Oh boy, am I excited to talk about today’s game. gafanhoto Manufacturing is probably one of my favorito game studios out there. Sure, they don’t make the highest quality games, but their desire to make what they want to make rather than what some publisher wants them to is inspirational, and it’s that desire to create what they want to that has helped allow indie game developers to thrive in the modern age. One of their first games to truly reach a cult status was Killer7. Created as part of the Capcom Five, it was part of five games published and/or developed por Capcom to be exclusives on the Gamecube. One game was cancelled, three of them were ported onto later consoles, one of them being Resident Evil 4, the most ported game ever, and only one was a Gamecube exclusive, PN-03, and it was a piece of shit. But Killer7 was among one of them that was part of the Capcom Five to be released on the PS2 and later a Remastered version on Steam. So let us check out probably one of my favorito games out there.
Now I must confess, I did not play the PS2 version of this game. I didn’t play the PS2 version because the PS2 version is hot garbage. You see, on the PS2 version of the game, carregando screens take far longer to load, the resolution makes the game look much worse, and the controls are unresponsive at times. I played the original Gamecube version, which, yeah, it was definitely not cheap, costing around $60, but boy was it worth it to play one of the best games on the system. You play as the Smith Syndicate, a “group” of seven assassins that work under Harmen Smith, a wheelchair bound old man. With the ability to change personalities, Harmen becomes the other Smiths and gains their abilities. The other Smiths include Garcian Smith, the one that receives the missions and is the “cleaner” of the group. Dan Smith, a caucasian man with a amor for fighting and killing his enemies. Coyote Smith, a Cuban pickpocket that can pick locks. Con Smith, a quick moving little man. KAEDE Smith, the female of the group with a scope on her gun. Kevin Smith, the quiet one that can throw knives (Not to be confused with Clerks director Kevin Smith), and Mask de Smith, a luchadore with dual wield grenade launchers. With your team, you go about stopping Heaven Smiles, a terrorist group that is formed from a virus that turns people into suicide bombers. Yes, the game is very weird, but surely it will be an easy to follow and understand game… Ha ha ha.
So right off the bat, the first striking thing about the game is the visuals. The game uses a lot of low poly character modelos and environments, all hidden behind cel-shading and hard shadows. The sixth generation of games had a real amor for this cel-shading style, and I amor it too. Wind Waker, Jet Set Radio, Viewtiful Joe, all great games with this amazing art style. But those games used cel-shading to create a bright, colorful world that was like a cartoon or comic book. In Killer7’s case, it’s dark, atmospheric, and feels so otherworldly that it almost gives off an uncanny vibe. People have described Killer7 as being a horror game, and… yeah, I can definitely see that. The gameplay alludes to that in a way. Killer7 is a kinda-sorta on rails game. You have a wide open area, but you are stuck on a path and can mover progressivo, para a frente or turn around and go back. If there are branching paths, you get a selection to click on and then go that way. It’s a neat way to mover about and I never found it to be too jarring like some may. The combat also has a strange shift as well. You will be alerted of Heaven Smiles in the area, not por a radar or an alarm, but por the sound of their laughter. Once you hear them, you take out your gun and go from third person to first person, and you can then see the Heaven Smiles lumbering toward you. With that, you have to aim at the glowing weak points around their body, be it the arm, the leg or the neck. Once you do, they will immediately die and you will receive a lot of blood, which you can use to upgrade your Smiths or heal yourself if you are running out of health. Die as any other Smith than Garcian, then you gotta run back as Garcian and get their body to bring them back to life. Die as Garcian and it’s game over. The gameplay has this strange middleground of other types of video game genres and yet it melds together real well in a way that almost feels hypnotic.
That’s not to say the gameplay is perfect. A lot of puzzles are very simple. It has a sort of Resident Evil way of solving puzzles, as in you go find a door, it’s locked, go look for an item, find item, use item to find another item, get the key, unlock door, proceed to seguinte locked door. It’s not bad at all (I mean, it’s worked for Resident Evil for at least five games), but it doesn’t give you much in the way of solving puzzles yourself. Another issue is some audio issues. Due to some sound mixing, some background noises are harder to hear than the voices themselves. One example is when the Killer7 runs into an assassin pretending to be a secretary in a burning building, but the fogo is so loud that you can’t hear what she’s saying, and with no subtitles, you gotta listen real closely to even get a hint at what she’s talking about. But it probably wouldn’t help understand the story of Killer7 any easier. Killer7 has a story that is so hard to understand. It’s a game filled with different plots that go from one thing to another in seconds. It’s like the game purposely had parts of it’s story cut out during composição literária to create this sort of thing. The base story is trying to stop a heated power struggle between the politics of the United States and Japão as they both try to manipulate each other to better the other in the political game, but things are always changing. Sure, you could be trying to find an important item for the U.S. government, but we really need to take care of this one crazy afro man who turned a southern town into a crazy cult. We could go and deal with the Heaven Smiles in this political hotel, but we really gotta take care of these Power Rangers because they were talking shit. I know it sounds like I’m saying the absolute ramblings of a psychopath, but it makes about as much sense with the context. Even the cutscenes change to show the shift in tone and setting with these cutscenes. And not only to the story's shift, but tone entirely. The Heaven Smiles running around blowing people up and creating a haunting atmosphere all around change into these fuckers running around with T-shirts in the summer sun and lounging in a nice Carribean city with music, bright as day. It goes from this uncomfortable experience to bordering on comedy, which I can’t tell if that makes it scarier or not. I’ve heard rumors trying to decipher the story as a whole, but I just feel that, since this is a game about politics, it’s actually… not, kinda. Let me explain. What I am referring to is politics for the average person just looks like a mess. You hear about it all the time, yet do we really understand it, truly? I know I don’t. It’s normal to get worried about the threat of warfare because our politicians are failing super hard, but at the end of the day, you just go, “Eh, fuck it. I have my own shit to deal with”. Sure, it may not be as crazy as fighting an afro businessman or hunting down a psychopath with an animê girl partner, but these are personal issues with the Smiths. Politics are just a thing you hear about, but never really get invested in. We got our own problems, dammit.
Killer7 is a game that trumps over everything when it comes to what we understand in a game. Not just from the bizarre story (Which it totally does that too), but from just gameplay as a whole. For starters, bosses are not… actually bosses. For the mid-boss, you will have this crazy build-up. After collecting items for a guy at a window, you will enter what looks like a lounge for a club. Then going down the stairs, listening to the sickest música in the game. Then you will run around a garagem toward your destination. And at the end of it is… a boss that you could probably kill in one hit. All this build up for a one hit kill enemy, and yet it doesn’t feel unsatisfying. It just adds mais perguntas onto this layer of perguntas that Killer7 brings up. Then the actual bosses are just as strange. Fighting a walking afro with his flesh melted sounds interesting. One touch and you’re dead, but all you gotta do is run behind him and shoot him in the afro and you win. You have a standoff with a psychopathic killer, but you can’t shoot until the bird says you can, and the bird will try to psych you out, so you gotta listen to when it will actually call. Even a one on one stand off with the Power Rangers isn’t a real fight since it’s all predetermined, but it’s still so strange of a “fight”. Most of these bosses are just here to add mais perguntas to this already strange game and I can’t help but speculate. Oh, and if you’re like me and thought to get respostas from the book of Killer7, Hand in Killer7, don’t. Not only is it stupid expensive, moreso than the game itself, but it creates contradictions to stuff in the game and just adds mais questions. Once again, I can’t tell if it’s intentional or not. But despite playing the game several times and watching analysis vídeos and leitura pages upon pages trying to decipher the strange story, I think I at least grasp a mild understanding of the games plot, and I feel that trying to understand the plot and discussing it with others is one of the games appeals. It manages to create so much speculation and confusion that it leaves you wanting to understand, and even when you exhaust all options, you still only come out with mild understanding. And I won’t spoil anymore of the game, I want everyone to play this strange game and experience the most odd parts themselves, but I will say, despite all these moments of confusion, it still manages to pull off a great final act with a twist that doesn’t feel like total bullshit like a few games I know of (Detroit).
Killer7 is great, okay. It’s an amazing game. It’s got a lot of strange things about it that may not appeal to the dude-bro gamers out there, but it’s a classic. It’s probably my segundo favorito gafanhoto game, No mais heroes being an obvious first, but I feel as though Suda really did reach his true potential with directing a great game with Killer7. Being his first game that you… play, unlike the other games he made that were mostly text games like The Silver Case, this was a great first attempt with his company. So yeah, I’m obviously giving this game the award of Hidden Gem. It’s a real classic. Pick it up if you haven’t. The Gamecube version is pricey, but great if you can get it for cheap. As for PC users, get the remastered version on Steam. It’s $19 and it’s a real classic of a game
Bonus Award: Personal Bias. Yeah, I may have been cantar this game’s praises too much, but it’s just such a stylish game and I can’t get enough of it. Seriously, play this game if you haven’t. It’s an experience like no other. And I hate to be sound like that one asshole that goes, “You don’t play the game. You experience it” but to do it anyway, Killer7 really is an experience like no other
Now I must confess, I did not play the PS2 version of this game. I didn’t play the PS2 version because the PS2 version is hot garbage. You see, on the PS2 version of the game, carregando screens take far longer to load, the resolution makes the game look much worse, and the controls are unresponsive at times. I played the original Gamecube version, which, yeah, it was definitely not cheap, costing around $60, but boy was it worth it to play one of the best games on the system. You play as the Smith Syndicate, a “group” of seven assassins that work under Harmen Smith, a wheelchair bound old man. With the ability to change personalities, Harmen becomes the other Smiths and gains their abilities. The other Smiths include Garcian Smith, the one that receives the missions and is the “cleaner” of the group. Dan Smith, a caucasian man with a amor for fighting and killing his enemies. Coyote Smith, a Cuban pickpocket that can pick locks. Con Smith, a quick moving little man. KAEDE Smith, the female of the group with a scope on her gun. Kevin Smith, the quiet one that can throw knives (Not to be confused with Clerks director Kevin Smith), and Mask de Smith, a luchadore with dual wield grenade launchers. With your team, you go about stopping Heaven Smiles, a terrorist group that is formed from a virus that turns people into suicide bombers. Yes, the game is very weird, but surely it will be an easy to follow and understand game… Ha ha ha.
So right off the bat, the first striking thing about the game is the visuals. The game uses a lot of low poly character modelos and environments, all hidden behind cel-shading and hard shadows. The sixth generation of games had a real amor for this cel-shading style, and I amor it too. Wind Waker, Jet Set Radio, Viewtiful Joe, all great games with this amazing art style. But those games used cel-shading to create a bright, colorful world that was like a cartoon or comic book. In Killer7’s case, it’s dark, atmospheric, and feels so otherworldly that it almost gives off an uncanny vibe. People have described Killer7 as being a horror game, and… yeah, I can definitely see that. The gameplay alludes to that in a way. Killer7 is a kinda-sorta on rails game. You have a wide open area, but you are stuck on a path and can mover progressivo, para a frente or turn around and go back. If there are branching paths, you get a selection to click on and then go that way. It’s a neat way to mover about and I never found it to be too jarring like some may. The combat also has a strange shift as well. You will be alerted of Heaven Smiles in the area, not por a radar or an alarm, but por the sound of their laughter. Once you hear them, you take out your gun and go from third person to first person, and you can then see the Heaven Smiles lumbering toward you. With that, you have to aim at the glowing weak points around their body, be it the arm, the leg or the neck. Once you do, they will immediately die and you will receive a lot of blood, which you can use to upgrade your Smiths or heal yourself if you are running out of health. Die as any other Smith than Garcian, then you gotta run back as Garcian and get their body to bring them back to life. Die as Garcian and it’s game over. The gameplay has this strange middleground of other types of video game genres and yet it melds together real well in a way that almost feels hypnotic.
That’s not to say the gameplay is perfect. A lot of puzzles are very simple. It has a sort of Resident Evil way of solving puzzles, as in you go find a door, it’s locked, go look for an item, find item, use item to find another item, get the key, unlock door, proceed to seguinte locked door. It’s not bad at all (I mean, it’s worked for Resident Evil for at least five games), but it doesn’t give you much in the way of solving puzzles yourself. Another issue is some audio issues. Due to some sound mixing, some background noises are harder to hear than the voices themselves. One example is when the Killer7 runs into an assassin pretending to be a secretary in a burning building, but the fogo is so loud that you can’t hear what she’s saying, and with no subtitles, you gotta listen real closely to even get a hint at what she’s talking about. But it probably wouldn’t help understand the story of Killer7 any easier. Killer7 has a story that is so hard to understand. It’s a game filled with different plots that go from one thing to another in seconds. It’s like the game purposely had parts of it’s story cut out during composição literária to create this sort of thing. The base story is trying to stop a heated power struggle between the politics of the United States and Japão as they both try to manipulate each other to better the other in the political game, but things are always changing. Sure, you could be trying to find an important item for the U.S. government, but we really need to take care of this one crazy afro man who turned a southern town into a crazy cult. We could go and deal with the Heaven Smiles in this political hotel, but we really gotta take care of these Power Rangers because they were talking shit. I know it sounds like I’m saying the absolute ramblings of a psychopath, but it makes about as much sense with the context. Even the cutscenes change to show the shift in tone and setting with these cutscenes. And not only to the story's shift, but tone entirely. The Heaven Smiles running around blowing people up and creating a haunting atmosphere all around change into these fuckers running around with T-shirts in the summer sun and lounging in a nice Carribean city with music, bright as day. It goes from this uncomfortable experience to bordering on comedy, which I can’t tell if that makes it scarier or not. I’ve heard rumors trying to decipher the story as a whole, but I just feel that, since this is a game about politics, it’s actually… not, kinda. Let me explain. What I am referring to is politics for the average person just looks like a mess. You hear about it all the time, yet do we really understand it, truly? I know I don’t. It’s normal to get worried about the threat of warfare because our politicians are failing super hard, but at the end of the day, you just go, “Eh, fuck it. I have my own shit to deal with”. Sure, it may not be as crazy as fighting an afro businessman or hunting down a psychopath with an animê girl partner, but these are personal issues with the Smiths. Politics are just a thing you hear about, but never really get invested in. We got our own problems, dammit.
Killer7 is a game that trumps over everything when it comes to what we understand in a game. Not just from the bizarre story (Which it totally does that too), but from just gameplay as a whole. For starters, bosses are not… actually bosses. For the mid-boss, you will have this crazy build-up. After collecting items for a guy at a window, you will enter what looks like a lounge for a club. Then going down the stairs, listening to the sickest música in the game. Then you will run around a garagem toward your destination. And at the end of it is… a boss that you could probably kill in one hit. All this build up for a one hit kill enemy, and yet it doesn’t feel unsatisfying. It just adds mais perguntas onto this layer of perguntas that Killer7 brings up. Then the actual bosses are just as strange. Fighting a walking afro with his flesh melted sounds interesting. One touch and you’re dead, but all you gotta do is run behind him and shoot him in the afro and you win. You have a standoff with a psychopathic killer, but you can’t shoot until the bird says you can, and the bird will try to psych you out, so you gotta listen to when it will actually call. Even a one on one stand off with the Power Rangers isn’t a real fight since it’s all predetermined, but it’s still so strange of a “fight”. Most of these bosses are just here to add mais perguntas to this already strange game and I can’t help but speculate. Oh, and if you’re like me and thought to get respostas from the book of Killer7, Hand in Killer7, don’t. Not only is it stupid expensive, moreso than the game itself, but it creates contradictions to stuff in the game and just adds mais questions. Once again, I can’t tell if it’s intentional or not. But despite playing the game several times and watching analysis vídeos and leitura pages upon pages trying to decipher the strange story, I think I at least grasp a mild understanding of the games plot, and I feel that trying to understand the plot and discussing it with others is one of the games appeals. It manages to create so much speculation and confusion that it leaves you wanting to understand, and even when you exhaust all options, you still only come out with mild understanding. And I won’t spoil anymore of the game, I want everyone to play this strange game and experience the most odd parts themselves, but I will say, despite all these moments of confusion, it still manages to pull off a great final act with a twist that doesn’t feel like total bullshit like a few games I know of (Detroit).
Killer7 is great, okay. It’s an amazing game. It’s got a lot of strange things about it that may not appeal to the dude-bro gamers out there, but it’s a classic. It’s probably my segundo favorito gafanhoto game, No mais heroes being an obvious first, but I feel as though Suda really did reach his true potential with directing a great game with Killer7. Being his first game that you… play, unlike the other games he made that were mostly text games like The Silver Case, this was a great first attempt with his company. So yeah, I’m obviously giving this game the award of Hidden Gem. It’s a real classic. Pick it up if you haven’t. The Gamecube version is pricey, but great if you can get it for cheap. As for PC users, get the remastered version on Steam. It’s $19 and it’s a real classic of a game
Bonus Award: Personal Bias. Yeah, I may have been cantar this game’s praises too much, but it’s just such a stylish game and I can’t get enough of it. Seriously, play this game if you haven’t. It’s an experience like no other. And I hate to be sound like that one asshole that goes, “You don’t play the game. You experience it” but to do it anyway, Killer7 really is an experience like no other