Now that I’ve completed Resident Evil Requiem, I put myself through the usual ordeal of reviewing every piece of Resident Evil lore, contradictory though it often is. In this renewed interest in Capcom’s long-standing franchise, I began to wonder who a potential Resident Evil 10 should feature in the main role and came to realize that it’s actually a rather difficult problem to solve.
Though a very recognizable survival horror franchise at heart, Resident Evil is thoroughly narrative-driven, introducing and building up characters and environments that embedded themselves into the collective consciousness of gaming culture, no matter if you played the games or not. In fact, it is so heavily reliant on good stories that having bad characters in a Resident Evil game would completely break the mood, even more so than leaning into action over horror.
And some of its characters are so recognizable and unique that it’s almost impossible not to have them featured in an RE game in some capacity, because without them, the series is essentially starting from scratch. But that is perhaps what the franchise deserves to do and tried (rather successfully) with Resident Evil 7.
Since that game, though, Capcom has slowly circled back to its old, iconic cast. RE8 let you play a lot as Chris and turned him into a significant part of the story, whereas RE9 is essentially 50 percent RE4 Remake with Leon front and center. The best parts of all three of these games, though, are the slower-paced, horror-inducing moments with Ethan Winters and Grace Ashcroft, both of whom are the average Joe and Jane finding themselves in an environment far beyond anything they would have known up to that point.
It’s also what makes the first two Resident Evil games so amazing as well. Jill and Chris wind up in the Spencer mansion, encountering man-made horrors beyond comprehension, as do Claire and Leon when they first arrive in RPD. That shock and awe of first encountering something entirely unnatural and superhuman induces both in the characters and in the players a sense of dread and fear by default, and I’d even say the characters’ terror spills over to the player controlling them.
Later games started repeating the characters constantly, and while Jill’s encounter with the Nemesis is rather memorable, it’s still not her first run-in with Umbrella’s monsters and thus not as scary. The Nemesis is also more or less a repeat of Mr. X from RE2, which many players had seen before, further decreasing the fear factor.
So, Capcom’s ultimate misstep for RE4 onwards (even though RE4 was a good game overall) is the repetition of experienced characters, some of whom started to become almost superhuman due to all the plot armor surrounding them (cough, Chris punching boulders, cough), further and further reducing the horror and turning Resident Evil into a spectacle of action and absurdity. While that’s fun and all, I don’t think it suits the franchise whatsoever.
Now that Resident Evil Requiem is on track to completely wrap up the Umbrella saga, options are more or less endless. We can go back to the mold, have some new plotline open up, and get new places to explore, perhaps again outside of the United States. But that’d have to be accompanied by a proper protagonist, one that does not have enough experience to face-tank the monsters coming their way—one that needs to start small and grow as the game progresses.
Naturally, both Grace Ashcroft and Ethan Winters started off shocked, terrified, and emotional, ending up the wiser by surviving tremendous ordeals that’d have killed most other people almost instantly. Neither should come back, though, because now they’re no longer their initial selves, and their experiences helped them overcome their fear, which would defeat the purpose of a “survival horror” game.
Sure, I’m fine with having a dual protagonist setup, as most RE games do, but one should always be some average guy or girl, or at least someone who hasn’t met the worst of the Umbrella bunch. They need to feel fear and they need to know terror in their hearts, because if they’re an action hero, then we’re in an action game, and the only way to genuinely be a horror game, Resident Evil 10 should make our protagonist as powerless as they can get.
And from that state of no power, they should grow and mature and gain skills to take down the threats they’re facing.
But to that end, maybe our favorites should sit the next one out. Y’all are over 50 each, I’m sure retirement is on the cards.
Oh, and it should be first-person again, but I guess that’s more or less guaranteed at this point.
