by [name redacted]

Expanded from my weekly column at Next Generation, and posted on the game’s release date.

Samurai Champloo is the latest hit by Cowboy Bebop creator Shinichiro Watanabe, who might well be described as the Sergio Leone or Quentin Tarantino of the anime world. killer7 developer Grasshopper Manufacture has what might be described as strong aspirations to be the Quentin Tarantino of the videogame world. So this is a sort of clever pairing.

A Japanese trend I’ve begun to notice lately is the subcontracting of lucrative licenses to the most prestigious niche or up-and-coming developers – the likes of Treasure, Dimps, Cavia, Yuke’s. These are damned good developers, each with specific skill sets, specific views toward what makes a good videogame, and a substantial cult following. The trend is not unlike Hollywood’s recent predilection toward matching big blockbusters to the Cannes elite, resulting in movies like Batman Begins and the Spider-Man series.

Over here, any parallels are more the exception than the rule. The closest you really get are the likes of Neversoft, which sprang out of nowhere with Tony Hawk and – despite its success – has managed to keep relatively small and self-contained, seemingly more interested in exploring its ideas about design than in growth for the sake of growth. Treyarch is another good example. Maybe some past incarnations of Shiny or Raven or BioWare would count, though in their current forms they’re a little too… important.

Playing the Player

Grasshopper Manufacture is a somewhat different story; the developer has only a handful of games to its credit, all of which are artsy, experimental, and most certainly original. For Grasshopper to land the Samurai Champloo license as its first licensed game, that’s kind of like… I don’t know, the guys behind Façade getting the license to the next Kaufman/Jonze movie. It’s appropriate and yet – where the hell did that come from?

The result is a game that, like all of Gouchi Suda’s work, relies on a sort of deconstructionalist idea of modern videogame design to enhance the underlying subjectivity of the experience in bizarre ways. The big talking point is the relationship between the underlying music and on-screen action; every attack combo available to the player is timed to the music. The player can choose between two soundtracks for any given level, each of which opens different control possibilities. Bloodletting is hyper-gory by intention, to get a reaction out of the player. It’s all… that kind of stuff: the psychology of presentation, to elicit a particular reaction out of the player. It’s basically a reappropriation of film techniques.

The problem, of course, is that there’s more to videogames than just the presentation – and there’s only so far you can get by toying with the player. Indeed Suda’s games are often so self-obsessed as to be annoying to actually play. You feel like the game is constantly giving itself high-fives, rather than paying attention to your own input. Still, for what it is, Suda’s style is well-suited to a hip narrative license like this. And given that the game is supposed to represent a “lost chapter” from the series, perhaps the more direct authorial control the better. I’m sure Roger Ebert would appreciate the sentiment.