Resident Evil: Requiem has left its aging heroines behind

Resident Evil: Requiem is both a celebration of and a bloody reckoning with the series’ iconic monsters and locations. In taking time to revisit classic areas and force players to face off with classic creatures, Requiem forges a path to a new future. But while Leon S. Kennedy is allowed to chart that new course one bullet at a time, there is a conspicuous absence: the women of Resident Evil are mostly missing or left standing on the sidelines.

Who is and is not allowed to chart the course of their future? If Resident Evil: Requiem is about disposing of old traumas and the dustier canon remnants — the T-virus, unstoppable Tyrant zombies, the last vestiges of the Umbrella Corporation — there’s mostly one person at the helm of this violent if healthy purge. Time and time again throughout the game, Leon Kennedy takes up his guns and handles much of the dirty work in excising various iconography from the franchise. He rolls up his sleeves, holds his hatchet aloft, and starts hacking away.

This is most clear in his boss fights. Invariably, at multiple points of the game, Leon faces off with vestiges of the series’ past. He fights another Tyrant hunter like the one that hounded him in Resident Evil 2, uproots a mutant plant similar to the original game’s Plant 42, and even has a face-off against a soldier who seems to be HUNK, the series’ famously unkillable special operations guru. It’s a cleaning, a series of murders freeing the series from the specter of what came before. But only Leon is allowed to chart this future. Peers like his fellow Resident Evil 2 star Claire Redfield or frenemy Ada Wong aren’t here. The women of Resident Evil, when the time comes to leave the past in the dust, aren’t really allowed to participate in the events that will, at least in theory, mark an end to the decades-long trauma that’s gripped their lives.

There is, of course, one exception to this.