Suda is a genius. It's too bad he's wasting that genius as the Grasshopper CEO instead of writing and directing games like he used to.
You can tell without looking when he hasn't contributed to a GHM game. They're just not as interesting. NMH2 is superior to the first game in every way... except the writing and the sense of style. It's like going from a masterful low budget indie film to a big-budget, less creative sequel with a "safer" director.
I still like GHM games a lot though. And I appreciate it when Suda writes a game every once in a while. I think Lollipop Chainsaw is the only one of their "big" releases that I haven't played yet.
I feel like he hasn't really gotten a chance to actually be in charge of anything in some time, though. I wonder how he feels about that; Killer Is Dead was supposed to be his next game where he had complete control, then nope, it was someone else's project. Then Lily Bergamo was supposed to be, but then it turned into Let It Die and that didn't happen then either.
At least he wrote KiD's script... but he'll probably never "direct" a game again, and that makes me sad.
I actually really like Let It Die, especially considering it's a F2P game. (Though I haven't yet hit that "optional" paywall that exists in all F2P games, so my opinion may change.) But it's far from the studio's highest creative achievement, and I don't want GHM locked into making F2P stuff forever now that they've been acquired.
Killer7 is interesting, I'm still not entirely sure how much of it is supposed to be symbolic and how much of it is faux-symbolism. Not to mention some of the symbolism is just build up for a dumb pun.
It has some extremely memorable sound effects, though. Some of the Heaven Smile laughs and the heartbeat during a Target's intro cutscene are really unnerving.
Out of interest, what "faux-symbolism" are you thinking of?
I played Killer is dead 3 times and i still dont get the story.
I like KiD a lot, and it definitely has that Suda style, but yeah... the story is all over the place. It's so hard to follow that it made me wonder if there was an issue with the translation/localization.