This is a companion piece to my GBAtemp Recommends article on Dead Rising. I wanted to talk about each game in the series but that article would have been too long, so I decided to move that discussion over here in case anyone was curious.
Dead Rising 2 (and Spinoffs)
For Dead Rising 2, development shifted from Capcom’s internal Japan studio to Blue Castle Games (bought out and renamed Capcom Vancouver after Dead Rising 2’s successful launch). The influence of a Western developer is clear here, but Keiji Inafune and the core Japan team stayed in constant contact with Blue Castle throughout development, allowing it to retain the gameplay’s quirky humour. The script, however, seems to be mostly Blue Castle’s work and its unevenness slows down the momentum considerably.
The biggest difference between the two games are their protagonists. Frank West never had the strongest personality, but he always felt like a real person, which made it all the funnier to see him in a cutscene dressed as Mega Man. Dead Rising 2’s protagonist, Chuck Greene, is a more traditional American action hero, no-nonsense and hard-faced. The rest of the world around Chuck has its ridiculousness amped up to 11, which does create some fun moments, but since it’s contrasted with Chuck’s severely nonplussed reactions to everything, there’s nothing grounded to make the absurdity pop. Worse yet it is the one-note and immature humour of some of the characters, such as the scantily-clad, breathy twins whose every line of dialogue is an attack on Chuck’s sexuality or masculinity. There’s nothing inherently wrong with jokes like that, especially in a series like Dead Rising, but the relentlessness and sophomoric nature of it makes the gag wear out its welcome quickly.
Dead Rising 2 still nails the humour in its smaller moments, however. There are some fun survivors out there, like the warring stand-up comedians who won’t return to the safe house with you until you award one of them with a comedy trophy (the loser will take some convincing, or even payment, to follow you to safety) and you’re once more supplied with a litany of ridiculous weapons and costumes (though, again, the fun of the silly costumes is diminished somewhat by the cutscenes already being so aggressively silly). It’s really just more of what worked in Dead Rising.
The crowning achievement of the game is the combo weapon system. Scattered around the map are workshops that let Chuck duct tape two items together to make a new one. It gives a purpose to the useless items that litter the game, each kill with a combo weapon grants extra experience so they feel constantly rewarding, but most importantly, they’re just stupidly fun. There’s a certain manic glee that comes from duct taping a sledgehammer to a fire axe and swinging through a crowd of zombies, obliterating anything remotely in your path. Even the ones that aren’t effective are fun to play with, like the bucket + power drill combo that you plop on a zombie’s head as it effortlessly bores through their skull. It’s held back by a sometimes arbitrary restriction on what items will work (why can I combine a boxing glove and a bowie knife but not, say, a boxing glove and a hunting knife?), but for the most part it’s a perfect encapsulation of the absurdity that made the first one work so well without drawing attention to the absurdity the way Dead Rising 2 so often does.
Aside from the combo weapons, gameplay changes in Dead Rising 2 are mainly relegated to fixing problems from the first one. Thankfully, the survivor AI has been drastically improved, perhaps teetering towards being so easy to care for that they can be pretty much ignored, but it’s hard to complain about given the disastrous AI in the original. Getting mission-related calls no longer stops you from acting, and it’s easier to check the time and your quest log. The map isn’t as effective as the Willamette Mall (Dead Rising 2 is set in a casino resort and too many of the areas are dominated by rows upon rows of slot machines), but this is mitigated somewhat later in the game by the inclusion of vehicles in certain areas that make it easier to get around. Online co-op was also added in a very straightforward, simple way. The second player just plays another Chuck, they don’t appear in cutscenes and don’t keep any progress, just latching on to the story file of the main player. Still, for a game where a lot of the enjoyment comes from exploring and making your own fun, it’s always nice to have someone else there to show off to.
Dead Rising 2 also received some interesting spinoffs. Case Zero and Case West are a short prologue and epilogue, respectively, to the main story, downloadable for $5 apiece. These bite-sized Dead Rising chunks are surprisingly fun, using their short runtimes and smaller maps to ramp up the intensity on the timer and putting severe stress on the player. Unfortunately, they weren’t included in the 2016 re-release of the series, so the only way to play them on current-gen consoles is through the Xbox One’s backwards compatibility.
The other spinoff was Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, a “What If?” scenario imagining what would happen if Frank West was the star of Dead Rising 2. Blue Castle’s version of Frank is more egotistical and wisecrack-y than Capcom’s, more annoyed than terrified by the outbreak, but it works given the character’s history. T.J. Rotolo is always welcome in the role, and giving the main character an energy that’s closer to the manic world helps the comedy play a little better. Besides that, there are a few new survivors and psychopaths, some quality of life improvements, the re-introduction of the photography system and a new space theme park area. It’s the superior version of Dead Rising 2, but not enough has changed to make playing both versions worth it.
Dead Rising 2 was a success on launch, performing well both critically and financially. It signalled a promising start to Blue Castle’s run on the series, but unfortunately it’s a momentum they wouldn’t be able to keep up moving forward.
Dead Rising 3 & 4
Shortly after Dead Rising 2’s launch, series producer Keiji Inafune quit Capcom. It’s unclear how much guidance there was from Capcom’s internal Japan team moving forward, but Dead Rising 3 feels remarkably different than previous entries, and Inafune’s absence is felt. (Inafune himself said, very diplomatically, in a 2013 interview that Dead Rising 3 was “not the game [he] would have made.”). Immediately upon its reveal as an Xbox One launch title in 2013, there was fan outcry over the dismal brown and grey aesthetic, both for not being Dead Rising and for seeming like a relic of the previous generation.
Reactions softened after release, but ultimately this wasn’t the game Dead Rising fans were looking for. Between its drearier tone, near-removal of the timer, and unintuitive map, most of Dead Rising’s identity had been stripped. Set in the town of Los Perdidos, players are faced with a larger map and none of the landmarks that made the first two maps so memorable. Due to the burned-out husks of cars, dilapidated buildings and fires raging throughout the city, everything looks the same and with its constant turns and narrow streets, it’s impossible to get any sense of direction or know where you’re going without constantly checking your map. Vehicles are given a bigger emphasis this time to accommodate the bigger space, but you’re under little threat while driving so moving from point A to point B becomes tedious rather than a tense survival experience.
The game would be a total slog to get through if it weren’t for the combo vehicles. Dead Rising 3 lets you weld together vehicles if you can get them back to garages found around the city. It’s similar to the combo weapon system in that some are only good for the one-time novelty of it, but also in that once you find one that works, the simple joy of mowing down zombies with it never goes away. Combo vehicles were the only meaningful addition this time around and it seems much of the game was designed around them, but the joys of ploughing through a horde of zombies on a motorbike with a steamroller attached to the front doesn’t quite make up for the shortcomings in almost every other department. It’s not just that Dead Rising 3 doesn’t feel like Dead Rising; it feels so watered down that it could almost be anything.
After Dead Rising 3 sold the series’ identity to broaden the appeal, Dead Rising 4 came back to redefine the series. It’s an admirably ambitious project that doesn’t live up to its promise, reportedly having its development time cut down to just a year by Capcom executives. The controls and inventory system were changed, a stronger focus was put on story and characters than ever before, the timer was totally eliminated, sci-if elements are introduced and the art style is changed to a more realistic style. This change in art style really began in Dead Rising 3, but given that here Frank West is back in the driver seat, returning to Willamette fifteen years later to cover another outbreak, the difference is more noticeable and jarring than it was there.
It’s an odd move to return to the beginning of the series’ roots while also fundamentally changing the series, and it ends up feeling like a hollow gesture to appease longtime fans (just look at the way the advertising blared “FRANK IS BACK” to hype up series loyalists). Frank doesn’t look much like himself and, worst of all, T.J. Rotolo wasn’t asked to return to voice Frank, rendering him completely unrecognizable. The new actor does a fine job but if you’re trying to bank on your fan’s love for the character, replacing the actor is complete self-sabotage. It’s a shame because the script actually serves Frank quite well. He’s suffering from PTSD and uses an abrasive sense of humour to keep people at a distance, but the façade breaks whenever he’s forced to confront what happened to him at Willamette. It’s a clever way of reconciling the relatable, human Frank of Dead Rising with the boisterous Frank of Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, even if it’s not terribly original for horror-comedy protagonists. A lot of the comedy suffers from the immaturity that’s always been a part of Blue Castle’s writing with the series, but grounding Frank’s jokes in something so human produces real laughs and as such, Dead Rising 4 is probably the most successful of any of Blue Castle’s scripts.
Where Dead Rising 4 falls apart is the gameplay. Again being set in a whole city, it suffers from the same map issues as its predecessor, but without the freshness of combo vehicles to soften the blow. New this time around are robotic exo-suits Frank can pilot, offering easy transportation and mass zombie slaying abilities. They’re fun, but the issue is that they’re just found in the map rather than being assembled, robbing you of the sense of improv that comes from building a combo vehicle from materials on-hand. The combat and inventory systems were also overhauled, becoming more complicated with the goal of allowing you to switch between items more fluidly, but in tense situations it can leave you scrambling to find what you’re looking for, especially given the way the combo weapon system trains you to load your inventory with items that might be useless on their own but useful later on.
Conclusion
With the shuttering of Capcom Vancouver in 2018, the future of the Dead Rising series isn’t looking good. We’ve seen Capcom revive dormant series before (Devil May Cry V from earlier this year stands out), but the question is if Dead Rising has the fan backing for a revival to make sense. Even at its most popular, the series was highly divisive, with plenty of people respecting the premise and openness but being completely unable to get past the restrictive timer. Fans haven’t been excited by the series since Inafune left (they also likely wouldn’t be excited if he returned given the way his reputation has tanked since going independent) and attempts to broaden the series’ appeal only upset existing fans rather than creating new ones. As much as I hate to say it, Dead Rising got more chances than it probably deserved, and it might be best if it stayed dead.
Dead Rising 2 (and Spinoffs)
For Dead Rising 2, development shifted from Capcom’s internal Japan studio to Blue Castle Games (bought out and renamed Capcom Vancouver after Dead Rising 2’s successful launch). The influence of a Western developer is clear here, but Keiji Inafune and the core Japan team stayed in constant contact with Blue Castle throughout development, allowing it to retain the gameplay’s quirky humour. The script, however, seems to be mostly Blue Castle’s work and its unevenness slows down the momentum considerably.
The biggest difference between the two games are their protagonists. Frank West never had the strongest personality, but he always felt like a real person, which made it all the funnier to see him in a cutscene dressed as Mega Man. Dead Rising 2’s protagonist, Chuck Greene, is a more traditional American action hero, no-nonsense and hard-faced. The rest of the world around Chuck has its ridiculousness amped up to 11, which does create some fun moments, but since it’s contrasted with Chuck’s severely nonplussed reactions to everything, there’s nothing grounded to make the absurdity pop. Worse yet it is the one-note and immature humour of some of the characters, such as the scantily-clad, breathy twins whose every line of dialogue is an attack on Chuck’s sexuality or masculinity. There’s nothing inherently wrong with jokes like that, especially in a series like Dead Rising, but the relentlessness and sophomoric nature of it makes the gag wear out its welcome quickly.
Dead Rising 2 still nails the humour in its smaller moments, however. There are some fun survivors out there, like the warring stand-up comedians who won’t return to the safe house with you until you award one of them with a comedy trophy (the loser will take some convincing, or even payment, to follow you to safety) and you’re once more supplied with a litany of ridiculous weapons and costumes (though, again, the fun of the silly costumes is diminished somewhat by the cutscenes already being so aggressively silly). It’s really just more of what worked in Dead Rising.
The crowning achievement of the game is the combo weapon system. Scattered around the map are workshops that let Chuck duct tape two items together to make a new one. It gives a purpose to the useless items that litter the game, each kill with a combo weapon grants extra experience so they feel constantly rewarding, but most importantly, they’re just stupidly fun. There’s a certain manic glee that comes from duct taping a sledgehammer to a fire axe and swinging through a crowd of zombies, obliterating anything remotely in your path. Even the ones that aren’t effective are fun to play with, like the bucket + power drill combo that you plop on a zombie’s head as it effortlessly bores through their skull. It’s held back by a sometimes arbitrary restriction on what items will work (why can I combine a boxing glove and a bowie knife but not, say, a boxing glove and a hunting knife?), but for the most part it’s a perfect encapsulation of the absurdity that made the first one work so well without drawing attention to the absurdity the way Dead Rising 2 so often does.
Aside from the combo weapons, gameplay changes in Dead Rising 2 are mainly relegated to fixing problems from the first one. Thankfully, the survivor AI has been drastically improved, perhaps teetering towards being so easy to care for that they can be pretty much ignored, but it’s hard to complain about given the disastrous AI in the original. Getting mission-related calls no longer stops you from acting, and it’s easier to check the time and your quest log. The map isn’t as effective as the Willamette Mall (Dead Rising 2 is set in a casino resort and too many of the areas are dominated by rows upon rows of slot machines), but this is mitigated somewhat later in the game by the inclusion of vehicles in certain areas that make it easier to get around. Online co-op was also added in a very straightforward, simple way. The second player just plays another Chuck, they don’t appear in cutscenes and don’t keep any progress, just latching on to the story file of the main player. Still, for a game where a lot of the enjoyment comes from exploring and making your own fun, it’s always nice to have someone else there to show off to.
Dead Rising 2 also received some interesting spinoffs. Case Zero and Case West are a short prologue and epilogue, respectively, to the main story, downloadable for $5 apiece. These bite-sized Dead Rising chunks are surprisingly fun, using their short runtimes and smaller maps to ramp up the intensity on the timer and putting severe stress on the player. Unfortunately, they weren’t included in the 2016 re-release of the series, so the only way to play them on current-gen consoles is through the Xbox One’s backwards compatibility.
The other spinoff was Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, a “What If?” scenario imagining what would happen if Frank West was the star of Dead Rising 2. Blue Castle’s version of Frank is more egotistical and wisecrack-y than Capcom’s, more annoyed than terrified by the outbreak, but it works given the character’s history. T.J. Rotolo is always welcome in the role, and giving the main character an energy that’s closer to the manic world helps the comedy play a little better. Besides that, there are a few new survivors and psychopaths, some quality of life improvements, the re-introduction of the photography system and a new space theme park area. It’s the superior version of Dead Rising 2, but not enough has changed to make playing both versions worth it.
Dead Rising 2 was a success on launch, performing well both critically and financially. It signalled a promising start to Blue Castle’s run on the series, but unfortunately it’s a momentum they wouldn’t be able to keep up moving forward.
Dead Rising 3 & 4
Shortly after Dead Rising 2’s launch, series producer Keiji Inafune quit Capcom. It’s unclear how much guidance there was from Capcom’s internal Japan team moving forward, but Dead Rising 3 feels remarkably different than previous entries, and Inafune’s absence is felt. (Inafune himself said, very diplomatically, in a 2013 interview that Dead Rising 3 was “not the game [he] would have made.”). Immediately upon its reveal as an Xbox One launch title in 2013, there was fan outcry over the dismal brown and grey aesthetic, both for not being Dead Rising and for seeming like a relic of the previous generation.
Reactions softened after release, but ultimately this wasn’t the game Dead Rising fans were looking for. Between its drearier tone, near-removal of the timer, and unintuitive map, most of Dead Rising’s identity had been stripped. Set in the town of Los Perdidos, players are faced with a larger map and none of the landmarks that made the first two maps so memorable. Due to the burned-out husks of cars, dilapidated buildings and fires raging throughout the city, everything looks the same and with its constant turns and narrow streets, it’s impossible to get any sense of direction or know where you’re going without constantly checking your map. Vehicles are given a bigger emphasis this time to accommodate the bigger space, but you’re under little threat while driving so moving from point A to point B becomes tedious rather than a tense survival experience.
The game would be a total slog to get through if it weren’t for the combo vehicles. Dead Rising 3 lets you weld together vehicles if you can get them back to garages found around the city. It’s similar to the combo weapon system in that some are only good for the one-time novelty of it, but also in that once you find one that works, the simple joy of mowing down zombies with it never goes away. Combo vehicles were the only meaningful addition this time around and it seems much of the game was designed around them, but the joys of ploughing through a horde of zombies on a motorbike with a steamroller attached to the front doesn’t quite make up for the shortcomings in almost every other department. It’s not just that Dead Rising 3 doesn’t feel like Dead Rising; it feels so watered down that it could almost be anything.
After Dead Rising 3 sold the series’ identity to broaden the appeal, Dead Rising 4 came back to redefine the series. It’s an admirably ambitious project that doesn’t live up to its promise, reportedly having its development time cut down to just a year by Capcom executives. The controls and inventory system were changed, a stronger focus was put on story and characters than ever before, the timer was totally eliminated, sci-if elements are introduced and the art style is changed to a more realistic style. This change in art style really began in Dead Rising 3, but given that here Frank West is back in the driver seat, returning to Willamette fifteen years later to cover another outbreak, the difference is more noticeable and jarring than it was there.
It’s an odd move to return to the beginning of the series’ roots while also fundamentally changing the series, and it ends up feeling like a hollow gesture to appease longtime fans (just look at the way the advertising blared “FRANK IS BACK” to hype up series loyalists). Frank doesn’t look much like himself and, worst of all, T.J. Rotolo wasn’t asked to return to voice Frank, rendering him completely unrecognizable. The new actor does a fine job but if you’re trying to bank on your fan’s love for the character, replacing the actor is complete self-sabotage. It’s a shame because the script actually serves Frank quite well. He’s suffering from PTSD and uses an abrasive sense of humour to keep people at a distance, but the façade breaks whenever he’s forced to confront what happened to him at Willamette. It’s a clever way of reconciling the relatable, human Frank of Dead Rising with the boisterous Frank of Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, even if it’s not terribly original for horror-comedy protagonists. A lot of the comedy suffers from the immaturity that’s always been a part of Blue Castle’s writing with the series, but grounding Frank’s jokes in something so human produces real laughs and as such, Dead Rising 4 is probably the most successful of any of Blue Castle’s scripts.
Where Dead Rising 4 falls apart is the gameplay. Again being set in a whole city, it suffers from the same map issues as its predecessor, but without the freshness of combo vehicles to soften the blow. New this time around are robotic exo-suits Frank can pilot, offering easy transportation and mass zombie slaying abilities. They’re fun, but the issue is that they’re just found in the map rather than being assembled, robbing you of the sense of improv that comes from building a combo vehicle from materials on-hand. The combat and inventory systems were also overhauled, becoming more complicated with the goal of allowing you to switch between items more fluidly, but in tense situations it can leave you scrambling to find what you’re looking for, especially given the way the combo weapon system trains you to load your inventory with items that might be useless on their own but useful later on.
Conclusion
With the shuttering of Capcom Vancouver in 2018, the future of the Dead Rising series isn’t looking good. We’ve seen Capcom revive dormant series before (Devil May Cry V from earlier this year stands out), but the question is if Dead Rising has the fan backing for a revival to make sense. Even at its most popular, the series was highly divisive, with plenty of people respecting the premise and openness but being completely unable to get past the restrictive timer. Fans haven’t been excited by the series since Inafune left (they also likely wouldn’t be excited if he returned given the way his reputation has tanked since going independent) and attempts to broaden the series’ appeal only upset existing fans rather than creating new ones. As much as I hate to say it, Dead Rising got more chances than it probably deserved, and it might be best if it stayed dead.
