Killer7

I think my first Suda game was No More Heroes on the Wii. At the time I loved it for its “in your face” attitude, seemingly crude humor and avante garde presentation. It wasn’t until years later, well beyond playing all 4 games in that series did I gain a better understanding of what he and that game was doing. That revelation didn’t come with Lollipop Chainsaw or Killer is Dead, it was The Silvercase, a game that I played way too late into my obsession with all things Suda. I’m convinced that’s his favorite game, or maybe it’s his muse. He creates this thing that came out of that space in your mind, between cognizant thought and dreams, it improved on a pre-existing formula and presented it in a way that hadn’t been done before. Now every time he is looking to shake up subsequent games he goes back to The Silvercase for inspiration, or maybe it’s permission.

Killer7 is unlike any game I’ve played before, it’s nothing like any games that came before it and no one has ever tried to make one since. Similar to the way Cowboy Bebop “becomes a new genre itself" this work, Killer7 created its own genre.

It may look like it has a formula, the best expectation is to expect nothing. It may seem like you are going from level to level with a stop at a mid boss before the big bad but this doesn’t always play out. Lollipop Chainsaw follows a pattern more clearly while No More Heroes ramps this up considerably. In K7 it’s more about punctuating a run-on sentence than providing you with a skill based challenge fight. Those ending scenes after the labyrinthian levels filled with paranormal characters chatting in your frontal lobe still provide impact, and they can still be challenging and memorable even though they aren’t “bosses with 3 patterns and multiple health bars” (In No More Heroes this is a repeated joke about how it’s time for the boss to transform, that is when someone else isn’t cutting Travis to take the fight on first).

Once the movement of K7 starts to become second nature, the systems of the game become really fun to navigate. You have a big map for each area with icons of different clues to the puzzles that need solving. Even though the maps are confusing, and they can get downright loopy, it’s not frustrating to chip away at the puzzles. There is freedom in not being able to move around these levels Willy-Nilly, something about the railed track of movement makes back and forth navigation almost easier. Because there is plenty of back and forth, especially when one of your personas die and Garcian needs to go on a retrieval mission.

This design of having separate “personalities” to control, each with their own unique abilities and weapons is like having a large party in an RPG that you can switch between at any time. Imagine if in Doom the pistol was controlled by Doom guy but the chainsaw swapped him out for a really angry woman who was always covered in blood. It’s more than just changing your weapon, your perspective will literally shift based on the character height, the reactions, the movement speed, it’s all be tweaked and tuned. The most interesting to me is Garcian, who exists to help you retrieve your failures. When you die, your personality falls, and while you can switch to another, sometimes you need a skill that only the dead possess. It’s up to you and Garcian to navigate the level and use the retrieval kit to bring the dead back to life. There is no XP gain, no loot or items waiting for you, just the keys to move forward.

I could talk about this game for hours I think, I really want to write like 4000 words on this but I’ll leave that for someone with a better grasp on language. So I’ll say this: Killer7 is just fucking cool. Once you learn the moves, when you start to know the system, it plays unlike anything else. I love it, it’s brilliant, it’s fucking cool. The outlandish characters you meet, the anime cut scenes, the fact that you get to play as an old man in a wheelchair with the biggest video game gun I’ve ever seen fired while seated, it’s just full of new and surprising things that a 40 year old in the year 2023 hasn’t seen before, and that’s accounting for all the games that have come out since 2005.

Some additional reading on Killer7: