I am a massive Resident Evil fan– a massive survival horror fan in general. I have many divisive opinions about the series. By that I mean I really do not care for Leon as a character and I heavily dislike the gameplay of RE4 (and RE4R). I just thoroughly dislike the action based gameplay and the paths it has led the series down. Consequently, I also despise RE5 and RE6, but that’s a more common sentiment. * That’s not a grand statement where I declare what direction the series should take, just my feelings about what I personally want out of my Evil Resident. * There’s the baseline, I prefer the scary scary scavenge to survive what’s around the corner gameplay. I generously put RE7 and RE2R up as two of my favorite games of all time. I also inexplicably love Village though I’ll have some justification for that later on.
But seriously, I cannot understand Leon’s appeal as a character. The most I can do is muster some affection for him in RE2 and the occasional polite chuckle. The most active enjoyment I’ve gotten out of him is in the novelizations but that’s a different circus. Right now, Leon is at the top of my mind because of Resident Evil: Requiem.
It should be called Resident Evil:Resentment because that’s the primary emotion it’s evoking in me. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so much internal conflict over a game before. I don’t want to call it bad! But unfortunately the AVGN homunculus who lives in my mind palace is banging at his prison bars screaming “What were they thinking?!”. So, I’m going to provide some cheap and slap dash criticism based on a single playthrough of the game.
WHAT I LIKED
The main source of my conflicted feelings is that the aspects of Requiem that I liked are things I REALLY liked. Thus why I feel so betrayed because it feels like such a waste.
Rhodes Hill A general criticism I see repeated by fans, and my husband who is a passive observer of me playing the games (having only played RE1 and RE2 in the past) is that Resident Evil has a tendency to tread the same ground over and over. But, I contended that “same-y” is not inherently bad. Case in point I absolutely adored (what we saw of the) Rhodes Hill Care Center. The entire game should’ve been set here. I find the intersection of an ornate and improbable spooky mansion and hospital/sanitorium to be just fresh enough that I’m deeply disappointed that we didn’t see more of it. The atmosphere worked incredibly well for me. The dark hallways and the red light from the door of the isolation ward is just a delicious atmosphere. I killed the Chunk in that hallway next to the nurse’s station creating a giant bloodsplatter that never went away. Returning to that wing after that first encounter with The Girl was incredibly nerve racking which brings me to.
THE GIRL I really enjoyed Lisa Trevor Part Two here and wish she’d had a larger role (because the entire game should’ve been set in the Care Center. Bite me!). Her ability to escape into the ceiling was a really scary mechanic. Watching her do it from the doorway of lit rooms made the experience of leaving the room even worse.
The hole in the ceiling of Emily’s cell room created an expectation that she could pop out at any moment. I would have loved to see a cutscene where The Girl returned to that room to ‘visit’ Emily. It’s always a good scare when an enemy crosses the border of a safe room and it would’ve established motivation for her kidnapping Emily later on. More could’ve been done, outside of notes, to establish Marie as the girl is all I’m saying. Especially, because when Emily mutates her monster form doesn’t even mildly resemble The Girl– because mutations in this series are only consistent when they want to be. But I digress… She's grotesque and imposing and I love her. I wish we’d gotten to know her better.
SUCKING UP BLOOD The Blood Collector, crafting, and injectors are such a good game mechanic. Part of the magic of survival horror is weighing risk vs reward so creating a motivation to kill enemies, in a game series where ammo and weapons are scare is so fucking good!
The entire crafting system, and the hemolytic injectors, created opportunities for creative problem solving. I saw someone saying it was “crazy” that you could kill mini bosses but I loved it. Taking down Chunk and the Chef as Grace using the hemolytic injector (and bit of the Requiem for Chunk) felt great, and gave me a feeling having earned safe (or at least safe-er) passage through the hallways. I will concede that I think the hemolytic injectors should’ve had a high crafting cost considering how OP they can be. But that would’ve required them to rethink their
In short, I really enjoyed the time spent at Rhodes Hill. I felt there was a good balance between like 80% Grace gameplay and 10% Leon. It should’ve stayed with Leon only popping in for short sections. It felt like a decent balance that had the potential to satisfy both sides of the fanbase who prefer a certain style. If the game had stayed in the Care Center there could have been opportunities to strategize and use Leon’s sections to take out larger enemies to benefit Grace later on. But alas that brings us to...
RACCOON CITY SUCKS This is common sentiment with critics of this game but mom said it’s my turn to say it– I hate Raccoon City. The second we get there the color palette shifts to beige Resident Evil Apocalypse earthtones and sucks all the life out of the game. Even the zombies are shades of tan, and beige (and they’re also annoying bullet sponges). The point is that RC is bombed out and lifeless.. got it. But that makes for a boring slog of a section with negative amounts of atmosphere that I never want to play again.
I will admit, I got a slight kick of seeing Victor on that motorcycle but his wolf friends, and the entire section felt like the worst parts of RE6 to me. It was completely ludicrous in a way that I couldn’t get on board with. To go from completing puzzles while evading The Girl at the Water Treatment Plant to trudging through the beige wasteland of Raccoon City, to on an improbable on-rails motorcycle chase was whiplash.
Pointless call backs are pointless call backs. Giant spider, Mr. X, Plant 42, lickers and more lickers and more lickers I don’t see a point in harping on them too much. I will say I think that Mr. X (even though I love him dearly) was the most egregious inclusion here. There was literally no reason for this mfer to show up at all, let alone for such a shocking small amount of time. I would’ve honestly loved for him to be a stalker enemy but in ARK. Give Grace a chance to meet my guy. It would’ve been more interesting for Grace to witness some of these callbacks, instead it’s just a boring nostalgia gauntlet for Leon. Except, he never met Plant 42? So that was just for the player? They could’ve imbued these things with more purpose. Like having the jack from the RPD library be used in solving a puzzle in ARK instead of just another spot in the building. It would’ve been interesting to have an item players know from a previous game be used in a puzzle, especially since you just keep carrying the jack after you use it on the shutter (doesn’t count as a puzzle to me).
I’ve seen people wax on about how this was an anniversary game so this game HAD to include Leon and Raccoon City.. or the fans would be mad? The game was marketed with the goal of "Negotiating the legacy of Raccoon City”. Unless the legacy of Raccoon City is Leon having a single flashback to Kendo (yawn) and then spending maybe 5 minutes in the RCPD before heading into a copy and paste Umbrella laboratory (or was it a ‘Connections’ laboratory?) this game did… nothing. It makes me feel like RE7 did a better job reflecting on “the legacy of Racoon City” with that one magazine mentioning the long term effects on survivors of the incident. Speaking of survivors of the Raccoon City incident…
WHY DOES CAPCOM HATE CLAIRE? Is this a result of all those people who only played the Leon A path in RE2 and then quit? What the hell did Claire do to get sidelined THIS hard? You can explain why Jill isn’t mentioned. She’s a survivor of the RC incident but on a different path entirely. But to place at the center of this game a T-Virus disease that Leon and Sherry picked up during the events of RE2– during which they barley interacted with each other– and to exclude ANY mention of Clarie like she never existed pisses me off beyond belief. If they’re sick surely she’s sick too? Leon and Sherry somehow picked up an infection while Claire, the woman running through the sewers and Umbrella’s lab to make a G virus cure FOR SHERRY, got out clean? The only mention of Clarie in this game is a glorified cellphone charm that reduces her to the title of “Trusted Companion”. What is she? A cartoon dog?
It’s just insane to me that we’ve gotten two mainline games featuring Leon and Sherry reuniting and nothing for Clarie and Sherry. Especially for a game series that features prominent mother-daughter relationships (Sherry/Anette, Mia/Eveline, Miranda/Mia/Rose, Alyssa/Grace/Emily) INCLUDING IN THIS GAME ITSELF! The choice to exclude ANNNY MENTIONE of the character that spent the Raccoon City Incident protecting and caring for Sherry is INSANE!!!
Clarie is my favorite character in the series so I’m uhh enraged at how this KEEPS HAPPENING. If a Code Veronica remake ever gets announced I will be shocked.
BAD WRITING- GRACE I don’t have much to say about Grace because I find her a bit unremarkable. I hope she’s a one-off protagonist that we never see again because I really don’t think anything else would make sense. So much of the game just happens to her. Which you can say is true for most horror protagonists but it just feels a tad egregious in this case. The inciting incident to get her to the Care Center involves her being passive; she doesn’t seek out going to Wrenwood; she gets sent there and doesn’t object; she fights back but ultimately is kidnapped and taken. She makes active choices to save and protect Emily– good writing– and then.. is coerced into leaving with the totally normal bad boys, passes out again, and waits around until Leon shows up to save her. She makes the Elpis choice at the end of the game, and then doesn’t even get to participate in the boss fight. Half of the narrative gets absorbed by Leon’s Nostalgia Gauntlet ™ and Grace’s character arc gets muddy as a result.
LEON Leon being sick could’ve been interesting but it wasn’t. We’ve literally seen him and a younger blonde woman deal with being infected by a parasite before. Seeing him and a younger blonde woman being infected with a T-virus is… uh boring.
SHERRY She literally has a strain of the G-Virus. Why would the T-Virus kill her? Sherry’s presence is just… wholly unnecessary. Hunnigan should have been in this game instead.
VICTOR I thought Victor was pretty cool at first. The pictures of him and the other doctors at the Care Center are hilarious because he’s so obviously Not a Normal Guy yet they’re working with him anyway. I didn’t even mind that he’s a Spencer disciple, despite “Student of Spencer" being well tread ground at this point. But like many things in this game he winds up being such a waste. They leaned way too heavily on notes and files in this game, like the totality of this guy’s backstory is communicated only through files. Grace didn’t even get a cutscene or a line of dialogue acknowledging this is the guy who killed her mother? That he was the person on the phone? It honestly makes Grace seem like she never puts any pieces of the story together; she doesn’t even seem to acknowledge this guy was experimenting on Emily? Victor’s importance gets greatly diminished when Zeno shows up and becomes the primary antagonist. He gets knocked down to helicopter pilot and motorcycle assailant, seemingly explodes, comes back and is now a Nemesis for some reason.
TEMU WESKER ZENO Many people have already asked this… but what was the point of this guy? He’s not even a boss. All he seems to do is be felled by hubris and bring up The Connections again in case you forgot about them. To be honest he makes The Connections look like an extremely stupid Umbrella clone instead of the evil shadow organization alluded to in RE7. Temu Wesker from Wish.com Umbrella.
HUNK He’s clearly not dead. The entire point of his fight is just for the player to say “Look it’s Hunk!”.
SPENCER Look, I don’t care as much about Spencer having a good guy turn as other people do. If the only text we had to go off of was RE1 and his murder mansion I’d call this an alright narrative choice to have him regretful as an old man close to death. Of course it’s paired with a myriad of other stupid writing choices so it’s difficult to defend Spencer retcons getting thrown in with the wash.
EMILY/MARIE/CHLOE/EVIL LITTLE GIRL HOARD I am still struggling to figure out why they were cloning little girls. Why do some have glowing red eyes and super strength that move like a hive mind? Why do others turn into giant monsters? Why were they doing this at all? Why did they think it was a twist for Grace to turn out NOT to be a clone? They couldn’t have cloned her because Chloe and the Evil girls in the orphanage predate her birth. Why is Grace called the "Template" if they didn’t clone her? Whose memories are they trying to transfer? Spencer’s? Why? They’re trying to implant Spencer’s memories into a clone to unlock a 4 letter password to get Elpis but they don’t even know what Elpis does for sure?
Why did they choose to make little girl clones before Grace was born? Spencer was still alive when the Chole sequence happened. Were they just experimenting on children to study memory transfer? Why little girls? Why did they turn into the Village of the Damned? They’re obsessed with Grace because she’s the child ‘chosen’ by Spencer; it makes zero narrative sense for Grace to be a random orphan and have no connection to the clones. “I’m just a random girl and this is a big misunderstanding” is not a narratively satisfying climax. The only way this all makes sense is if Grace is just a “normal” clone with no mutations, and no experimentation. It would add depth to Spencer’s motivations to “rescue” one of the clones he created as part of an attempt to atone.
But the ultimate problem is none of this is clearly stated in the actual text of the game. If she’s not a clone, WHY did the clones exist? Who was the original? Why little girls? Why the Raccoon City Orphanage? Where’d Spencer get a random infant? The gutter?Victor has Grace’s childhood genetic information, he kidnaps her and takes another sample, but at no point notices it’s different from the clones? The villains of the game are laboring under an assumption, false information, that they never verified. The Elpis twist was fine, it showed Zeno’s hubris, but everything else is just wet tissue paper. Every thread I can find discussing this is filled with people saying with certainty “Grace is not a clone” and “Grace is a clone”. This is not purposeful ambiguity; it's a result of so many rewrites that no one knows what the text is actually trying to say.
A few general questions I have about the plot
- Is Elpis really just a magic deus ex machina vaccine that cures all virus related shenanigans?
- Why were they cloning little girls? Why only little girls?
- What is the purpose of the memory transfer? Why are they trying to do it so bad? To figure out a 4 letter cliche password?
- How did Victor turn into a Nemesis? Wouldn’t he have had to be a tyrant for the parasite to work?
- Why would Sherry be sick from the T-Virus if she is already infected with a strain of G-Virus that allows her to regenerate when harmed?
- Did Elpis remove Sherry’s G-Virus abilities?
- Is Grace a clone or not?
- If Grace is not a clone why is Victor so stupid?
- Who is Zeno and where did he come from? What’s his deal?
- Why do we have so many notes about Victor and none about Zeno?
- Who was that helicopter pilot? Did he work for the Care Center?
- The Connections took over ARK; why did they just continue to pump out Umbrella’s exact catalog of bioweapons with no changes? Wouldn’t someone have noticed those products weren’t disappearing after Umbrella collapsed?
- What is the timeline between the BSAA trying to take ARK from The Connections and the events of the game?
- Did Capcom take Clarie and kill her off screen?
- Since when does Hunk work for The Connections?
- Are the zombies we see in Raccoon City just leftovers from the 90s or did The Connections put them there?
LOCATION: the office
MOOD: tired
MUSIC: