Killer7 - 獅子 - "Harman, the world won't change. All it does is turn. Now, let's dance."

[Catabo]

new crowdfunding programme: raise money for cowman to visit his local skyscraper



Actually, if we go non-local, we can send him off to that Chicago one with the window that lets you stand over the city and say it's an extracurricular activity for All the Sonics (see: the part in Sonic Adventure 1 where Sonic runs down a building). MAKE IT HAPPEN

ADPE: anyone know the source of the orchestral stab-ish sound effect that plays at 8:08 when the bullet settles down? I feel like I've heard it in several works of media so it must be pretty mainstream in terms of source.

[strongbadman]

I'm glad raocow not too long ago said that he should stop the recording at every new save point and then proceeded to just ignore that. I'm being sincere, it shows this game really has its hooks in him!

[thatguyif]

Been quiet a while, doing stuff.

Actually, if we go non-local, we can send him off to that Chicago one with the window that lets you stand over the city and say it's an extracurricular activity for All the Sonics (see: the part in Sonic Adventure 1 where Sonic runs down a building). MAKE IT HAPPEN

Ah yes, the Wesley Willis Skydeck. (I am never not going to call that tower the Wesley Willis Tower. Chicago needs to honor one of its greatest heroes in music somehow)

And I mean, he can crash at my place to cut down on costs, I live pretty close to it

ADPE: anyone know the source of the orchestral stab-ish sound effect that plays at 8:08 when the bullet settles down? I feel like I've heard it in several works of media so it must be pretty mainstream in terms of source.

I think it's just a sample that you can throw in, probably part of an FX pack of some sort. I know a lot of engineers use stuff like this.

Anyway...Curtis Blackburn. Where to begin? If Sunset was meant to be an obtuse critique of Japanese politics, I suspect Encounter is meant to be the equivalent to American foreign policy. Curtis Blackburn represents that horrific tendency in the States of getting in bed with extremely dirty interests because they'll help "us" fight "our" enemies. Drug lords, warlords, religious fanatics...even entire regimes built around this shit. Just this week, it was revealed that the Saudi royal family, that overbred mass of Wahhabist trash, had direct lines to the 9/11 bombers. Of course the news got buried. After all, wouldn't want to lose that precious Saudi oil after sanctioning the Ruskies (whoops!).

Curtis Blackburn is very much that tendency: Trafficking children (particularly orphans) and their organs for various purposes, along with being essentially a pedo. All for the sake of law and order.

It goes a bit deeper than that, but that relies on the supplemental material.

I think the reason most people don't like talking about Encounter is because this is a VERY dark chapter in the game. And you can see it everywhere.

In the name of Harman...

[eltiolavara9]

i thought i wouldn't like this game but ended up binging trough all the lp videos so far yesterday its amazing

[Catabo]

that sentence that you hear all the time.png (251.24 KiB) Viewed 1863 times

ADPE: anyone know the source of the orchestral stab-ish sound effect that plays at 8:08 when the bullet settles down? I feel like I've heard it in several works of media so it must be pretty mainstream in terms of source.

I think it's just a sample that you can throw in, probably part of an FX pack of some sort. I know a lot of engineers use stuff like this.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I'm used to instrument samples in music usually being from a handful of common sources (hello, Roland and Korg!), but I don't have the same handle on sfx.

[EllenHouraisan]

I don't think I'll ever see "Defeat the giant spear man" without finding it funny. XD

[thatguyif]

Image

It's no "Defeat Four Ducks" though

[thatguyif]

So a detail that may have been missed: MASK's new...mask basically made his reload time the fastest of those with reload times. After having a reload time only slightly faster than KAEDE's, he became faster than Con in reloads. It's a nice touch.

It's not said whose body Garcian was "cleaning" in today's video, but given the location, I suspect it may have been Mary Montana's.

Words are to be said about AYAME Blackburn. But not yet, and not with me. Know this: When said, they won't be pleasant. And take heed of today's subject line.

In the name of Harman...

[strongbadman]

Ayame Backburn is a weird fight, because...she's the most straightforward fight in the game thus far. She's not as much of a puzzle boss as some of the others, she'e not a weird shooting contest or a chase through a maze, she can be fought with just about any smith. It's the closest to a ln on rails shooter boss this game has gotten.

Common strategies seem to be using kaede to snipe her as she comes towards you or use con to just unload on her. Maybe you'd wanna use dan since he's just gotten a shiny new gun, or kevin with his no waver knives. Coyote has no real advantages in this fight, but he'e perfectly viable.

Or you could just use Mask and blow her up. That might be a less appealing strategy if you haven't pumped up his power, or if you're on Deadly where enemies do more damage and I believe take more damage as well, but it's an option. I'm not sure how you avoid damage in this fight.

[thatguyif]

A two-part post. One in line, the other...not. The other will come after sleep.

Ulmeyda brought up the Yakumo, which would seem strange...except that's how he became who he was in the first place. It's hinted at that Ulmeyda got either the whole Yakumo or some piece of it while as a postal worker. And just merely having a piece turned him into some powerful cult leader/executive. Him, a postal worker?

Just what is this thing, this cabinet policy?

Knowing Suda51, and understanding Sunset, the Yakumo Cabinet Policy...I feel like it has to be referring to the 1955 System as a whole. It's worth considering Japan's history once again: In the 10-year period between the end of WWII and the institution of the 1955 System, Japan was a rather unstable place, recovering from the devastation that the destruction of their empire had caused. There were 6 elections in those ten years, with Prime Ministers switching nearly every year. The economy had to be helped a lot by the Occupation forces to get going again, and Japan had the benefit of being a base of operations for UN and US forces during the Korean War, allowing them to trade material goods and logistical supplies to power the war for the UN side. On their own, such efforts would've instituted a decent recovery for the Japanese, but the matter of political instability made that tenuous at best.

Then the 1955 System gets implemented with the creation of the LDP (and to a lesser extent the JSP), and things change dramatically. Outside of 1960, which included the Anpo protests and the Miike miners' strike, Japan undergoes a period of remarkable stability that has, for better or worse, lasted into the present. But more importantly, the economy had incredible growth for the next three decades. Now, much of what we consider the "West" underwent some kind of massive economic growth at some point following the Second World War: Les Trente Glorieuses in France, das Wirtschaftswunder in Germany and Austria, il miracolo economico in Italy, el milagro español in Spain. (Really, the only ones who didn't were the Eastern Bloc and the European periphery of Greece, Turkey, and Portugal.) But Japan really trumped them all, with economic growth over decades we would not see again until the 2000s with China. Japan's rise was so explosive, by the 1980s, they were on track to overtaking the US itself, leading to much anxiety here. (Hence that infamous bit in Back to the Future Part II where future Marty was found to be serving under a Japanese manager.) Such growth turned Japan into a very rich nation, and possibly even more powerful than they were when they sought to build their empire in east Asia.

How do such things happen? How does Japan go from a war-torn nation to an economic powerhouse? There's no one singular explanation to it, no universal theory. Certainly no single government policy can make that possible. Even the 1955 System alone couldn't explain it, since it still functionally exists today, three decades after Japan's peak. But then, we've never been good at complex explanations, and they tend to get in the way of a good story.

Suda51 at least understood that government policies define how a country functions, especially in the absence of real social movements. But he also found Japan's success under the 1955 System to be absurd. So he imbued those policies with a mystical, even religious property, to further lend credence that maybe, just maybe, Japan's entire existence is smoke and mirrors.

The religious aspects get amplfied to an intense degree in supplemental materials, with a full copy of the Yakumo being uncovered and worshipped by millions with the same intensity as one would a Catholic or Buddhist relic.

In the name of Harman...

[strongbadman]

Once again, Ayame Blackburn is the most straightforward on rails shooter fight we've seen thus far, even moreso now. Popping in and out of the light and staggering when she's shot is a classic of the genre, and you can definitely win this without moving. This is where a beefed up Con really shines, with good aim you can shred ayame.

To address something raocow said in the video, I do believe all those map icons don't exist in Deadly. It makes the puzzles slightly less obvious, and it has the side effect of making the map overall less readable.

Finally, this has been said before, but every level has a cap of how much thick blood you can earn, and raocow hasn't yet reached that cap on any level. He's collected a lot of blood here, so I actually don't know if this level's cap is just really big, or if the amount you didn't get from other levels carries over to keep you from screwing yourself. That would be something for someone to test.

[KobaBeach]

Two, it says a lot about people who actually wish to be a magical girl or an anime girl or a Touhou. A lot.

i like how you're comparing wanting to be an idealized fictional character to being raped and tortured by a complete lunatic. clearly you're the smartest person in the world

[EllenHouraisan]

Seems like someone is taking Suda's magic assassin fantasy game a tad bit too seriously.

[Grounder]

[KobaBeach]

psa: we will be putting nitori as the final boss of a3mt instead of justice guilty gear as i originally intended. this is a warning

[strongbadman]

In a game with a couple really good names, Trevor Pearlharbor is my favorite. You cannot take it seriously.

[Catabo]

Whoah whoah whoah whoah. Handsomemen "online game"? Wasn't there something mentioned about the internet being banned in addition to air travel, or am i making that up? can't believe this story isn't internally consistent smh

psa: we will be putting nitori as the final boss of a3mt instead of justice guilty gear as i originally intended. this is a warning

that,s a funny way to spell justice man meag man rock force

(honestly tho, a super sentai rangers-type thing would be a great theme for bosses in a Mario hack since there are usually seven or eight of them. I wonder if it's already been done?)

[Grounder]

you've heard of sans undertale, now get ready for

[Catabo]

you've heard of

mayoinomori.png (1.87 KiB) Viewed 1459 times

now get ready for

MAYOINOMACHI.png (26.87 KiB) Viewed 1459 times

[thatguyif]

It is interesting, really, the story of Alter Ego. It's a story you kind of find in the mid-late 1990s and early 2000s, the idea of fantasy world, the fiction, taking shape in the real world in horrifying ways. That time period was rather strange in that respect: The internet was barely functional (in comparison to what it is now), with broadband not becoming a common thing (at least in the States) until after this game was made. But a lot of stories around that time were focused on blurring the line between and fantasy, with the notion that perhaps the real is just a fantasy. It was out of this fear that the Internet would eventually supplant traditional media.

Can't see a story like that being written today. The problem is the fantasy world is a place that people would rather live in now. The contradictions of the real world are seen as too much to bear, and consumer culture has inured many to a state of passivity, unwilling to do anything more than the bare minimum to live. So many people live fabricated lives, project fake power and empty threats, and rely on people to just follow them along in the performance. You can't build a story about the fantasy projecting into the real when the fantasy is just a house of cards. And of course, it's not hard to just ignore this performative shit. I mean, just look at me: I've been ignoring Koba's noxious rambling. Because of that, it's also easy to see the trap people make for themselves: If the fantasy faces any sort of scrutiny, faces any sort of challenge, people just hole themselves up further and double down, going for pointless gestures of self-affirmation as a form of solace. They can't project to the real world because they lack any grounding, so they just don't. If the Handsome Men plot were to occur in real life today, it would've been broken up before it even had a chance to start, and become a running meme on Twitter and TikTok.

Anyway, finally, raocow broke the machine! The machine breaking is the game's way of preventing you from just grinding your Smiths. There is a hard cap of thick blood you can convert each chapter. In short, you cannot max out all your characters. I'm unsure how many you can max out, but if I had to guess, it'd be something like 3, maybe 4, presuming you dedicate all the blood to them? The reason for this is partly to maintain some level of balance and difficulty, so players don't just grind their way to victory. There's also a second, less obvious reason, but we haven't reached that point yet.

You have also unlocked all the abilities of the game on different characters. The two that I want to bring up is DoubleTap and TripleTap. In today's video, raocow noted how sometimes it felt like Dan fired with a hair trigger, and that multi-shots fired off. That's Double/TripleTap. You fire off 2-3 shots at once instead one. The nice benefit is it only uses ammo for one shot. Also worth noting: If you get Critical Lock-On, it replaces Head Lock-On as an ability.

In the name of Harman...

[strongbadman]

Worth noting about the blood machine:

On the final level there actually isn't a cap on the blood machine. At least, not one that I've seen. You CAN max out your characters then, but there's very little need to do so, since by the time you're ready to grind you're right at the end. Add in to that the smiles you'll be killing are pretty nasty ones, you don't wanna bother. I'm also pretty sure a proper new game plus doesn't exist.

[thatguyif]

So yeah...today's Handsome Men battle was a scripted battle, pure and simple. The dead giveaways:

• KAEDE getting killed during her reload animation, which is meant as a joke about her reload time.
• MASK's "death," "resurrection," and subsequent defeat of Handsome Purple using his Arrows of Light from Panzer Dragoon Macross misssile massacre finishing move that the game conveniently gave you the necessary five vials of thin blood to use.

I think you're onto something when you mention how this level is a meta-commentary about the game. But I think there's a bit more to it than that. It's a meta-commentary about a lot of things. Like, with MASK's fight in particular, you could see it as a reference to tokusatsu/sentai plots where characters are bested in battle, only to take on a new form for a comeback. It could be seen as a reference to anime of a similar nature. Given it's MASK, it can also be a commentary on the tendency of faces/tecnicos to fall in a pro wrestling match, only to make a surprise reappearance and comeback, winning the match with a finishing move. There's a lot you can focus on.

While my broader socio-political/historical commentary is worth noting, the game is very malleable. It's brilliant in its inexplicability.

In the name of Harman...

[thatguyif]

To paraphrase that old adage,

The real Killer7 begins here

It's worth noting that the guy who "fell off" the roof of the building is Hiro Kasai, who was your informant to start the second half of Sunset. That's probably why the mission got triggered in the first place.

And yes, Samantha is dead. Basically, Harman awoke from his vegetative state, and he got mad.

In the name of Harman...

[Catabo]

Look, it's okay to dress like Coyote dresses as long as you don't talk like Coyote talks.

Shout-out to the dinosaur shirt from chapter 3(?).

[thatguyif]

I get the feeling we'll go another 7 before we finish.

Still, you should get started on testing, raocow!

In the name of Harman...