When Killer7 came out in July 2005 a whole bunch of people didn’t quite know what to make of it. You see, that was the first of Goichi Suda’s games to get an international release, and instead of getting a slow introduction to his extremely punk style, his studio, Grasshopper Manufacture, partnered with the legend Shinji Makami and Capcom on a project very much in the spotlight, as part of the GameCube’s “Capcom Five”. It’s not the kind of game that would get a AAA release now, for sure, but even in hindsight it’s fair to wonder how it ended up getting the kind of support it did both in terms of budget and promotion in 2005, and from a publisher as significant as Capcom.
Killer7’s GameCube release has a Metacritic score of 74, which you are being alerted to not because review scores matter even a little bit in terms of determining the value of art, or to say that these scores were Wrong, but just as proof that critics were indeed divided. People loved the story and storytelling, unless they hated it. They thought the controls were simple and elegant, unless they were convoluted and game-breaking. Here’s a selection of quotes from a few notable outlets who were, by and large, mixed on Killer7:
1Up: “For every artistic triumph the game unveils, it also bundles an equal number of peculiar design choices that make for a largely confusing whole.”
New York Times: “If you want to see a game push beyond the conventions of game narrative, then Killer7 is worth renting. But prepare yourself to be consecutively thrilled, confused, provoked, annoyed and bored senseless.”
G4 TV: “If this one had gameplay to match its story and visuals, we’d be looking at a Game of the Year candidate.”
Electronic Gaming Monthly: “It’s hard to recommend picking up Killer7, even as a curious experiment or artistic statement, when so much of the actual gameplay screams to put it down.”
Detroit Free Press: “Were it not for the bizarre control scheme, the whole game could be artwork.”
Siliconera: “Gamers eager for something different and darker will eat Killer7 up. Whereas some gamers will absolutely loathe the game because it takes time to get into and time to relearn controls.”
IGN: “Players who can look beyond the control mechanics will find a truly bold and intriguing adventure game lurking within Killer7‘s beautiful cel-shaded visuals. This is a game that oozes style from beginning to end and also one with a story so brutally off-the-wall that it practically demands your attention.”
One, note that the literal New York Times bothered to review Killer7, in 2005. The thing about being shoved into a spotlight that wasn’t ready for it was not hyperbole. Two, most (but not all) of the more positive contemporary reviews are from smaller publications and outlets, which makes a bit of sense. A more niche audience, perhaps, a review written more for their tastes than the broader ones that, again, the New York Times or even IGN might have been writing for. Again, this makes sense: the man who also goes by Suda51 has espoused his devotion to “punk” many times over his years in the industry, and he’s not necessarily speaking of the music. He’s talking about zigging when the industry is zagging, about going against the dominant trends.
Suda was an undertaker who joined Human Entertainment to make video games. He served as both writer and director of Super Fire Pro Wrestling Special on the Super Famicom, and made the most of the opportunity. In the game’s story mode, you start out as a rookie climbing your way to the top, and when you finally reach the mountain’s peak, your girlfriend has left you, your coach and tag-team partner have both been murdered, and while you’re world champion, you’re also, understandably, lonely and depressed, and reaching the pinnacle of your profession did not change that. That’s dark enough as is, but Suda kept going: your character ends up committing suicide days after becoming champion.
There’s a difference between shock for shock’s sake, and giving players what they aren’t expecting, and Suda51 has made a career out of the latter. Killer7 is an entire game made out of that.
Throughout the ‘90s and ‘00s game controls became more standardized as the controllers themselves began to be designed along similar lines. First-person shooters were growing in size and scope, getting further away from their 2D roots. More powerful hardware meant more impressive visuals, but also fully utilizing all that extra horsepower to push beyond established genre conventions and into new territory, with far more freedom for the player. So, Suda made an over-the-shoulder shooter that was actually a first-person shooter but more accurately was on rails, and in reality was an adventure game with some puzzles that featured shooting as a key gameplay mechanic. You did not run around freely, as so many of 2005’s other games allowed. You did not control yourself with the analog stick, unless you’re talking about the reticule for your guns or choosing which direction to head in from a real-time menu choice. You pressed the large, green A button on the GameCube controller, and your character would run forward. You pressed the smaller, red B button, and your character would turn around. The right trigger was for switching to first-person mode so you could fire at enemies. The left trigger was for scanning to make the enemies visible to you. You hear foes before you see them, as they let off an unsettling laugh, alerting you to their presence, and the rest is timing and remembering what you do and do not control with the controller in your hand.
Killer7 has puzzles, and they are very Resident Evil in nature, in the sense you go to one place you can’t progress in, then you find an oddball solution to a puzzle elsewhere, which gives you an object you can use to solve the other puzzle. They’re not particularly taxing, so much as you need to remember where you might need to go in order to get to where you actually want to be. There’s an entire hint system for you to help you along, as well: all you have to do is shoot the mask that a guy who’s just kind of hanging around in various places is holding in his hand, and he’ll get you some information to help. Or you could talk to the guy hanging from the ceiling, dressed in a red gimp suit, if you’d like your advice to be a little more cryptic. Or the dead guy with a very large collection of t-shirts who is there to help, unless he’s there to chastise, unless he’s doing both at once.
Oh, and the enemies you fight are cult members belonging to Heaven Smile, who have been transformed into a variety of monsters who will come at you at different speeds, cackling all the while, and will explode if they reach you, severely damaging you. To defeat them, you shoot them—blow their limbs off, and you’ll collect “thin” blood, which can be used to heal yourself or to fill vials to perform special moves with certain characters. Shoot them in their weak point, killing them much more quickly, and you get thick blood, which you will give to a doctor through a TV screen, and in return you will receive serums that can be used to upgrade your abilities.
Ah, and also you’re playing as one of seven personalities contained within the current form of a demigod waging a cosmic war of good versus evil that has raged on and on for ages. One of them wears a luchador mask and fires dual grenades to help you blow up either Heaven Smile members or cracked walls. One is good at picking locks and holds his gun like he hopes he never is going to hit any of his targets. One uses knives, instead, and another likes to cut herself to spray blood that makes hidden objects and paths appear. The one running the show—or at least appointed to run it—doesn’t like to fight so much, as he’s The Cleaner. If one of the personalities is killed on the job, The Cleaner, Garcian, has to go collect their head in a bloody brown paper bag, and bring it back to life in the safe rooms with the TV that has that doctor living (?) inside of it. If Samantha is in there and wearing a maid outfit, you can save, but if she’s just lounging around, you’ll have to find another safe room for that.
None of this is meant to shock you when you play. It’s about establishing a vibe. And the vibes are wild. You are supposed to be unsettled. You are not supposed to be comfortable. Everything from the laughter of Heaven Smile members to their actual smiles, to the way the blood curls out of their body in thin wisps that defy gravity, to the casual nature of the violence these personalities deal out, to the fact that it is not you controlling the camera angles at any point, to the way the game controls—against the norms of the day, but truly elegant if you stop fighting against them for how you want them to work—is meant to unsettle you. The soundtrack is fantastic, but it’s not there to make you feel good, either: just so you get the picture, one of the game’s composers, Masafumi Takada, is responsible for the soundtracks of a few Danganronpa titles, as well. Every decision is made to keep you both immersed in the world of Killer7 and made uncomfortable by it—to introduce constant friction for the player. It might come off as violent or weird for the sake of it, but Suda made a game that has quite a bit to say, as well: about living in a post-9/11 world, about the slow decline of empires, of political intrigue and good vs. evil and violent paranoia. And the various forms of friction are distractions, in a way, from all of that messaging; it’s a wonder that this game ended up receiving a mixed reception.
Killer7 has a little bit of Majora’s Mask in it, with the way the personalities are essentially utilized strategically or for progression in specific spots. Their movements and attacks differ—you’re basically equipping what you need at that moment, a “mask” like when Link dons the face of a Goron when he needs strength or speed, or that of the Zora when it’s time to swim. The combat itself calls to mind Warp’s Enemy Zero, from another singular developer in Kenji Eno: in Enemy Zero, none of the monsters trying to kill you on your spaceship were visible, but they sure could see you. You had to basically ping their location using sound in order to determine how far away from you they were and what direction they were in, and then fire at them with a charged shot at the exact right moment to avoid instant death. Enemy Zero is not as beloved as some other Warp works like D, which should not surprise you given that detail about how the fighting works. Killer7’s combat also calls to mind adventure games from the past, like in Snatcher or Policenauts, when suddenly you had to pull out a gun and fire very accurately in a first-person view when the rest of the game had been a very different kind of game. Mashing all of this together, with Suda’s particular visual and auditory aesthetic, made for a game that somehow had clear influences but was also truly unlike any of what it had pulled from.
Given its hybrid-genre nature, the emphasis on its style in many forms, and how much more receptive to all of that sort of thing games as a whole are now than they were two decades ago, Killer7, in many ways, feels like it fits more into the present than it did its own time. The time it resides in now exists, at least in part, because it grew up with Killer7 around to guide it. Maybe not in the kind of major spotlight scene that it shockingly arrived in back in 2005, no, but in the thriving independent scene? Look at 1000xResistand tell me none of the developers at Sunset Visitor, just as an example, were influenced by Killer7, either directly or indirectly. That game has style, it has shock, it has the kind of visual aesthetic and characters that stick with you, and God, you just want to try to make sense of it all while you’re in the middle of it. It is dark, it is one genre masquerading as another genre entirely, especially on the visual side, and hoo boy are you part of something much larger that you can barely come to grips with.
Killer7 might have vexed some critics—and it certainly did not become a major commercial success—but it did become a cult favorite that’s more accepted as a stunning achievement for this art form the further we get from its initial release. It continues to this day to be picked apart and pored over for its themes and design. It also launched Suda’s career as an international name, which brought on No More Heroes,Shadows of the Damned, Lollipop Chainsaw, and even a Fatal Frame game co-developed with Nintendo and Tecmo—that one, Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, finally received a a worldwide release in 2023, 15 years after its initial launch on the Wii in Japan. Suda’s heart has always been rooted in survival-horror as much as it is professional wrestling, and that, too, was evident in Killer7.
Video games are richer for having developers like Grasshopper Manufacture and Goichi Suda in them; if you haven’t yet tried Killer7 for yourself, don’t wait for a remake that might never come. Get yourself over to Steam, slide that digital money across the virtual counter, and prepare yourself for one of the true greats, still misunderstood 20 years later.
Marc Normandin covers retro video games at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Bluesky at @marcnormandin.
