Last week marked 15 years since Dead Rising 2 made its debut. For my money, Dead Rising 2 is one of the best unlikely success sequels going, but whenever I think of it, I can’t help but remember its prologue even more fondly.
The reason I consider Dead Rising 2 an unlikely success is that, on paper, the odds were stacked against it. For whatever reason Capcom made the decision that it wasn’t going to make a second Dead Rising title in Japan – which meant separating the team behind a break-out hit and creating a new one for a sequel. That was risky enough – but then Capcom also chose to place that team outside of Japan. Any scholar of Japanese publishers knows that such East-meets-West development arrangements are at great risk of unsteadiness. Plus, the first Dead Rising was characterized by a fabulously Japanese vision of an American town, plus US foreign policy and a very Yankee predilection for excess. Could that survive in the West, even being made north of the border, up in Canada?
Equally risky were the swings the game’s developers chose to take. Much of Dead Rising’s winning formula was retained – but the choice to build the game around a hard deadline involving vital doses of an anti-zombie medication, the in-your-face setting of a fake version of Vegas, and switching out beloved protagonist Frank West all stood as ballsy moves. But y’know what? It all works.
Dead Rising 2 is brilliant. If Capcom’s brass is looking at the performance of Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster and thinking about how to continue the series, they’d be well-minded to simply ignore the third and fourth entries. The second, though? That deserves to not only remain canon, but also deserves a remaster of its own.