Our first look at Leon Kennedy in the lead up to Resident Evil Requiem’s release was a momentous occasion. Many fans had theorised his return to the series ever since we realised Requiem would return to Raccoon City, but seeing a 50-year-old Leon in the digital flesh still made almost every fan giddy with excitement.
My biggest concern, however, was that Capcom would break my heart by killing off Leon in Requiem, as it was stated very early on that he’d be pushed to his limits. Luckily, that wasn’t the case (sort of), and while he was a little slower and certainly more hunched over Leon defeated everything that came his way in Requiem.
The final cutscene even hinted at the possibility of another Leon escapade, or perhaps just a reunion with Chris, and by the sounds of things director Koshi Nakanishi doesn’t see why we couldn’t have many more years worth of Leon’s one-liners and suplexes.
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“I think Leon is really appealing in his current form,” Nakanishi rightfully explains in an interview with Eurogamer. “And who knows, we could bring him back when he’s 70, and I’m sure he’ll still be a great character.” Well I’m certainly sold, playing as a 70-year-old Leon Kennedy sounds sick.
Nakanishi follows this up by addressing the future of Resident Evil games and how “it’s not a cast iron rule that whenever we come up with a new game and we decide to release it here, that we have to exactly age everyone up to match it or anything like that.” It doesn’t seem as if Capcom feels “the need to replace [its most recognisable faces] with younger characters … we don’t really think of it in those terms.”
Honestly, that sounds pretty good to me. All the scenes with Leon were excellent in Requiem, and while I did miss Grace in parts, racing through Raccoon City on a motorbike may have been some of the most fun I’ve had in a Resident Evil game in quite some time.
“We did want to gradually introduce [humour] so it isn’t like as soon as Leon appears, he’s just wisecracking constantly and slightly breaking the horror spell,” Nakanishi explains. “So I think we kept his one-liners and whatnot to relatively few near the start. And as his scenes ramp up in intensity and he becomes more accustomed to the situation, we let him off the leash a bit more, and a bit more Leon-style craziness starts to happen, building up towards the end of the game.
You want to decide which scene is going to be the maximum amount of peak Leon craziness, then keep it as the top level.
Koshi Nakanishi, director
“You want to decide which scene is going to be the maximum amount of peak Leon craziness, then keep it as the top level and not go any further, because you do need to balance it with other more serious scenes. So while Leon does motorbike up the side of a skyscraper and has a sort of crazy vehicle chase, he also then has more reflective scenes: where he arrives at the destroyed Raccoon City Police Department and is thinking back to his first day on the job; the scenes about his infection. We want to try and include the fun craziness, but also then have it conclude and give players a chance to get a bit more engaged in the serious storytelling aspect of the game.”
You get a fair amount of 180s in Requiem, especially as Leon progresses through Raccoon City. On one hand he’s cracking jokes, launching himself off of skyscrapers, and taking on Shelob-like spiders without a hint of fear. And then the atmosphere shifts all of a sudden, such as when he found the remains of Emma Kendo.
I loved getting to play as an older Leon Kennedy in Requiem, and I’d be well up for more adventures with my favourite grey and grizzled protagonist. Although I’m sure at some point Capcom will do to Leon what it did to Jill and inject him with something that slows his aging or perhaps even stops it entirely—anything’s possible with the T-virus.
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