I’ve had a very long and troubled time with Suda 51 and his development team Grasshopper Manufacture. Apart from Sine Mora, the 2-D shooter that was mainly devised by a separate team and Black Knight Sword, their games have had the shared features of being clumsy in game mechanic execution, uncomfortably denigrating of females but interesting artistically.
The only game that I can say I enjoyed, after hating it for years, was Shadows of the Damned.
So I don’t know why I played Lollipop Chainsaw. Well I do, it was because a couple of friends raved about it and I was in a second hand store and my girlfriend was amused by the cover and insisted I buy it.
She has since apologised for encouraging me to buy this piece of crap.
Every other Suda 51 game, I have been able to appreciate on some level. There was something in all of them that signalled that there was some kind of vision, however misguided, behind whatever discombobulated mess I was having to play through.
Lollipop Chainsaw has bad jokes, awful voice acting, stilted level design, combat that makes Onechanbara look refined in its intent and an art style that seems to exist only to hide the utterly crumby character models.
This is a game that thinks character depth is having a perfectly formed female lead who worries about being too fat. It has an upgrade system with all kinds of moves that are inessential to completing the game and in some cases a hindrance to any possible enjoyment, the little that there is.
The input feels laggy and the combat sections feel tacked together without any sense of flow or rhythm. The boss battles are the worst offenders with some being a drudgery of repeated attack patterns with the antagonist completely invincible for swathes of time to others being a walk over in the most disappointing fashion. The game just can’t seem to find a middle ground.
The grindhouse aesthetic – something I am utterly sick of seeing in games – is there to hide the low poly count of the models. ‘Look, it is meant to look shit because that is what we were aiming for!’ is what they want to say but it feels disingenuous.  I shouldn’t really criticise them for trying to work with the shit stain of hand they were dealt but I can’t help resent them for trying to flog me this crap as acceptable.
People need to get over Grasshopper Manufacture, this punk rock ethos thing that people seem so attached to seem to forget that a lot of Punk sounds like shit and that is mainly because the people creating it don’t know what they are doing.
They never charge 60 dollars for it though.
Comments
4 responses to “Mid-Week F.A.P.: Lollipop Chainsaw”
I admit I was curious about what you'd make of this one. It sounded dreadful to me but sometimes you manage to find a gem where others see turds.
Alas, this sounds like just a turd.
One of my many in-progress-currently-on-hold articles is an assault on that punk metaphor. It annoys the hell out of me at the best of times, most of all when people use it to mean lazy or shoddy. As for this kind of argument:
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/post/173616-trolling…
All I can say is that if that's what you take from punk rock in space year 2013, you need to pull your head out of your arse because it's been up there for over thirty years. Way to categorise an entire subculture from an outsider's perspective. Jesus.
A turd indeed.
Looking back on the last lines of that FAP I would rather have written. Grasshopper Manufacture are about as Punk as the most recent Green Day forays.
Haha, now that I can get onboard with. Arena rock, concept albums and major labels don't exactly scream independence, DIY ethics or outsider aesthetics.
I mean, I'm glad GD aren't just trying to re-live past glories and are pursuing new creative directions, good for them! But I'm not sorry to have parted ways with them. And I can't say I feel I'm missing anything by ignoring Suda51's work.
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