#1050

A playthrough of the hidden character Frank West in the Wii port of Capcom’s Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All Stars.

Frank West. He’s covered wars, you know. And also killed a shit ton of zombies. Star of (some of) the Dead Rising games, Frank made his debut in the original Dead Rising released in 2006, and has sporadically appeared throughout the series ever since. Dead Rising was one of those flawed brilliant games; so incredibly fun and admirable that you tended to overlook the quite clunky combat and horrible escort-mission mechanics. The later games have still been pretty good, but nothing’s quite matched up to the finesse and the fun I had with the first game in the series. More or less wholly inspired by George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (to the point they actually put a disclaimer on the box stating they had no affiliation with it), the original Dead Rising saw journalist Frank West dropped into the zombie-infested Willamette Mall, to attempt to uncover the source of the zombie-outbreak and ends up uncovering a huge government conspiracy in the process. You know, your average week at work.

Dead Rising was quite unique in that it was something of an open-world game, and more or less implored you to play through it numerous times rather than attempting to complete it in one playthrough. The game has an innate time limit, meaning that if you wanted to do anything you had to be pretty good with time management. However, as the game featured an RPG-progression system, it was often too difficult to take on certain missions and bosses during the first couple of playthroughs, and instead you were expected to take your time, level up and build up your stats through various playthroughs, develop strategies and ultimately get to a point where you were ready to tackle the main story. Nearly everything within the mall itself could be used as a weapon, and the game itself despite the macabre setting and story had a hell of a sense of humour to it, such as being able to stick a Servbot helmet on a zombie, and getting exp (or PP, as it’s known in the game) for taking pictures of it. Indeed, much of the exp earned in the game came from taking pictures of certain scenarios or persons, rescuing civilians caught up in the outbreak, or taking down bosses. You got a certain amount of exp every time you killed a certain number of zombies, but you didn’t earn exp for regular kills like the later titles, meaning that it took quite a few playthroughs to get enough exp to max out Frank’s stats. Those boss fights, too, were something else. Known as Psychopaths, each one had a unique theme song and aesthetic which helped to make each fight stand out as its encounter, and really gave you the incentive to seek out the fights as a result, not only because of the exp they granted but also because of just how entertaining they were.

This game was released before the Dead Rising sequels, so I have to say it was pretty nice to see Capcom bother to include Frank here, as they did in UMvC3. I remember there being a bit of debate back in the day whether he’d make it into either game, and as I’d been such a big fan of the game itself I thought he’d make for a brilliant inclusion. And, indeed, he absolutely does. Introduced in this version of the game, Frank’s design seems…a little weird here, not gonna lie. His model looks a little off and, my god, that character portrait is awful. That doesn’t matter however, as he’s still a great tribute to the character.

Moveset-wise, Frank is pretty good, but definitely feels a touch limited. In terms of special moves he has a baseball bat and a giant swing-throw, which were staples of his in Dead Rising 1, but he also has a couple of goofy moves such as a zombie which rides in a shopping trolley, as well as the ability to spawn a zombie on either side of the screen, as well as from above. Combo-wise I think he does pretty well, although as I said he feels a bit limited really. His supers are pretty brilliant too; his main one seems him transforming into Mega Man and unleashing a giant energy beam, a reference to both the Mega Man costume and hidden Mega Buster super-weapon being in Dead Rising 1, where the buster had the ability to kill almost any boss or foe in one hit. His other regular special is basically just a more powerful version of his giant throw ability, but his hyper combo seems him slamming a servbot helmet onto an enemy’s head and then smashing them through an entire line of zombies. Ridiculous, but very very fitting.

Frank is a pretty great inclusion here, I think, but he definitely seems…I dunno, a little rushed maybe. That model in particular just looks really bad, and his moveset does seems pretty damn limited considering the source-material they had to work with. That said, I had quite a bit of fun playing as him here, and I’m certainly glad they included him here.

Next up, it’s the other hidden Capcom character, and another damn good one.