Garcian Smith, Sinnerman
Killer7 is sort of one of my favorite games. I consider most of it to be near-unplayable--it's not a fun experience by any means. And it's pretty much the most terrifying game I've ever played--something about it just gets to me on a very fundamental level. I frankly don't think I have it in me to play it again, now that I know what I'm up against, what I'd have to go through. But it's rare for a work to still feel so brutal three years after playing it, and it's a work that's like nothing else--all of its aspects are uniquely itself. There'll be assholes who snark about the fact that the plot is incomprehensible and that means The Game Is Bad, but frankly it reminds me a LOT of David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE (another work that's sort-of one of my favorites that I'd like to see again but am daunted by cause I know what I'm up against): I can't follow the plot of INLAND EMPIRE if there even is one, but I can follow the emotions and the mood of the story--which is really the point. You don't know exactly what Laura Dern is dealing with, or why, but the ending, in which a group of tertiary characters dance to a lip-sync of Nina Simone's "Sinnerman" while Dern relaxes, smiling, is one of the most cathartic endings of all time. Killer7 is primarily a story about acceptance of responsibility for one's sins, and it features a similiarly cathartic and disturbing scene on a rooftop as its ending: Garcian Smith breaks down with the guilt and the weight of his transgressions: much like Dead Man Walking, the goal is not to Set Things Right--both Dead Man Walking and K7 are set in worlds where immoral acts cannot be undone or righted--but to accept that wrong has been done.
It's necessary that there's another chapter after the ending of Killer7--an epilogue of sorts--where you get to choose whether Japan or the US should be destroyed. As counterpoint, a repeat of the ending of Chapter 1 is played, featuring a never-ending battle between two men that the game pretends are the incarnations of Good and Evil. (Morality is much more complex than that in the game, but I don't feel like discussing that bit here.) There will always be war, the game says. There will always be pain, and sin, and fighting, and struggle: and all we can do is accept our part in it. To be redeemed is not to avoid sin: in this game's world, an avoidance of sin is impossible because no one is innocent. To be redeemed, instead, is to admit to one's portion of sin.
The rest of the plot is noise. All of the political manipulations and contortions the plot goes through are to set up that choice between the US and Japan. For that choice to mean anything, one needs to be physically drained, almost physically ill when making it. To make us physically ill, the game sets up a series of punishing and disturbing scenes which we can't make sense of. The entire game is a psychic attack which is simply context for that choice. It is an assult--the horrific laugh of the Heaven Smiles, the repetitive and catatonia-inducing bursts of static in the loadscreens, the mindless puzzles (almost, to my mind, a deconstruction of Resident Evil's puzzles: if getting a code in one room and inputting it in the next is considered a fair and standard survival horror puzzle, Killer7 takes it to the next logical conclusion: the very first puzzle is basically inputting a combination which is ON THE VERY SAME SCREEN as the place to input it--and yet, why did that puzzle get more flack than those which inspired it?)--all of them are designed to wear down the player.
It is worth mentioning that the outcome of the choice is irrelevant--it amounts to basically a screen which says "Oh no, the US was destroyed!" or "Oh no, Japan was destroyed!" Much like a But-Thou-Must in which both answers are wrong, Destroy-the-US-or-Japan is about the act of choosing. The entire game is set on a path of irrelevant choices--which is why it's set on rails. You can only progress towards your target or away from it. Suda51 seems to love to give us the illusion of choice--if I talk about No More Heroes that'll be one of the things I'll mention--an illusion which only serves to let us know that sin is inevitable.
Ignoring Coin Heaven and underground bonus areas, platformer games only give us one major path, traditionally--we move Mario from one end of the screen to the other--while sandbox games (which I openly hate) give us more freedom--Grand Theft Auto and Morrowind let us dick around as much as there are sidequests to still do, letting us take on the thread of the storyline when we get bored of taking sidequests. Both usually take the concept of the game's ending as an unnecessary-to-examine given which'll happen eventually. Killer7 is the result of examining goals in a linear game; No More Heroes examines them in the context of a sandbox game. I would be very interested in seeing Suda51's take on the MMORPG (another genre I can't stand), which generally *has* no predefined goal. Killer7 is about the inevitability of getting to the right-hand-side of the screen. No More Heroes is about the inevitability of getting bored with or completing all the sidequests. How would one make a game about the inevitability of the point where a game isn't fun enough to continue paying for?
The two-hours-and-fifty-minutes before the ending of INLAND EMPIRE are setting up a wonderfully powerful music video for "Sinnerman," just as the twenty hours before the ending of Killer7 are an emotional context to the Moment of Choice (and really, "Sinnerman" would be an appropriate theme song for that game too.) And the meaninglessness of the choice serves to highlight that, for all the promise of interactivity most games give us, all we can ever do is beat a game, turn it off to have dinner, or delay either inevitability.
It's necessary that there's another chapter after the ending of Killer7--an epilogue of sorts--where you get to choose whether Japan or the US should be destroyed. As counterpoint, a repeat of the ending of Chapter 1 is played, featuring a never-ending battle between two men that the game pretends are the incarnations of Good and Evil. (Morality is much more complex than that in the game, but I don't feel like discussing that bit here.) There will always be war, the game says. There will always be pain, and sin, and fighting, and struggle: and all we can do is accept our part in it. To be redeemed is not to avoid sin: in this game's world, an avoidance of sin is impossible because no one is innocent. To be redeemed, instead, is to admit to one's portion of sin.
The rest of the plot is noise. All of the political manipulations and contortions the plot goes through are to set up that choice between the US and Japan. For that choice to mean anything, one needs to be physically drained, almost physically ill when making it. To make us physically ill, the game sets up a series of punishing and disturbing scenes which we can't make sense of. The entire game is a psychic attack which is simply context for that choice. It is an assult--the horrific laugh of the Heaven Smiles, the repetitive and catatonia-inducing bursts of static in the loadscreens, the mindless puzzles (almost, to my mind, a deconstruction of Resident Evil's puzzles: if getting a code in one room and inputting it in the next is considered a fair and standard survival horror puzzle, Killer7 takes it to the next logical conclusion: the very first puzzle is basically inputting a combination which is ON THE VERY SAME SCREEN as the place to input it--and yet, why did that puzzle get more flack than those which inspired it?)--all of them are designed to wear down the player.
It is worth mentioning that the outcome of the choice is irrelevant--it amounts to basically a screen which says "Oh no, the US was destroyed!" or "Oh no, Japan was destroyed!" Much like a But-Thou-Must in which both answers are wrong, Destroy-the-US-or-Japan is about the act of choosing. The entire game is set on a path of irrelevant choices--which is why it's set on rails. You can only progress towards your target or away from it. Suda51 seems to love to give us the illusion of choice--if I talk about No More Heroes that'll be one of the things I'll mention--an illusion which only serves to let us know that sin is inevitable.
Ignoring Coin Heaven and underground bonus areas, platformer games only give us one major path, traditionally--we move Mario from one end of the screen to the other--while sandbox games (which I openly hate) give us more freedom--Grand Theft Auto and Morrowind let us dick around as much as there are sidequests to still do, letting us take on the thread of the storyline when we get bored of taking sidequests. Both usually take the concept of the game's ending as an unnecessary-to-examine given which'll happen eventually. Killer7 is the result of examining goals in a linear game; No More Heroes examines them in the context of a sandbox game. I would be very interested in seeing Suda51's take on the MMORPG (another genre I can't stand), which generally *has* no predefined goal. Killer7 is about the inevitability of getting to the right-hand-side of the screen. No More Heroes is about the inevitability of getting bored with or completing all the sidequests. How would one make a game about the inevitability of the point where a game isn't fun enough to continue paying for?
The two-hours-and-fifty-minutes before the ending of INLAND EMPIRE are setting up a wonderfully powerful music video for "Sinnerman," just as the twenty hours before the ending of Killer7 are an emotional context to the Moment of Choice (and really, "Sinnerman" would be an appropriate theme song for that game too.) And the meaninglessness of the choice serves to highlight that, for all the promise of interactivity most games give us, all we can ever do is beat a game, turn it off to have dinner, or delay either inevitability.
posted by R. Goodness at 12:09 PM
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