Reality as we find it sees Suda51 hell-bent on destroying his own legacy as one of the finest auteurs in the history of games.
Examples are numerous and each is more disheartening than the last. Post them if you wish. The causes are not really important.
It is pretty much a tired subject at this point but you are right. If Suda kept going he could have had the level of respect that Ryukishi07 has nowadays, and Ryukishi also makes a boatload of money from anime adaptations, merchandise and what not, and he's nowhere near as good a writer as Suda. Whenever I am wasting time on my retarded hobby of running a Suda 51 fansite I always find myself sifting through some unknown information or replaying some of the old game and I remember why I do it. He really did bring a level of writing that is nearly unheard of in any other videogame lol. I mean there are well written games here and there but just Flower Sun and Rain alone has depth that is usually only found in a good novel or certain arthouse movies.
We talked to death about how shitty everything released after the original NMH was, but what I find really sad is that from 2015 onwards (I guess because Suda made enough money with Let it Die to last him for a while lol) we were experiencing a reinassance of sorts where Suda was going back to personal projects. It's just a shame that most of the new stuff was stuck in Japan, so we didn't know about it until fan translations started to come out, and by now it's too late for it to pick up momentum again.
On may 2015, the art of grasshopper manufacture was released and it included some behind the scenes stuff that had never been revealed publically before. Namely the fact that Shadows of the Damned was based on one out of five rejected scripts for what was originally meant to be Kurayami (which would have been the natural evolution of "open world" game design by GHM which started with FSR, evolved in ONK and NMH and was subsequently abandoned.)
The manga Kurayami Dance came out between August 2015 and November 2016 and it was based on another one of those rejected Kurayami scripts, although it's still not what was originally intended. It's fantastic and better than anything GHM shat out between 2008 and 2015.
The Siler Case was remade and translated in October 2016. It also had a tie-in with Kurayami Dance, came bundled with a new comic that cemented its connection with Moonlight Syndrome and new chapters were released with a patch in April 2017 to tie it into FSR and the 25th ward better.
On march 2018, The 25th Ward was also remade and completed with three new chapters to conclude the story and tie it into Moonlight Syndrome and the upcoming Travis Strikes Again.
On April 2018, Suda left the old Grasshopper Manufacture (which then changed its name to Supertrick games) to fund a new company with reduced staff and a focus on making smaller games.
https://houjin.jp/c/6011101065710
https://houjin.jp/c/5010001190768
On June 2018, the complete suda51 book was released which outside of the usual artwork and interviews, also included a whole bunch of KTP writing. There was a reprint of the Killer7 short story "Killer is Dead" which remained incomplete, the original scripts for both Kurayami and Killer is Dead before they had to be changed due to producers meddling, and RGB was a whole new story which again, was mostly there to tie the 25th ward into the upcoming No More Heroes stuff.
On November 2018 Killer7 got re-released on PC in HD
On January 2019, Travis Strikes Again was released which in addition of not being dogshit (a surprise at this point in the company's history) also had a bunch of interesting tie-ins with the KTP games. While some of them can and probably should be dismissed as random cameos, Travis does visit the 25th Ward after the events of said game with multiple characters showing up, one of the endings of 25W tying directly into those events (with Mr. TD "TopDrunkee"). The intro to the game was also the conclusion to the Killer is Dead short story that was republished just the year before.
While TSA has a bunch of shit in it that I dislike (I am not a fan of nerdgasm shit, jerking off over how many game references we can throw at each other, deadpool humor, I don't like any of it) it's so much better than 99% of the company's output from 2008 onwards it's not even funny. The only game from that era I would really say holds a candle to TSA is Black Knight Sword, and according to Suda that was mostly Ren Yamazaki's brainchild.
There really was some momentum there where it seemed like we might go back to the roots of why we enjoyed GHM in the first place. Pretty much everything he had the rights for except for FSR (which is supposedly getting remade instead of remastered, so I am a bit worried if it ever comes out at all) got ported to newer system, the new stories and additional chapters all tied into each other and all the way back to Moonlight Syndrome. Hell even MS might have been re-released, they had an event lined up where they would discuss it with the original devs but it got cancelled due to covid. (Spike really should have just pushed for a re-release of the syndrome games after Danganronpa got popular, since SDR2 had a tie-in with Twilight Syndrome. They might have made a buck off of them since I doubt a re-release would cost them much, and they already have the rights.)
It's just a shame that the buck stopped at No More Heroes 3 since it was such a catastrophic failure that the company had to be sold to the chinese.
I don't have the updated numbers but I'm pretty sure TSA outsold it in the same span of time, and that was made on a fraction of the budget.
Now that some time has passed I am over the shock of how fucking awful it was (NMH3 really is one of the worst games released by the company and that's saying something) and I'm starting to see there was some ambition to it in how the open world was realized. Playing through ONK a bunch of times and replaying the original No More Heroes trying to mod a confederate shirt in to get banned off of Moddb and nexusmods really made me appreciate how he uses open worlds as a narrative tool. In that just looking at the place you're visiting can tell you a lot about the setting. (Obviously the open world gameplay itself sucks shit but all of Suda's games have unfun gameplay. That's just something we're gonna have to live with and move forward.)
NMH3 might have been going for that at some point in development which would explain the overtly elaborate designs of the various areas. I'm gonna wager and say the open world was one of the first things that was designed, possibly before the plot was re-written, because those areas don't tie into the story in any way whatsoever.
A place like Neo Brazil seems to imply some shit happening in between games, which probably would have tied into the whole technocratic thing with Damon Riccitello and its urbanization firm.
Which in TSA might have even been connected to ELBOW somehow considering the designs they show are similar to Flower, Sun and Rain Hotel.
Suda even discussed for a bit how the inhabitants of Santa Destroy in 3 are just employees and cyborgs. Real people don't live there anymore at all.
All of that would have been interesting, along with the american superhero angle which he dropped entirely. I can almost imagine another TSA-like game where it's not super political (In TSA, the bad guys are the CIA, but they're just doing random shit that has nothing to do with the CIA at all) but still gets into some interesting real world implications. American Superheroes being used as icons for corporate restructuring by urbanization firms is dangerously close to today's blackrock mandated propaganda, which the MCU is a part of lol. (I'm not saying that's what he was going for. It might have been what Season 1 of the boys was going for but that show became the same propaganda it was satyrizing almost immediately.)
It's weird though that not only was the superhero angle completely dropped, but Notorious also got retconned into a completely different character from TSA just to be universally good and an ally to Travis. In fact most of TSA got retconned or at least ignored except for Bad Girl's resurrection, and the one Bad Man scene.
If they went with the urbanization+superheroes angle, the presence of Midorikawa would have made more sense, considering she was trained by Kurumizawa from the 25th Ward which was in opposition to the Elbow group. She might have shared his ideals. In the end though she is just wasted on another Tokusatsu joke because whatever.
Unfortunately, as it is now, the game is closer to a temper tantrum. I think it's kind of pathetic that Suda is so angry at the CEO of EA for something that happened a decade ago that he wasted an entire game just to call him retarded. Instead of you know, making a good game. I wasn't kidding when I said it reminded me of Doug Walker the nostalgia critic. That's exactly what he does in his videos, he gets mad at rich directors and instead of making better movies than them (because he can't) he just has minorities play a strawman version of them in skits where he bashes them with his flawless logic LOL!!
The writing is nearly 1:1. Just impotent nerd rage which I think is beneath him considering he's one of the best writers working in the industry, if not the best depending on what you count. Most experimental game directors never get to make anything more than a few games, let alone a fully realized universe with its own visual language.
What I would firstly like to focus on here is cause for optimism.
Rays of hope such as proposed projects, statements in interviews, business decisions, etc.
I realise that pickings are slim which is precisely why I felt this needed a dedicated thread.
General updates have the opposite effect.
Has there been anything positive since they were bought out by the chicoms? I guess they did get a new office. Suda seems optimistic about the fact that they'll get to work with bigger budgets, mostly unimpeded, but he did say the same thing (and was probably promised the same thing) by EA, by Kadokawa, by Marvellous, by Gungho and they all ended up meddling with his vision. I don't know why he would still believe it lol.
https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/su ... es-3075171
In this interview he at least seems aware of the fact that they overreached with NMH3 and they're going to focus on slightly smaller stuff. Which is probably a good idea, but I have to woder wtf he means when he's talking about AA budget titles. Nier Automata is a AA budgeted game and it's nowhere near the realm of what GHM can afford to do.
Anyway, I can't find the specific interview but he did mention GHM was going to produce five games, three of which would be new IPs. The two other ones might be ports of FSR and SOTD. I am curious about the FSR remake but I really can't imagine that game with a new soundtrack. Plus this interview where he hints at connecting FSR with the NMH games kinda worries me lol.
https://www.thegamer.com/interview-suda ... asshopper/
I have not checked if latest versions of PCSX2 can run the original FSR properly. (The last one I tried had a glitch where the guidebook wouldn't render properly, even on software mode. It did not work on hardware mode at all.) I know the emulator has been overhauled a whole lot. It's just that I'm on vacation with a shitty laptop, so I can only write.
As per the three new IPs, one of them seems to be a crossover game with a bunch of heroes coming together (isn't that what NMH3 was trying to be? Whatever) and another one might be Hotel Barcelona. Though I doubt that one will ever happen.
https://www.destructoid.com/after-no-mo ... buckaroos/
https://www.thegamer.com/suda51-swery-h ... me-update/[quote]Reality as we find it sees Suda51 hell-bent on destroying his own legacy as one of the finest auteurs in the history of games.
Examples are numerous and each is more disheartening than the last. Post them if you wish. The causes are not really important.
[/quote]
It is pretty much a tired subject at this point but you are right. If Suda kept going he could have had the level of respect that Ryukishi07 has nowadays, and Ryukishi also makes a boatload of money from anime adaptations, merchandise and what not, and he's nowhere near as good a writer as Suda. Whenever I am wasting time on my retarded hobby of running a Suda 51 fansite I always find myself sifting through some unknown information or replaying some of the old game and I remember why I do it. He really did bring a level of writing that is nearly unheard of in any other videogame lol. I mean there are well written games here and there but just Flower Sun and Rain alone has depth that is usually only found in a good novel or certain arthouse movies.
We talked to death about how shitty everything released after the original NMH was, but what I find really sad is that from 2015 onwards (I guess because Suda made enough money with Let it Die to last him for a while lol) we were experiencing a reinassance of sorts where Suda was going back to personal projects. It's just a shame that most of the new stuff was stuck in Japan, so we didn't know about it until fan translations started to come out, and by now it's too late for it to pick up momentum again.
On may 2015, the art of grasshopper manufacture was released and it included some behind the scenes stuff that had never been revealed publically before. Namely the fact that Shadows of the Damned was based on one out of five rejected scripts for what was originally meant to be Kurayami (which would have been the natural evolution of "open world" game design by GHM which started with FSR, evolved in ONK and NMH and was subsequently abandoned.)
The manga Kurayami Dance came out between August 2015 and November 2016 and it was based on another one of those rejected Kurayami scripts, although it's still not what was originally intended. It's fantastic and better than anything GHM shat out between 2008 and 2015.
The Siler Case was remade and translated in October 2016. It also had a tie-in with Kurayami Dance, came bundled with a new comic that cemented its connection with Moonlight Syndrome and new chapters were released with a patch in April 2017 to tie it into FSR and the 25th ward better.
On march 2018, The 25th Ward was also remade and completed with three new chapters to conclude the story and tie it into Moonlight Syndrome and the upcoming Travis Strikes Again.
On April 2018, Suda left the old Grasshopper Manufacture (which then changed its name to Supertrick games) to fund a new company with reduced staff and a focus on making smaller games.
https://houjin.jp/c/6011101065710
https://houjin.jp/c/5010001190768
On June 2018, the complete suda51 book was released which outside of the usual artwork and interviews, also included a whole bunch of KTP writing. There was a reprint of the Killer7 short story "Killer is Dead" which remained incomplete, the original scripts for both Kurayami and Killer is Dead before they had to be changed due to producers meddling, and RGB was a whole new story which again, was mostly there to tie the 25th ward into the upcoming No More Heroes stuff.
On November 2018 Killer7 got re-released on PC in HD
On January 2019, Travis Strikes Again was released which in addition of not being dogshit (a surprise at this point in the company's history) also had a bunch of interesting tie-ins with the KTP games. While some of them can and probably should be dismissed as random cameos, Travis does visit the 25th Ward after the events of said game with multiple characters showing up, one of the endings of 25W tying directly into those events (with Mr. TD "TopDrunkee"). The intro to the game was also the conclusion to the Killer is Dead short story that was republished just the year before.
While TSA has a bunch of shit in it that I dislike (I am not a fan of nerdgasm shit, jerking off over how many game references we can throw at each other, deadpool humor, I don't like any of it) it's so much better than 99% of the company's output from 2008 onwards it's not even funny. The only game from that era I would really say holds a candle to TSA is Black Knight Sword, and according to Suda that was mostly Ren Yamazaki's brainchild.
There really was some momentum there where it seemed like we might go back to the roots of why we enjoyed GHM in the first place. Pretty much everything he had the rights for except for FSR (which is supposedly getting remade instead of remastered, so I am a bit worried if it ever comes out at all) got ported to newer system, the new stories and additional chapters all tied into each other and all the way back to Moonlight Syndrome. Hell even MS might have been re-released, they had an event lined up where they would discuss it with the original devs but it got cancelled due to covid. (Spike really should have just pushed for a re-release of the syndrome games after Danganronpa got popular, since SDR2 had a tie-in with Twilight Syndrome. They might have made a buck off of them since I doubt a re-release would cost them much, and they already have the rights.)
It's just a shame that the buck stopped at No More Heroes 3 since it was such a catastrophic failure that the company had to be sold to the chinese.
I don't have the updated numbers but I'm pretty sure TSA outsold it in the same span of time, and that was made on a fraction of the budget.
Now that some time has passed I am over the shock of how fucking awful it was (NMH3 really is one of the worst games released by the company and that's saying something) and I'm starting to see there was some ambition to it in how the open world was realized. Playing through ONK a bunch of times and replaying the original No More Heroes trying to mod a confederate shirt in to get banned off of Moddb and nexusmods really made me appreciate how he uses open worlds as a narrative tool. In that just looking at the place you're visiting can tell you a lot about the setting. (Obviously the open world gameplay itself sucks shit but all of Suda's games have unfun gameplay. That's just something we're gonna have to live with and move forward.)
NMH3 might have been going for that at some point in development which would explain the overtly elaborate designs of the various areas. I'm gonna wager and say the open world was one of the first things that was designed, possibly before the plot was re-written, because those areas don't tie into the story in any way whatsoever.
A place like Neo Brazil seems to imply some shit happening in between games, which probably would have tied into the whole technocratic thing with Damon Riccitello and its urbanization firm.
[img]https://img.game8.co/3410752/fa25a3442979a84c0d245c0d54e03b3b.png[/img]
Which in TSA might have even been connected to ELBOW somehow considering the designs they show are similar to Flower, Sun and Rain Hotel.
Suda even discussed for a bit how the inhabitants of Santa Destroy in 3 are just employees and cyborgs. Real people don't live there anymore at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wVs3NDHRAs
All of that would have been interesting, along with the american superhero angle which he dropped entirely. I can almost imagine another TSA-like game where it's not super political (In TSA, the bad guys are the CIA, but they're just doing random shit that has nothing to do with the CIA at all) but still gets into some interesting real world implications. American Superheroes being used as icons for corporate restructuring by urbanization firms is dangerously close to today's blackrock mandated propaganda, which the MCU is a part of lol. (I'm not saying that's what he was going for. It might have been what Season 1 of the boys was going for but that show became the same propaganda it was satyrizing almost immediately.)
It's weird though that not only was the superhero angle completely dropped, but Notorious also got retconned into a completely different character from TSA just to be universally good and an ally to Travis. In fact most of TSA got retconned or at least ignored except for Bad Girl's resurrection, and the one Bad Man scene.
If they went with the urbanization+superheroes angle, the presence of Midorikawa would have made more sense, considering she was trained by Kurumizawa from the 25th Ward which was in opposition to the Elbow group. She might have shared his ideals. In the end though she is just wasted on another Tokusatsu joke because whatever.
Unfortunately, as it is now, the game is closer to a temper tantrum. I think it's kind of pathetic that Suda is so angry at the CEO of EA for something that happened a decade ago that he wasted an entire game just to call him retarded. Instead of you know, making a good game. I wasn't kidding when I said it reminded me of Doug Walker the nostalgia critic. That's exactly what he does in his videos, he gets mad at rich directors and instead of making better movies than them (because he can't) he just has minorities play a strawman version of them in skits where he bashes them with his flawless logic LOL!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HA_rXWhPC0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF2aA9oVPNM
The writing is nearly 1:1. Just impotent nerd rage which I think is beneath him considering he's one of the best writers working in the industry, if not the best depending on what you count. Most experimental game directors never get to make anything more than a few games, let alone a fully realized universe with its own visual language.
[quote]What I would firstly like to focus on here is cause for optimism.
Rays of hope such as proposed projects, statements in interviews, business decisions, etc.
I realise that pickings are slim which is precisely why I felt this needed a dedicated thread.
General updates have the opposite effect.[/quote]
Has there been anything positive since they were bought out by the chicoms? I guess they did get a new office. Suda seems optimistic about the fact that they'll get to work with bigger budgets, mostly unimpeded, but he did say the same thing (and was probably promised the same thing) by EA, by Kadokawa, by Marvellous, by Gungho and they all ended up meddling with his vision. I don't know why he would still believe it lol.
https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/suda51-says-grasshoppers-ten-year-plan-includes-three-original-games-3075171
In this interview he at least seems aware of the fact that they overreached with NMH3 and they're going to focus on slightly smaller stuff. Which is probably a good idea, but I have to woder wtf he means when he's talking about AA budget titles. Nier Automata is a AA budgeted game and it's nowhere near the realm of what GHM can afford to do.
Anyway, I can't find the specific interview but he did mention GHM was going to produce five games, three of which would be new IPs. The two other ones might be ports of FSR and SOTD. I am curious about the FSR remake but I really can't imagine that game with a new soundtrack. Plus this interview where he hints at connecting FSR with the NMH games kinda worries me lol.
https://www.thegamer.com/interview-suda51-no-more-heroes-grasshopper/
I have not checked if latest versions of PCSX2 can run the original FSR properly. (The last one I tried had a glitch where the guidebook wouldn't render properly, even on software mode. It did not work on hardware mode at all.) I know the emulator has been overhauled a whole lot. It's just that I'm on vacation with a shitty laptop, so I can only write.
As per the three new IPs, one of them seems to be a crossover game with a bunch of heroes coming together (isn't that what NMH3 was trying to be? Whatever) and another one might be Hotel Barcelona. Though I doubt that one will ever happen.
https://www.destructoid.com/after-no-more-heroes-3-suda51-will-work-on-a-game-for-buckaroos/
https://www.thegamer.com/suda51-swery-hotel-barcelona-horror-game-update/
