Summary
After six years of anticipation in a series most considered ‘dead’, theannouncement that Dead Rising was finally making a comeback should have been cause for celebrationfrom a community that was hungrier than the undead roaming Willamette. But that’s not exactly how it went.
While theDeluxe Remasterreveal trailer didn’t show us much, it did confirm that Frank West had undergone his umpteenth redesign and was also being recast yet again with original actor TJ Rotolo no longer in his breakout role. AfterDead Rising 4’s disastrous take on everyone’s favourite photojournalist- which was a big part of the series' downfall - alarm bells started ringing. And with this being a remake,fans were even more protective than they were back in 2016.
Capcominitially kept very quiet about who would be taking up the mantle of Frank West in Deluxe Remaster,but it was eventually revealed that Jas Patrick, known for Partitio in Octopath Traveler 2 and Dai Bo in Scissor Seven, was our new zombie-slaying freelancer, and was well aware of the trepidation fans were feeling.
Patrick initially started out as a musician before admitting that it “wasn’t getting anywhere” and pivoting towards voice acting after encouragement from his wife and the engineer behind his home studio.
Dealing With A Hesitant Fanbase
“How could Inotsee it?” Patrick says. “Look, I’m a gamer. I have been a gamer all my life. I get it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen something and been like ‘Oh, they changed the thing’. You know, it’s what we do. You fall in love with this universe or this character or this mechanic - the fact of the matter is until literally three minutes before I went into the booth to record, I had no idea I was Frank.”
When auditioning for the part that would eventually have him playing Dead Rising’s leading zombie killer, Patrick was only given a very small amount of information on who it was that he was trying out for. That’s standard practice for voice-acting so that projects can be kept secret, but Capcom went the extra mile by pretending that the game was all about an alien invasion instead of an undead uprising.
They’ll give it code names or project names. They’ll just say the name of the character, but then they made it aliens and not zombies. So it was an alien attack and I had no idea. - Jas Patrick
Alongside Frank, Patrick tried out for multiple characters, including some of the first game’s iconic Psychopaths like Cletus, Kent, Adam, and Stephen, all without knowing that he was setting himself up for the return of Dead Rising. After some time, Patrick found out that he was not only successful, but had managed to get the lead role.
Becoming Frank West
After landing the unknown part, Patrick poured over the auditions to try and figure out what it was that he’d be starring in. He wasn’t entirely sure by the time of his first recording session, but he told his wife that “it’d be cool if this was like Dead Rising” because of the humorous dialogue from the character who would later be revealed as Kent.
“So I got there and shook hands with the director and he said ‘Are you familiar at all with Dead Rising?’ Patrick tells me. “And he said ‘You know the protagonist?’ I said Frank West. And he said, ‘Oh good, so we won’t have to explain it to you. You’re Frank’. I sat down for a second and then I jumped up and caught myself just as I was about to hug him, patted him on the shoulder and shook his hand awkwardly. I don’t remember much else because three minutes later, I was reading the first lines as Frank in the helicopter.”
Although the response to Frank West having a new voice and look was initially a whirlwind of mixed reactions from worried fans who feared a repeat of Dead Rising 4,early looks at the game eased a lot of those concerns, and even saw some players saying that they prefer Patrick’s take on the character.
Considering the fact that all of this took place over the course of a few months from Deluxe Remaster’s initial reveal and its release, it was quite the rollercoaster for Patrick, who went from a mystery voice actor under heavy scrutiny to announcing the role on Twitter and seeing the shift in public opinion from negative to overwhelmingly positive.
“Nobody knew who I was, first of all,” Patrick says. “So I didn’t really take it personally. People had already started saying the famous line - the new guys starting to grow on me. Then everybody else started saying it. Then the previews came out and there was this immediate schism between your purists and the people that are like, ‘I like this guy’. I wasn’t surprised to see people having concerns, but it couldn’t have gone better.
Patrick compares the situation to what happened with Nick Apostolides when he was revealed to be replacing Paul Mercier as Leon Kennedy, with fans quickly warming up once they’d actually heard his performance.
One of the main reasons for that initial unease is that, unlike Capcom’s Resident Evil remakes, Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster mostly uses the exact same dialogue as the 2006 release, meaning Patrick’s performance is much more easily compared to TJ Rotolo. While recording Frank’s voice lines, Patrick had to watch the cutscenes and match the lip flaps and performance capture from the original game to make sure it was all timed correctly, a process that he describes as being very similar to his time working on anime.
“When people are like ‘Oh he sounds like he’s trying to do an impression’, that’s because I had to,” Patrick tells me. “I had to make the lips match. If you play the original and me together, they’ll line up perfectly. It’s pretty wild.”
Patrick tells me that his favourite line from the whole game is Frank’s sarcastic “Kinda” when Jessie asks him if he knows how to use a gun.
He’s Covered Wars Y’Know
For the most part, Patrick says that recording voice lines for Deluxe Remaster was a relatively smooth process that didn’t require many extra takes, but there were a few specific lines that received extra care and attention from himself and Capcom’s recording team.
That, of course, includes Frank’s iconic “I’ve covered wars, y’know”, which has become something of a catchphrase for the character over the years. Patrick tells me that it didn’t take too many tries to get right, but that the team knew how important that line was to fans and made sure to take the time for it to be perfect and live up to expectations.
“It’s Frank West man,” Patrick says. “This is a major legacy video game character, so there’s a lot of reverence going on in your mind. But at the same time, you’re being a professional and trying to get it right. So we’re blazing through these and going as fast, but then we’d hit a problem area or something was weird. Nothing against TJ [Rotolo], but there would sometimes be a strange delivery because it was performance capture. So it was an interesting experience.”
Making A Mark On Frank West
Most of Patrick’s time recording for Deluxe Remaster was spent on matching TJ Rotolo’s lines and performance, but he did have a few chances to give his own take on Frank and separate himself from previous iterations of the character. And, as all Dead Rising fans know, there have been quite a few.
This can most be heard with the new voiced dialogue that’s been added to Frank’s conversations with survivors, which was entirely done through text boxes in the original Dead Rising. In 2024, though, that’s no longer the case and both the survivors and Frank have a lot more to say to each other.
“There wasn’t a lot of room for me to put myself into it,” Patrick says. “But when I talked to the survivors where there wasn’t audio there originally, that’s where it’s more me - I’m not following so much. People have said, ‘you may really hear the concern in his voice when he’s trying to talk someone down’, and that’s because it’s more me.”
Frank’s broken Japanese conversation with two tourists was Patrick’s favourite survivor conversation to record, partly because it was his idea for the photojournalist’s obnoxious elongated “Fraaaaank”.
Happy To Be Frank
Beyond getting a glimpse behind the scenes of the work that went into Dead Rising’s long-awaited return, my chat with Patrick confirmed that he’s just as passionate about the series and his role as long-term fans are, and knows why Dead Rising is so important to so many people who have been enamoured with the series for nearly 20 years.
“Dead Rising is special,” Patrick says. “ It’s special for its nostalgia. It’s special for what it did in the industry in 2006. It’s special for the fan base. I may not be ultra-purist or part of the ride-or-die for 18 years, but I’ve always liked Frank. He’s just a special, special character and to be able to play him is absolutely mind-blowing.”
As grateful as Patrick is for the chance to play such an iconic character, he’s equally excited about getting the chance to return to the role in the future, something that he’s told Capcom he’d be more than happy to do. Following Deluxe Remaster’s release,surveys were sent out that indicated that other games in the series could eventually get the Deluxe Remaster treatment.
I would love to have the same amount that TJ [Rotolo] got. He’s amazing and did such a good job on all of that, but I’d love to see my chance at Marvel vs. Capcom and things like that. - Jas Patrick
While Patrick has already shown his support for a potential remake of Off The Record, the alternate version of Dead Rising 2 starring Frank West instead of Chuck, he’d also love to see a brand-new game in the series that lets him give an “untethered” performance as the photojournalist.
“Dead Rising 5 for sure would be the real test,” Patrick says. “That would be the Jas version of Frank West and would be truly me as Frank, untethered, unfettered, which would be cool. It’s a little scary even thinking about it, but it’s also exciting.”
Of course, if we’re talking about a potential Dead Rising 5 that brings back Frank West, I couldn’t resist asking Patrick what he thought would be the ideal setting for a new entry in the series, something that Capcom has even said is a possibility during interviews about Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster.
Patrick has heard all of the cries for a game set on a cruise shipand thinks it’d be a good backdrop if it was big enough to house all of the shops and weapons the series is known for, but he has a completely different locale in mind.
“I really tried to think about this when I saw people talking about a cruise ship and I started thinking about a bunker or a fallout shelter,” Patrick says. “Like an underground area and the surface of the planet has been overrun with zombies, so there’s all these fake man-made habitats and they could be linked by a high-speed bullet train. So you could go from habitat to habitat. And you could really get in the weeds with that.”
