Why ‘Dead Rising 2’ Remains a Bigger, Bloodier, Better Sequel

To say that 2006’s Dead Rising was a successful game for Capcom is an understatement. A defining series for the Japanese studio during the seventh generation of consoles, the first Dead Rising game was a two-ton bundle of fun whose technical prowess was matched only by its eclectic combination of over-the-top gameplay and unsettling horror. The earnesty in which the horror contrasts with the wacky shenanigans going on in the moment-to-moment gameplay made for a compelling whole that you can’t help but feel engrossed by. It’s this combination of conflicting ideas that formed a memorable, if not incredibly difficult whole, ultimately netting two separate remasters over the years. The latest one, Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, is set to release on September 18th.

But when you make a game as compelling and fascinating as the first Dead Rising, how on Earth do you follow it up? How do you expand upon what is believed to be one of the most well-thought-out and condensed Capcom games from one of the company’s most fascinating periods?

Naturally, you outsource it to Blue Castle Games, a developer on the other side of the planet.

In anticipation of the upcoming Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, it’s time to take a look back at the sequel that first introduced quality-of-life features to the franchise. It also introduced its own issues. We’ll get into that. We’re looking back at Dead Rising 2, the first sequel — and arguably the only good sequel — in this beloved horror series.

Fear and Loathing in Fortune City

The year is 2011. Five years after Frank West, freelance journalist extraordinaire, successfully escaped from a zombie-infested shopping mall with proof that the dead walk, additional zombie outbreaks are popping up all over the countryside. One such outbreak occurred in Las Vegas, Nevada, leaving newly widowed motocross champion Chuck Greene with an infected daughter, Katey, to tend to. Katey requires two doses of Zombrex a day to fend off the encroaching zombification. Naturally, Zombrex is incredibly expensive. Strapped for cash and with nowhere else to turn, Chuck puts his dignity aside as he ventures into Fortune City to keep his precious daughter alive.

Enter Terror Is Reality (TIR): the latest morally questionable game show that’s taking the nation by storm. Swathes of the undead are nothing more than pigs for the slaughter as they’re subjected to elaborate deathmatches. TIR’s latest contestant, Chuck, is having a rough go of it, with everyone between his fellow contestants to his sadistic host, TK, hazing him for his poor performance. Unfortunately, as Chuck is washing the blood off of his uniform, all Hell breaks loose.

A sudden explosion accompanies the arrival of zombies into the general populace. Panic ensues, sending civilians scuttling under the plodding feet of the undead. Chuck sequesters his daughter into a secluded safe room occupied by Stacey, a zombie rights activist, and Raymond, a security guard. After a brief foray back into the horde to retrieve Zombrex for Katey, Chuck is met with nervous glances.

Security camera footage of Chuck — or “Chuck,” as it’s actually someone wearing his TIR uniform — is revealed to be responsible for the outbreak. The news quickly spreads outside of Fortune City. The military is on the way to shut this mess down.

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With only 72 hours before the military arrives, Chuck Greene is tasked with:

1. Clearing his name and finding the true cause of the outbreak.
2. Gathering enough Zombrex to keep Katey alive.
3. Helping whoever he can find along the way.

It’s going to be a long three days.

Much like its predecessor, Dead Rising 2 is a game that doesn’t simply use its time limit as a framing device. Instead of putting you on a set path, you’re free to traverse the entirety of Fortune City at your own leisure, with story progression and side missions demanding that you be at a specific place at a specific time. Should you ignore these missions, you may inadvertently miss out on cool bosses, interesting characters, and even the best ending. Your choices throughout will net you one of six separate endings.

As for what you’ll be doing in Dead Rising 2, it’s fairly straightforward. You’ll run around Fortune City, escort survivors to the safe room, battle murderous psychopaths, gather weapons and healing items, and kill thousands of zombies all the while. Doing all of these things nets Chuck Greene prestige points, or PP, which acts as the game’s equivalent to experience points. Gathering enough PP grants Chuck a level-up, increasing his health, damage, speed, inventory capacity, and other fun rewards. Should you ever feel the need to do so, you can also restart the game from the very beginning while maintaining your current level, allowing you to tackle the game’s earliest challenges with brand-new skills and abilities.

On the surface, Dead Rising 2 is almost an identical experience to Dead Rising, at least in a mechanical sense. But there’s enough going on that slowly reveals itself the more you play to differentiate this sequel from its beloved predecessor.

Sleaze, Sex, and Combo Weapons

Dead Rising is to campiness what Dead Rising 2 is to sleaziness. While the first game maintained a strange balance between black comedy and stern-faced horror, the mix between the two elements formed a game full of laughs as well as nervous shudders. The latter, however, starts to dive a bit more into full-on cartoonish crassness that would go on to define the Dead Rising franchise in the years that followed — for better and for worse.

Dead Rising was so fascinating because of its unique cultural framing. In a bid to make a more distinctly “Westernized” game for a growing, globalized audience, Dead Rising deliberately incorporated elements from Western culture that, from an outside perspective, seemed more familiar to those to whom the game was being marketed. What you get as a result is this strange mishmash of Western ideas from the lens of a Japanese developer. Hundreds of zombies on-screen at once filling a sprawling shopping mall in the middle of Colorado is about as Western as you can get. It even spurred a lawsuit due to its similarities to Dawn of the Dead — but that’s a story for another day.

The same can be said for Frank West, the game’s playable protagonist. A very plain-looking man meant to resemble the iconic everyman action hero popularized by movies like Die Hard, Frank West was the direct opposite of the typical Japanese-influenced protagonists you’d find in other games. Frank isn’t even necessarily a “hero” at first — his role in Dead Rising is mostly due to his own self-serving interests, though his sense of empathy provides a stabilizing contrast against his memorable eccentricities. He’s covered wars, you know.

Keiji Inafune, a prolific producer at Capcom whose credits extend all the way to 1988’s Mega Man 2, was a driving force behind these Westernization efforts. He’s been more than vocal about them, after all. During a promotional tour for Dead Rising 2, an interview with Engadget provided some additional context as to why Frank — and subsequently Chuck — were designed this way:

“Frank as a character is very symbolic of a learning process for us, which is we didn’t want to make your specific Anime, nubile, 18-year-old Japanese character. We wanted to make a more rough, tough, gritty character for the Western market and we initially designed this out of Japan so there was a lot of learning we had to go through. Like, in the beginning, some of the directive I gave was ‘Make Frank ugly, make him fat.’ You know, we wanted to make him not super attractive as a character.”

The decision to ultimately outsource development for Dead Rising 2 to an external Western developer also came from Inafune, at least partially. Per Prima Games, the decision was due in part to faltering sales of the original Dead Rising in Japan, as well as the combined demand from fans overseas.

What you get as a result of this, however, feels like a bizarre inversion of Dead Rising‘s weirdness. You have a Western developer attempting to make what feels like a distinctly Japanese experience. There’s this underlying sense of sleaziness that, admittedly, feels somewhat appropriate for the kind of extravagant seediness found in the casino-filled space of Fortune City. Zombified showgirls, psychopaths in bondage gear, half-naked survivors, errant sex toys lying around where you least expect it — it’s a game that leans heavily into this territory compared to its predecessor.

Even its individual psychopaths are a little more unhinged and cartoony. While the first game depicted them in a comparatively subdued way (barring a questionable depiction of an Asian butcher), Dead Rising 2 goes out of its way to give them menacing smiles, bulging eyeballs, comical musculature, and — of course — prominent sexuality. It’s not a terrible thing, mind you, but it’s something you notice as you survive each day. A partnership with the real-life Playboy magazine certainly adds to this.

These exaggerated elements extend to Chuck himself. Instead of expressing disgust or remorse at having to defeat psychopaths, he spits out hilariously hackneyed one-liners. Instead of snapping photographs of the chaos around him, he can take the time to gamble at slot machines or poker tables. The very first thing you do when you start Dead Rising 2 for the first time is ride a motorcycle with chainsaws strapped on either side while mowing down zombies in a colorful arena. That’s not even getting into the presence of combo weapons.

Ideated by Blue Castle Games, per a Siliconera interview with producer Shin Ohara, combo weapons are Dead Rising 2‘s biggest claim to fame. Whereas the first Dead Rising used Frank West’s photography as a key mechanic, netting you tons of potential PP for making interesting and/or shocking photographs, Dead Rising 2 uses Chuck’s skills as a mechanic to its own advantage. Upon visiting one of many maintenance rooms scattered throughout Fortune City, Chuck can duct tape two distinct weapons together to form a more powerful combination with different effects. A box of nails and a wooden baseball bat form…a nail bat. A standard bowie knife and a pair of boxing gloves form an impromptu pair of claws. Likewise, dousing a pair of boxing gloves in motor oil sets them ablaze. An ordinary paddle can support the weight of a chainsaw, a concrete saw can be outfitted with additional saw blades, and even something as simple as a severing hand can be filled with a stick of dynamite to form a zombie-clearing explosive. While some combo weapons are a little esoteric, you’ll quickly find a handful of staples to incorporate into your rotating arsenal.

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The biggest problem with something like this is that weapon balancing across both Dead Rising and Dead Rising 2 is admittedly not perfect. Weapons in the former often fell into definitive tier lists; as in, some were blatantly better in every way than their contemporaries. The miniature chainsaws dropped by the psychopath Adam MacIntyre, a tragic clown, are arguably the most infamous example of this. A common strategy would be to simply take him down as soon as possible, leave and re-enter his area, and stock up on miniature chainsaws. You’re essentially set for the rest of the game by that point. It’s not as easy to fall into the same situation in Dead Rising 2, but it’s pretty close.

Despite boasting over 40 unique combo weapons to make, chances are you’ll only reliably stick to around 10 total. A lot of them are either too situational to really take advantage of, or they just demand items that are too inconvenient to consistently grab. Some of them are just fun novelties. The drill bucket, for instance, is hilarious as a concept. It’s a bucket with drills that you slam onto a zombie’s head to kill them. It’s great. But you can only use it ten times before it breaks, and it takes upwards of several seconds to kill a zombie. Oh, and you have to manually pick it up again after you use it. Yes, Dead Rising has its own share of novelty weapons, too. However, the increased effort involved in acquiring most combo weapons doesn’t match their overall effectiveness. At the very least, most boast fantastic durability over their non-combo counterparts, and they even net you additional PP for every zombie killed with them.

It’s worth noting that this single addition would reverberate throughout the entirety of the Dead Rising franchise. Every subsequent game in the series would feature combo weapons in some form or another, and their outrageous nature would only become more and more zany with each successive installment.

The Many Ways to Play Dead Rising 2

We didn’t even mention the biggest change that Dead Rising 2 brought to the table: multiplayer. Originally meant to be included in Dead Rising, Chuck Greene’s trek through a nightmarish Nevada can be accomplished with an additional friend. It’s a drop-in, drop-out system that seemed to work well enough — other than some minor changes to how dying works, everything else in the game remains functionally the same.

One multiplayer mode that I would’ve liked to play, however, is “Terror Is Reality.” It pits you against other players in the very same game show Chuck was originally competing in. You’ll kill zombies in a variety of ludicrous ways in order to secure a fancy cash prize. It’s nothing too crazy or really worth putting a ton of time into, either.

The biggest reason to play “Terror Is Reality” comes from the fact that Ranked matches (which are essentially dead 14 years after its release) would grant you actual cash that can be used in the main game. Being first introduced in Dead Rising 2, cash can be used in a variety of ways, be it in numerous forms of gambling or for specific side missions. You can even use it to quickly acquire Zombrex for Katey. Unfortunately, gathering cash outside of “Terror Is Reality” can be really obnoxious and time-consuming. Unless you know which specific survivors to save, or you’ve gathered a handful of useful items that aid in gambling luck, you’re likely to just smash whatever ATMs you come across for an easy $2,500.

Beyond two DLC packs that take place before and after the main story (which remain exclusive to Xbox platforms to this day), there’s also another way to play Dead Rising 2. A common criticism echoed throughout Dead Rising 2‘s press tour and its subsequent release is as follows: Where’s Frank West? Anytime Frank West isn’t on-screen, the audience should be asking, “Where’s Frank West?” Well, lo and behold, you’re given the opportunity to play as Frank West in not only one of the aforementioned DLC packs, but in a complete revamp of the base game.

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Dead Rising 2: Off the Record is a complete non-canonical repackaging of the game that sees Frank West taking the protagonist role in lieu of Chuck, who subsequently becomes one of the game’s numerous psychos. Acting as both a rerelease and an expanded version of Dead Rising 2, Off the Record boasts a recreated storyline, additional combo weapons, new enemies, and a brand-new sandbox mode that removes the persistent time limit in exchange for ample challenges strewn throughout Fortune City. Frank’s camera makes a return as well, on top of reintroducing the first game’s extraordinary difficulty back into the fray.

It’s not often you see a game specifically remix itself to have another protagonist take the lead, but it goes to show just how strong of an impact Frank West had. It’s not as if Chuck Greene is a terrible protagonist, either. Even Chuck’s voice actor, Peter Flemming, is an incredibly nice guy in real life. But one has to wonder if Frank’s memorable lines and resulting impact were ultimately a detriment. Frank’s personality in Dead Rising 2 is nothing short of a caricature of himself from the first game. This terrifying theme would repeat itself to a terrible extreme in the black sheep of the series Dead Rising 4. Thankfully, the changes that Off the Record brings to the table as a whole are seen as a net positive by most, even if its individual changes to the game’s balancing may seem a bit strange.

Dead Rising 2, in general, made a ton of quality-of-life adjustments that we’d later see teased in Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster. For example, the ability to move while aiming. It’s not a deal-breaker — Resident Evil 4, for instance, was balanced around not being able to move while aiming and shooting — but it makes gun battles a little more dynamic, either with zombies or with gun-toting psychopaths. Multiple save slots instead of one single slot give you a bit of breathing room when it comes to making mistakes. The enhanced survivor AI also makes escorting people to safety much less of a strenuous experience. They’re actually competent at staying alive, and their immediate threat of death via the zombie hordes isn’t nearly as intense as the first game.

Is Dead Rising 2 Still Worth Playing?

I had fun with Dead Rising 2. Really, I did. Much like the first game, there’s a mix of arcade sensibilities and actual survival horror that forms an addictive game you can’t really put down. It’s infuriating at points, but in a way that isn’t discouraging. Every minute, you’re always learning something. You’re finding the best spots for healing items or reliable weapons. You’re learning how to serpentine your way through zombie hordes. You’re figuring out how to reliably damage psychopaths without coming into harm’s way. It’s fun. It’s an iterative kind of fun. You’ll start out not being able to do much of anything and slowly work your way up to slashing your way through Fortune City with ease.

In an interview with AusGamers, originally published in April 2010, Blue Castle Games’ President Rob Barrett had this to say when it came time to sell a prospective audience on Dead Rising 2:

Well this series is different . . . You know, most games with zombies, they’re your primary threat; you’re scared of them and any individual one is a threat to you, but here it’s just a mob of toys . . . the real threat is the bosses and psychos, they’re the guys who’re gonna kick your ass – the real monsters are the people, the zombies are just your toys.

He’s right. Part of the fun in the first Dead Rising was the inherent absurdity of its premise. Fighting ravenous zombies with hockey sticks and loose television sets while dressed in ridiculous outfits made for a fun accompaniment to the chaos on screen. When it came time to battle those who were still human, suddenly, things got a bit more serious. You have to plan for it, you have to vary your arsenal, find enough space for healing items, and even plan to level up a few times The same applies to Dead Rising 2.

It’s why I can’t really find much else to talk about when it comes to actually playing Dead Rising 2. For most, save those who’ve played Dead Rising extensively, it’s a game that’ll fall into many of the same beats of the original. It’s almost to a fault — it’s “safe,” the kind of iterative sequel that heavily relies on what already works with a few doohickeys thrown in here and there.

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But that’s fine. Arguably, there’s really not much else you can change without sacrificing what made the franchise so appealing to begin with. The next two games in the Dead Rising series would see a more mixed reception from fans and critics alike as expanding the scope further, both narratively and mechanically, really started to weigh the overall experience down. The time limit would even be gradually phased out, being incredibly generous in Dead Rising 3 and completely missing outright in Dead Rising 4. Blue Castle Games (later rebranded to Capcom Vancouver) would be dissolved following the lackluster response to Dead Rising 4.

But with the upcoming Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, there’s a chance to set things right. The in-house studio at Capcom responsible for the first game is back in action. It’s a good sign.

As for Dead Rising 2, is it still worth playing? Sure. Co-op still works, most changes introduced work in the game’s favor, and you can find it for dirt cheap during most sales. While most either declare this or Dead Rising to be their favorite in the franchise, both games are well worth your time.

Dead Rising 2 is currently available on Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC.

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