“Punk Rock,” Auteurship, and Goichi Suda

Goichi Suda of Grasshopper Manufacture leads teams to make games that really only Goichi Suda could possibly influence. I want to share what his works mean to me, how I interpret them (at this moment in my life), and the conclusion I have so far kept coming to with his and Grasshopper Manufacture’s works at large. (Notable exceptions of titles are omitted because I don’t remember them too well or they’re pretty hard to grok on casual plays, like Sine Mora, so if you’re looking for that one writer who is FINALLY gonna write about Grasshopper’s playable entry in the Short Peace anthology because NO one has talked about it even when it was just released, I must politely assure you this is not that essay.)

Auteurship over the past several years has become a hot topic, especially as we delve into more toxic directors and creative leads in film and games; as the worst of them rear their heads, we ask ourselves, “should we value asshole geniuses even as they cause harm to those trying to make their visions a reality?” I’ve never really known where I fell on this topic, as some of my favorite works have been by auteurs. There’s something about unpacking a singular person’s voice and mindset from a complex and immersive work that feels palpable; it’s easy to feel a connection between yourself and some unknown yet strangely real entity who you might never meet, simply because you catch that spark of “a person, a specific person with a specific mindset made this.” In the back of your head, you know a game is developed by dozens, hundreds, and sometimes thousands of individuals, because that’s the reality of what you’re playing. However, when someone like Goichi Suda is leading a team, be it as writer or director or designer or what have you, there is something compelling about “knowing” a bit more about this one man who doesn’t normally even set foot on the same continent as you by way of the kinds of stuff he makes.

And yet, with all this talk of auteurship, of “knowing” a creator, I could not actually explain to you what I know about Suda51, other than he claims he came up with the idea for No More Heroes while on the toilet. Everything else is a bizarre mix of naked influences, stilted and downright weird dialog, supernatural and punk rock and gonzo visuals, and visual style and tone shifts at the drop of a hat.

Killer7 was the first title I played from Grasshopper Manufacture. The only reason I can tell you it was largely a political game was because I read a plot synopsis on Gamefaqs, because I sure as hell didn’t pick that up when I was still early in high school playing it on Gamecube. As I played more, it became one of a handful of titles I’d discuss with other people to unpack its meaning — that I’d replay with the sole intent of coming to a better understanding of it — as opposed to many other games and movies and comics where I was honestly fine getting to the end, being satisfied (or not) by what I experienced, and moving on to the next thing.

It stuck in my head for years, partially because it was a game with Cam Clarke in it (I was huge on Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2, which he played prominent roles as a melodramatic antagonist), and partially because it was a game that I had so much difficulty describing to anyone in a way that would compel them to play. I’ve all too often been correctly tokenized as the person who will play a game if someone tells me it’s bad and weird, as if that is my honey. I will especially play a game if someone tells me it’s their favorite game but they know no one should play it because it’s very bad in a lot of ways. Killer7 became that kind of game for me; everything about it flew in the face of what I considered “good” (save for its visual aesthetic, which still pops off whether you view it in 4:3 on a CRT or in crisp HD on a 4K-compatible monitor) and it became impossible for me to recommend its rough gunplay, its awkward movement systems, its bizarre narrative that frankly still won’t make sense after a few plays if you don’t really pay attention to key lines and open yourself up to metaphors being flung like so much spaghetti desperate to stick to a wall.

As No More Heroes released, I found myself at odds, because ostensibly this was an entirely different game from Killer7. It was a more crass, naked, geeky experience for the specific kinds of people who held Astroboy and Tokyo Gore Police with almost the same cultural significance to the self — and that’s saying a lot considering Killer7 not only featured some bizarre visual monstrosities but also an entire color-based tokusatsu squadron of transforming “heroes,” dual-wielding otaku sensibilities and niche slasher flicks all while telling a story about jingoism and the endless culture of global violence oft pushed by our own governments. Which… honestly, if you get down to it, doesn’t seem that different from No More Heroes, huh? NMH is far more brazen, sure, and features a more straightforward visual style by comparison, but you’re still wielding lightsabers and collecting anime shirts as you are further compelled toward violence for not only its own sake but for the sake of an economy which seems exclusively motivated by violence.

Not all of his works are set up like this; Flower Sun & Rain, a title which Westerners only got in the form of a DS game, was a Twin Peaks setup that seemed to eschew the nascent romanticism at the heart of even the freakiest of David Lynch’s works in favor of going harder into an off-kilter mystery, all in a seeming Groundhog’s Day setup. The Silver Case, which would only find its way to Western shores well after its initial heyday, delights in the crassness and clinical nature of detectives and policework while also providing a world where the practice of killology, a police philosophy which pushes the idea that police are the last line of defense between order and chaos which must be upheld by any means necessary, is pushed to illogical extremes as elements of the supernatural compel people to absurd violence, all while somehow making a critique on how we view violence all too brazenly, like if someone made a cop procedural of Cronenberg’s Videodrome. Shadows of the Damned… Well, that’s mostly boner jokes. It’s really fun, though, and you should play it.

(A note you can skip: Shadows of the Damned is more than just a bunch of boner jokes. It really is a lot of fun, though a bit frustrating at times, and does things with tropes and formula that I think are genuinely fun and clever.)

Now, for the record: I have no idea what the hell “punk rock” is to Suda51, despite his attempts to assert that his works are “punk rock.” This isn’t a criticism but an acknowledgment that, frankly, I don’t always know what the hell Suda51 is talking about in his games, and I think that’s kind of the point, which seems kinda weird. But as I understand “punk rock” from his titles, he takes a very brazen, crass approach to narrative in which we aren’t treated to any heavy-handed morals or any one specific message, and we have to find it in key lines that are shouted at the coolest possible moment to say them, almost as if there is an expectation to whip the crowd into a frenzy. As the assassin Travis Touchdown screams he is human, a cold-blooded killer who shouldn’t be granted mercy for his viewpoint in life, that his is a life he wouldn’t wish on anyone else, all while showering in the blood of his recently conquered foe, we stand in the mosh screaming with him or sitting silently with the controller in hand going, “Oh, so he’s a self-aware monster. Violence is bad, and we shouldn’t aspire to be like him even as we see more and more of ourselves in him and we see his vulnerabilities and boundaries, especially because he is a product of the violent world he lives in, I get it.”

They’re also titles which have more of an intent to hit you with feeling and emotion — not make you feel, but make you feel others’ feelings. In no other title than Silver Case can I more accurately describe his dialog as “like a book with all but the dialog removed,” so you’re left with dense yet frenzied speech and cadence where you must intuit the nuance as best you can with limited visual information, but as it “clicks,” suddenly your brain becomes a theaterscape where living, breathing bodies are doing the work of static images, with wry smiles and laughter during bits that, read plainly in a vacuum, feel serious and melodramatic, yet in context feel the weight of years of companionship and partnership and lived experiences in an often unkind world. You’re not really concerned with the accuracy of what’s being spoken to you but the things the expression makes you feel, and sometimes these can be heavy-handed preaching to the choir or glimpses into personal character revelations that are shared in passing to the world at large, personal lines that are granted new meaning as they reach new recipients, with just enough scrubbed out that they could mean whole worlds to someone in the right state at the right time.

In that sense, the “punk rock” nature of Suda51 starts to make sense. Much like his works, his description of “punk rock” isn’t so much about evoking a very specific aesthetic, but a mindset and emotional state involved in experiencing and making it; a kludge of experiences and interests and societal criticisms mashed together into a paste and assembled into labyrinthine, impossible structures where, with each step, you can see glimpses of their source, what makes each step, what makes each wall and floor and ceiling, in a horrible Cronenbergian monstrosity that strikes you into silence for its seeming imperceptibility, but by god do you feel something about it.