Resident Evil Requiem Director and Producer Address Lack of Leon, Not “Passing The Torch”

Rumors circulated before Tokyo Game Show about the supposed reveal of Leon S. Kennedy in Capcom’s Resident Evil Requiem. One State of Play and PlayStation Japan stage event later, and that confirmation is still pending. While IGN did witness a new trailer, Leon was nowhere to be found.

Upon bringing this up to game director Koshi Nakanishi and producer Masato Kumazama at TGS, they laughed, and the latter said, “We will take on board this feedback.” When asked if there’s any concern about the rumors and whether they affected Grace’s position as the only (to our knowledge) playable character, the latter said, “We’re always happy that people are interested in the game enough to speculate so much.”

Interestingly, Kumazawa was more candid about Requiem being a potential “passing of the torch” moment for the franchise…which is to say, it isn’t. “Although we don’t have firm plans for the future storylines of later titles in the series, I still think passing the torch is probably going a bit too far, because we’re not just going to wipe the slate clean completely in terms of the series lore and history.

“But at the same time, I don’t want to always have to just go back to the well of existing characters to create new games, which was part of the motivation to introduce Grace.”

Resident Evil Requiem launches on February 27th, 2026, for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2. Surprisingly, there initially weren’t plans to release it on Nintendo’s console. You can read more on that here or check out some admittedly impressive off-screen footage of the game in handheld mode.