Resident Evil 3: Nemesis director admits confusion about Raccoon City's return in Resident Evil Requiem

The director of the 1999 classic, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, Kazuhiro Aoyama, is confused over the survival of Raccoon City and its landmarks, including the Raccoon City Police Department, in the upcoming Resident Evil 9: Requiem.

Aoyama spoke in a recent interview with YouTuber Under The Mayo. He told the YouTuber about the original game’s cataclysmic finale, where a thermobaric missile rains hellfire on the zombie-infested Raccoon City, completely annihilating it and reducing the RCPD to ashes.

The original game’s closing crawl drove home the point with the words: “Raccoon City has been literally wiped off the map.” It doesn’t get any more obvious than that.

Aoyama spearheaded Nemesis as an official sequel after the game’s initial spin-off concept. The decision to obliterate the city was a deliberate move to “close the book” on the outbreak’s epicenter, bringing an end to the game’s nightmare.

The game is set years after the events of Resident Evil 3 Remake. In Resident Evil 3 Remake, the ending maintains the destruction of Raccoon City, but pans away from the chaos, mainly focusing on Jill Valentine’s escape. In a way, Resident Evil 3 Remake softened the original’s missile impact, as Raccoon City was engulfed in plumes of smoke compared to the devastation seen in the original.

Fast forward to Resident Evil 9: Requiem, and the remains of Raccoon City and RCPD are still intact amid a post-apocalyptic haze. Aoyama was “confused” to say the least, as Under The Mayo’s host withheld the specifics “out of professional courtesy,” but described it as “interesting,” nonetheless.

Aoyama wondered if “time travel was involved.” It’s a glaring nod to the series’s liking of over-the-top B-movie tropes, though fans are not surprised, as Resident Evil has flirted with timeline shenanigans before.

Requiem director Koshi Nakanishi leaned into this ambiguity during the game’s development and acknowledged the stretch in logic, stating, “Revisiting some of these iconic locations isn’t necessarily realistic.”

Of course, fans expressed skepticism over the jarring retcon, but Nakanishi had this to say about it during an interview at Gamescom 2025:

I won’t say we went into a physics simulation of exactly how it was affected by the bomb. 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.’