If you’ve been wondering why Frank West got a new voice actor, we may 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’s content has been re-recorded.
The original Dead Rising was a product of its time. In 2006, the game became more cinematic, but still retained many of the tropes, idiosyncrasies, and structural limitations of previous generations as developers grew accustomed to high-definition content, more cinematic presentations, and greater processing power and storage space. As a result, Dead Rising had some of its signature fully voiced cutscenes, but also had a large amount of in-game dialogue delivered simply through text boxes.
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That’s not the case with the latest remake – which tries to live up to its “deluxe” title by adding a ton of content to the game. The whole experience ends up feeling like it straddles some no-man’s land between a traditional remake and a true remaster. It’s obviously the same game in the end, full of all that glorious 2006 energy, so it’s a remake – but these additions are enough to make it feel like one. Small amount Remake. It doesn’t help that Dead Rising already got a remake in 2016.
Regardless, Dead Rising Deluxe Remastered has a ton of new voice acting. Any dialogue that was solely text-based in the original game is now voiced and subtitled – including phone calls from Otis the handyman, meant to alert Frank to various situations at the mall. This is actually a big quality of life improvement, because in the original game, Otis would often call at very inconvenient times and the subtitles would get lost in the melee – here, Otis’ voice even rings in during boss fights to tell you what’s going on.
Other times, it just adds a cool vibe to certain missions. At some point early on, you’ll find two survivors who are Japanese tourists. In this remake, I overheard their small talk in Japanese before I saw them. The encounter is a small puzzle, and you can’t recruit these survivors to rescue them until you find a Japanese phrasebook in a bookstore. When you return to them with that book, Frank’s new voice actor reads the book in his best stilted, broken Japanese.
Once a survivor joins you, you’ll have another surprise in store – Dragon’s Dogma-style chat. You know how in Dragon’s Dogma your fellow chess pieces would chime in with dialogue to help you out? Well, in Dead Rising: Deluxe Remastered, any survivor Frank brings along will do the same thing.
This manifests in a few interesting ways. Each survivor has their own voice actor and a set of lines that they can drop as you wander around. There’s no interruption to your actions–just ambient dialogue, with its own subtitle window on the right side of the screen.
Some might tip you off to a location in the mall that might have useful supplies – like telling you where a gun shop is. Other times, they might notice something in the environment, like a PP sticker that you can take a photo of for extra experience points. When something like this is noticed, it’s actually marked on your in-game map – just like in Dragon’s Dogma. One survivor even asked me to bring Their After noticing Frank’s camera, she took a picture, noting that this might be her last chance to take a photo.
All of this is very similar to Dragon’s Dogma, and I kind of wonder if there’s shared code, since DD2 and DRDR share the RE engine. It’d also be interesting to see how much of this chit-chat is shared between all survivors, and what advice is reserved for specific groups of people. In many ways, this could change the survivor economy, and in a strictly timed game like Dead Rising, some people might be more valuable than others – this could be an interesting layer of time management for Dead Rising.
Don’t get me wrong – just like in Dragon’s Dogma, this chatter is bound to become at least a little repetitive as the game progresses. Still, in the limited time I played Dead Rising, I still appreciated it. I’m familiar with the Willamette Mall because I’m a big fan of Dead Rising – but these little touches can be very helpful to first-time gamers and those with slightly poorer memories. It also combines with improvements to the AI to make the survivors you rescue feel more like people and less like dumb robots.
Of course, none of this really explains why Frank’s original voice actor and B-movie superstar TJ Rotolo wasn’t invited back. That being said, Frank’s new voice actor is charming, talented, and a perfect fit for the role – although many fans may miss some of Rotolo’s iconic lines. Hopefully all the great new work will fill that void.
Dead Rising: Deluxe Remastered will be released on September 19th and will be released on PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.
