The Syndicate's History

Yahtzee reviews Romeo is a Dead Man, exploring its Suda51-esque plot, combat, and the peculiar 'Bastard' system. Is it a triumph or a tedious affair?

This week on Fully Rambomatic, Yahtzee reviewed Romeo is a Dead Man.

Long-term viewers will know that I'm a fan of Suda51, the Japanese game developer who's kind of like what you'd get if you took a stream of consciousness and gave it creative control and a haircut. His games, including his signature No More Heroes franchise, are often surreal, irreverent, self-indulgent, ultra-violent, up and down quality-wise, but most importantly, never dull, and about a million miles from the hacked-out committee-driven realm of mainstream Western game design from which he'd no doubt be swiftly defenestrated before he was more than three slides into his pitch deck. And I wouldn't have it any other way, which is why I was keen to try out his new one, Romeo Must Die-- I mean, Romeo is a Dead Man. Sorry, I keep doing that. The first one's a film, isn't it? And thinking about it, Romeo is a Dead Man would be the logical follow-up to Romeo Must Die; maybe it is an unofficial sequel. Romeo is a Dead Man's plot is certainly presented like it's a sequel, in that the entire premise is summarized with a narration over stills like it's not particularly important.

We play as Romeo Stargazer, a sheriff's deputy in the small town of Deadford whose interesting qualities begin and end with his name, and who falls in love with a mysterious woman inevitably named "Juliet", who, it turns out, was some kind of multidimensional cosmic entity who proceeded to destroy all of space and time, somehow, I think. At the same time, Romeo gets his face bitten off by one of her minions, but gets brought back to life by his genius scientist grandfather - been watching Rick and Morty, have we, Suda? - as a Kamen Rider-esque masked superhero named Deadman, whose signature weapon is the Deadball. Fucking Christ, you been hanging out with Hideo Kojima or something? Anyway, he gets recruited by the FBI-- Hang on, I thought space and time got destroyed! They impound a fucking TARDIS? And as part of the space-time police, he has to explore the fragments of reality to kill zombie hordes and track down the many evil dimensional clones of Juliet, in hopes of reuniting with the one he liked. And it is as he is confronting a Juliet clone who proceeds to rip her own head off and turn into a sort of giant killer Weetabix that our participation in the plot actually begins.

So now comes the difficult task of explaining what Romeo is a Dead Man is as a game. On the surface, it's a third-person hack-and-slash, much like No More Heroes; in fact, I doubt you'll be surprised to learn that the Deadball takes the form of a beam katana in combat, and much like with No More Heroes, Romeo wields it like there's something he's very afraid of and disgusted about stuck to the end. But the overall tone of Romeo feels much more understated, with much less of the energy and overt satire; Romeo himself is certainly no Travis Touchdown, in that he has the personality of a brick wall stumbling bewildered through a ceiling convention.

The missions all consist of exploring a location, usually some kind of public building, killing the monsters that infest it, and then using magic TV sets to enter an equivalent subspace version of the same area where everything's made of cubes and there aren't any monsters, doing things to unlock doors and pathways in the real world so you can reach the objective. It's weirdly consistent with this, and now I'm going to have to make a liar of myself, because earlier, I said Suda51's games never get dull, and that's what this became after a while. It's like, every now and again, all progress and gameplay is halted until we go into the attic and itemize our dead grandma's hoarded collection of completed Sudoku puzzles. The funny thing about Suda is that it's impossible to tell if certain aspects of his games are like that as a joke, or to appease the mad space fish inside his brain, or just because he couldn't be arsed. And the subspace parts of the levels definitely feel like a "cannot be arsed" person's approach to padding out the runtime; see also the way the game switches to top-down 2D pixel art whenevr you're in your home spaceship that is a thing that you have.

So combat is a bit mashy, as I said, and Romeo tends to commit to his animations a touch too long, which makes him annoyingly open to interruption and stunning. But I realized not long in that while the basic heavy attack takes ages to wind up, the jump heavy attack does the same damage and is more-or-less instant, so I spent a lot of time after that getting through battles with foot-stomping hissy fits, and that feels like a design oversight. Not that the combat was ever that hard; it can get hairy when you're having to fight off large groups, but I got through the whole game only using the starting sword and the starting gun. You can acquire other weapons - there's slower but more powerful ones, there's faster but less powerful ones - but I didn't see the point when the balanced options are just fine in every situation, and in the course of a playthrough, I didn't acquire enough upgrade items to max out the stats of even one set of weapons. So it's possible the additional weapons are a trap, or important moral lesson on appreciating what you have.

In short, bit flabby, but an interesting addition is that you are assisted in combat by a bunch of complete bastards. No, really, that's what they're called: Bastards. They resemble corpses in sparkly costumes, and they all have unique cooldown abilities you call upon in battle: one's a turret, one heals you, one's a good old-fashioned wholesome suicide bomber. Although, it'd be nice if the suicide bomber actually did his job when I called upon him; half the time, the enemy would hit him, and he'd just not explode. "Welp, I've suddenly realized life is worth living. You're on your own. Bye!" Wow, you guys are aptly named.

But that's not the really annoying part about Bastards; it's that you have to grow them from seeds in your home base, and every time you pull one up, there's a button prompt and a prolonged cutscene, and then we have to pick their name and personality quirk, which was cute the first time, not so much after Bastard 37. You're also obliged to merge Bastards to create ones with competitive stats, Persona-style, and that requires mashing the "Skip" button through another, like, four mini-cutscenes, and then they don't just give you the result; you have to plant it again and immediately pull it out of the ground again with another prolonged unearthing sequence. So things get very tedious when there's a lot of Bastard husbandry on the schedule.

Serious question: what could one say is Romeo is a Dead Man's genre, gameplay aside? Is it comedy, horror, romance, sci-fi? It is none of those things; one could only call it, in all summation, "a Suda51 game", and frankly, not one of his best. Core gameplay's not that interesting, and neither is the plot; the ending in particular doesn't resolve much of anything relating to Romeo's situation, not that there was much to invest me in it. But then I took a step back and considered, "What if this game isn't about Romeo Stargazer, who has, as previously established, the personality of an unpainted wooden duck on display outside a knick-knack shop? What if this is a game about Suda51?" In broad terms, the plot is about a search for meaning after the destruction of a prior existence, and doesn't that feel apt coming from a creator who just wrapped up the series he's best known for, who perhaps might now be seeking a new direction in life? Is Romeo Suda51, a once-dead man brought back to life to recover an idealized lost love - that is, creative muse - and encountering nothing but hollow imitations? And where do the Bastards come into all this, these unreliable beings cultivated to life to defend Romeo from attackers? The fans, perhaps? Am I a Bastard, Suda? Actually, don't answer that.

Grew up around where Shakespeare was born actually: Yahtzee

And I hear Rosencrantz and Guildenstern aren't looking too healthy either