When Resident Evil Requiem released earlier this year, it was like the game could do no wrong. It was showered with praise and fortune, easily becoming the fastest selling game in the series’ history.

From the outside looking in, you’d be right to believe that the game was always going to be a big hit. Resident Evil has very much been on a tear recently, after all.

Entry after entry, marketing cycle after marketing cycle, it just seems like the franchise can not stop winning ever since the release of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard back in 2017.

However as time has marched on and more and more ground has been covered in the series’ fictional universe, pockets of waryness and skepticism have been forming around the franchise’s communities.

In 2021, the ‘Ethan Winters saga’ concluded with Resident Evil 8: Village. The subsect of the franchise that it began was famous for it’s bold reinvention of many of the survival horror games’ most time-worn systems.

Swapping third person for first person, injecting horror back onto the main palate of the atmosphere, narrative and gameplay, Biohazard and Village were very much bold swings.

And man did they pay off. Like previously mentioned, 2017 truly was the year this series started running again, and it really hasn’t slowed down since.

They have had some squirms and concerns with things like Resident Evil 3’s remake, but the franchise has been amassing more and more audience members ever since those famous bold blows.

However, this has not come at a certain cost. Or perhaps better spoken, certain fears.

One of the strongest assets Resident Evil has nurtured in the last decade has been it’s outstanding ability to take older games and resuscitate them back to life with fresh, beautifully gleaming coats of paint and -in some cases- great gameplay overhauls.

These games of course do not further the franchise’s ongoing storyline, which had effectively been reserved for ‘mainline’ entries. However, that has not stopped them from being wildly popular smash-hits. Resident Evil 2 famously launched to take the second place sales-wise in the franchise’s history.

That was then followed by a certainly more modest Resident Evil 3, despite it minting over 10 million copies. 3, as well as the remake of 4 very much proved that there was still a great appetite for the series’ seminal approaches to survival-horror game design.

However, the stark, stark difference in design had left many worried for Resident Evil’s future strategy.

Would they stick with first person, doubling down on their inventive new style, or would they revert back to their provably reliable third person formula?

With a new mainline entry on the horizon after Resident Evil 4’s smashing success in 2023, fans and critics alike laid in anticipation for what Capcom would choose to do.

And when the calendars reached June of 2025, the answer was officially revealed.

Resident Evil: Requiem would allow players not only their fill of their masterfully immersive first-person gameplay, but also their sillier, all the more satisfying third person destruction as Leon S. Kennedy.

Question after question then soon appeared. Would this design decision lead to an identity crisis within the game’s structure? Was there a good reason to bring Leon back, or was this just for nostalgia purposes?

I myself was wondering the same things. Of course I had never been a hugely dedicated or seasoned Resident Evil player, but I could absolutely tell where these concerns were coming from.

However as I dove into the experience more and more, it became increasingly clear that Capcom knew exactly what they were doing. Leon was deployed expertly to relieve tension and offer the game great novelty as I progressed through the story.

It never really stopped being interesting. Sure, it was a bit of a bummer when Grace’s main narrative threads were concluded, hurling me into what would end up being Leon’s part of the game, but I couldn’t find myself any less willing to play.

I think at the end of the day, the way Capcom was able to achieve this great feat of game design comes down to storytelling. Leon’s satisfying tension-releases, his gruff and grim open world wandering. It all serves the experience Capcom wished to craft greatly.

It never felt like they were pushing the fun in new directions for the sake of catering to two different sects of their audience, it all just blended into one masterful experience for the player to enjoy.

I think at the very core, this is what the future of the Resident Evil franchise will most likely look like. It is not going to be about third or first person. Action or horror. I think it’s going to be about narrative, story and direction.

Capcom has proven very well that they know what they are doing when crafting an authentic, exhilarating single-player experiences that hook you all the way until their conclusion. And with the absolutely insane success Requiem was able to capture, I don’t think they’ll be slowing down anytime soon.