Shinji Hashimoto’s got big plans for Resident Evil: Survival Unit

The chance to talk to a games industry icon doesn’t come around all that often, but that’s exactly the opportunity that presented itself during our trip to Gamescom 2025. Ahead of the upcoming launch of Resident Evil: Survival Unit, we sat down with Shinji Hashimoto, who you might know from his contributions to iconic series such as Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy, to talk about his foray into the world of survival horror.

While we knew our chat with Hashimoto would cover a lot of ground, we didn’t expect just how much, discussing everything from how his experience working on the Kingdom Hearts games inspired his approach to Survival Unit to not wanting to waste a minute when playing Final Fantasy XI Online. Those are just the headlines, though, so let’s dive right into our chat with the man steering the ship behind one of 2025’s most anticipated new mobile games. It’s worth pointing out, though, that Hashimoto had a translator for this interview, so we’ve had to interpret some of the quotes ourselves.

Pocket Tactics: I’ve just played the demo for Resident Evil: Survival Unit, and I love that it’s revisiting the fixed perspective from the original game. Why did you decide to revisit that and bring the original feeling to the game?

Shinji Hashimoto: So when I first got this opportunity to develop a Resident Evil game, out of respect for the series, I really wanted to make it as close as I could to the current-gen Resident Evil games. Then there were a lot of limitations I had to face. So I went back to Capcom to talk about how we should tackle this opportunity and its challenges.

One of the most important factors in Resident Evil is sound. The ambience, noise, and all the things that give you hints of the horror or survival background. But on mobile, does anyone turn up the speakers or even use headphones? There is a certain limitation we need to overcome with the form factor

So we went back to the drawing board, thinking about what things would be more approachable to the user. The fixed camera view is one of them, with others. We also decided to bring the strategy factor to the game, so as long as it’s something you have to survive. But it’s not about the tension. What really counts for the users is that the strategy of our game is survival. So those kinds of new approaches end up developing into the gameplay.

Survival Unit feels like a unique opportunity, as it has all these characters from all the different Resident Evil games. Can you tell us what it’s been like meddling with all the characters and bringing them together?

I have a unique trade. A lot of the games I’ve developed, including Kingdom Hearts, are generally all-star games. When handling other IPs, it’s really difficult to bring all the characters from different time periods and put them into one.

That’s a really big challenge, but if you come across a certain threshold, it starts to feel like a really unique opportunity for the IP that fan bases couldn’t find anywhere else. That’s been really rewarding for me in my many years of game producing. So this is another opportunity to do that, playing with the Capcom formula.

You mentioned Kingdom Hearts there. Resident Evil Survival Unit is quite a big tonal shift from the glee of that series to horror. I wanted to ask about the experience of jumping into horror and your approach to the genre.

As a creator, if you’re doing the same formula over and over – I mean, if it’s a good formula and people love it, that’s okay – but as for me, having done a lot of different IPs and series of titles, such as Final Fantasy, I tend to find that I want to surprise people and try to let them know that I have a lot of drawers to open, and there are a lot of other things that I can handle.

So this is purely for that urge to bring out the surprise. Later, I might open up a different drawer for different opportunities. One of the inspirations is my love of the horror genre. Not like a bloody horror, but more like the Korean Netflix horror genre. I love watching those and had a lot of inspiration from them.

Are there any influences that you’re bringing to the project that people might not expect?

I wanted users to see the whole map, [full of] middle bosses and final bosses, and horror aspects, and [hope] that it becomes a huge inspiration for players to work together to overcome those kinds of challenges. I brought in Yoshitaka Amano, who is a designer from the Final Fantasy series, to create one of our middle bosses. So that will be an interesting addition for those playing. One of my favorite zombie series is from the UK: the 28 Days, 28 Weeks, and 28 Years Later films. Last night, I watched 28 Years Later, and now I can’t wait for the sequel.

With Resident Evil: Survival Unit blending strategy elements with a fixed perspective, how are you keeping that satisfying feeling for console players who are used to the third-person perspective?

Yeah, it’s a really new concept with new ideas for fans to understand and digest. That’s why we are doing these interviews, getting your help to come across ideas. We had a lot of challenges, like realizing that ambient sound can’t be the major factor. So we introduced the strategy. When you break down the uniqueness of this platform and how users approach it, we think strategy would be the right choice for the users once they start to play.

One of the big aims for us is expanding the environment. That is, expanding the environment for the community and expanding the environment of the game itself, for the community to play as if it were a playground. So if we create a world with horror elements here and there, users will need to collaborate. Just imagine we have a UK guild, a French guild, and an Italian guild. Sometimes they compete. There’s competition, but sometimes they have to work together to break into the next zone. That would be a very interesting factor when it comes to the Resident Evil world.

One of the amazing things about this kind of community gameplay is that once you really get into it and start working with everyone else, just one more hour of sleep is really hard to come by. If you try the game by yourself, for your satisfaction, that’s okay, but if you’re with others and enjoying it together and thinking, “I want to contribute to my community” and “let’s play this and let’s win this battle together,” it’s much more welcoming and more inviting for the users to play and enjoy the game together. So we really want users to feel like it’s natural to have fun with other players.

When I was playing Final Fantasy XI and EverQuest, I didn’t even want to waste time going to the toilet because I was so invested. If you’re a fan of online games, you know how it works. Everyone has to be on time. Everyone needs to be prepared. And there’s a time limitation, as everyone has to go to work the next day. You need everyone gathered and ready to go. So that’s a kind of tension. We wanted to create those kinds of interesting factors within the limitations.

Finally, the Resident Evil series has tried a lot of different things over the years, but I wanted to ask if you felt like you had the opportunity to try something new with Survival Unit that we’ve never seen before?

Something that has never been done in the Resident Evil series is probably the mobile platform itself. So, during my time with Square Enix and making the Final Fantasy series, I found they’re experts on consumer games, but not the mobile game genre. They usually bring in other, more experienced development teams to handle their projects.

This time, out of the ideation discussion with Capcom, they allowed us to not just use their IP but also to make the game for the new platform. That was a surprise. Of course, as a producer, there’s a lot to worry about while trying to offer user satisfaction and make users understand that it is a different form factor. It retains the essence of the original game that we respect very much, but it’s something new.

There you have it, our conversation with Shinji Hashimoto about all things Resident Evil: Survival Unit. For more frights and scares, be sure to check out our guides to the best horror games. We’ve also got more Gamescom coverage for you to check out in the form of our Honor of Kings: World preview and Arknights: Endfield preview.