If you’re wondering why Frank West has a new voice actor, we might have the answer: Dead Rising: Deluxe Remastered has a lot of new dialogue for you to listen to – which means a lot of the game has been re-recorded .
The original Dead Rising was a true product of its time. In 2006, games became more cinematic, but as developers became accustomed to high-definition content, a more cinematic presentation, and more processing power and storage space, games still had many of the tropes, characteristics, and structural limitations of previous generations. As a result, Dead Rising has some of its signature fully-voiced cutscenes, but there’s also a lot of in-game dialogue that’s just delivered via text blocks.
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But that’s not the case in the game’s latest remaster – which is trying to live up to its “deluxe” moniker by adding a ton of content to the game. The entire experience ultimately feels like it straddles the no-man’s land between a traditional remake and a proper remake. It’s clearly the same game, and it’s packed with the energy of 2006’s glory, so it’s a remaster – but the additions are just stunning enough to make it feel like one Bit Remade. The fact that Dead Rising has already been remade once in 2016 doesn’t help.
Regardless, there’s a lot of new voice acting in Dead Rising: Deluxe Remastered. Any dialogue in the original that was previously just text-based is now voiced and subtitled – including a phone call from handyman Otis that’s meant to alert Frank to various happenings in the mall. This is actually a huge quality-of-life improvement, as in the original game Otis would often call at very inconvenient times and the subtitles would get lost in the melee – here Otis’s voice is even heard during boss fights It will also sound to tell you what’s going on.
Other times, it just adds a cool vibe to certain missions. Early on, you discover two survivors, both Japanese tourists. In this remake, I overheard them chatting in Japanese before seeing them. The encounter is a mini-puzzle, and you can’t recruit these survivors to rescue them unless you find a Japanese phrasebook in a bookstore. Once you return to them with the item, Frank’s new voice actor reads the book in his most stilted, broken Japanese.
Once a survivor joins you, there’s another surprise – some Dragon’s Dogma -style chit-chat. You know how your companions in Dragon’s Dogma help you through dialogue? Well, in Dead Rising: Deluxe Remastered, any survivors behind Frank will do the same thing.
This manifests itself in some interesting aspects. Each survivor has their own voice actor and set of lines that they can drop as you move around. Your movements are uninterrupted – just the ambient dialogue moves its own subtitle window to the right side of the screen.
Some may give you hints about locations in the mall where useful supplies may be stored – pointing you to the location of a gun store, for example. Other times, they may notice something in the environment, such as PP stickers that can be photographed to gain bonus experience points. When something like this is noticed, it will actually be marked on your game map – just like in Dragon’s Dogma. One survivor even asked me to take their Takes a photo after noticing Frank’s camera, noting that this may be her last chance to take a photo.
All of this is very similar to Dragon’s Dogma, I’m kind of wondering if there is shared code, a RE engine shared by DD2 and DRDR. It’ll also be interesting to see how much of this chatter is shared among all survivors, and which advice is reserved for specific groups of people. In a lot of ways, this could change the survivor economy, and in a game with a strict time limit like Dead Rising, some might be more valuable than others – which could be the key to the Dead Rising time management meta. An interesting level.
Don’t get me wrong – just like in Dragon’s Dogma, this chatter is bound to get at least a little repetitive as the game progresses. Still, in the limited time I’ve spent with DRDR so far, I’m still grateful for it. I’m familiar with Willamette Mall as I’m a huge Dead Rising fan, but these little touches might be helpful for first-time gamers and those with slightly shorter memories. It’s also coupled with AI improvements that make the survivors you rescue feel more like humans and less like goofy robots.
Of course, none of this really explains why original Frank voice actor and B-movie superstar TJ Rotolo wasn’t invited back. That said, Frank’s new voice actor is charismatic, talented, and perfectly suited to the role – although many fans may miss some of Rotolo’s iconic lines. Hopefully all the great new stuff will help fill that void.
Dead Rising: Deluxe Remastered was released on September 19th for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
