Kill the Past

Introduction

I’m a man who enjoys the auteur vision in video games. Stream-of-consciousness games can really show you a person’s personality and it makes a game stand out in a pool of games made by a committee. Suda51 is one of those auteur game creators, and perhaps the most auteur game creator. Besides choosing his public persona name after a wifi password, he’s made games under large publishers that make no sense in either gameplay or in plot. To that point, the Kill the Past Games are a series by Suda51 that people are in debate about which games are actually in the series. I wanted to get into these games to see what the fuck that guy is on. The most agreed-upon list of games includes The Silver Case, Flower Sun and the Rain,  Killer 7, The 25th Ward, No More Heroes 1, 2, Travis Strikes Again, and No More Heroes III. The games do not generally carry over characters except for direct sequels, are rarely on the same console, and a few of them released in the U.S. just in the past five years despite being created in the nineties. Somehow, I managed to get my hands on all those games and play every one, except The 25th Ward. To talk about them all and the series as a whole, I’ve decided to do a lightning round. Each game is given one or two paragraphs and a review score. 

The Silver Case - Steam and Switch. Originally on Playstation 1

The Silver Case is, at its core, about a murder mystery. Unfortunately, it’s also about tons of other shit. The central plot follows a serial killer’s escape and killing spree; which is interesting and fun. You come in pretty late in the plot so you get to piece together his past as well his current whereabouts. I enjoy a good mystery, I enjoyed those moments of The Silver Case. However, there’s a fuck ton of time that just consists of side characters discussing the world but none of it is interesting. 

The Silver Case plays like a visual novel that takes 14 hours to complete and contains a lot of talking about nothing for hours and hours. There’s tons of world-building and philosophical commentary on the future, but man do I not care. Now, it is not exclusively a visual novel. There is some crime scene investigation gameplay but it's hardly interesting to play, nor are the scenes interesting to explore. Overall, it’s just not a game I would recommend, and do not have too much to say.

2/5 - Ugh

Flower, Sun and the Rain - Nintendo DS. Originally on Playstation 2 as a Japan-exclusive

You play as Sumio Mondo, a man whose official title is “searcher,” and is called into a tropical resort to investigate why a plane keeps blowing up. When the plane blows up he wakes in his bed, signifying there’s some kind of groundhog day thing going. It sounds like an interesting setup for what would become a fun plot. It’s not. There are a lot of twists and turns that I found very confusing, and besides Mondo himself, most of the characters aren’t interesting. Most of them spend the game yelling at you for just kind of sucking at your job. There’s a long time between the start of the game and when you actually get to start working on the central mystery, and side characters consistently berate you for not doing the main mystery. The plot confuses me a great deal, but the mystery game’s gameplay does not. 

It plays like how you think a detective game would. You walk around, find items, solve puzzles, etc. One problem is that the puzzles’ solutions are almost always in a brochure that was handed to you at the game’s start. 99% of the puzzles have you input a code, which is from the brochure. Every puzzle also has an element where you have to connect a cable to begin. There is no trick to it, just find the colored plug and plug it in. Despite the setup, there’s not really a lot of work going into the puzzles, just flip to the page talking about what you’re doing and enter away. Later in the game, the overworld expands to an insane degree and it can become very daunting to walk across the map for 20 minutes doing nothing really interesting. It’s been described as an acquired taste but after beating it I can’t say I ever got into it.

                                                           1 / 5 Oh this shit sucks

Killer 7 - Steam. Originally on Gamecube and Playstation 2 

I honest to God could not tell you what Killer 7 is about. The plot is about a group of eight assassins completing missions with an overarching narrative I was never quite clear on. Nevertheless, the single missions are interesting and fun to play through. Many chapters have anime cutscenes, but most have a different art style from the rest which gives each chapter a distinct feel. One chapter has you fighting comic characters come to life, another fighting a fun dude with an afro. There’s also your assistant who is a ghost butler in a gimp suit who comes down to you on a bungee cord. It is balls to the wall nuts and eternally entertaining. Every once in a while I think about going back to it.

You may think this is where I say that the gameplay stops me from replaying but it doesn't really. The gameplay is an on-rails shooter with some puzzles you solve. Its puzzles are better than Flower, Sun, and the Rain, but are still pretty simple. One of the first puzzles you solve is to light candles on a candelabra in the right order but the candles are numbered in order already. So what the fuck is the point? There’s also a weird blood and special move mechanic whereby shooting an enemy (all of which are suicide bomber monsters by the way) in the right spot you can gain a blood vial. Use the blood vial to do a special move. The game is really unhelpful at telling you which characters of the eight can do what move and when using the move is appropriate. But, despite all the problems with Killer 7 I still loved how wild it was. It came in a time where game companies would pour money into weird shit that was released to mainstream attention, and I love it for being uninhibited by rules like make your gameplay good or have the plot make sense. But you know what? Killer 7 has so much style it doesn't need substance.

5/5 Oh this shit rules

The 25th Ward - Playstation 4 and Steam. Originally released on the iPhone app store

I didn’t play The 25th ward. It’s another visual novel that takes 14 hours to complete. Suda51’s gameplay is usually interesting but if there’s no gameplay to speak of then fuck off.

No More Heroes - Switch. Originally on Wii

After being told that if he kills the world’s best assassins he can sleep with an attractive woman, Travis Touchdown gets a lightsaber he bought in an eBay auction and gets to killin’. That’s the plot. No More Heroes is a game that doesn’t take its plot seriously, unlike a lot of the previous games, and that’s what gives it the edge. It is genuinely funny and I would not hesitate to play the HD update on Switch. 

If it weren't for the gameplay that is. No More Heroes is a hack n’ slash that feels surprisingly satisfying. Mashing A with the final blow being a swing from a Wiimote feels good and somehow never gets old. You go through the ranking of the bosses and a lot of them are weird and pretty memorable in mechanics and presentation. Fighting random goons and bosses is super fun and where the game shines. However, to access those arenas you need to gain enough money in the overworld by doing minigame jobs. Filling up gas, mowing the lawn, picking up coconuts, etc. They’re fine, it’s just you have to do a lot of them and you’ll often have to travel across the map just to start them. If you fail a mission or want to do a job again you have to drive back to a place where a job listing is then drive back to where the job is. Besides that, there are not a lot of interesting things to do in the overworld and while driving the frame rate chugs pretty heavily on Wii. I found the motion controls really fun though. 

4/5  - I enjoyed it

No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle - Switch. Originally on Wii

Second verse same as the first but with a few key differences. The job minigames are all 8-bit and optional. This makes them infinitely more fun somehow. Additionally, there’s no overworld so the game runs better and you miss the annoying travel times. For some fucking reason every great game composer worked on this game and the soundtrack is killer. The chief No More Heroes theme goes hard and I listen to it every so often. The biggest downside is that the game wasn’t really directed by Suda51. So, the writing and wacky ideas are a lot less interesting in this game and, if we’re being honest, wacky bits are probably why you showed up to this. 

4/5 - I enjoyed it

No More Heroes: Travis Strikes Again - Switch, Steam, and Playstation 4

It’s a top-down hack n’ slash. The premise is that Travis gets sucked into a game console and has to go through six haunted games but they all play the same. Not much to say really. It feels like an indie game the way it's designed. It does show Suda51 going back to some core game design ideas after fucking around with nonsense in between games in the series, but you’ve played better top-down beat 'em ups/hack n’ slashes. The plot is also really self-indulgent. You may have asked yourself what ties any of these games that don’t share characters, are on different systems, and play totally different, together? Travis Strikes Again is why. This game brings everything together in a really odd way through visual novel cutscenes. I wasn’t really sure why it's doing it but hey it does. Those elements don’t add anything. Nothing about Travis Strikes Again is too interesting, but it isn’t bad.

3/5 - eh

No More Heroes III - Switch and Playstation 4

Travis Touchdown is back to do the same things he did in the first two main games! Get excited! No More Heroes III’s biggest problem is just that it's more No More Heroes and the novelty of a wacky game that breaks the fourth wall might be over by the technically fourth game. They also brought the overworld back and it is just as empty and ugly as it was in the first game. On the plus side of things, the game’s writing and boss fights are just as fucking insane as it was in the first game if not more so. One boss is just a musical chairs game, which I thoroughly enjoyed. There’s a Daemon X Machina cameo in there. You remember Daemon X Machina, right? That game we all played and liked? The general hack n’ slash gameplay, which at this point needed some refining, has been touched up and is genuinely really fun with new enemy types. Combat is probably at a series high in this game. You get a fun dive kick that I used all the fucking time and it never stopped being amusing. To the opening point though, I also think that by this point, your tolerance for Suda51 nonsense may be at a limit. In between every chapter, Travis and a friend record a podcast talking about Miike films and I'm not sure why. I’d love to know what was going on in the dev room at the time. In conclusion, it’s still good but has the problems of the original and by the fourth game, the “wow this game is weird you guys” effect may be gone. 

4/5 - I enjoyed it

Conclusion

It would be very difficult to recommend the Kill the Past franchise as a whole. The games are hard to find and get into. Unlike games that together form a concrete narrative like Metal Gear Solid, or even loosely like Legend of Zelda, the Kill the Past games don’t really have a connecting thread besides the basic idea of characters overcoming their past. (There’s also this weird thing where Killer 7 contradicts every other game because a country gets nuked into oblivion but it's still fine in later games so whatever). None of the gameplay really carries over except for the No More Heroes games so there’s no gameplay commonality like the 3D Mario or Final Fantasy games. For my money, you should play Killer 7 and the first No More Heroes. No More Heroes is the one I can recommend without a huge “this game’s not for everyone” but I think Killer 7 deserves a chance if you know what you’re getting into. I’d recommend Flower, Sun, and Rain if I wanted someone to complain with. As for which versions; I would recommend the PC port of Killer 7 and the Switch version of No More Heroes. If No More Heroes goes well the sequels are still pretty good.