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For the trilogy, seekontek.netFor the supplement, see thefan translation atdelta headtranslationthree-word catchphrase—it provided a productivemeans through which to read games markedby his brand.2013’s Killer is Dead was heralded as a return toform for the auteur, after a number of diversions;fans anxiously anticipated a return to the themesof Killer7 after years of Lollipop Chainsaws. It waswidely rumored that Suda51 had taken a backseaton directing “his” games sometime aroundthe release of No More Heroes; but fans still boughtthem, in hopes of a return to form.What this mentality ignored wasthat the phrase wasn’t an authorialsignature, but a productiveframing.A year prior to the release of Killer is Dead, Suda51’sGrasshopper Manufacture participated in a compilationgame, published by Level-5, for the Nintendo3DS handheld console. Titled Guild01, it wasintended as a showcase for Japanese auteur designers.Grasshopper Manufacture’s contributionwas Liberation Maiden, a game in which the Presidentof a future Japan (who happens to be a teenagegirl) pilots a mecha to fight off “The Dominion”and restore Japan to its natural beauty.For more on this, see:ClockworkWorldsThe mecha genre itself was just beginning a resurgencewhen Liberation Maiden came out. Theremake of Neon Genesis Evangelion had begun, andPacific Rim was well into development. The followingyear, the compilation’s sequel included agame called Attack of the Friday Monsters! whichmore directly addressed the conventions and historyof the mecha and kaiju genres, and the waysin which they are used to create futures for whichwe can all be nostalgic.This nostalgia is always haunted. The kaiju genre,and its most famous figure, Godzilla, are wellknown for being a response to the atomic bomb
and to widespread industrialization. They are politicalin a way that the depiction of mechas is not,even though the two are historically intertwined.The history, however, is largely avoided when thegenres are split; that Liberation Maiden is a mechagame is in some sense an attempt to avoid the politicsof history.A future for which we can all becomfortably nostalgic sits uneasilywith the imperative to killthe past.Liberation Maiden manages to create a future whichinverts the past. As the player shoots lasers at enemiesand buildings, causing them to burst intoflora, bits and pieces of narrative are unlocked.These unlocks happen when the player does unintuitivethings like “flying to the edge of the combatzone;” not challenges so much as suggestionsto play the game poorly. Six of these unlockablesare marked “History,” and provide worldbuildingcontext. “100 years in the future,” Japan is awaning ecological paradise under semi-subjugationby “The Dominion,” and is leading a worldwideeffort to resist the Dominion’s strangleholdon the world.The “sole ruler of the Dominion[,] known onlyas ‘the Chairman,’” never shows up in the gameproper. His “ambitions border on madness,” asthe leader of a nation whose “radical political philosophyis little more than a front for spreadingtheir own ideals and national interests, leadingthem to wage war against the entire world.” TheChairman, who is a clear analogue of Mao, alsohas weaponry described as “[l]acking any artisticaesthetics.”Over the course of the played through narrative,the Dominion is only ever given a single momentof visual identification; after the player has defeatedthe final boss, a large airship appears bear-
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Page 39 and 40: A few weeks later, my family and I
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