The Death of Dead Rising - A Bleak Retrospective

so i have a confession to make [Music] i love zombies zombie films games comics even the mere concept of zombies is amazing to me the undead coming back to life and becoming feral beasts oh that is amazing something that was once human turning into a monster that wants to rip you apart it sends shivers down your spine at the mere concept but there's a bit of a problem zombies are stupid and slow no it's not that it's that nowadays zombies are kind of tired and will often take a back seat to the media they're in and will often be used as a set dressing probably the worst offender of this is the last of us too geronimo [Laughter] while the infected are still in the game and the rat king is actually a pretty cool concept they take a back seat to the human drama and i don't know about you but whenever i play a zombie game i kind of want to fight zombies it's part of the reason why resident evil games even the latest non-remake entries like seven and the one with the big tall chested vampire lady while our fun they don't scratch that itch of me wanting to deal with zombies hell the mold creatures from 7 are they even actually zombies at all they're made from dead people and mold but bye have a great time it doesn't have the same charm which is why i really appreciate the remake of resident evil 2 it brought back the actual zombies there's a lot wrong with zombie media today so it makes it hard for me to call myself a fan of it and don't get me started on resident evil 3's remake why do they give nemesis a nose that being said this video is talking about my favorite series of zombie media and how it was brutally murdered day one the day i came here was the worst day of my life i'll admit it it was a big mistake [Music] i've covered wars you know [Music] did you just say zombies hard to imagine that 16 years ago we would be first introduced this series created by kg nafune one of the minds behind mega man and that piece of garbage mighty number nine like an anime fan on prom night [Music] and when we first caught a glimpse of this game it looked completely different the graphics weren't all polished and the main character frank west wasn't voiced by tj rotolo and that's fair it was beta footage it wasn't really something to fully expect from the final product but one year later something is horribly wrong in the small town of willamette i'm sorry but what was that willamette colorado willamette what in the world we finally saw what the game looked like as well as what you could do with it and let me tell you it's fantastic the game was quite colorful a stark contrast to what you'd have been dealing with with zombie games it made the walking dead pop out more the background was a wonderful playground a maul a large mall filled with the brim with many fun things you could use as weapons hell you could even use the health recovery items as throwables if you wanted chainsaws bats hockey pucks umbrellas hell you could use zombies themselves as weapons you could rip their heads off swing them around and make sure you treat people with respect on twitter to put it simply there's a lot you can do in this game and it gave you so many options hell you could mix food and beverages to get boosts you could hold on to books that would give you boost your weapons you can throw pies at zombies who doesn't want that oh [ __ ] i can't believe you've done this sure there were some issues with the game it was a little clunky with the controls and you couldn't move while you were doing focused aim and survivors were the dumbest ai in the world and that's saying something because the zombie ai in the game is actually pretty cool you can even distract zombies with a hunk of meat oh yeah survivors um yeah the thing is about this game it has a lot of uh escort missions in it yeah and if you've got a survivor stuck in the water areas they're dead they can't get out of there i don't know why but there was something wrong with gay water but hey we're talking about a game that came out nearly 15 years ago i think we can give it some leeway especially when it comes to the graphics now it's not a bad looking game but it certainly has shown its age i think what's the best part of the game is the bosses the psychopaths unlike other zombie games like the also capcom owned resident evil the bosses were regular people who weren't turned to zombies or giant monsters they were people who broke down from the psychological terrors of the zombie invasion like adam the clown who dual wields chainsaws or cliff who can pop in and out of doors the mosses were unique and while they were regular people at one time they're still dangerous and arguably more dangerous than the zombies themselves but they didn't make the zombies any less of a threat and didn't put the zombies in the back burner because zombies were the reason for them to act like this you know how i just brought up cliff the reason why he goes insane is a mixture of his time in the military and watching his granddaughter died as zombies and then everything was war it's psychological stuff like that that makes the game interesting in how zombies can blend into the world it makes the lore more fleshed out the game itself was set up in an interesting manner too with the time system every 5 seconds you spend the game a minute passes it pressed the players into time management making decisions and had them learn the game in and out finding out where weapons and food caches were and this would suck if it wasn't for the groundhog day mechanic basically whenever you died you'd be allowed to restart the game however you'd carry over your experience and not just your own personal experience but the experience of frank meaning he'd be an objectively better character going into the game sure the time mechanic could still be [ __ ] at times but it was still something that pressed the players and with the groundhog day mechanic it made a very unique blend that really hadn't been seen in many games at that point especially zombie games frank would grow with the player at the more they played the game and unlock more fancy moves speaking of i'm pretty sure we should talk about frank and then go into inside of the story frank west is a freelance journalist going into willamette colorado the town's locked down as you're flying over the town in helicopter you see what frank and the pilot call riots look i know riots can be messy but when you see people eating each other i think there's something more than just rioting doesn't sound like civil disobedience it's too quiet anyway you go to the mall and you've got three days to figure out the mystery where these zombies came from and get out with the story i will be going into more detail in a few minutes but for what i will say now is the game is detailed i found it enjoyable and it gave you a lot of different endings and even offered an overtime mode that gave you an additional campaign if you did specific things throughout the story which would effectively extend your play time keep that in the back of your head we'll be uh we'll be coming back to that later in this video speaking of the story while i gave a brief overview of it let's give a small detailed rundown of the narrative years ago in the small town of santa cabeza an old fart of a scientist named dr barnaby accidentally created zombies when he was trying to find a way to clone cows i don't know how you go from clowning cows to creating zombies but hey hey science i guess anyway the zombie plague pretty much destroyed santa cabeza and the united states government covered up the incident but there were two survivors carlito and isabella both of whom decided to get revenge on dr barnamy and the united states government they unleashed the zombie virus in willamette and frank wisconsin landing in willamette mall you came by helicopter didn't you nah he came by jet ski of course he came by helicopter are you stupid yes then after some reject of the golden girls somehow match the overpower to grown men she opens the door to the mall and the zombies come pouring in damn we gotta get those old people off steroids frank then meets jesse and brad two members of the government who are on order to investigate and deal with carlito hold it and yes we are looking for the man in that picture skipping a bunch of gameplay we learned the truth when carlito's dying when he was facing off against a rather intent and that's a super abridged version of the story and i didn't even give the ending because i actually want you guys to play the game go ahead it's a really good game if you can get it sure it's not the greatest story ever told but it certainly isn't offensive and it does play around with a tired idea of fighting zombies although fun fact when the game first came out it had a sticker on the cover that basically was their way of saying don't sue us george romero especially when you consider that there were themes of consumerism in the game's story much like how day of the dead was there are interesting themes in the game stuff like you can hit nature hard but it'll just hit hard as back and it's not just the tired and tame consumers are like zombies you'd have to be a complete idiot to think that it'd be a compelling story to tell with a narrative with zombies would be a good idea [Laughter] anyway i think it's important to talk about frank westmore since well he's part of the reason what made the game great yeah he wasn't the suave character you see in games especially japanese games at the time he didn't have the hair of cloud strife he didn't have super powers although he could do backflips he was just a regular guy sure he had sarcastic moments but he was mostly down to earth and respected life an example is when you face off against paul a psychopath in the game you obviously fight the guy and it's clear he's messed up in some regard but you can actually save him after the boss fight i mean after taking a picture of his crotch being on fire because why not fantastic all the guy needed was one good deed to help turn him around frank doesn't want to kill people not only because it's obviously a bad thing but doing so have a potential lead go up in flames starting at the crotch frank isn't a good guy but he's definitely not a monster and he wasn't spotting off one-liners in the game consistently and he certainly wouldn't allow people to kill others right in front of him i feel disturbance in the force fish frank isn't the most compelling character he wasn't mega man although you could certainly dress up as him but he was likable enough and certainly didn't annoy players there's a reason why he got the spin-off title but we'll get to that later when we talk about dead rising 2. so yeah there was a lot of appeal to the first game it wasn't the greatest but it certainly was a good enough game to warrant a sequel title and even a few terrible movies that hardly anyone talks about and for good reason i think before i actually get to talking about the game's sequel it's important that we talk about what came between the two titles unlike a lot of games especially nowadays there was a prequel story for the second game dead rising 2 case 0. it takes place about four years before dead rising 2 takes place and was available only on the xbox arcade for about 5 bucks and only lasted an hour but it still gave people a chance to experience the gameplay for the second title and even transfer your experience and money that you earned in the main game a shame that the only way to access this content now is through the arcade like this should have been included in the future releases of dead rising 2 especially considering that it does have elements to the story included that would help the player when the games were released in 2016 to a future consoles they were heavily criticized for not including the dlc expansions in case 0 we meet chuck greene our new protagonist who unlike frank was a motocross champion and a father to his daughter katie both of whom just escaped from las vegas which just had a zombie outbreak yeah the zombie plague from willamette got out and is now spreading and unfortunately katie's mother bit her luckily during the time of the first game there's a medication that suppresses the zombie plague but needs to be taken every 12 hours the only reason i'm bringing this up now is because it's necessary to know this in the main game story and it changes a little bit case zero gave you a taste of how chuck played and immediately you could tell a difference between the first and second titles chuck operated a little bit smoother guns were easier to control and you can move while you aimed and there was one big addition that really made the series one that was more fleshed out in dead rising 2's full game combo weapons baby patriarchy thanks to this handy-dandy mechanic chuck can create weapons of mass zombie genocide with them ranging from the practical and rather broken location of the knives taped to boxing gloves to shooting fiery ping-pong balls to hey a better jedi than rey i bypassed the compressor the weapons managed to add a bit more flair and color into the world and it made sense i mean most of the time even with my favorite weapon the knives with boxing gloves i'll never understand why one knife can turn to six but it added new level of complexity to the base game as it allowed you to up your arsenal as well as kill zombies in more hilarious fashions there was a bit of an issue with the combo weapons though as they were too good too plentiful and the moment you got them the regular weapons may as well be practically useless especially since you get some of the best weapons just outside the safe room and dead rising too the knife boxing gloves and the light slave then the lightsaber it kind of makes the game a bit too easy especially when the materials respawn as soon as you enter an accident area don't get me wrong the game can still be challenging and it's fun to paddle saw through the zombies it's a fabulous concept that really made the games more memorable and i kind of spilled out of case 0 and went to the actual dead rising too so let's just keep going the story takes place in fortune city a new version of las vegas if you will chucks on the latest and greatest television show terror is reality hosted by chuck's doing this we can get money for more zombrex that medication i brought up earlier for his daughter at this time though it has to be taken every 24 hours but as you can imagine zombies get loose chuck is accused of starting this massacre and it's up to you to save katie and clear your name and i gotta say i like the idea of the plot it adds a bit more of a personal note to the story since if you want to create some grade a investment add a little kid to the mix although really it comes up as a cheap hollywood attention grabbing move now that i think about it the best and cheapest way to get an audience to care for a character and make them relatable is to give them a kid here at hollywood studios we've been conscious of what successful films have not only been made but have stood the test of time after many decades of research we've realized that part of the process of making a successful film is having a good story turns out all we had to do was place a dainty slimmer rock next to it with one or two pebbles by its side oh please don't kill him he's got a family and then we smashed it it's it's awful and that sort of thing has been slowly creeping into the world of gaming last of us the evil within two amnesia i don't know it's just something that i've noticed as games have become more and more like films and it's something i don't want to happen to video games especially with how trash hollywood has become but enough of me ranting about that dead rising 2 was a very good follow-up to the original game and there were a few things that changed chuck was a little more stiff to control the camera was a little bit closer to the chuck than it was to frank in the original game but it really didn't bug me in that regard dead rising 2 is a fun game to be had with a lot more combo setting and the inclusion of combo weapons it made the gameplay a lot more memorable and like the first game it still had a number of endings and even had an alternative scenario that would allow you to get an optional final boss and more content to explore the city it certainly didn't make for a fun idea to see you romp around the city fantastic what also helps is that the game is that there is the introduction of a new kind of zombie you see in the original game the only time you get a different type of zombie is when the game turned to night and that would only have the zombies act more aggregated and become stronger slightly and that was gonna bare bones however when it's dead rising too they introduced a new kind of zombie gas zombies these bad boys are bigger stronger uglier and they love to throw up on you [Applause] and if you get hit you'll be flinching enough for them to grapple ya seriously these things will really give you a bad time if you're not equipped well because sometimes they don't even take the weapons right of course and if you allow me to be opinionated the best part of this generation of dead rising came from a different form the fortune city incident people always ask me about it why didn't you cover it why didn't you break the story the next question people always ask is well if you'd been there what would you have done differently [Music] [Music] this was something i'm pretty sure hasn't happened in game before a what if story version of the original dead rising 2 where instead if you play of chuck greene you are playing as the original main character frank west now if i had a choice between the original and off the record i would suggest playing off the record not only does the game streamline the process of using zombrex meaning you can take it whenever you want and you don't have to stop what you're doing to go back to the safe house as you would have to in dead rising 2's original but there's also a new area to explore more original combo weapons as well some very fun bosses not to mention i find the game to be a lot more enjoyable because the sarcastic quips that frank delivers they're smarmy they don't come off as annoying and he acts serious when he needs to break his back and in a good way you're here to get your next big scoop no way pal i'm not here for work this is my vacation but yeah off the record to me is a superior version of the second game of dead rising games and the reason why i'm not going too far into the story is because i feel like you guys should be the ones experiencing it i want you to get this game they are really cheap to find nowadays there is one more thing i should bring up and that's case west as it was a dlc chapter for dead rising 2. it was an epilogue chapter that featured chuck greene and frank west teaming up and it's a really good dlc again i don't want to give too much away about the story for it but let's just say it sets up the story for the third title in a way i'll also say that the boss of the dlc is well i'm kind of surprised no one complained about that boss dead rising 2 wasn't the greatest follow-up in video games but it certainly solidified in the hearts of fans that the series was going to survive and evolve that i was willing to produce fine content and of course make the games all the more outlandish and fun after all who doesn't want to tear through zombies with chainsaws on a pontoon ore it's oddly satisfying throw in the fact that the characters were a lot more colorful and out there as well as improving upon the psychopaths from the original game dead rising 2 and off the record submitted themselves as great follows for the franchise looking towards the psychopaths you certainly had some interesting ones such as a mascot who went insane a crazed protester who was trying to fight you for zombie rights and your typical console fanboy i joke but the bosses did take another page out of reformatting the psychopaths and tried different characters they didn't just basically slap on the same mechanics which is something that a lot of games with sequels do and with off the record frank's weathered personality and sarcasm added more charm to the game making it more enjoyable since frank came off as if he was a player surrogate like for example if adam was your brother i'd hate to meet your sister frankly this is where you think dead rising really managed to make a name for itself as it managed to appeal to a larger audience helped by the fact that dead rising 2 and off the record were actually poured to outside a single console system it really expanded the franchise's reach although the dlc for dead rising 2 still remains exclusive to this very day on the xbox still the series was on fire and looking great and before dead rising 2 officially released talk for the third game was in the works and the third title in this series was on its way albeit with some shaky ground i suppose [Music] watch [Applause] [Music] so this is where things started to go a bit downhill to clarify dead rising 3 is not a bad game i don't think it is at all however it's a heavily flawed dead rising game the game itself is not bad per se if it's on its own but we're talking about a series here this time we're in los perdidos playing as the young mechanic called nick ramos you've got six days to explore the city and find a way out and survive and there's a lot of mix going on here in those peditos but i think in order to be fair we should talk about some of the positive support get with the issues that i've had with this title first the controls nick was actually a lot more fluid to control than frank or chuck and you could now sprint oh yeah i didn't bring up the fact you couldn't sprint in previous titles oops there's also heavy light and ground attacks you can do but probably the biggest thing that changed was the combo weapon system not only are there new combo weapons that you can make but nick can make a combo weapon on the fly he doesn't need a workbench you can also combo combo weapons to make super combo weapons there was one such weapon in dead rising 2's dlc where you could combine things to make the laser gun but there's a much bigger variety [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] oh my how lewd there's also the fun little addition where you can combine vehicles which is helpful in concept and they expanded the map since you got a whole city to explore instead of just a mall but more on that later so yeah they've managed to streamline the combo system and expand upon the combo system as well by including new elements in the gameplay i'll give an example of something we've made much easier that everyone seems to like um is the combo system so when you find the blueprint you know you have to find the blueprint combos but um you don't have to go to a workbench and do it um you can combo on the fly so once i've got the ingredients for the recipe if i find the stuff that goes in there it says hey do you want a combo right now yeah i would because i don't want to have to walk over and find that to do it i'm sorry i don't know where that came from i feel like i just found something that was crooked and stupid anyway there are a few more fun aspects to said game like for example how there's much bigger variety in the zombies both mechanically and design choices there's a fun little aspect that the zombies all have randomized appearances and they won't just be shambling around depending on who they were before they turn they'll actively change tactics like football players will charge at you and tackle you to the ground or how cop zombies will carry handguns and actually shoot off rounds and said rounds can actually hit neck side note there's a lot more realistic gore with the zombies in previous titles they'd essentially just be filled with red jello not here though oh that's a nice slice probably the biggest changes that you can save whenever and wherever you want you don't need to find a bathroom in order to save your game which you know is good it's a little bit less tension though but hey i'm down for that now these are just a handful of the positive changes and there were others but i should probably discuss the negatives of said game one of the most notable change is that this is one of the brown and gray games you see during this time period where this game came out there were a really terrible trend that's still going on to this day where a lot of games opt out of colorful graphics and will go for a more grim realistic look and i use realistic with quotation marks on that this design choice flew into dead rising 1 and 2's design philosophies both of those games had colorful settings and backgrounds that were a stark contrast to the story as well as the walking undead there's nothing wrong with this kind of artistic design but it really took away from some of the charm of the previous two games had and while there were some obvious themes and design choices that made the game if you looked hard enough the pilot choice certainly was a factor as to why people wrote off the game's level design the camera was a bit more of an issue as well mainly with the shaky cam it got so bad that there were actually reports of people getting legit sick and couldn't play the game for long periods of time even though you had combo vehicles there were a ton of roadblocks that limited how far you could use them so while they had this fun new concept they severely need capped the ability to use them although there were some that you could actually use if you knew what to do but eh the next two are what really hurt dead rising 3's experience for me the weapon lockers and the extended time limit the weapon lockers were an interesting addition to the main gameplay it basically allowed you to store every unlocked weapon and combo that you had you could have the best combo weapons at your fingertips with no price and this wasn't a new game plus thing this was in the base campaign once you get the best items there's no need to use anything else since you can get more of the best weapons at a whim sure there was a bit of a cool down period but that's kind of you know small potatoes in comparison to this and the extended time limit was also off-putting not only because did they give you too much time to complete everything it really comes to the factor of how the original two games were so good and made you do time management i'm not one of those snobs who thinks that challenge automatically makes the game good hollow knight mega man cuphead super meat boy niho what devil may cry no not that one if i look past the fact that he's just like really cool and edgy with them having different levels of difficulty they aren't good because they're challenging they're good because they expect the player to engage with their gameplay and work with their limitations as well as not actually holding the player's hands the problem with dead rising 3 is it gives the players too much freedom without a lot of cost not to mention the survivors now survivors weren't the greatest in the first game their ai was terrible i brought this up with a pool of water dead rising 2 did make the ai a little better at least then they wouldn't screw you over when you had them recruited dead rising 3 beat his ass boys yeah the survivors can actually be used as a small tiny mini army even to the point where you can actually beat up some of the psychopaths in the game if you use them right this is a cool concept but it does make the game a bit too easier than i think it should be well unless you want to get into the fray because then they'll just get in the way if you want to use them as fighters don't get me wrong i'm glad the survivors are able to do things like giving them their own unique ability to not die and even weaponize them and heck they can be useful when you're searching buildings as they keep the zombies out and to be fair the game did also add a difficulty mode it's the first with a series with nightmare mode which ramps up the difficulty at quite a bit but when it comes to dead rising 3 the worst aspect it removes anything of survival horror to it and this ties back into the challenge of things while i wouldn't consider dead rising to be a part of the horror genre specifically it still had elements of survival horror where you had to be able to manage your inventory know where you had to go to get specific weapons and know where you can get some decent healing items then rising 3d however doesn't have that thanks to the weapon lockers you can basically have any weapon at your fingertips that you already discovered so if you manage to get the better weapons in the game congrats you can get it from any of the safe houses via the magical lockers that were in the resident evil games this actively hurts exploration since in previous games you'd have to be able to know where the items were you could go to the best routes get them and you know where things like the work tables the save stations and the fast travel routes if you wanted to go save survivors now here's the thing i am a bit conflicted on the gameplay in some regard i will say i do like the skill tree system here on paper or the attributes as they're called and concept i like the idea it allows you to improve nick in any way you'd like at any point you can i'm a guy who loves the games that give you the option how to customize or choose what attributes you need at the time for your character as it gives you a chance to have a skill that can get you out of a pickle should you have any trouble going through certain aspects of a game now those in the audience who love to leave essays in the comments section may have noticed the words i used in that last point words like in concept and the the problem is that the game overdoes it such as making the sprinting being made infinite or the ability to equip every book to give you a constant boost or my personal bane especially considering my last rant about this it's the portable locker you see it's a portable vehicle that whilst an interesting concept basically takes away the one thing that stopped you from abusing the lockers that i mentioned about normally you'd have to go to a safe room but you got this portable monster yeah i can't really fight back but it still has that issue that i brought up there's note the issue and that's what the final perk system now to point something out in the previous games you had reached the higher levels and you still had all the skills the boost in inventory and health sure the game was easier but you still didn't have much of an advantage over the miles of zombies or the psychopaths if you were too reckless you could still be killed and the hordes could get you if you're still ill-prepared i know what i'm saying is extremely anecdotal but i never actually died on my first run of dead rising 3. granted i was on the standard mode but i never really wanted to come back to play nightmare mode at least not in depth and not for this video and i don't have proper console in which to play originally so there are other things i want to talk about when it concerns with this title namely the psychopaths and the story as well as the dlc let's start with the psychopaths a good chunk of them were based off the seven deadly sins which you know is a tired trend to base bosses off of as it more often than not forces you to put your characters into certain kinds of personality types that isn't to say it's the same all the time with this but it's definitely the case here for gluttony you got darlene the fatty lust dylan the [ __ ] and for pride it is man and just to make it clear the game came out in 2013 and that whole incident came out in 2018 now aside from the tired theme of sins going on there are other problems with the psychopaths and that's mainly because they're not really all that believable to me i know that considering that this is the game where you can basically create lightsabers and dragon suits that breathe fire that i shouldn't be complaining about realism but that's the thing with dead rising while there were comedy aspects as well as there being out of the world instances the world is grounded in realism the comedy stems from the gameplay it comes from the weird items you can use to smack the zombies around and it comes from that you're actually wearing during the cutscenes however despite all that goofiness the characters still treated the situations they were in seriously the characters still reacted to the world and the tragedies that were happening and this extended to the psychopaths in the first game there were a lot of people who basically turned into psychopaths for example cletus the gun salesman wasn't exactly a psychopath but a man who was afraid of the zombies and became afraid of people who would be after his gun supply orin off the record and spoilers chuck greene yes he is a boss in dead rising 2 off the record he loses his daughter katie and he breaks down to the point where he thinks a doll that he has strapped to his back is her and he has to do what he can to protect her i don't get that vibe with the psychopaths in dead rising 3. with only one exception and i will only call him a psychopath then again considering what's going to be happening [Music] but we're saving that for a few more minutes back to my original point another reason why they didn't just click with me as the previous ones did is well they just came off generic to me maybe that's just me but it seemed like the fact that a lot of them were over exaggerated characters and some of them even the cusp of stereotypes auntie granted it's not the be-all end-all for me similar to the psychopaths of the previous dead rising games the maniacs are tough survivors who went nuts during the outbreak i'm at least thankful that we have psychopaths in this game getting away from that depressing thought let's talk about nick in the story at the same time nick is actually the youngest of protagonists in the games thus far being a young mechanic in los perdidos nick isn't really all that compelling of a character to me now i'm not saying frank west or chuck greene were the deepest characters in all of gaming if they were puddles i'd certainly wouldn't get my feet wet as their motivations and personalities weren't exactly what i call memorable editors note i do not agree with this statement not one bit he's covered wars you know but they were both at least confident and had motivations to brave the zombie outbreak that were relatable and interesting nick on the other hand isn't exactly of the same ilk especially when you learn that nick happens to be immune to the zombie disease something he learns after he gets bitten i mean maybe i'm immune i don't know i'm being snarky here obviously as it turns out due to the events of the first game nick has a bit of a connection to carlito again if you want to know the actual story for the first game go play it for more details getting back to dr3 aside from his immunity there's not a lot of development for nick now i've gone on record saying that you don't need to have a character develop during a story since the main idea of dead rising something that we've seen with frank and chuck is that they don't actually develop as characters they're older characters who are set in their ways and have their own moral compasses that were developed and reflect their actions in the game nick isn't really the same though he's a younger fellow who starts off the game being nervous and afraid of what's happening and that happens throughout the majority of the game and then he becomes angry i'm gonna kill you with my bare [ __ ] hands you son of a [ __ ] we've got a badass over here like in a majority of the cut scenes in the game nick carries on with his usual scared and inexperienced behavior and it isn't until the later part of the game that he actually becomes badass i will admit that as the story goes along nick in game does act a little more confident when you actually play the game and while it is a nice touch it's a bit at odds with the cutscenes especially with the psychopaths there's also the main story of the game and it comes off as very what are the right words to use here dry bones i guess like there was nothing that really hooked me into the story to really care about nick and the other characters and in some cases some motivations came out of nowhere there's also a bit of a romantic subplot and that's really all i could say about it i don't know what to tell you as the romantic subplot is something you can find in any flick that shoehorns in a dime a dozen romance i'm not saying and don't appreciate that sort of thing but i'd rather i just don't think that it's really all that necessary and dead rising i mean the most we've gotten dead rising before when it came to romance was they didn't teach me that in journalism school so don't get me wrong that's schlocky too but the very least didn't take up the main portion of the story and was mostly just a side point and didn't have any actual foothold in it let's also take a look at the ending and spoilers then again i already warned that there would be spoilers in this video so whatever consider the endings for the first two dead rising games that are canonical there's a trend where the main protagonist will be put into a rather dire situation it wasn't a happy ending and it left you wondering what would happen to these characters what you were playing as [Music] meanwhile rick nick are you okay i'm doing just fine annie we're on our way okay me and dad then we have to pick up isabella she went back to the lab to find something i was worried nick i i can't lose you now don't worry you won't hey [Music] what the hell was that everything turns out great for the protagonist now i'm not opposed to happy endings hell the overtime endings were dead rising 2 and off the record are decidedly coded to be happy endings there's just something final about this ending especially when you consider the events of the game and nick's immunity to zombieism but unfortunately that wouldn't be the case so it kinda rubs me the wrong way finally let's talk about the dlc because it's kind of a mixed bag the untold stories of los perdidos and for the low low price of 29.99 you can play as 4 other characters in the city and learn their stories unfortunately the dlc didn't really deliver for me most of the missions consisted of fetch quests or rescue missions surrounded with a cutscene what didn't help was that the characters we were playing as weren't exactly the deepest of characters yes they were side characters in nick's story in one case there also was a psychopath but we learned about them couldn't have been discerned from what we had in nick's story and the fact the stories were pretty much carbon copies of each other didn't help they fell flat and they felt they were made cheaply and that's because that wasn't the original plan randolph stayer is one of the designers of the game and came out a while ago with an article expressing some of the design choices that were made for the game if you get a chance give it a read it's interesting to read this stuff if you have any interesting game design work the original plan for the dlc came in two packages a prologue similar to dead rising 2 case 0 and a 3 part epilogue that would see each mainline series characters star in their own episode i personally preferred these and the stories that we wrote for them but due to the exclusivity rights and the move to the xbox one the time and budget we required to make the original designs were gone that leads us to where we landed the untold stories of los perditos so we would have gone a similar dlc treatment that dead rising 2 had but expanded upon as well i wonder if there were other plans for like an off the record version of dead rising 3 that actually would have been pretty fun to actually play but as the quote stated it was the exclusivity rights in the transfer the xbox one that caused this change another reason why i hate limited titles before dead rising 3 was completely locked down i was put in charge of dlc planning for two of four episodes the budget was thin the timeline was tight and resources were still hammering on the main game regardless of that this was one of the most fun parts of the project the world had already been constructed and all we had to do was create mission content you know i can appreciate a developer's woes but this just seems like unfair treatment it seemed like the developers really wanted to do what happened last time but we're trying to make the best out of the current situation for the dlc that and no offense mind you i don't think was really worth it sometimes when criticizing something like a piece of media you tend to forget that there are people behind the work people have a real passion for what they're doing regardless with the prices and stories i wouldn't recommend getting the dlc there was one more dlc and i'm sad to say that this is really a shame because what we got [Music] arcade was hyper edition ex-boss [Music] oh that is a beautiful sight i'm not even going to attempt to say all that but in actuality this was a pretty fun multiplayer arcade addition to the game this level of detail put into the costumes that are all call backs to previous capcom titles complete with voiced clips it was a fun arcade-styled game that really made this sort of dreary looking game amazing it was fun it was interesting and it certainly was worth the price of admission but and there always has to be a but this dlc is exclusive to the xbox and last time i checked you cannot get this on the pc version of dlc don't get me wrong while i find the third edition to be disappointing as a dead rising title it's not a bad game sure i'm a bit more harsh with it than in the previous titles but that's because it was a start to what a lead into something much much much worse still i acknowledge that perhaps i'm being a bit unfair to the game it still has a lot of positives to it but considering that to this day it remains only on pc and xbox it really hurt the game's potential reach in the long run hell when the game first came out i had dipped out of buying the latest consoles for a while the only reason why i got back into stuff like console tiles was because of well i think you get the reason why still while it may have made things a little too easy for my taste dead ryzen 3 still offered something new and fun for players and frankly i do think the game does get a bad rep nowadays especially considering how some people will put the game on the same level as what the [ __ ] hippity-hoppity get the [ __ ] off my property [Music] you know when my father was still around he would always tell me that he hated the holidays it was a completely boring concept to me at the time how could anyone hate christmas it was a time of joy a time of family a time of giving my old man told me the reason why he came to hate the holidays wasn't due to things like corporatism of it it wasn't because of bad christmases with his family no no no no no he hated because he was a radio dj and had to listen to the same tired christmas music for god knows how long during his shifts and up until a few years ago i couldn't understand his pain at least until this game yes though i also answered hey [ __ ] or frank who all right or manufacturing for meat [Music] you know a lot of the time whenever i sound angry in my videos it's mostly played up for laughs or i'm playing a character what you think i'm actually a black and white caricature of a manga boy with pointy ears but i wanted to be known far and wide dead rising 4 is a mess of a video game it is probably one of the worst ways a seagull could go down ever i hate this game and this will probably be the longest part of the video it's going to get loud so let's get into it dead rising 4 came out in december of 2016 and all honesty it was already having some terrible signs to it you know those developers i showed slightly earlier these were the people whom were given the reigns people who had no actual connection to the previous titles now this isn't a death sentence there are a lot of developers who take the reigns from games that have no connection with previous titles hell you can make that argument with dead rising itself since dead rising 2 was made by a canadian studio rather than a japanese one the problems start to crop up not from when you start the game no no no no no much earlier the problems crop up with the moments we received any interviews from the development team and if you don't believe me when i say they were misleading then see for yourself the whole dead rising franchise has been known for mayhem and just killing tons and tons and tons of zombies and we've kind of upped the ante for dead rising 4. frank is back that's why we have our hashtag frank's back okay frank's back frank is back frank is cooler he's tougher a little wiser but he's still frank frank's mellowed with age now he's 16 years older he's 54. he's still frank um but you know his his sense of humor is better you mess with my camera again right you're a quick one that's what she said but we don't want to force funny down people's throats we want the gamer to decide what's funny and what's not um and uh you know we think we've really captured what we really wanted frank to be all along what are you doing uh for us i think we were really looking at our roots and going back to one but we that's the correct answer by the way okay great uh so how important is going to be the like one big thing about dead rising is you see a lot of like people you have to go save and join your party are we going to see more of that in this one yep and it's better i mean it's not like i'm making the perfect game right going back to the roots making the perfect game and you believe that how [ __ ] naive are you [Music] you lying god damn mother [Music] keep your cool common keep your cool you barely started talking about this mess alright look one of the biggest issues i have with dead rising 4 is the marketing push if there's one thing i really dislike about modern day media it's deceptive marketing tactics that plague studios where they overhype a game like it was the second coming of a retro christ and that goes for a lot of marketing that uses these tactics so things like marvel or the spider-man game doing this i don't approve of the only difference is that the end products tend to not actually be made terribly so they tend to avoid this kind of vitriolic reaction from the player base dead rising 4 however is not one of those games there is so much wrong with this game and it's probably the best example of how a franchise in gaming can have so much rot put onto it when it's in the wrong hands take pokemon for example people complained about how pokemon cut a huge part of the decks and lied about the animations alright fair enough but with dead rising 4 they removed some of the most key features to any dead rising game at least with pokemon you didn't have multiple basic features removed from sword and shield in dead ryzen 4 you can't even pick up random items or use them as weapons like you could in one let alone throwing pies at zombies well unless you count the cutscene bargain then sale at the flea market end of the frank west throwing a chair at a window i really thought that would work how does a game from the mid-2000s manage to do something better than a game that was from a previous console generation son of a [ __ ] alright i'm getting ahead of myself let's start with what this game is about we're taking control of hank east the preferred name as we go back to the town of willamette as a new zombie outbreak happens there the story if you can even call it that starts off with hank being a professor of photojournalism at a college where he's duped into going to a classified government testing facility by one of his students vic and yes this isn't really frank west no matter how badly you want to argue that it is this character is the farthest thing away from frank west he is practically a new character and no that's not just because the voice change frank's entire personality seems to have shifted [Music] no [ __ ] are you okay my therapist says it's an ongoing process all right we need cover that hotel looks good three star's the best frank these guys need medical attention can you keep obscurus off us sure you play florence knight and girl i'll be rambo when this is over we can switch how about i just owe you one instead [ __ ] this door is cold locked you can hack the code with your spectrum analyzer let me guess you messed with my camera again right you're a quick one that's what she said who wants barbecue no no one holy [ __ ] frank this is some atrocity level [ __ ] going on here and the best you can do is crack wise that is unfair i have photographed things and thought about things your mother was a gopher and your father smells a body spray honestly with how frank is portrayed in the game the opening portion of this is actually oddly fitting just not in the right way i'll get into why the story itself is terrible as well as why frank is here as both are a major issue as to why so many people who are longtime fans of dead rising hate this game and yes i say hate you only need to look on youtube to see that people have made extremely popular videos expressing their disdain for this title well i guess you can throw me onto that list now so let's start with the gameplay that's the most important part of a game like this so how does it play and look well okay look i know there are patches and updates to fix this mess but there are so many issues like going on since day one this is one of the signs that developers rushed this product out before fixing these issues and i don't find that to be acceptable one of the biggest changes in the gameplay would have to be the control and inventory system i combined those two because this is the one of the many shortcomings of the game originally you'd have melee throwable range and consumables marked to the d-pad on your controller the problem with this is that it limits the gameplay especially concerning the fact you can no longer throw pies in terms of the food we've streamlined that too because we've done it where you can go you pick up the food and instantly put it into a separate inventory oh and then you have all your little uh crosses on the bottom yeah and then when you need to hit food down on the d-pad bam fill it up you don't you still see the animation of doing it but you don't have to go and spend time to prepare the food oh man because people we found people really didn't like that i would love to know who the these people are that these developers talk to so let's explain this not only did you take away the ability for me to throw any non-throwable weapons away including swords pies drinks none of that is throwable now but you also changed the entire inventory system i never understood why they thought this wasn't fast in previous dead ryzen games you just cycled through your inventory and only took a matter of seconds to do so there are also mapped the triggers on the controller meaning you can shift through the items quickly and since it was mentioned i might as well talk about it mixed drinks were taken out i mentioned this briefly but that's mainly because i want to talk about it here in the past dead rising games you can mix foods in a blender and they'd give you some interesting effects upon consumption one the best was quick step which does exactly what you think you gain the ability to go gotta go or spitfire which allowed you to temporarily have the ability to chuck super spits at your enemies and it would actually hurt them you are basically spitting literal saliva bullets like you are the hobo from hobo games point is there are a lot of pros getting the drinks in addition they would heal you upon consumption so things like ketchup which weren't all that useful say for making zombies slip on it could be used to help recover hp by mixing it with something else getting back to the inventory when it came to throwable items frank now just throws them in an arc frank can no longer whip plates at zombies or kick the soccer ball now he just throws whatever he can seriously who were these fans who asked for this give me back my ability to throw pirates at zombies you bearded monsters christmas zombies and everything gore these were the ingredients chosen to create the perfect little game but capcom accidentally added an extra ingredient to the concoction camp can vancouver i'm making the perfect game right you're like a [ __ ] comedian you remember when i gushed about how you could call on your inner wrestler and do so much damage to the zombies well things like that are no longer usable upon command what you need to do now is build up combos and then you perform set action and a lot of these skills that you required in previous games no longer exist the developers managed to take a branch out from dead rising 3 using a skill tree system which allows you to boost your stats but you don't get the fun skills like ripping zombie guts out one small thing to note that really irks me is unarmed combat you could easily punch the zombies in the last games all you need to do was go to a slot that didn't have an item not the case here if you try to attack them while you still have a weapon equipped the game will automatically equip the item to attack with well thank you mama in this game and four are we going to see you know the same traditional like day and night cycles and like a a hard day limit for when you have to be finished with the game no so we've taken the time away because we had a lot of so what we did was we kept time in one place and we got rid of it in another um because this game has got so much more side content and stuff to explore and find um we did a lot of testing and we found that people could never complete the stuff in the amount of time and then we'd give you so much time to do it that time meant nothing who exactly were these testers in so much content dude considering that none of the survivors have backstories that they're sterilized into you you'd help us survive and they go thanks remember in dead rising 2 the girl who woke up in her underwear and you'd have to take off your clothes so she wouldn't feel embarrassed just to save her or playing poker against cheating bots that may as well be unfair as youtube's own bots or dead rising 3 the old lady who wishes to revisit all the places she loved and reminisce about her husband or the guy who wants you to bring him zombies so he can make a porno there's absolutely nothing like that in the base game i just can't get over how lazy this level of design is especially when it's in comparison to the previous titles and you have the gall to say what you did here was better that all this side content was the reason that the time system was removed yeah you know the time system i brought up the one that was in all three of the previous games that's gone one of the you know wonderfully unique things about the first game uh was the time constraints and whatnot and obviously zombrex in the second game a lot of that was sort of like left by the wayside i mean there was elements of it in three are you going to reintroduce some of that into dead rising 4 uh we're not doing time elements in this right now and uh there is no cure currently in this game right uh we wanted to really allow players to explore our world more than they've been able to in the past with the time element in there you weren't able to go into every store and look everywhere right which is why you decided to block off a ton of stores in the mall also i guess stuff like the sane achievement which allowed you if you saved all the survivors or psychopath runs i'm sorry i just do not believe this at all my own experience with the titles of dead rising 1 and 2 allowed me to explore along the way and even then there were things like the sandbox modes which allowed players to explore the mass with having to worry about the story or keeping up with cases of zombrex we do a lot of user research we send a ton of research out and we do a lot of q a with people and we found out that the people it was okay some people really liked it and more people didn't like it because they wanted to be able to go you know what you ended my game and i was so close and i don't have to go do that all again right you know they didn't want to have that pressure um and so what we wanted to do is we really wanted to make sure the world was really open lots of side missions lots of stuff to discover um and let people it's still the same dead rising but we've taken some stuff away and added a ton more what [Applause] what the hell are you talking about who the hell are these people you talked to dead rising didn't end the game for you if you failed a mission you were allowed to continue playing if you didn't make it in time for a mission sure you'd get the bad ending but you could also continue playing onward or go back to a previous save or checkpoint i am legit wondering if these developers even played the older titles at this point we also really want to encourage killing zombies yeah and if you're under a time constraint you see that big group of zombies and you're like oh i want to do it but sometimes you can't we want to let the players just go to town on as many zombies as possible you could literally do that in the previous games the games gave you tools to clear massive hordes of zombies look if i want to play a muso style game i'll play persona 5 strikers which is a lot more fluid than this massive lumpy flesh and a lot more colorful that's for sure always it isn't being a thing for me where i'm like i'm running low on time and i'm like i've got two survivors like i gotta pick one of the two and it's like well not getting a perfect run this time all right yeah and then people say oh well i could just go play it again yeah yeah people don't want to play it again to get that one other thing yeah so that's cool that's i like i i appreciate that you guys are you're listening to feedback from the gamers yeah you know what the game you know we get a lot of feedback of course we can't respond to everything um but we really try to at least acknowledge that we get a lot of it in um and it's important because the people who play our games who we're making the game for so we have to please the most people that we can who the hell are these gamers this was your first dead rising game and your last my god i gotta get away from these interviews they're seriously pissing me off listening to this cockamamie [ __ ] [Music] so let's talk about the crafting system stuff like making combo weapons and combo vehicles and as such for a sequel you'd obviously have to up the ante so what's left upgrading frank himself not in that way basically in the game you've got these things called exo suits they allow frank to power up and mash through mobs and of course you combine them with certain items to get upgrades it's a neat concept but that being said the exit suits are extremely limited it's clear that they were put in to deal with mass hordes of zombies however they run on limited charges and as such they aren't really a good thing to have since they don't last as long as you'd like they're more like vehicles in this sense against solo enemies like the bosses it's like being challenged to a showdown with a guy wielding a knife and you decide to bring a flamethrower what doesn't help is that you can't use regular weapons with the exosuit which kinda sucks because it's a bummer when the whole idea of you being souped up is that you can obliterate zombies more easily but for some reason you can't use regular weapons and take advantage of the possible combination something that can be used with the exosuits you can't say hit zombies with a baseball bat and send them flying like a home run record that's not possible in the game you can combine the extra suit with some items in order to make combo suits but they still lack the inability to be interesting to use in fact all the combo weapons seem to be rather off-putting one of the biggest changes to the combo system is that instead of finding specific items for both components you just need one specific item and combine it with an aspect of another and some of them are just kind of lazy like a sword of fire a sword of ice i'd also like to point out the dead rising 4 has 47 combo weapons you want to know how many combo weapons there are in dead rising 3 64. hell dead rising 2 50. how do you have less combo weapons than the game that introduced the concept that doesn't seem scientifically possible so i think we've established three things so far in this segment one my voice can be very annoying at times two the developers are full of it i'm making a perfect game right and three dead rising four has some major issues when it comes to gameplay and i'm pretty sure i haven't covered them all like apparently this is the game that introduces stealth a concept while introduced doesn't really mean a whole lot in the grand scheme of things and really from my experience it's a lot easier just to run through with guns and smash my way through enemies it's basically taking the gameplay that we had in the previous games and dulling it down in order to appeal to a much wider audience there are probably a lot of things that you can probably add onto that list but if i did this video would probably be hours long and frankly considering that there are whole youtube careers that were made to criticize this game i'd rather not go that far but i want to point out that the biggest issue i have with the game is the fact they took so much out while the developers kept saying that they were going back to the roots the franchise these guys never had a hand with the original game which was made by a completely different team altogether and if they did then this would be more troubling as the mechanics that were established back in the original game were removed and for what that mixing drinks would be removed that we can't use anything we get our hands on as weapons all over the sink of mowing down zombies i can tell you guys if you like killing zombies then please for the love of all that's holy just stick with the original three titles and off the record not only would you be getting more out of a varied experience but you'd be able to enjoy all the zombie killing goodness at a better price and frankly i want to get to talking about the other issues with this game like let's talk about the maniacs hmm what's that what are maniacs why they're the [ __ ] versions of psychopaths they're like a total downgrade from the psychopaths from previous titles one of the major differences is that when you approach the areas where the maniacs are there's no actual cutscene to introduce them it's an in-game dialogue and this is a big deal as the cut scenes in the previous games will show you the personality of the psychopaths as well as give you a much better impact on what the characters are like learn what they were before when they lost their minds and for some even learn their motivations and give you a slight idea on how they would fight you that and shows a level of polish for your game they were mostly people who were once regular folk maniacs however yes you kissed your mother under the mistletoe frank am i supposed to be intimidated by you maniac because i am a little he has the biggest balls i've ever seen of any game character yeah what didn't help was that the maniacs were essentially clones of frank even down to the fact that they attacked the same way with their combo weapons and the only real difference is that they have a lunge attack and have thicker health bar not that you would be able to tell sometimes if you know what you're doing you can kill these mini bosses really quick hell a video i would recommend if you're looking for more in-depth review of this mess of a game is from tasnaker he proved that you can kill the maniacs with not only a random soldiers in this game but also with the zombies that's because the maniacs are instantly put on the map but when it came to previous games the prior psychopaths had their own areas that would have zombies moved away not to mention the psychopaths would have their own mechanics like antoine from dead rising 2 a chef who despite his girth was actually a speedy little guy in addition he had long and short range attacks and he wouldn't have piles of food that he would go to and snack on in order to heal himself it's not the deepest boss battle but he still stood out as one of the more few boss in the game that could heal themselves to be fair to the maniacs though there was an update made when the game was released on ps4 with said update going to other versions of the game and that added more difficulty thus made the maniacs slightly more durable than toilet paper but even the number of maniacs that aren't in the main story are lacking most of them don't even have a proper name to him and they are just masked goons and there's only five of them that's right outside the main story bosses you've got five maniacs the developers of the game made it really apparent that one of the reasons that the time mechanic was removed from the fourth game was so people could enjoy the content but unfortunately i'm not seeing said content getting back to the psychopaths even though they were boss fights and could be challenging they were still rather simple in their designs since you wouldn't want players wasting all their time defeating them when they could want to do other missions it would add tension to the fights without making them super complicated and the games would at least put some items nearby that would help you fight against the psychopaths however without those time constraints one would think that the bosses are in the overworld would get a bit more complicated and would have even some uniqueness to them after all you've got all that freedom and a huge map what's stopping you from making a ton of complex bosses think sort of like the bosses in breath of the wild that you can encounter i mean not literally of course but in the same vein of having unique mini bosses that have their own set of mechanics and abilities but that doesn't exist in dead rising 4 and the game hardly has any other content other than the story the maniacs and the collectibles sure there are random events in the game but those are mostly just about survivors and woo boy i already brought up in earlier that survivors in this game barely have any actual backstories and hinted that they don't have anything interesting about them hell the only two reasons why you'd ever want survivors is to get a combo weapon that they can drop and how they'll give you exp for the safe houses that you go to in previous games survivors would make it worth your while to risk your neck such as giving you loads of prestige points special items such as zombrex or even combo cards or money that would help you out in the game but according to dead rising 4's dev team survivors were the equivalent of that friend who would ask you for money say thanks and never see you again that's not even true in dead rising 3 where you had stranded survivors i'm sorry that i keep bringing up these interviews but it just baffles me how some of these statements were made did these people or capcom think that we wouldn't know was in the previous games i can't even say that exploring the mall in town on themselves were that interesting for example the mall is a big issue with the lack of a maul and dead rising 3 the prospect of the mall returning as a setting was a good thing after all part of the appeal of dead rising and dead rising 2 is a bit of a wish fulfillment that if you ever trapped in a zombie apocalypse that you'd become this badass who could take whatever you could get your hands on and smash some brains in inside one of the most iconic places in zombie fiction and like i've shown that part's been surgically removed from the game meaning that a ton of the reason for that is gone most of the shops in the mall are closed gone are the shops that would have oodles of items for you to grab and smack a zombie across the head what i'm getting at is there is a limitation of freedom and creativity which runs counter to the idea of open world games the less you give your players to do the quicker they'll run through the content that you do have getting back to dead rising 4 that's exactly what they did for the sake of streamlining the process they removed what made dead rising be dead rising via the gameplay sure you could still dress up as goofy characters sure you don't need to worry about accidentally eating your food by mistake but those things are but pale imitations when compared to the previous titles in the franchise hell get yourself an assault rifle and you'll find that taking out bosses and mini bosses is rather pitiful especially the soldiers that are wearing the exo suits especially those that have flamethrowers since there's a big weakness that would allow you to kill them in one shot remember when i brought up challenging games that's part of the reason why i dislike this title from a gameplay perspective instead of forcing the character to think on their feet manage their time and learn the map for the sake of getting things done the developers decide to replace that with even mowing down zombies does nothing for me in this title since if i want to do that i move a copy of off the record and farm the sandbox mode at least there there are challenges that force me to do unique things and i'm able to get cash that can be used in the main game then it allows me to unlock the big items like the vehicles that you can use to run over zombies oh side note let's talk about the christmas theme for this game now remember when i talked about how i learned my father's pain with christmas music well here's where i talk about the excruciating agony i experienced with it here i can understand the game with its christmas theme going on but it makes it really unsavory to want to play the game outside the holiday seasons the other three games didn't have that issue dead rising americana dead rising 2 las vegas dead rising 3 urban with smaller themes for each district notice something here the games up to this point didn't focus on holidays rather they focused on locations and built the world around those locations adding a lot of cohesion in the design work as well as what kind of weapons you could pick up and use there it adds a grounded feature to your game it doesn't run the risk of driving your player base to use a sharpened candy kang as a shiv and commits sepaku to cheap christmas tunes every time they checked like menu could have just been a winter theme and that would have worked i think i've made my point about the gameplay and i've spent about 12 pages complaining about it and we haven't even gone to the worst part of this game so let me make this perfectly clear when it comes to frank in the story it's a complete disaster and yes i'm not gonna call him hank anymore short story frank has become completely annoying and the story is shallow as all hell long story well now's your chance to get a drink you got it good so at the end of the game frank west dies hold up wait a minute oh i'm sorry were you not expecting me to drop that bomb on you well i'm just giving you the dead rising 4 experience since before the game even came out this marvelous dlc called frank rising was already shown to happen with giving details that frank would die at the end of the game and reanimate as a zombie so thanks for spoiling the ending devs what a wonderful big brain you have to match those beards can't complain too much though since this isn't the first time that capcom has earned the moniker crap column they did the same thing with a sure as rap locking the true ending in paid dlc but this is just worse since just gave away such a big plot twist and already sounded the experience from the get-go at least for me now let's talk about flanderization if you're not familiar with the term it's a form of simplifying a character to their essential traits meanwhile missing the point of their character entirely and it's arguably that they didn't even know what frank's essentials were i love mini golf and that's basically what frank west has become in this game the developers well we're going back to our roots we wanted to make sure that we're honoring uh dead rising and and where it comes from why you always lying it's like the developers didn't know the first thing about frank west and it just decided to take a completely different character and have him steal the moniker of frank look was frank west sarcastic at times yes but in the times we've seen him he also had a serious side and was at the very least a logical person he didn't want to fight the psychopaths but he wasn't given a choice most of the time and the psychopaths would often land the killing blow upon themselves frank west wouldn't immediately go after someone or kill them because that would have been a potential source of information that would help him on the story that he was going through not to mention he wasn't a heartless monster with carlito who was about to die thanks to carlito being the man who started the zombie outbreak that killed thousands in willamette and because of his actions would cause millions of deaths in the coming future frank didn't forgive the guy but he could tell that there was injustice being done to the man that forced him to become like this and it was caused by the government in frank's country i can't extend that same character beat to dead rising force frank though especially if we look at the beginning of the game it's hinted that frank west has ptsd involving zombies but that has nothing to do with the rest of the game in fact frank likes killing zombies it's a fun pastime for him now if i had to be frank about frank there are two major issues i have with his depiction in dead rising 4. the first being the fact that i'm stuck listening to frank west's podcast throughout the game this happens to be a bit of a big trend in games that's still going on where you have the characters often monologuing to themselves or have another person to bounce off of you've seen this in games such as metal gear rising the last of us shadows of the damned it's a trait that games and modern times have been using as of late and i'm not knocking that so long as the dialogue is natural doesn't get on my nerves it isn't full of one-liner punch lines that fall flat in the face i don't have a problem with it guess what dead rising 4 does am i supposed to be intimidated by you maniacs because and here's the thing about that i wouldn't mind this i really wouldn't aside from the sheer cringe factor of the lines themselves it's not that far off what frank west has done in dead rising off the record there are two big differences though in that and off the record while frank was sarcastic it didn't impede on the story itself what i mean is that while he made quips after defeating the psychopaths and people like tk who deserve such behavior throughout the rest of the game frank remained a level head individual who treat other people with respect he wasn't an [ __ ] for the sake of being an [ __ ] sadly i can't extend the dead rising poor which is sad because at the beginning of the game we're given a few traits of frank that can make him be relatable or understanding but as the story goes on from that point it does whatever it can to make frank out to be obnoxious and stupid as possible and that's thanks to another character vic to save you some time the basic setup for the conflict is that vic takes frank to take pictures of a facility that has human experimentation going on they learn that there are clones of zombies being made and frank just wants to get in and out to get the scoop meanwhile vic i'm gonna burn this place to the ground oh yes that'll totally stop the human experimentation especially you instead building a smooth armed soldiers they'll totally put the public eye in a place that'll be burned into being unrecognizable to investigation teams right vic leaves frank's ass behind and frank is on the run because he's accused of assaulting soldiers months later a unique animation that doesn't show up in the game ever again the zombies are back in willamette and brad park a zdc agent who you're able to play as with dead rising 3's dlc finds frank and demands that he gets backed into the zombie run town to find vic and get a big scoop so he can redeem himself now i know i'm generalizing the plot but considering how basic the narrative is i just want to focus on the biggest issue of the story to me and that's frank and vic throughout the story we get different signals from these characters an example being frank acting like a fun-loving [ __ ] to someone who's willing to accuse vic of stealing the scoop meanwhile doing things that would actively hurt his chances of getting credible information such as killing maniacs without attempting to talk them down willing to leave darcy one of the more annoying npcs to die and acting like an [ __ ] to people for no goddamn reason oh and making jokes when they're very inappropriate then you've got vic someone who's willing to get onto frank's ass for wait a minute vic who's willing to chastise frank for using people in order to get the scoop but will turn around and sell a group of survivors to the same military faction who was in control the military lab that she and frank first broke into so she's a massive hypocrite and as i alluded with the earlier section of frank rising she actually gets out of the town while frank dies for her look let me be real with you i hate the characters in this game there's just so much stupid that one can take before they decide to say you know chucking my controller through the screen is a much better use of my time and it wouldn't be so bad if the game didn't try to make it all more comedic whenever it tries to have a serious moment the game or more specifically frank will make a cringe-inducing comment that comes off as the developers going no wait don't take us serious we're just hopping aloft this is something else i've noticed when it comes to games where the developers will take the whole marvel snark and put that into games especially of those of western companies look i get it the marvel cinematic universe is popular but i've really gotten tired of how much every character now has to be a snarky [ __ ] it ruins otherwise good scenes makes it so i can't take anything being said seriously and makes the characters unbearable since they begin to blend together in that regard what was i talking about again oh right i think i've established and i think this series had its highs and went on a very big low but why is that well as you no doubt have noticed there were a lot of things that were going on behind the scenes of the studio in charge of the game capcom vancouver the original heads for this previous titles had left the company including the writer of the previous games for dead rising 2 3 and off the record any read before this game was even completed and because of that whatever was written at the time had to be written over from what i heard and by that i'm talking about did you know gaming which by the way looking at their sources didn't give me a lot of credible information so take this with a grain of salt but because the limited time constraints and people who left the company during development of the game there were a lot of cut corners and i can certainly buy that since there are a lot of reused assets in the game as well as copy and pasted locations with slight differences here and there regardless the worst part of this is just how basic the game went and how said developers basically lie to the faces of the fans hyping up the game and flat out misleading people with the game's premise and such dead rising 4 not a good game it's not a good dead rising game i just don't like it obviously that's just my opinion on the matter because i know there's going to be a subsection of people on the net who do like it but let me be upfront with this if you like the game good for you you got some joy out of something i consider to be garbage and besides this was the game that had effectively killed off dead rising as a franchise and that's sad so so sad there is nothing good about this game excuse me editor's note they animated the servbot mask it's the greatest game there ever was well i guess that works notice me senpai notice me [Music] so after that train wreck of dead rising 4 where are we well we've basically got ourselves a dead franchise at this point i mean there were attempts at making a dead rising 5 so let's see what they had planned let's see oh chuck green would be back as a playable character and katie would also return and have psychic powers okay then never mind look considering how dead racing 4 went and how it was botched so badly from the rest of the series i doubt i would have liked the direction that 5 would have taken i don't know what other people would think but i assume that there will be others that would agree with me on that regardless it's amazing how a franchise well not the greatest or biggest in the world was still beloved by many and was slaughtered so callously it is a shame dead rising while not my favorite game series is a series that i do enjoy and love it's been almost 5 years since the release of dead rising 4. and since then the series has gotten quiet i don't know when it comes to capcom and their track record with games it's hit or miss as well as how they treat their properties resident evil's been getting more and more traction meanwhile ace attorney gets thrown to the side devil may cry gets one of the better redemption stories from the cursed pachinko machines and don't get me wrong i have my issues with capcom and the dead rising games are one of the reasons why i have an issue with the game company dead rising is a series that serves as a testament how great things and gaming can turn into complete garbage removing features taking away player choice and worst of all lying about the situation this is the reason why i hate big time gaming as they often will exploit their audiences and will deliver products that are up to par to previous parts i know that people will probably point towards things like pokemon or devil may cry dmc and to an extent yes i can agree but dead rising is the go-to example of shady business practices killing a franchise that i really enjoyed and grew alongside with and to see the games that people who were given the reigns of the franchise basically rip out the soul of it and don't think of giving capcom the company themselves a pass on this i've no doubt in my mind with how things were going with the creators of the series leaving the offices and teams that there were some shady stuff going on behind it but regardless this video was a nice trick to the history of a franchise that i once adored and watched it crash and burned who knows maybe there's a pachinko machine of dead rising out there certainly won't surprise me regardless while the franchise is pretty much dead and buried at this point five years after dead rising force smashed into the ground i still have the first few games in the series to go back to so if you want my opinion i think the first three titles along with off the record are at least worth your time it can certainly don't cost too much it's something you guys may want to check out i'm uncommon and thanks for watching hey guys i hope you enjoyed this video if you did i would like to take a few moments to talk to you about this as the real me this video was a labor of love and i want to thank my editor kaiser trigger for his hard work with this without him this video would have taken much longer and not be as polished and there'd be a link to his channel down below so be sure to give him some support that being said if you enjoyed these kinds of videos on my channel and see more please consider supporting me in the following ways while i do have a patreon i'm not going to share and say support me on patreon to get more content like this i consider patreon to be more of a tip jar at this point and if you want to support me through that i'll still appreciate it now if you really want to support me make sure you subscribe hit that bell hit the like button and if possible share this video around on various forms of social media twitter reddit and share it in discord groups if you want it'll help get the video out there and tell me that you guys are liking the content i've been creating as of late with me moving away from drama and making more analytical and fun videos this has been a fun exciting time for me to make these things i found a passion and would love to see it flourish and you guys can help out with that and since hopefully by the time this video comes out we'll have hit 70k subs i want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart that i appreciate all of you and i'm happy you guys are liking the direction that my channel is going or i at least hope you guys are liking which way the channel is going thanks again sincerely manga common

Channel: MangaKamen

Views: 29,148

Rating: 4.910913 out of 5

Keywords: dead rising, dead rising 4, the death of dead rising, resident Evil, Resident evil 8, resident evil village, capcom, mangakamen, Devil may Cry, Devil May cry 5, DMC Devil May Cry, video essay, retrospective, gaming, video games, review, critique, interviews

Id: GuwfX1f6pP4

Length: 85min 5sec (5105 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/_kellythomas_]

I liked dead rising 1 & 2, didn't past 20% of 3, and have yet to try 4.

I'm very interested in the series but have to nope out of a 90 minute video that is likely to spoil the later two games.