Resident Evil: Requiem on Nintendo Switch 2 ‘Wasn’t in the Original Plan’, Says Developer

At the most recent Nintendo Direct, Nintendo fans were blessed with the news that not one, not two, but three modern Resident Evil games would be coming to Nintendo Switch 2: Village, Requiem, and Biohazard. But according to Requiem’s developers, this wasn’t always the plan. In fact, the team didn’t originally plan to bring anything to the Switch 2 at all.

Speaking to me at Tokyo Game Show, producer Masato Kumazawa explains the story of how the Nintendo Switch 2 ended up with the three most modern Resident Evil games on their way to the system:

The Switch 2 hadn’t been announced when we started planning this game [Requiem], so of course it wasn’t in the original plan. When the Switch 2 was announced we were able to start testing developing games for it, and we thought it would be great if we could bring the Resident Evil series to this platform. We started off with internally porting Resident Evil: Village to see if it would work well on the hardware, and it looked really great, so that gave us the confidence to add a Switch 2 version of Reqiuem to the plans, and that led us to the recent announcement where we confirmed not only Reqiuem was coming, but 7 and 8 would also be coming to Nintendo Switch 2 at the same time.

It’s no surprise that Kumazawa is gassing up the Switch 2 port of his own game, but I played a brief section of Resident Evil: Requiem at Tokyo Game Show in handheld mode on the platform and…yeah, it looks pretty good! I asked him as a follow-up if there was anything unique about the Switch 2 version of the game, and his response that no, there isn’t, “in a good way.” It’s just Requiem, on the Switch 2, able to be taken on the go. And though my sampling of this experience was brief, I’m optimistic from that short demo that Kumazawa’s not just all talk here.

We previewed Resident Evil: Requiem just last month, and you can read our impressions of what we’ve seen so far right here. You can also check out the rest of my discussion with Nakanishi and Kumazawa, including continued efforts to get them to say something, anything, about Leon Kennedy, and why the pair are struggling to figure out what qualifies as “scary” after all these years. We’ve also previously spoken to the pair on a number of other topics, such as Raccoon City’s return and the game’s new monster design.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.