For personal reference more than anything else. Still have done spoiler warning just in case though.

Second time doing a full playthrough after the first being around 4 or more years ago. Did 72 Hour Mode and Overtime Mode.

Won't go into the same stuff that I went into when talking about Dead Rising 2 as there's not much point. This will basically serve as a comparison between the two games though.

This game feels like if they removed the rod from up inside DR2's arse and replaced it with a kick. This is far more an improvement then I was expecting, many issues from the original game have either been improved, changed or gotten rid of. Even if something is not improved by much, it still feels like enough.

Frank West isn't my favourite video game protagonist by any stretch of the imagination and in this game he seems to go through a crappier version of the exact same arc he went through in Dead Rising 1, but he actually has a personality, something missing from Chuck Greene, he's a lot more fun and has chemistry with the other characters, like Rebecca. Rebecca is the most notable improvement I think as she has a back and forth with Frank that makes her scenes feel less painfully awkward then in DR2 and not only this but where she only had a couple of lines I enjoyed in the original, she now has so many more because they gave her a lot more dialogue it seems. Stacey would have been difficult for me to judge which version of her I preferred if they actually did anything with her storyline in DR2, now she gets to be a pretty entertaining villain for a short while and she feels better like this. The rest of the main characters are mostly the same, Brandon gets an upgrade from optional content to a place in the main story and its kind of interesting but has a slight issue that I'll get to later.

The ending of the 72 hour mode is mostly different as well as the game doesn't just go straight to the boss fight anymore but has you go around the map destroying harvesters which could have been repetitive but I think they choose just the right amount to allow it to feel like a good sort of science-fictiony moment to the game but not long enough to be a massive chore. The boss fight with Stacey replaces the one with Sullivan and I'm not the biggest fan of either in all honesty but if I have to choose between a hand to hand boss fight (that admittedly does feel like its honouring the first game's final boss) or a fight with a big robot in an amusement park, I know which one I'm choosing. It does feel sort of clunky but I don't really mind.

Speaking about the psychopaths, the only other one lost from DR2 is the fight with Leon which I felt didn't really work all that well and it was one of my least favourites in the game (even if Leon was kind of entertaining). Its been replaced with a fight with Chuck Greene that feels so much better and is quite an enjoyable fight. There's also a new boss fight with Evan who is Adam from the first game's brother, its ok but that's about it. The rest of the boss fights are the same but all get some degree of upgrade, certain characters are now more enjoyable to fight as they spam annoying attacks less (Carl and Brandon), a couple feel quite a bit harder though. Reed and Roger feel a fair bit more tough now and I had a slightly better time with them but not by much. The twins are now one of, if not my favourite fight in the game now as the whole thing just feels much more faster paced which made it much more exciting and difficult.

Seymour Redding is probably the standout as the biggest change though as he went from one of the easiest bosses for me who I managed to kill really quickly, to one of the contenders for most difficult boss I've faced in this series so far. A mechanic in this game makes it so that if you repeatedly attack an enemy without stopping, they will no longer take damage (or take much less) and you need to stop for a couple of seconds in order to be able to do damage again. Seymour is really good at far range due to his great aim and lasso attack which if done pretty late in the fight can kill Frank, having to stop attacking him for a second and get out of the way as he will obviously take this moment to attack greatly increases the chances of eventually losing to him, also due to the low amount of healing items nearby. I see this boss like I saw Isabela's in DR1, a boss fight that feels kind of bullshit and should probably have been worked on a little more but fuck if I wasn't having such a great time trying to beat it.

The game overall feels harder and it makes the game so much more fun and tense, it roughly sits in the middle of DR1's difficulty (quite hard) and DR2's difficulty (quite easy). Survivors take much more damage when grabbed by zombies now and while I didn't lose any I was escorting, it came so close at times. The timer also felt possibly shorter than DR2's (or maybe things just took longer to do) and I cut things quite close a couple of times with literal (in-game) minutes to spare.

There were quite a few other little improvements that I noticed like, being able to jump kick and dodge roll from the very start of the game, the game straight up telling you when a survivor is too far away so you don't have to try and find the green circle on all of the boxes of the survivors that are all on top of each other and a checkpoint system was honestly greatly appreciated as well even if I try to manually save whenever I can.

The biggest things new to the game are the Uranus Zone which feels like such a neat inclusion to the map. It gets used a couple of times in the main story and for certain survivors and due to a lack of time I didn't fully explore it like I've done in the past, but its nice to have an amusement park to play the games at or go on the rides and the space theme helps give it an identity and separate it from the rest of the game's world. There's also the sandbox mode which I didn't really play with this time but have done a lot beforehand, I'm not much one for all of the challenges but being able to explore the map at my own pace and having to deal with the bosses again and defected survivors is really cool.

Getting into the issues of the game, as mentioned before there's a slight issue with Brandon and he's not the only one where this happens, but there's a few points in the game where a cutscene needs to happen in a very similar way to DR2 and the game feels like it doesn't make as much sense with Frank as it did with Chuck. Brandon's dialogue about the protagonist not having the courage to do what needs to be done being mostly unchanged worked with Chuck because Brandon assumed Chuck commited an act of terrorism for CURE but Frank hasn't done or thought to have done anything like this to warrant this response from Brandon. Slappy feels like a victim of the game trying to change things but not quite getting it, how he went from seeing Frank expose what was going on in the first game to being able to fix his 'toy' I'll never know, its a shame because there's actually a bit of tragedy involved with this fight that wasn't there before, as Slappy had just accepted that Suzy was dead in DR2 but now seems to genuinely believe that she's only 'broken' and can be 'fixed' which was kinda sad. All the changes aren't bad though as Carl going from wanting to kill Chuck because he caused the outbreak and screwed up his schedule to now wanting to kill Frank because he committed mailer fraud is fucking hilarious.

Saying all this though, while there's certainly points that feel kind of awkward in this game as it tries to fit in to what the original was doing, the rest of the time it weirdly feels natural. DR2 didn't feel like anything was wrong with it or whatever but so many things feel like they make much more sense here, Frank's back and forth with Rebecca, the overall tone feeling more upbeat, even the return of the photography mechanic. In both games you have a couple of survivor missions where you need to reunite a couple (LaShawndra and Gordon), family members (Camille and Lillian) or whatever and when they do reunite they embrace for a couple of seconds and whenever this happened in DR2 I would instinctively try to get the camera out or think that this would be a perfect moment for a photo, but that game doesn't have a photography mechanic so just felt a little awkward. In this game it feels right being able to take pictures of these moments or when a psychopath does a pose or anything really. After playing both games quite close together, as weird as it may sound OTR feels like the original game and DR2 feels like the 'reimagining'.

The last thing for me to note is that this game had a fair amount of issues which after a quick Google search may be down to this port. The dialogue was so quiet especially compared to all of the other game's sounds, Frank got stuck in a couple of things and I had to reload to fix it, the game also stopped showing the little 'cutscene' with the survivors once you've escorted them back to the security office and instead the text would show and just stay there until the game was reloaded or I went to a different part of the map cut off by a loading screen. It wasn't the biggest deal ever and I've certainly played games that were in a worse state but it was enough to be pretty noticeable unfortunately.

Overall, this game is so good, this feels kind of unfair but I struggle to see a reason to go back to DR2 from now on as this game just improved upon so much and really turned DR2 into the game I wanted it to be. It has its problems but they aren't enough to really affect the game too much in my opinion. Really good game that I'll happily come back to anytime.