Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster’s greatest addition? A whole lot more voice acting, with a Dragon’s Dogma style twist

If you’ve been wondering why Frank West has a new voice actor, we might have our answer: Dead Rising: Deluxe Remaster has a whole lot of new dialogue for you to hear - which means a lot of the game has been re-recorded.

The original Dead Rising was a real product of its time. In 2006 games were becoming more cinematic, but still had many of the tropes, hallmarks, and structural limitations of previous generations as developers got used to high definition content, more cinematic presentation, and more processing power and storage space. As a result, Dead Rising had some iconic fully-voiced cutscenes - but also a whole lot of in-game dialogue that simply passed by with text boxes.

Not so in the latest remaster of the game - which tries to live up to its ‘Deluxe’ moniker by adding quite a lot to the game. The whole experience ends up feeling like it straddles some no-man's land between traditional remasters and a proper remake. It’s clearly the same game in the end and is full of glorious 2006 energy, so it’s a remaster – but the additions are seismic enough to feel like a bit of a remake. The fact Dead Rising has already been remastered once, in 2016, doesn’t help matters.

Anyhow - Dead Rising: Deluxe Remaster has a whole lot of new voice acting. Any conversation that was previously just text-based in the original now has accompanying voiceover alongside the subtitles - including calls from handyman Otis designed to alert Frank to various goings-on in the mall. That’s actually a great quality-of-life improvement, since in the original game Otis would often call at really inconvenient times where subtitles would get lost in the melee - here, Otis’ voice rings out over even a boss battle, telling you what’s up.

Other times, it just adds a cool ambience to certain quests. At one point early on, you discover two survivors who are Japanese tourists. In this Remaster I overhear their chatter, in Japanese, before I see them. This encounter is a little puzzle, where you can’t recruit these survivors to rescue them until you find a Japanese phrasebook item in a book store. Once you return to them with that item, Frank’s new voice actor reads from the book in his best stilted, broken Japanese.

Once survivors join you, there’s another surprise in store - a bit of Dragon’s Dogma style chatter. You know how in Dragon’s Dogma your pawn companions will shoot off dialogue to help you out? Well, in Dead Rising: Deluxe Remaster, any survivors Frank has in tow will do the same.

This manifests in a few interesting ways. Each survivor has their own voice actor and suite of lines they can drop as you wander around. There’s no interruption to your movement - it’s just ambient dialogue that gets its own subtitle window off to the right of the screen.

Some might give you a hint as to a location in the mall that might hold useful supplies - like pointing you to the location of the gun store. Other times, they might notice something in the environment, like a PP Sticker which can be photographed for bonus experience points. When something like this is noticed, it actually gets marked on your in-game map - just like in Dragon’s Dogma. One survivor even asked me to take their photo after noticing Frank’s camera, noting that it might be her last chance to ever have it taken.

All of this is so similar to Dragon’s Dogma, I sort of do wonder if there’s even shared code, what with DD2 and DRDR sharing the RE Engine. It’ll also be interesting to see how much of this chatter is shared across all survivors versus which advice is reserved for specific people. In many ways, this could alter the survivor economy, where in a strictly time-limited game like Dead Rising, some people might become more valuable to have around than others - which could be an interesting layer to the meta of Dead Rising time management.

Don’t get me wrong - like in Dragon’s Dogma, this chatter is sure to get at least a little bit repetitive as the game winds on. Despite that, in the limited time I’ve had with DRDR so far, I nevertheless appreciate it. I know my way around Willamette Mall well enough, because I’m a Dead Rising devotee - but these tics are likely to be really helpful to first-time players and those whose memories are a little more lapsed. It also combines with AI improvements to make the survivors you rescue feel a little more like people and a little less like idiotic robots.

Of course, none of this really explains why original Frank voice actor and B-Movie superstar TJ Rotolo hasn’t been invited back. With that said, Frank’s new voice actor is charming, talented, and fits the role great - though many fans are likely to miss some of Rotolo’s iconic line deliveries. Hopefully, all the great new stuff will help to fill that void.

Dead Rising: Deluxe Remaster releases on September 19, and is releasing on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.