Resident Evil’s story in order, from Umbrella’s founding to Requiem. Each era sums up what happened, who was there and why it matters later, with links to the chapter, character or file in the guide where you see it. At the end of each one you get the page that tells it in depth. Dates are in-universe, not release dates.
1968–1997: Umbrella
The story starts before Umbrella. In the 1950s a British medical student, Oswell E. Spencer, collapses in the snow on a trip through Eastern Europe and is rescued by the priestess of an isolated village, Mother Miranda. He stays on as her student and learns how a fungus, the Mold, transforms the human body. He ends up leaving because their goals differ: she wants to bring one person back to life; he wants to change the world, and the Mold does not spread well enough for that. Spencer tells it himself in his letter to Miranda, which you find in her lab in Village.
He finds the key in Africa. In December 1966 Spencer, the virologist James Marcus and the aristocrat Edward Ashford set up the Progenitor virus project, drawn from the Stairway to the Sun, the poisonous flower the Ndipaya tribe used to choose its kings. In the 1960s, says the file on the Ndipaya tribe, a corporation takes their Sun Garden from them by force. In 1968 the three found Umbrella, a pharmaceutical company that serves as a front for their biological research (the history of Resident Evil). Spencer writes to Miranda that he will name it after the symbol in the cave they talked about: Umbrella’s logo is the crest of the Four Houses of Miranda’s village. Ashford dies that same year, infected by the Progenitor.
In the Arklay Mountains, next to Raccoon City, Spencer has already had a mansion built with a lab beneath it; there Umbrella also opens an executive training school run by Marcus. On 13 January 1978 Marcus signs the telegram that changes everything: “T-Virus development a success” (the telegram from James Marcus). The t-Virus kills its victims and brings them back as zombies, and turns animals into creatures; from there Umbrella designs biological weapons, the B.O.W.s. Two of Marcus’s brightest students, Albert Wesker and William Birkin, take his work to the Arklay lab. In 1988, on Spencer’s orders, Wesker assassinates Marcus.
Wesker is no ordinary employee. Since the late 1960s Spencer has run a eugenics programme: gifted children raised by his foundation under the surname Wesker, to be infected as adults with a Progenitor strain. Albert is subject 013; another of those children, Alex, is 012 (test subjects). Albert will not learn the truth until 2006.
From 1988 the projects multiply. Under Birkin’s direction the Tyrant programme begins, a humanoid B.O.W.; a European Umbrella lab works on the Nemesis, a parasite that makes its host intelligent; and William and Annette Birkin develop the G-Virus in NEST, an underground lab beneath Raccoon City built from 1991. The Ashfords had long gone their own way: the young Alexia Ashford had created T-Veronica, tested it on her father and in December 1983 injected herself to enter a fifteen-year cryogenic sleep.
Resident Evil Requiem adds what Spencer was hiding under it all. In 1980 he draws up a plan that runs through the Wesker Project and the t-Virus and ends in a secret lab under Raccoon City, the ARK, and a project called Elpis. In the 1980s the ARK raises cloned children in the city orphanage to pass Spencer’s memories on to them through blood. In February 1990 the Series 60 clones kill the orphanage staff: you play it as Chloe, the first of Series 70, in Requiem’s chapter 11 (Series 60 results). According to the report Grace writes at the end of Requiem, Elpis is finished in the mid-1990s.
And someone else is already watching. The same report says that in 1986 a front foundation of The Connections, an international bioweapons syndicate, paid Marcus 30 million dollars. In 1996 Wesker, by then in Umbrella’s information department, is made captain of the Raccoon City police’s new S.T.A.R.S. unit.
In depth: Umbrella and Wesker.
1998: Raccoon City
In May 1998 the t-Virus leaks in the Arklay lab and the attacks in the forest begin. On 23 July the police send in the S.T.A.R.S. Bravo Team. Its medic, Rebecca Chambers, and an escaped convict, Billy Coen, discover on a train and in Umbrella’s old training school that Marcus created the t-Virus and that a queen leech has taken his form to get its revenge (Resident Evil 0). The next day Alpha Team goes in: Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, Barry Burton and their captain, Wesker.
The Spencer Mansion is the door to the lab, full of zombies and B.O.W.s. Wesker is the mole: he works for Umbrella, has brought his own team there to gather combat data and has blackmailed Barry by threatening his family. He releases the Tyrant, which impales him, and the survivors (Chris, Jill, Barry, Rebecca and the pilot Brad Vickers) escape as the lab blows up (Resident Evil). But Wesker had injected a virus from Birkin that brings him back to life with superhuman strength and speed. Umbrella writes him off: its 28 August report lowers Project W’s success rate to 18% (the report on Project W).
Nobody believes S.T.A.R.S., and the unit is disbanded. On the night of 22–23 September an Umbrella squad raids Birkin’s lab to steal the G-Virus; Birkin, wounded, injects it, becomes “G”, kills the soldiers, and the t-Virus reaches the sewers. Within a week Raccoon City is lost. Among those trapped are eight civilians from a bar, and one of them is the journalist Alyssa Ashcroft, Grace’s future adoptive mother (Resident Evil Outbreak).
Jill is still in the city. Umbrella unleashes the Nemesis, a Tyrant with a parasite that makes it intelligent, to wipe out the remaining S.T.A.R.S.; Jill runs with Carlos Oliveira, an Umbrella mercenary, is infected, and Carlos gets her a vaccine (Resident Evil 3). On the night of 29 September Leon S. Kennedy, a rookie cop on his first day, arrives with Claire Redfield, who is looking for her brother Chris. At the police station they find Lieutenant Marvin Branagh and the last officers (the 1998 veterans); it is the same station Leon walks into again 28 years later, in Requiem’s chapter 10.
Claire protects Sherry Birkin, William’s daughter, whom her monstrous father hunts to implant an embryo in her; her mother, Annette, gives Claire the way to make the vaccine that saves her (Sherry and the Raccoon City incident). Leon teams up with Ada Wong, who says she is looking for her boyfriend (in the remake, that she is an FBI agent) and is really a spy sent by Wesker to steal the G-Virus for a rival of Umbrella (Ada and Raccoon City). On the morning of 30 September NEST self-destructs, Birkin dies and Leon, Claire and Sherry escape by train (Resident Evil 2). Its two routes contradict each other; later games take pieces from both.
On 1 October, at dawn, a US government missile levels Raccoon City: at least 100,000 dead. Jill and Carlos get out at the last moment (in the original Barry picks them up by helicopter; in the 2020 remake they fly out alone). Leon swears it will never happen again (Leon and the Raccoon City incident). The official story is that the outbreak had to be sterilised (the report on the Raccoon City incident).
Requiem tells another. The Connections had already secured the ARK and lobbied for the strike to destroy the evidence and pin the blame on Spencer alone. In the minutes of their first assembly, “The Defense” objects that there is no presidential authorization and one “K.D.” answers that the organization is involved (the first assembly minutes). A redacted memo to the White House asks for action “for the sake of Elpis” (the special directive for Raccoon City).
In depth: Raccoon City and the games with no guide.
1998–2004: The fall of Umbrella
Leon and Sherry end up in the army’s hands. Adam Benford, an official who will one day be President, offers Leon a deal: his silence and his service in exchange for the girl’s safety. Leon trains as an agent in a government team set up to hunt Umbrella (the DSO, which he is often linked with, will not exist until 2011). Sherry grows up in custody, studied for her G-Virus and shielded from Wesker, with Derek C. Simmons as her legal guardian, a senior official who will use her for his own research (a deal with the United States).
Claire is still looking for Chris. In December 1998 she is captured at an Umbrella facility in Paris and sent to Rockfort Island, an Umbrella prison and training base run by Alfred Ashford. An attack by Wesker’s organization releases the t-Virus there; Claire escapes with another prisoner, Steve Burnside, to Umbrella’s Antarctic base, where Alexia wakes from her sleep. Chris comes to rescue his sister and finds Wesker alive, superhuman and working for a rival of Umbrella, hunting T-Veronica. Steve dies, Wesker takes his body and Chris kills Alexia (Resident Evil – Code: Veronica).
Chris and Jill form their own group against Umbrella. In February 2003 they raid the company’s last major facility, a chemical plant in Russia. Wesker slips in at the same time, takes all of Umbrella’s data and hands excerpts to the courts (Umbrella Chronicles). In 2003 Umbrella is found guilty on all charges and goes bankrupt; its last branch is liquidated in March 2004, and Requiem dates the bankruptcy to 2004. Spencer, under an international arrest warrant, hides on his estate in Europe.
Umbrella’s B.O.W.s reach the black market and end up with terrorists and guerrillas. To stop them, a pharmaceutical consortium that saved itself by helping convict Umbrella founds the BSAA, an anti-bioterrorism alliance that starts with only eleven members, Chris and Jill among them, and later comes under the UN (the BSAA).
Leon’s first mission as an agent comes in 2002, in South America, alongside Jack Krauser, against a drug lord who had bought T-Veronica (Darkside Chronicles). That same year Krauser fakes his death and joins Wesker. Wesker, for his part, puts Umbrella’s archives to work for another company, Tricell, through its geneticist Excella Gionne.
The Connections take their cut too. According to Requiem, they steer the trials and the liquidation to get hold of what Umbrella leaves behind. One of their allies, the former t-Virus researcher Victor Gideon, skips the trials and buys a care center near Raccoon City once funded by Spencer’s foundation (the report on Victor Gideon).
In the summer of 2004 the world finally sees B.O.W.s in public: the terrorist group Il Veltro attacks Terragrigia, a floating city in the Mediterranean, and the city is destroyed (Revelations). And Spencer, old and in hiding, has adopted an orphan girl, Grace: in November and December 2004 Victor writes in his journal that his master’s research is about to bear fruit and that “that child” is the final piece (Victor’s journal).
In depth: Umbrella, Wesker and the games with no guide.
2004: Las Plagas
In the autumn of 2004 Leon, now a government agent, gets his most famous mission: rescue Ashley Graham, the US President’s daughter, kidnapped on her way home from college (info on Ashley). The trail leads to a rural village in Spain (Resident Evil 4, chapter 1-1).
There, Los Iluminados rule: a cult that worships Las Plagas, parasites that control their host. For centuries the Salazars, the region’s castellans, kept the remains of the Plagas sealed under their castle (the castellan memo). The young heir, Ramón Salazar, broke the seal under the sway of Osmund Saddler, a charismatic leader who won over the village chief, Bitores Méndez, and through him every villager. Those who carry a Plaga are the Ganados.
Saddler’s plan is to infect Ashley and send her home so the Plaga spreads through the President’s circle (our plan). Leon is injected with one too while he is unconscious. He finds out in chapter 2-1, when he finds Ashley in the church and Saddler reveals that both of them carry his parasite.
They are not the only ones interested. Luis Sera, the biologist who designed the Dominant Plaga for Saddler, the one that can command the others, wants out and has asked for help outside. His leak reaches the rival of Umbrella that Ada works for and Wesker, who sends Krauser first to infiltrate the cult (it is Krauser who kidnaps Ashley to win Saddler’s trust) and then Ada (Sera and the 3rd party). Ada plays both sides: her real employers have told her only to pretend to serve Wesker.
Leon crosses the village, kills Méndez in chapter 2-3 and enters the castle. In chapter 3-3 Saddler kills Luis and takes back the sample, but Luis manages to give Leon the pills that hold his Plaga back. Salazar merges with the Queen Plaga and falls in chapter 4-4 (the Salazar fight). On the island Krauser drops the mask: in the knife duel of chapter 5-3 he admits he kidnapped Ashley to get the sample, and Leon beats him (the Krauser fight). Ada finishes him off later, as Separate Ways shows.
In chapter 5-4 the pilot Mike is shot down and Luis’s machine removes the Plagas from Leon and Ashley. In the final chapter Ada throws Leon a special rocket launcher, Saddler dies, and Ada takes the sample at gunpoint and leaves him the jet-ski key to escape (our mission). The Separate Ways mode tells the same days from Ada’s side: she rings the bell that saves Leon in the village, rescues Luis, sinks Saddler’s warship and ends Krauser. Assignment Ada, the other extra mode, is not canon.
Where do the samples go? Wesker had sent Ada after them, just as he sent her after the G-Virus in 1998 (Ada and Raccoon City), but she hands the Dominant Plaga to her employers and sends him a Subordinate one. Wesker then recovers a Dominant one from Krauser’s body. From it, and from Tricell’s money, come the Type 2 and Type 3 Plagas of Africa. What is left of Los Iluminados will keep selling Plagas for years, and the Spanish government quarantines the region.
In depth: Las Plagas and Wesker.
2005–2009: Tricell and the end of Wesker
In 2005 Jill and Chris, now in the BSAA, find out aboard the cruise ship Queen Zenobia that the head of a US anti-terror agency, the FBC, had armed the Terragrigia terrorists himself (Revelations); the FBC is dissolved and by the end of that year the BSAA comes under the UN. In November the CG film Degeneration brings Leon together with Claire, who now works for the NGO TerraSave, in an outbreak at Harvardville Airport; at the end Tricell buys the guilty pharmaceutical company and takes its G-Virus samples. In 2006 the CG series Infinite Darkness teams them up again against a conspiracy inside the US government itself.
In August 2006 Spencer, old and ill, has his butler Patrick leak his whereabouts to Wesker (Patrick’s memoirs 3). When Wesker arrives, Spencer tells him the truth: he is a product of Project W, and Spencer’s plan was to force human evolution with a virus and become a god (Albert Wesker). Wesker kills him. The BSAA, tipped off, sends Chris and Jill to arrest Spencer; they find him dead and Wesker standing over the body. Jill tackles Wesker through a window and both fall over the cliff. You play it in Lost in Nightmares (the Wesker fight). In November Jill is declared dead.
Jill did not die. Wesker keeps her and finds that the t-Virus antibodies left in her since 1998 let him tame his new project: Uroboros, a Progenitor strain meant to kill all of humanity except the genetically “worthy”. Jill becomes his agent, drugged and controlled by a device on her chest. Tricell provides the money and the lab, built in Umbrella’s old African center under the Ndipaya ruins, where the Progenitor was found.
In March 2009 the BSAA sends Chris to Kijuju, in Africa, to capture Ricardo Irving, a bioweapons dealer. His new partner is waiting there: Sheva Alomar (Resident Evil 5, chapter 1-1). The town is a testing ground: its people, the Majini, carry Type 2 Plagas, which take over the host in seconds (Type 2 Plagas). A photo in chapter 2-1 makes Chris think Jill is still alive. Irving injects a Dominant Plaga and dies in chapter 3-3 (the Irving fight), but not before pointing to some caves and to Excella.
In chapter 5-3 Chris finds Jill: she is the masked woman at Wesker’s side. Chris and Sheva tear the device off her (the Monarch Room fight). Jill escapes with the BSAA soldier Josh Stone and finds Wesker’s weak spot: the serum he needs to keep his powers stable poisons him in high doses (Desperate Escape, Serum PG67A/W).
On Tricell’s ship Wesker injects Excella with Uroboros and turns her into a monster (Uroboros Aheri). In that chapter you find the Project W report, signed “Alex W.”, and the notebook in which Spencer ordered the whole staff of his African center wiped out (Spencer’s notebook). Wesker’s plan is to release Uroboros from a bomber at high altitude so the wind carries it across the planet (the Uroboros plan). In chapter 6-3, on 7 March 2009, Chris and Sheva inject him with two overdoses of serum, chase him into a volcano and finish him with two rocket launchers (Uroboros Wesker).
Wesker dies, but he leaves a legacy: a son he never knew, the other survivor of Project W, and a Tricell that has already sold B.O.W.s to half the world. With him dead, Sherry’s custody ends and she becomes a government agent.
In depth: Wesker, Las Plagas, bioterrorism and the games with no guide.
2011–2013: The C-Virus
With Umbrella and Wesker gone, the threat is no longer a company but a market. In 2011 President Adam Benford creates the DSO, an anti-terror agency reporting directly to him, and Leon is one of its founding members. That year, in the CG film Damnation, Leon slips into an Eastern European civil war where the rebels use Plagas and Ada steals another sample. On an island in the Baltic, Claire and Barry face Alex Wesker, the other survivor of Project W, who does not come out alive (Revelations 2).
The new enemy is in the White House. Derek C. Simmons, the National Security Advisor, leads The Family, a secret society older than the United States that, from the caverns under Tall Oaks Cathedral, keeps buried everything that ties the country to Umbrella (The Family). Since 2001 his scientist Carla Radames has been developing the C-Virus from T-Veronica and the G-Virus. Simmons, obsessed with Ada, who worked for him before 1998, orders a strain carrying her DNA. In 2009 it works, on Carla herself, who is turned into a copy of Ada (two Ada Wongs). Broken and bent on revenge, Carla founds Neo-Umbrella to destroy Simmons and, while she is at it, the world.
On 24 December 2012, in the republic of Edonia, Carla, posing as Ada, turns Chris’s BSAA unit into monsters with a needle bomb. Only Chris and his sniper, Piers Nivans, survive; Chris loses his memory and spends six months drinking in Eastern Europe (Chris chapter 2). That same night Sherry finds Jake Muller, a mercenary whose blood resists the virus: he is Wesker’s son (Jake chapter 1, Jake Muller’s infamous father). A huge B.O.W., the Ustanak, hunts them, and they end up held for six months while Carla uses Jake’s blood to improve the virus.
On 29 June 2013 the C-Virus breaks out in the US city of Tall Oaks just as Benford was about to reveal the truth about Raccoon City. Benford turns and Leon has to shoot him (Resident Evil 6, Leon chapter 1, Leon and Adam). With him is Helena Harper of the Secret Service, who opened a gap in the President’s security because Simmons was holding her sister, Deborah. Under the cathedral they find The Family’s lair; Deborah dies mutated (the Deborah fight) and Simmons bombs the city to erase the evidence.
Between 30 June and 1 July everyone converges on Lanshiang, in China. Chris, whom Piers has brought back, hunts “Ada”; Jake and Sherry escape; Leon and Helena come after Simmons, and the real Ada, framed by Carla, crosses paths with them all. On Neo-Umbrella’s aircraft carrier a Family gunman shoots Carla; she injects the enhanced virus and Ada kills her (Ada chapter 4, the Carla fight). Simmons, infected on Carla’s orders, transforms again and again until Leon, Helena and Ada finish him at the Quad Tower (Leon chapter 5).
In Carla’s undersea lab Piers injects the C-Virus to defeat the Haos and dies saving Chris (Chris chapter 5). Jake ends the Ustanak and his blood yields the vaccine (C-Virus vaccine); he cuts his fee to 50 dollars and goes off to fight B.O.W.s under another identity. Helena and Leon are cleared at Deborah’s grave.
What RE6 leaves behind: a President murdered so he would not talk about Raccoon City, a vaccine, a Chris back in command, a Sherry in the DSO and a Family that outlives its leader.
In depth: bioterrorism, Wesker and the games with no guide.
2014–2021: The Mold and the Winters
The old heroes are still active in two CG films: in Vendetta (2014) Chris, Leon and Rebecca stop a virus in New York made with Plagas from Los Iluminados, and in Death Island (2015) Jill returns to duty on Alcatraz. Umbrella is back too, but changed: since 2007 its remains have been a company that fights biological weapons instead of making them, with a blue logo “as atonement” (the letter regarding Umbrella’s goals).
The threat to come is a different one, and older. In 1919 the Spanish flu kills Eva, the daughter of Miranda. In despair, Miranda goes down into a cave under her village and finds the Megamycete, the core of a Mold colony that stores the consciousness of everything it absorbs. She comes back with power, calls herself Mother Miranda, subdues the village’s Four Houses and spends a century looking for a body in which to revive Eva (Miranda’s diary). In the 1990s or around 2000 she gives samples to The Connections, who use the Mold to build mind-controlling bioweapons; the E series culminates in Eveline, a girl of about ten (R&D report 1).
Mia Winters works for The Connections without her husband, Ethan, knowing. In October 2014, while she and Alan Droney move Eveline on the tanker Annabelle posing as her parents, the girl breaks loose, infects the crew and the ship runs aground in the Dulvey bayou, in Louisiana (orders, chapter 6). Jack Baker and his family take in Mia and Eveline; within days the mold has turned them into the Bakers you know. The son, Lucas, becomes an agent of The Connections (email log). In January 2016 a local paper reports that more than 20 people have gone missing in the area; the byline is Alyssa Ashcroft’s (over 20 missing).
In July 2017 Ethan Winters gets an email from Mia, missing for three years, and goes to look for her (Resident Evil 7, chapter 1). Jack kills him soon after he arrives, though neither of them knows it: the mold had already replaced him and keeps him going, something not revealed until Village. Ethan survives the Bakers, chooses to save Mia (the ending that counts) and in chapter 8 kills Eveline, who without her medication has aged into the old woman in the wheelchair (the Eveline fight). Chris turns up in a helicopter bearing the Umbrella logo.
Two stories close Dulvey. In Not a Hero, Chris, on loan to the new Umbrella, hunts Lucas through the salt mine and kills him (Mutated Lucas), but Lucas has already sent his data to The Connections. In End of Zoe, Joe Baker saves his niece Zoe and ends what was left of Jack. The BSAA walls off the bayou and calls it a gas leak; in exchange for her cooperation Mia’s past is kept secret, and the Winters move to Eastern Europe under new identities.
Chris does not forgive the cover-up. In 2018 he takes the Hound Wolf Squad without authorization and spends three years hunting Miranda and The Connections. On 2 August 2020 Rose is born, the daughter of two mold-altered parents; The Connections tell Miranda, who sees in her the perfect body for Eva. On 9 February 2021 Chris storms the Winters’ home and shoots “Mia”, who is Miranda in disguise, and Rose disappears (Resident Evil Village, chapter 1).
Ethan searches for her through Miranda’s village. Miranda has split Rose into four flasks and handed them to the four lords: Alcina Dimitrescu, Donna Beneviento, Salvatore Moreau and Karl Heisenberg. He beats them one by one, from chapter 4 to chapter 11; Heisenberg wanted to use Ethan and Rose to rise against Miranda. In chapter 12, on 10 February, Ethan learns he has been dead since 2017, kills Mother Miranda, hands Rose to Chris and dies destroying the Megamycete. In Miranda’s lab lies Spencer’s letter: Umbrella’s founder was her student. And Chris’s team finds that the BSAA has sent bioweapons dressed as soldiers into the village.
In depth: the Mold.
2026: Requiem
Twenty-eight years after the missile, in October 2026, the story returns to Raccoon City (Resident Evil Requiem). Several survivors of 1998 have died mysteriously. It is Raccoon City Syndrome: the t-Virus left in their bodies wakes up over the years and, in its last stage, kills within one or two hours (the report on Raccoon City Syndrome). Leon, now a DSO agent, has it; so does Sherry, who guides him over the radio.
Grace Ashcroft, an FBI analyst, is sent to a body at the Wrenwood Hotel, the same place where in 2018 a hooded man killed her mother, Alyssa, in front of her (Alyssa’s journal, chapter 1). It is a trap: Victor Gideon is waiting, kidnaps her and takes her to his Rhodes Hill care center. Leon goes after them.
Victor is obsessed with Spencer and with Elpis, which he believes is a mind-control virus. He thinks Grace is a clone who carries Spencer’s memories and the Elpis password in her blood. At the care center he has raised clones modelled on Grace’s genetic records: the blind girl Emily and Marie, The Girl, who stalks Grace until sunlight dissolves her in chapter 8 (the last fight with The Girl). In the same chapter Emily dies, mutates, and Leon has to shoot her (Emily, mutated).
Grace leaves with Victor and his boss, Zeno, a high-ranking member of The Connections with powers very like Wesker’s, to find out what Elpis is. At the police station Zeno tells her his version: The Connections lobbied, with help from Simmons’s Family, for the 1998 missile strike to hide Elpis; Benford died for trying to tell; and Grace is “the original” behind all the clones. He shows her the 1990 orphanage recording (chapter 11). Zeno is unknowingly repeating Victor’s mistaken theory.
Leon kills the Tyrant Zeno sets on him, goes down through the orphanage and reaches the ARK, The Connections’ North American bioweapons factory since 1998 (chapter 13, the Raccoon City bioweapon research report). In the minutes of their assemblies, The Connections boast of having the BSAA “fully under our control” (the 51st assembly minutes). Leon, in the final stage of the syndrome, makes Grace promise to destroy Elpis.
The answer is on the disk Alyssa left behind: her interview with Spencer, old and remorseful. Grace is not a clone but an ordinary girl whom Spencer adopted and whose care his will entrusted to Alyssa (Alyssa’s interview notes, the letter from Patrick, chapter 15). Elpis, Greek for “hope”, does not control minds: it is an antiviral that neutralizes the t-Virus, the G-Virus and the syndrome. Spencer made it as atonement.
In the ending that counts, Grace types “Hope” and releases Elpis. Zeno injects it, convinced it is a weapon, and loses his powers; Victor, who carries a Nemesis parasite inside him, beheads him, keeps a vial and tries to destroy the ARK. Grace cures Leon with Elpis and Leon kills Victor (the Victor Gideon fight). Umber Eyes of the Hound Wolf Squad gets them out, sent by a Chris who never appears. Leon cures Sherry, Emily turns out to be alive and Grace adopts her. In the other ending Grace destroys Elpis and Zeno kills Leon.
Requiem joins the saga’s two continuities: it follows the remake versions of Resident Evil 2 and 3, and it changes the meaning of the 1998 missile, which was no longer containment but an operation by The Connections to seize the ARK and blame Spencer.
In depth: Requiem and Raccoon City.
What comes next
The furthest point in the story is 2037. In Shadows of Rose, Village’s DLC, Rose is sixteen, lives under US government protection and wants to be rid of her powers. She enters the memory of a fragment of the Megamycete, where “Michael”, what remains of Ethan’s consciousness, helps her against the Masked Duke. There she defeats the echo of Miranda, who wanted her body, decides to keep her powers and says goodbye to her father (Shadows of Rose chapter 3).
Requiem leaves loose ends. After the credits, soldiers, most likely The Connections’, move through the ruins of the ARK “before they send in the wolves”. Nobody knows where Chris is or what his message to Leon said. The body of The Commander, head of The Connections’ guard, disappears. Zeno’s powers are never explained. And any survivor of 1998 could have the syndrome, with only a few vials of Elpis in the world.
Capcom has announced a story expansion for Requiem, with no title, date or content known as of late September 2026, and a Code: Veronica remake, Resident Evil Veronica, for 2027.
The live-action films, from Paul W. S. Anderson’s series to Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil (2026), are not part of this story: they are separate continuities with their own rules. You will find them in films and series.
In depth: the Mold, Requiem and the timeline.