Killer 7

Suda 51 is a polarizing figure in the game industry, and Killer 7 is easily his most polarizing game. Purely as a game, it fails in many respects. It is a simple on rails shooter with arcane adventure game style puzzles. Controls are cut down to an absolute minimum in that you hold a button and move forward or turn around and move backwards. Fighting requires pausing your movement and switching to first person for a tensely stationary shooting gallery.

But to judge it for how it doesn't play is missing the point.

There is a reason for the lack of freedom in Killer 7's stylishly flat-colored worlds. You are trapped in a claustrophobic series of hallways designed to unsettle you. And in between the hallways and the monsters you must solve arbitrary puzzles to escape this nightmare. If Resident Evil 4 redefined survival horror by liberating your controls and making you an action movie hero, Killer 7 plays devil's advocate by taking control away and locking you in a dark room.

Killer 7 gives a uniquely unsettling experience that is crafted in all aspects to creep you the fuck out. It isn't really survival horror in the classic terms of the genre, since you'll never run out of firepower, but don't let unlimited ammo give you a false sense of superiority. The lack of resource management does not make this game any less stomach-turning then the best stages in Silent Hill. Enemies start out invisible, with only a crazed laugh to warn you of their suicidal approach. When you switch to first person to shoot them your character is locked in place and you better hope you can shoot faster then they can walk (or run) at you. The game's save rooms, hosted by a gimp-suited man dispensing tutorials, offers respite from the deadly madness outside with its own S&M madness inside.

The story is largely incomprehensible, yet manages to plot out a world that is oddly consistent in its own fiction. Revolving around subjects like international terrorism and world diplomacy, it takes hot-button topics and filters them through distorted sideshow mirrors. You can try to make sense of it, but it might drive you crazy trying. Character dialogue further cements this disconnect between you and the game. At first listen it sounds like the way Zelda does dialogue, all gibberish inflections. However, listen closely enough and you notice bits that match the subtitles. In actuality the dialogue is fully voiced and then run through a filter, making it near incomprehensible, yet vaguely familiar.

Turn off the lights and turn up the sound: like your worst nightmares Killer 7 is reinforced by denying you input and movement. You are trapped on a conveyor belt and sent off into a mad world.

Dragon Quest I - Humble Beginnings

It's the birth of the console RPG. It's also frustrating and requires minimal strategy.

And yet at the same time there are some interesting things here that few modern RPGs do. The world is completely open. With luck and a lot of fleeing, you can get to the final dungeon at level 10 (defeating the final boss will be an impossibility though). Also important, and a mainstay of the series, the game rewards those who don't fear death. In keeping all the awesome swag and EXP picked up before death, losing half your gold is a worthwhile penalty. By transporting you back to the castle, death can even have its uses for a smart player wanting to get around the world quickly.

Still it is heavily dated. Battles consist entirely of the one hero and one enemy trading blows and occasionally casting magic at each other. Although death isn't much of a penalty, it is still a frustrating waste of time to start all the way back at the castle.

If you're still interested, I would suggest getting the Game Boy Color version, since it includes the far superior sequel and the numbers are tweaked so to require less grinding. Also, climbing stairs no longer requires opening the menu.

Shadow of the Colossus

In the opening cinematic of Shadow of the Colossus, the hero places a dead girl on an altar, asks to bring her back, and is told by a voice from the sky to kill all the colossi roaming the land.

The rest is entirely up to you to see it through.

In its simplicity and minimalism of design and play it feels like an 8-bit game. Your goal is killing 16 colossi, however, you are never forced. You hold your sword up to the sky and you can observe where to go. But you are free to detour as much as you like and explore.

Exploration is its own reward. Other games might cram their worlds with enemies and dangers every few meters. They'll put lots of little goals all around the world for you to discover and be rewarded. Mario's gold coins. GTA's packages. Banjo Kazooie's random useless shiny collectible number 12. Shadow of the Colossus gives you a big, empty space. No, a big, empty, beautiful space. It is less a game, and more an experience, something to spend time within on your own terms.

There are moments when this illusion is shattered. The HUD will start blinking with a warning blip (for that matter the HUD itself is distracting, but the flashing just makes it worse) and if "too much" time is spent in a battle, a detached voice dispatches advice. Rather extraneous things, feels like the work of executives or focus group testing and are not in the spirit of the rest of the game.

When I fought the first colossus, it was an exhilarating match of scale. I fumbled through the puzzle of getting to its head, and landed a stab. As if puncturing a high pressure valve blood streams out, and it all became rather horrifying. The camera swung around to its eyes as it struggled in pain to shake the hero off, and I saw the eyes of an innocent creature. The colossi will defend themselves, but they are not violent by nature.

Some colossi are very straight forward. You leap onto them and find new places to get higher up, a rock climber scaling an erupting volcano. Against others you have to observe the environment, and use it to your advantage; one fight involves a sequence of dominos. The worst battle requires steering a tediously slow waterlogged colossus. The best colossi are roller coasters, riding and flying for dear life as you make your way to its weak point.

As exhilarating as it all is, killing the colossi became something I began to dread. As each one falls, the hero gets stronger and stronger, but it's clear from his face that it's taking a toll on his body. The cost of reviving the girl is life, of not just the colossi, but the hero as well.

And so I took it slowly, no more then one colossus a day. Letting it all sink in. I took refuge in exploring the world. Finding awesome vistas over cliffs. Riding across expansive plains. Through canyons and dunes. Enough simulated natural beauty to take my mind off the colossi. But it can't last forever. Eventually I had seen all there was to see, and so it was time to get on with it.

When it's all over, the roles are suddenly reversed. I finally understood crushing inevitability just as the 16 colossi I felled. At several points during the ending, you suddenly gain control over the hero. You can wreck as much damage as you can and struggle all you like, but in the end, there is only one fate for the hero, and you are forced to accept it, kicking and screaming.

Persona 3

Years ago I would return home from school and spend the rest of my free time by my lonesome in front of a TV or monitor, playing games. Hacking dungeons. Fighting bosses. Saving worlds.

What a fucking waste.

It's not often that a game united in play, narrative and purpose has any kind of real message or lesson. However Persona 3 has an important message, one I wish a game would've told me years ago.

Persona 3 is telling you to get a life.

Much of the game is spent in a tower called Tartarus with randomly generated floors and enemies to encounter. The goal is ultimately to reach the top, and you have less then a year of game time to do so. To get more powerful, you take Persona, the creatures that inhabit your mind and soul and preform your actions, and fuse them together to make more powerful Personas. To do this you're hanging out in the Velvet Room, the Persona fusion area, looking for the best combination of the disparate creatures and freaks of your Persona collection. You come upon a decent fusion, but then you notice the Arcana the new creation belongs to. You stop right then and there and call it all off. There's a way to make this creation even more powerful, and it requires you to get out of the dungeon and get on with your real life.

For this isn't an ordinary dungeon hack, where you only go back to town for healing and new items and equipment. Instead, you're living out your life as a Japanese High School student. The dungeon hacking is just another aspect of your busy schedule that includes daily classes, cramming for exams, wooing cute girls, and hanging out with your buddies. Dungeon hacking is fun, sure, but meeting other people and building friendships is a lot of fun too. The twist in Persona 3 is that they are never mutually exclusive.

Everyone you can hang out with and befriend is tied to an Arcana--a tarot card. The classmate who loves ramen and is hot for teacher, for example, is Magician. You can spend an afternoon with him psyching him up to ask the teacher out, and when it's over your rank with Magician, known as an S. Link, levels up. When you fuse a new Persona with the Arcana of Magician, the S. Link determines how much bonus experience points the Persona will start with, leveling it up to be way more powerful from the start. Depending on the responses and actions you take with your friends, you will have either an easy or a hard time getting S. Link ranks up. Not so much a "right" or "wrong" answer in the moral sense; most multiple choice responses call for you to understand what that character wants to hear or want you to do. In order to advance S. Links, you must be in tune to your friends' M.O. and, depending on the situation, even be manipulative in order to get closer to them.

When you're done for the day, you can go back to Tartarus and dungeon hack away, although you really only have to do it once or twice a month. The game rewards you for not spending all your time in Tartarus by making your party members get tired after a period of time in the tower, and giving the protagonist super-human "Great" status for spending days outside the tower. It sets a reasonable time limit to Tartarus explorations and keeps you in the day to day pacing of the game. And although the life sim might seem boring, it manages to stay pretty varied most of the time, since different days of the week have certain S. Link friends available and unavailable, and there's often a unique event or two in a week. You are not simply fighting bosses, watching a cut-scene and fighting the next boss for the next cut-scene. It is left to you to build friendships and fuse Personas and fight your way up the tower however you choose to do it.

Hand in hand, dungeon hacking and life sim combine in the narrative, which despite being largely telegraphed manages to be powerful nonetheless, due to the fact that you achieve friendships with the characters in this game through your own efforts, and not by a linear script that holds your hand. Friendship gives you strength and this strength becomes a tangible power in battles. This is a rare game that reinforces the very concept of the story by playing it.

It's making me want to leave the TV and make some real friends of my own.