Resident Evil Requiem's director, Koshi Nakanishi, says that the team at Capcom, in particular the women at the company, are to thank for Leon Kennedy's new "hot uncle" design in the upcoming ninth entry in the long-running survival horror series. He describes how Leon has a lot of fans inside the company who were "pretty strict" with his sexy older look.
In an interview with Automaton, Nakanishi describes the recurring Resident Evil protagonist as not "just handsome" but "cool personality-wise too." In order to realize this vision he says, "the designers worked really hard… we took a lot of care in refining him to be an 'ikeoji'." Ikeoji is a contraction of two words: ikemen, itself a contraction, meaning an attractive guy, and ojisan meaning middle-aged man.
