After finishing Killer 7 last night, I thought I would check for any online resources. Now that I know the ending (Mask de Smith betrays the team to Kun Lan to open a Heaven Smile fitness club, and is then erased from existence when the player - breaking the fourth wall in direct consult with Harman Smith - deletes his save file from the TV), I could forage blissfully unimpeded by spoilers. Any game that expects us to seriously accept a character with the name "Trevor Pearlharbor" is approaching a Twin Peaksian level of dramatic hilarity, and I wanted to Learn More About It.

I found this on GameFAQs (head for the one titled "Plot Analysis"), an investigation weighty enough to stand as someone's graduate thesis. Author James Clinton Powell describes himself as a poet, and it is a kind of poetry the way he weaves elements from the game with real-world history and his own educated speculation to craft a document that is insanely thorough and exhaustively specific. You read it and you wonder how the dude gets through the day.

Anyway, if you played the game and found yourself at all bamboozled by the seemingly scattershot, untenable storyline, give it a read. Here's some of my favorite paragraphs, to give you an idea what you're in for. Turns out, it's terribly intense... and, you know what, it does actually make sense. In this interpretation.

Why the moon? "The full moon is a symbol of transformation. It throbs full screen while each mission loads. As well, when Garcian sees Emir standing, dazed, atop the Union Hotel, the full moon is in the background. I take the persistence of the full moon as a symbol that the Harman Assassins--and Harman himself--were killed during a full moon. If, as I think, Emir has killed Harman and crew just before killing Hulbert, then Harman and the Assassins were killed a full three days befor the recording of Hulbert's cassette tapes."

On the Hotel level: "Kun Lan's dialogue implies that they have been visited recently by successive people. H. H.'s dialogue implies that these visitations are the "surfacing" of people. I propose that, here, Kun Lan and H. H. allude to their experience of Garcian's awakening into his identity as Emir. As Garcian revisits each murder, the spirit of the victim "surfaces" like a bubble--that is, he or she rises to the top of the hotel, through the elevator, and enters the Forbidden Room. These events occur parallel to Garcian's loss of each Persona, because he can no longer identify himself AS them."

About the hilarious fighting game sequence: "The "video game" layer of the ALTER EGO mission takes the game to a more metaphorical level. We see Kun Lan putting down a controller, after we watch the credits for what looks like an online fighting game made by Capcom. This implies that we, as players, have been playing an online video game against Kun Lan."

Religious allusions in Andrei Ulmeyda: "Ulmeyda, importantly, represents most of the characteristics of Western religion. As we know from Clarence's monologue at the end of CLOUDMAN, Ulmeyda's followers drank Ulmeyda's blood; this reflects the ritual of the Last Supper, in Christian tradition. Further, Ulmeyda delberately infected himself with various lethal diseases, and overcame them. His blood is filled with numerous antibodies to genuinely deadly diseases, giving his blood a degree of "healing power," much as Christ's body is believed to have held in the Christian tradition."

Duality in Curtis Blackburn: "Ayame Blackburn is one half of another light-and-dark juxtaposition. Remember that Curtis Blackburn also taught Dan everything that he knew. Presumably, given Curtis' unique skills, he also taught Dan how to perform the Collateral Shot. Ayame Blackburn's strength is found by entering into darkness; Dan's strength is found by emitting light. I suspect that they are two halves of Curtis Blackburn's total knowledge."

I also enjoyed the lengthy analysis of the game's timeline and how it follows from our own American history with Japan, from WWII through Reagan's historic re-establishment of accord... the suggestion that the Smiths' individual powers were inspired by their deaths... and the explanation as to why the VO sounds like somebody is backwards-sampling on a Casio:

...when the game was made originally in Japanese, the characters' lines were spoken in clear English. However, the language was closer to Engrish: English made slightly incomprehensible through Japanese trans- lation. Knowing that native English speakers would be disturbed by the poor grammar and syntax, the developers decided to present the voices garbled and accompanied with grammatically correct subtitles.

It says something incredible about Killer 7 - and about video games in general - that it can inspire such intense scrutiny and still maintain substance.