In the annals of vaporware, none was more frustrating to Nintendo fans than Killer 7. This is a game that was announced in advance of E3. I mean E3 2001. It was supposedly going to be a tour de force for the Gamecube, making everyone with any aspirations of being a serious gamer want to play it, and a killer app for Nintendo’s first disc-based console. However, all that was shown for five straight E3s was some highly stylized video, and I began to think that Duke Nukem Forever would come out on the Phantom before Killer 7 saw the light of day. Capcom sure showed me, finally releasing the game about a month ago. Was it really worth the delay?
First off, let me say that I can’t fathom, for the life of me, what took Capcom so long. Did they literally throw out several different game play engines? Was finding the time to renege on their system-exclusive promise (it came out on the same day for the Playstation 2) really that arduous for the company? Seriously, we were one announcement that the game would “make gamers its bitches” before we officially activated the Daikatana Scenario. As is, given how long this game was promised and how innovative it was supposed to be, I think we can safely say that Killer 7 has set itself up for the comparisons.
The game takes place in an alternate present, in which world peace came about in the late 1990s and things are looking like a utopian paradise. However, this is just begging for a would-be conqueror to attempt to rule the world, especially as they’ve completely disarmed every army in the world and even shut down all the peaceful nuclear reactors for good measure. This threat comes from the terrorist group, the Heaven Smile, led by a man with supernatural powers by the name of Kun Lan. The only hope to stop Kun Lan is his rival and frequent chess opponent, assassin Harman Smith.
The game’s twist, well hyped by Capcom, perhaps ill advisedly, is that Harman has multiple personalities – seven of them, and these seven personalities perform the dirty work under the name Killer 7. Harman apparently contains the mystic power to actually shift shape into each of these personalities, shifting from a frail man bound in a wheelchair into a different assassin with their own psychoses. It actually ruins the effect of the game right off knowing Harman’s secret, as it doesn’t seem at all strange that one of the Smith assassins is switched with another.
To be fair, though, the game does still manage to present many intriguing questions throughout the game. What’s the reason that Harman, who is regularly haunted by previous hits, continues his missions? Does he really have mystic powers to literally shift shape as his personalities emerge? Is this game just the delusions of a man driven mad by his profession? The only possibility eliminated is that there really are seven others who work under Harman. Mulling over these questions is actually much more interesting than the plot itself, which is fairly boilerplate film noir plot.
This isn’t to say that the plot is terrible. The interactions of the Smiths in the dark world they inhabit, while predictable, are highly entertaining. I love watching the various members of Killer 7 interact with others, as they find the levels of duplicity in the worlds’ governments, as they try to finally stop Kun Lan once and for all. While this complex of individuals isn’t at all complex, that doesn’t make them any less entertaining. I’m particularly fond of watching Garcian Smith (the level, dispassionate second-in-command), Dan Smith (the brutal and sinister enforcer), and Coyote Smith (the loose cannon thief) interact with the world. Even flat characters can be entertaining if they’re written well.
Of course, the game’s primary focus isn’t its treatment of madness and professional hitmen. Its focus is using those professional hitmen to take out madmen cultists. This is where the game’s huge flaws lie, to be honest. The game is basically a rail shooter, where you just hold down A and only occasionally press a direction to advance around the level. Granted, you get the chance to turn back when you want/need to, but for the most part you just keep going in a straight line everywhere. The only shift is when you go to attack, when you’ll switch to a first person view to aim at the oncoming cultists and lay into them.
Of course, the biggest problem is that you can’t dodge at all. This is especially problematic as the Heaven Smile members have a real bad habit of exploding on you when they get a hold of you. Now, each character does have a counter maneuver they can use, but you have to unlock it and its not very reliable even once you do. I don’t know how many times I yelled “Just step to the left! Just one step, and the combustible cultist won’t get you!” This was especially maddening when I used Kaede, the personality with the least amount of health (you start seeing the enemies that can take her out in one hit on the second level). Being forced on rails to the point that you can’t even get out of the way of obvious danger annoys me to no end. Rail shooters almost never work for me (I can think of two, all-time, that I enjoyed), especially when it takes multiple shots to deflect potential damage at nearly all times and you have to take time to reload your weapons.
One final annoyance with fighting is that the enemy is completely invisible until you press a button to scan the area. All this does is waste about a second of time, and is completely useless at hiding your enemies as one button press will make you face the nearest one, whether or not it’s currently visible. I think Capcom threw it in just to increase the likelihood that you’ll give anyone watching the game a seizure from the screen blink that accompanies the scan that reveals Heaven Smile members. It really doesn’t have any point beyond to waste time, which is about the last thing this game needs to do – waste more of my time.
Beyond that, the game also forces you to do the same fetch quest silliness that plagued Capcom’s Resident Evil efforts. I hate having to go back and forth the same areas (with regenerating enemies – who left the back door open so more exploding cultists could get in?). It gives a brand-new meaning to the term “the banality of evil.” After all, what could be more dull than forcing the hero (or antiheroes in this instance) to run down the same drab hallways repeatedly? After seeing the same freaking rooms for the tenth time, I was pondering whether or not the Heaven Smile could use a personality or seven to join up. Maybe that way, I’d at least get to use the Infinite Enemy Backdoor (patent pending).
Going back to the earlier question about what took so freaking long, I think it was the graphics (given how simplistic and boring the gameplay is, it certainly wasn’t that). I was excited for this game for a long time because cel shading seemed, to me, to fit a stylized noir graphics look better than any other concept. Indeed, the graphics live up to their promise, giving proper nuance and atmosphere to each character and area in the game. It’s really stunning, as this looks to be the best noir story ever depicted, and everyone looks properly dangerous and fascinating. They even remember to do the one little touch so few games bother with – the characters actually wear different outfits in each level. In some cases, it’s as subtle as a different tie. And then you have more obvious examples, like how Mexican wrestler Mask de Smith wears a different mask in each level. This game is, in fact, everything that it was promised to be graphically.
However, that isn’t to say that Capcom wouldn’t take the chance to totally ruin it. After you clear the first level, you are “treated” to a recap of the game’s backstory, in case you were too lazy to read the freaking manual. I don’t have any problem with doing this in general. However, Capcom decided on the incredibly stupid decision to have it play as a standard anime, instead of the cel shading present in the rest of the game. Seriously, I can’t fathom for the life of me why they decided on this. The graphical style was working so well. If Capcom was worried about it taking up too much space, they should have just pre-rendered the scene and stored it as the same kind of file. It would have taken up just as much space but looked like it actually fit the game.
The game’s voice acting does require some improvement, though. During the story sequences, you will hear varying levels of voice acting. Some personalities, like Garcian and Coyote, have great voices. Others, like Kaede and Con, have voices that don’t feel right. And I swear, Mask de Smith sounds like he’s still about to hit puberty. The “mixed bag” problem of video game voice acting is still obvious, possibly exacerbated by the Screen Actors Guild’s ongoing strike against video game voice acting. However, the real problem is that during the main action of the levels, what speech you hear (usually from the spirits of those killed by the Killer 7 prior to the game – possibly another sign of Harman’s madness) is vague mumbling sounds, similar to the annoyances found in Custom Robo’s story scenes. I really wish they had at least sprung for short clips, or just not bothered with sound at all during these parts.
I will give the game credit, though, in that it mostly avoids music throughout the game. While there are some parts where appropriately dramatic music plays, the game is mostly silent beyond the creepy signature laugh of the Heaven Smile, your weapon, and your killer’s quip for when they get a critical hit against a foe. For this game, it really adds to the ambience, as music throughout the game would mostly serve to be distracting. Capcom, mercifully, does understand that sometimes silence is the best sound to make. However, as you can see by the mumbling in many parts of the story, they haven't completely learned this lesson.
Finally, I really should discuss the ESRB rating, especially since this game is Jack Thompson’s next target. To be honest, I’ve seen worse at the nearest subway station, and heard worse in high school. You do shoot at humanoid creatures, but they’re covered with enough crusty material that you wouldn’t mistake them for human. They do let out some blood when taken out, but if anything they’re actually a little easy on the blood in the game; I personally was expecting throwing knives, grenade launchers, and a revolver/hand cannon to produce much more blood (and flying body parts) than actually come out. Blood does get splashed around, but it isn’t an abattoir. Moreover, the weapons act totally unrealistically (yeah, I’d like to see someone fire off two grenade launchers like that without flinching) and the aiming isn’t totally precise (you’ll always hit, but sometimes the difference between a critical and not is a pixel), so nobody is going to use this as practice for anything beyond learning how not to design a control interface. Also, to be fair, there is a ton of cursing. I mean a ton. Whereas I was actually a bit surprised at how little blood and gore the game had, I was also shocked at how much cursing the game contains. I’ll grant you, this is partly because Coyote loudly drops an f-bomb every time he gets a critical, but you’ll hear foul language throughout the game. It’s nothing incredibly offensive, but the sheer volume was a bit overwhelming. This game is meant for people who can handle a little blood, a lot of foul language, and who can properly understand to not kill people for being suspected Heaven Smile. In other words, it’s safe in nearly all instances for people 17 and older, just like the rating says. Capcom can’t keep parents from buying lousy games for their kids.
Really, though, there isn’t too much in this to keep a gamer interested. Yeah, the art direction is incredible. While the story isn’t particularly mind-blowing, it is serviceable and entertaining. But the control scheme is so awful and frustrating, clearing the game is more a matter of patience with poor layout than any skill or talent. This manages to be one of those games that are more entertaining to watch than to play. If they ever made the cel shaded Killer 7 movie, I’d be all over that like THQ on a lousy licensed game. However, given how long this has been in development, how much was promised, and how incredibly mediocre this game actually turned out to be, this game gets put in the Daikatana Hall of Fame, to be remembered as a game that made us wait too long for too little.
