Killer7

Killer7 is a distinctive action-adventure from Grasshopper Manufacture, led by Goichi Suda, known as Suda51. The player takes control of seven distinct personalities of the assassin Harman Smith, switching between them on the fly, each with different abilities, weapons, and temperament — from a slow but powerful old man, through a fast but fragile girl, to a character able to turn invisible. The game combines movement along linear, almost rail-like paths with the gradual unraveling of a bizarre, strongly stylized story about government conspiracies, assassins, and supernatural threats, split into separate chapters each with its own atmosphere and setting.

The visual style, with bold flat colors, comic-book shading, and an unconventional, often fixed camera, made Killer7 one of the most distinctive games of its generation, and it is still cited today as an example of an auteur approach to design that would be hard to push through in mainstream production again. The controls were deliberately simplified — movement happened along predetermined lines, with the player moving between fixed points and focusing mainly on aiming, solving simple puzzles, and choosing which of Harman Smith's personalities to use for a given situation.

The PS2 version launched alongside the GameCube release and was practically identical in content and gameplay — both versions were developed side by side in the same development cycle under publisher Capcom. The only real difference lay in the technical specs of the media: the GameCube at the time used smaller optical discs with limited capacity compared to the standard DVDs the PS2 version used, which for games with similarly stylized and data-heavy environments usually showed up in data compression demands and in loading times between chapters. The story, characters, music, and progression, however, remained the same on both platforms — neither version added or removed any content.

Why play it: For an experience virtually identical to the GameCube version — the bizarre visual style, nonlinear storytelling, and Suda51's unmistakable direction remain unchanged on PS2, just with somewhat longer loading between chapters.