The series’ future looks bright, if a little bumpy.
It’s been nearly three years since the last mainline entry of the Resident Evil video game series , a superb reimagining of RE4 (2005), released in March 2023. RE9: Requiem is in many ways the boldest game in the series since 2017’s RE7: Biohazard — unsurprising, given that they’re from the same director. It was missteps in both predictable and unpredictable ways, but it overall succeeds in almost every respect.
The most notable gamble Requiem takes is its combination of the series’ two extremes, RE4-esque action horror and the resource-scarce survival horror of RE1 (both the 1996 and 2002 versions), in one story. Most of the game’s front half is spent as new protagonist Grace Ashcroft, a petite desk jockey thrust into a classic zombie-filled sanatorium presumably designed by one of its patients. Most of the back half (though both protagonists feature throughout) is spent as series regular Leon S. Kennedy, a fearless badass who canonically suplexes zombies so hard their heads explode.
Beyond the obvious tonal dissonance created by the shifts in perspective between these two characters, the completely different gameplay styles are likely to alienate many fans who only enjoy one half of the series. Even those who enjoy both may feel jarred by the sudden transitions — and it doesn’t help that Grace may be the most vulnerable protagonist the series has seen, only armed with a weak handgun, extremely limited magnum and a few sub-weapons.
Luckily, director Koshi Nakanishi has experience with this design philosophy; he directed the 2012 spinoff RE: Revelations, in which the player shifts between tense horror on an empty cruise ship with action-focused segments starring a variety of annoying or forgettable side characters. The ideal behind this is that horror builds tension while action releases said tension in a supremely satisfying way. Revelations failed to fulfill this idea’s potential in several ways, with its incredibly brief 20-minute chapters and barely-connected side plots. RE9 avoids those mistakes by keeping Grace’s sections fairly lengthy, and Leon’s sections either similarly lengthy or plot-critical. The best use of this concept, daresay the only worthwhile use in the entire campaign, is when Leon is given access to the area you’ve spent the past few hours in as Grace. Blitzing across the sanitarium where you were forced to hide from zombies with Leon’s ability to obliterate anything that looks at him wrong is extremely satisfying. Other than that, though, Leon and Grace never share the same areas in any meaningful way.
This being the case, it seems that the game should’ve had two separate campaigns, or at least an option to choose only one character’s campaign after completing their unified story. Even as a person who enjoys both halves of the story, I would enjoy having a choice in any future playthroughs.
Among the game’s other issues, the worst of all is its relative overabundance of slow, boring, scripted (or borderline scripted) sequences. Practically every game in the series has this to some extent; for example, the worst part of RE4 (2023) was a certain segment at the end in which Leon slowly stumbles through a lengthy hallucination sequence. Requiem features even more moments of this sort than the average RE entry, arguably made worse by their higher level of interaction (e.g. doing specific tasks to avoid a scripted monster, rather than just holding the forward key for a few minutes), as the player is now forced to put an amount of brainpower into a boring, unskippable sequence to avoid a failure state.
The most egregious instance of this happens late in the story in a flashback in which the player must hide in certain preset places without moving for minutes at a time while following a particular path with no alternate routes. On my first playthrough, that section made me sigh; the second and third felt even worse. I assume the intent was to add a horror segment in the middle of a long stretch as Leon to add release, but it was not worth it.
I have a few more minor gripes. Leon’s briefcase in Requiem attempts a classy, just about entirely monochrome look which is far harder to read than the diverse and colorful inventories of both the 2005 and 2023 versions of RE4. Grace’s inventory is similarly colored, but is far easier to read due to its comparatively larger icons and lower capacity. Speaking as a keyboard and mouse player (though this problem likely applies to controllers as well), the new weapon shortcut system seems to be a direct downgrade. In RE4 (2023) the player could set eight shortcuts by pressing the first four number keys either once or twice whereas in Requiem they can only bind six weapons to the first six number keys.
This new system makes scrolling with the mouse the easier way to switch to your fifth or sixth weapons, but that method is often imprecise and less intuitive than simply pressing a number key once or twice. On a more minor trigger warning note, Requiem does feature a giant spider. While the series has featured such enemies before, it’s never been so intense as in Requiem. The incredible graphics, narrow corridors and more personal camera angle dwarf the fear previous iterations invoked. For many, this will be an instant turn-off.
Up to this point, the review has been negative. Make no mistake, though, Requiem is quite good. Capcom almost always releases products well above standard AAA fare. It’s visually incredible and amazingly optimized, its level design is among the best in the series, the new zombies who retain personality quirks from their life are fantastic and the main cast is acted superbly. Leon’s sections, while subtly different from his gameplay in RE4 (2023), are quite fun once you get the hang of his new gameplay.
All these things are somewhat expected from a Resident Evil game, and thus it is more important to point out flaws as opposed to strengths. In total, I enjoyed Requiem immensely. I’ve already invested 30 hours into it, beaten it three times and gotten every achievement. This is a fantastic game well worth the cost of entry (even excluding the free and substantive downloadable content it’ll almost certainly receive), but it’s held back by several avoidable flaws that I hope future entries rectify.
