in the funniest meta moment in Requiem. Zeno not only looks almost exactly like Wesker, he even has the same super-speed and enhanced strength of that long-time Resident Evil villain. It’s heavily implied that this is another of Umbrella’s Wesker clones, and that you’re about to face this guy as a boss in yet another callback–until he foolishly injects himself with Elpis. Instead of becoming even more powerful, he’s transformed into a regular guy. Hilariously, Gideon puts an end to him with a single, easy shot to the head.
These moments aren’t just supposed to ping your RE2 nostalgia. Requiem is taking each of these iconic Resident Evil ideas and creatures and putting them down, one by one. It’s saying, with a shot to the head, that there will be no more Weskers. There will be no more Tyrants. There will be no more T-virus. There will be no more Umbrella. The last monster you fight is Gideon, transformed into a big gooey Nemesis monster that’s almost exactly like the one players beat in Resident Evil 3 remake, in one last callback. And then you kill him too.
All of Umbrella’s biggest bads, its worst and greatest creations, fall before you. Elpis is released and all viral weapons are no more. Even Leon’s Raccoon City Syndrome, the disease that Raccoon City survivors have all developed and the most pointed metaphor for the past’s influence over Resident Evil’s characters, is cured. The lasting legacy of Raccoon City, and of Umbrella, is wiped away.
With Requiem, Resident Evil did what RE6 couldn’t: It made the series into a coherent whole. And what’s more, revisited its past so it could bury some of it–a last ride through Raccoon City, before finally leaving it in the rearview.
The series can go forward with a new, clear villain: The Connections. They’ve been around the whole time, either working with, or responsible for, all those folks we’ve seen get badly mutated before someone’s tossed us a rocket launcher so we could finish them off. They’re more powerful than Umbrella, and they’re still out there, trying to find new ways to control the world.
And now that Resident Evil has put down all its old horrific and disgusting ideas of how they could have done that, it’s free to imagine all new horrific and disgusting ideas for them to try.
