I played Killer7 one time a lifetime ago on the PS2 when I was a wide-eyed 15-year-old.

This second playthrough was done with the remastered Steam version. Also had another 15 years and change to grow up and come at it with my weary and way more critical 31-year-old eyes.

While I only played it once to completion all those years ago, it was such a memorable and formative experience that so many scenes and lines of dialogue stuck with me to this day, which is funny because I think having those moments frozen in my mind has made seeing them again to be not as impactful. I guess that comes with any type of media that relies partly on shock value and being off-kilter, but I thought it would be different with this game, which I remember being the wildest thing.

Don't get me wrong, Killer7 is still pretty bizarre and absurd. It's much easier to imagine it first getting released on itch.io than on current and next-gen consoles if it came out today. From the mechanics to the aesthetic to the narrative, it's a mish-mash of genres and styles and themes that somehow cohere. It's got on-rails navigation, kinda clunky first-person precision aiming, a stark cel-shaded geometric look dripping with harsh and inky black shadows threatening to swallow everything in negative space, abrasive sound design, eerie atmosphere, a cast of straight-up psycho killers, and incredibly dense and manic storytelling.

But with age comes clarity, and I've had a better time comprehending the insanity this time around.

I've got a firmer grasp of its perspective on geopolitics and philosophy (it's extremely nihilistic bordering on juvenile) and how it tries to express some of that through its gameplay.

The uniquely distinct UI and the non-stop barrage of repeated one-liners every time you get a critical hit on an enemy are charming nostalgic blasts from that bygone era of non-homogeneity in design and unpolished feedback.

It's kinda gross with how it treats women, and from what I've seen and heard about Suda's later works regarding this issue, I guess it's not so surprising anymore. Yes, just about everybody in this game is kinda horrible and meets a grisly demise, but it's always sexualized with the female characters.

I do have to give it some props for being so direct about the cardboard artifice of corporations. However, I don't think it's particularly radical with its political commentary, since it does trot out tired observations about maintaining power balances, historical cycles, and the futility of the "powerless" to enact change under the powers-that-be. It's "punk" in the most individualistic sense. Its take on terrorism is completely out-of-touch with how extremist ideology actually manifests itself, devoid of any socio-economic context.

But the dialogue sure is sharp! Maybe a tad too edgy. And the vocal performances surprisingly hold up! Well, it helps to have most of it heavily filtered through a nightmarish distortion, but the lines that are delivered clearly still resonate, at least aesthetically.

Greg Eagles as Garcian Smith is all cool and professional with a hint of disdain that makes him human. The voice actors for Harman Smith and Kun Lan have a friendly familiarity of a thousand-year antagonistic bond, the former sounding like a deep gravel well and the latter bouncing off all that gravitas with impish mischief.

Oh and the laughs. The laughs of those Heaven Smiles. Shit is still the sinister ear-piercing sound that sends shivers down my spine.

Perhaps the only voice that sticks out like a sore thumb now is Cam Clarke as Andrei Ulmeyda. Yes, it has everything to do with that white guy famous for playing Liquid Snake voicing a black guy in this game with perverted Texan televangelist vibes. That combination might have sounded oddly compelling to my narrowly Americanized 15-year-old Filipino mind (and hey it's Liquid Snake!) that was mostly ignorant of the complexities of racism in America, but it just sounds wrong now. Doesn't help that Iwazaru, the guy in the gimpsuit who gives you tutorials and hints, says how much afros just "disgust" him, and it feels like it was supposed to be comedic. It's definitely a choice to have a black man be the charismatic cult figurehead and stand-in for corporate america then be voiced in an over-the-top manner by a white guy. Contrast that with the nuanced portrayal of Garcian Smith, the black main character of the game voiced superbly by a black man, it's another mark in the complicated history of Japanese-developed games made by Japanese developers obsessed with American pop culture and how they handle race.

Killer7 is a strange thing, and it's a strange thing to go back to. It's apparent how alienating it is, and there are arguments to be made through its framing with surveillance cameras, tv screens, loading transitions, shifting artstyles in the cutscenes, and even explicit lightgun/arcade elements, but it never goes all the way and breaks the fourth wall like, say, the Metal Gear Solid series. Trying to look at it from a top-down perspective can be a chore with how deliberately disjointed its structure is, and I don't even think there's all that much to take away from that task. It purports to be subversive, but all you do in this game is kill and "solve" the most rudimentary puzzles and ~level up~ largely uniform skills with a little regressive politics on the side. It's a whole lotta hyperviolence. The Smiths all explode in the same pixelated blood explosion that the Smiles do.

Maybe it's just playing the same joke that all games and stories and media like it have played, that trying to draw more meaning out of art that obfuscates its... meaninglessness will only make you look like a fool. I don't know if that's still funny, or I just don't get it.

I think I like it less now than I did all those years ago, but I still respect what it tries to accomplish, and I can't help but still be into its whole ~attitude~ because there's still that weird teenager inside 31-year-old me that's all about this shit.