Arcades spawned the Resident Evil virus

Requiem continues the series’ balance of arcade replayability and AAA depth.

By Marc Normandin | March 7, 2026 | 8:00am

Image: Capcom

Games Features Resident Evil

Good Resident Evil games share a number of essential traits. Scares and thrills are a must, of course. Grotesque enemies, likable characters, the occasional boulder-punching. Something that remains up for debate is the precise mix of horror and action that makes for a good Resident Evil. Regardless of where that particular scale tilts, these games are capable of greatness so long as an important metric is hit: replayability.

From the start, Resident Evil games have had an arcade spirit within them, encouraging players to come back again and again. You can complete a Resident Evil one time and walk away satisfied, but you won’t see all that the game is about if you do that. The goal here—one designers have to work hard to achieve with their games—is to be played and replayed until you achieve a perfect run. Resident Evil games are graded on accurate, efficient shooting, with emphasis on saving your game as little as possible, and even, on occasion, factoring in how often you heal. You can carry over your inventory and upgrades into New Game+, which is regularly the only way to fully upgrade your arsenal. The final difficulty levels are built with this kind of progress in mind, along with the addition of infinite ammo. Once all the weapons and full health and such are in place, it’s just pure speed and adrenaline and efficiency available to you thanks to the reps you have put in and the knowledge you have gained as you make your way through mansions and police stations and ruins and strange European villages.

Consider that part of the reason the remake of Resident Evil 4 felt so much tougher than the original at first was not just because of rebalancing and redesign, but because you were starting from scratch rather than building on a save you began two decades and many runs ago. The second run through Resident Evil 4 is different from the first, and the third and fourth and 10th are each even more different, as, like protagonist Leon Kenny, you become more experienced, more confident, more capable of the job than before.

The very first Resident Evil is not as action-oriented as later entries, but even this game showcases the approach toward achieving a singular run after continual practice. How quickly you, as Jill Valentine or pre-swole Chris Redfield, can get through the mansion, whether you can save the likes of S.T.A.R.S. members Barry Burton and Rebecca Chambers, how the choices you make influence the story in ways that won’t necessarily give you the best ending or results—all of this plays a part, as do even smaller decisions like letting certain zombies live or die, which can impact your game later as they mutate into stronger foes. Resident Evil 2 has its campaigns overlap such that picking up certain items in one game can make another more difficult, since they will not be there for the other character in their run—it adds intrigue, but it’s also another point of optimization to concern yourself with, to determine whether the additional item space better serves you as Leon or as Claire, now knowing what you know about both. Resident Evil 3 is linear in comparison to its predecessors, but its comparative simplicity also encourages you even more to get from the start to the end in the most efficient manner possible through repeated plays.

Some Resident Evil games include a rank system, meaning adaptive difficulty—that’s straight from the arcades and the world of shoot ‘em ups. In order to master an arcade game with a rank system, you need to know when to shoot, when to not shoot, how often to kill, and to balance the idea of scoring with the idea of survival, as the game will respond to your success by attempting to kill you even more aggressively than it already was. “Score vs. survival” is at the heart of so many arcade experiences, to the point that games played with one in mind have to be approached differently than the other. Resident Evil, whether third-person or first-, if it’s a modern shooter or has tank controls, is still built with those same principles in mind.

That design makes those decisions about which zombies to kill and which to let live even more vital, with every potential kill featuring its own decisions in terms of which bit of limited ammunition you want to use. Every round fired is one you will not have for later on, meaning you have to prioritize your short- and long-term survival in every encounter, deciding if you will use a handgun this time instead of a shotgun, or attempting to get by with a knife or just running past your enemies. Some Resident Evils, like 5, might be more generous with how much ammunition you get, but they also up the ante in other ways, with screen-filling enemies and larger hordes of zombies to fight off. You are still making decisions about what weapon to use and what resources to prioritize.

Resident Evil might be a massive AAA franchise at this point 30 years in, but from the original all the way up to 2026’s Resident Evil Requiem, this design is load-bearing. The arcade foundation holds everything up. Requiem’s zombies are undead in a way similar to the original’s, in that you kill them but they eventually mutate into more difficult and problematic foes, anyway. Choices must be made about how to handle them—use more ammunition to get the job done once and for all, craft special injections that will end them for good, or just run right on by and hope for the best? The answer depends on your overall goal, your focus on “score” vs. survival, and the resources you have saved up.

That this is the case should not be a surprise given Capcom’s own arcade roots, as well as the tastes of the director of the first Resident Evil, Shinji Mikami. Resident Evil might have gotten bigger and flashier over the years, but at the heart of all of these experiences are arcade-guided designs for replayability and perfection. Mikami would implement them in the oft-misunderstood P.N.03, one of the Capcom Five, as well as its spiritual sequel Vanquish; both of these games are meant to first be played on their lowest difficulties to familiarize you with the concepts and layouts and enemies, to give you time to upgrade your possible loadouts, and then you play on progressively higher difficulties until you have actually experienced the true game.

They might skew more toward the arcade sensibilities and design than the AAA side instead of finding the same balance as Resident Evil, but, like with another Mikami joint, the Playstation 2 title God Hand, that lack of balance there has its own appeal that only highlights and reinforces the delicate nature of Resident Evil’s design throughout the years. Resident Evil is a healthy marriage of two seemingly opposed forces, arcade and AAA games, and that has made it one of the most successful franchises in the industry for decades, instead of a cult classic referenced in articles about more popular games to help the reader better understand the one they know and love. Play, then play again—only better this time, every time.

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