Resident Evil 4

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-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 was spun off as Devil May Cry (2001). Other versions were scrapped 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 garnered acclaim for its story, gameplay, graphics, voice acting, and characters. It is cited as one of the best video games, winning 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. 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 of Resident Evil 4 was released in 2023.