Monday 1 August 2022

Killer7: Bullet Flowers


Let's have a look at Killer7, a cult videogame from 2005. For many years Killer7 was a console exclusive, but in 2018 it was remastered and re-released for the PC, so after it went on sale recently I decided to try it out. I've long been curious about Killer7. The game's stylish visuals and surrealistic atmosphere attracted a lot of press when it was new. It's often cited as one of the most interesting video games of the 2000s, if not necessarily one of the best.

For a long time I thought it began life on the Sega Dreamcast. It has all the hallmarks of that console's best titles - the stylish cel-shaded graphics and eclectic soundtrack of Jet Set Radio, the constrained movement of Rez, the general fin-de-siècle attitude etc. But it was actually developed for the Nintendo GameCube, several years after the Dreamcast had been discontinued, so you learn something every day.


Killer7 was part of a batch of games produced by Capcom exclusively for the GameCube. The plan was to boost third-party support of the console by giving it a bunch of titles aimed at a more mature audience than Nintendo's own games. Unfortunately the first title, PN03, sold poorly, so Capcom gave up and decided to port the rest of the games to the PlayStation 2 as well, or alternatively cancel them outright. Thus Killer7 was simultaneously released in 2005 for the GameCube and PlayStation 2, and for many years afterwards it was only available for those two platforms.

The general consensus at the time was that the GameCube original was the best, with more detailed graphics and quicker loading times. The 2018 PC remaster is based on the GameCube version, albeit that there are a handful of technical differences.

Why is there a PC remaster? I'm not sure. Lead developer Goichi Suda went on to bigger and better things with No More Heroes, but even that game wasn't particularly popular. Perhaps Capcom found the source code in a filing cabinet somewhere and thought "why not" and "yes" and "let's do it" and "yes" and "hahaha" and "shall we do it" and "why not" and "yes" and "we're doing it" and "we're really doing it" and "this is funny" and "hahaha" and "yes" and "we're doing it". Perhaps Capcom thinks that the GameCube still has the potential to be a huge hit, despite the fact it was discontinued in 2007.

Perhaps it was really, really cheap and easy to do. I don't know. Do you remember the GameCube? I was alive back then and I can only name two GameCube games. Super Monkey Ball and Super Mario Sunshine. And there was a Zelda game. The Wind Walker. That's three games.

Except, get this. It was The Wind Waker. Not Walker. I didn't realise until this very second. I've been wrong all these years. Well I never. No-one disliked the GameCube. It just seemed a poor deal compared to the PlayStation 2 because it couldn't play DVDs and there were only a tiny handful of exclusive titles and no good first person shooters. The hardware was indestructible, and nowadays it makes a nice shelf ornament.


The PC remaster is mostly based on the GameCube version. One exception is this graphical effect - in the GameCube original the player character wasn't tinted red during scene transitions.

A surprise updated released in October 2024 fixed that, though.

As of this writing Killer7 is only available brand new for the PC. There were rumours of a Nintendo Switch port, but so far nothing has come of it. If you have an original GameCube copy of the game it should work on a Nintendo Wii as well, because the Wii was backwards compatible. Is it available on Sony's PSNow streaming service? No, it is not.

The PC remaster has support for widescreen monitors and HD resolutions, plus mouse and keyboard controls. The levels, music, cutscenes and so forth are unaltered, including the use of GameCube button prompts.

There's some debate as to how the mouse and keyboard interfere with the gameplay. Killer7 is fundamentally a shooting gallery game, in which case mouse aim is a godsend, but unlike Unreal Tournament the shooting is slower-paced, more measured, so I'm going to assume that it plays for me much as it played for people back in 2005 with a GameCube controller.


Let's talk about the plot. Killer7 takes place in the near future, at a time when the world is threatened by a mysterious plague that turns people into explosive zombies called Heaven Smiles. For reasons that are not readily apparent the United Nations decides to fight this threat by hiring a bunch of top assassins, the Killer7. The Killer7 are led by a chap called Harman Smith, who delegates responsibility to his second-in-command, Garcian Smith; you spent most of the game playing as Garcian Smith.

Garcian has operational control of the Killer7. He's a relatively weak fighter, but he has the power to resurrect any of the seven if they die. Each of the seven has a different set of skills, and part of the gameplay involves switching from one character to the other to solve puzzles. Con Smith, for example, is small, so he can fit through gaps:


Coyote Smith is a petty thief who can pick locks, Mask De Smith is a masked wrestler who can blow down destructible walls, Kevin Smith is a cat burglar who can turn himself invisible, and KAEDE Smith can uncover hidden messages by spraying walls with her blood. Each of the seven also has a signature weapon. KAEDE has a scoped pistol that can hit distant targets, for example, and Mask has grenade launchers that can take down giant mutants.

The odd one out is Dan Smith, who is the plain vanilla Killer7. His only special power is a twelve-shot, double-barrelled revolver, and he's very handy with it.



At this point I was going to make some sweet references to top 80s indie band The Smiths, because the characters are all called Smith, but the game already has a lot of references to The Smiths, so that joke would be redundant. The game has several references to 1980s and 1990s indie guitar bands, which dates it a bit. The hip kids of today are into L'Rain and Jazmine Sullivan, not Dinosaur Jr and the Melvins.

The story is told with a mixture of in-game cutscenes and cartoon animations. At the outset of the game Japan finds itself under attack from a long-range missile strike that may or may not have been launched by the United States. In theory this is the game's overriding plot - you're racing to save Japan - but in practice the game forgets about the missiles almost immediately and divides into three unrelated episodes, in which you deal with a cult leader, a rogue cartoonist, and a competing assassin (respectively).


When it was new Killer7 attracted so-so reviews. The critics praised the style and atmosphere but were unimpressed with the monotonous gameplay. My dim, dim recollection is that there was a fad at the time for auteur-led games that had massive, lengthy cutscenes, such as Metal Gear Solid 3, or alternatively minimalist genre experiments such as Shadow of the Colossus and Okami, in which case Killer7 was right at the cutting edge of the games-as-art debate. Unfortunately it's just not that good, either as a game or as art.

I'll talk about the gameplay first. Killer7 has an unusual control scheme. The levels are divided into a series of tracks, with junctions; you can run back and forth down the corridors and turn left and right at junctions, just like Pac-Man, but you don't have complete freedom of movement. Interactive objects are pointed out to you, as if they were junctions as well.


I was surprised at how well it works. The scheme eliminates the problem in tank-style 3D games whereby your character keeps bumping into the scenery. After a couple of minutes I found I could fluidly navigate the maps, which are generally not very complex. Apart from a few obtuse puzzles the gameplay involves exploring the levels, flicking switches along the way, and collecting special bullets that you can use to access the final boss arena.




The combat is distinctive as well. Periodically you hear laughter in the background, which is the sign that there's a Heaven Smile lurking around. To fight them you bring up your gun, scan the area for Heaven Smiles, then shoot them. You can in theory just pump them with bullets until they expire, but they all have a weak spot, and if you hit that spot the Heaven Smile dies with a single shot. Alternatively you could shoot off their legs and finish them off as they crawl towards you.

Some Heaven Smiles have a hidden weak spot, outlined in green. As the game proceeds you encounter ever-more-outlandishly-mutated Smiles - ranging from shambling zombies with enlarged limbs to giant tentacle monsters with eyes that you have to pick off individually. In the image above the Heaven Smile is an armoured ball. I'm just about to shoot its one and only vulnerable face.


Every time you kill a Heaven Smile you are rewarded with some blood, and if you kill the Smile by hitting its weak spot you get special, thick blood that can be processed into character upgrades. The upgrade system is mostly useful for players who just pump the Heaven Smiles full of bullets; with my mouse I found it fairly easy to hit the one-shot-kill weak spots, so the upgrades weren't so useful. Oddly I found that KAEDE's slow-firing scoped pistol was more of a liability than a help, because it feels as if the weak spots get smaller when you zoom in.

Periodically you come across ghosts of the Killer7's past victims, who usually have some helpful hints, although often they're just there for background flavour.



That's pretty much the entire gameplay. You run through a series of simple mazes, collecting objects, solving puzzles, and listening to ghostly characters drone on. One particularly annoying chap uses the same template for all his speeches, which gets boring very quickly. I eventually ended up ignoring him, which was unfortunate because he's essential in one level. There are some little minigames, and a brief parody of side-on fighting games, but on the whole you run around a lot and shoot Heaven Smiles.

You have to stop and scan the area before engaging the Heaven Smiles, and you can't fire while moving, so the combat feels slightly old-fashioned. You know what Killer7 reminded me of? Gauntlet, remember that? "Elf needs food, badly"? The 1980s arcade machine? Killer7 is essentially Gauntlet, with seven characters instead of four, and it's in 3D, but the gameplay isn't really all that different. Seriously, if Killer7 was viewed from the top down it would essentially be Gauntlet. Single-player Gauntlet, because it's strictly a single-player game.

Is the gameplay any good? The puzzle aspect annoyed me. One half of the puzzles involves equipping a special ring in order to blow out fires, light candles etc, which is easy. The other half of the puzzles involves memorising background details and answering questions about them, which isn't fun at all. It's not difficult, it's just that it's not entertaining. Did the developers expect me to take notes with a pencil and paper?

The final puzzle is even more aggravating, because it involves listening to a bunch of dull audio logs over and over again until you pick up on a bunch of uninteresting details about a character you've never met before.


The boss fights generally have a puzzle aspect as well, although in almost all cases I found that overwhelming firepower carried the day. Perhaps the mouse control helps. The PC version also gives you hotkeys to switch characters and heal, which speeds things up.

On the whole the puzzles range from uninteresting to annoying. The shooting is much more entertaining, although again it's really just a slow-paced shooting gallery. It's no more sophisticated than House of the Dead or Time Crisis. The vast majority of the baddies are melee-only. They walk up to you and explode, although each of the Killer7 has a desperation defence that activates at short range. Given the fact that two characters have quiet weapons - a suppressed pistol and a knife - I wonder if there was originally going to be a stealth element, or at least some more complexity.

The combat isn't awful, it just isn't very sophisticated. You shoot monsters that slowly walk in a straight line towards you. The monsters tend to respawn right up close, so you have to time your movements carefully, and there are monster generators that try to overwhelm you with numbers, so you have to carefully balance your shooting and reloading, but it never gets complicated. Unlike for example Left4Dead there's no dynamic element to the monster spawns, they appear in the same place every time.

Later on the game introduces baddies that can only be killed by Mask De Smith's grenade launchers, but this just means that you have to either play as Mask all the time, or continually switch back and forth, back and forth from Mask to your favourite character. The downside to Mask's firepower is that he can't collect any blood from the enemies, so if you want to heal him or upgrade his weapons you have to switch to someone else first.


Given that fact that you can heal at any time, and Garcian can resurrect the dead, it's hard to lose Killer7. It has a checkpoint system, so death just sends you back a little bit. The early trailers sold the game as a fast-paced bullet-fest, but the actual gameplay is much more sedate.

Unfortunately the plot has exactly the same problem. It moves slowly and intermittently, and it just didn't grab me. It touches on some of the same themes that the developer explored in No More Heroes, but not as effectively. For example, at one point you fight the mask-wearing, submachine-gun-toting henchperson of chief nastyman Curtis Blackburn:



In fact you fight her twice, and in both cases she isn't a pushover. The climactic battles against Ayame Blackburn play like a parody of boss fights, but the game makes it clear that Ayame has been tortured into fighting you, and when you kill her the music goes quiet and she just lies there dead. There's no sense of triumph. It's one of the few things that works, but it's not enough. The ending sequence has a similar sense of futility, but it doesn't have enough build-up to be truly effective.

Killer7's story really has two problems. It occasionally reaches peaks of surrealistic mania, but they're few and far between, and it doesn't sustain that pitch because the pace is all wrong. For every "like a flower that blooms in the soil of our carnal and corrupt society" and "I'm talking about guys who beat off four times a day" there are hours of obtuse burbling about the relationship between Japan and the United States. The climactic revelation that the United States' political system is built on a lie feels far more prosaic than was obviously intended, and I was left wondering if it was a reference to The President's Analyst or not.

The visual style has aged well, but the storyline and overall ethos are stuck in the 1990s. The emotionless, slick, postmodern 1990s, when nothing meant anything and everything was just a symbolic reference to something else. It feels like a student art project made by someone who was terrified of making a substantial point about the real world. The world's problems seemed to be over in the 1990s, so the art world shunned social issues in favour of a decade of laughing at the past by recontextualising symbols.

Apart from Gauntlet, Killer7 reminded me a lot of Matthew Barney's contemporary Cremaster films, which were big news at the time of Killer7's development. The Cremaster films were essentially an attempt to capture the magic of David Lynch without plot or characterisation, but they didn't work because they were just feature-length music videos. The kind of boring music videos that start off with five minutes of dialogue, and there's a story about finding some lost tapes or something. Killer7 feels like an imitation of the form of a socio-political thriller without any of the substance. If nothing else it made me appreciate David Lynch's Lost Highway and Inland Empire even more, because Lynch had a knack for that kind of thing.

The grand finale divides its time between a meditation on the political process and a considerably more interesting psycho-drama in which the history of the Killer7 is explored, and in my opinion the game would have been a lot better if it had concentrated on the latter aspect.



That's a pretty harsh take, but Killer7 disappointed me. It's not much fun as a game. The parodies of superhero comics and cults are like Frank Zappa's jokes, e.g. they feel like references to humour rather than actual humour. That might have been excusable if the plot had been interesting. FAR: Lone Sails didn't have much gameplay, either, but what it did have was thematically consistent with the plot, which was subtle and emotionally engaging, with a bittersweet ending. But because Killer7 was born of the 1990s it has no emotional engagement at all - it deliberately undercuts it - and purely as a thriller it doesn't work because everything is a reference to something else, and nothing has meaning because quote meaning unquote itself is a construction.

Other problems? The ending reveals that the Killer7 are not what they seem, but it doesn't have any impact because none of the Killer7 are fleshed out. You'd think there would be seven levels, with each of the seven given a moment in the spotlight, but in practice only Dan is given any characterisation. The rest have as much characterisation as the assassins from The Pink Panther Strikes Again, e.g. none, which is a shame because the character designs are striking, Kevin and KAEDE in particular.

And so ultimately I was disappointed with Killer7. I'm glad I played it, because it looks great and now I know what the fuss was all about, but at the same time it's just not all that good.