The Development Of Leon S. Kennedy

It’s not just the words that tell the story in the medium of gaming. It’s how the words are given to you through your interactions with the gameplay world, your characters mechanics, and these small details can go a long way in making a game feel cohesively nuanced beyond its surface level. It’s an aspect that films, television shows, books and the like don’t have to worry about. Interactivity within the framework of their mediums is simply not possible to that degree. That’s not to say that any one medium is inherently “better” than the other, rather there are things that they each offer that the others do not.

Resident Evil 4’s remake impressed me on so many levels. It’s faithfulness to the original while deviating in smart and sensible ways, it’s ability to balance it’s campier tone (felt to astronomic degree in the original) with hard hitting reality of the situation it’s main characters find themselves in without straying into “overly self-serious” territory, but perhaps more than any other way I found it’s depiction of Leon Kennedy to be it’s most fulfilling. Followed up through its dialogue and character writing sure, but it is in the way Leon controlled that made his rescue of the President’s daughter from a hive minded cult all the more rewarding. 

For the sake of consistency we will be talking about the Resident Evil 2 and 4 Remakes respectively whilst fully acknowledging the impact that the original two games made back in their respective times.

Throughout the majority (if not all) of Resident Evil 2 Leon very much plays like a babyfaced rookie police officer. There’s a frantic energy to the whole affair, the realization that the fate of an entire city may rest at the hands of a gumshoe. Running through the Raccoon City Police Department trying your best to gauge whether or not you should dispatch with the zombified remains of the inhabitants or his ammunition would we better served for a better time. If grabbed by a zombie you are helpless to do anything other than to let it bite into you. You never have a chance to dodge. Even if you have a knife available in your inventory to break the grapple of an oncoming zombie should you decide to use it Leon will lose hold of the knife, echoing that Leon is clearly not experienced enough of a police officer to handle the challenges thrown at him with more aplomb and confidence. He cannot hide from the sight of enemies (with the exception of the blind lickers) or Mr. X. The lumbering titan sent by Umbrella to wipe any traces of their involvement in the Raccoon City disaster.

Fast forward to Resident Evil 4 not only are the enemies which Leon must make his way through faster, they can also throw weapons, dynamite, some wield deadly stun batons and in some cases, much larger than him. After years of special forces training, Leon is far more equipped not only to combat the enemies with more certainty mirroring that the time between games was spent jading him, preparing him for a mission of such responsibility of saving and looking after the president’s daughter, Ashley but it also gives Leon’s motivation of redemption (“this time it will be different, it has to be”) an extra bit of dimension as well rather than the “just another mission” tone of the original RE4.

When a villager is able to grab Leon in Resident Evil 4, he is no longer helpless to do anything about it. Mashing the prompted button allows Leon to break free of their grab, and so long as Leon has durability in his knife can aggressively shove it into his opponents neck as he wrenches it back without losing it in the process as he would have in Resident Evil 2. Additionally if Leon hits an enemy in the correct spot (usually the head) the player can rush up and have him roundhouse kick that enemy, knocking back all other enemies around, controlling the crowd. A crowd of zombies would’ve spelled the end for Leon in RE2. Recall the beginning of the game where your only choice is to run past the large group of them on your way to the police station.

I haven’t even mentioned my personal favorite mechanic of the game: the knife parry. If an enemy is using a melee weapon such as an axe or a sickle, if your timing is right, Leon can bounce the attack off of his knife, a satisfying *CLANG* in tow and go in for the roundhouse kick as he would with a pistol round adding an extra dynamic of anticipation in the face of danger close.

At practically every turn Leon was at the behest of someone else’s orders. Marvin, Ada, it was usually someone else or something else setting Leon on his path, giving him his objectives. With Ashley and Luis in RE4, he is always undoubtedly the one calling the shots within his own party. And with Ashley quite literally as strategically managing her placement and actions remains a key tenet of RE4’s design philosophy (even if some of that strategy was unfortunately stripped away.) It gives way to a prepared, and in command characterization whilst depicting balanced human characteristics I did not expect. He is as aware of the gravity of his mission as he is enjoying the action, quipping away at the adversaries he comes to face. 

A particular scene about halfway through after Ashley is controlled by Las Plagas pulls a knife on Leon and runs away from him in fear of what she might do after she breaks free. What gave way was a surprisingly quiet and subdued as Leon finds Ashley crying on a couch, crying to herself as she tells Leon to stay back, desperation in her voice as she tells Leon “I wasn’t myself” to which an empathetic Leon replies “that must have been terrifying I-I know.” Leon reminds her that “we have to do this, together.” Maybe somewhere inside him, he remembers a time where he was more scared than assured that night in ’98.

There was always a bit of cognitive dissonance between the original RE2 and RE4 when it came to Leon. It felt like a completely different person from that we knew of in Raccoon City. Not the case here. Not the case here. But in fairness to Capcom of the 2000s, I don’t think there was nearly as much of an effort to keep a narrative through-line between the original games, whereas the current Resident Evil team clearly set that as a priority going into development. 

The prevailing interpretation I’ve come away from this work with is that the voluntary collective of the few is able to do more good for a situation than the enforced collective of the many. It is through the aforementioned mechanics of the game and how it is written that that message is given credence and credibility. While the quality of writing is many notches higher than that of the original it is in its gameplay that the heart and soul of Resident Evil is always found, and found no better than it is here.