questionable game design choices here and there but it has a killer mood (heh) and the storyline is captivating
This review contains spoilers
Join me as I attempt to play through every Sudaverse game. Obviously, I started at the beginning of Kill the Past with The Silver Case. I didn't enjoy it at first, but I was enthralled in the unique presentation and building mystery. The most interesting part to me were the Shelter Kids, human experiments designed to kill, and kill they did. Kamui being these Shelter Kids was a surprising twist, and the ending with you killing Suda51 himself was both intense and humorously self-referencial. It was a slog to play at times, with most of the gameplay being repeating the same motions over and over again at a snail's pace. The Placebo chapters were the worst of this. While they eventually became interesting, it still had the overlay of this humdrum apartment. A nice start to what is certainly going to be a wild ride, and a decent visual novel in its own right.
"Fairytales are crimes. The unrealistic fantasy that happens in real life is a crime."
That's the first line I can think of when asked to explain what this game has to say as an exposition on crime in relation to human nature, and ultimately, figuring out what it all meant and the answer being so simple despite all the complicated and confusing plots and backgrounds is what has made it stick so much on my mind.
It's obtuse as hell in terms of story and game design, Suda's style has been there since day one no doubt about it, and that includes (to the dismay of some) tedious/baffling gameplay sections that hate the player with a passion and a disregard for coherent storytelling in favor of raw emotion or even explaining what is going on in a way that makes sense. I have like, zero experience engaging with a visual novel seriously and that's probably why it took me a whole year to finish, a genre so unappealing to me and these Suda-isms being presented in such a sluggish and hard to connect with way would've definitely made me drop this during a moment of weakness. But I'm glad i stuck with it until the end! Despite its failings there rly is no better introduction to the KTP series than this.
Took me a while but the more I played the more hooked I was, the more I felt like I understood its themes and characters but that was only the case once i got the full picture, which was hard as hell considering how much you need to go over them and how every character is not even allowed to be completely unlikeable. My interest began small but just kept growing, connecting chapters with their respective new order/joy division songs, learning more about the behind the scenes aspects of the game and Suda's mindset during it, and just falling in love with its style of writing and the unreal style of presenting the intended feeling before you can even begin to rationalize it. The socio-political commentary is still as poignant as it was in 1999 in regards to the corruption of anything this society has been built on and works with, and the way the internet has mixed itself with the despair and hope of trying to find sense through the whole thing and finding something real even against the knowledge that nothing really is and it's working against you, very reminiscent of metal gear solid 2 in that way even if it came after. But it was the ending that really solidified it for me because I've never felt what Kill The Past really meant until everything fell into place here, and once they've been given the agency to decide their outcome, their answers are simple as living with this pain, not giving a shit about the fate entrusted to them and seizing that fucking light before it's out.
It is what it always intended to be: a reflection on crime and human nature that can't be given an answer beyond what we decide to do with it ourselves, and that impression just hasn't left my mind and will probably grow more and more as the series goes along, and ain't that just the best.
That's the first line I can think of when asked to explain what this game has to say as an exposition on crime in relation to human nature, and ultimately, figuring out what it all meant and the answer being so simple despite all the complicated and confusing plots and backgrounds is what has made it stick so much on my mind.
It's obtuse as hell in terms of story and game design, Suda's style has been there since day one no doubt about it, and that includes (to the dismay of some) tedious/baffling gameplay sections that hate the player with a passion and a disregard for coherent storytelling in favor of raw emotion or even explaining what is going on in a way that makes sense. I have like, zero experience engaging with a visual novel seriously and that's probably why it took me a whole year to finish, a genre so unappealing to me and these Suda-isms being presented in such a sluggish and hard to connect with way would've definitely made me drop this during a moment of weakness. But I'm glad i stuck with it until the end! Despite its failings there rly is no better introduction to the KTP series than this.
Took me a while but the more I played the more hooked I was, the more I felt like I understood its themes and characters but that was only the case once i got the full picture, which was hard as hell considering how much you need to go over them and how every character is not even allowed to be completely unlikeable. My interest began small but just kept growing, connecting chapters with their respective new order/joy division songs, learning more about the behind the scenes aspects of the game and Suda's mindset during it, and just falling in love with its style of writing and the unreal style of presenting the intended feeling before you can even begin to rationalize it. The socio-political commentary is still as poignant as it was in 1999 in regards to the corruption of anything this society has been built on and works with, and the way the internet has mixed itself with the despair and hope of trying to find sense through the whole thing and finding something real even against the knowledge that nothing really is and it's working against you, very reminiscent of metal gear solid 2 in that way even if it came after. But it was the ending that really solidified it for me because I've never felt what Kill The Past really meant until everything fell into place here, and once they've been given the agency to decide their outcome, their answers are simple as living with this pain, not giving a shit about the fate entrusted to them and seizing that fucking light before it's out.
It is what it always intended to be: a reflection on crime and human nature that can't be given an answer beyond what we decide to do with it ourselves, and that impression just hasn't left my mind and will probably grow more and more as the series goes along, and ain't that just the best.
kino.... in every sense of the word..
yeah "puzzle" ""game""
Like everybody else’s review, this is gonna be a wall of text
With every Suda game I play, I question more and more why I continue playing them. Before playing TSC, I had played Killer7, the three main No More Heroes games, and Killer is Dead with it being the only game I came out of with a fully positive feeling. I find Suda’s writing style to be obtuse, esoteric, and obnoxious for the sake of being obnoxious. I don’t feel like he writes compelling characters as most just have a single gimmick they stick to for the entire story or their characterization feels like a mishmash of other characters from media he likes (he’s stated he’s inspired by everything he likes). I feel the worlds he writes tend to not live up to their potential, feeling like he either wasn’t able to finish all the background writing or he thought he did but there’s a lot missing. His newer works also feel masturbatory, he never stops referencing his old works and how freaking awesome! they are, which is funny to me because I think almost all of them aren’t very good
I was really hesitant to play The Silver Case. My friend @Kungfugloves spent weeks shouting about how insane and amazing it is, how “it doesn’t feel like a human wrote it” and how everything feels super unique and interesting. The thing is I hate visual novels. I do not find them engaging, I put gameplay and story on an equal pedestal and visual novels tend to be stripped of the former. As stated, I also do not like Suda’s writing and this is nothing but that. He tried to ease me in by saying one of the campaigns was written by someone else so I’d at least like that one. He bought it for me despite me telling him not to and so I bit the bullet and tried my hardest to go into it with an open mind
I remember watching my friend play this a few months prior to my playthrough and genuinely getting a headache from the UI and backgrounds. I didn't have as much of an issue with it this time around but I do think they're waaaay too busy and a lot of them seem like they're trying to be cryptic and weird for the sake of it. I also found the music to be largely uninteresting, very little of it being downright bad but there isn't a single song that ever stuck out to me and I couldn't even hum a single tune from the game if you stuck a gun to my head
But how did I feel by the end? I think “underwhelmed and frustrated” is probably the best descriptor. The story wasn’t nearly as complex or interesting as I was led to believe. I did have the context that the original release was 1999, but at the same time none of the concepts or story beats felt original to that time period. I’d definitely seen police procedurals of a similar nature as a child with my grandparents that followed a lot of the same beats. Mental clones had been done before in comics and manga well before this. Manic obsessions with serial killers had been a phenomenon for ages.
This game also plays like complete and utter shit. I go into further detail about it in Placebo later in this review but I cannot understate how little I enjoyed the simple act of playing this game. The little exploration you do isn't interesting and takes ages. The puzzles aren't interesting, fun, or engaging, searching every nook and cranny for what you can interact with is actively shit. I cannot and straight up refuse to understand anyone who says that playing this is a good time
The chapter I was most disappointed by was Parade, which my friend described as being “actually crazy, there’s explosions and kidnappings, it’s insane”. Those were present, sure, but the presentation of the game didn’t do the former any good and the latter felt like any other political kidnapping in any other media, topped off with Suda’s esoteric writing that I hate (I know the conclusion is very much easy to understand but the way it’s presented prior to the reveal really rubbed me the wrong way). Runner up goes to Spectrum which felt like an insane waste of time from beginning to end and Lunatics which doesn’t add anything except a miserable conclusion for the five fans of Moonlight Syndrome
I enjoyed Placebo more than Transmitter for the sole reason that the mundane life Tokio lived was more compelling to me than the police procedural of Transmitter. Seeing Tokio’s life descend and him slowly lose his mind as it becomes less clear what’s real and what isn’t was interesting and despite how much more fantastical parts of it were than Transmitter, the grounded tone felt less miserable than Transmitter. I did feel the gameplay was more frustrating though due to the constant back and forth of the three interactables in the room, not telling you which you should do first so you have to constantly trial and error which leads to reading the same lines over and over. I’m told this is a holdover from the original PS1 version but I feel they could have just cut out that spot in the room by the bed if they wanted to
The only other character I ended up liking by the end was Kusabi. I say this because he was easily my least favorite character for a lot of the game. Most of his dialogue early on felt like it was written around the profanity instead of the profanity being written in after, it felt like Suda just discovered the words “fuck”, “shit,” and “goddamn”. I do think he gets some nice development as the game goes on and he effectively becomes the protagonist due to how intertwined he is in everything, but I feel the way he’s more or less dropped at the very end (and how he’s used in the future games now that I’ve played them) is a major misstep
I understand TSC. I get what it’s trying to say. I don’t think it’s an interesting story, I don’t think anything it does is new, I feel it expects the player to never have even considered anything it says throughout its runtime which feels like an insult to the player’s intelligence. I do think the world of the 24 wards is really interesting and had me intrigued the whole time. This game’s world seems downright miserable to live in and the things they hint toward really had me itching for more, but unfortunately instead of any interesting developments I spent the final chapter going up and down ten buildings for some lore that easily could have been consolidated to a drastic degree. Maybe if I liked visual novels more I might have given this a higher score but I don't think that's the case
Most of the criticism I’m writing comes from during and after the playthrough but now that I’ve gone through Flower, Sun, and Rain (terrible) and MUCH MORE IMPORTANTLY The 25th Ward (amazing), this game’s flaws mean much more to me because I can see what was possible in this world that has been created and how the establishing framework placed down in this game could have been so much better. I do think it’s interesting how prescient the writing is when it comes to the way government corruption and terrorism are presented, but I don’t think this game is very good in any way honestly
At least it got me to play The 25th Ward
With every Suda game I play, I question more and more why I continue playing them. Before playing TSC, I had played Killer7, the three main No More Heroes games, and Killer is Dead with it being the only game I came out of with a fully positive feeling. I find Suda’s writing style to be obtuse, esoteric, and obnoxious for the sake of being obnoxious. I don’t feel like he writes compelling characters as most just have a single gimmick they stick to for the entire story or their characterization feels like a mishmash of other characters from media he likes (he’s stated he’s inspired by everything he likes). I feel the worlds he writes tend to not live up to their potential, feeling like he either wasn’t able to finish all the background writing or he thought he did but there’s a lot missing. His newer works also feel masturbatory, he never stops referencing his old works and how freaking awesome! they are, which is funny to me because I think almost all of them aren’t very good
I was really hesitant to play The Silver Case. My friend @Kungfugloves spent weeks shouting about how insane and amazing it is, how “it doesn’t feel like a human wrote it” and how everything feels super unique and interesting. The thing is I hate visual novels. I do not find them engaging, I put gameplay and story on an equal pedestal and visual novels tend to be stripped of the former. As stated, I also do not like Suda’s writing and this is nothing but that. He tried to ease me in by saying one of the campaigns was written by someone else so I’d at least like that one. He bought it for me despite me telling him not to and so I bit the bullet and tried my hardest to go into it with an open mind
I remember watching my friend play this a few months prior to my playthrough and genuinely getting a headache from the UI and backgrounds. I didn't have as much of an issue with it this time around but I do think they're waaaay too busy and a lot of them seem like they're trying to be cryptic and weird for the sake of it. I also found the music to be largely uninteresting, very little of it being downright bad but there isn't a single song that ever stuck out to me and I couldn't even hum a single tune from the game if you stuck a gun to my head
But how did I feel by the end? I think “underwhelmed and frustrated” is probably the best descriptor. The story wasn’t nearly as complex or interesting as I was led to believe. I did have the context that the original release was 1999, but at the same time none of the concepts or story beats felt original to that time period. I’d definitely seen police procedurals of a similar nature as a child with my grandparents that followed a lot of the same beats. Mental clones had been done before in comics and manga well before this. Manic obsessions with serial killers had been a phenomenon for ages.
This game also plays like complete and utter shit. I go into further detail about it in Placebo later in this review but I cannot understate how little I enjoyed the simple act of playing this game. The little exploration you do isn't interesting and takes ages. The puzzles aren't interesting, fun, or engaging, searching every nook and cranny for what you can interact with is actively shit. I cannot and straight up refuse to understand anyone who says that playing this is a good time
The chapter I was most disappointed by was Parade, which my friend described as being “actually crazy, there’s explosions and kidnappings, it’s insane”. Those were present, sure, but the presentation of the game didn’t do the former any good and the latter felt like any other political kidnapping in any other media, topped off with Suda’s esoteric writing that I hate (I know the conclusion is very much easy to understand but the way it’s presented prior to the reveal really rubbed me the wrong way). Runner up goes to Spectrum which felt like an insane waste of time from beginning to end and Lunatics which doesn’t add anything except a miserable conclusion for the five fans of Moonlight Syndrome
I enjoyed Placebo more than Transmitter for the sole reason that the mundane life Tokio lived was more compelling to me than the police procedural of Transmitter. Seeing Tokio’s life descend and him slowly lose his mind as it becomes less clear what’s real and what isn’t was interesting and despite how much more fantastical parts of it were than Transmitter, the grounded tone felt less miserable than Transmitter. I did feel the gameplay was more frustrating though due to the constant back and forth of the three interactables in the room, not telling you which you should do first so you have to constantly trial and error which leads to reading the same lines over and over. I’m told this is a holdover from the original PS1 version but I feel they could have just cut out that spot in the room by the bed if they wanted to
The only other character I ended up liking by the end was Kusabi. I say this because he was easily my least favorite character for a lot of the game. Most of his dialogue early on felt like it was written around the profanity instead of the profanity being written in after, it felt like Suda just discovered the words “fuck”, “shit,” and “goddamn”. I do think he gets some nice development as the game goes on and he effectively becomes the protagonist due to how intertwined he is in everything, but I feel the way he’s more or less dropped at the very end (and how he’s used in the future games now that I’ve played them) is a major misstep
I understand TSC. I get what it’s trying to say. I don’t think it’s an interesting story, I don’t think anything it does is new, I feel it expects the player to never have even considered anything it says throughout its runtime which feels like an insult to the player’s intelligence. I do think the world of the 24 wards is really interesting and had me intrigued the whole time. This game’s world seems downright miserable to live in and the things they hint toward really had me itching for more, but unfortunately instead of any interesting developments I spent the final chapter going up and down ten buildings for some lore that easily could have been consolidated to a drastic degree. Maybe if I liked visual novels more I might have given this a higher score but I don't think that's the case
Most of the criticism I’m writing comes from during and after the playthrough but now that I’ve gone through Flower, Sun, and Rain (terrible) and MUCH MORE IMPORTANTLY The 25th Ward (amazing), this game’s flaws mean much more to me because I can see what was possible in this world that has been created and how the establishing framework placed down in this game could have been so much better. I do think it’s interesting how prescient the writing is when it comes to the way government corruption and terrorism are presented, but I don’t think this game is very good in any way honestly
At least it got me to play The 25th Ward
BELIEVE IN THE NET!
This review contains spoilers
This has to be one of the most unbearable games I’ve played. The greatest disconnect between public perception and personal experience I’ve ever had. The gameplay is so fucking tedious. Unskippable cutscenes and transitions during location changes that take very long. Wouldn’t be too bad normally, but they happen constantly.
The writing is just okay. Sometimes it’s interesting but other times they’ll beat you on the head with some plot points. Also the translation isn’t great at points. Very confusing writing. Comedy that doesn’t translate. It seems like a teenager’s first draft of police talk. Really dumb writing. Tetsu goes “I’m gonna shoot your fucking head off!” Hachisuka goes “So basically…I was on my period.”
Some music repeats too often. Some of tracks are pretty good.
The central mystery isn’t very strong. I think a big part of that is how nonchalantly the police act about it. They don’t seem to care, so I don’t either.
The parts I liked
Music is usually pretty good. Sometimes annoying and discordant. I like the art. Some of the mystery is intriguing. Some characters have depth. Some adult themes you don’t see shown so intensely: sexism.
The storyline about the little boy who dies from a weak heart and his friend doesn’t remember what happened. They both protect each other from bullying. His ghost is haunting the apartment complex.
The flashback real footage sequences. The haunted mansion was a standout.
Impromptu pop quiz to test you by the police squad.
The writing is just okay. Sometimes it’s interesting but other times they’ll beat you on the head with some plot points. Also the translation isn’t great at points. Very confusing writing. Comedy that doesn’t translate. It seems like a teenager’s first draft of police talk. Really dumb writing. Tetsu goes “I’m gonna shoot your fucking head off!” Hachisuka goes “So basically…I was on my period.”
Some music repeats too often. Some of tracks are pretty good.
The central mystery isn’t very strong. I think a big part of that is how nonchalantly the police act about it. They don’t seem to care, so I don’t either.
The parts I liked
Music is usually pretty good. Sometimes annoying and discordant. I like the art. Some of the mystery is intriguing. Some characters have depth. Some adult themes you don’t see shown so intensely: sexism.
The storyline about the little boy who dies from a weak heart and his friend doesn’t remember what happened. They both protect each other from bullying. His ghost is haunting the apartment complex.
The flashback real footage sequences. The haunted mansion was a standout.
Impromptu pop quiz to test you by the police squad.
suda51's writing is the best, vibes are at 100%, main cast of characters is great. ending was a bit not for me, but it's still amazing nonetheless.
i love sumio kodai wholeheartedly.
i love sumio kodai wholeheartedly.
This game basically does what Killer7 does but better written
im...im...im... a suda fan and i need my diaper
#incel #blackpill #doomer #depression #suicide #firstworldproblems #bullying #cyberbullying #anxiety #socialanxiety #tfl #foreveralone #loner #redpill #bluepill #manosphere #omegle #onlinedating #tinder #bumble #onlyfans #pua #hikikomori #neet #looksmaxxing #gymmaxxing #gymcel #ricecel #currycel #chad #facerating #touchgrass #jbw #lgbtqi #gay #lesbian #transgender #christian #muslim #christianity #islam #niceguy #supremegentleman #inkwell #mgtow #feminism #monkmode #nofap #semenretention #fds #daygame #nightgame #hypergamy #cuck #alpha #beta #mogged #betabux #golddigger #realnigga #getalife #stopreading #satire
#incel #blackpill #doomer #depression #suicide #firstworldproblems #bullying #cyberbullying #anxiety #socialanxiety #tfl #foreveralone #loner #redpill #bluepill #manosphere #omegle #onlinedating #tinder #bumble #onlyfans #pua #hikikomori #neet #looksmaxxing #gymmaxxing #gymcel #ricecel #currycel #chad #facerating #touchgrass #jbw #lgbtqi #gay #lesbian #transgender #christian #muslim #christianity #islam #niceguy #supremegentleman #inkwell #mgtow #feminism #monkmode #nofap #semenretention #fds #daygame #nightgame #hypergamy #cuck #alpha #beta #mogged #betabux #golddigger #realnigga #getalife #stopreading #satire