Resident Evil 4 (2005)

Resident Evil 4 is a 2005 survival horror game developed and published by Capcom for the GameCube. Players control the special agent Leon S. Kennedy on a mission to rescue the president of the United States's daughter, Ashley Graham, who has been abducted by a religious cult in rural Spain. Leon fights hordes of enemies infected by a mind-controlling parasite and reunites with the female spy and mercenary Ada Wong. In a departure from the fixed camera angles and slower gameplay of previous Resident Evil games, Resident Evil 4 features a dynamic camera system and action-horror oriented gameplay. Development began for the PlayStation 2 in 1999. Four proposed versions were discarded. The first was directed by Hideki Kamiya, but the series creator, Shinji Mikami, felt it was too great a departure, so it became a new game, Devil May Cry (2001). Other versions were discarded until Mikami took over as the director. Resident Evil 4 was announced as part of the Capcom Five, a collaboration between Capcom and Nintendo to create five exclusives for the GameCube. Resident Evil 4 received acclaim for its gameplay, graphics, story, characters, and voice acting, and won multiple Game of the Year awards. It was ported to numerous formats, and became a multi-platform hit, selling 15.2 million copies by March 2025. Resident Evil 4 is widely cited as one of the best and most influential video games ever made. It influenced the evolution of the survival horror and third-person genres, popularizing the "over-the-shoulder" third-person view used in games such as Gears of War, Dead Space, and The Last of Us. Resident Evil 5 was released in 2009 and a remake was released in 2023.