Requiem for fan service
I got to play Resident Evil Requiem for work over the last two and a half weeks. I didn't write the review, but I 100% agree with its assessment that this is a highly competent game, but also one that stumbles about in its second half, fascinatingly reminiscent of a zombie in its death throes.
(The rest of this post will get real itchy and tasty with spoilers, so if you haven't played Requiem yet, beware.) I am going to attempt to summarize Requiem's poorly-explained story here, mostly for my own benefit, because the game expects you to read a 60-page document called "Grace's Report" upon completing it that still doesn't detail things well. Anyhow, the newbie lead is Grace Ashcroft, an FBI analyst who gets sent into the field by her boss to investigate the hotel where her adoptive mother was murdered. (Holy shit, take that up with HR immediately.)
Grace is secretly a child created by Umbrella Corp founder Oswell Spencer, who had an epiphany in his final years and realized that zombie-fueled genocide is actually kinda bad. And so he raised a regular baby before passing her on to Alyssa Ashcroft, one of the survivors of the oft-overlooked PS2 spinoff Resident Evil Outbreak, which is the first sign of Requiem dipping deep into the fan service test tube.
Unbeknownst to Grace, Spencer also gave her subconscious knowledge of a password that can activate a serum called Elpis, which counters all viral strands that Umbrella and its competitors had a role in making. In other words, Elpis is a trump card that Spencer created in his final days to screw over all of the other eugenics nutjobs in the RE universe, in a real "it is not enough that I succeed; others should fail" fashion. Two of these nutjobs include the baddies of Requiem - a creepy doctor named Victor Gideon and a jobber clone of Albert Wesker named Zeno, who is never actually identified as a clone throughout the narrative, but is 100% a clone. I mean, just look at the screenshot below.
Both Victor and Zeno don't know that Elpis is an antiviral. They think Spencer's last will and testament is a bigger and badder bioweapon, and they want Grace to open it up for them. After being kidnapped by Victor, Grace escapes into Rhodes Hill, a health facility/bioweapon testing center, where she gets chased by dozens of zombies and this game's stalker enemy, a big mutated girlie simply dubbed The Girl. Along the way, she makes friends with a little test subject named Emily, and also gets saved by Leon Kennedy, who's investigating the case and gives her a sexy revolver dubbed "Requiem" to survive. Hey, they did that thing where they put the name of the game into the game.
All of the stuff in the Rhodes Hill section of Requiem is ace. Playing as Grace is classic survival horror goodness, and the layout of the hospital features all of the puzzles, backtracking, and inventory management that made me fall in love with this franchise when I did my massive Resident Evil series playthrough almost a decade ago. There are some new wrinkles to the formula as well, coming in the form of zombies that retain pieces of their old intelligence and act in varied ways. Enter a chef zombie, who Grace must avoid as he marches back and forth in the kitchen with a giant cleaver. Then there are two singer zombies who the game describes as possessing "main character energy," and they'll unleash banshee-style screams if you get too close. These little personalities make what would pass for typical cannon fodder all the more endearing, and it's a wonder that Resident Evil didn't think of this sort of thing earlier.
Grace's Rhodes Hill nightmare is made more breathless by the inclusion of a few tidbits as Leon, who has so obviously had enough of this shit that he immediately starts kicking the undead left and right, whacking them to bits with his hatchet and chainsawing them as if he still hasn't learned how to use garden tools properly since his RE4 service in Spain. These are the action-orientated gulps of air that punctuate Grace's extremely tense survival horror moments, and they are very fun, especially when ya boy just darts through sections of the facility that Grace struggled with, blasting undead heads to pulp because you know he's seen far too much of this nonsense since the '90s. There's one killer sequence where Leon has to defend Grace from a rooftop with a sniper rifle that had me yelling out "LET'S GOOO" at very high intervals.
Unfortunately, the Rhodes Hill stuff ends about halfway through the game, and Grace gets squirreled away by Zeno and Victor. Leon takes center stage to follow them to the nuked-out remains of Raccoon City, which marks one of the first times that this series has ventured into the post-apocalyptic setting that nearly all of its lackluster live-action interpretations have insisted upon.
And it's here where Requiem stumbles. Instead of navigating tightly-designed corridors filled with personality-laden enemies, Leon's Raccoon City slog is dominated by a beige environment, typical zombie chuds, and a fetch quest to collect parts of a detonator. I've always believed that Resident Evil should never veer too hard into the dystopia inhabited by The Last of Us and The Walking Dead, where mutations have inherited the Earth and you play as a survivor trying to eke out an existence amongst them. It's just not as interesting as the series' forte, which is all about living in the existing capitalist hellscape that is the modern era, except one where corporations have learned to make and use the undead for profit. Leon's section navigating the ruins of Raccoon City proves me right.
The search for detonator pieces does eventually end, replaced with a foray into Raccoon City Police Department. And it's here that the game tries to emphasize the fact that Leon is coming home, grappling with the PTSD of 26 years ago while slowly dealing with the reality that he too has been infected by the T-Virus, a convenient twist that Requiem handwaves by saying it's due to prolonged contact with zombies over the years. You'll then walk through the hallowed halls that Leon navigated as a rookie in RE2, and the game clearly wants you to feel the passionate pull of nostalgia. It hopes to tug at the heartstrings of longtime fans, eliciting a tear from their eyes as they peer upon scenes they haven't seen in an eternity - even though all of the assets on display aren't really that old, as the entire police station map is just a dirtied-up version of what was made in 2019 for the Resident Evil 2 remake.
Some of the Easter Eggs here are good, like the inclusion of Tofu in RPD if you visit S.T.A.R.S. office and examine Jill Valentine's old beret. But much of it feels misplaced. For instance, the S.T.A.R.S. sequence would be more meaningful if it were Chris Redfield or even Jill herself doing the examining, since those two were, after all, the actual S.T.A.R.S. members of the franchise, while Leon was just a regular cop. (Once again, I long for Capcom to bring Jill Valentine out of forced retirement.)
Other bits feel way too convenient. Zeno just happens to have a Tyrant in his back pocket who looks like Mr. X, and so Leon gets to duel his old foe, which is neat at first but also feels like a very "let's hit you over the head with how rad Leon became over the last two decades" sequence. This feeling is compounded in the final area of the game, the ARK secret facility lurking beneath Raccoon City, where longtime secret character HUNK appears to challenge Leon to a duel. The game calls him the "Commander," just as it refuses to identify Zeno as a Wesker clone, but make no mistake, this is HUNK. If you parry correctly you can kill him without much trouble, and the entire fight is the equivalent of Boba Fett coming back for two minutes in a Star Wars movie only to be unceremoniously impaled by a CGI-deaged Luke Skywalker. (Has this happened yet? I stopped caring about Star Wars years ago.)
This is not meaningful fan service. Rather, it feels designed to elicit a quick and dirty "holy shit" reaction from streamers, and it succeeds at doing so, if the Leon vs. HUNK reaction round-up on YouTube is any indication. But HUNK's cameo doesn't advance the plot in any major fashion, and one could say this about most of the relevations in Requiem's last moments. Lickers appear, largely to hit home more RE2 vibes. Zeno dies without anyone blinking an eye. Victor mutates into a Nemesis (but not the actual Nemesis that everyone knows and remembers from RE3). Grace heals Leon with Elpis, allowing him to presumably continue kicking ass for another 10 Resident Evils. Emily somehow survives despite mutating into a monster, so that Capcom can have a happy ending for Grace.
I had a rollicking time playing through this stuff when it was on screen, but thinking about it after the fact makes me feel cynical. After its initial setup, Requiem quickly becomes a game that seems desperate for players to adore it, throwing brushstrokes of the past at them like a painter dying to recreate their old style. But Grace's story of learning her past connections with Spencer and Leon's tale of dealing with trauma never align as well as they could have, resulting in a game that feels hammered together from two disparate halves, with Capcom hoping that nobody noticed along the way.
The entire premise of Requiem is somewhat flawed from the getgo, because we're expected to believe that Oswald Spencer - made out to be an utterly reprehensible individual in every other Resident Evil game - somehow became a better person in his final days. But if one were to accept this as a retcon, then there are ways in which Requiem could've been cohesively rearranged. The entire game could have been set in and around Rhodes Hill, for one, focusing more on Grace's story with Leon serving as backup, the role he excels at during the first half. Without the distractions of Raccoon City, Mr. X round 2, and HUNK, we could've had a scaled-down, focused plot about Grace's origins that perhaps provided a little more detail about Spencer's change of heart.
Alternately, if Requiem truly desired to bring players back to RE2's heyday, it should've axed Grace Ashcroft entirely. She's an endearing protagonist, and I do like how Requiem serves as a complete story for her, but this game could've easily starred Sherry Birkin, who appears behind the scenes as Leon's radio helper. She too is suffering from the T-Virus, and her inclusion is once again mostly confined to fluffy fan service rather than anything meaningful. But she could've certainly been recast as the lead role, perhaps with her going off to investigate Raccoon City after hearing rumours of the ARK facility beneath it. This would give Leon more than enough reason to star as the game's deuteragonist, considering their shared history, and it would've made all of the throwbacks to RE2 more pointed. Hell, if Capcom really wanted to elicit hardcore emotions, why not bring Claire Redfield back as well?
Alas, this does not seem to be Capcom's strategy with Resident Evil. Seemingly logical decisions, like making a game starring Sherry - once a little girl in RE2 who is now a grown woman committed to fighting bioterrorism on her own terms - are cast away, probably replaced with the argument of "oh, Sherry has no connection to Elpis, and she's too well-trained for the beginning of the game to be scary if you're playing as her." To this, I shake my head. If Requiem wants to convince us that Spencer regretted his life's work right before he died, surely a retcon of Sherry's origins that link her with Elpis is possible. Sherry could also have simply acted as a desk agent ever since the conclusion of RE6, justifying the limited inventory and more frightening gameplay that she'd be saddled with in comparison to Leon.
I am reminded, for a moment, that missed opportunities are par the course for Capcom. I am a Mega Man fan, after all, as well as a Breath of Fire fan, and I have seen how this company has bungled decisions multiple times with both series. So this is nothing new, and I suspect that Resident Evil's recent aggressive release cycle has also forced Capcom to prioritize pumping these games out quickly rather than carefully, ensuring that they're composed of bits that can be tweaked for future usage. You see evidence of this all throughout Requiem. Aside from the recyled second half, there are models just waiting to be reskinned for the inevitable Code Veronica, RE0, and RE5 remakes. (The Titan Spinner spider boss, Spencer's inclusion, and not Wesker Zeno, right down to his Matrix-esque powers.)
I felt this way when I played Village a few years back, which seemed like its setting was an excuse to make assets for the RE4 remake. And even though I ultimately like Requiem more than the second part of Ethan Winters' story, I cannot help but feel like this game exudes fumbled potential. What was supposed to be a requiem for the franchise as a whole, hence the name, comes across more as an example of how Capcom will continue to make Resident Evils as fast as they can, creating repurposable elements each year while never really letting old characters like Leon rest, and never really elevating what should be obvious choices at successors - like Sherry - to the driver's seat.
Requiem sold something like 5 million copies in a few days, so obviously, there are plenty of players who care little about these things and will eat all of it up. I probably will too, honestly. But I recall that Resident Evil's finest chapters were ones that did something new - RE2, RE4, RE7. Requiem dabbles with this, dangling its personality-filled zombies in your face. But ultimately, it is no RE2. It is the latest product from an annual release machine, too intent on forcefully trying to make us embrace the past and admire its cleverness. As a result, it pushes its finest parts to the rear while elevating the wrong parts to the forefront.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the bonkers Final Puzzle, an ARG-style challenge that had players from across the world coming together to crack a code that involved flushing toilets 8 times in a row and figuring out the distance from the Earth to the moon. And after all of that effort, what did the community get? An achievement and some measly currency points in the in-game shop. Blah. Requiem is fine, but Resident Evil as a whole can be much, much better.