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Before I get started, consider this a big spoiler warning for Resident Evil Requiem because I'm about to talk all about the ending and what it means for the series' future. Certain things happen that could potentially change Resi forever so, if you've not rolled credits or know what happened, stop reading now.
Requiem ends with the final discovery of what Elpis is, the MacGuffin you spend much of the game chasing. At the finale it's revealed to be an antivirus for Umbrella founder Oswell Spencer's line of Progenitor bioweapons; something he created after a deathbed realization that being the eugenist creator of an engineered virus responsible for millions of deaths was probably a bad thing. It means anything derived from the original virus – the T, G, C, Uroboros virus, and so on – is potentially just… gone. Removed from the Resident Evil universe by this new cure-all that saved Leon and removed Zeno's powers.
If it plays out how the ending suggests, it's probably the biggest and most exciting thing the series has done since that first zombie turned his head in the mansion. Obviously, getting rid of all the monsters in a monster game might not sound like the best idea, but hear me out.
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You see, Resi has had a serious problem ever since the second game ended with Raccoon City being nuked. It's kind of hard to miss that sort of thing. Wiping out an entire city with undead hordes and then thermonuclear weapons tends to get noticed. So once the series gets to around the fourth game in the timeline there's monsters everywhere and everyone knows about them. Plus, using the whole bioweapons idea as the cause behind the proliferation means that it's established that almost anyone with a grudge and access to billionaire eBay can buy some regenerating flesh horror and unleash it for personal gain. By the time we settle into games like Resident Evil 5 and Revelations there's an outbreak of something somewhere basically everyday.
Which creates a massive problem for the series that we've already seen Capcom try to address in the lead up to Requiem. The developer made it clear that they created Grace as a cipher for the player to feel fear, specifically because it wouldn't work to have Leon scared after 30 odd years of dealing with one creature after another. The horrors persist and so does he. There's a reason Resident Evil slowly morphed into a more of an action game over the years – you just can't do real horror when all your main characters are monster killing machines and everyone and their mother sees bioweapons daily.
In Resi-Land if you ever see a TV it's showing a news broadcast about the latest nodule with teeth to shlop into a populated area. There are literally multiple global organizations tasked with taking care of it all. By the time we get to Resident Evil Revelations, Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine rock up to clear up a bioweapon outbreak with all the zip and enthusiasm of students volunteering to clear an oil spill off the beach.
Breaking the mold
Check out our massive Resi deep dive with GameRadar's On The Radar for Resident Evil Requiem!
It was clearly a problem Capcom had been aware of for a while, even before creating Requiem's Grace, as evidenced by Resident Evil 7's complete reboot. That tried to restart the series by addressing all the issues you get when mutating undying flesh monsters killing everyone is just a Tuesday. It conjured up a new location, hero, monsters and enemies, and left the player unsure and unprepared – something that's vital for a good horror experience. Instead of a quick googling to double check what viral strain you just shot, with at best mild curiosity, 7 was full of 'WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!' moments that hadn't really been a thing since 4.
For that reason, 7 is a peak the series has yet to reach again for me – a genuinely scary, unpredictable experience because, while it was unmistakably a Resident Evil game, it was framed in a shroud of uneasy ambiguity and uncertainty the series hadn't achieved for years. And that's something Elpis reinstall now, by resetting Resi at a fundamental level.
While it's not clear yet what's going to happen with Elpis, a universal progenitor antivirus is clearly a huge shake up for the series. It was hailed as something that would upset the world order while Victor and Zeno chased it, believing it to be a mind control virus. Ultimately revealed as a tool to end almost all bioweapons, it absolutely is upsetting the world order, just not how they thought. The Mold and Las Plagas are presumably still around, but what does a world deprived of anything related to the original Progenitor strain of viruses look like now?
That sort of question means Capcom potentially now has a blank slate to continue Resident Evil with, and that's stupidly exciting. With all the big hitters gone we could be back to little outbreaks in backwater forests, with new mutations and monsters we don't have an extensively linked wiki page on; experienced through characters that don't know what the hell is happening. The fear the original games created in the 90s, because it was all unknown, could be back. That fear helped the series run for nearly 30 years and, if Capcom fully embraces change now, it could run for another 30. It's fitting that a game called Requiem could be saying goodbye to Resident Evil as we know it.
Of course the important question is where does Requiem sit in our best Resident Evil ranking?
