At the CAPCOM NEXT 2024 event, Resident Evil 7 Director Koshi Nakanishi announced he was working on a new Resident Evil game. “It was really difficult to figure out what to do after 7,” Nakanishi explained, “but I found it and it feels substantial.” Today I want to try and take my best guess (with some creative liberty) at what I think Koshi Nakanishi and his team have in store for fans of the long-running series. I will be referencing some rumors and possible leaks, so if you don’t want to know anything about RE9, I’d stop now.

CAPCOM is a company that I often think of as one that uses past experiences to help make future projects. They potentially experiment with smaller competitive multiplayer games like RE: Verse to get a handle on server performance so that 6 months later when they release Exoprimal the game launches relatively smoothly. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is the first game on the RE Engine to push an open-world experience and a year after its release, we’ll be getting Monster Hunter Wilds, which, by all accounts, will be the franchise going into more of an open-world-style setting. An even simpler comparison would be Resident Evil 7 figuring out how to make the franchise a first-person experience so that Resident Evil 8 could continue that. So with all of this said, what does this mean for Resident Evil 9?

With rumors swirling that the upcoming title will take place in the Asian countryside, it’s safe to assume that the team will take what was learned with RE8 and Resident Evil 4 Remake to help craft a truly memorable setting. Important to keep in mind, though, that while these are different teams working on these games, there’s no reason not to think they’re not all helping one another. While Resident Evil 8 and 9 reportedly went into development around the same time, with RE9 having almost 4 more years of development time, any mistakes made by the previously released titles can be used as lessons to learn from. If the team working on the upcoming title can capitalize on the extra development time, they could have a new classic setting that rivals RE4’s opening village or RE2’s police station. I’d bring up the mansion from the first game, but there’s no need to set such unfair expectations.

As for the game’s protagonist, reports on this are as official as me taking shots in the dark, which is exactly what I’m about to do. One of the franchise’s strongest features is its roster of characters: Jill, Chris, Leon, Claire, and Ethan, to name a few. To figure out who we might be playing we need to understand where we last left our possible heroes. Keep in mind that I look at the Resident Evil franchise as existing on two different timelines. There’s the timeline that features the original 6 games plus the spin-offs and the other that features the current remakes and RE7 and 8. For the purposes of this, I’ll only be using the most current timeline.

Claire Redfield

The last time we saw Claire was at the end of RE2: Remake and while I would love to see Claire finally return to a mainline title, with rumors of a Code Veronica remake on the horizon, I think this ties Claire up for the foreseeable future.

Chris Redfield

By the end of Resident Evil 8, Chris is a broken man in desperate need of a vacation. Though I think an entire game of Chris running around proclaiming he’s “too old for this shit” would be amazing, I think our best chance to see Chris returning as a playable character would be in a remake of Resident Evil 5.

Rose Winters

While both RE8 and its DLC end on an odd cliffhanger, because of who the character has become, I think a full game featuring Rose would make for a very different type of game. On top of that, fans are burnt out on the Winters family and would prefer to see them take some time away from the franchise.

Leon Kennedy and Jill Valentine

As far as I’m concerned, these are our prime candidates for the upcoming game. Leon is easily the biggest fan favorite of the franchise and Jill Valentine might as well be the mascot for the franchise. She’s the first character most of us played in the first game and even represented the franchise in Marvel vs Capcom 2. Obviously, we just got a ton of Leon Kennedy in the remake of RE4 but having a chance to see where the character is after so many years would be incredible and the same goes for Jill. The only other time (keep in mind the timelines) we’ve gotten to see her outside the mansion was in the remake for RE3. Resident Evil 8 takes place in 2021. Assuming the next game pushes the timeline even further, it will have been 23 years since Jill’s last adventure and 17 for Leon. With so much time passed for both characters, it wouldn’t matter what the plot of the game is because the most interesting part would be learning about these characters. We’ve seen what this story has done to someone like Chris Redfield. What does a 48-year-old Leon Kennedy look like?

So what’s my actual prediction for the game? Based on what Director Koshi Nakanishi said during the CAPCOM NEXT event, I do think the franchise will continue to be first-person. While I think that might disappoint some fans, I believe there will be a technical reason for this. Maybe we won’t see this until the inevitable Resident Evil Zero remake, but it’s been years since Resident Evil 2 Remake allowed players to play as multiple characters in one game. I think Resident Evil 9 will deliver a similar experience. And while I’m not an expert at game development, I’d have to guess keeping the game in first-person would make having two playable characters somewhat easier to accomplish.

It’s also been reported that a lot of Japanese players found RE7 to be too scary which caused CAPCOM to pull back on the next game. That said, RE8 does have one of the creepiest moments I’ve ever experienced in any game, go figure. Having multiple characters could allow for different experiences. As we saw in Resident Evil 4, Leon is an action star. He’s jumping through windows, suplexing cult members, and jet-skiing through caves. Meanwhile, Jill Valentine is the master of unlocking. Don’t get me wrong, when it’s time to start firing bazookas Jill knows what she’s doing, but playing as a 51-year-old woman sneaking around an abandoned Asian countryside sounds unbelievably creepy and something I’d love to play.

On top of all of this, while I’m not ready to say the next Resident Evil game will be entirely open-world, I do think because of the level designs we saw in both Resident Evil 8 and Resident Evil 4 Remake, we will see the studio push the franchise as close to the genre as possible. Everyone agrees that the opening village in RE4 is iconic. Imagine a scenario where a terrifying village was just part of the world that you could come across. You’re exploring the hillside when suddenly, off in the distance, you see a creepy, run-down town. I can only imagine how tense the walk toward the town would be, let alone how intense the game would get once I made my way in.

Maybe I’m way off on all of this and the game will be a 3rd-Person solo mission starring our boy, Leon Kennedy and it takes place years before the events of Resident Evil 7. While I think it would be interesting to play as middle-aged protagonists, something we rarely see, CAPCOM, may way want to keep its playable heroes as young as possible for as long as they can. To be honest, Resident Evil is easily my favorite franchise and as long as the teams at CAPCOM continue making them with the love and care that they’ve shown over the last several years, I have full confidence that Resident Evil 9 will be another classic that we can add to an already decorated franchise.