Resident Evil is my favorite video game franchise ever, and it's all because of Leon Scott Kennedy. His calm-in-the-face-of-danger, middle-part-framed face defined cool to my seven-year-old self in 1998's Resident Evil 2. Now, it's 2025, I'm no longer seven (I'll let you do the math), Leon's pushing 50, and I'm ready for some more new blood in Resident Evil Requiem.
Resident Evil 2 isn't the first game I played as a kid, but I think it's the first where I really clocked what was going on. In the same way that Drew Barrymore's gruesome death at the beginning of Scream left an everlasting imprint on my developing psyche, I'll never forget the first time I saw Leon Kennedy roll into Raccoon City in his Jeep Wrangler and do his very first tango with flesh-eating zombies. Cut forward to Resident Evil 4, objectively one of the greatest action-horror games ever made, and Leon had cemented himself as a video game icon right up there with Lara Croft and Solid Snake.
