right off the bat, there's a binary choice to make here. either you opt for a traditional story mode, or you experience the los perdidos outbreak through the lens of 'nightmare mode' - a feature designed to bring the game more in line with previous dead rising entries. as a fan of the hectic hustle and bustle core to the franchise's dna, in which significant organizational sense and stringent time management were required to succeed, the choice hardly posed a dilemma for me. but nightmare mode more or less revealed an incogruous title on all fronts - appending a time limit to dead rising 3's broader framework shines a spotlight on the pervasive rot at its core. where previous titles succeeded in designing interconnected networks to immersive oneself in, with main arteries clogged by zombies, psychopaths and hapless survivors, dead rising 3 has almost zero semblance of focus. the game's insistence on depicting a city is part of the problem here. willamette was nothing more than a mall, content to function as quaint romero pastiche, and fortune city gets a pass as a somewhat believable gambling district, but DR3 devotes its attention towards depicting a citywide outbreak somewhere in socal, with the titles marketing boasting about los perdidos' size utterly eclipsing both willamette and fortune city. you can chalk it up to the typical western AAA developmental decision, largely in service of traditionally rigid AAA expansion (bigger! better!). im also gonna speculate that it was primarily to shine a spotlight on just how many zombies can exist on the screen at once with this new #tech, and, credit where credits due, there's a lot of em. scores and scores of them can be on the screen at any time, even, with no loss to frame rate on my decrepit laptop. however, thanks to the ease of play this time around, you're rarely put in a position where this is an actively stressful thing, nor is there ever enough incentive to utilize the games sparse strokes of verticality to traverse the environment too much. getting around rapidly in nightmare mode also means using a car a lot of the time, which chokes any interesting decision-making and essentially turns this into a game of going to marked waypoints in a vehicle that's half as slow because it keeps running into cattle. inventory management's barely a consideration since there's food everywhere and you can craft weapons on the fly. nightmare mode doesnt tell you where any save points are because the game was built with autosave in mind despite the mode adhering to traditional tenets of the series regarding save management ie if you die fuck you, reload your last save. the clock is way faster now which makes Doing Everything in One Shot, another series staple, virtually impossible, meaning to complete nightmare mode you have to jettison almost everything that isnt the main story. 'escortable survivors' have been reconfigured into 'stranded survivors' where the goal is to just kinda kill the zombies around them and let them escape on their own. the list goes on and on, beyond what im willing to critically focus on - it's not really dead rising, it's in an incredibly frictional state where it has to bow down to western design convention while simultaneously juggling series expectation which mostly results in some incredibly annoying, gimmicky bosses and incredibly strange design decisions. the end result is total gratuitousness, essentially dead rising as musou, and it's not even an interesting musou. dull as dishwater for the most part.

at most i suppose i should thank nightmare mode for being such a babymode breeze that i wasnt compelled to stick around this world for any longer like i otherwise might have in a normal playthrough. not touching the narrative with a ten-foot pole, a total bastardization of dead rising's playful sense of tone and humor to such an inexplicable extent that i remain unsure how capcom vancouver was responsible for dead rising 2 as well. weirdly misanthropic and tasteless game overall, there's a kind of collectible you can get called a 'tragic ending' where you just stare at a dead body while a piano plays and they make a pun about their death and it's all...lacking in harmony. nick kind of sucks a lot too. part of the appeal for this series for me has been embodying atypical protagonists - dour and often selfish schlubby everymen who overcome insurmountable obstacles with a servbot smile, and nick is just too naive, one-note, and inconsistently characterized for me to be invested in his plight. also jesus christ, this games ugly. something about this game's aesthetic and colour palette was revolting to me, made me have a headache trying to focus on everything, and the UI which bleakly resembles this infamous riff on modern AAA design does it no favours. this 'XBone Launch Title Art Direction', as i've come to call it, really produced some of the most nauseating games on the planet. lococycle, ryse: son of rome, panzer dragoon de puta, powerstar golf, and fighter within...the idea that this game has a sequel that people hold in even less regard scares the shit out of me. if i ever get around to it, dead rising 4 might just be the worst game i'll ever play. impressive!

they made the psychopaths in this game represent the seven deadly sins. fucking grow up