Resident Evil Requiem Changes That Are Dividing Longtime Fans

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Resident Evil Requiem Changes that Divided Fans

Published Mar 14, 2026, 11:30 AM EDT

Elena Chapella (She/Her) is a current Writer for DualShockers, formerly an award-winning journalist for local news stations and newspapers in central Indiana.

Elena is passionate about writing, playing Dungeons & Dragons with her friends, and, of course, playing video games.

When she's not writing, Elena is actually a high school teacher by day. She teaches students essential life skills for adulthood, including job readiness, financial literacy, and college preparation.

Now that Resident Evil Requiem has been out for a little while, many players have had the chance to finally play it and experience the story properly. A lot of people have some thoughts.

There were some surprises that long-time Resident Evil fans ended up being divided on. Of course, you can't please everybody when making something new, but there were certainly some interesting choices, and it makes many wonder what Capcom's overall game plan is moving forward with some.

Resident Evil Requiem Where to Find All Mr. Raccoon Memoriam Statues

Resident Evil Requiem: Where to Find All Raccoon Memoriam Statues

Trying to catch the little rascal in Resident Evil Requiem? He's a sneaky and mischeivious one — but thankfully, we know where he's hiding.

There were some moments in the game that were just full of hype and fun, maybe with a playful eyeroll with the incredible amount of cheese that it's served with, but there were other moments that didn't land with the same grace (no pun intended). It's got all the Resident Evil staples and camp that we know and love, but even still, there were some things that fans simply weren't too happy about.

If you were to go through any forum discussing the game, you'll notice that fans are most divided on a few key moments of the game and its story. They either love or hate these moments, and very rarely do we see anyone fall in the in-between (at least while the game is still brand-new).

This article will contain spoilers for Resident Evil Requiem.

10 Putting a Ring on Leon

Great, Now Weirdos are Being Weird

Like previous RE titles, you're able to view various models and concept art pieces after beating the game. You have to buy them with Challenge Points, but thankfully, they aren't too much. One of the concept art sketches is of Leon, depicting his various outfits and the infection on his hands... as well as a gold ring on his left ring finger.

Immediately, the fandom went into hysteria trying to figure out who the lucky bride is, but just as immediately, people started taking it too far. From harassing the development team (who continue to joke and tease the fans about it even now) to full toxicity within the fandom itself, it was an implosion of entitlement that we never get an answer to.

At one point, IGN ran a poll asking players who they theorize Leon is married to, and a whopping 72 percent chose Sherry. You know, Leon's daughter-figure that he has known since she was a literal child. It's gross, weird, and almost guaranteed to be incorrect, especially since his relationship with Sherry is incredibly paternal.

Watch him actually be married to a civilian, completely unrelated to anyone in the games at all, just to continue to spite weirdo fans.

9 Raccoon City Being a Slog

It's a Main Selling Point, After All

Resident Evil Requiem Leon Umbrella Sign

One of the main selling points of RE Requiem is the fact that we are returning to Raccoon City, a snapshot of a world frozen in time, yet in complete and utter disarray from the missile. Many fans were excited to get back to where it all began, but ended up being pretty disappointed when they finally got there.

Raccoon City, simply put, is a slog to get through. The main gameplay loop revolves around Leon having to find all the detonator parts so he can get to the center of town, and it's just ... empty.

Sure, Raccoon City is supposed to be deserted and abandoned, it's a miracle that lingering zombies are still even there. Yet, they're all just zombies, maybe a few Blister Heads if you kill them and then leave them alone for a while, with no significant variation with the enemies (other than maybe what weapon they're welding). By the time you're on the second part, it's already been too repetitive. The gameplay can be as fun as it wants, but it can only carry the experience for so long.

It's especially disappointing considering how strong Rhodes Hill Care Center is. Raccoon City doesn't even come close in the comparison. The only real highlight of the area is the bike ride and our time at R.P.D., but you have to dredge through so much of Raccoon City before you can even get there; so by the time players actually show up, they just want to be done.

8 Bringing Back Mr. X

Was He Really Necessary?

After getting through R.P.D. and finding Grace, Zeno deploys a surprise friend to keep us busy while Grace is taken away: the Tyrant-501, also known as Mr. X.

Fans of Resident Evil 2 should immediately get war flashbacks from having to run from Mr. X on the regular, but this time, we aren't helpless against him. Leon manages to escape R.P.D., then kills Mr. X shortly after, so he's in the game for about a whopping half hour, which raises a question: what's the point of bringing him in at all?

10 Resident Evil Requiem Systems That Quietly Reward Caution Over Aggression

Being careful used to be optional in Resident Evil, really — but not in Requiem.

Sure, it's a neat callback and a fun Easter Egg, but he ends up serving zero purpose in the overall storyline. He shows up, aura farms, then dies just as quickly, so was it truly necessary for him to be in the game at all?

In the end, it just feels like cheap fan service, which is a complaint that many fans (including myself) have stated the game suffers from.

7 Making Victor a Nemesis

The Snake Motifs Were Right There!

Resident Evil Requiem Leon Victor Nemesis

Victor Gideon is, without a doubt, one of the best villains in the Resident Evil franchise. Seriously, Antony Byrne did such a fantastic job with this role, so incredibly well-written and well-acted. He's even well-designed, wearing a trench coat of snake skin (a fun headcanon is that it's Yawn's skin) while acting like a viper with everyone around him.

Unfortunately, however, despite all the snake motifs with his character design and personality, Victor's final form ended up not being a snake at all — but rather, he's a Nemesis. Not the same exact Nemesis as the one from Resident Evil 3, but the same virus, and nearly the same final form.

As cool as that is (and as hilarious of an image it is to imagine Jill explaining her terrible, no good, very bad day over a lunch break with Leon), Victor being a Nemesis ended up feeling shoehorned in. Our only clue and parallel that he is one is the fact that he's relentless, stopping at nothing until he achieves his goal.

Yet, so many more factors point to a snake-like figure being the final boss, but that ended up being disregarded in favor of something with a bit more fan service weight.

6 Zeno's Existence

7 Minutes. 7 Minutes is All I Can Spare to Care About You

When we first hear about someone named Zeno, it's while Victor is on the phone in a secret lab at the Rhodes Hill Care Center. When we finally meet him, however, we see that he's a spitting image of someone familiar: our long-favorite enemy, Albert Wesker.

Not to mention, he possesses a lot of the same abilities that Wesker has, being able to teleport away from bullets in a puff of black smoke, with superhuman speed and strength to back it up. Even though he's going by another name, a lot of fans would be speculating that this is Wesker himself, that he somehow lived through the events of Resident Evil 5.

Instead, we learn that Zeno is just a clone of Wesker. Nothing more, nothing less. Which, it's not a terrible plot point if this was something that would be explored more in the game (and potentially future titles), but instead, he's killed by the end of the game. He shows up, spreads misinformation to Grace, then gets his head lobbed off while he's throwing a tantrum.

There was so much unexplored potential with Zeno, and many fans are more upset about the waste of potential rather than his existence. Yet, due to his happenings in the game, his entire presence in the game just feels... odd.

5 Seeming to Favor Remake Continuity

Hopefully It's Just Graphical

When you first get to R.P.D., Leon has a flashback of his time there on his first day. The flashbacks, along with the layout/structure of Raccoon City overall, are centered around the remakes rather than the original games.

While I personally think this is just due to graphics (OG graphics would look silly in a flashback in a game like this after all), many fans are interpreting it as Capcom favoring remake continuity over the original. I'm even divided on this, since I'm convinced that this is simply for graphical purposes, with both continuities co-existing at the same time.

But, considering how we seem to have even more remakes for the series lined up, it's definitely possible that this could be a form of ret-conning from things they didn't like about the originals. Admittedly, I don't mind too much if that ends up being the case, even as an OG fan, but there were plenty of other fans who are not happy with that idea.

Again, I'm convinced that this is simply for graphics purposes, but the implications have enough players in the fandom biting their nails.

4 Spencer's Complete 180

We're Supposed to Trust This Fool?

When we finish up going through ARK as Grace, we end up in the Archives room, watching the video files left on the floppy disk that's in the terminal — as well as the one that we get from Alyssa Ashcroft at the beginning of the game.

On that floppy disk, there are a few video files that show an interview between Alyssa and Ozwell Spencer, one of the founding members of Umbrella, where he reflects on his time at Umbrella and everything that happened. He expresses regret, guilt, haunted by the dead and unable to atone for his sins — that is, until he made Elpis, an antiviral that makes everything he's made up until that point completely null and void. Yet, we don't know it's an antiviral until after it's been released; we have to take a leap of faith with trusting him.

Up until this point, we'd promised a dying Leon that we'd destroy Elpis, and far more fans are going to take his word over Spencer's. It's like everyone just suddenly forgot everything he had done and made up until this point, including, right before dying, exclaiming that "I was to become a God!"

Suddenly, certain players act like they're better than those who got the bad ending, acting like they're an expert on media literacy when saying that we're supposed to release Elpis, but they ended up just making themselves look like a fool by basically saying, "I trust and love infamously evil Ozwell Spencer!"

3 Somehow, Emily Lives

Guess We're Riding Off Into the Sunset

When we meet Emily, a blind child trapped at the Rhodes Hill Care Center, Grace is immediately maternal to her, pushing past her own fear to protect this little girl by any means necessary. It's a nice parallel to Claire and Sherry, despite Claire not even having a single mention in the game.

However, by the time we make it to the end of the Care Center, Emily had been badly hurt in a helicopter accident — and she won't survive by the time we finally kill The Girl. After a brutally realistic CPR scene, the entire tone of the game shifts, even more so once she turns into a grotesque monster due to her viral infection. one that Leon has to shoot and take down.

At first, this was absolutely harrowing — I'm a high school teacher by day, and ever since becoming one, I've been so, incredibly sensitive to child death. So the fact that there was no trigger warning for a scene like what we had witnessed felt incredibly insensitive, almost just wrong... until the end of the game, after we release Elpis, when Leon reveals he didn't shoot any of her vitals and can still be saved. Suddenly, the in-game child death turned into a fake-out, an outright lazy storytelling device that turned the whole situation into insensitive shock value with no genuine substance.

Capcom couldn't commit to Emily's face, and it made the story completely suffer as a result. If they wanted a happy ending with everyone riding off into the sunset together, they should have gone a different direction with Emily, one that doesn't disrespect players or their time.

2 A Bad Ending Where Leon Dies

Fake-outs are Just Lazy

Resident Evil Requiem Release or Destroy Elpis

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: fake-outs are an incredibly lazy storytelling device that should genuinely be avoided. Yet, there are multiple fake-outs in this game, with Emily being one of the most prominent. The most divisive of them is the fake-out with the game's own ending, where players have to choose between destroying or releasing Elpis.

Players who (rightfully) don't trust Spencer and want to keep their promise to Leon often opt to destroy Elpis for their first ending... and it results in Leon's death in the end.

Once you finish the credits, thankfully, you're given the option to go right back to the keyboard and release Elpis instead, resulting in Leon's life being saved and the actual ending being played out, with everyone living happily ever after. The bad ending exists solely for shock value, to toy with a beloved character, and it just feels cheap.

This is perhaps my biggest complaint about the game, one that many, many fans are also divided about. Regardless of which ending you get first, most fans are able to agree that the way this game's ending(s) were handled was just rushed and borderline incomplete, especially since the bad ending serves no purpose other than to make fans cry.

1 Killing H.U.N.K.

Then Again, That's if He's Even Truly Dead

For decades, players have been fascinated with H.U.N.K. (which stands for Human Unit Never Killed), speculating his role in Umbrella and the games overall. Often, he was a side or background character at most, without interacting with any of the main characters — so you can imagine the hype fans felt when he just walked through the door in Requiem.

Not to mention, we actually get to fight him as a proper boss fight, using the hatchet (since he'll knock most guns out of your hand and damage your health while he does) and having an absolute blast. And, in the end, Leon takes the victory by slashing open H.U.N.K.'s throat with the hatchet, finally killing the infamous Grim Reaper ... and angering countless fans.

I'll be wholly honest, I never really understood the hype behind H.U.N.K., so I wasn't bothered in the slightest, but this ended up being the main complaint for so many veteran fans. Some believe he was killed unceremoniously, some believe he should have stayed in Umbrella's shadows, others are just mourning the loss.

But, more than anything else, killing H.U.N.K. caused an immediate rip in the fandom, with fans on both sides in heated arguments about what could have been done. Then again, that's if he's even truly dead in the first place, because if you play on Insanity and head back to the area you fight him in, you'll see that his body is actually gone, vanished without a trace.

So, if anything, I think it's a solid controversy, one with equal amounts of speculation and discussion, and one that we'll likely never get true answers for.