I've grown to hate the word "weird". Despite having often been referred to as someone who likes "weird" things, I bristle these days when it's slung around. When used in discussion about art, it typically flattens work down into a differential equation. Rather than the work being judged on its merits and meanings, it's framed against its contemporaries and whether it fits within their models of normalcy.
It pains me to say it, but killer7 is weird. Pretty much everything about it is weird. Mechanically, it's a blend of rail-shooter and survival horror. Solve puzzles. Shoot things. It's a little rigid and takes some getting used to, but it surprisingly works. Its narrative is utterly all over the place, too (I will elaborate later), and it's audiovisually singular. Even it's development seems to be an aberration. It's surprising that this game even exists.
killer7 is my first Grasshopper game. It won't be my last, I don't think. But I don't think I'm wrong in saying that this game was a lot of people's introduction to SUDA51 and his millieu. A lot of tonal and narrative flourishes are immediately noticeable: the punkish dialogue, the fragmented storytelling, the love of blood, the esoteric lore. While I think the story might implicitly be its most enduring legacy, it's also beloved for it's ~vibes~, and rightly so; this is simply one of the best looking and sounding games of its generation, steeped in style. But as the credits rolled, both as Garcian comes to his revelation, and as the explosions roared, I struggled to care much at all.
I want to be unambiguous here: I enjoy killer7. It looks and sounds incredible. I like the wild swings it takes both mechanically and narratively. I respect its ambition deeply. But the problem is that this game is in many ways inseparable from its massive cult status. So the question I keep finding myself returning to is: do the majority of these fans love killer7 for its cryptic political themes and psyschotropic theatrics? Or do they like it because they think it's "weird"?
I'm not saying killer7 is "weird for weird's sake". Far from it. It's clear that there's depth here. But stop: what is meant by depth? Never forget, as Samuel Beckett wrote, that "the danger is in the neatness of identification." This phrase haunts me still. We can identify what is occuring in the game, who is who, what is what, why is why, but this brings us no closer to interpretation. We can manage to figure out the lore of killer7 but that doesn't mean we understand it. Even identifying a symbolic framework, say, declaring Harman Smith to be God, and declaring Kun Lan to be the Devil, does not really bring us closer.
To stop myself from making an ass of myself, I looked to analyses and criticism of killer7 to see if they could shed any light on it. And frankly, I don't think they did. This at least assuaged my concerns that I'm just an idiot. Well, actually, I am an idiot sometimes, but not because I wasn't paying attention. This is not to dismiss anyone else's work as unimportant or bad. There was a lot of enlightening information. Rather, I mean to say that there seemed to be no puzzle pieces I had missing in my understanding of killer7 that would have shattered my overall opinion. Maybe I'll read Hand in Killer7 and feel differently. I would say the main thing I've seen laid out that I didn't pay as much attention to was the theme of government control and instruction. And that definitely is an important element of its story. This game has been analyzed to death and I doubt I can bring anything new to the table. If I wanted to speak broadly and succinctly, I would say killer7 is a game about nations, control, and violence. But there's so much to say! I could write about cameras, about televisions, about my disinterest in the game's psychological thriller elements, about violence in video games, about interpellations and ideology, and so on, and so on, and so on. But let me slow down.
My main takeaway from killer7's themes (particularly it's political ones) is as a piece about nationalism, democracy, and globalism, but most distinctly as a response to Fukuyama's "end of history". Fukuyama theorized that history had reached it's end, that events would still occur, but a grand narrative of societal evolution was over. He later ate his hat, and admitted that he was wrong. He pointed to Islamic extremism as something he underestimated. September 11th, 2001 might have been the rebirth of history for Fukuyama. Despite being set in the U.S., killer7 is very much a game about Japan, too. The future of Japan, the nationalist spirit, is at stake. In the game's alternate history, international conflict has supposedly ended, with nuclear warheads being detonated outside the atmosphere (this would totally work in the real life) being remembered as the symbol of everlasting peace. But then the Heaven Smile appear, an infectious virus that transforms humans into weapons. They throw themselves at you and blow themselves up. Sound familiar? Suicide bombings became a trend in the 2000s. Terrorism, I am told, tends to move in these trends: hostages, mailbombings, mass shootings. Horrible stuff. There's more. Election manipulation, human trafficking, cults, the list goes on. These are not harbingers of war, but rather the conflict itself. It's an endless state of disquiet; peace does not exist. Democracy is a facade. Our actions are interpellated. Nations are fragile. The violence continues. This isn't chaos. This is order. So says Kun Lan.
Suffice to say, I do think there is depth to killer7. Hopefully I've proven I'm not just a moron. It wears the mask of weirdness, but it does have things to say. Whether or not I agree with its propositions is a different conversation. Instead, what I question is whether or not the average killer7 enjoyer is even interested in that. Because it's not exactly easy to get to. When I first played Hotline Miami, a similarly "weird" game, one Goichi Suda apparently quite liked, the core themes passed straight over my head. Only years later, seeing others' criticism, did I begin to understand its critique of violence and media. For me, it was a frenetic stealth-action hybrid with a bumping soundtrack and animal masks. Surely, I wasn't the only one, and surely, there are people like this with killer7. Maybe if I had played it at the same time as when I played Hotline Miami or some other formative year (lord knows my parents would never have let me played it when it came out), it would have affected me the same way. Make no doubt about it, "weirdness" can be dazzling and enchanting, even if it is superficial.
I want to be perfectly clear: this did not make my enjoyment of Hotline Miami any less valid. Nor of killer7. And if you like killer7 despite being perplexed by it or not delving into its arcane mythology, that's valid, too. Guess what? I like it, too! Aesthetics and presentation are a part of art, and if you love something for that, and hell, even if you love something just because it's weird, fucking go for it. Love it all you want. Don't feel compelled to justify that affection with empty analysis and identification.
I will not give in to astonishment. I will not say, "well, it's weird, gotta hand it to 'em". I know I risk outing myself as a plebeian who doesn't get it, but I refuse to become Homer Simpson, nodding as he watches Twin Peaks saying, "Brilliant, heh heh! I have absolutely no idea what's going on." I suspect killer7 will be a game I like thinking about more than I liked playing. I look forward to thinking about it more; I already feel myself working into a shoot as I ponder it. This was only written in a flurry after finishing it then taking a nap. Who knows? Maybe I'll grow to love it. But in this moment, I will not accept my lack of "getting it" as an excuse to give into smiling along, because I do get it on some level. And I like it. It's just that I'm not as excited as everyone else. And that's okay.
It pains me to say it, but killer7 is weird. Pretty much everything about it is weird. Mechanically, it's a blend of rail-shooter and survival horror. Solve puzzles. Shoot things. It's a little rigid and takes some getting used to, but it surprisingly works. Its narrative is utterly all over the place, too (I will elaborate later), and it's audiovisually singular. Even it's development seems to be an aberration. It's surprising that this game even exists.
killer7 is my first Grasshopper game. It won't be my last, I don't think. But I don't think I'm wrong in saying that this game was a lot of people's introduction to SUDA51 and his millieu. A lot of tonal and narrative flourishes are immediately noticeable: the punkish dialogue, the fragmented storytelling, the love of blood, the esoteric lore. While I think the story might implicitly be its most enduring legacy, it's also beloved for it's ~vibes~, and rightly so; this is simply one of the best looking and sounding games of its generation, steeped in style. But as the credits rolled, both as Garcian comes to his revelation, and as the explosions roared, I struggled to care much at all.
I want to be unambiguous here: I enjoy killer7. It looks and sounds incredible. I like the wild swings it takes both mechanically and narratively. I respect its ambition deeply. But the problem is that this game is in many ways inseparable from its massive cult status. So the question I keep finding myself returning to is: do the majority of these fans love killer7 for its cryptic political themes and psyschotropic theatrics? Or do they like it because they think it's "weird"?
I'm not saying killer7 is "weird for weird's sake". Far from it. It's clear that there's depth here. But stop: what is meant by depth? Never forget, as Samuel Beckett wrote, that "the danger is in the neatness of identification." This phrase haunts me still. We can identify what is occuring in the game, who is who, what is what, why is why, but this brings us no closer to interpretation. We can manage to figure out the lore of killer7 but that doesn't mean we understand it. Even identifying a symbolic framework, say, declaring Harman Smith to be God, and declaring Kun Lan to be the Devil, does not really bring us closer.
To stop myself from making an ass of myself, I looked to analyses and criticism of killer7 to see if they could shed any light on it. And frankly, I don't think they did. This at least assuaged my concerns that I'm just an idiot. Well, actually, I am an idiot sometimes, but not because I wasn't paying attention. This is not to dismiss anyone else's work as unimportant or bad. There was a lot of enlightening information. Rather, I mean to say that there seemed to be no puzzle pieces I had missing in my understanding of killer7 that would have shattered my overall opinion. Maybe I'll read Hand in Killer7 and feel differently. I would say the main thing I've seen laid out that I didn't pay as much attention to was the theme of government control and instruction. And that definitely is an important element of its story. This game has been analyzed to death and I doubt I can bring anything new to the table. If I wanted to speak broadly and succinctly, I would say killer7 is a game about nations, control, and violence. But there's so much to say! I could write about cameras, about televisions, about my disinterest in the game's psychological thriller elements, about violence in video games, about interpellations and ideology, and so on, and so on, and so on. But let me slow down.
My main takeaway from killer7's themes (particularly it's political ones) is as a piece about nationalism, democracy, and globalism, but most distinctly as a response to Fukuyama's "end of history". Fukuyama theorized that history had reached it's end, that events would still occur, but a grand narrative of societal evolution was over. He later ate his hat, and admitted that he was wrong. He pointed to Islamic extremism as something he underestimated. September 11th, 2001 might have been the rebirth of history for Fukuyama. Despite being set in the U.S., killer7 is very much a game about Japan, too. The future of Japan, the nationalist spirit, is at stake. In the game's alternate history, international conflict has supposedly ended, with nuclear warheads being detonated outside the atmosphere (this would totally work in the real life) being remembered as the symbol of everlasting peace. But then the Heaven Smile appear, an infectious virus that transforms humans into weapons. They throw themselves at you and blow themselves up. Sound familiar? Suicide bombings became a trend in the 2000s. Terrorism, I am told, tends to move in these trends: hostages, mailbombings, mass shootings. Horrible stuff. There's more. Election manipulation, human trafficking, cults, the list goes on. These are not harbingers of war, but rather the conflict itself. It's an endless state of disquiet; peace does not exist. Democracy is a facade. Our actions are interpellated. Nations are fragile. The violence continues. This isn't chaos. This is order. So says Kun Lan.
Suffice to say, I do think there is depth to killer7. Hopefully I've proven I'm not just a moron. It wears the mask of weirdness, but it does have things to say. Whether or not I agree with its propositions is a different conversation. Instead, what I question is whether or not the average killer7 enjoyer is even interested in that. Because it's not exactly easy to get to. When I first played Hotline Miami, a similarly "weird" game, one Goichi Suda apparently quite liked, the core themes passed straight over my head. Only years later, seeing others' criticism, did I begin to understand its critique of violence and media. For me, it was a frenetic stealth-action hybrid with a bumping soundtrack and animal masks. Surely, I wasn't the only one, and surely, there are people like this with killer7. Maybe if I had played it at the same time as when I played Hotline Miami or some other formative year (lord knows my parents would never have let me played it when it came out), it would have affected me the same way. Make no doubt about it, "weirdness" can be dazzling and enchanting, even if it is superficial.
I want to be perfectly clear: this did not make my enjoyment of Hotline Miami any less valid. Nor of killer7. And if you like killer7 despite being perplexed by it or not delving into its arcane mythology, that's valid, too. Guess what? I like it, too! Aesthetics and presentation are a part of art, and if you love something for that, and hell, even if you love something just because it's weird, fucking go for it. Love it all you want. Don't feel compelled to justify that affection with empty analysis and identification.
I will not give in to astonishment. I will not say, "well, it's weird, gotta hand it to 'em". I know I risk outing myself as a plebeian who doesn't get it, but I refuse to become Homer Simpson, nodding as he watches Twin Peaks saying, "Brilliant, heh heh! I have absolutely no idea what's going on." I suspect killer7 will be a game I like thinking about more than I liked playing. I look forward to thinking about it more; I already feel myself working into a shoot as I ponder it. This was only written in a flurry after finishing it then taking a nap. Who knows? Maybe I'll grow to love it. But in this moment, I will not accept my lack of "getting it" as an excuse to give into smiling along, because I do get it on some level. And I like it. It's just that I'm not as excited as everyone else. And that's okay.
4 Comments
Killer7 has often felt like the Fight Club of video games to me. Both aestheticize violence, both comment on the myth of the "end of history," and both are admired by many for their aesthetics and/or for some intellectually impoverished interpretation of their messages. This is not, as you say in your review, to endorse the message (in either case): Fight Club I've always found a bit trite, and I never quite made it to the end of Killer7 for similar reasons. You do a great job in this piece of rendering the experiential tension of appreciating a message at the same time as enjoying the aesthetics (of violence, in this case) that, in obverse, work to depict that message.
I'll add that I think part of the issue when it comes to critically interpreting both works that I mentioned (Killer7 and Fight Club) is that the texts themselves are a little too in love with the aesthetics of violence. To my mind, this absolves at least some appreciators of "moron" status -- they are only falling into the same ethical mindtraps as the authors.
^
This is quite the statement. When the product fixates itself so much on what it tries to critique or demolish, it commonly starts to blend iself into a pulp of pretentiousness. Not that that pulp is bad per se, it shouldn't be and the underlying message still exists, but it does get too on the nose.
Great write up.
This is quite the statement. When the product fixates itself so much on what it tries to critique or demolish, it commonly starts to blend iself into a pulp of pretentiousness. Not that that pulp is bad per se, it shouldn't be and the underlying message still exists, but it does get too on the nose.
Great write up.
Pangburn
2 years ago