The upcoming Resident Evil 9: Requiem promises a harrowing return to the series' roots, but one key figure from the franchise's past is scratching his head over its central premise: the inexplicable survival of Raccoon City.
Kazuhiro Aoyama, the director of the 1999 classic Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, has expressed open confusion about how the iconic—and supposedly annihilated—Raccoon City and its famous police department are set to appear in the new game. His bewilderment stems from the fact that his original game was built around the city's total and utter destruction.
A City "Wiped Off the Map"
In a recent, wide-ranging interview with YouTuber Under The Mayo, Aoyama reflected on the deliberate finality of Nemesis. He recounted the game's cataclysmic finale, where a US Air Force thermobaric missile rains hellfire down on the zombie-infested metropolis, purging it in a single, devastating blast. The intent was to erase the epicenter of the T-Virus outbreak forever.
"The decision to obliterate the city was a very deliberate one," Aoyama explained, through a translator. "We wanted to 'close the book' on that chapter of the nightmare. It was a definitive ending."
This point was hammered home for players in the original game's closing text crawl, which unambiguously stated: “Raccoon City has been literally wiped off the map.” Landmarks like the Raccoon City Police Department (RCPD), the setting for the iconic Resident Evil 2, were understood to have been reduced to ashes and rubble.
The Resident Evil 3 Remake in 2020, while modernizing the story, maintained this core event. However, it softened the visual impact somewhat, panning away from the city as Jill Valentine escaped, showing it engulfed in massive plumes of smoke rather than the explicit fireball of the original.
Requiem's Post-Apocalyptic Anomaly
Fast forward to the reveals for Resident Evil 9: Requiem, and fans were shocked to see the remains of Raccoon City—including a heavily damaged but distinctly recognizable RCPD building—standing amid a post-apocalyptic haze. This directly contradicts the established lore that the city was vaporized.
Aoyama’s reaction was one of pure bafflement. In the interview, he admitted to being "confused" by the revelation. Under The Mayo's host, withholding specific plot details "out of professional courtesy," described the setting to him, which Aoyama found "interesting," to say the least.
The former director’s mind immediately went to the most fantastical explanation. "I wondered if 'time travel was involved,'" Aoyama joked, giving a glaring nod to the series' long-standing love for over-the-top B-movie tropes. While seemingly a quip, the comment resonates with fans who have seen the series flirt with timeline shenanigans and increasingly supernatural elements in recent years.
The New Director's Defense
This jarring retcon has not gone unnoticed by the fanbase, with many expressing skepticism online. However, Requiem's director, Koshi Nakanishi, appears to be leaning into the ambiguity.
In a separate interview, Nakanishi acknowledged the stretch in logic. “Revisiting some of these iconic locations isn’t necessarily realistic,” he conceded, confirming that the development team was aware of the canonical headache they were creating.
But how does he justify it? During a follow-up discussion at Gamescom 2025, Nakanishi offered a glimpse into the team's thought process, which seems to rely on a selective interpretation of the bomb's blast radius.
"I won’t say we went into a physics simulation of exactly how it was affected by the bomb," Nakanishi stated. "But we were like, ‘Okay, well, this is where the bomb landed in the city. Then this would be the blast zone, you know, the shock wave would maybe travel into these areas, and that’s how they’d be affected.’"
This explanation, while attempting to ground the decision in a semblance of logic, has done little to quell the debate. For many, it feels like a hand-wave to facilitate a nostalgic return to the series' most famous location.
For more details from the development team, you can read the full interview on GSMGoTech.
The contradiction sets the stage for one of Resident Evil 9: Requiem's biggest mysteries. Is it a simple retcon, a calculated narrative choice with an in-universe explanation, or, as Aoyama mused, something even more bizarre? Players will have to wait to uncover the truth when the game launches to see how Capcom justifies bringing a city back from the dead.
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