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I realize someone already did Killer7 but I will never shut up about it so here's another post about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFO7y15XqNc "Like our chess games. You always seem to win." "Do you know why?" "You tell me." "Because you're a bad player." Killer7 is a game that makes no goddamn sense, but in its dogged devotion to not making any goddamn sense, it somehow wraps back around to being compelling. I don't even remember why I bought it for Gamecube so many years ago (I remember having to wait until I was 18 because it was M rated, a rating it richly deserves), but it was the game that convinced me that games could tell stories that'd be more difficult to tell without the level of investment that comes from playing a character, and I think was the first game I legitimately cried at while playing. The premise kinda starts out simple: you play as the seven members of a league of assassins known as the Smith Syndicate. led by their "cleaner" Garcian Smith. Well, technically there are eight of them: the eighth is Harman, a wheelchair-bound old man who is sometimes shown to be in some sort of ancient rivalry with a loudly-dressed force of chaos named Kun Lan and sometimes shown to be a frail old man living in a room in Garcian's trailer and taken care of by an abusive young woman. Kun Lan is the leader of a group of monsters/cultists named Heaven Smile: the Heaven Smiles are invisible to everyone except the Smiths, and attack by suicide bombing their victims. Running in parallel to this is a political story about the US subjugating Japan and their subsequent relationship, and a series of other seemingly random asides. Most of these do not get resolved. A book, Hand in Killer7, was released after the game to try to explain things, and just made the confusion worse. The climactic chapter of the game resolves Garcian's character arc, but that's about it. You're just along for the ride. The gameplay is more rail-shooter than anything else: you're restricted to set paths through the levels with occasional branches, and when you hear an enemy (each of which makes a distinctive cry) you switch into first-person mode and stand in place to shoot them. In between are a series of fairly tame Resident Evil-esque puzzles where you find a MacGuffin somewhere in a side room, read something in the environment to learn a password, or use one of the Smiths' special abilities. Killer7 is the brainchild of a designer named Suda51. Suda51 is a Japanese man who is evidently obsessed with American culture in general and lucha libre in particular (one of the Smiths is a luchador whose abilities are upgraded by picking up new costumes periodically, and his next game, No More Heroes, gives the main character a selection of wrestling moves). This sometimes manifests in strange ways: one of the side plots (spoilered since it's late in the game, but it doesn't make any more sense in context) has a character reveal that every American president since the founding of the republic has been elected by a shadowy cabal running out of an elementary school in... Seattle?. The levels are populated by "remnant psyches": people the Killer7 previously killed. These include a guy in bondage gear who gives you gameplay hints, a guy with a whole collection of funny phrases written on his T-shirts, a young girl who shows up only as a disembodied head and tells you about how she murdered her family, and several other characters who you killed in previous chapters. It appears that the text for these was translated twice: once very badly for the voice-over, and once again somewhat more clearly for the subtitles. To avoid confusing the poo poo out of English-speaking audiences, the voice over has a thick layer of distortion applied to it, but you can kinda make out that they're talking about similar things in different words (and the Steam port allows you to listen to the "original" audio). This adds to the bizarre aesthetic: you're talking to someone and they say the same thing twice slightly differently. And then there are the cutscenes. I will resist the urge to just put all of them here, but Cam Clarke chewing the scenery is particularly memorable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEb39GqOqW8 Masafumi Takada did the music here; a couple favorites are a boss theme for a boss that kinda feels like they should have very different boss music, and an oddly placed jam that only plays in a short hallway (which, luckily, shows up in most of the levels for the usual unexplainable reasons). There's a pretty decent Steam port now, so you can experience whatever the hell this game is supposed to be for yourself. Incoherence fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Oct 26, 2021 |
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Oct 26, 2021 20:32
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 17:23 |
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