Headscratchers / Killer7

• What the flaming rat heck is going on?
  • James Howell has some ideas.
  • This troper has a simpler one. Harman is a schizophrenic old man suffering heavy delusions. Garcian is a social worker who was hired to take care of him - Samantha is his abusive nurse. Harman begins to believe his delusions more than the reality, and thus, we find him wandering paths in a straight line. While there are no Heaven Smile, there were weapons, and bodies to take said weapons. You've been wandering the streets, visiting an office complex, an apartment building, a Japanese restaurant, a trailer park, an amusement park, and a suburb (and so on), and shooting innocent people.
    • I've heard a similar one, except it involves an old man who's dreaming of a world where he's wanted and powerful and useful again, with his abusive girlfriend and his African-American nephew working their way into his senile fantasies. Possibly while playing Resident Evil.
  • The Occam's Razor answer: All of the characters are in Hell and being forced to live out variations of this game over and over again for eternity.
  • Here's what I got: Harman and Kun Lan aren't enemies or rivals; they're simply chess partners, possibly from a large pantheon of gods. They have a low opinion of humans, and play games with them when they get bored. Both Harman and Kun Lan pick a country (in this game, Harman picks America, while Kun Lan picks Japan), and some chess pieces, making those chess pieces their alternate personae. For the Kings, they use copies of themselves which are in the same style as these chess pieces; Harman uses Principal Harman/Master Harman, and Kun Lan uses Iwazaru. Kun Lan starts by playing off Japan's feelings of hatred towards America following their defeat and America forcing democracy onto them at the end of World War II, using Toru Fukushima and the Yakumo to set up the U.N. Party (I might be getting the U.N. and Liberal parties mixed up). However, he falls into Harman's "trap" (continuing the chess allegory), causing Coburn Elementary to make Emir Parkreiner into one of the greatest assassins alive. Harman then moves all of his pawns (the Coburn assassins) against Kun Lan, with one of them managing to become a Queen by killing the Killer7 (Emir); Harman can now move his King into place (Master Harman). However, Kun Lan was tricking Harman as well, leading to several of Kun Lan's pieces being on Harman's side (Greg Nightmare and the Seven Black Smiles; note that there are eight of them, possibly Pawns). This leads to the Yakumo being stolen, and found by Cloudman/Matsuken (after being split into two halves). Kun Lan retaliates by attempting to win back his pieces (in some versions of chess, Pawns become Queens, while in others, you get pieces back for moving pawns across the board; since Harman and Kun Lan are from different cultures, they play differently) by using Curtis Blackburn and the organ trade. This also leads to the Handsome Men, but they're basically a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment. As for the psychic matrix, ghosts can also be personas, and Emir/Garcian proved himself to be able to make personas. He just doesn't use anyone aside from the Killer7 and Harman - which leads to my theory that the Killer7 aren't split personalities, they're ghosts trapped in one body and fighting for control.
• If the Killer7 fought the Team Fortress 2 cast, who'd win? Assume the Killer7 can be fielded at once for fairness' sake. Or just have it one-on-one.
  • I guess that depends at what point in Killer7 this occurs. Mask is pretty unstoppable at the end of the game, but kinda meh at the beginning. And have we upgraded the assassins fully? Can we use Killer8 instead of Killer7 to try to even out the numbers? There are just too many things you need to specify before we can answer this properly. Though, if we have Killer8, full upgrades, endgame, the Team Fortress 2 guys will go down hard.
    • Not necessarily. The killer7 don't really have any way to deal with a well-placed Sentry, for example, and they don't have a Medic to make them temporarily invincible. Since this is killer8 mode, they don't have the Vision Ring, which means they can't reveal cloaked Spies. Additionally, none of them are really suited to close-range combat (except maybe Young Harman), whereas every Team Fortress 2 character has a pretty damn effective melee weapon. Of course, the real kicker is that the Team Fortress 2 classes can move and shoot at the same time.
  • The Killer 7. Old Harman is immortal and his gun can kill most anything. Try using the Action Replay code that enables you to select him from the TV. He can even survive the insta-kill attacks of boss monsters and the smiles in Killer 8 mode, which will even kill the other characters with the "infinite life" code active.
  • Then let's even the odds. First up: Con versus the Scout.
    • Scout. Con may be technically faster, but the Scout has greater firepower. Plus, he can (with nuclear assistance) dodge anything that comes towards him, and with the Force-A-Nature it only takes about two shots at close-quarter range to take a Fragile Speedster down.
  • Round two. Spy versus Kevin
    • Tie. They'd both go invisible and spend a good ten minutes looking for each other before giving up.
  • Round three. Kaede versus Sniper
    • Sniper. Kaede, even fully upgraded, takes WAY too long to reload, if she doesn't get the sniper the first time. Can you say headshot?
  • Round four. Heavy versus Mask De
    • Depends on what version of Mask De. Heavy would win unless Mask De was fully upgraded, really.
    • If Heavy has his own upgrades, most notably explosive resistance and deflector rounds, which have been proven against massive numbers of grenades, Mask would have his work cut out for him.
  • Round five. Medic versus Garcian.
    • Medic, the Projectile shield is just too overpowering against someone who can't shoot and run, He'd bullrush Garcian and vaporize him.
  • Round six. Dan versus Soldier.
    • Soldier, for the simple reason that Soldier is well, Soldier, making the slow Collateral Shot worthless while Dan's own slow mobility makes him easy prey for either the Beggars Bazooka or Air Strike's barrages.
  • For the purpose of the game, let's throw in Samantha to give both sides nine fighters.
• During the Alter Ego pre-boss fight cutscene, Con gets real excited about seeing an actual Handsome Men pose. Con's blind, so seeing this may be difficult for him.
  • Isn't it obvious? Con is Daredevil.
  • That's pretty much correct, Con can 'see' nearly anything through radar or something... alternatively, it may be a hint that the battle isn't occurring in the 'real' world.
    • Yes, it's radar. Then again, it's not like that he just assumed that there was a Handsome Pose judging by the sounds of yelling Power Ranger clones.
  • A theory posited on a forum somewhere was that his 'seeing' the Handsome pose was a metaphor for how children were blind to the important issues and concerns of our world but more than willing to pay attention to frivolous, childish things like Sentai knockoffs. Perhaps he could also 'see' much of the themepark you visit half way through the game, as well?
  • His headphones are really a Star Trek style visor.
• They're not in Marvel vs. Capcom 3?!
  • Every Capcom character in MvC3 is from a game directly created by Capcom or a company under them. Killer7 was only published by Capcom, unfortunately.
    • No, it was made by Capcom. PS4 is a studio within Capcom, founded to make killer 7, PN03, Viewtiful Joe, Dead Phoenix, and Resident Evil 4.
    • Yes, but Killer7 was made by Grasshopper Manufacture and was the only game not made by PS4
• So, according to the end of chapter 5, all of the Smiths are actually in Garcian's head. If so, then why does Curtiss Recognize Dan? And for that matter, How can they all be present at the same time in Alter-Ego?
  • Because Curtis is also just in Garcian's mind. Or Harmen's mind.
    • See also the "They're all in Hell" comment.
  • According to the main page, it's implied that they really can manifest separately, around the same time it's also implied that they actually can't.
  • In one of the gamefaqs explanations, it says that some parts of Alter Ego happen in the real world, and some in the game world. For instance, the murder of the writer happens in the real world, while the match of the Killer7 vs the Handsome Men was actually a game on the (forbidden) internet, where some people had trained to fight them, even if only in a virtual space, which is why when you finally get to Garcian, the game ends and you see what actually happened when Garcian went to Broadway; "The game world and the real world co-exist as one".
  • Alternatively after absorbing them, Garcian can physically transform into them.
    • Dan used to be real, before Garcian absorbed him. So it's plausible that Curtis would recognize him.
    • Garcian shows signs of having similar powers as Harman, possibly due to training under him, note how the Third Eye used to be Harman's and before that Dimitri's (he's the man sitting next to the younger Harman). So Garcian can assimilate too, to some extent. The difference, I think, is that Garcian didn't realize that he was turning into the other personae. He may have known that the Smith Syndicate was supernatural, but he might have thought that was all Harman's doing - when really, this version was almost entirely him.
• At the intro to Chapter 1, two hundred "Pulsar" missiles are launched at Japan, to which one of the U.S. Department of Defense people notes it's enough that "a country could disappear off the map". Since there are no nuclear weapons left anywhere on the world, how on earth could these Pulsars be that powerful?
  • At best, peace in the killer7 world was achived through dystopia, but it's implied that even these measures are something of a farce. Heaven Smiles spread throughout the world even without air travel; despite the internet being banned, the Smiths manage to fight the Handsome Men in an online game, apparently. It doesn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to say "nuclear weapons were banned and destroyed, but some other even more powerful type of missile was developed, and the various superpowers of the world immediately manufactured a ton because it wasn't technically against the peace accords."
  • Or all of them being destroyed was an outright lie, or at least misleading; it's more than possible that there were countries that the UN wasn't able to convince to destroy their missiles, and they still declared that all of them were destroyed in order to further convince everybody that they had achieved world peace. Hell, given that the missiles were launched from another Asian country, it could have been North Korea who wouldn't/didn't destroy them.
• Why would they ban the internet, airplanes, and (possibly) peaceful nuclear research (say, for power generation or radiology)? I get banning nuclear weapons, but why ban the other three?
  • To erase “transmittable crime.”
    • Or, if you want to be more cynical, people in power simply passed those laws to hold more power over the people whilst excusing them as "necessary precautions."
• Why does Christopher Mills appear as a remnant psyche when he was not killed by the Smiths? There's also Jean Depaul and Benjamin Keane, but at least there you can argue the Smiths directly factored into their deaths.
  • While the name wasn't coined until killer7, the remnant psyche concept had already existed in Suda's previous work, The Silver Case. Throughout the course of the game, Tokio Morishima (the protagonist of the Placebo scenario) assimilates the souls of the recently departed who had died in his proximity, and most of them aren't people he's in some way responsible for killing. He becomes a medium for their parted voices and communicates their attempts at speaking to him through emails to himself. The Smiths most likely assimilate recently departed souls much the same way regardless of whether they killed a person or not, the only key difference is that the Smiths have mastered the ability to commune with the dead (perhaps through Harman's godlike influence since we know he already resurrected Dan once when he was only a corrupt Seattle officer) whereas Morishima was more belligerent and attempted to shut out the remnant psyches.
• Coburn Elementary School's role in the backstory got me thinking: did Suda deliberately mix up Washington D.C. and Washington state for the story? Because there's no way the U.S.'s first presidential election could have taken place on land that was far east of U.S. territory at the time.

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