Hot on the heels of Yukikaze's historic 5 million Mercenaries run, the global RE:9 Requiem community has already set its sights on the next milestone — and 6 million is no longer a pipe dream.
It's been just over a week since Capcom unleashed Update 2.0 for Resident Evil 9: Requiem, and the Mercenaries mode has been completely transformed. What started as a trickle of new high scores has turned into a flood, with the global leaderboard being rewritten on an almost hourly basis. The latest buzz? The race for 6 million points has officially begun.
Yesterday, Japanese speedrunner Yukikaze posted a jaw-dropping 5,024,700 score on the new "Requiem Cathedral" map using Leon S. Kennedy's aggressive combat kit. The run, which took over two weeks of dedicated practice to perfect, leveraged a newly discovered enemy spawn pattern that allowed for a nearly continuous combo multiplier across the map's three phases. The video has already amassed over 400,000 views on YouTube and sparked a wave of copycat attempts.
But what makes the 6 million target realistic is the depth of the new Mercenaries mechanics introduced in Update 2.0. The tiered enemy spawning system — where tougher enemies appear in escalating waves rather than randomly — creates predictable scoring windows that top players can optimize. Combined with Leon's expanded moveset from the new campaign chapters, including a charged kick that can stagger even the hulking Executor enemies, the theoretical maximum score has expanded significantly beyond what was possible in the base game.
"Six million is absolutely achievable," said Yukikaze in a recent Discord interview with the RE speedrunning community. "The key is phase 2 route optimization. I lost at least 80,000 points to suboptimal movement in the church section alone. With perfect execution, 6.2M might be the real ceiling on this map."
The competitive fervor has brought a massive wave of returning players. Steam concurrent player counts for RE:9 Requiem have held steady at roughly 40% above pre-Update 2.0 levels, a remarkable retention figure for a game that launched four months ago. Capcom has taken notice, with the development team reportedly monitoring the leaderboard activity closely for potential balance adjustments in future patches.
Beyond the Mercenaries craze, New Game Plus+ continues to offer fresh challenges for single-player enthusiasts. The Inferno difficulty speedrun world record has been pushed down to 1 hour and 42 minutes, with runners discovering creative sequence breaks that bypass several of the game's more time-consuming puzzles. The convergence of the competitive and single-player communities around Update 2.0 has created perhaps the most vibrant period in RE:9 Requiem's post-launch lifecycle.
Capcom has yet to announce any further content updates, but the sustained player engagement suggests that a premium DLC announcement may be on the horizon. For now, the Mercenaries leaderboards remain the center of attention — and the quest for 6 million is just getting started.