There's obviously a lot that is unclear, but personally I think that Toriko is Kusabi's daughter.
Yeah that's what the game tells you. Toriko seems to be very involved in the destiny of Lospass island though, which is what makes me wonder if Toriko is just a form that some other entity took on.
There's definetly a parallel going on, where Sumio is carrying Catherine around, while Toriko is chasing Christina (who is actually a male) around, like the roles are reversed. I am pretty confident that Christina is Sumio Kodai, which would mean Toriko is, to some extent, Catherine.
You are straight up shown Catherine in the new Placebo chapter acting as a spirit.
And the Famitsu interview does mention that a Silver Eye exists within Catherine the suitcase.
https://www.paradisehotel51.com/sin/202 ... interview/
Logically, I think that Catherine (the spirit, and probably the original owner of the silver eye that ended up in the suitcase) is the maiden that prayed for the island to be saved, and eventually called upon the help of a man from the east (Sumio)
https://lparchive.org/Flower-Sun-and-Rain/71-15.png
Why would Toriko be playing out that role though? Talking to you, I'm edging more thowards the interpretation that Toriko actually did visit Lospass Island at some point, and inherited the will of Catherine much like Sumio & Step end up inheriting the will of the Sundance people.
Thank you Catherine, thank you for your love!
There seems to be a lot that may hint to the 'it's all a dream' theory, but I think the end of the game makes it clear that the island was real and thus the characters probably went there.
My personal take is that Sundance was the one telling the truth in the end. That is to say that in the game, you're playing through the memories of sixteen different Sumios.
It's a bit hard to explain chronologically because this interpretation relies on information from the 25th ward, but FSR already shows you that people were being straight up manufactured/cloned on lospass island in an effort to reconstruct or weaponize Sundance society. (TSC/FSR/25W show you three different experiments by elites in creating a perfect populace. In TSC you see citizens being mindbroken during childhood through MKUltra style mind control, in FSR citizens are straight up manufactured, and in 25W they are made to behave a certain way as adults through a system of punishment and reward enforced by strict rules.)
At the end of the game, you are told that Tokio's Hyena is used to kickstart the Next Maspro.
I believe Shiroyabu from 25W is part of the Next Maspro. In Whiteout, after Shiroyabu ascends, he remembers multiple lives and you see a flashback set between games where policeman Shiroyabu had to fight a terrorist Shiroyabu. My memory is a bit hazy but I am sure they also mention other Shiroyabus who happened to live normal lives.
In that context, I think it retroactively explains the appearence of the multiple Sumios in FSR. I believe the Sumios (which were manufactured on Lospass based on a template, which was possibly Kodai himself) were leading separate lives until they were all lured on Lospass Island and their personalities were overwritten with the Mondo one. (There's also a line in FSR that describes ELBOW as a mind control operation which sounds out of context until you realize that Mondo is a mindwiped version of Kodai.)
Remy or Sue (I haven't played the game in two years and I'm not looking at my notes so allow me some leeway I am also drunk) mention that the world of Lospass seems to open and close around Sumio. So in a sense it is "all a dream", but not in the proper sense of the word. A dream, depending on your spiritual beliefs, is either a reinterpretation of the day's events dictated by your subconcious, or an out-of-body experience with a deeper meaning.
I think Kodai is being made to experience or live through the memories of all the Sumios who were lured to Lospass island, through some unknown means. (Possibly just using a Silver Eye, considering by the time 25W takes place they're understood as massive data repositories. In Kurayami Dance, Wataru is able to "experience" Akari Tsukiyono's life by absorbing her silver eye. Catherine can also jack into the Sumio body that Sundance was inhabiting which means they're probably all equipped with silver eyes. The mass produced Steps also have a glowing eye.)
Sumio Mondo's role is that of a Searcher, that is to say, that he will find a lost item for his client. Lospass island is a land that has LOST its PAST, so it's only natural that Mondo's true objective would be to FIND its LOST PAST. That being the legacy of the Sundance people, which were genocided & bulldozed over by the Hachisuka clan sponsored by ELBOW (globalist/corporatist consortium of advanced nations). At the end of the game, Sumio is able to uncover the island's past, which is what makes Toriko the winner of the wager with Sundance Shot I guess. Mondo is going to pass on that memory to Step who is currently in France, which will also lead him to inherit the will of the Sundance people, despite neither Sumio nor Step being originally from Lospass. (Ritz seems to be the only actual survivor, Shot doesen't have a body at all. He seems to just exists as a persona within the Sumio collective.)
Within that interpretation, that spooky fucking scene at the end where Edo and the rest of the Hotel staff talk about blowing up the entire island, yet talk about Step's return as if they're gonna be there to see it kind of makes sense. Lospass island is a paradise that only exists as a memory, and that memory will be shared with Step, allowing him to "return" to Lospass.
Tetsugoro's line of there never being any island at all, and how the plane is going to touch down "in the real world" also makes more sense when you look at Lospass as a place that exists in memories. What is Paradise? A place separate from the real world.
Lospass can't move on from its last day of existance because the memories of it have never been shared, and have been erased from history. With Kodai learning the past of Lospass & sharing it with Step, it can finally move forward into tomorrow.
The "When they cry" series of visual novels by Ryukishi07 actually tackles a similar theme, where incidents with no survivors are repeated over and over and over again because noone is alive to tell the tale, so they could have played out in a number of different ways. They usually end with one of the kakera/fragments ending up revealing at least one survivor, who is able to settle the memory of the event.
https://07th-expansion.fandom.com/wiki/ ... franchise)
Both seem to be based on the idea of quantum physics where reality does not actually exist until it is observed, or is at least influenced in its existance by being observed. At least I think that's what 25w was going for with the concept of observers who cannot be observed. WTC has similar entities that are defined as witches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_ ... m_physics)
This is an aside but it's so fucking sad to see Sumio as a depressed fuck in 25W lol. His life is still dogshit, his experience on Lospass didn't really change anything for him. It's nice how he hints at the fact that he will some day be able to visit Lospass with his dead lover Ayame though. Even that's depressing though when you consider that Ayames and Kamuis are just naturally attracted to one another, so how real is their love really? They barely interacted before she got killed off off screen, along with her unborn child.
Though I could see some aspects occuring simply in Mondo's head or even a shared dream of some of the characters. You've obviously done way more digging into the game than I have so I'll be interested to read what you put together when you finish it.
Yeah I've been into this shit for 15+ god damn years. I was underage when I imported japanese copies of TSC & FSR, and I even bought a chipped PS2 to play it. (I'm pretty sure there was no pcsx2 at the time, or at least I wasn't aware of it. I do remember playing TSC on an early version of epsxe though.)
I had to get a videogame store in piazza vescovio to special order FSR for me because stores were not stocking on it when the DS version came out lol. So yeah, this stuff has been sitting with me for a while, and I am a complete waste of life.
Anyway the order I was planning of doing things in, was to slowly replay the games while taking notes & writing summaries for each chapter which would organically lead me to write separate in-depth articles. I haven't even gone through all the stuff that Jack wrote for the old website, which was mostly about Killer7, I only rewrote the "What is Kill the past" page. I will carry everything over eventually though.
You can see an example of it here, where I started writing the Silver Case summary:
https://www.paradisehotel51.com/sin/202 ... -thoughts/
And I organically spun-off discussion on the game's setting in this other article:
https://www.paradisehotel51.com/sin/202 ... planation/
(I would actually appreciate your take on this one because, again. I don't actually know japanese. This is just my understanding of how the translators misunderstood the whole idea of a "24th ward".)
I didn't even finish the summary for the first chapter lol. The issue is that I keep getting distracted by other shit, I actually do a lot of site work but never in the order I plan to. Rake pushed me to play Blood+ ONK and I got so interested in that, played through the game four times to find every single collectable, hunted down interviews etc., then I financed some translations, bought some books for BigManJapan to archive (which I still need to ship, because I have no access to digital currency at the moment, but Rake did say he would pay for shipping so that's happening at some point.) and got involved in all sorts of IRL shit to the point where I haven't replayed the games since summer of 2020.
I am also a complete retard who refuses to advertise anything I do, and the way the website looks it seems like it's abandoned, while in reality I constantly update random pages here and there. My (retarded jewish/italian) logic is that by the time I'm done with it, having space taken up by random updates is going to be worthless. Especially when you consider I have a very clear endpoint, since I don't plan on really covering anything past the original No More Heroes in detail.
I might change my mind in regards to Kurayami Dance, but even then I think my thoughts on that story can be summed up in one page, rather than having a whole expansive section dedicated to different articles on several different concepts.
There's also a slight visual redesign incoming but the person working on the various art assets has been busy with IRL shit. I already did most of the writing for it though. It's just going to affect the aesthetics though, the structure is gonna stay the same. It's gonna make everything even more alien and confusing though lol. The front page is gonna be an invitation to Paradise Hotel, as if it's a real place.
do wonder sometimes if Suda just inserts things just to create mindfucks and mess with the player. Ranko Tsukigime's Longest Day seems like it's just a bizarre mishmash of nonsensical crazy stuff with no rhyme or reason.
I honestly don't try to look too hard at anything he worked on after 2007 because I feel he wasn't really trying. Back then (when NMH2 and SOTD released and none of us really liked them, and the following games were equally as disappointing to the point where it looked like a joke. When I say "us", I am referring to a bunch of people that have not hung out here since 2012 or something.) we were all disappointed with GHM's output to the point where the fanbase just sort of disappeared or dispersed.
For example this girl, who is actually the only person who even came close to translating Moonlight Syndrome, used to be on our old forum & we were also friends on facebook lol.
https://izzeybee.wordpress.com/2013/10/ ... n-project/
Sal was also originally from our forum.
https://www.youtube.com/user/sal4
He did post here a few times and he also showed up on some of my livestreams but I get the feeling from meeting him that he's actually a busy person with a real life lol.
At the time, we all thought he was selling out, but it didn't really make any sense because noone was buying those games at all. Nowadays, I tend to think that the development of Kurayami just broke him and his confidence.
There's also another thing that noone ever talks about, how some of the GHM stuff moved to Spike-Chunsoft to work on Danganronpa after the original No More Heroes. Namely the composer Masafumi Takada & the art director Akihiko Ishizaka (which is why Jabberwock Island from Super Danganronpa 2 looks nearly identical to Lospass Island, to the point of having the airport display a "welcome to paradise" banner LOL!)
Ishizaka in particular is irreplaceable in my opinion, the UI & graphic design from TSC to NMH looks fantastic to this day.
There was some hope for a comeback between 2015 and last year, since The Silver Case & The 25th Ward were re-released with new chapters, one of the Kurayami scripts got adapted into Kurayami Dance (which is great, and I wish Suda would just stop trying to make horrible HD action games and just wrote manga & novels for the rest of his life lol), the Art of GHM & Suda51 Complete book (which also included a reprint of Killer is Dead, the new short story RBG, original scenarios for SOTD & KID and all the shit you already know about) being released, the new Fire Pro campaign and it eventually culminated with Travis Strikes Again acting as an anniversary title referencing nearly every single GHM production. I don't sacrifice baby goats to the altar of that game like most fans do, but I still think it's good.
It's just unfortunate that it all culminated with No More Heroes 3 flopping so hard that the company was bought out by a chinese shovelware producer lol. I don't know if you got anything out of that, but I personally consider it the worst game ever released by the company.
Again, it's sad because even though their games never sold well, whenever GHM does whatever the fuck it wants, the games actually have some staying power to the point where TSA was still being discussed months after its initial release, and Killer7 got a PC re-release just a few years ago. Meanwhile whenever they try to pander to their supposed "fanbase", they get some apparent clout on social media by the same group of 4 or 5 journalists but it never actually resonates with actual audiences. NMH3 was forgotten after a week and I envy those people because I have three copies of that piece of shit sitting in my library, constantly judging me.
I agree. These days, I find that popularity just seems to come from things being shared via social media rather than people actually trying things out. I have never really engaged much online over the years, but lately I have started developing this strange desire to want people to play the games that I think are great, despite knowing that there's no reason anyone should care what I think or vice versa.
You're talking to a guy whose hobby is to run a website that has an actual userbase of maybe five people, that only led to weird american mutants calling me a nazi (I am jewish LOL!)
I don't think there's anything wrong with doing shit for yourself exclusively. I personally got so tired with the structure of the novel that I let a contract expire (I wasn't actually going to make any money out of it regardless. Every time I wrote stuff for an audience of internet mongoloids I only lost time and patience, and never made any real money lol.) and I find writing stuff for the website to be a lot more refreshing.
I almost want to go back to the pre-internet days when my game info came from magazines. I simply explored games myself and didn't give a shit whether they were popular or not.
I never really talked about it before but the way I originally came across Killer7 was because a writer for an italian Nintendo magazine used to be a huge Smiths fan and got really invested in the game due to how it tied into the themes of Smiths songs. I might actually try to find the copy and scan it at some point, since I think I still have all those magazines in storage.
I was never really a music guy so I have no clue how accurate that is. I do know that the game directly references the song "How soon is now" (outside from the obvious, the Smiths being SMITHS) which in and of itself is based on wordplay implying a theme of as above, so below ("I'm the son/sun, I'm the heir/air"). My point is that that's the kind of refreshing perspective you don't get anymore because of an army of mind controlled keyboard warriors constantly moderating WTF you're allowed to say before it's labelled as "fake news" and "nazi propaganda".
Another game that I'm really interested in playing once it comes out, but I imagine will get no love, is Monark.
I never heard about it at all until you brought it up which means you're probably right lol. I don't even know where the fuck I'm supposed to learn about stuff like that because online videogame discussion is just a trojan horse for american racial and sexual politics, that only partain to americans.
I looked up a trailer for it.
I will say I am personally tired of school settings, though I understand in Japan you are supposed to grow out of this shit by the time you're 18 and just sacrifice your life to your company while your wife sets your bed on fire or something. It does look visually stimulating which is more than I can say about most games nowadays.
It reminds me a bit of Caligula, which unfortunately ended up being pretty disappointing.
The story was really a bunch of nothing which surprised me because it was written by Satomi Tadashi (Persona 1&2) and the combat system, while interesting, didn't really live up to its potential because the game was easy enough I never really had to strategise (which is a problem I had with pretty much every japanese rpg I played recently. Even Shin Megami Tensei IV basically had no endgame unless you bought the DLC lol. I have not played SMTV nor anything more recent because I haven't been in the mood to play RPGs for years.)
Monark also seems to have some weird take on its combat system, I just hope they actually build a game around it. It does seem to capture the feeling of living in an insane world pretty well though lol. WHich is probably because of what you said here:
The way the characters in those games persevered in the irrational circumstances they were in, inspired him to keep living in our own irrational world. That interview turned the game into a must play for me.
I might not end up liking it, but the point is that I'll decide that for myself after experiencing it.
Yeah which is the point of a hobby. Which is why it's so alienating to me that the modern humanoid golem seems to take no enjoyment in life whatsoever, and just wastes its time trying to appear "popular" and "cool" to its twitter friends.
That's not even limited to videogames. I personally love being in nature and hanging out with animals, but if you every try to look up locations on the internet, all you'll find is weirdos exploiting that shit for views. Which tells me they don't enjoy what they're doing at all. It's just an identity they decided to take on for the sake of "social" media. It gets fucking crazy when you realize how expensive owning your own luxury boat is, and how people don't enjoy being on them at all, and just use it for clout lol.
I might just do that. I was gonna write some stuff here, but I've probably already derailed this thread enough.
Noone gives a shit don't worry. I only ever move posts if I go on a racial riot for five or six consecutive novel lenght posts. I just do that to keep things in order. Other than that I always thought the overt moderation on forums was fucking weird because when you're speaking with someone IRL, conversations naturally switch between subjects because a human being is not a twitter bot lol.
[quote]There's obviously a lot that is unclear, but personally I think that Toriko is Kusabi's daughter.[/quote]
Yeah that's what the game tells you. Toriko seems to be very involved in the destiny of Lospass island though, which is what makes me wonder if Toriko is just a form that some other entity took on.
There's definetly a parallel going on, where Sumio is carrying Catherine around, while Toriko is chasing Christina (who is actually a male) around, like the roles are reversed. I am pretty confident that Christina is Sumio Kodai, which would mean Toriko is, to some extent, Catherine.
You are straight up shown Catherine in the new Placebo chapter acting as a spirit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmmaYL1gmYc&t=2s
And the Famitsu interview does mention that a Silver Eye exists within Catherine the suitcase.
https://www.paradisehotel51.com/sin/2021/05/26/famitsu-interview/
Logically, I think that Catherine (the spirit, and probably the original owner of the silver eye that ended up in the suitcase) is the maiden that prayed for the island to be saved, and eventually called upon the help of a man from the east (Sumio)
https://lparchive.org/Flower-Sun-and-Rain/71-15.png
Why would Toriko be playing out that role though? Talking to you, I'm edging more thowards the interpretation that Toriko actually did visit Lospass Island at some point, and inherited the will of Catherine much like Sumio & Step end up inheriting the will of the Sundance people.
Thank you Catherine, thank you for your love!
[quote]There seems to be a lot that may hint to the 'it's all a dream' theory, but I think the end of the game makes it clear that the island was real and thus the characters probably went there.[/quote]
My personal take is that Sundance was the one telling the truth in the end. That is to say that in the game, you're playing through the memories of sixteen different Sumios.
It's a bit hard to explain chronologically because this interpretation relies on information from the 25th ward, but FSR already shows you that people were being straight up manufactured/cloned on lospass island in an effort to reconstruct or weaponize Sundance society. (TSC/FSR/25W show you three different experiments by elites in creating a perfect populace. In TSC you see citizens being mindbroken during childhood through MKUltra style mind control, in FSR citizens are straight up manufactured, and in 25W they are made to behave a certain way as adults through a system of punishment and reward enforced by strict rules.)
At the end of the game, you are told that Tokio's Hyena is used to kickstart the Next Maspro.
I believe Shiroyabu from 25W is part of the Next Maspro. In Whiteout, after Shiroyabu ascends, he remembers multiple lives and you see a flashback set between games where policeman Shiroyabu had to fight a terrorist Shiroyabu. My memory is a bit hazy but I am sure they also mention other Shiroyabus who happened to live normal lives.
In that context, I think it retroactively explains the appearence of the multiple Sumios in FSR. I believe the Sumios (which were manufactured on Lospass based on a template, which was possibly Kodai himself) were leading separate lives until they were all lured on Lospass Island and their personalities were overwritten with the Mondo one. (There's also a line in FSR that describes ELBOW as a mind control operation which sounds out of context until you realize that Mondo is a mindwiped version of Kodai.)
Remy or Sue (I haven't played the game in two years and I'm not looking at my notes so allow me some leeway I am also drunk) mention that the world of Lospass seems to open and close around Sumio. So in a sense it is "all a dream", but not in the proper sense of the word. A dream, depending on your spiritual beliefs, is either a reinterpretation of the day's events dictated by your subconcious, or an out-of-body experience with a deeper meaning.
I think Kodai is being made to experience or live through the memories of all the Sumios who were lured to Lospass island, through some unknown means. (Possibly just using a Silver Eye, considering by the time 25W takes place they're understood as massive data repositories. In Kurayami Dance, Wataru is able to "experience" Akari Tsukiyono's life by absorbing her silver eye. Catherine can also jack into the Sumio body that Sundance was inhabiting which means they're probably all equipped with silver eyes. The mass produced Steps also have a glowing eye.)
Sumio Mondo's role is that of a Searcher, that is to say, that he will find a lost item for his client. Lospass island is a land that has LOST its PAST, so it's only natural that Mondo's true objective would be to FIND its LOST PAST. That being the legacy of the Sundance people, which were genocided & bulldozed over by the Hachisuka clan sponsored by ELBOW (globalist/corporatist consortium of advanced nations). At the end of the game, Sumio is able to uncover the island's past, which is what makes Toriko the winner of the wager with Sundance Shot I guess. Mondo is going to pass on that memory to Step who is currently in France, which will also lead him to inherit the will of the Sundance people, despite neither Sumio nor Step being originally from Lospass. (Ritz seems to be the only actual survivor, Shot doesen't have a body at all. He seems to just exists as a persona within the Sumio collective.)
Within that interpretation, that spooky fucking scene at the end where Edo and the rest of the Hotel staff talk about blowing up the entire island, yet talk about Step's return as if they're gonna be there to see it kind of makes sense. Lospass island is a paradise that only exists as a memory, and that memory will be shared with Step, allowing him to "return" to Lospass.
Tetsugoro's line of there never being any island at all, and how the plane is going to touch down "in the real world" also makes more sense when you look at Lospass as a place that exists in memories. What is Paradise? A place separate from the real world.
Lospass can't move on from its last day of existance because the memories of it have never been shared, and have been erased from history. With Kodai learning the past of Lospass & sharing it with Step, it can finally move forward into tomorrow.
The "When they cry" series of visual novels by Ryukishi07 actually tackles a similar theme, where incidents with no survivors are repeated over and over and over again because noone is alive to tell the tale, so they could have played out in a number of different ways. They usually end with one of the kakera/fragments ending up revealing at least one survivor, who is able to settle the memory of the event.
https://07th-expansion.fandom.com/wiki/When_They_Cry_(franchise)
Both seem to be based on the idea of quantum physics where reality does not actually exist until it is observed, or is at least influenced in its existance by being observed. At least I think that's what 25w was going for with the concept of observers who cannot be observed. WTC has similar entities that are defined as witches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_(quantum_physics)
This is an aside but it's so fucking sad to see Sumio as a depressed fuck in 25W lol. His life is still dogshit, his experience on Lospass didn't really change anything for him. It's nice how he hints at the fact that he will some day be able to visit Lospass with his dead lover Ayame though. Even that's depressing though when you consider that Ayames and Kamuis are just naturally attracted to one another, so how real is their love really? They barely interacted before she got killed off off screen, along with her unborn child.
[quote]Though I could see some aspects occuring simply in Mondo's head or even a shared dream of some of the characters. You've obviously done way more digging into the game than I have so I'll be interested to read what you put together when you finish it.[/quote]
Yeah I've been into this shit for 15+ god damn years. I was underage when I imported japanese copies of TSC & FSR, and I even bought a chipped PS2 to play it. (I'm pretty sure there was no pcsx2 at the time, or at least I wasn't aware of it. I do remember playing TSC on an early version of epsxe though.)
I had to get a videogame store in piazza vescovio to special order FSR for me because stores were not stocking on it when the DS version came out lol. So yeah, this stuff has been sitting with me for a while, and I am a complete waste of life.
Anyway the order I was planning of doing things in, was to slowly replay the games while taking notes & writing summaries for each chapter which would organically lead me to write separate in-depth articles. I haven't even gone through all the stuff that Jack wrote for the old website, which was mostly about Killer7, I only rewrote the "What is Kill the past" page. I will carry everything over eventually though.
You can see an example of it here, where I started writing the Silver Case summary:
https://www.paradisehotel51.com/sin/2020/09/05/chapter-summaries-and-thoughts/
And I organically spun-off discussion on the game's setting in this other article:
https://www.paradisehotel51.com/sin/2020/09/01/the-24th-ward-an-explanation/
(I would actually appreciate your take on this one because, again. I don't actually know japanese. This is just my understanding of how the translators misunderstood the whole idea of a "24th ward".)
I didn't even finish the summary for the first chapter lol. The issue is that I keep getting distracted by other shit, I actually do a lot of site work but never in the order I plan to. Rake pushed me to play Blood+ ONK and I got so interested in that, played through the game four times to find every single collectable, hunted down interviews etc., then I financed some translations, bought some books for BigManJapan to archive (which I still need to ship, because I have no access to digital currency at the moment, but Rake did say he would pay for shipping so that's happening at some point.) and got involved in all sorts of IRL shit to the point where I haven't replayed the games since summer of 2020.
I am also a complete retard who refuses to advertise anything I do, and the way the website looks it seems like it's abandoned, while in reality I constantly update random pages here and there. My (retarded jewish/italian) logic is that by the time I'm done with it, having space taken up by random updates is going to be worthless. Especially when you consider I have a very clear endpoint, since I don't plan on really covering anything past the original No More Heroes in detail.
I might change my mind in regards to Kurayami Dance, but even then I think my thoughts on that story can be summed up in one page, rather than having a whole expansive section dedicated to different articles on several different concepts.
There's also a slight visual redesign incoming but the person working on the various art assets has been busy with IRL shit. I already did most of the writing for it though. It's just going to affect the aesthetics though, the structure is gonna stay the same. It's gonna make everything even more alien and confusing though lol. The front page is gonna be an invitation to Paradise Hotel, as if it's a real place.
[quote] do wonder sometimes if Suda just inserts things just to create mindfucks and mess with the player. Ranko Tsukigime's Longest Day seems like it's just a bizarre mishmash of nonsensical crazy stuff with no rhyme or reason.[/quote]
I honestly don't try to look too hard at anything he worked on after 2007 because I feel he wasn't really trying. Back then (when NMH2 and SOTD released and none of us really liked them, and the following games were equally as disappointing to the point where it looked like a joke. When I say "us", I am referring to a bunch of people that have not hung out here since 2012 or something.) we were all disappointed with GHM's output to the point where the fanbase just sort of disappeared or dispersed.
For example this girl, who is actually the only person who even came close to translating Moonlight Syndrome, used to be on our old forum & we were also friends on facebook lol.
https://izzeybee.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/suda51s-moonlight-syndrome-translation-project/
Sal was also originally from our forum.
https://www.youtube.com/user/sal4
He did post here a few times and he also showed up on some of my livestreams but I get the feeling from meeting him that he's actually a busy person with a real life lol.
At the time, we all thought he was selling out, but it didn't really make any sense because noone was buying those games at all. Nowadays, I tend to think that the development of Kurayami just broke him and his confidence.
There's also another thing that noone ever talks about, how some of the GHM stuff moved to Spike-Chunsoft to work on Danganronpa after the original No More Heroes. Namely the composer Masafumi Takada & the art director Akihiko Ishizaka (which is why Jabberwock Island from Super Danganronpa 2 looks nearly identical to Lospass Island, to the point of having the airport display a "welcome to paradise" banner LOL!)
Ishizaka in particular is irreplaceable in my opinion, the UI & graphic design from TSC to NMH looks fantastic to this day.
There was some hope for a comeback between 2015 and last year, since The Silver Case & The 25th Ward were re-released with new chapters, one of the Kurayami scripts got adapted into Kurayami Dance (which is great, and I wish Suda would just stop trying to make horrible HD action games and just wrote manga & novels for the rest of his life lol), the Art of GHM & Suda51 Complete book (which also included a reprint of Killer is Dead, the new short story RBG, original scenarios for SOTD & KID and all the shit you already know about) being released, the new Fire Pro campaign and it eventually culminated with Travis Strikes Again acting as an anniversary title referencing nearly every single GHM production. I don't sacrifice baby goats to the altar of that game like most fans do, but I still think it's good.
It's just unfortunate that it all culminated with No More Heroes 3 flopping so hard that the company was bought out by a chinese shovelware producer lol. I don't know if you got anything out of that, but I personally consider it the worst game ever released by the company.
Again, it's sad because even though their games never sold well, whenever GHM does whatever the fuck it wants, the games actually have some staying power to the point where TSA was still being discussed months after its initial release, and Killer7 got a PC re-release just a few years ago. Meanwhile whenever they try to pander to their supposed "fanbase", they get some apparent clout on social media by the same group of 4 or 5 journalists but it never actually resonates with actual audiences. NMH3 was forgotten after a week and I envy those people because I have three copies of that piece of shit sitting in my library, constantly judging me.
[quote]I agree. These days, I find that popularity just seems to come from things being shared via social media rather than people actually trying things out. I have never really engaged much online over the years, but lately I have started developing this strange desire to want people to play the games that I think are great, despite knowing that there's no reason anyone should care what I think or vice versa.[/quote]
You're talking to a guy whose hobby is to run a website that has an actual userbase of maybe five people, that only led to weird american mutants calling me a nazi (I am jewish LOL!)
I don't think there's anything wrong with doing shit for yourself exclusively. I personally got so tired with the structure of the novel that I let a contract expire (I wasn't actually going to make any money out of it regardless. Every time I wrote stuff for an audience of internet mongoloids I only lost time and patience, and never made any real money lol.) and I find writing stuff for the website to be a lot more refreshing.
[quote]I almost want to go back to the pre-internet days when my game info came from magazines. I simply explored games myself and didn't give a shit whether they were popular or not.[/quote]
I never really talked about it before but the way I originally came across Killer7 was because a writer for an italian Nintendo magazine used to be a huge Smiths fan and got really invested in the game due to how it tied into the themes of Smiths songs. I might actually try to find the copy and scan it at some point, since I think I still have all those magazines in storage.
I was never really a music guy so I have no clue how accurate that is. I do know that the game directly references the song "How soon is now" (outside from the obvious, the Smiths being SMITHS) which in and of itself is based on wordplay implying a theme of as above, so below ("I'm the son/sun, I'm the heir/air"). My point is that that's the kind of refreshing perspective you don't get anymore because of an army of mind controlled keyboard warriors constantly moderating WTF you're allowed to say before it's labelled as "fake news" and "nazi propaganda".
[quote]Another game that I'm really interested in playing once it comes out, but I imagine will get no love, is Monark.[/quote]
I never heard about it at all until you brought it up which means you're probably right lol. I don't even know where the fuck I'm supposed to learn about stuff like that because online videogame discussion is just a trojan horse for american racial and sexual politics, that only partain to americans.
I looked up a trailer for it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oA5yETFqvlg
I will say I am personally tired of school settings, though I understand in Japan you are supposed to grow out of this shit by the time you're 18 and just sacrifice your life to your company while your wife sets your bed on fire or something. It does look visually stimulating which is more than I can say about most games nowadays.
It reminds me a bit of Caligula, which unfortunately ended up being pretty disappointing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MKbRIL-Wbg
The story was really a bunch of nothing which surprised me because it was written by Satomi Tadashi (Persona 1&2) and the combat system, while interesting, didn't really live up to its potential because the game was easy enough I never really had to strategise (which is a problem I had with pretty much every japanese rpg I played recently. Even Shin Megami Tensei IV basically had no endgame unless you bought the DLC lol. I have not played SMTV nor anything more recent because I haven't been in the mood to play RPGs for years.)
Monark also seems to have some weird take on its combat system, I just hope they actually build a game around it. It does seem to capture the feeling of living in an insane world pretty well though lol. WHich is probably because of what you said here:
[quote]The way the characters in those games persevered in the irrational circumstances they were in, inspired him to keep living in our own irrational world. That interview turned the game into a must play for me.[/quote]
[quote]I might not end up liking it, but the point is that I'll decide that for myself after experiencing it.[/quote]
Yeah which is the point of a hobby. Which is why it's so alienating to me that the modern humanoid golem seems to take no enjoyment in life whatsoever, and just wastes its time trying to appear "popular" and "cool" to its twitter friends.
That's not even limited to videogames. I personally love being in nature and hanging out with animals, but if you every try to look up locations on the internet, all you'll find is weirdos exploiting that shit for views. Which tells me they don't enjoy what they're doing at all. It's just an identity they decided to take on for the sake of "social" media. It gets fucking crazy when you realize how expensive owning your own luxury boat is, and how people don't enjoy being on them at all, and just use it for clout lol.
[quote]I might just do that. I was gonna write some stuff here, but I've probably already derailed this thread enough.[/quote]
Noone gives a shit don't worry. I only ever move posts if I go on a racial riot for five or six consecutive novel lenght posts. I just do that to keep things in order. Other than that I always thought the overt moderation on forums was fucking weird because when you're speaking with someone IRL, conversations naturally switch between subjects because a human being is not a twitter bot lol.
