Capcom Aims to Conclude the Resident Evil Story, Not the Franchise

Capcom has been giving a lot of interviews to mark the 30th anniversary of Resident Evil, and that stands out because the publisher rarely goes into detail about its franchises. When its developers do open up, it's worth paying attention. With Resident Evil Veronica due next year, there's plenty of discussion going around, and one comment in particular has people talking about where the series is headed.

That comment is about the overall story. Capcom says the plot was never planned out from the beginning and grew with every new game. The team calls this the hardest part of putting together a ten-year branding concept while it was planning the Resident Evil 2 Remake. It also says that if you play through every remake, you should be able to see the reasoning behind the order they came out in.

With Requiem arriving this year, Capcom feels the first ten years are now complete, and it expects the conclusion to come over the next ten.

Many headlines took that to mean the series will wrap up within a decade. That isn't what the company is saying, and its clarification makes that plain. What it describes is a plan for the story, not for the franchise itself. After the seventh game, the team decided to build a new overarching narrative. That game kicked things off in a world after the sixth, and the remakes then began building toward the ninth.

The ending of the ninth game adds a lot to this. You get fresh revelations about Oswell Spencer, and a clone of Wesker shows up, at least for that game. It's easy to see him playing into Resident Evil 10. All of this suggests the remakes are being folded into the wider franchise story, with the new versions and the original games sharing one timeline.

There are plenty of contradictions between them, both in the story and in how the games are structured, but it works as big popcorn entertainment, and you don't need to think about it too deeply. Seen that way, the main narrative runs from Resident Evil 2 through Resident Evil 9, with the Oswell Spencer thread and the Wesker clone carried forward.

It looks like Resident Evil 10 would open a new arc meant to finish the whole story, probably with another crossover along the lines of Resident Evil 6. That's a worrying thought for anyone who has played the sixth game through to the end. It has a lot of good ideas, and the gameplay is fun, but the campaigns are uneven. Leon's story feels like a complete package.

Chris's story is complete as well, but the gameplay doesn't feel like a full package.

Jake's campaign is strange, and the credits tease him as the new lead of the next numbered game. Capcom went with Ethan instead, and that left things in a mess. You can only hope the team has learned from that and won't repeat it when the full crossover arrives ten years from now.

Working in phases is a smart way to handle the story, though, and it raises the matter of what comes after the next conclusion. There are a few options. The company could reboot the series again with a self-contained game in the style of Resident Evil 7, with a character like Chris turning up near the end.

It could also go back to the first game and build the timeline from scratch, remaking all the remakes. Whatever follows the Oswell Spencer story, there's a lot of room to work with. Capcom is in a strong position right now. Onimusha looks great, Pragmata is on the way, and Dragon's Dogma 2 has been fixed.

Monster Hunter Wilds has also been patched up, and people are still playing Monster Hunter Rise and Monster Hunter: World. Even so, audiences get tired of seeing the same thing over and over, and at some point a reinvention becomes necessary.

Last time it caught the company off guard.

It nearly went out of business after the sixth game and a run of mediocre releases, and then one last-ditch effort with the seventh game saved it. It's good to see that the publisher has learned from that. It's actively preparing for the day when sales start to slide because players have had enough of the same thing.

The one thing to hope for is that whatever reinvention it settles on still feels true to the series' spirit. The fact that the team is thinking about it at all is a good sign that the company will be around for a long time, and that's reassuring when you look at the AAA landscape as a whole.

Right now, the publisher is releasing a lot of games with a lot of variety. It has far more hits than misses, and it goes back and fixes the ones that launch with problems. That makes it a template other third-party publishers could follow, and Konami appears to be doing exactly that with franchises like Castlevania and Silent Hill.

Things look good in Japan right now. It would be nice to see some of that spirit return in the West so developers here can take back some control over the games industry. That part is half a joke, but better Western games would be welcome. Either way, the next few years should be interesting.