Written by: João Silva <br>Akihiro Nakanishi, director of *Resident Evil Requiem*, confirmed in an interview with Japanese outlet Denfaminicogamer that an entire chapter of the game was removed shortly before its February 2, 2026 release — and that the same thing had already happened with *Resident Evil 7*, whose "ghost Chapter 2" never made it into the final version. This isn't the first time the franchise has lost whole pieces of story along the way to the shelf, but it's the first time someone at Capcom has explained, in plain terms, why it happens on purpose. ## What we actually know about the cuts in Requiem and across the franchise Nakanishi didn't detail what the removed chapter in *Requiem* contained, but he gave enough clues to place roughly where it would have sat: between the moment Grace Ashcroft leaves Rhodes Hill Hospital and the scene where Leon S. Kennedy makes his way through the ruined outskirts of Raccoon City, 28 years after the events of *Resident Evil 2*. It's not the only time the series has held back material players will never touch: - **Resident Evil (1996)** shipped a noticeably leaner US version than the Japanese one — a more violent FMV intro was cut, soundtrack tracks were removed, and even a blood-written message on a wall disappeared from the western localization. - **Resident Evil 3.5**, the process that eventually produced *Resident Evil 4*, went through four completely different discarded concepts — nicknamed "canceled Biohazard 4," "castle concept," "hallucination concept," and "zombie concept" — before arriving at the version we know today. - **Resident Evil 0** was originally built for the Nintendo 64 and moved to the GameCube after the console's commercial end; most of the game was already finished, but the hardware switch allowed for more ambitious pre-rendered sequences, like the moving train. - **Resident Evil 7** lost the aforementioned ghost chapter, cut back during the drafting phase. None of these are leaked-from-behind-the-scenes scandals — they are, to varying degrees, admissions from the studio itself. ## Cutting isn't a red flag — not in this case, anyway Here's the point most of the coverage of Nakanishi's remarks missed: he wasn't describing an emergency cut made under deadline pressure. He was describing a recurring editorial process. "We don't suddenly cut things at the end of development," he said. "We often go through repeated revisions during the early drafting phase... it's similar to editing text or video. We shoot a lot, organize the material, and think about whether the intended message comes through." And then the line that sums it all up: "Subtraction really matters." That reframes what usually turns into "lost content" headlines. When a production like *Cyberpunk 2077* cuts content, the story tends to come wrapped in crunch, missed targets, promises that didn't fit into the finished game. Capcom's case with *Requiem* is the opposite: a studio editing its own narrative the same way a screenwriter cuts a scene that works on its own but throws off the third act's pacing. The comparison to text editing isn't a figure of speech — it's literally the vocabulary Nakanishi chose, and it tracks: he's been describing this same habit since at least the production of *Resident Evil 7*, released in 2017. What this suggests, in practice, is that Capcom treats the "ghost chapter" as a normal stage of production, not a failure to be hidden. And there's an interesting irony in that: the franchise that built a billion-dollar industry on Umbrella's bio-weapons and the aesthetics of mutation and erasure applies that same principle to its own writing — it cuts whatever threatens the larger organism. It's worth noting that the game-preservation community doesn't share that comfort. The fan known as Deli295, who rebuilt cut content from the original *Resident Evil* into a compilation dubbed *True Director's Cut*, is just one example of a recurring impulse among players: the idea that anything that existed during production somehow belongs to the audience that bought the finished game. Nakanishi would disagree — and historically, so would Capcom. ## What's left unanswered Nakanishi didn't say whether the cut chapter from *Requiem* will ever surface as DLC, a leaked development file, or simply stay buried, the way *Resident Evil 7*'s did. The question he left open, maybe without meaning to, is a different one: if cutting has become part of the series' creative method, how much of the *Resident Evil* we've played over the last thirty years is, in fact, the second or third version of a story that was already told — and discarded — internally before it ever reached us?