Resident Evil has been one of the quintessence of the video game industry for years for years, providing everything over the years, from a disturbing, atmospheric haunting jump. But because his programmers are still looking for modern ways to terrify people, several of its leaders admit that they are not always 100% certain what elements of Resident Evil are already terrifying.
This is due to our interview with the director of Koshi Nakanishi and producer Masato Kumazama at the Tokyo Game Show 2025. We started with a conversation about the modern hero of Resident Evil: Requiem, Grace and her differences than the more oriented to the action of Leon S. Kennedy. This led to a discussion about why the series withdrew to weighty elements of action in Requiem, as Nakanishi explains:
I think you can classify the Resident Evil titles on a scale of how much they are like Resident Evil 2 or Resident Evil 4. Resident Evil 7 was definitely on the 2nd side because he returned to Horror Horror and was very recognized. Resident Evil Village built on this and added more actions and shootings and brought her a re4 page of this particular scale. But if we are still heading in this direction, there is almost the effect of inflation in which you must constantly add more and more actions to outdo the previous title, and doing so, it finally ended where Resident Evil 5 and 6 went, and although they are still great games, the general consensus is that they pushed the resident of evil to the action. I did not want to do this with the ninth title Resident Evil, in which I just tried to outdo the action in the village and finally created something that I did not want to do. The powerful bombing of the scale towards the Style Resident Evil 2 style was our intention and it is almost an improvement of this style of 2 resident 2.
However, this led to a question in which I asked Nakanishi about the other side of the coin, about trying to outdo my own terror with each modern title. Nakanishi noted that their goal is not necessarily to introduce horror innovation, but there is a certain effect of numb, which has such a long action over these games, where they really have to see the audience’s reactions to know if what they did is actually terrifying or not.
It ended up in Nakanishi’s question, if there was something they cut out of the game for being too terrifying. He couldn’t remember anything specific, which was actually removed from the game after adding it, but he remembered one anecdote that could make Ethan Winters fans Chichoć:
So at least we know that Grace will probably not have the same problems that Ethan did with his arms. Probably.
Last month we announced Resident Evil: Requiem, and you can read our impressions about what we’ve seen here so far. You can also check the rest of my discussion with Nakanishi and Kumazawa, including the way Reqiu came to Nintendo Switch 2 and what is happening to Leon Kennedy. Earlier, we also talked with a couple on many other topics, such as the Raccoon City return and a modern monster project.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior Ign reporter. You can find her post on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.skyla. Do you have a hint with history? Send it to ralentine@ign.com.
