Who Did It Better? - 7 Deadly Sins

Well, of course he does. 47 is the one guy who would actually be capable of killing Batman if he were so inclined! Although, here, we are talking more about the game’s overall portrayal of sin. If it were up to 47 specifically, each of Dead Rising 3’s psychopaths would have been dead in seconds.

  1. WRATH
    VS

Coming in at my least favorite of the top 3 best sins, we have Wrath. The clearest and least ambiguous of the sins, Wrath represents anger and violence; specifically, allowing oneself to become consumed by anger and acting out upon it, usually with violence. With the exception of Sloth, Wrath is usually the end-of-the-road sin, the one that the other sins eventually lead to. In Hitman 3, Wrath is the last sin released, while in Dead Rising 3, it is the first sin dealt with. For Dead Rising 3, the sinner is Harry “Zhi” Wong, a man in a near-constant state of uncontrollable rage due to recent misfortunes, who finally snapped during the zombie outbreak.

For Hitman 3, 47 is swagged-out in dark leather, looking like he’s ready to shoot a place up. And what a coincidence… 47 is symbolically defending his body from the chemical inhibitors he’s been injected with, represented here by swarms of human attackers coming to kill him. So, he’s going to kill them first, kill them all. While you wouldn’t think it to look at him, it’s pretty clear 47 is at the end of his patience with the situation and is unleashing whatever counts as “anger” in him. He is having the natural resulting reaction to a lifetime of people using him because of his genetics. His clients are one thing; that’s a business arrangement that he is compensated for. But groups like Providence and the Franchise trying to utilize him specifically as a building block has now pushed him over the edge. The player is even more influenced, as the frustrating situation can really unleash players’s fury and make them want to super-murder the swarms of attackers as hard as they possibly can. It’s infuriating, but fun.

For Dead Rising 3, Zhi, the first Psychopath encountered in the game, is meditating in a zen garden littered with dismembered bodies when Nick comes across him. Although he invites Nick in, Zhi declares he will kill anyone who disrupts his peace, and Nick realizes what the body parts mean. When some roaming zombies enter the garden making noise, Zhi attacks with a Guan Dao, vowing to kill survivor and zombie alike. Fast and deadly, Zhi is beyond reason. Upon his defeat, he laments how wrong his life has gone; his kids don’t respect him, his wife has left him for another man, he’s been fired from his job, and now the zombie outbreak has taken what little peace he had left. Raging at the universe itself, Zhi uses his weapon to cut off his own head in final defiance of the shitty hand life has dealt him.

Who did it better? Hitman 3.

While the battle with Zhi is a fun and exciting one, and it’s cool seeing a Psychopath attack with martial arts, what ultimately brings it down is that Zhi is relatively easy to defeat if you enrage him by damaging his garden surroundings. Also, it is not clear if the player should really feel sorry for him; did the tragedies of his life really drive him to constantly be mad at everything, or was he always an angry asshole and that’s why everyone in his life turned against him, and he’s just projecting? The game seems to imply that his misfortunes really are the cause of his insanity, but who can say? On the other hand, we know that 47 is fully justified in his hate for those who have pursued him his whole life in an effort to get their hands on him and dismantle him to make soldiers from his blood. While he’s hardly an innocent soul, it’s not his fault that he was made to be this way, and his wrath upon his tormentors would be justified by nearly any court system in the world on self-defense alone. Also, like several others on this list, the player can actually feel the anger and hate as they try to kill off the invaders without proper weapons and little prep time, making them feel part of the action.

When you feel the urge to unleash your Wrath, Hitman 3 is the better selection.