For 25 years, theResident Evilfranchise has reinvented itself time and time again, sometimes revolutionizing the entire industry along with it. After just three highly successful games,Resident Evil 4forever changed the franchise by introducing a bigger focus on action. Then,Resident Evil 7: Biohazardbrought back the survival horror element with a vengeance and introduced another big change with the shift to a first-person perspective.
Now,Resident Evil Villageis taking another step forward by throwing us deep into gothic horror territory and diving more into dark fantasy horrors. This decision opened up a huge branch of lore that changes what we knew of the world ofResident Evil, as well as its future possibilities. WithResident Evil 9being inevitable, the franchise’s best step forward should be a look back atResident Evil’s weird cousin,Devil May Cry.
Spoilers Ahead
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Devil May Cry, of course, is the action game focusing on Dante, a demon hunter with a lifelong quest to vanquish the world of demons. The first game in that franchise started out as a proposed idea forResident Evil 4, with directorHideki Kamiyawanting to tell a more “stylish” and “cool” action game centered around a mystery surrounding the protagonist and his superhuman abilities (which the game would explain with biotechnology). Though that idea was deemed too outside of the survival horror thatResident Evilwas known for at the time,Devil May Crydid end up becoming a successful franchise of its own, andResident Evil 4did end up becoming more of an action game, but it’sVillagethat fully feels like the franchise going back to that initial pitch.
This started withResident Evil 7: Biohazard, which combinedThe Texas Chain Saw Massacre-style folk horror with the titular biohazards. The title felt distinctly different from the zombies in previous games while still managing to explain it away as being pseudo-connected to the usual Umbrella shenanigans.
Villagemostly leaves the zombies behind in order to focus on more classic monsters like lycans and vampires, with the player taking on the role of Ethan Winters in his quest to find his daughter, Rose, and murder everyone and everything that gets in his way.
The move towards lycans and vampires works so well because they still carry a sense of verisimilitude that tracks with our classicResident Evilzombies. Though their name implies a werewolf connection, the lycans are still more or less mutated humans in the same way we’ve had different kinds of zombies in previous games. They act as your more agile zombies while the vampiricmoroaiceare classic slow ones. Where the game’s new lore really shines is in how it connects its new and weirder monsters like Salvatore Moreau’s Lovecraftian creature, or Karl Heisenberg’s FrankensteinianTetsuo the Iron Manmonster.
These boss fights, together with the other two Lords of the Village — Tall VampireLady Dimitrescuand dollmakerDonna Beneviento— make the game so unique, because of how much it feels like a theme park. In the game, you explore four distinct areas, connected by the titular Village which acts as a hub for the story. Each of the four areas (controlled by one of the four Lords) feels completely unlike what came before both in this game and in the franchise at large. The aesthetics and locale change, you get a new style of gameplay, and unique boss fights that makeVillagefeel like a game version of Universal Halloween Horror Nights.
Of course,Villageis not only about its gameplay but also its lore and theshocking waysin which it connects to the rest of theResident Evilfranchise. Towards the end of the game, you find out that Oswell E. Spencer, the founder of the Umbrella Corporation and the reason we’ve played these games for 25 years, used to be an apprentice to this game’s villain, Mother Miranda; the two spent years working on using the megamycete (or Mold) to experiment on people. At some point, Spencer parted ways with Miranda because Miranda only wanted to use the Mold as a means to revive her dead daughter, while Spencer wanted to achieve the next step in human evolution. Instead, Spencer went on to focus his work on the “progenitor” virus he found in Africa.
We also discover that all the strange occurrences and creatures in the Village are caused by experimentation with the Mold. That means there were no supernatural creatures, but the Four Lords were bioweapons with superhuman abilities.Though at first glance you may think this is a cheap cop-out to justify the franchise using more than zombies as villains, it is actually a genius way of opening the doors to all kinds of monsters in future games. And remember, the zombies ofResident Evilwere never really “true” zombies like those inGeorge A. Romero’s movies, because they are not reanimated dead, but infected people without a pulse. Now, the franchise can justify adding any sort of supernatural creature as long as it’s some kind of bioweapon that alters a subject’s physiology. This is where Rose and Ethan Winters come in.
ThroughoutBiohazardand early on duringVillage, Ethan’s extraordinary healing ability became a meme due to how he could reattach a limb and make it work with nothing butgrit, spit and a whole lot of duct tape. ButVillagereveals that Ethan actually died duringBiohazard, and what we’ve been following wasAgathaa Mold construct all along. This explains Ethan’s extraordinary resilience and healing ability but also implies that Rose has some secret power even beyond what Miranda possesses.
So what does this mean forResident Evil9? It’s still early to tell, but the epilogue toVillagegives us a clue. In the final moments of the game, we see Rose working for Chris Redfield in some undisclosed capacity, and he has snipers targeting her at all times in case her powers get out of control.
Given how the franchise has expanded its take on horror, encapsulating a lot more than just zombies, it is not out of the realm of possibility to imagineResident Evil 9letting you play as Rose. After all, the franchise is known for its strong female characters, yet we haven’t had a game with a proper female protagonist since 2015’sResident Evil: Revelations 2.And what better character motivation than being made out of the same bioweapon stuff that killed your father?
With how much ofBiohazardandVillageplayed like a tragedy or even a dark fairy tale,Resident Evil9could dive more into that tone, tying Rose’s childhood tragedy and trauma into her young adult life as essentially a teenage soldier for Chris. The final “proper” scene inVillagehas Chris discovering that the BSAA is using bioweapons of their own, and he was going to investigate. If whatever they are planning is still ongoing by the time of the epilogue, Chris could easily recruit Rose to do his dirty work and fight bioweapon fire with bioweapon fire.
Plus, The Duke may still be out there, since we still know so little about him, what he is, or what weird abilities he may possess, and he certainly seemed to have a keen interest in the Winters Family. Having Chris serve as Rose’s legal guardian but also a sort of captor (what with her 24/7 armed guard) while The Duke comes in as another figure who knew Ethan, is “friendlier,” and (probably) has some superhuman abilities of his own could make for an interesting dynamic.
More importantly, why introduce a character who is related to the protagonist of your game and who has superhuman abilities if you won’t be allowed to play as them?Resident Evil 9, if it continues the Winters lineage, could lean into Rose’s abilities much in the way Dante does inDevil May Cry,or even in the way Jesse Faden uses her powers inControl. Hey, as long as it’s explained as being part of biological experiments, the sky is the limit. If this franchise could go from very limited ammo and only using handguns to being able to use anactual lightsaberto fight Lady Dimitrescu, why not make the jump to controlling other creatures or manipulating The Mold?
Considering where the franchise is and where it all started,Resident Evilhas every opportunity to represent a large variety of horrors, supernatural or otherwise. We are just getting started.
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