There was a time when Dead Rising felt like the most technologically advanced game on the planet. Launching in the first six months of the Xbox 360’s life, alongside Gears of War, it was considered a poster child for the platform’s visual and mechanical prowess. I remember playing it for the first time and being blown away by how it let you loose inside a sprawling mall where you could go anywhere and do anything, so long as you were ready and willing to make your way through hordes of undead.
There were hundreds of them on screen at once, something we’d never really seen in games before, and here they were ready to be sliced, diced, dismembered and played with at your leisure. Let them swarm and you’d be overwhelmed, but the joy of Dead Rising came from exploring the mall and ransacking shops to find the most creative ways to kill thousands.
Dead Rising Is One Of The Greatest Zombie Games Ever Made
It was Capcom’s take on George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, an inspiration so blatant that the Japanese company was taken to court over it and had to put a disclaimer on the box. It took everything we loved about zombies in popular culture and put it all into one game. Nearly 20 years later, it’s still at the peak of the zombie genre, and now a remake is on the way.
Yet despite the myriad ways in which it pushed forward video games with its graphical and mechanical ideas, Dead Rising was also surprisingly old-school in its design. But Capcom depicted features like its punishing save system and fragmented open world with so much confidence that both became series staples, and when future games eventually eliminated them in favour of presumed approachability, fans complained. And I can’t blame them.
If you’re unfamiliar with the original Dead Rising, you are only allowed to save within the safety of bathrooms spread across Willamette Mall. You’ll have to memorise where they reside or pray you are lucky enough to stumble across one when you’re low on health or fleeing from a punishing psychopath, of which there are many.
When combined with the immovable 72-hour time limit in the campaign, which limits what quests and survivors you can meet, saving in Dead Rising becomes a key part of how you approach every moment.
And It Needs To Keep Its Iconic Save System Untouched
Saving your game in Dead Rising is frustrating because that’s the entire point. In order to level up, get stronger, and progress through the narrative, you are expected to fail and be asked to restart the campaign several times over as you learn new mechanics, gain more health, and become a far more capable zombie killer.
If Capcom allowed us to destroy the zombie menace with ease right away, the dread that permeates so much of the game would cease to exist. We wouldn’t feel like a survivor, but a saviour who is dropped into this mall with the intention of preventing the apocalypse. Frank West might have covered wars, but he remains a normal, dorky dude with a bad haircut and an expensive camera.
I recall countless play sessions as a kid which stretched on for hours because I was trying desperately to find the nearest save point by hopping between different shopping centres hoping that I wouldn’t bump into a random psychopath or those buggers in the yellow coats and green masks who would knock Frank unconscious and force him into an evil ritual over in the movie theatre. Not only would this strip you of clothes, but you’d have no health and need to escape a horde of high-level enemies and then find somewhere to save.
Yes, it sucks hard when you’re going through it, but you’ll feel like a god when you come back several hours later at a much higher level with so much loot and additional special moves and can stomp this cult into the ground in seconds. Its save system is framed by anxiety at first blush, but it soon grows into a familiar foe you will learn to work around and embrace. Future games in the series weren’t as fun because they assumed the save system was getting in the way of killing zombies, which it was, but only because it trusted the player to get better and work their way towards the eventual goal.
Dead Rising 3 all but removed the challenging save system, while the fourth game gutted the ability to manage food and mix together smoothies, dumbing it down so much that it was basically Dynasty Warriors With Zombies: Christmas Edition. It can be easy to see why Capcom decided it needed to make Dead Rising more palatable and far less frustrating as it became a major franchise, but if that means it loses its core identity, the end result just isn’t worth it. And with an updated version of the original on the way, it can’t leave these defining mechanics behind.
