Lollipop Chainsaw

[lobotomy42]

I am only slightly embarrassed to admit that I have pre-ordered this. My copy should arrive today - I'm more excited than I should be.

I will try to play tonight or tomorrow to get some first impressions.

[Korax]

I played the intro level, and so far, it's a Suda51 game. Killing greaser zombies with a chainsaw while Joan Jett & Toni Basil play in the background, all covered in a bright candy coating. I'm finding the controls a little bit awkward, but hey, Suda51.

I really like how a lot of the violence is kind of Lisa-Franked: your chainsaw trails a rainbow as it cuts through the air, and zombies evaporate into multicolored sparkles when they die.

[Sno]

I am only slightly embarrassed to admit that I have pre-ordered this.

It comes with an inflatable pink chainsaw!

I also pre-ordered this, and feel no particular shame in having done so.

Have been looking forward to more of Suda's specific brand of punk art nonsense.

[lobotomy42]

It comes with an inflatable pink chainsaw!

Mine doesn't have this! Where did you pre-order from?

[Sno]

Mine doesn't have this! Where did you pre-order from?

It was a Gamestop/EBGames thing.

[Sno]

So i burned through this really quickly, it's not particularly long.

I really enjoyed it, i think it's an excellent game, probably a new high water mark for Grasshopper

There's threads of the No More Heroes design DNA in there, but it's a much less awkward game, feels maybe more like other contemporary 3d action games.

It definitely still looks like a Suda game, that stylistically interesting and kind of aesthetically crummy cell-shaded visual.

I thought it was pretty funny and well-written, and i am sure some people will be terribly offended by it.

I think it's probably too easy on normal, and i thought the boss fights were disappointingly straightforward. (I think i need to play some more on hard and see how that goes.)

I don't recall if the game ever tries to illustrate that its mechanics are designed around the player trying to kite zombies into groups, daze/injure them, and set them up for simultaneous kills. (Which is one of the only ways to earn the rarer type of medal.)

It's the kind of game that somebody could just button mash and brute force through and probably have a terrible time, but that's true for most examples of the genre.

I've seen some reviews complain that there's no in-mission saving, but there is. It saves at regular checkpoints, but to load your checkpoints, you have to back all the way out to the main menu and say yes to the quick load prompt when starting up the game again. (Japanese UI at its finest. Speaking of which, there's also no way to answer phone calls that aren't automatically picked up, you have to go all the way into the collectibles sub menu and listen to them there.)

Anyways.

I very much enjoyed it, this is a thing i would recommend. (You know, to the right people.)

[Twig]

I've heard bad things and also, as an unashamed Suda fan (Killer 7 and No More Heroes, specifically), I've not been impressed by what I've seen of the game. Your words have repiqued my interest. Hmm.

I NEED A PS3.

[Sno]

I feel like it's a better Grasshopper game than a Suda game.

If that makes sense.

[lobotomy42]

This game is serving to be a reminder of how bad I am at action games. I'm playing on easy and still getting my ass kicked. (And those insta-death arcade sequences are particularly gruesome.)

[Sno]

Have some distance when beginning strings, the first couple attacks usually leave you pretty vulnerable and are better just for closing distance while you build up to the later attacks in a string. (The game introduces the concept of homing attacks without any explanation, but i believe it's the game's nomenclature for the first few attacks out of each string? Possibly?) Also, don't just mash one attack, use your combos. Combos are always stronger than button mashing.

For larger enemies, stay behind them and out of their attack radius. (The bunny hop move, when the dodge is modified by your proximity to an enemy, is the simplest way to get behind a larger enemy, and it also combos into some of the strongest attacks. Some later enemies will deflect the bunny hop though.)

Use your high-low chainsaw attacks appropriately.

Daze zombies with the pompoms, wound zombies with the chainsaw.

Kite wounded zombies into groups of dazed zombies, then use appropriate wide-angle moves to get your triple/quad/etc kills for platinum medals.

Turn off the auto-aim for the blaster, it's horrible. (Additionally, while holding down the left trigger, X reloads and A is a quick turn.)

Also, the game lets you carry a ton of "nick tickets" and health items, way more than you should ever need to use.

As for insta-death, i unno. Which part, specifically, was giving you trouble?

[lobotomy42]

Thanks. I got through the mini-game okay - it was the one that was sort of like a frogger / shmup combo? The last "video game" in the video game level. But I eventually made it through and finished the game. (On Easy, but whatever, it counts!)

I liked this quite a lot. It may be the first non-adventure game I've taken home and beaten in essentially one sitting. The cast really help sells it - Juliet, in particular, could easily be screwed up, but Tara Strong really nailed the line between casually badass and cheesecakey naive. The gameplay mostly works, too, although I can never get combos off correctly in these types of games (fighting games, too, come to think of it) and as a result it was probably more difficult than intended. But the upgrades came at a nice enough pace to keep me from getting bored in between the awesome setpieces. (And what is a Suda51 game without setpieces? Not much.)

In tone and gameplay it seemed highly reminiscent of No More Heroes. The final boss in particular seemed to be a variation on the NMH2 final boss. (But I guess there's only so many options for huge final bosses in the world, anyway?)

Also, geeze, San Romero High School? I just now got that!

[ItsMeYourFriend]

is there anything interesting going on with the presentation of the game? one of the reasons no more heroes 'clicked' with me is that there was a lot going just concerning the presentation of the game. For example, at first glance Travis is presented as this badass, stylish video game hero character who is wielding a lightsaber type weapon and has a punk aesthetic but upon further investigation of the character over the course of the game, it's revealed that he's basically a total loser. He's broke, doesn't have a job, is obsessed with things typically associated with nerds (professional wrestling and anime), he can't talk to women and constantly strikes out with crystal, etc.

There's also the video game references littered throughout the game, defeated enemies explode into blood and coins, travis will sit at the beginning of a stage (clearly breathing and active) until you press the 'A' button, the old school video game scoreboard tracking the ranking of assassins.

The end result was that you had a game that was superficially a beat'em up but was surprisingly interesting and everything coalesced into something great.

My worry is that lollipop chainsaw doesn't do that, it appears to merely juxtapose a sparkly, girly aesthetic over the more typically grim setting of a zombie attack and to have an overly sexual protagonist. Is that an accurate summation of the game or is there more going on that hasn't been conveyed in any of the coverage i've seen? Is there any meaning to having this juxtaposition beyond "wow hey they are pretty different" and is there any intention to the main character beyond "hey, here's a sexy girl for all you guys ;)"?

(sorry this is kind of rambling, i'm remarkably tired at the moment)

[Sno]

So I think you've got it. Early in the game, I thought I was reading some subtext into some things, like it was going to end up being a skewering of high-school cliques or something, but it didn't really go anywhere with that. I still think that element is kind of there, but there's no big mind fuck, and there's no big subversion of your expectations. I mean, but all the little stylistic touchstones are there. It has the Suda style without feeling like a Suda story, and that's maybe the James Gunn influence there. That kind of plays into what i said about this being a better Grasshopper game than a Suda game. (Narratively, it's more like the collaboratively-designed Shadows of the Damned than No More Heroes.)

It really is very sharply written though, the game has some genuine laughs and i don't think the game is nearly as pandering and gross as WB's marketing would have you believe, if that's your concern. (They had a weird game to sell, so they sold it with sex.)

[lobotomy42]

Yeah, I also wish they had done a little more with the high school stuff. I liked the way most of the bosses were high school outcasts (goths, punks, hippies) -- but then some were simply random (Vikings?) I was hoping they'd go more for a sort of an inverted Revenge of the Nerds type deal, but then it seems like at some point they decided they were doing a series of musical genre references and huge gross-out bosses.

I slightly disagree with Sno's take -- I think, if anything, it was disappointed it was so similar to NMH. Falling back on "some wacky Video game culture references" seemed as precisely out-of-place here as it seemed in-place in NMH. It's consistently fun, but it does feel sometimes like they were really close to something great and just missed.

[lobotomy42]

I really like how a lot of the violence is kind of Lisa-Franked: your chainsaw trails a rainbow as it cuts through the air, and zombies evaporate into multicolored sparkles when they die.

Lisa Franked is a great way to describe it: this is definitely one of the best things about the game.

[ItsMeYourFriend]

Yeah, I also wish they had done a little more with the high school stuff. I liked the way most of the bosses were high school outcasts (goths, punks, hippies) -- but then some were simply random (Vikings?) I was hoping they'd go more for a sort of an inverted Revenge of the Nerds type deal, but then it seems like at some point they decided they were doing a series of musical genre references and huge gross-out bosses.

this was my assumption when i first heard about it last year, that it would be kind of weird send-up of high school movies or something along those lines. grasshopper is one of those devs that is so consistently out of left field that i was just kind of hoping this game was something that it isn't. at least i think i'll have my expectations aligned a bit!

[Sno]

I liked the way most of the bosses were high school outcasts (goths, punks, hippies) -- but then some were simply random (Vikings?)

I took it as the five main bosses all representing a style or era of music, with the viking dude being metal.

I slightly disagree with Sno's take -- I think, if anything, it was disappointed it was so similar to NMH. Falling back on "some wacky Video game culture references" seemed as precisely out-of-place here as it seemed in-place in NMH. It's consistently fun, but it does feel sometimes like they were really close to something great and just missed.

I think we might have differing opinions on No More Heroes, but with regards to Lollipop, I don't think we have much of a disagreement.

I'm saying that Lollipop is kind of banging on all the Suda trademarks without finding the lunatic narrative energy of some of his earlier games.

I mean, but all those video game flourishes were absolutely not out of place in No More Heroes, it was narratively contextualized there. Travis was a video game nerd living out the plot of a video game, it was the main point of the entire game.

[syntheticgerbil]

Just finished this tonight. I have some more grinding to go to get all the costumes, concept art, zombie portraits, and trophies, but I'm already making major headway on my second playthrough since Stage 5 and 6, I beat the Dad's score first time without even trying. Stage 1 and the Prologue came easy without trying as well now on my second clean up playthrough now that I have a bunch of combos as well, so hopefully I get the best rank for the remaining 3 stages without two much issues. Those were the only trophies I was somewhat worried about.

 

But on to the game. Based on what you guys were saying here, that it's a more shallow Suda 51 game or doesn't hit his usual mark, I would assume that's true, but there seems to have been a lot of involvement with James Gunn doing whatever he does with the B movie stuff, so maybe it's more of a collaborative thing? I can't say for sure since I call myself a Suda 51 fan even though this is only the third game I've finished by him, with Liberation Maiden and Killer 7 being the other two. Those latter two are night and day in difference so I don't think I was expecting anything similar with Lollipop Chainsaw other than what the trailers showed the game to be: dumb mindless fun.

 

Kind of just have shitty days at work every day now, so this is exactly the right kind of game to come home to. It's not too difficult, it had quicktime events I somewhat appreciated for once, the humor was downright idiotic (the kind of potty mouth embarrassing humor my girlfriend and I share), and there were many cool designs to look at within a nice well directed art style. I mean it is a trip through typical genres like you guys say, but the shallowness felt right to me. The only part I was somewhat annoyed with was that the villain was a shunned goth kid. That choice was way too obvious and uninteresting.

 

I'm not really into this style of fight everyone type games, so I can't really give much comment on the depth. It seems a little off to have to purchase all the good combos, many of which are fighting you for stat upgrades. I spent most of the first half of the game with only a few tricks up my sleeve. Just having about 5-6 combos given to me upon starting the game would have been nice, as they make the combat much more fun to look at.

 

I think my major disappointment was just that I cannot select the boss fight music as my in game tracks. I'm a Mindless Self Indulgence fan and Jimmy Urine made some great stuff for the bosses that's much more varied than his work with the band. The Stage 5 boss theme is an amazing song. Instead I'm kind of stuck with a 5 song soundtrack of songs that tend to be less grating after hearing them the nth time. Stage 5 and 6 didn't have any good genre songs and instead a loaded my available soundtrack up with a bunch of crappy teen type metal that was popular about 5 years back. Why even include this uninspired crap within the game after the greatness of Stage 1 and 2's "punk" and "renaissance metal?" Anyway, minor quibbles with an overloaded soundtrack in the end.

 

Also I love when games let me press buttons to do useless shit during the credits.

[lobotomy42]

Also I love when games let me press buttons to do useless shit during the credits.

 

I never even noticed that!