Retro spotlight: Dead Rising

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Capcom in the aughts was something to behold. If you weren’t there for it, in terms of buying and playing the games, you can look back in awe at the sheer volume of experimentation and franchise-spawning games, and think about how great it must have been for all of those series and one-offs to release one after another between the tail-end of the Playstation 2 era and the first forays into the hi-definition ones. Monster Hunter! Lost Planet! Ōkami! God Hand! Dead Rising! A Breath of Fire game that actually innovated and added to the strong foundation it was built from! A treasure trove, truly, and before we even get to the part where Dragon’s Dogma happened.

Well, a treasure trove for some. Plenty of those games released to rave reviews or plenty of customers willing to fork over cash, but some did not — God Hand, famously, was somewhere between panned and mixed and didn’t do well at retail, and while Monster Hunter is an absolute behemoth now with nearly 100 million units sold by the series, the first two games on the Playstation 2 combined for just over 500,000 sales, and the initial entry scored a 68/100 on Metacritic. And even the ones that did end up with praise aplenty out of the gate seemed misunderstood by too many. Which is fine, really, in terms of not everyone needing to enjoy the same stuff. But the aughts also happened to be a time where there seemed to be a referendum on the worthiness of Japanese video game studios and the supremacy of western devs, so. Maybe this has just stuck out to me a little more than it normally would, especially since Capcom was clearly attempting to be ambitious and succeeding at it, too.

Speaking of sticking out, Dead Rising managed to do so for a few reasons. For one, it flat-out rules: you’ll find complaints about its save system being cumbersome or what have you, and there were even reviewers complaining about how it borrowed a mechanic from Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, by having you retain all experience and levels into future playthroughs to allow for a combination of knowledge and power on your second, third, and so on attempts at clearing the game, but you can ignore all of that. Dead Rising has specific save points, yes, and you’ll lose progress if you die and want to reload from a save, but making a problem out of that is weird! If you could save anywhere, Dead Rising would lose some of its teeth: it’s a comedy horror game, sure, but much of the tension that is there comes from stumbling upon a situation you were not as prepared for as you should have been, and seeing how you can wriggle your way out of it, or if you’re going to die. Being able to save every time you see a few too many zombies would take away from that.

The save system also creates a choice for you whenever you do die: should you reload a past save, giving up all of the experience and levels and skills you gained since your previous save, or, should you bank all of that and start over from the beginning, armed with both a stronger self than you began with in your previous run, and the knowledge that comes through playing? Dead Rising takes about six hours to get through its (initial) in-game 72-hour runtime. Starting over isn’t a huge lift, even if you’re deep into the game, and since you can skip cutscenes… yeah, you should probably aim to be as powerful as you can even if it means starting over.

This pseudo-roguelike nature bothered reviewers in a way that probably comes off as surprising now, but this was a pre-Souls world, too, one that was leading into the beginning of the retro revival that would feature a whole bunch of reviewers complaining about how these 25-year-old games didn’t play themselves. That Capcom was doing this for an action-adventure horror title with this large, open world to explore was something. That it wasn’t even the first time they played this card with banking your stats, skills, and levels for your other playthroughs only makes it that much more impressive.

Dead Rising was developed by Capcom Production Studio 1, with Mega Man staple Keiji Inafune serving as producer — the reason the Dragon Quarter mechanic was carried over into Dead Rising was because the same team developed that game, too.

Here’s how Dead Rising works. You’re playing as photojournalist Frank West, who has been tipped off to a story about zombies in the city of Willamette. He lands via helicopter at the mall, which is barricaded and surrounded by zombies, and begins to unravel the mystery of what’s going on there. He has three days — 72 hours — to do this, while also rescuing as many survivors as he can before the chopper comes back to pick him up. You are going to die, and often. Frank starts with very little in the way of health, speed, or strength, and you yourself don’t know where anything or anyone is. Kill zombies, though, or rescue some survivors, take high-quality photos, clear some “Cases,” which are story chapters and events, and the experience will start rolling in. Frank will get stronger, he’ll be faster, he’ll be able to take more damage and carry more items. You will know where survivors are, where respawning weapons you’ve taken a liken to are sitting, which paths are dangerous, which are safer, and what you need to prioritize.

For example: early on, you don’t know a couple of important things about the enormous courtyard of the mall, but through repetition, you’ll learn. As night of the first day dawns, a military jeep with a big ole gun on it will be driving around, with three convicts taking it for a spin. They’re taking down zombies, they’re hunting people, they’re doing whatever they want to because society, as it were, has broken down in Willamette. You’re not going to be able to defeat them in your early state, and you won’t have the armaments to do so even if you did somehow have the health. They’ll end up killing survivors you’ve corralled, or who are out there in the courtyard, or even you. However! If you explored a bit before it got dark, you might have found the gun shop in the northern section of the mall. If you discovered it later in the day, the proprietor is there, and he has decided he’s going to murder anyone who approaches him — he needs all of those guns for himself, apparently, and will just fire a shotgun at you repeatedly from behind the counter in between swigs of hard liquor. If you go there early enough in the day, though, this “psycopath,” as the game refers to the people who have decided chaos and violence against other people is how they’re going to handle the zombie outbreak, isn’t there yet. Which means you can grab sniper rifles and shotguns galore for yourself… and then use them to take out that military jeep full of convicts, clearing the path.

Eventually, it’ll respawn, but by then, you should know a few other tricks. Such as the secret and instantaneous path through the bathrooms found in the west and east wings of the mall, which you learn about from rescuing a mall employee from an indoor rollercoaster that a murderous clown juggling mini chainsaws has kept running nonstop since the zombies came, in order to keep them away from him. Or maybe you have access to the maintenance tunnels, and can bash your way through the hordes of zombies hanging out down there to get to vehicles which will shorten your trip to the various points of egress around the map — all of which let you avoid a second encounter with that murder-happy jeep. You don’t know any of this stuff at first, but as you learn, and as you die, you’ll be given the chance to apply all of this knowledge in another playthrough, which in turn should let you rescue even more survivors, and gain even more levels, and see even more of the game’s story.

Dead Rising is fascinating in this way, because you can succeed without actually unraveling the mystery at the game’s core. You can beat the game without seeing the story through! Simply survive for the 72 hours and make it out in the helicopter with as many survivors as you managed to save in those three days, and the credits roll. It won’t be the “best” or canon ending if you do that, but it’s an end all the same… and you can always replay with your levels, skills, stats, and knowledge all saved up, too, to give it another go. The best ending doesn’t require you save every survivor — that’s more of a challenge — but does necessitate completing every story mission while also seeing a specific character at a specific time when traveling around the mall somehow became even more unsafe than it already was when 50,000 zombies descended upon it. That’s not an exaggeration, by the way, the population of Willamette exceeds 50,000, and there’s an achievement for managing a population’s worth of kills in a single playthrough.

How would you fail to complete the story missions? Well, a key NPC could die on your watch, for one. You don’t get a chance to restart if that happens: the game continues on, as do your questions about what’s really going on here and who’s responsible. It works in both directions, even: the only way to successfully save a certain pair of characters is to fail in the story at a specific point where their lives aren’t yet in immediate danger! You could also just straight-up miss the window in which the mission is occurring, or have to bail on a battle because you’re going to die if you don’t, and the game will treat this as failure. Do better next time, but next time is in another playthrough.

Your watch tells you what time it is — look at it by pressing left on the D-pad — but the missions you’ve collected to that point display on your HUD, as well, with how much time is left: Cases are story, “scoops” are side missions, which Otis, a mall employee, might tell you over the walkie talkie, or you might happen to discover someone in a precarious position out in the mall that Otis hasn’t alerted you to yet (or won’t). A blue bar means you don’t need to rush, while yellow means time is starting to run short, and red means you’re going to miss it if you don’t move soon. There are 49 savable survivors in Dead Rising, and without learning to prioritize your movements and the best order to do things in, you stand no chance of saving them all. Hell, even picking up half is going to take considerable work! But that’s the fun of the game, this building up of knowledge and tactics and skill through repetition, that, in the end, will lead to a superior ending and dozens of rescued innocents. Oh, and, eventually, a survive-as-long-as-you-can mode that’ll get you on the online leaderboards if you can thrive there.

How do you kill the zombies? By any means both possible and necessary. Sure, picking up guns will help, but there isn’t an endless supply of them, and really, trying to pick off a horde of zombies with a handgun that contains 30 bullets and roots you in place while you shoot isn’t going to work out in the long run. Dead Rising can put 800 zombies on screen at once, and if you get close to them or start attacking from a distance, more than you can maybe handle will converge on you. Frank will learn some offensive and defensive skills as he gains levels — a running knee, a kick as he lands, a judo throw, a double lariat that also throws whatever weapon you’ve equipped as a projectile as a bonus at the end — but mostly you’re going to be picking up whatever you can find and bashing zombie brains in with it. Baseball bats, lead pipes, 2x4s, shelving, televisions, promotional lipstick displays, shovels, condiment bottles, brooms, sandwich boards, knives, a katana, an axe, chainsaws, frying pans you heated up on a range first — whatever you can think of finding in a mall, Frank will pick it up and either swing it or throw it. Soda cans are projectiles, as are stacks of CDs. A giant stuffed bear won’t do much damage, but it is pretty funny to see in action. And hey, maybe you can even dress up a little bit like Mega Man and equip a promotional Buster cannon.

Experimenting with weapons and eating everything you can find — especially if it’s something you can cook first or make a smoothie out of — is going to take up quite a bit of time, as will attempting to master photography and taking the photos that’ll score you the most points and experience. But again, this is all knowledge you personally get to keep, which means you’ll remember, say, that it’s important to mix two milks together at a particular venue so you can get a speed boost when you need it, or that two orange juices together will attract the Queen Bees (which are actually genetically engineered hornets, not innocent bees) which are the source of the zombie plague. Smash a Queen near a bunch of zombies, and they go down in a heap, as do the larvae inside of them. Being able to invoke this “Nectar” state with a smoothie whenever you don’t have a preexisting status effect in place, to lure a Queen to you, will be useful in more ways than the obvious, and finding the spot that makes this task easier is vital. And representative of how the entire game works, too.

Dead Rising had and has its critics, but it’s a true gem of a game. Sure it has some idiosyncrasies, but they’re also part of what makes the game work the way it does. The only real issue with it is that some of the text appeared very tiny on standard definition screens, as the game was very much made for the Xbox 360’s HD capabilities — you have to remember that, at the time, the Wii not outputting in HD was defensible given how many households did not yet own a TV capable of displaying in hi-def. (And as someone who originally played Uncharted on the Playstation 3 on a CRT screen, I can even vouch for this moment in time where the hardware was somewhat forward thinking instead of for the moment it was at first in.) The original Xbox 360 edition is not backwards-compatible on the Xbox Series X, but that’s because Capcom released an updated version for the Xbox One — it’s annoying that things work this way, where games that end up with dual releases don’t both work through backwards-compatibility, but that’s a larger issue than just Capcom’s decisions, too.

Dead Rising received a re-release for the Xbox One and Playstation 4, both of which are compatible with their successor systems, and is on Steam now, as well. It also had a Wii-specific port in 2009 that both took advantage of the system’s particular strong points — firearms play more of a role here, thanks to the Wii Remote’s IR pointer — while compensating for its relative lack of horsepower by no longer allowing it to be as open-world of an experience as it once was. The real problem is that photography disappeared, as that certainly was a source of enjoyment in the original and served to differentiate the game from others, but so it goes. Now you can’t take a photo of a zombie murdering another guy via accidental sexual positions. Still, though, it’s a fascinating artifact despite its deficiencies, an attempt made by Capcom to reach the Wii audience following the success of a Wii-specific (and genuinely banger) port of Resident Evil 4. Oddly, it remains the lone Dead Rising game on a Nintendo platform, despite the fact the Wii U could have handled ports, and the Switch is certainly capable, too.

If you’ve played Dead Rising before, it’s worth diving back into to see how ambitious it truly was, coming out at a time when the Playstation 3 hadn’t even released yet, as part of Capcom’s very early forays into utilizing the power of a next-gen HD system. And if you’ve never played it at all, well, now’s a perfect time (unless all you’ve got is a Switch), because the original Dead Rising still very much has the juice. And even exists now within a context where more people might even appreciate what it was going for.

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