Being aDead Risingfan has been a weird experience for the past several years.Capcomhas two unique survival-horror zombie franchises with dedicated fanbases, butResident Evilhas always been the golden boy. I wrote aboutthe seemingly dead state of Dead Risingbefore, and I mentioned there that a full remake wouldn’t be a bad way to revitalize the franchise.
In the months since, further love forResident Evil4 REmake, as well as its additional DLC, has only made me double down on my feelings that Dead Rising needs this treatment too.
By the by, I came up with a revisit to this ideajust beforethe announcement of more REmakes. I love it when I’m topical on accident!
Wait, Does Anyone Actually Want A Resident Evil 5 Remake?
RE2 and RE4 remakes were the treatment the originals deserved. But can we say the same about Resident Evil 5?
Dead Rising remains a classic game, and its sequel Dead Rising 2 is a favorite of mine, but, I think both games were lightning in a bottle. There’s nothing unique about zombies but there’severythingunique about Dead Rising, and a lot of that uniqueness came from Capcom Vancouver perfecting game mechanics no one else would dare touch.
In Dead Rising, you leveled up with PP, and if you failed the story, you could opt to start from the beginning with all those levels and PP intact. You had to learn the game as you replayed it, as the game starts clunky and hard but becomes rewarding once you unlock all the tricks.
There are also survivors, who you had to escort back to the safe room, and in DR 1 they had the defense stats of a napkin. DR 2 fixed this and made the survivors pretty beefy. It was a valid quality-of-life change, but sadly, Capcom started over-tinkering with these kinds of changes and alienating fans. The most infamous case is the removal of the timer.
In Dead Rising 1, 3, and every iteration of 2 (we’ll get to that), there was a time limit to how long you had to finish the story beats. Survivor missions will only start at certain points, and if you didn’t save them within the time limit, whoops!They die, you suck.The timer was removed due to an alleged survey that claimed most fans hated the mechanic, but seeing as it was patched back in later with the Frank Rising update, that ‘survey’ didn’t seem to tell the full story.
I think what ultimately happened was just the practices of the time. The Xbox One and PS4 era saw a huge push for quality-of-life features, removal of outdated and archaic elements to make games more fun than ever before. This practice probably killed Dead Rising’s unique perfection of archaic gameplay. But between the third and fourth entries, the push away from archaic design turned Dead Rising into another generic zombie game. Nothing in me would be excited about Dead Rising 5, but a genuine return to the first two games, forcing Capcom to remember the special mechanics and the way players latched onto them, nowthat’ssomething I think has legs.
Especially since I also feel there’s already proof that a remake that adds quality-of-life features makes a great Dead Rising; Dead Rising 2: Off The Record. This was an alternate take/director’s cut that saw Frank West return as the hero of DR 2 instead of Chuck Greene, but Frank wasn’t the only addition.
An autosave was built-in when you entered a room, Frank’s camera returned and didn’t need batteries anymore, and Zombrex doses could be done anywhere instead of only in the safe house. Survivors had bad health again, but still not on the level we saw in Dead Rising 1. I call DR 2 one of my favorites, but there are so many times I play it and go “Man, I miss that autosave.”
If DR 2 can be improved this way, so can DR 1. Capcom has been praised for keeping the spirit of Resident Evil 2 and 4 intact while making them feel like modern games. They already have the template for a Dead Rising remake thanks to Off The Record, and the resume to show they understand remakes thanks to Resident Evil. For me, the appeal of resurrecting the series is in resurrecting some of the cool ideas of the older games, rather than a continuation of the story, and seeing it shine in Capcom’s excellent RE Engine would be a dream. Besides, a remake could be used to gauge interest, and if it’s good,thenthey could continue the mainline series, integrating the things they implemented in the Dead Rising 1 and/or 2 remake.
West Of Zero
A remake of the first two Dead Risings would also keep the set together, as it were. Dead Rising 2 was more than just one game; there were standalone DLCs as well as Off The Record. Off The Record came with the Dead Rising Triple Pack for the remaster on Xbox One and PS4.
But Case: West and Case: Zero, to this day, remain Xbox 360-only titles. They are backwards-compatible, so if you have an Xbox Series, congratulations you may play all four games named Dead Rising 2! I personally recommend Case Zero over West, unless, of course, both games get that remake. As West has so many things that could be improved.
West’s timer is the weakest in the series, as even if you try and do everything in one go, you’ll be sitting around waiting and waiting until the next mission. It’s the timer I’d most like to see improved and redone. Add extra missions, shave it down to make it more tense (there could even be an option to turn it off). All of these are better than DR 4’s full removal, and even an improvement over Case: West’s bloated time limit.
Case: West also tried to tease story elements in DR 3, but those plot revelations barely meant anything after all. But now that Capcom knows how the story unfolds, I say ‘screw it’ and make the revelations matter this time! Give Marion some damn screen time and properly set her up as the villain, remove that stupid line about there being a cure since DR 3 just gave up and claimed she was lying anyway. Hell, just kill her off at the end. Even that would change hardly anything and confirm it’s a new universe anyway.
Say what you want about remakes, Capcom’s track record with them is stellar. I’ve stopped wondering if the story can be salvaged after what DR 4 did, and by this point it’s best to bury this timeline and start afresh. The REmake treatment, bundling together all the game’s content while revamping the graphics and cleaning up some of the dated elements (yep, that might include a more lenient timer), is the best way to bust this franchise right back to the top.
I Love Smashing My Space Bar To Stomp Necromorphs In Dead Space
Trigger buttons on a gamepad just can’t match the powerful ‘clack’ of the space bar.
