So Killer7 as the "style" down pat, but what of the "substance"? There's plenty of gameplay - it's just so streamlined that it's easily mistaken as being "simplistic". Controlling Killer7 is simple. You hold down a button, and you run forward. Press the B button, and you'll turn around so you can run the other way. At certain junctions, you can choose to the direction you can go it. At times, you will hear a sinister laughter. Hitting the R trigger will send you into first person mode. The bad guys - the Heaven Smiles - are invisible, but they alert players of their presence with satanic little chuckles. Get too close, and they'll detonate, with a friendly explosion and a hideous laugh. In order to kill them, you need to scan the area by hitting the L trigger. From here, you shoot. Haphazardly pulling the trigger in the general direction of your foe will often work pretty well, although most enemies have weak spots that will aid in the killing. Some enemies have certian tricks to beat them, although they're rarely complicated. You harvest two types of blood from your foes - thick blood can be used to upgrade your characters abilities, while thin blood can be used to heal or activate special attacks.

It's often been termed that the game is "on rails", which isn't entirely the cases - that turn of phrase suggests it's a gun-shooter like Time Crisis, but Killer7 has far more in common structure-wise with the original Resident Evils. You run around, you pick up odd engravings, you "solve" "puzzles". Those terms are quoted because nearly all of them are blitheringly simplistic, and the ones that aren't can easily be beaten by trial and error. A guy named Yoon Hyun gives explicit hints; the map screen tells you which character or item to use to solve almost obstacle. The only exceptions are one or two boss fights later in the game that are so obtuse, I'm not sure how anyone could justifiably solve them without a saunter to good ol' GameFAQs.

Killer7

As such, Killer7 guides you in a way that confuses - and probably angers - most people. It kills that intuition you have to explore every nook and cranny. You might run past a hallway, but you can't go down it - it's simply the game's way to say that there's nothing important down there. But what does that accomplish? On one hand, it lends a sense of mystery to your surroundings. On the other hand, it just makes the game far more direct. See those doors? You just ran right past them. In most games, games where you have complete control over your characters, you would maybe run up to the door and see that it was locked. Maybe it leads to an empty room. Maybe it has a power-up or some other bullshit that encourages the player to waste their time checking each and every corner in each and every level to hopes to gain some leverage for victory, perhaps done to artifically lengthen the game and bloat it out more for the sake of "gameplay". In Killer7, you needn't bother - in fact, the game won't even let you.

So you wonder, why did Capcom take so much control out of your hands? Video games were all about having complete control over your character's destiny - an ideal tampered with slightly during the laserdisc arcade games and later, the Sega CD FMV crapfests - but having an avatar that you don't directly control is a bit of an affront. Today's gaming is all about playing around in a "sandbox" - that is to say, big, empty areas with absolutely nothing of note in them, a la every Grand Theft Auto ever made. In some ways, Killer7 is a drastic "fuck you" to any game that forced you to wander around aimlessly trying to discern what the hell was important and what wasn't.

Maybe there were other reasons that the control was so limited. Maybe it was to show off fancy, low angle camera shots - which lends to credence to the "style over substance" mantra already being chanted. Maybe the programmers were just lazy and wanted to nail an easy-to-use control method without bogging down the mechanics. Maybe it was just to force the dream-like feeling of the game. In your dreams, you feel as if you're in control, but everything is linear - you're watching yourself. Given the craziness of the game, this would almost make sense.

Or maybe - and this could be a stretch, but stay with me - maybe it was done to piss off Americans.

No, seriously.

I can't find too many sources for Japanese game reviews outside of Famitsu, but it scored pretty well over there. Here in America, the reviews have been all over the place. And most of the negative ones were because of that "on-rails" movement thing.

See, Americans like freedom - if we didn't, we wouldn't have kicked the Brits out over two hundred years ago. But more than that, we have an unending lust for personal freedom. That's why us Americans are so obsessed with driving - sure, we COULD take the bus, but why stick to a predetermined route that often takes longer, and is cramped with other (probably annoying) people. No one outside of urban areas really takes public transportation unless they're financially unable to support a vehicle of their own. Contrast that to the Japanese transportation system, which relies heavily on trains. I'm sure people own cars in Japan, but it's not central to the lifestyle like here in America. While part of it may have to do with America's spread-out geography, we're a culture that desperately craves the individual freedom granted by our motor vehicles.

Killer7

Now look at some of the video games America has pumped out. We've produced open-ended games like Civilization, SimCity, and Pirates. Take an American RPG like Ultima or Fallout - they're also open-ended, nonlinear adventures. On the other hand, you have the Japanese RPG, following the precedents set down by Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy - they only barely qualify as "role-playing", because so many of them follow a predetermined story path. Perhaps this open-endedness is why Metroid has always been more popular in the West than it ever has in its homeland. While you'll see exceptions on both sides, it's pretty clear that American designers (and gamers) want full control over their character's destiny. And if that's not possible (and it often isn't), then it at least giving the illusion of control.

And see? Killer7 doesn't even grant that. I'm totally taking a shot in the dark, but maybe the typical Japanese person would pick up Killer7, and say "Hmmm. I cannot directly move my character. This is odd." Then shrug it off and enjoy the hell out of it - because maybe full control just isn't that important. Whereas, judging by the mass reaction, a typical American would pick it up and say "What? I can't move my character? This is BULLSHIT." On the opposite side of the coin, I've been told some Japanese gamers despise the game because it's too much like a first-person shooter - Halo sells systems here in America, but they're hideously unpopular over there. So maybe the game may offend sensibilities of both cultures, just on different levels. (In the end, I suppose it doesn't matter - the game sold poorly in both territories.)

So it's interesting that the culture clash between America and Japan is one of the primary themes of the game.

The plot of Killer7 is disjointed and weird - there's something about post-WWII politics in Japan and a child-kidnapping ring and some other nonsense about the sham that is American democracy. In the same way that Metal Gear Solid 2 came off a bit pretentious at the end, I find it a little bizarre that a Japanese game can deliver such straight-faced commentary on a political system not of its own - it's like Michael Bay making a movie on how the British monarchy is really controlled by a small group of Voodoo overlords who live in the Antarctic and have a secret plan to unleash the powers of some Lovecraftian demon through the use of the Crown Jewels. Still, you play games like Shin Megami Tensei or Final Fantasy Tactics or Xenogears, and you get the feeling that the Japanese aren't so fond of Christianity or any Western religion. In that same fashion, in playing Killer7, you kind of get the sense that the Japanese also aren't so much of a fan of democracy - the same democracy that Alex de Tocqueville declared as a "great success" back in the late 18th century, and the same democracy we Americans imposed on Japan right after we turned two of their cities into radioactive waste. Not being Japanese or being familiar with the less public elements of their culture, I couldn't tell you. Or it could be that the Japanese share the same distrust of government and authority figures that we do.

The mish-mash of both Western and Eastern ideals pervades the entire game. Harman Smith, dressed as a Catholic (or Episcopalian, take your choice) priest, is representative of the traditional Good. He contrasts to Kun Lan, whose red eyes immediately suggest that of Satan, and therefore Evil. Yet they routinely share insights over a friendly game of chess, suggesting a bizarre yin/yang relationship. Almost all of the characters - save Kaede - are American (Mask de Smith is Mexican, but that's close enough.) Yet Garcian addresses Harman in the same way that a samurai addresses his daimyo. Influences from both American and Japanese gangster movies are abound. Big kanji painted in blood splatter across the screen, all unsubtitled too. Most of the transition scene text is displayed in both English (at the top) and Japanese (at the bottom.)

So there's the clash between American and Japanese culture. There's also the clash of a schizopheric versus himself, the clash of a hero out for justice, and of course, the classic clash between Good and Evil. Practically every type of literary conflict is accounted for in Killer7, which I think should say a lot for its value as a storytelling device.

Killer7

Like most mindfucks, Killer7 is only partially cohesive. Whether this counts as sloppy storytelling is up for debate, but you definitely get the impression that quite a lot was left on the cutting room floor. Dan and Mask de Smith are given some semblance of background, but nearly everyone else is glossed over. Most of the cutscenes are done using the in-game engine, except for a few fully animated ones scattered throughout the game. And what's more, two completely different animation studios were used for them - the videos in the "Sunset" chapter have empty-eyed characters, whose heads bob unnaturally due to the odd computer animation, while the cutscenes in "Alter Ego" have a more traditional Cowboy Bebop-style anime look. And the attempts to reconcile the multitude of conflicts never really quite piece together.

But there's just all kinds of craziness throughout the game, and the proverbial devil is in the details. The subtitles float in place hauntingly. The blood of fallen enemies unfurls like red ribbon. Clever parodies of popular catchphrases ("Got Blood?", "All you need is blood") appear whenever you kill some one. The status screen has a running stream of C-like program code running in the corner. Crazy touches like this are all throughout the game.

Admittedly, it will take awhile to warm up to Killer7. I was unimpressed with it when I saw it at E3, being mostly convinced it was a half-ass Resident Evil 4 ripoff with pretentious graphics. Fast forward two months - after my first fifteen minutes with it, I was relatively sure I had wasted $50. But once you settle in the groove - which should happen around the third chapter, when the craziness really ramps up - Killer7 will start to feel natural. It's the kind of game that will keep you up all night, as your brain attempts to unscramble the mad labrynth that Capcom and Suda 51 has created. It's also the kind of game that will stick with you long after you've beaten it. I can't really think of a greater compliment than that.

Killer7 was released in July of 2005, around the same time as the infamous "Hot Coffee" issue in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which angered politicians with its hidden sex scenes. Retarded ambulance chaser Jack Thompsons spearheaded part of the crusaders to protect the nation's youth from pornography, and not long after the ESRB changed the rating of GTA:SA from "M" to "AO", good ol' Jack went after Killer7. Why? Not for the absurd amounts of violence, but for the sex scene. Which he didn't actually see - he just read some review on IGN that made note of it, and make more demands to the ESRB to re-rate it. Never mind how tame it is: