With each post in this mini-feature, I highlight a game from a different country around the world. Keep in mind these aren't necessarily the best or most popular games from each nation, but simply a fitting representative.
Sine Mora - Digital Reality, 2012
I've been on a Suda51 kick recently, and I love me some Eastern European game design. Grasshopper Manufacture's most recent collaboration is with Budapest-based studio Digital Reality for the shoot-em-up downloadable title Sine Mora. It may be the best modern shoot-em-up since Treasure's Ikaruga. Like Ikaruga, its twitch-gameplay difficulty harkens back to the genre's arcade roots. But while most games like this are vertical these days, Sine Mora is a horizontal game based around a time-slowing mechanic which helps the player get through the bullet-hell levels and epic bosses. Grasshopper did the artwork, but Digital Reality did all the actual game design.
And most importantly, while most foreign games in my global gaming series are still in English (for better and for worse), Sine Mora's characters actually speak in Hungarian. I love it. I don't know if it's Grasshopper who made the call to let Digital Reality keep the game in their native tongue, but publisher Microsoft deserves major props for letting it happen. This may be the first time a game has ever been released worldwide in Hungarian, a language spoken by only 15 million people.
The global gaming map so far (zoom out for full map):
I've written on this blog before about how much I love Goichi Suda's Killer7. At this point in my life, it may be my favorite game of all time. The avant-garde approach to game design by his studio Grasshopper Manufacture is unmatched.
But as I've also written about on this blog, Suda's games have gone downhill since Killer7 in 2005. He seems to have realized his games have quirky appeal, so he's been banking more and more on the "silly" aspect of his work, without the bleak qualities of Killer7 that make it so evocative.
Grasshopper's first game following Killer7, No More Heroes, was more on the humorous side but still a brilliant game. But Suda's two major productions since then, Shadows of the Damned and Lollipop Chainsaw, are humorous to the point of losing the deeper meaning seen in Suda's older work.
So the announcement of Killer Is Dead is a welcome return to Suda's roots. Billed not as a sequel but a spiritual successor to Killer7, the first real details on Killer Is Dead have emerged over the past few weeks. Its official website is online, and the first official trailer has been released:
It sports the cel-shaded serious look of Killer7 mixed with a healthy dose of the swordplay hack-and-slash of No More Heroes. This is great, although I hope it isn't too button-mashy.
Perhaps my favorite aspect of Killer7 was simply interacting with its bizarre cast of characters and exploring the gameworld. From the first part of the trailer, I was worried it would be an action-adventure game with all "action" and no "adventure".
But the second part of the trailer beginning at the 1:50 mark of the video--the epilogue?--gives me hope. It's an introduction to the game's protagonist, the immaculately-named Mondo Zappa. This reminds me of Killer7 protagonist Garcian Smith, and lovable No More Heroes main character Travis Touchdown. Zappa hints at the next video featuring "a beautiful woman who has devilish hands," and we get to see indeed, a woman with at least ten hands. I CAN'T WAIT FOR MORE!
The prevalence of moon imagery throughout the website and the trailer harkens back to Killer7, and of course, Mondo Zappa is probably a reference to musician Frank Zappa's daughter Moon Zappa. Suda has said in interviews that the game exists in a near-future where lunar tourism is prevalent, but insists that Killer Is Dead isn't a science fiction game. Coming from Grasshopper Manufacture, this could mean anything.
A final note: can Masafumi Takada do the soundtrack, please? He was the man behind the music of Killer7 and No More Heroes, but hasn't worked with Suda since then. Maybe he's the secret behind Grasshopper's greatest works.
From the polarizingreviews to its quirky creator, plenty of people have written about the 2010 cult hit Deadly Premonition. Despite its incredibly dated graphics and horrendous combat mechanics, Hidetaka "Swery65" Suehiro's intricate Twin Peaks-inspired tale is full of deep character development and a realistic small-town open world that truly feels alive.
What really struck me, though, is how much it reminded me of another Japanese gaming auteur with a similar nickname: Suda51. While Goichi Suda has never made an open-world crime game, the "rough around the edges but incredibly out-there and original" soul is the same.
Suda's newer games have been a bit of a letdown for me, because they've forgotten what makes his work so gripping: the strange dark tone. Killer7 and even the more recent No More Heroes had a very twisted underbelly that made them compelling. It's black humor, but it's also a sort of gallows humor. Shadows of the Damned and Lollipop Chainsaw featured plenty of dark and evil, sure, but they didn't have that certain... je ne sais quoi.
So what is that je ne sais quoi? The more I think about it, the more I realize that the games I think about long after I finish playing them are the ones I don't understand. Deadly Premonition hit me the same way Killer7 did because it hinted that there's more to this game than I can fully comprehend.
We all remember playing Pokémon Red and Blue back in the day, and one of the aspects of the games that kept us coming back was the aura of mystery around them. Before the age of internet FAQs, rumors about the game spread by word-of-mouth. You'd hear "if you go to this place at this certain time and do this, this happens." Because there were a few Easter eggs and glitches like the Rare Candy Trick, this led us to believe that any of the urban legends could be true. And more than anything, that's what made the first Pokémon titles so memorable.
Many games from our youth are like this. Partially because we weren't old enough to fully "get" them, and partially because the internet hadn't given us all the answers to every game yet. I remember everything from Myst to seemingly-innocent games like DinoPark Tycoon feeling like they were full of dark mystery.
Suda's older work captures this feeling perfectly. And I love Deadly Premonition because its creator Swery captures it, too.
