In
spite of the fact that you probably never have heard of it, I am not
exaggerating in the slightest when I say that, for me, Killer7 is the
best game ever made. Better than anything ever designed before and
after. To illustrate how highly I think about Killer7 it deserves
mentioning that my former best game ever was The Elder Scrolls V:
Skyrim. Amazing as that game still is, it’s outstanding quality
seems mere child’s play when compared to the rollercoaster of an
experience that Killer7 provided me with.
However,
the game has slipped by the majority of gamers unnoticed. It came out
in 2005 on the Gamecube and was later ported to Playstation 2.
Developed by Grasshopper and published by Capcom, Killer7’s
directors were Shinji Mikami, who had already made a name for himself
with Resident Evil and Devil May Cry, and Goichi Suda, who later
became a well-known game auteur known as Suda 51. Suda’s fans will
know Killer7 as the game with which he genuinely made his reputation,
especially in Europe and the US and although back in 2005 Shinji
Mikami was the only one mentioned on the back of the box, it would
forever be remembered as Suda’s personal masterpiece. And although
I had little idea what I was in for when I bought it, the term
‘masterpiece’ quickly seemed an understatement.
Although
Killer7 earns almost all it’s stripes in the story department, I
won’t get into that until the end of this review as this is a
highly spoiler-sensitive game. As understanding the plot largely
hinges on player interpretation, it is very well possible that basic
elements of the plot are only understood at the end, so even saying
what the plot is about can ruin the experience for you. Therefore, I
will first talk you through the gameplay. Killer7 is at heart a
railshooter with puzzles. However, the term ‘railshooter’
shouldn’t go unqualified here. You can only move along rails and
you shoot from a first-person perspective, like you would in other
railshooters, but you are able to freely move your character up and
down this rail at any time. The camera normally is in third-person
mode, but if you hold the button to aim your gun you switch to
first-person mode. You hold another button to move forward and press
a third one to turn. You can also decide which way to go at some
intersections, where you move your analog stick to select a path to
take. It is always clear when enemies are around, as they are
announced by the sound of laughter. During the game you can switch
between a maximum of seven very different characters, all with their
own weapons and special abilities. All of these characters can be
upgraded with a basic upgrade system. Upgrades and puzzle hints are
purchased with so-called ‘thin blood’. There is also ‘thick
blood’ which can heal your characters and can power some
character’s special powers. Both are acquired by killing enemies.
Beyond on-rails shooting there are the aforementioned puzzles, which
are quite unusual in their appearance but which generally are not too
challenging. Often they require you to get a key-like item from
elsewhere in the level, or they require you to simply use a certain
character’s special ability. These special abilities are all aimed
towards making the way on through the level accessible and using them
for puzzles is usually no more complicated than recognising which
character’s ability is required, selecting that character, and
pressing the ‘special ability’ button.
Levels
usually follow a pretty similar structure. You can move about freely
from the word go and can backtrack as far as you want at any time.
There are multiple puzzles scattered across the level and inbetween
them you will find constantly respawning groups of enemies:
origami-like invisible exploding giggling monsters named ‘heaven
smile’ which only become visible when you press a button. The
central idea for each level is that you collect all so-called ‘soul
shells’, which are often found at the end of puzzles. Then, at the
end of the level, you need to pay those shells to be granted access
to a kind of sub-bossfight with a special enemy. Once you enter this
fight, you can’t return. Once you are victorious you may continue
to the last part of the level where usually the biggest plot-relevant
things happen after which there is usually a bossfight. Sometimes the
game takes two connected stages, both structured like this, and calls
it one level. Mind that I am leaving a few details on this level
structure out, because mentioning some things can already be seen as
a spoiler.
Realize
that Killer7’s gameplay is almost always easy as hell. Like I
mentioned, enemies are always announced by laughter, so you will
never be surprised by them. You also are provided with auto-lock on,
which is especially overpowered when you upgrade the lock-on so much
that it targets enemies’ critical spots which give you an
instant-kill when hit. Although, on the Gamecube version, auto-lock
is less of a luxury and more a necessity as the Gamecube’s analog
stick is a complete nightmare if you need to do precise aiming and
some bossfights certainly demand spot-on accuracy. This, beside the
fact that the game was amazing in general, is a reason why a PC-port
would still be a good idea. But generally, aiming is a piece of cake.
And the other pillar that gameplay rests on, puzzling, is no problem
either. You can always use thick blood to buy the solution to a
puzzle and you are always given a free hint if you want. But often a
hint isn’t needed because you only need the aforementioned key to a
door or the right character and their special ability.
But
difficulty-wise, the story more than makes up for the gameplay.
Besides being completely vague and abstract in general, the game is
extremely scarce with explanation. Beyond some cutscenes most
background information comes from characters, usually ghosts of the
deceased, that you can talk to for information. Those ghosts are
basically like audio logs in Bioshock in that they provide a lot of
background information on what’s going on. However, I don’t think
it would have been possible to have them talk more cryptic if all of
them had been talking Arabic because they all seem to have turned
whatever message they had for the player into some vague poetic text
in which it is up to you to interpret their message. Cutscenes aren’t
much clearer, because there is little exposition and people
constantly throw complex and unclear terms around such as ‘Yakumo’.
Nothing is ever explained and to have some grasp of what’s going on
you have to digest every character’s words five times and remember
everything that ever happened in the story with great detail. That is
quite challenging, shown by the fact that there are plot explanations
out there for Killer7 that are the size of small novels. But in a way
there’s a certain beauty to that all. Let me compare it to London’s
tower bridge. For touristic purposes an elevator was built in the
towers. A tower bridge with an elevator is like a game that explains
all of it’s plot explicitly so that players stay engaged. After
all, a developer wants his plot to be understood so that his game
will appeal to a wide audience, just like how an elevator makes a
monument more accessible, ensuring that more people will visit it.
However, this elevator is no part of the monument and in that way
slightly tampers with it’s purity, so to speak. Killer7 is more
like a tower bridge without an elevator. There is only plot and
nothing that is meant to make the story more easily understood is in
the way of the plot’s inherent beauty. That also shows how little
financial motives there were for creating Killer7. This is not
everyone’s kind of game and, thank goodness, no-one at Capcom or
Grasshopper tried to turn this into an everyman’s game just to
increase the target audience to make profit.
I
just want to tell you some more about the story’s actual content
and as telling you even a little bit about the story is immediately
an immense spoiler, this entire paragraph contains enormous spoilers.
Essentially, one might divide events in Killer7 up into three levels:
a divine level, a worldly level and an individual level. Events on
every level have consequences for the levels below it. The ‘highest’
level is the divine level, where a battle between the devil of the
east, Kun Lan, and the god of the west, Harman Smith, takes place.
Their
battle has been going on for all of eternity and is fought through
their direct actions on earth or the actions of their agents on
earth. This battle can be extended to the events on the worldly level
of Killer7, which focuses on a Japanese conspiracy to control the US
and the US’s battle against the Heaven Smile, which have become the
main terrorist threat in the alternate-history universe of Killer7.
As Harman Smith is the god of the west and as Kun lan is in control
of Japan and is the creator of the Heaven smile, these events are the
earthly manifestations of their eternal struggle. Then there is the
personal level, which revolves around a man named Harman Smith, who
is not the god of the west of the same name, but an assassin in
service of the US who can manifest himself as seven different
assassins which are also the playable characters in the game. These
seven are all quite different, but share their knowledge and act as
one. There is Garcian Smith, a afro-American in a white suit who is a
‘cleaner’. He can revive the other assassins by collecting their
bodies and is the only one who can directly talk to Harman Smith, his
boss. Then there’s Dan Smith, an American, young, somewhat
loud-mouthed assassin armed with a revolver. His special ability
allows him to destroy monster spawners that block the way. Con smith
is a young blind boy who can hear what others can’t and shoots with
two pistols. Coyote smith is a south-American thief who can pick
locks and jump over or onto obstacles. Mask de smith is a Mexican
ex-wrestler who can move heavy obstacles out of the way and uses
grenade launchers, that can also destroy weak walls. KAEDE smith, the
only woman, can shoot blood out of her wrist to summon a demon that
can make magical barriers disappear, a power that I for some reason
don’t envy. Her pistol has a large scope which is never really a
definite must but which you’ll really want to use for those
accurate bossfights. Finally, there’s Kevin Smith, an albino that
throws knives and can turn invisible to avoid security lasers. On
all three levels of the plot the story deals with the relation
between the east and the west, or, more specifically, Japan and the
US.
You
really don’t have to stop considering playing Killer7 when I say
that the plot is complicated and sometimes completely
incomprehensible, because the game has such a great atmosphere that
simply being inside the Killer7 universe feels unique. The atmosphere
is as great and mysterious as the game’s story and really brings
across the exact feeling intended. A key way the atmosphere is
brought across is in the graphics. Killer7 came out in 2005 and
therefore had little processing power at it’s disposal. Luckily the
game used this limitation to it’s advantage and chose a
textureless, somewhat cartoony, sterile artstyle that is still nice
to look at today but which could be handled by the consoles back in
the day. Considering that the story is abstract and surreal, these
abstract surreal graphics are really fitting. The dialog is amazing
as well. Those dialog lines which were as comprehensible as listening
to Arabic might not always be easy to follow, but they are certainly
nice to listen to. Then there is the masterful soundtrack. Music-wise
it’s nice to see that the developers grasped that you don’t use
loud, exciting music for exciting cutscenes. On the contrary, you
should use calm music because of that juxtaposing the intensity of a
moment with non-intense music makes a way stronger impression. The
voice acting in this game is seriously out of this world. Never have
I seen more emotion in dialog lines than here. That’s all the more
impressive considering that this was a low-profile release and not
the kind of thing you’d hire million-dollar voice actors for. All
of the above leads to a never-before seen level of immersion which
you still get if the story makes no sense.
Although
I still spend every waking moment praying that this game will be
launched again on PC, I’m pretty sure my hope is in vain as Killer7
slipped a lot of people by unnoticed and wasn’t the kind of
money-making machine the mainstream industry seems to love so much
these days. Then again, back in 2005 there were almost no
possibilities to launch a game besides consoles and the money one had
to invest to make a console game meant that you did have to make
something that appealed to a wide audience as you had a lot of money
to make back. Now, however, with the rise of the indie-games market
and the internet, there is a place for unusual games for smaller
audiences and Killer7 would exactly fit that bill. Therefore, one
would say that conditions for this masterpiece would be ideal today.
The day I see Killer7 on the Steam sale page is the day I will
download a million copies of it just to ensure Capcom will turn a
profit on it, but until that day, I will at least still have a reason
to pick up my Gamecube controller.
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