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To what extent is Goichi Suda still making the games that bear the Suda 51 hallmark? It's hard to tell. The affable punk stylist of the Tokyo games scene hasn't taken a director credit since 2008. Usually referred to as creative or executive director, sometimes taking a scenario or scriptwriting credit - and always happy to speak to the press as the cool figurehead of his studio, Grasshopper Manufacture - Suda's style is unmistakable, but his personal creative input is increasingly opaque.The firebrand of the mid-2000s who made the hypnotically strange Killer7 and the anarchic No More Heroes has turned himself into a sort of anti-establishment brand, like a fashion designer, leaning on borrowed rebel rock riffs. The games, always rough, have started to look rote with it. The amusingly schlocky Shadows of the Damned and Lollipop Chainsaw are now followed by Killer is Dead, a zany action game directed by Hideyuki Shin which rather self-consciously recycles the look and themes of Suda's more fondly remembered cult hits.
Once again, then, we take the role of a devil-may-care assassin inhabiting a wild comic-book reality where anything can happen: nursery-rhyme horror, giant mutants, sentient trains, possessed Yakuza, unicorns, mansions on the moon, the works. Mondo Zappa glides through all this chaos in a sharp suit, slashing at robotic enemies with his katana or shooting at them with his cybernetic arm, looking cool in the colour-saturated, high-contrast, cel-shaded visuals.
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