Killer7
Upon finishing Cruelty Squad in November, I thought to myself “Y’know what would be a great companion piece to this? Killer 7.”
The work of Japanese auteur Suda51 (though, not solo work - the indie game scene hadn’t really come into its own yet), Killer7 is a hyperviolent, visually-arresting rail shooter with a fascination with Americana, the place of Japan in a world torn between China and the United States, and biological grotesqueries. While the game originally came out in 2005 for the Nintendo GameCube, there was a recent Steam release that is impressively slick. The game ran for me without any issues, and is now in full widescreen and HD, making the experience a real visual treat, even in the year 2022.
It’s impossible to talk about Killer7 and all of its weirdness without talking first and foremost about the control scheme - you hold LMB to run and, when you arrive at a junction, the game prompts you to select a new direction with another click. Hold spacebar to switch to a first-person aiming view, right-click to scan for the invisible biological suicide bombers known as ‘Heaven’s Smile’, left-click to fire. If you can land a hit on a Smile’s weak spot, it’s an instant kill. This hilariously nonstandard control scheme seems like it would be unmanageable, but it only took about ten minutes before I was proficient, zipping around Killer7’s labyrinthine environments with ease. This control scheme allows the developers to force the player camera exactly where they want it, and each environment, each encounter, is designed with these forced camera angles in mind. The fact that the player can’t just spin the camera around, looking at whatever they want whenever, was probably a real boon to performance with regards to getting these beautiful cell-shaded locals and characters rendering smoothly on the GameCube back in the day.
Now, you might be tempted to ask the question “What is Killer7 about, anyway?”. In an effort to answer this question my high school self went on GameFAQs and read the guide ‘KILLER7 PLOT ANALYSIS’ by James Clinton Howell. It can still be read, eighteen years later, which I will leave as an exercise to the reader. It is also just shy of fifty-thousand words long, so this is not an exercise I expect you to engage with. That said, attempting to dissect and assemble Killer7’s plot into something that is kinematically coherent is probably a futile exercise, since the answer to questions like ‘How can Mask de Smith headbutt bullets?’ is very probably ‘because it’s cool’. There are plenty of interesting themes with a wild, rollicking, narrative running through them all, but Killer7’s desire to interface with its own story and thematic content is, perhaps, inconsistent, and would frequently prefer to revel in the style of such discussions rather than to resolve or explore them. I think Killer7’s attitude towards much of its subject matter could probably be summed up by this exchange, towards the end of the game:
Garcian: “What is ‘United States’? What is the purpose of the President?”
Matsuoka: “How the hell should I know? I’m Japanese.”
Not to say that the story content is lackluster - it’s phenomenally entertaining, and helps pull along the gameplay, which, while easy to control once you get the hang of it, is somewhat lackluster. There are a wide variety of Smiles, but they all boil down to ‘shoot the weak spot’, with different punishments for missing. The game is also littered with puzzles, but they’re very much in the Resident Evil vein of ‘find the oddly shaped object to put in the oddly-shaped hole’. The boss fights, while a highlight in terms of story and spectacle, possess a wide variation in terms of quality and difficulty - a shootout inside a maze of fused-together ambulances is great, but is tragically short, and the fight against a running target in a wide-open parking lot is a real drag.
The Bottom Line
Killer7 is beautiful and cool, but, like its protagonist, is possessed of a sort of multiple-personality disorder - one moment it's a tense political commentary on the relations between East and West, and the next there’s a near-non-sequitur showdown with a super sentai team in Times Square that doesn’t really tie into anything.