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Resident Evil Requiem is, somehow, coming to Switch 2, and director Koshi Nakanishi is taking the opportunity to show off his Nintendo cred. Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link has a mixed reputation among series fans, but Nakanishi loves it so much that he snuck in a massive reference to it in one of his first major directorial projects on Resident Evil.
"Of course, I played the original Legend of Zelda game, but I really loved the Zelda II: The Adventure of Link game," Nakanishi explained in a Creator's Voice video on the Nintendo YouTube channel. "It's more challenging, but I loved it. Actually, when I was making Resident Evil Revelations, there was an enemy called a Scarmiglione who carried a shield, and if you aimed at them, they would move the shield up and down. The truth is, this enemy was inspired by the armored soldier from Zelda II: The Adventure of Link."
Zelda 2 has always been seen as something of a black sheep for the series, since it traded the original's top-down adventuring for side-scrolling dungeons and battle sequences. In hindsight, it's a neat game and a fun experiment with the Zelda format, but it is brutally difficult even by the standards of the NES. The armored soldier enemies Nakanishi referenced stick in my mind as the most annoying bit of the whole thing – they respond very directly to your sword strikes, and it was always a tedious process trying to break through their defences.
Still, it's easy to see how a brutal NES classic might inspire the eventual director of some of the best survival horror games out there. "This is the first time I've said that," Nakanishi added. "I played so much that it's safe to say I was raised by Nintendo." It seems appropriate, then, that Revelations – the 2012 game in which the Zelda 2-inspired Scarmiglione enemies appeared – started life as a 3DS exclusive.
