Summary
Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster’s art director, Satoshi Takamatsu, has admitted that the team might have “gone overboard” with redesigning Frank West and making him look older.
When it was first revealed that Dead Rising would be getting a remake(or Deluxe Remaster, as Capcom likes to call it) earlier this year, there was one immediate roadblock - Frank West’s new look and voice. The first trailer for the game really only showed us that, whichleft a sour taste for manyas it seemed like yet another drastic redesign for the iconic photojournalist.
Cut to a few months later, and the final results are much better than we could have imagined, withfans taking to Frank’s new design and performance quicker than anyone expected. While that’s all behind us now, it seems that evenCapcomknows that it went a little too far with how old it made Frank look.
Earlier this week,Inverse had the chance to speak to several key developers on the Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster team, including its art director Satoshi Takamatsu. During the interview, Takamatsu is asked why the team redesigned Frank so heavily and what the meaning behind it was, which leads to him admitting that the wrinkles and older look might have “gone overboard”.
Takamatsu says that Capcom wanted to create a “more realistic” art style and that theybuilt upon the “average Joe” concept that is a foundation of Frank’s design. The developers then worked to make him more masculine and opted for a beefier body that embodies an American football player (which makes sense considering the Football Tackle) and someone who enjoys “beer and bacon cheeseburgers”.
This leads to Takamatsu talking about Frank’s new face, which he notes has more wrinkles to help “create more vivid facial expressions”, something that he laughs at and says that the team went overboard on. This seems to indicate that the developers know that fans thought he looked a bit too old, even if no one is complaining about the end result.
We also gave him a few more wrinkles to help create more vivid facial expressions, but we might have gone a bit overboard in that area. Haha! - Satoshi Takamatsu
Despite that, it seems that the team are all happy with how Frank’s new look turned out and that he’s lived up to what he was originally designed to be for the 2006 game. While it’s true that he looks more mature than a 32-year-old, he’s still the same cocky photojournalist that we’ve all come to love.
