YMMV / Killer7

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Due to the game's ambiguous nature, this leaves the characters as this:
  • Harman and Kun Lan: Opposites? Opponents? Or just two sides of the same coin?
  • Emir Parkreiner: We're never given a look into his personality and inner thoughts, though the manual refers to him as psychotic in some way. But given Garcian's reactions to his actions, one has to wonder whether he regrets some of his actions and sees himself as a monster because of them. At one point, Kun Lan tells a story about a high school football player who snapped after being subjected to sexual abuse by his mother; one fan theory is that he's actually talking about Emir.
  • How much of Killer 7's personalities are their actual personalities and not just Emir's view of them? Notably, their death scenes seems to imply that their personalities are somewhat different from the ones they have throughout the game. It's hard to tell with some of them since a lot of them don't get any proper focus in the game.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • The Last Shot Smile, boss of the Playable Epilogue.
  • Most Smiles that appear as mid-bosses are usually this, since they normally require a single hit to kill. However, most of these are justified since they become regular enemies. The last two do not, however, and are two of the toughest bosses in the game. In fact, you can make an argument that the last one is the Final Boss and the ones after are Post Final Bosses.
• Awesome Music: The soundtrack by Masafumi Takada and Jun Fukuda covers a wide variety of genres, and ranges from creepy and atmospheric to just plain awesome and catchy.
  • Some good examples include Sweet Blue Flag (Ayame Blackburn's battle theme,) Tecks Mecks (the stage music for Cloudman,) Rave On (the most awesome music for walking down a completely featureless corridor ever) and Blackburn (the stage music for the inside of Curtis' house.)
  • Even more good examples include Emoticon (Suzie's theme) and Residence (one of the stage themes for Alter Ego.)
  • Taxidermy, the song that plays after Dan allows Curtis to be killed by his own device is pure Nightmare Fuel.
• Camera Screw: The camera mostly displays from the ground, giving you the best view of your chosen assassin's legs with the only camera control being a choice between looking in front of you or behind you. Otherwise, the camera will be switching back and forth between different angles unpredictably, from aerial shots to side views, to a fixed point in the corner or at far side of the room, to viewing the front of you so you must walk towards the camera, to making you walk away from the camera. Sometimes, the camera doesn't bother focusing on you at all and instead chooses to look at a poster of a bikini-clad girl — and when it decides to ogle the poster of the bikini girl, that's actually a clue to one of the game's puzzles. This is just that sort of game. And yet it's not as much of a problem as you may think, because when you pull your gun (the only time camera position matters in this game), it goes right into first-person view, no matter what it's doing otherwise.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Con is by far the most used character by virtue of his insanely fast fire rate, reload, and movement speed, as well as the fact that gems one of only two characters to learn the insanely powerful Critical Lock-On early instead of needing to be maxed out. His only weakness is his low health, which is rendered moot upon obtaining the Stamina Ring at the start of Cloudman. The vast majority of players will always have him out outside of specific sections where other characters are required or if KAEDE's sniping is called for.
  • Of the two non-puzzle rings, the Stamina Ring is preferred over the Power Ring. The only fights where doing extra damage actually matters are AYAME Blackburn and the Galactic Tomahawk Smile, and even then the damage boost the Power Ring provides is minuscule compared to the health bonus of the Stamina Ring.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Creepy Awesome: About half of everyone in the game. The ghosts helping the Smiths, Heaven Smiles, Kevin Smith...
• Creepy Cute: Susie Sumner is a cute girl..who killed millions before she died and came back as a severed head. Also, her dialogue is recorded with a text to speech program.
• Cult Classic: Introduced the Western world to Suda51, and many still consider it the high water mark of his career (including Suda himself).
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Broken and Rolling Smiles move really fast and their weakpoints are a nightmare to hit.
  • Poison Smiles are normally just a way to train the player to use weakpoints (if they're killed normally, they get right back up). On the unlockable killer8 ultra-hard difficulty, however, they become incredibly dangerous as all weakpoints are invisible. You're forced to guess at random, shooting different parts of the Smile until you get it right as they get closer and closer. (You could also use a counter attack on them, but Young Harman doesn't have one and all of the other characters are woefully underpowered in this mode).
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • For a character that gets very little development, Con Smith is notably popular among fans of the game. He's very fast at shooting, reloads quickly, runs quickly (so you can get to Harman's Room and back in a short amount of time), and the low power of his bullets and low health don't matter because you can take out a Heaven's Smile before it gets to you.
  • KAEDE has literally zero ingame character development, outside of the Camellia Smile symbolism, but remains popular for her very simple, yet strikingly memorable, character design.
  • Andrei Ulmeyda, despite only appearing for one chapter, is a fan-favorite thanks to his over-the-top eccentricity and incredibly hammy performance by Cam Clarke. His utterly horrifying boss battle is also considered to be one of, if not the, most memorable in the game.
  • Among the Remnant Psyches, Travis Bell and Susie Sumner seem to be the most liked.
• Fanfic Fuel: The first playable level is stated to be the thirty-third contract the killer7 have taken on. There is zero detail on what the preceding 32 were, apart from that poor sod in the phone booth in the introductory cutscene presumably being one.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Critical Lock-On, obtained by KAEDE and Con upon leveling all their attributes to four and by Dan, Kevin, and Coyote upon maxing them out. When a Heaven Smile with a normal weak point is scanned with this ability unlocked, it will automatically target the weak point, removing the need to actually aim.
  • The PC version has mouse aim, which, in a game balanced for a controller, can tear the difficulty a new one.
• Ho Yay:
  • Travis' description of how he got killed by the Killer7 is pretty suggestive.
  • Once he becomes a Remnant Psyche, Mills gets very affectionate towards Garcian, calling him "Garcie" and fretting over him crying (unseen by the player).
  • Harman and Kun Lan, especially since a literal interpretation of the Last Shot Smile is that Kun Lan dresses up in bondage for Harman.
• Magnificent Bastard: See here.
• One-Scene Wonder: The Russian Roulette scene with Benjamin Keane is considered one of the best scenes in the game, as well as being Keane's only cutscene.
• Polished Port: The PC port adds mouse aiming, HD and widescreen support (with 2D elements repositioned or expanded instead of stretching them), and runs at a smooth 60 FPS. There is also the option to select between Japanese and English language versions (the voices are the same in both except for the garbled speech of the Remnant Psyches, and Japanese version adds subtitles), and added keyboard shortcuts for functions such as switching between different characters and healing. The only thing to really complain about is that all on-screen button prompts are for gamepad.
• Signature Scene: On a lighthearted note, the Cloudman intro. On a darker note, Garcian and Keane's game of Russian Roulette.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • Oddly enough, Ministry of Education, the final boss's theme, sounds a lot like Johann Sebastian Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor (c.f. here).
  • The track "Electronical Parade" that plays during the ISZK Land segment is based on a riff from the song Baroque Hoedown, which is famous for being used in Disney's Electrical Parade.
• That One Boss:
  • Ayame Blackburn is ridiculously hard to hit and has a tendency to tag you with bullets every few seconds.
  • Andrei Ulmeyda starts the fight by trying to horrify the player, causing them to run away from him and get lost in the maze. And running into him is a One-Hit Kill. Good luck.
  • The last two Queens: the Timer Smile and Galactic Tomahawk Smile, to the point where the latter is more of a Final Boss than Greg Nightmare, Emir Parkreiner, and the Last Shot Smile could ever hope to be.
• That One Level: killer8 makes the Kaku Building into the hardest level in the game, as the building has very tight spaces while dealing with the Smiles, who one hit kill most characters.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: 7 playable characters (plus Harman making 8), but only three of them (Garcian, Harman and Dan) get any real focus. Mask gets some interaction with Jean, Con gets a couple of lines in a cutscene, and KAEDE, Coyote and Kevin are just left by the wayside.
  • Hand in killer7 mentions some interesting details about the characters that are just screaming to be fleshed out. According to it, KAEDE was killed by her brother who was a member of Japan's Liberal Party, by order of Matsuoka. Kevin is stated to have been forced to kill the man he loved.
• The Un-Twist: Garcian's identity and his murder of the other Smiths isn't just heavily foreshadowed, it's everything but flat-out stated long before The Reveal. Since this is a Suda51 game, opinions are divided on whether this is a poorly-executed Twist Ending, a parody of twist endings (a la No More Heroes), or a deliberate untwist.

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