I don't play many games that don't look appealing to me, and it's rare that I'll dislike a character who makes any kind of impression. This character I can't call "hated", and that's why I might
hate him. Hate his game, hate his existence, hate that this industry is mostly a mountain of missed opportunities, misunderstandings, and failures once we leave Japan.
Nick Ramos from Dead Rising 3.
Do any of you remember this guy? Probably not. That's very much the problem.
Dead Rising had a
fantastic protagonist in Frank West. Who I believe was uniquely defined by his atavistic appearance and manner. He looked like a cross between a neanderthal and an Amerifat who used to play football in high school. And
he was kind of a genuine asshole with an authentic feeling selfish and practical characterisation which fit beautifully into a genuinely edgy and transgressive game about globalism,
consumerism (Americans being fat), and terrorism.
Dead Rising's power I believe was in the depth and authenticity of its pathos. Frank was a product of this. A guy who feels like he has real human depths to him, even if he's not
complex. There's a whole person there. And not everyone has some great drama going on. Frank is just kind of an asshole. He needs to make money. The world is trying to go around, and him with it. And this attitude, his as much as everyone else's, is ultimately the caused the game's priming incident and led to the current tragic situation. Frank is a complete person who fits into a complete world generated by a thoughtful, honest, and unflinching, even if not necessarily complex contemplation of how people are. This I believe is a unique strength Japanese pop-art taps into. It shouldn't be unique. But it is. If you just
think about things, and make organic connections and developments,
if you aren't lying to yourself about the world the results will probably become compelling if you address something dear and serious to us. Like living, death, struggle, and prosperity.
Where do these ideas go? If you're the original Capcom team they go to Willamette, Frank, and everyone else.
Then Dead Rising 2 had a
decent protagonist in Chuck Greene. A handsome, mild, all around excellent guy who feels so much like a
woman's fantasy that to me he always felt more like a guy who should be turning up in a Netflix Christmas movie than a zombie plot about human awfulness. And that's the thing. He's
not in a plot about human awfulness, at least not
real human awfulness. Dead Rising 2 was made by Canadians, people ridden with various complex and unnatural psychopathologies which render them more or less allergic to honestly addressing the human condition.
Especially by around 2010.
Frank West was a serious, heavy, worn down man leveraging himself against a harsh, fat, stupid, and unfair world. Chuck Greene is a sexy grizzled widow-daddy ("hear that ladies?") roped into a quest to help his PETA girlfriend fight late capitalism, which wants to withhold your free healthcare for profit and oppress you with its various heavyset male authority figure enforcers. Chuck is a clean mister perfect and a perfect reflection of the new Canadian Moral Picture of the world and people which informed and generated this second production. Frank's adventure in the middle of nowhere among the quaint townies managed to present an infinitely more dark, sleezy, and bleak picture of human nature to Chuck Greene's fight for his life in the Second City of Sin. The problems with the world are no longer intractable or inherent within us. It is now
greedy people. It is
the corpos. But grizzled sexy widow daddy is here to punch them in the nose, and in collaboration with the free and fearless press (a staple of the world of 2010) he is going to solve this. Drama. Tragedy. Terror. The Human Condition... sanded down and refined to a level that a Canadian millennial is comfortable with. We just need a good guy to punch the bad corpo who wants to take healthcare. No interesting person is going to emerge from this universe.
That said... who remembers
Dead Rising 2: Off the Record? The most bizarrely good do-over of a video game I've ever seen. Pretty much every problem I have with 2 is fixed
by making Frank the hero again. Frank still exists in the Dead Rising universe after 1, but he's this weird vestigial element, obviously a product of
fundamentally different sensibilities. But the force of his presence in 2, the same basic premise rewritten to make him fit into it, suddenly it more or less works. Frank is not Chuck. By Dead Rising 2 they decided he should be outright ugly. Hair is falling out. Fatter. More disheveled. Wrinkled. Maybe they do this because they have to make him a joke to be comfortable with his fundamentally
unclean character. But a dirty joke character is much better than a clean nothing (sorry Chuck). Scenes which feel completely trite and pointless in 2 suddenly have a touch of human spark in Off the Record because Frank at the very least will get exasperated, make jokes, wonder about making money, and generally act like a person with interests and motivations rather than a protagonistic force of goodness and plot resolution.
But the funniest part of
Off the Record is how they handled Chuck. His spot in the story is given to Frank. So where does he go..?
Grizzled sexy widow daddy becomes insane hobo widow (former) daddy. This is kind of cruel. And insanely funny. That they killed off his human connection to the plot and played his complete self destruction for laughs. And
this works too. He's actually more human in this sideshow what-if appearance scene than his entire protagonist role. And he gets the best boss theme in the entire series to accompany his second showing.
And now, sorry about the wait, that brings us to
Nick Ramos. If you've followed me so far, you get why I like Frank more than Chuck, I shouldn't really even need to finish the post. The conceptual frame is there. Put Dead Rising 3 in there and compare along the lines established. If Dead Rising bled pathos as it went through the Canadian wringer through to the realisation of Dead Rising 2, then after the next production cycle the energy, spirit, and truth of the original Japanese creation was completely wrung out, and by Dead Rising 3 we have a work completely divorced from real unfiltered or distorted contact with anything human. If Dead Rising 2 was a product of a refined and sanitisation of vision, Dead Rising 3 is a vision collapsing into a void.
That's how you get Nick Ramos. Nick Ramos is what you write when you're afraid of writing anything. He does not have a personality. Nothing about him has roots in human nature. There is not a whole of depth within him, his form as a created character not an expression of the whole of anybody real on the production side, Nick Ramos is a final product of a refusal to acknowledge or address the world as it is. Or really even at all. And this is symptomatic of the whole of Dead Rising 3. Void-man protagonist of a void-game. If you've actually played this thing you might have gotten the same feeling I did. That this poor game barely limped over the production finish-line on a wing and a prayer.
But, I did not get the feeling that the real Nick was on the cutting room floor somewhere. It's probably more symptom. The production was troubled because how do you give direction to a work that's about nothing? It's just a pileup of
video game stuff. With a plot that's just
western video game plot stuff. The limp, sanitised threats of 2 have reached final placeholder anti-culture forms by 3. Conspiracy of old arcade game villains to hurt the masses for no real reason, but played straight in a kind of dumb imitation of the form of a plot that seeks to bear moral weight because these people are so far off from meaning they can't even tell what they're missing. Characters monologue, get indignant and upset, tell their motivations, but there is absolutely no sense, discernable humanity or pathos to a single word of it. The utter pointlessness that western popular culture managed to sink to under Obama is bewildering to consider in retrospect. These poor Canadians had their souls hollowed out by the New World Order. You know not a single person who worked on this game was capable of resisting the vaxx.
I might seem like I'm talking around
Nick Ramos here, but what else is there to say? Ramos, like the other two characters, really becomes interesting in consideration of the forces that generated him. This is what art is to me, it's how I entertain myself. Fictional biographies in isolation strike me as a deeply boring and pointless way to pass time. And it goes both ways, interesting roots are
how you get interesting characters, so if you're interested in criticism you have to understand this.
I have spent all this time telling you Nick has tortured, artificial roots. And what is the product of those roots? What is Nick? Frank West is a Mercenary. Chuck Greene is a boring steadfast hero. Nick Ramos is... kind of a whiney retarded faggot.
He has no personal driving force to him. Kind of a common theme in video game protagonists, they often need to be guys who are taking directions all the time because the game has to move from fixed situation to fixed situation. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas played off of this amusingly by making CJ a limp doormat disrespected by everyone. To justify his taking orders no matter how powerful or competent he gets, and to create a comedic motif and serve as a funny contrast to the ever-escalating scale of the things he's being told to do. He gets yelled at and called a bitch, then reluctantly goes to hijack a fighter jet.
The industry as a whole has been rather self aware about this for a long time. And you can do things with it. Not every protagonist has to be some kind of self-driven overman to not disgust me. I actually quite like CJ the ultimate doormat. But Nick Ramos is not written with any wit or finesse. CJ is personally weak to set up his lack of freedom within the primary plot. Nick Ramos is personally weak because Capcom Vancouver apparently just didn't want to step on any toes by writing about anything. So whenever anything happens he squeals and asks
"WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?" like he's John YIIKman and then defers to the nearest authority figure. That often being his fat rockabilly boss-chick mechanic boss. Why is his boss a fat rockabilly chick? Because that's a random combination of harmless fashions I suppose. And what is he doing all game? Just running and surviving. He comes into conflict constantly, but always reluctantly. Frank was a reasonable mercenary out to avoid trouble, but clearly didn't like bad people. His vague reactions in cutscenes served to set up your own spontaneous response to the scenario facing him once control was thrown back to you.
Nick's reactions to danger are always some kind of preposterous stumbling panic leading into extreme violence. Nothing in the game
feels violent, the tone is confused, detached, kind of bad-comedy awkwardness. But he's always killing people in response to these situations in which he demonstrates no serious resolve of any kind. Which creates a very strange feeling as you go. This guy was obviously written by people uncomfortable with violence. The whole game could have been light and vapid to work around that, but the vestigial moral weight and general moral framing of Dead Rising 1 for whatever reason died hard. The game's bosses (primary "human" enemies) are associated with "sins". What does "sin" mean to Capcom Vancouver? Obviously it's just a vapid gimmick. They feel a vague responsibility to put a moral dimension in their story. It comes out as a series of rotely produced labels. "
uhhh, this guy was... angry... so Nick is going to stumble into his house, accidentally piss him off, then spend five minutes braining him with a double-sword-axe contraption. This is what it means to be serious. We believe we are a more serious culture than Japan (2013 remember)."
Nick Ramos is just a weak, humourless, void of a character spawned by a weak, humourless, void of a production. A product of a weak, humourless, void of a culture (Canada in 2013). This was set up to go very badly.
Another Obamagimmick to this game that I
liked, is that there's another character in the plot who is his own character for playing co-op. I played this game with a friend (wouldn't have made it otherwise) and had a fun time playing as him. The dueteragonist, Dick, looks like Nick but Blonde, and has a minor role in
some cutscenes that he's canonically present for. And while his presence is very thin, from what we see of him he's kind of a snarky asshole. And in those comments he gives off more of an impression of a real human inner life than Nick does across the whole game. Under these circumstances the general spirit of light negativity feels like a ray of something approaching humanity piercing through a dead overcast cover of Obama anticulture. Even then, Good God don't play the game for Dick. He's barely even a character. Just saying that because he's so light they felt no need to distort or mess with him and gave him a stock basic
type casting, which makes him feel like a better human foundation for a story than the actual protagonist who gets all the screentime.
If there's any fun in this game it's playing with a friend and dressing Nick and Dick like psychopaths while you blow things up for a while. I wrote all of this, so you can clearly see that my negative reaction to Nick Ramos means a lot to me. Is he my most hated protagonist? Well he's the one I immediately felt I could produce a wall of negativity on for your pleasure.
