Jill Valentine deserves better
I'm gonna be honest. I love Leon S Kennedy, but this should've been Grace's game and if it couldn't have been only Grace's game. Then why not Jill?
Okay, I get it. Leon returns to Raccoon City, I get the importance. But I am just disgusted by the way Jill has been treated by Capcom.
She has not been touched since Resident Evil 5 and Revelation. And a single file in Revelation 2.
Yes, she appears in Death Island, but that makes the whole problem worse.
You see, after RE5, after being brainwashed by Wesker and then rescued by Chris, Jill just disappears from the main timeline.
Chris is out there punching boulders and leading Anti-BOW squads and Leon is still getting dragged into government messes.
Jill has been absent, for years. All we got was a throwaway file in Revelations 3, vaguely mentioning she was in rehab after RE5 and hoping to return to duty….
One of the most experienced operatives in the franchise, who survived the mansion, Raccoon City, Nemesis, outlived Umbrella, survived mind control, experimentation at his worst….a SINGLE FILE. That's it.
And finally Death Island. The problem with Death Island is she looks the same as she did in RE3Make. Same hair, same outfit, same energy, same overall presentation. It's like the last 16 years of her life barely happened. This was a character who was captured, experimented on, mind controlled, kept in stasis and psychologically dismantled by Wesker. Yet her own design completely sidesteps all of that.
EVERYONE ELSE has visibily evolved.
Chris looks older, heavier and worn down.
Leon carries that permanent exhaustion of someone who's seen too much
Claire's grown into a hardened survivor
Jill, meanwhile looks like she's frozen in time and that's kind of the perfect way for how Capcom treats her. Death Island doesn't push her forward, it kind of resets her. It reassures fans by presenting a familiar Jill, but avoids that engaging what would make her different now. No scars, no visible storytelling, no sense that RE5 fundamentally altered her in anyway. Yeah she's back, but only in the safest most nostalgic way possible.
So yes she reappears, but reappears unchanged and untouched by the very trauma that removed her from the series in the first place, which makes the absence sting even more.
Everyone keeps rotating back into the series. Rebecca shows up in the CG films(but she ALSO deserves a new game). Claire gets RE2R and CG films(I swear to god if Claire doesn't get a Requiem DLC...). Even side characters resurfaces.
Jill meanwhile, exists in this weird limbo, where she's canonically alive, active enough, but never allowed to properly reclaim her place. Does she still work with Chris? Does she work with Carlos? Is she back in the field? Is she semi-retired? Did she finally say fuck it and her and Barry finally opened that sandwich shop? We generally don't know and that silence is the problem.
Jill Valentine helped define Resident Evil and ending her arc with a "well she recovered off screen" and a occasional cameo, is quite frankly shit and a complete disservice to the iconic character that is Jill Valentine.
RE3R and Death Island proves fans still care. Now Capcom needs to actually commit and give her a real forward moving story again.
With that rant out of the way, here is why Jill deserved to be in Requiem JUST AS MUCH AS LEON.
1) Nobody except her spent so much time in Raccoon City. She lived there just as Chris and Rebecca, but both of this two left the city after Arklay incident. And that means Jill is related to this story more than anybody else in franchise. We might tell about Alyssa, but she is not one of the main characters of the RE franchise.
2) As ex citizen of Raccoon City Jill might face her past there: she remembers the streets, the bars, cafe, cinema, police department, parks and especially - her apartment. She might tell us about this city more than anybody else, this story closer to her more than for anybody else.
3) If the task is to investigate what happens there, isn't this a task for cop, who knows that city better than anybody else?
4) When we have ending of her story in RE3 or RE3R, she give us a promise to take down the Umbrella. Isn't this challenge fits more for somebody but Jill, to put a final end to this corporation that suddenly isn't dead?
Jill deserved to be in Requiem just as much as Leon, her going down to help Grace and returning to end Umbrella's remnants is what her character deserved. But....instead, Leon returns and Jill is left in stasis by Capcom. AGAIN!
It's sad and downright disrespectful that Jill’s only recent appearances have been in a remake that feels kinda incomplete or insubstantial and a pretty mediocre animated movie. She deserves way more love from Capcom, a new main game with her as the protagonist. They can totally lean on her slow aging thing to keep her around in multiple games, c’mon.
